People who hold negative attitudes toward one marginalized group are increasingly likely to express prejudice toward others as well, according to a new study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. The research shows that generalized prejudice in the United States has grown stronger and more politically aligned over the past two decades.
While previous research has shown that individual forms of prejudice often overlap, the assumption that this overlap—or “generalized prejudice”—is stable across time had not been formally tested. The authors wanted to investigate whether people’s attitudes toward different marginalized groups are becoming more consistent with one another and whether these patterns are increasingly tied to ideological identity.
“I’ve long had an interest in the topic of generalized prejudice, that is, the finding that specific prejudices (e.g., racism, sexism) correlate with each other. In other words, if you score relatively high in racism, then you likely score relatively high in sexism, homophobia, etc.,” said study author Gordon Hodson, a distinguished professor of psychology at Brock University.
“This topic is of particular interest because this robust finding strongly supports the notion that individual differences are relevant to understanding prejudice (which is contested in some theoretical camps; see Hodson & Dhont, 2015). But if you are prejudiced toward a range of unrelated groups, that tells us quite a bit about you as a person — that at least some of your prejudicial tendencies are due to your character.”
“It turns out that my PhD student Hanna Puffer is also interested in this topic! So we’ve been pursuing this topic together. We’re both interested in how prejudicial attitudes can generalize across groups, including as a function of intergroup contact (e.g., Puffer & Hodson, 2024).”
To explore this question, researchers analyzed nationally representative data from the American National Election Survey, covering five presidential election years between 2004 and 2020. The total sample included nearly 22,000 participants.
In each wave of the survey, participants rated their feelings toward four groups—Black people, illegal immigrants, gay people, and feminists—using a scale from 0 (extremely unfavorable) to 100 (extremely favorable). For analysis, the researchers reversed these scores so that higher values reflected greater prejudice. Participants also reported their political orientation on a 7-point scale ranging from “extremely liberal” to “extremely conservative.”
The researchers used statistical modeling to determine whether these four types of prejudice reflected an underlying factor—generalized prejudice—and whether the structure and meaning of this factor changed over time. They also tested how closely generalized prejudice was associated with political ideology, age, sex, and education in each election year.
Across all five time points, the researchers found that people’s attitudes toward the four marginalized groups were positively correlated. In other words, someone who expressed negative views about one group was more likely to express negative views about the others.
But the strength of these associations grew over time. In 2004, the average correlation between prejudices was around .30. By 2020, this had risen to about .43, meaning that group-based prejudices had nearly doubled in their shared variance. People’s biases were becoming more tightly linked, suggesting that a more unified form of generalized prejudice was emerging.
The findings indicate that “over time, American attitudes toward marginalized groups (i.e., Black people, gay people,
feminists, ‘illegal’ immigrants) are becoming more correlated,” Hodson told PsyPost. “That is, the notion of generalized prejudice is becoming more and more important.”
Importantly, the structure of generalized prejudice itself began to change. In 2004 and 2008, a simple model that treated generalized prejudice as a single underlying factor fit the data well.
But starting in 2012, the researchers found that this model no longer captured the complexity of the relationships. They had to adjust the models to allow for extra connections between specific attitudes—for example, anti-gay and anti-feminist views were more closely linked than their relation to generalized prejudice alone could explain.
Similarly, negative attitudes toward Black people and immigrants began to share unique variance. These patterns suggest that while generalized prejudice remained a coherent concept, certain forms of prejudice were becoming even more strongly tied to each other, reflecting broader changes in social and political dynamics.
One of the most striking findings was how much more strongly generalized prejudice became linked to political conservatism over time. In 2004 and 2008, the association between generalized prejudice and conservatism was moderate, around .40. By 2016 and 2020, that correlation had risen to approximately .70.
That means people who identified as more conservative were much more likely than in the past to express a broad range of prejudicial attitudes. This trend was not mirrored for other demographic variables: the associations between generalized prejudice and factors like age, education, and sex remained relatively stable over time.
