The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. In our country, laws are supposed to provide the certainty and order necessary to foster liberty and innovation. Instead, our vast regulatory structure often serves to constrict ordered liberty, not promote it. The United States Code itself is more than 60,000 pages. But unelected agency officials write most of the complex, legally binding rules on top of that, often stretching these statutory provisions beyond what the Congress enacted.

In particular, the previous administration added more pages to the Federal Register than any other in history, with the result that the Code of Federal Regulations now approaches a staggering 200,000 pages. These regulations linger in such volume that serious reexamination seldom occurs.
This regime of governance-by-regulator has imposed particularly severe costs on energy production, where innovation is critical. The net result is an energy landscape perpetually trapped in the 1970s. By rescinding outdated regulations that serve as a drag on progress, we can stimulate innovation and deliver prosperity to everyday Americans.

This order directs certain agencies to incorporate a sunset provision into their regulations governing energy production to the extent permitted by law, thus compelling those agencies to reexamine their regulations periodically to ensure that those rules serve the public good.

Sec. 2. Definitions. For the purposes of this order:
(a) “Conditional Sunset Date” means the date a regulation will cease to be effective and be removed from the Code of Federal Regulations, if the agency does not extend the Sunset Date pursuant to section 4(d) of this order.
(b) “Covered Agency” means one of the agencies listed in section 3(a) of this order.
(c) “Covered Regulation” means a regulation issued in whole or in part pursuant to a statutory authority listed in sections 3(b)-(j) of this order.
(d) “DOGE Team Lead” means the leader of the DOGE Team at each agency as described in Executive Order 14158.
(e) “Regulation” means each part, subpart, or individual provision of the Code of Federal Regulations promulgated under an agency rule as defined in 5 U.S.C. 551(4).

Sec. 3. Covered Agencies and Regulations. (a) This order applies to the following agencies and their subcomponents: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); the Department of Energy (DoE); the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC); and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It further applies to the following agency subcomponents: the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), all within the Department of the Interior; and the United States Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), within the United States Army.
(b) For the DoE, this order applies to all regulations issued pursuant to the following statutes and any amendments thereto:
(i) the Atomic Energy Act of 1954;
(ii) the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987;
(iii) the Energy Policy Act of 1992;
(iv) the Energy Policy Act of 2005; and
(v) the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.
(c) For FERC, this order applies to all regulations issued pursuant to the following statutes and any amendments thereto:
(i) the Federal Power Act of 1935;
(ii) the Natural Gas Act of 1938; and
(iii) the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act of 1978.
(d) For the NRC, this order applies to all regulations issued pursuant to the following statutes and any amendments thereto:
(i) the Atomic Energy Act of 1954;
(ii) the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974; and
(iii) the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.
(e) For the OSMRE, this order applies to all regulations issued pursuant to the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 and any amendments thereto.
(f) For the BLM, this order applies to all regulations issued pursuant to the following statutes and any amendments thereto:
(i) the Mining Act of 1872;
(ii) the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976; and
(iii) the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
(g) For the BOEM, this order applies to all regulations issued pursuant to the following statutes and any amendments thereto:
(i) the Outer Continental Shelf Act of 1953; and
(ii) the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
(h) For the BSEE, this order applies to all regulations issued pursuant to the Outer Continental Shelf Act of 1953 and any amendments thereto.
(i) For the FWS, this order applies to all regulations issued pursuant to the following statutes and any amendments thereto:
(i) the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act;
(ii) the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918;
(iii) the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act of 1934;
(iv) the Anadromous Fish Conservation Act of 1965;
(v) the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972;
(vi) the Endangered Species Act of 1973;
(vii) the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976; and
(viii) the Coastal Barrier Resources Act of 1982.
(j) For the EPA and ACE, within 30 days of the date of this order, the Administrator of the EPA and Secretary of the Army shall provide to the President, through the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB Director), a list of statutes vesting EPA and ACE with regulatory authority that shall be subject to this order.

Sec. 4. Zero-Based Regulating. (a) To the extent consistent with applicable law, each of the Covered Agencies shall issue a sunset rule, effective not later than September 30, 2025, that inserts a Conditional Sunset Date into each of their Covered Regulations.
(b) The sunset rule shall provide that each Covered Regulation in effect on the date of this order shall have a Conditional Sunset Date of 1 year after the effective date of the sunset rule, subject to the process set forth in subsection (d) of this section. Unless the extension condition specified in subsection (d) of this section is satisfied, agencies will treat Covered Regulations as ceasing to be effective on that date for all purposes. An agency shall not take any action to enforce such an ineffective regulation and, to the maximum extent permitted by law, shall remove it from the Code of Federal Regulations.
(c) In any new Covered Regulation, to the maximum extent consistent with law, the relevant Covered Agency shall include a Conditional Sunset Date that is not more than 5 years in the future. Amendments to any Covered Regulation shall provide that they do not reset that regulation’s Conditional Sunset Date and shall be subject to the same Conditional Sunset Date as the amended regulation. The OMB Director may exempt a new regulation or amendment from the requirements of this paragraph if he determines that the new regulation or amendment has a net deregulatory effect.
(d) The sunset provision added to existing and new Covered Regulations shall provide that the agency will offer the public an opportunity to comment on the costs and benefits of each regulation, such as through a request for information, prior to a rule’s expiration, and following such opportunity the Conditional Sunset Date for that Covered Regulation may be extended if the agency finds an extension is warranted. A request for information shall not automatically extend the Conditional Sunset Date. A Covered Agency may extend the Conditional Sunset Date for a particular Covered Regulation as many times as is appropriate, but never to a date more than 5 years in the future.

Sec. 5. Implementation. (a) Neither a determination to extend the Conditional Sunset Date of a particular regulation, nor a regulation that expires as a result this order, shall count towards the ten-for-one regulatory requirement in Executive Order 14192 of January 31, 2025 (Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation).
(b) Agency heads shall coordinate with their DOGE Team Leads and the Office of Management and Budget to implement this order.
(c) This order shall not apply to regulatory permitting regimes authorized by statute.

Sec. 6. Severability. If any provision of this order, or the application of any provision to any agency, person or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this order and the application of its provisions to any other agencies, persons or circumstances shall not be affected thereby.

Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the OMB Director relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

Numerous environmental protection groups were preparing to file lawsuits Friday after President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to repeal what he called "unlawful regulations" aimed at protecting the public from pollution, oil spills, and other harms—sharply curtailing the process through which rules are changed as he ordered agencies to "sunset" major regulations.

The order was issued a week-and-a-half before the deadline set by another presidential action in February, when Trump required agencies to identify "unconstitutional" and "unlawful" regulations for elimination or modification within 60 days.

Those restrictions, under Wednesday evening's order, can be repealed without being subject to a typical notice-and-comment period.

Trump named the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement among several agencies affected by the order, and listed more than two dozen laws containing regulations that must incorporate a sunset provision for no later than September 30, 2025.

The laws include the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987, and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.

Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, suggested the order was Trump's latest push to benefit corporate polluters.

The Trump corporate regime orders agencies to ‘sunset’ environmental protections, as part of an effort to make it easier for industry to pollute. thehill.com/policy/energ...

— Hans Kristensen (@nukestrat.bsky.social) April 11, 2025 at 7:14 AM

Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was "beyond delusional" for Trump to attempt to repeal "every environmental safeguard enacted over the past 50 years with an executive order."

"Trump's farcical directive aims to kill measures that protect endangered whales, prevent oil spills, and reduce the risk of a nuclear accident," said Hartl. "This chaotic administration is obviously desperate to smash through every environmental guardrail that protects people or preserves wildlife, but steps like this will be laughed out of court."

In a memo, the White House wrote that "in effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the 'good cause' exception in the Administrative Procedure Act."

"That exception allows agencies to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be 'impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest,'" said the White House.

As climate advocates scoffed at the suggestion that regulating nuclear power and pollution-causing energy infrastructure is "contrary to the public interest," legal experts questioned the legality of Trump's order.

"If this action were upheld, it would be a significant change to the way regulation is typically done, which is through notice and comment," Roger Nober, director of George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center, toldGovernment Executive. "If the agencies determine that a rule is contrary to the Supreme Court's current jurisprudence, then [this order says they] have good cause to remove it and [they] can get around notice and comment. That's certainly an untested and untried way of implementing the Administrative Procedure Act."

Georgetown University law professor William Buzbee toldThe Hill that the Supreme Court "has repeatedly reaffirmed that agencies seeking to change a policy set forth in a regulation have to go through a new notice-and-comment proceeding for each regulation, offer 'good reasons' for the change, and address changing facts and reliance interests developed in light of the earlier regulation."

"Adding a sunset provision without going through a full notice-and-comment proceedings for each regulation to be newly subject to a sunset provision seems intended to skirt the vetting and public accountability required by consistency doctrine," he said. "Like many other attempted regulatory shortcuts of the first and second Trump administration, this [executive order] seems likely to prompt legally vulnerable agency actions."

Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert suggested that the executive order is the latest example of Trump's push to govern the U.S. as "a king."

"He cannot simply roll back regulations that protect the public without going through the legally required process," Gilbert told Government Executive. "We will challenge this blatantly unlawful deregulatory effort at every step to ensure it doesn't hurt workers, consumers, and families."

Michael Wall, chief litigation officer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the order "a blatant attempt to blow away hundreds of protections for the public and nature, giving polluters permission to ignore whatever is coming out of their smokestacks while developers disregard endangered species protections and Big Oil no longer heeds the reforms put in place after the Deepwater Horizon disaster."

"This executive order is illegal," he said. "Congress passed these laws, and the president's constitutional duty is to carry out those statutes; he has zero power to rewrite them."

"There's no magic wand the administration might wave to sweep away multiple rules on a White House whim," Wall added. "Any changes to the rules the president wants rescinded would have to be justified, rule by rule, with facts, evidence, and analysis specific to that rule. He cannot do this by fiat."

‘I’m super worried’: fewer UK tourists visiting US amid Trump’s policies and rhetoric
Number of Brits crossing Atlantic down 14.3% from 2024 – and the travel industry fears decline could continue

After backpacker Rebecca Burke was arrested and locked up for nearly three weeks by US immigration ­officials in February, she started urging people not to travel to America.

Britons seem to have listened: UK residents visiting the US were down 14.3% in March compared with the same month in 2024, official figures show.

Analysts believe that Donald Trump’s claims that other countries were “cheating” Americans and reports of deportations may have had a chilling effect on travel to the US. But the March dip may be simply an early warning of a bigger fall in the summer, because tourists typically book holidays months in advance.

“Once we get into July, August, September, most of those trips will have been booked,” said David Edwards, founder of the Scattered Clouds travel consultancy.

“But if there is less global trade, there will be less international business travel. Business travel is booked with a much shorter lead time so if there is uncertainty, business travel could take a swifter hit.”

Spring is difficult for travel companies to analyse because Easter moves in the calendar. So could the comparative drop simply be the effect of the Easter school holidays falling in March 2024? It seems unlikely, Edwards said, because the figures from the US National Travel and Tourism Office show an even bigger drop, of 16%, compared with March 2019 when Easter was on 21 April and Trump was nearing the end of his first term.