“Political ideology has long correlated with racism, sexism, etc.,” Hodson explained. “But we were surprised at how rapidly its strength of association increased. Keep in mind, these are nationally representative data, so this tells us quite a bit about the changing nature of prejudice.”
In 2020, the researchers tested a new model in which political conservatism was treated not just as a correlate of generalized prejudice, but as part of its structure. In this version—referred to as “generalized prejudice 2.0”—conservatism was included alongside the four group attitudes as an indicator of a shared factor.
This model provided the best fit to the 2020 data, suggesting that political identity had become deeply embedded in the structure of generalized prejudice. In other words, by 2020, generalized prejudice and political conservatism had become so intertwined that they were statistically difficult to separate.
“Our analyses suggest that generalized prejudice and political conservatism are becoming so highly correlated that they are on the verge of becoming redundant constructs (or, alternatively, that political conservatism might be increasingly thought of as a component of generalized prejudice, rather than a predictor of it),” Hodson said.
The study’s authors interpret this shift in part as a reflection of growing political polarization, which may be encouraging people to align their social attitudes with those of their political group. The rise in public expressions of prejudice during events like the 2016 presidential campaign, combined with broader social debates around race, gender, and immigration, may have contributed to this trend.
Future research could expand this work by examining generalized prejudice in other countries, especially those with lower levels of political polarization. It could also explore how other social identities, such as religion or class, contribute to the development of generalized prejudice.
“We’d really like researchers to study generalized prejudice in more detail,” Hodson told PsyPost. “The finding of generalized prejudice has been considered a ‘given,’ that there’s not much to know. But there clearly is more to uncover and discover. Our research here, for instance, shows that generalized prejudice is changing in terms of its structure and interconnectedness, but also in its relevance to political ideology. In what other ways might generalized prejudice be changing?”
Yesterday, on the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, Americans across the country protested against President Donald J. Trump, his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk, and the administration in general. The decentralized 50501 movement, which stands for “50 protests in 50 states on 1 day,” was one of the organizers of the protests, planning more than 700 events. Spokesperson Hunter Dunn described 50501 as a “pro-democracy, pro-Constitution, anti-executive-overreach, nonviolent grassroots movement.” Notably, protests have spread to small towns all around the country, including towns in Republican-dominated areas.
One of the signs in Miami read, “I’m here fighting for your due process,” a right the Trump administration has abandoned with its rendition of men to CECOT, a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador. Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) appeared on a number of news programs explaining that his trip to El Salvador to make contact with his constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration said it sent to CECOT through “administrative error,” was about defending the rule of law.
“I am not defending the man. I'm defending the rights of this man to due process,” Van Hollen told Jonathan Karl of ABC News. “And the Trump administration has admitted in court that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported. My mission and my purpose is to make sure that we uphold the rule of law, because if we take it away from him, we…jeopardize it for everybody else.”
The right to due process is central to the rule of law in the United States, and the Trump administration has ignored it since at least March 15, when it spirited more than 250 men from the U.S. to CECOT. It claimed the men were all dangerous gang members who had committed crimes, but did not provide their names. Once news outlets got a list of the men, their investigations found the administration had lied about the men’s criminal status. Bloomberg reported that 90% of the men sent to CECOT had no U.S. criminal record.
Judge James Boasberg ordered the government not to deport the men and, if they were already in the air, to turn the planes around. But the administration went forward nonetheless and has appeared to taunt the courts ever since. After the men were landed and in CECOT, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted on X, “Oopsie… Too late” with a laughing emoji, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted his post. Last Wednesday, April 16, Boasberg issued an opinion saying that the court concluded “that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.” On April 4, Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Six days later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld Xinis’s order.
Last Monday, April 14, in a staged meeting between Trump and Bukele in the Oval Office, Trump made it clear he would ignore the Supreme Court. The administration has maintained that the U.S. has no power to order Bukele to release Abrego Garcia, and in the meeting, Bukele said he would not release the Maryland man.
The administration appears to have tried to create a fiction whereby the U.S. can spirit anyone out of the U.S. without due process, render them to prison in another country, and then declare it doesn’t have the power to get the person back. Vice President J.D. Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller were all present at the meeting. Miller mischaracterized the Supreme Court decision to say it had ruled unanimously in favor of the administration, the exact opposite of reality.