Travellers from other countries also seemed to avoid the US in March – visitors from western Europe who stayed at least one night in the US were down 17% in March, year on year. German visitors were down 28.2% and Spanish ones down 24.6% compared with 2024. Overall, global travel to the US was down 11.6%. UK residents make up the largest number of foreign visitors to the US, with 3.9 million a year.

TTG, the travel industry magazine, published a poll last week showing that two-thirds of travel agents it contacted believed there had been a downturn in bookings, while only 12% of operators said their business had not been affected.

Demand for hotel rooms in the US may also be reducing. Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality ­analytics at CoStar, which tracks hotel room occupancy, said that the strong dollar had led to an 8% fall in visitors in 2024.

“So now with the rhetoric that’s going on, I’m super worried that we’re going to continue to see travel numbers below 2019, maybe even decelerating from 2024,” he said. “Saying ‘you’re cheating us, you have a ­surplus, so we’re going to put a ­tariff on you’ – that rhetoric is not very welcoming.”

Research by VisitBritain in 2022 showed that international ­travellers ranked “destination is a ­welcoming place to visit” as the second most important factor in choosing a holiday.

After publicity around deportations of tourists, including Germans and Australians, the UK and German governments have updated their travel advice to warn citizens of the risk. The incidents may also harm the appeal of the 2026 World Cup – currently due to take place in the US, Canada and Mexico, with the later knockout stages entirely in the US – and the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, Freitag said.

“Next year will be very big – the World Cup is coming in 2026. So if I’m a German father with two boys and I want to show them the World Cup, am I really going to spend $1,000 a pop on an airfare, plus hotel, plus the ticket, if there’s even a remote chance that I will not be able to make it into the country? I’m not going to take that risk. Not everyone will think that, but probably some people will.”

Clare Collins, co-founder and chief operations officer for CT Business Travel, said that she expected there would be a decline in leisure travel to the US during the summer, but had not yet seen an impact on business travel.

“We’re not seeing any dramatic effects yet for business travel, but that could change in two weeks,” she said. “I think [in] the long-term leisure market, people will choose to spend their money elsewhere.”

If the March dip turns into a major fall in travellers from the UK, some airlines may start cutting routes, Edwards said, and that could have an impact on the British economy.

The UK travel industry recovered from the Covid pandemic mostly because American tourists flocked to Europe, buoyed by a strong dollar that made hotels more affordable in London and Paris.

“Europeans may be thinking ‘I’m not so sure that the US is a welcoming place to visit’,” Edwards said. “Equally, it might be that Americans are thinking ‘how welcome would I be if I go to Europe this year?’”

An American pastor has been kidnapped by armed men after they stormed his church service in South Africa, local authorities say.

Josh Sullivan had been conducting a service at Fellowship Baptist Church in Motherwell, a township in Gqeberra in the Eastern Cape, on Thursday evening when "four armed and masked male suspects entered", police spokesman Captain Andre Beetge told the BBC.

The men stole two phones before fleeing the church in the 45-year-old pastor's silver Toyota Fortuner. Police later found the vehicle abandoned, but there was no trace of Mr Sullivan.

A spokesperson from the US State Department told the BBC that they were aware of the kidnapping of a US citizen in South Africa.

They said there was no "greater priority than the safety and security of US citizens abroad".

Capt Beetge told the BBC the case had been handed to South Africa's elite police unit, known as the Hawks, which investigates serious organised and commercial crimes and high-level corruption.

"The police is currently following all possible leads to locate the victim and apprehend the perpetrators," said Hawks spokesman Lt Col Avele Fumba.

Jeremy Hall, the Sullivan family's spokesman, told local newspaper TimesLive, external that he was at the church with his wife and their children when the incident took place.

"They knew his name," he said.

Mr Sullivan's mother, Tonya Morton Rinker, wrote on Facebook that she was heartbroken over the news.

She added: "Our congressman and American embassy are working on finding him."

No ransom has been requested, according to the privately-owned News24, external.

Mr Sullivan describes himself as "a church planting missionary" on his personal website.

On it, he says he moved to South Africa with his wife and children in 2018 to establish a church for Xhosa-speaking people.

Over the past decade, there has been 264% increase in kidnappings in South Africa, according to police statistics., external

Just a few days ago, a Chinese national was kidnapped in Gqberra.

The US has demanded control of a crucial pipeline in Ukraine used to send Russian gas to Europe, according to reports, in a move described as a colonial shakedown.

US and Ukrainian officials met on Friday to discuss White House proposals for a minerals deal. Donald Trump wants Kyiv to hand over its natural resources as “payback” in return for weapons delivered by the previous Biden administration.

Talks have become increasingly acrimonious, Reuters said. The latest US draft is more “maximalist” than the original version from February, which proposed giving Washington $500bn worth of rare metals, as well as oil and gas.

Citing a source close to the talks, the news agency said the most recent document includes a demand that the US government’s International Development Finance Corporation take control of the natural gas pipeline.

It runs from the town of Sudzha in western Russia to the Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod, about 750 miles (1,200km) away, on the border with the EU and Slovakia. Built in Soviet times, the pipeline is a key piece of national infrastructure and a major energy route.

On 1 January, Ukraine cut off the supply of gas when its five-year contract with the Russian state energy company Gazprom expired. Both countries had previously earned hundreds of millions of euros in transit fees, including during the first three years of full-scale war.

Volodymyr Landa, a senior economist with the Centre for Economic Strategy, a Kyiv thinktank, said the Americans were out for “all they can get”. Their bullying “colonial-type” demands had little chance of being accepted by Kyiv, he predicted.

'People might treat us differently': Trump era leaves US tourists in Paris feeling shame

Strolling in bright sunshine across the immaculately raked gravel of Paris's Tuileries gardens, Barbara and Rick Wilson from The Dalles, Oregon, were not exactly in disguise. But earlier that morning, on their very first trip to France, Rick, 74, had taken an unusual precaution.

Before leaving his hotel, he'd taken a small piece of black tape and covered up the Stars and Stripes flag on the corner of his baseball cap.

"We're sick about it. It's horrible. Just horrible," said Rick, as he and his wife contemplated the sudden sense of shame and embarrassment they said they now felt, as Americans, following President Trump's abrupt moves on global trading tariffs.

Barbara, 70, even had a Canadian lapel pin in her pocket – a gift from another tourist - which she thought might come in useful if further subterfuge proved necessary.

"I'm disappointed in our country. We are upset about the tariffs," she explained.

A few yards away, towards the crowds gathering outside the Louvre Museum, another American couple was also trying to keep a lower profile than usual. Chris Epps, 56, an attorney from New York, had decided he would dress a little differently on today's tour.

"No New York Yankees hat. I left it in the hotel. People might come up to us, treat us differently. But so far, so good," he added.

It was just 20 days ago—on March 24—that editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg reported that the most senior members of the Trump administration discussed a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure commercial messaging app and that they included him on the chat.

Their Signal chat, which Goldberg published later in response to the administration’s insistence that there was nothing classified in the chat, showed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had posted precise details of the munitions and planes involved in the strikes. It showed that neither President Donald Trump nor the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a Biden appointee—was on the chat, and that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller apparently made the decision to strike based on his interpretation of what President Donald Trump wanted. In violation of the Presidential Records Act, the app was set to delete the messages. There was apparently no larger strategy or diplomatic plan other than to strike, and participants greeted news of the collapse of an apartment building into which a Houthi leader had allegedly walked with emojis of fists, fire, and a U.S. flag.

This extraordinary lapse in national security protections would normally have defined an administration and caused a number of resignations, but the White House called the case “closed” on March 31. And there was more: On April 2, Dasha Burns of Politico reported that the team working with national security advisor Mike Waltz regularly used the unsecure Signal app to communicate about issues involving Ukraine, China, Gaza, the Middle East, the U.S., and Europe. The officials to whom Burns spoke said they had personal knowledge of at least 20 such chats.

That story has been almost completely driven out of the news by President Donald Trump’s tariff machinations since April 2. On that day, after teasing the idea of what he called “Liberation Day,” Trump announced that at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, April 9, he would be imposing a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with significantly higher rates on countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices. By the next day it had been established that his team, led by trade advisor Peter Navarro, arrived at the tariff rates with a nonsensical formula that simply took the U.S. trade deficit with a country, divided it by the value of that country’s exports to the U.S., and cut the resulting number in half.

For the next week, the stock market plummeted, jumping only with rumors that Trump would back off on the tariffs, while economists and financial analysts revised the chances of inflation and recession upward, and economic growth downward. News coming out of the White House was contradictory: one advisor would say that Trump would not negotiate over tariffs and they were here to stay, while another would say he intended to negotiate and they were just starting points.

Meanwhile, as predicted, other countries began to put tariffs on goods from the United States or pause exports, and global markets fell. Americans from business leaders to small business owners to consumers and wage workers called out the “stupidity” of Trump’s trade war. Others noted that the tariffs appeared to be intended as a shakedown as countries or businesses who offered Trump the right price could get exemptions.

As trillions of dollars in stock values evaporated, Trump insisted the tariffs were here to stay. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” Trump told Republicans on Tuesday, April 8. He boasted that global leaders were “kissing my ass.” On Wednesday, April 9, at 9:33 a.m, he posted: “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!” At 9:37, he posted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”

But, as Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported, Trump’s team, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, was worried about setting off a financial panic that could not be stopped. Driving their concern was a broad sell-off of U.S. government bonds, which in the past investors had seen as a safe haven during times of market turmoil, and the rise in popularity of the government bonds of other countries.

Former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers noted that global financial markets were backing away from U.S. assets. Fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management George Cipolloni told Bernard Condon and Stan Choe of the Associated Press: “The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven. Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”

On April 8, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer defended Trump’s tariffs to the Senate Finance Committee. He was offering similar testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee at 1:18 p.m. when a social media post from Trump pulled the rug out from under him. Trump paused most of the highest tariffs for 90 days and instituted an across-the-board tariff of 10% in their place. But, perhaps unwilling to look weak, he announced that he was raising tariffs on goods from China to 125% effective immediately, “based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets.”

With Trump’s tariff pause, stocks jumped upward in one of the biggest single-day gains since World War II. Hedge fund manager Spencer Hakimian posted a graph showing that Nasdaq call volume—bets that stock values would rise—spiked minutes before Trump’s announcement. He commented: “Not a good look at all.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reposted Hakimian’s post and added: “Any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now. I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor. Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We’re about to learn a few things. It’s time to ban insider trading in Congress.”

David Smith of The Guardian noted that the juxtaposition of Trump golfing, dining with donors, and meeting with race car drivers even as economic chaos tanked people’s retirement accounts prompted accusations that he has lost touch with reality. A widely circulated video that appears to be Trump bragging to NASCAR drivers visiting the White House that investor Charles Schwab made $2.5 billion on Wednesday and that another investor made $900 million has fed anger at Trump’s economic chaos. On Friday the University of Michigan released its well-respected consumer-sentiment index, showing that consumer sentiment about the economy and personal finances fell for the fourth straight month, dropping 11% from March. Consumers from all political affiliations fear recession, inflation, and unemployment.