On Wednesday, Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to try to meet with Abrego Garcia, finally securing a visit on Thursday. This appeared to infuriate the White House, which posted on social media an image of a New York Times headline “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador” edited with red pen to read: “Senator Meets With Deported MS-13 ILLEGAL ALIEN in El Salvador WHO’S NEVER COMING BACK.” Over the image, it posted: “Fixed it for you, [New York Times]. Oh, and by the way [Chris Van Hollen]—he’s NOT coming back.”
There is no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13; indeed, he has never been charged with a crime, and a court had ordered that he must not be deported to El Salvador out of concern for his life. But as control over the narrative of their renditions is slipping out of their hands—influential podcaster Joe Rogan has been defending due process on his show—administration officials appear determined to paint Abrego Garcia as a dangerous criminal.
Yesterday the White House posted on social media an image of a hand that has been very obviously altered by adding “M-S-1-3” over the knuckles. A social media post by Trump is superimposed on the image. It says: “This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such ‘a fine and innocent person.’ They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles, and two Highly Respected Courts found that he was a member of MS-13, beat up his wife, etc. I was elected to take bad people out of the United States, among other things. I must be allowed to do my job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” The White House account added: “If he tattoos like MS-13, beats women like MS-13, and tramples the law like MS-13—THEN HE’S PROBABLY MS-13.”
Except the image is clearly false, no courts found he was a member of MS-13, and scholar of MS-13 Óscar Martínez commented: “I covered MS-13 for over a decade: its history, crimes, symbolism, cruelty, pacts with Salvadoran governments. I wrote a book about it. Never, ever, did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump's strange interpretation of tattoos.”
Although Abrego Garcia’s wife did file a temporary civil protective order against him in 2021, she has said she did it out of an abundance of caution after a previous relationship that had been violent. She did not pursue the order, and says the two worked out their issues with counseling.
Perhaps more to the point was Chris Kluwe’s point that “a sitting US President is using falsified evidence to try and deny due process to a man who has committed no crime.” Also to the point is that the administration’s insistence that Abrego Garcia will never come back to the U.S. flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s 9–0 decision that it must work to get him back to the U.S.
Early Saturday morning, the Supreme Court ordered the administration not to deport another group of undocumented Venezuelans under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, but the court was in such a hurry to prevent the rendition of the men—who had already been loaded onto buses to head to an airplane—that it issued its decision without waiting for them to finish writing.
In his One First newsletter, legal analyst Steve Vladeck noted that the court appears not to trust the government’s lawyers anymore. Vladeck saw the order as “a sign that a majority of the justices have lost their patience with the procedural games being played by the Trump administration.”
Trump did not take the order well. On Saturday night he posted: “TRUMP’S BEST POLL NUMBERS, EVER. THANK YOU!” After a religiously themed post this morning, he launched another attack on those he sees as his enemies—including judges—and blamed the country’s troubles on his predecessor, President Joe Biden. Then he posted: “We are, together, going to make America bigger, better, stronger, wealthier, healthier, and more religious, than it has ever been before!!! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!!”
Trump went on to post about the economy, including a post that said: “THE BUSINESSMEN WHO CRITICIZE TARIFFS ARE BAD AT BUSINESS, BUT REALLY BAD AT POLITICS. THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND OR REALIZE THAT I AM THE GREATEST FRIEND THAT AMERICAN CAPITALISM HAS EVER HAD!” About an hour later, he posted that “many World Leaders and Business Executives have come to me asking for relief from Tariffs. It’s good to see that the World knows we are serious, because WE ARE!”
It’s hard not to read desperation in the last days of Trump’s posts as Americans seem increasingly concerned about the loss of the rule of law, as Trump’s tariffs upset the economy, and as Russia’s president Vladimir Putin seemed to taunt his U.S. counterpart—who badly wants to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, as he promised to do with a single phone call—by declaring a truce over Easter and then promptly violating it.