This level of consumer sentiment is the second lowest since the index began in 1952. Chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics Samuel Tombs told the Wall Street Journal’s Harriet Torry: “Consumers have spiraled from anxious to petrified.” James Knightley, the chief international economist at the multinational banking and financial services company ING, noted that consumers appear to blame Trump for their concerns. While in January 44% of respondents told researchers that the government was doing a poor job of managing inflation and unemployment, now 67% say so.

The change happened so quickly that White House officials could not tell reporters what the actual tariff rates were for different countries. When more information was available, Kevin Schaul of the Washington Post noted that Trump’s new tariff levies had actually increased tariffs rather than lowered them because he had dropped rates only on goods from countries that don’t export much to the U.S. He had raised them significantly—not just to 125% but to 145%—on China, a major trading partner.

On Friday, China imposed 125% tariffs on goods from the U.S. A spokesperson for the Chinese Finance Ministry said that Trump’s tariff machinations “will become a joke in the history of the world economy.” At 9:20 a.m. President Trump posted: “We are doing really well on our TARIFF POLICY. Very exciting for America, and the World!!! It is moving along quickly. DJT.” The new tariffs had badly threatened Apple Inc., and at 10:36 p.m. the U.S. Customs and Border Protection posted a notice that various electronics, including smartphone and computer monitors, are exempt from the tariffs.

When economist Justin Wolfers commented: “I just want to tip my hat to the crack team of White House economists who were able to discover—in just a few short days—that the U.S. is dependent on China for smartphones, computers and semiconductors.” Dr. Soumya Rangarajan noted that “a basic medicine we use 1000x per day in the hospital, heparin, is also dependent on China, and people will die without it.” As Sabrina Malhi of the Washington Post explained, about 12 million people hospitalized in the U.S. need heparin every year, and it is only one of the many medications that will be affected by Trump’s tariffs on goods from China.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted that a “[g]ood way to see the current tariffs, as of literally today, is no tariffs on high value add manufactured goods marketed to middle and upper middle classes. Massive tariffs for cheap consumer items” that benefit those lower on the economic ladder.

While the damage from the tariffs both to the domestic and global economy, as well as the USA’s standing in the world, is not yet clear—all the chaos has been about the prospect of Trump’s high tariff rates, not their actual effect—Trump appears to be trying to downplay that story in favor of demonstrating his power.

As the tariff saga played out on Wednesday, Trump signed a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies informing them that they no longer need to let the public know when they get rid of regulations that they determine are obviously unlawful. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo notes that “unlawful” appears to mean anything Trump doesn’t like.

In a breathtaking violation of the Constitution, on Wednesday Trump also went after two individuals: Christopher Krebs and Miles Taylor. Trump appointed Krebs to head the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where in 2020 Krebs assured the American people that the presidential election had not been stolen. Trump now claims Krebs thus censored the speech of Trump loyalists.

As a Department of Homeland Security staffer, Taylor wrote an op-ed under the pseudonym “Anonymous” saying that members of the first Trump administration were pushing back against the president’s policies. Taylor later wrote a book about his time in the White House that Trump claims was “designed to sow chaos and distrust in Government” and thus “could properly be characterized as treasonous and as possibly violating the Espionage Act.” A grand jury believed Trump himself violated the Espionage Act by retaining classified documents.

Trump stripped security clearances from Krebs and Taylor and also from their employers. He ordered government officials to investigate the two men and to recommend “appropriate remedial or preventative actions to be taken to protect America’s interests.” Employees at CISA told Kevin Collier of NBC News they were disheartened by the attack on Krebs and noted that staffing cuts at CISA had “already severely degraded our capacity to defend critical infrastructure.”

What does China really think about Trump? They know about humiliation and won’t take it from him
Economically, the trade war may be bad news for Xi Jinping, but ideologically and politically it is a gift

Last week, Mao Ning, head of China’s foreign ministry information department, posted a blurry black -and -white clip of a moment in history. In 1953, the late Chairman Mao, in his heavily accented, high-pitched voice, made a defiant speech of resistance to what he called US aggression in Korea.

Kim Il-sung, the North Korean leader and founder of the Kim dynasty, now in its third generation, had invaded US-backed South Korea. When Kim’s attempt to unite Korea by force appeared to be failing, China threw nearly 3 million “volunteers” into the war and succeeded in fighting to the stalemate that has prevailed ever since.

There was no mistaking the symbolism of the image. As Donald Trump bragged to his acolytes in Washington that foreign leaders were queueing up and “kissing my ass”, Beijing was announcing a “fight to the end”.

Trump may be about to discover that it is unwise to insult Beijing. The harder he plays it, the harder Beijing will play it back.

This determination to fight to the end is both rooted in China’s recent history and in concern for its future. Since the Chinese Communist party turned its guns on protesting students in Tiananmen in 1989, its propaganda has drummed the idea of a “century of humiliation” into generations of Chinese citizens.

The term is shorthand for the period between the first Opium war (1839-1842) and 1949, when the Communist party won China’s civil war. It was a period in which western imperial powers forced the ailing Qing dynasty to make concessions on trade and extraterritorial rights, followed by the collapse of the imperial dynasty and the invasion of China by Japan.

Since 1989, the “century of humiliation” has been central to the CCP’s message of aggrieved nationalism, and the promise to its citizens that the party would make China so rich and powerful that it would never again be bullied by foreign powers.

That promise has substantially been delivered. Globalisation, access to markets and foreign investment triggered three decades of double-digit growth that transformed China from a poverty-stricken rural society to an urbanised industrial power, even if the benefits of growth remain unevenly distributed. No longer the low-wage, low-added-value world factory of the 1990s, today’s China commands a lead across a range of advanced technologies and supply chains, including those essential for the energy transition, mid-range technology and defence.

China’s challenge now is to negotiate the more difficult waters of continuing growth. The economy is sputtering, the property sector collapse has left provincial governments mired in debt and short of revenue, and the industrial sector is producing far more than the domestic market can consume, despite a decade-long government effort to encourage more spending at home.

Industrial overproduction leads to ferocious cycles of competitive price cutting and growing resistance to what China’s trade partners increasingly see as dumping of cut-price goods in international markets. In China, successive shocks to the economy have made citizens anxious about the country’s future. But there is another useful thread in China’s propaganda that is coming to the aid of its beleaguered leadership: the long-running contest with the US for global power and influence, and the proposition that the US aims to contain China and sabotage its rise.

There is no shortage of evidence to support the thesis: a decade of mounting, bipartisan hostility in Washington; a succession of defence and security reviews that cite China as America’s principal strategic threat; restrictions on sales to China of advanced semiconductors to slow its technological advance; and now Donald Trump’s trade war. Economically, the trade war may be bad news for Xi Jinping, but ideologically and politically it is a gift.

In 1989, the student protesters in Tiananmen erected a statue they called the Goddess of Democracy. It was a replica of the Statue of Liberty, and their message to the Chinese leadership could not have been clearer. Today, young Chinese people are flooding digital platforms with satirical TikTok videos of an obese Trump in a dress dancing with Elon Musk, or struggling to assemble goods on a production line.

In recent years, iPhones and Teslas became status symbols for the increasingly well-heeled Chinese middle class. Today, driving a BYD electric car and carrying a Xiaomi mobile phone are as much symbols of national pride in China’s technological advance as the troupe of dancing robots that entertained viewers in January’s New Year TV spectacular, or news of China’s latest space shot.

And if times are hard for China’s laid-off workers or job-hunting graduates, Xi can blame Trump and rally the nation to resist this latest round of US aggression.

Hardship created by a government that mishandles the economy is a political problem. Hardship generated by a hostile external power can easily become an asset.

During Trump’s first presidency, tariffs and export restrictions spurred China to greater self-reliance and domestic innovation. This latest round will reveal the depth of mutual dependency and how much reciprocal pain each side can inflict on the other.

China’s leadership did not choose the fight, but it now believes that there are considerable gains to be made in this deadly contest for global influence.

Isabel Hilton is a London-based writer and broadcaster who has reported extensively from China and Hong Kong

This article’s subheading was amended on 13 April 2025 to correct the spelling of Xi Jinping’s name.

Donald Trump is now badly wounded. Europe and the UK can seize an advantage

It’s time to fashion a new global trade order without the US

he game-changing geopolitical event last week was the near collapse of the immense $29tn ­market in US government debt, threatening the stability of the American and global financial system and the safe-haven status of dollar assets.

The US president boasted as the collapse unfolded that world leaders were queueing to “kiss his arse”. Twelve hours later, he was in the same humiliatingly weak position as the then British prime minister Liz Truss found herself after her tax-slashing “mini-budget” in 2022. The markets had forced him to pause for 90 days the swingeing range of “reciprocal” tariffs that he announced on what he proclaimed “liberation day”; instead he lowered all of them, bar that on China, to 10%.

The markets sighed relief, but “liberation’” had boomeranged. It was Trump who was imprisoned. He and his sycophants insisted it was all part of a grand plan. Nonsense – he is economically and politically gored.

He dare not risk reimposing the same tariffs when the “pause” ends without risking an even worse US debt crisis. Worse, he has killed the prospect of the rest of the world buying the avalanche of new US government debt that will follow from the huge tax cuts he plans in the autumn. The US Federal Reserve has been forced to reassure the markets, still weak, that it will do anything necessary to ensure their stability – another sign of how power is draining from Trump.

The EU, Britain and other rule-of-law capitalist democracies now have the balance of advantage. But they need to recognise it and work together to capitalise on the opportunity, rather than each sue for the most advantageous deal possible in their limited “national interest”.

This is a moment when the national interest is best pursued by hanging together. The situation remains dangerous. The US’s average tariff, including the 145% on Chinese imports, is the highest for a century. China, with its technological and financial power plus leverage over key raw materials, is on manoeuvres, trying to put itself at the centre of a new order.

The democracies must find a common front over the next 90 days as an exercise in damage limitation, and then go beyond that to fashion a new trade order from the ruins of the old – but necessarily without the US. Equally, they must have their eyes wide open about China. While it must be engaged with, it is not a benevolent power. Rather, it is the lynchpin of what author Anne Applebaum has called “Autocracy Inc”, a network of countries including Russia whose aim is to undermine rule-of-law democratic societies, human rights and political pluralism.

Britain’s Brexiters – as wilfully ignorant about the damage they have caused and today’s realities as Donald Trump – will vociferously complain, but the EU has to be Europe’s vehicle for the task ahead. Its current stance is an excellent starting point. Its goal is to remove all tariffs and, while it is prepared to negotiate on genuine US trade complaints and buy more US gas, it will use its heft to resist extra-territorial American claims on sovereignty, tax policies or regulation, calmly reserving the right for targeted retaliation if need be. It will certainly defend EU product standards across the board – from digital services to food. And it is open to a closer trade relationship with Canada.