That the administration seems to be reeling showed also in the news on Friday that the State Department has been torn apart by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Dasha Burns and Nahal Toosi of Politico report that Marocco is MAGA and was destroying the agency without advice from career officials. MAGA sees his firing as a sign Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.
Also on Friday, Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender of the New York Times reported that the administration was suddenly claiming that the letter it sent to Harvard University on April 11 withholding federal grants until the university handed administration officials power over the school’s students and programs was “unauthorized.” Nonetheless, the White House was standing by the letter, which prompted Harvard to take a strong stand against the administration. Officials blamed Harvard for the standoff because, they said, university lawyers should have called when they got such a dramatic letter.
In a response, Harvard pointed out that the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government—even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach—do not question its authenticity or seriousness.” It noted that it didn’t know which statements the government was claiming were “mistakes,” but in any case, the government’s actions had “real-life consequences.”
Today, Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times that on March 15, the same day he shared classified plans of a military strike against the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure Signal chat on which journalist Jeffrey Goldberg had been included, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared similar detailed information on a different Signal chat. This one he began himself in January on his personal phone for strategizing with his closest allies, and it brought together about a dozen people, including his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer.
Four people with knowledge of the second chat group spoke with Jaffe, Schmitt, and Haberman, suggesting that dissatisfaction with Hegseth in the department runs deep. Former Pentagon chief spokesperson John Ullyot resigned last week, and today he began an op-ed in Politico with the sentence, “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” On Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers, and an official announced that his chief of staff was leaving. Ullyot wrote it was “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” would come this week.
Finally, today was the deadline by which Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem were ordered to report to the president whether they recommended invoking the Insurrection Act to deal with conditions at the southern border. That law enables the president to use military troops as law enforcement officers inside the United States.
While the two did not file their report today, Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky, Jake Tapper, and Priscilla Alvarez of CNN reported Friday that when they do, they will not recommend the president invoke the act.
(...) One of the most striking findings was how much more strongly generalized prejudice became linked to political conservatism over time. In 2004 and 2008, the association between generalized prejudice and conservatism was moderate, around .40. By 2016 and 2020, that correlation had risen to approximately .70.
‘Full-blown meltdown’ at Pentagon after Hegseth’s second Signal chat revealed
Existence of group chat including Hegseth, his wife and others prompt calls for defense secretary to step down
A former top Pentagon spokesperson has slammed Pete Hegseth’s leadership of the department of defense, as pressure mounts on the US’s top military official following reports of a second Signal chatroom used to discuss sensitive military operations.
John Ullyot, who resigned last week after initially serving as Pentagon spokesperson, said in a opinion essay published by Politico on Sunday that the Pentagon has been overwhelmed by staff drama and turnover in the initial months of the second Trump administration.
Ullyot called the situation a “full-blown meltdown” that could cost Hegseth, a 44-year-old former Fox News host and national guard officer, his job as defense secretary.
“It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon. From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president – who deserves better from his senior leadership,” Ullyot wrote.
The warning came as the New York Times reported that Hegseth shared details of a US attack on Yemeni Houthi rebels last month in a second Signal chat that he created himself and included his wife, his brother and about a dozen other people.
The Guardian has independently confirmed the existence of Hegseth’s own private group chat.
According to unnamed sources familiar with the chat who spoke to the Times, Hegseth sent the private group of his personal associates some of the same information, including the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets that would strike Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, that he also shared with another Signal group of top officials that was created by Mike Waltz, the national security adviser.
The existence of the Signal group chat created by Waltz, in which detailed attack plans were divulged by Hegseth to other Trump administration officials on the private messaging app, were made public by the Atlantic magazine’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who had been accidentally added to the group.
The existence of a second Signal chat, coupled with Ullyot’s devastating portrait of the Pentagon under Hegseth, is likely to increase pressure on the White House to take action.
But the White House on Monday expressed support for the secretary of defense.
“The president absolutely has confidence in Secretary Hegseth,” Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, told reporters. “I spoke to him about it this morning, and he stands strongly behind him.”
Hegseth told reporters that he had spoken with the president and “we are going to continue fighting.”
The Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, issued a statement in a post on X on Sunday night following the New York Times report.
“Another day, another old story – back from the dead,” Parnell said. “The Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda. This time, the New York Times – and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage – are enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article.
“There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story. What is true is that the Office of the Secretary of Defense is continuing to become stronger and more efficient in executing President Trump’s agenda. We’ve already achieved so much for the American warfighter, and will never back down.”
Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator from Illinois and combat veteran, said in a statement that the second Signal chat put the lives of US men and women in uniform at greater risk:
“How many times does Pete Hegseth need to leak classified intelligence before Donald Trump and Republicans understand that he isn’t only a f*cking liar, he is a threat to our national security?
“Every day he stays in his job is another day our troops’ lives are endangered by his singular stupidity,” Duckworth said. “He must resign in disgrace.”
Jack Reed, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, a senior member of the Senate armed services committee, said the report, if true, “is another troubling example of Secretary Hegseth’s reckless disregard for the laws and protocols that every other military service member is required to follow”.
Reed called on Hegseth to “immediately explain why he reportedly texted classified information that could endanger American service members’ lives on a commercial app that included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer”.
Reed said he had “warned that Mr Hegseth lacks the experience, competence, and character to run the Department of Defense. In light of the ongoing chaos, dysfunction, and mass firings under Mr Hegseth’s leadership, it seems that those objections were well-founded.”
Ullyot warned that under Hegseth “the Pentagon focus is no longer on warfighting, but on endless drama” and said “the president deserves better than the current mishegoss at the Pentagon.”
Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, Pope Francis performed his final public act when he waved to worshippers in St. Peter’s Square. He died today at 88. Born in Argentina, he was the first Pope to come from the Americas. He was also the first Jesuit to serve as Pope, bringing new perspectives to the Catholic Church and hoping to focus the church on the poor.
The stock market plunged again today after President Donald J. Trump continued to harass Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. The threat of instability if Trump tries to fire Powell, added to the instability already created by Trump’s tariff policies, saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average fall 971.82 points, or 2.48%; the S&P 500 dropped 2.36%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.55%. The dollar hit a three-year low, while the value of gold soared. Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that since Trump took office, the Dow has fallen 13.8%, the S&P 500 is down 15.5%, and the Nasdaq is down 20.5%.
Hannah Erin Lang of the Wall Street Journal reported that “[t]he Trump rout is taking on historic dimensions.” She noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average “is headed for its worst April performance since 1932,” when the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. Scott Ladner, chief investment officer at Horizon Investments, told Lang: “It’s impossible to commit capital to an economy that is unstable and unknowable because of policy structure.”
The Trump administration announced on April 11 that it would withhold from Harvard University $2.2 billion in grants already awarded and a $60 million contract unless Harvard permitted the federal government to control the university’s admissions and intellectual content. Today, Harvard sued the government for violating the First Amendment and overstepping its legal authority under the guise of addressing antisemitism.
The complaint notes the “arbitrary and capricious nature” of the government’s demands, and says, “The government has not—and cannot—identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives, foster American success, preserve American security, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
University president Alan Garber explained that the freeze would jeopardize research on “how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield.” He continued: “As opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease are on the horizon, the government is slamming on the brakes. The victims will be future patients and their loved ones who will suffer the heartbreak of illnesses that might have been prevented or treated more effectively. Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
Harvard is suing the departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, Education, Energy, and Defense, the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, NASA, and the leaders of those agencies.
After news broke yesterday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had disclosed classified information on a second unsecure Signal chat—this one on on his unsecure personal cell phone—and his former spokesperson told Politico the Pentagon was in “total chaos,” and he fired three of his top aides, media articles today wrote that officials were looking for a new Secretary of Defense.
But Hegseth blamed the media for the exposure of his Signal chats, and Trump stood by Hegseth. According to Dasha Burns, Eli Stokols, and Jake Traylor of Politico, the president doesn’t want to validate the stories about disarray at the Pentagon by firing Hegseth. “He’s doing a great job,” the president told reporters. “It’s just fake news.”