But the EU needs to use the 90-day “pause” to get beyond that and ambitiously form a coalition of the willing to create a global pact not to pursue beggar-my-neighbour trade policies, and launch the basis for a global customs union. It would recruit from the G20, extending the invitation to Asia’s Trans Pacific Partnership, the Gulf Co-operation Council, South America’s Mercosur and the Southern African Customs Union. It could be done in parallel with the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a new Global Customs Union Council, aiming ultimately to extend any agreement into common technical and safety standards, and perhaps use the WTO to police its rules and arbitrate disputes. China could join if it accepted the rules.

Being outside the EU, Britain cannot be the lead playmaker in this effort, but it must indicate it will play ball – and initiate what it can. Rachel Reeves, writing in the Observer this week, signals a first step in this direction.

To be effective, Britain should ally itself with the EU in its negotiations with Trump and go for a much more expansive trade deal with the EU – to include agreement on technical standards – than the timorous one to be unveiled at the joint UK-EU summit in May, even suggesting Gordon Brown, internationally respected for his role in the debt crisis, as the lead sherpa, to show its good faith and commitment to the cause.

Any doubts should be dispelled by the numbers. The draft head of terms for the UK-US trade deal is pathetic: minimal concessions from the US while the UK is being forced to shrink its red lines on food standards, product regulation and digital services. The independent forecaster Frontier Economics reckons that the impact of US tariffs will shrink UK GDP by 0.7%, while a deeper deal with the EU could instead lift GDP by 1.5%, despite US tariffs.

So what is it to be? Bail out a stricken Trump with a third-rate trade deal on which he will boast Britain has kissed his arse? Or make common cause with the EU to boost our growth and fashion a new global free-trade architecture?

This evening, lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a court order to do so.

The 29-year-old Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. about 2011 when he was 16 to escape threats from a gang that was terrorizing his family. He settled in Maryland with his older brother, a U.S. citizen, and lived there until in 2019 he was picked up by police as he waited at a Home Depot to be picked up for work as a day laborer. Police transferred him to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After a hearing, an immigration judge rejected his claim for asylum but said he could not be sent back to El Salvador, finding it credible that the Barrio 18 gang had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”

Ever since, Abrego Garcia has checked in annually with ICE as directed. He lives with his wife and their three children, and has never been charged with any crime. The Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, and he joined a union, working full time as a sheet metal apprentice.

On March 12, ICE agents pulled his car over, told his wife to come pick up their disabled son, and incarcerated Abrego Garcia, pressing him to say he was a member of MS-13. On March 15 the government rendered Abrego Garcia to the infamous CECOT prison for terrorists in El Salvador, alleged to be the site of human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial killings. The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to incarcerate the individuals it sends there.

On March 24, Abrego Garcia’s family sued the administration over his removal.

On March 31 the government admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but said he couldn’t be brought back because, in El Salvador, he is outside the jurisdiction of the United States. It also accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang and said that bringing him back to the U.S. would threaten the public.

On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7.

In her opinion, filed April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “[a]lthough the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal.…. [H]is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the 'custodian,' and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”

The administration had already appealed her April 4 order to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision on Thursday, April 10, requiring the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” but asking the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” that release, noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. on April 11 explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.

But the administration evidently does not intend to comply. On April 11, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and ignored her order to provide information about what the government was doing to bring him back. Saturday, it said Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in CECOT. Today, it said it had no new information about him, but said that Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for the immigration judge’s order not to send him to El Salvador “because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”

There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.

Today, administration lawyers used the Supreme Court’s warning that the court must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs” to lay out a chilling argument. They ignored the Supreme Court’s agreement that the government must get Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador, as well as the court’s requirement that the administration explain what it’s doing to make that happen.

Instead, the lawyers argued that because Abrego Garcia is now outside the country, any attempt to get him back would intrude on the president’s power to conduct foreign affairs. Similarly, they argue that the president cannot be ordered to do anything but remove domestic obstacles from Abrego Garcia’s return. Because Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, is currently in the U.S. for a visit with Trump, they suggest they will not share any more updates about Abrego Garcia and the court should not ask for them because it would intrude on “sensitive” foreign policy issues.

Let’s be very clear about exactly what’s happening here: President Donald J. Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.

All people in the United States are entitled to due process, but Trump and his officers have tried to convince Americans that noncitizens are not. They have also pushed the idea that those they are offshoring are criminals, but a Bloomberg investigation showed that of the 238 men sent to CECOT in the first group, only five of them had been charged with or convicted of felony assault or gun violations. Three had been charged with misdemeanors like petty theft. Two were charged with human smuggling. In any case, in the U.S., criminals are entitled to due process.

Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.

Trump has said he would “love” to do exactly that, and would even be “honored” to, and Bukele has been offering to hold U.S. citizens. Dasha Burns and Myah Ward of Politico reported Friday that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is pitching a plan to expand renditions to El Salvador to at least 100,000 criminal offenders from U.S. prisons and to avoid legal challenges by making part of CECOT American territory, then leasing it back to El Salvador to run.

When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says, “The president's idea for American citizens to potentially be deported, these would be heinous violent criminals who have broken our nation's laws repeatedly," remember that just days ago, Trump suggested that a former government employee was guilty of treason for writing a book about his time in the first Trump administration that Trump claimed was “designed to sow chaos and distrust” in the government.

Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.

At least some people understand this. The president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!... And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother [International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers] apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”

An active-duty serviceman in the US army is openly following a proscribed neo-Nazi terrorist group on social media, one that has vowed to recruit soldiers in preparation for a so-called race war.

Experts say examples like this shows how under Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon is allowing extremism to go unchecked.