While the visible side of the administration appears to be floundering, new stories suggest that the less visible side—the “Department of Government Efficiency”—has dug into U.S. data in alarming ways.
On April 15, Jenna McLaughlin of NPR reported on an official whistleblower disclosure that as soon as members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) arrived at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they appeared to be hacking into secure data. While they claimed to be looking for places to cut costs, the behavior of the DOGE team suggested something else was going on. They demanded the highest level of access, tried to hide their activities in the system, turned off monitoring tools, and then manually deleted the record of their tracks, all behaviors that cybersecurity experts told McLaughlin sounded like “what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.”
Staffers noticed that an IP address in Russia was trying to log in to the system using a newly created DOGE account with correct username and password, and later saw that a large amount of sensitive data was leaving the agency. Cybersecurity experts identified that spike as a sign of a breach in the system, creating the potential for that data to be sold, stolen, or used to hurt companies, while the head of DOGE himself could use the information for his own businesses. “All of this is alarming," Russ Handorf, who worked in cybersecurity for the FBI, told McLaughlin. "If this was a publicly traded company, I would have to report this [breach] to the Securities and Exchange Commission.” When the whistleblower brought his concerns to someone at NLRB, he received threats.
“If he didn’t know the backstory, any [chief information security officer] worth his salt would look at network activity like this and assume it’s a nation-state attack from China or Russia,” Jake Braun, former acting principal deputy national cyber director at the White House, told McLaughlin.
McLaughlin noted that the story of what happened at the NLRB is not uncommon. When challenged by judges, DOGE has offered conflicting and vague answers to the question of why it needs access to sensitive information, and has dismissed concerns about cybersecurity and privacy. The administration has slashed through the agencies that protect systems from attack and Trump has signed an executive order urging government departments to “eliminate…information silos” and to share their information.
Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard Law School's Center for Labor and a Just Economy and a former NLRB board member, told McLaughlin: “There is nothing that I can see about what DOGE is doing that follows any of the standard procedures for how you do an audit that has integrity and that's meaningful and will actually produce results that serve the normal auditing function, which is to look for fraud, waste and abuse…. The mismatch between what they're doing and the established, professional way to do what they say they're doing...that just kind of gives away the store, that they are not actually about finding more efficient ways for the government to operate.”
On April 18, Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that DOGE is building a master database that knits together information from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Social Security Administration, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida. This appears to be designed to find and pressure undocumented immigrants, Kelly and Elliott reported, but the effects of the consolidation of data are not limited to them.
On April 15 the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Gerald Connolly of Virginia, asked the acting inspector general at the Department of Labor and the inspector general at the NLRB to investigate “any and all attempts to exfiltrate data and any attempts to cover up their activities.” Two days later, he made a similar request to the acting inspector general for the Social Security Administration.
Connolly wrote: “I am concerned that DOGE is moving personal information across agencies without the notification required under the Privacy Act or related laws, such that the American people are wholly unaware their data is being manipulated in this way.”
On April 17, Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro of ProPublica reported that the administration is looking to replace the federal government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay, with a contract awarded to the private company Ramp. Ramp is backed by investment firms tied to Trump and Musk.
While administration officials insist that SmartPay is wasteful, both Republican and Democratic budget experts say that’s wrong, according to Bing and Asher-Schapiro. “SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” former General Services Administration commissioner Sonny Hashmi told the reporters. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems…with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”
“There’s a lot of money to be made by a new company coming in here,” said Hashmi. “But you have to ask: What is the problem that’s being solved?”
Today is Earth Day, celebrated for the first time in 1970. The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT, which had been developed in 1939 and used to clear islands in the South Pacific of malaria-carrying mosquitoes during World War II. Deployed as an insect killer in the U.S. after the war, DDT was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.
DDT sprayed on vegetation washed into the oceans. It concentrated in fish, which were then eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells, so thin the eggs cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them. And so the birds began to die off.
Carson was unable to interest any publishing company in the story of DDT. Finally, frustrated at the popular lack of interest in the story behind the devastation of birds, she decided to write the story anyway, turning out a highly readable book with 55 pages of footnotes to make her case.