The Trump administration announced Friday that it was terminating a historic settlement aimed at improving wastewater treatment services for Alabamians in majority-Black communities harmed by raw sewage, calling the agreement an “illegal DEI and environmental justice policy.”

The announcement came two years after the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services under the Biden administration negotiated the settlement with Alabama officials. It represented the first time in U.S. history that federal civil rights laws had been used to alleviate an environmental injustice.

Catherine Coleman Flowers, a Lowndes County native whose civil rights complaint led to the 2023 settlement, has fought for years to help improve the lives of residents of the Alabama Black Belt. The Trump administration, in its announcement, said Lowndes County had been made a “target.”

“The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “President Trump made it clear: Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and to expending taxpayer resources in accordance with the national interest, not arbitrary criteria.”

The announcement also noted that the Department of Justice is “working quickly to close such cases in compliance with the Attorney General’s directive.”

In Lowndes County, about 40 miles southwest of Montgomery and 130 miles south of Birmingham, the region’s majority-Black residents have long suffered from inadequate sewage treatment, often resorting to so-called “straight piping,” where untreated sewage flows from residents’ toilets into their yards, where children often play. Around 72 percent of Lowndes County residents are Black, according to census data.

Barry Brock, director of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Alabama office, said the Biden agreement was fundamentally about civil rights and public health.

“The Agreement provides aid to people so lacking in basic water and sewer facilities that they must pipe sewage away from their homes,” Brock said in a statement. “What is at stake are legitimate concerns for their health and their rights to humane living conditions. Revoking those promises based on disfavored buzz words is arbitrary, inhumane, and ignores the substance and purposes of the Agreement.”

Following the civil rights complaint filed by Flowers and others arguing that Alabama had discriminated against Black residents by failing to provide adequate sanitation services, leaving residents exposed to raw sewage, the U.S. Department of Justice initiated a probe into the state’s alleged inaction.

As part of the eventual agreement, the Alabama officials agreed in May 2023 to suspend the enforcement of sanitation laws that could result in criminal penalties or jail time for lacking the ability to afford septic systems. The Alabama officials also agreed to launch a public health awareness campaign and conduct a comprehensive assessment of appropriate septic and wastewater management systems, prioritizing properties based on risk exposure to raw sewage.

It was not immediately clear following Friday’s announcement what impact the “termination” will have on the ground in Lowndes County.

The Alabama Department of Public Health, the agency required to implement the sewage improvements, said it would continue working to address the sanitation issues in the Black Belt as funding allows.

“The installation of sanitation systems and related infrastructure is outside the authority or responsibilities conferred upon ADPH by state law,” Ryan Easterling, the Department of Public Health’s spokesman, said in an email. “Nonetheless, ADPH will continue working with subgrantees on installation of septic systems as contemplated by the Interim Resolution Agreement until appropriated funding expires.

“After that time, ADPH will support and be available to provide technical assistance to other organizations that may choose to engage in this work,” Easterling said.

In the past, state public health officials have said that sewage issues in the state’s rural areas were always on their radar—they simply didn’t have the financial ability to remedy them.

“It’s never been for lack of knowing about it,” Dr. Scott Harris, the state’s top health official, said in 2023. “It’s just that we’ve just never had the ability or resources to do anything about it.”

In a statement sent to Inside Climate News, Coleman Flowers said that she hopes the termination of the settlement agreement means that the Trump administration plans to focus on providing all Americans with access to adequate sanitation.

“Resilient and sustainable sanitation is a problem in rural communities across the US,” Flowers wrote. “The people of Lowndes County exposed this issue to the American public. I pray that today’s action means that this administration will make sanitation a priority for all who are affected throughout rural America.”

Sherry Bradley, who created the Black Belt Unincorporated Wastewater Program after retiring from the ADPH, said she had not heard about the termination of the settlement and did not know if it would impact her group, which helps low-income families in Lowndes County install working sewage treatment systems.


Sherry Bradley, who runs the Black Belt Unincorporated Wastewater Project, explains how a new septic system will work for a mobile home in Lowndes County.

Conditions in the Black Belt, which spans as many as two dozen counties in south-central Alabama, and in Lowndes County in particular, have been widely criticized for years.

Following a visit to Alabama in 2017, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, characterized the situation in the Black Belt as a result of racism and the demonization of the poor.

“In Alabama, I saw various houses in rural areas that were surrounded by cesspools of sewage that flowed out of broken or non-existent septic systems,” Alston wrote after the visit. “The State Health Department had no idea of how many households exist in these conditions, despite the grave health consequences. Nor did they have any plan to find out, or devise a plan to do something about it.”

The challenges around adequate sewage treatment in the region are both technical and economic. Alabama’s Black Belt has thick, clay-laden soil that often renders traditional septic systems inoperable because water cannot easily seep below the surface. The area is also too rural for larger sewer systems to be cost effective, and has some of the highest poverty rates in Alabama.

DOJ officials have not yet responded to questions about what actions they have taken or plan to take to ensure access to adequate sanitation for all Americans, regardless of race.

U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, a Democrat, said in a statement that the agreement terminated by President Trump “had nothing to do with DEI.”

“It was about addressing a public health crisis that has forced generations of children and families to endure the health hazards of living in proximity to raw sewage, as the DOJ itself documented,” Sewell said. “By terminating it, the Trump Administration has put its blatant disregard for the health of my constituents on full display.

“Access to adequate wastewater infrastructure is a basic human right. Without support from the Trump Administration, it is vital that the Alabama Department of Public Health continue to do its part to remedy this injustice. I will continue fighting to address Alabama’s rural wastewater crisis and get our communities the infrastructure they deserve.”

Republican Sens. Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville did not immediately respond to requests for comment.