When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson's sanity.
But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."
Meanwhile, a number of scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.
Then, over 10 days in January–February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”
And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.
In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. Fifty-five years later, it is still one of the largest protests in American history.
Today the White House under President Donald J. Trump celebrated Earth Day by announcing that “we finally have a president who follows science,” with policies “rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources—no ‘Green New Scam’ required.” One of the policies the White House champions is “opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction.”
Four days ago, on April 18, journalist Wes Siler noted in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the day before, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum had signed an extraordinary order. The order assigned to the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget, or AS-PMB, control over the Department of the Interior, including its personnel and its budget.
Siler explains that “[t]he person currently serving as AS-PMB (which in normal times would require Senate confirmation) is DOGE operative Tyler Hassen, the CEO of a Houston-based energy company.” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement: “Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands.”
Siler notes that Burgum has handed power over the Department of the Interior to “a hitherto unknown political operative” who is holding his position in violation of the appointments clause of the Constitution.
He also notes that the Department of the Interior “manages the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey,” in addition to the National Park Service. “As such,” Siler writes, “Hassen is now responsible for 70,000 employees, the administration of numerous international treaties, the welfare of 574 Native American Tribes, 433 national park sites, over 500 million acres of public lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and 3.2 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf.”
Burgum’s order says that his order is designed “to effectuate the consolidation, unification and optimization of administrative functions within the Department of the Interior…in order to achieve effectiveness, accountability and cost savings for the American taxpayer.” In other words, he is falling back on the idea of further cuts to the U.S. government in order to save money.
In fact, the public lands already make billions of dollars a year for the United States through tourism, but since the 1970s, the right wing has come to see the public ownership of lands as an affront to the idea that individuals should be able to use the resources they believe God has put there for them to use. Developers have encouraged that ideology, for privatization of America’s western lands has always meant that they ended up in the hands of a few wealthy individuals.
That impulse shows in Project 2025. As Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”
Burgum appears to be on board with that plan. On January 16, in his confirmation hearings, Burgum made it clear that he sees selling the public lands as a source of revenue, referring to them as “America's balance sheet.” “[W]e’ve got $36 trillion in debt,” he said, but “[w]e never talk about the assets, and the assets are the land and minerals.” The Interior Department, he said, “has got close to 500 million acres of surface. It's 700 million acres of subsurface and over 2 billion acres of offshore…. That's the balance sheet of America…. I believe we ought to have a deep inventory of all the assets in America. We ought to understand…what is our assets, 100 trillion, 200 trillion? We could be in great shape as a country.”
Fears grow that Signal leaks make Pete Hegseth top espionage target
Experts say Pentagon chief has endangered secrets of US defense department and given assistance to foreign spies
As more develops about the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his repeated disclosures of sensitive military intelligence in unsecured Signal group chats, there are growing concerns his behavior has weakened the Pentagon in the eyes of its foreign adversaries and made him and his entourage a top espionage target.
Allies, already concerned by Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs, have also begun to see the US as an intelligence-sharing liability. There are fears that the mounting firings and leak inquiries in Hegseth’s orbit, along with his inability to manage these internal crises, exposes the entire global US war footing – especially, if a geopolitical and external crisis comes across his desk.
“[What if] a foreign entity, whether it be a state actor or non-state actor, is able to intercept the movements of troops or department personnel, or something like that, capture them and hold them to ransom,” said Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq war veteran and CEO at Task Force Butler. “That kind of thing could very easily happen.”
Earlier in the week, news broke that Hegseth had personally created a Signal group chat including his wife, brother and about a dozen other people who he then texted highly sensitive information on active strikes in Yemen. Previously, he discussed similar intelligence in a group chat on the same app, which included top officials in the Trump administration and a journalist from the Atlantic.
Former officials serving in national security positions under Joe Biden’s administration also told the Guardian on background that the situation is perilous and that Hegseth has endangered the secrets of the defense department and the White House. One person said Russian and Chinese spies were no doubt directly targeting susceptible people in Hegseth’s inner circle.
Goldsmith, a threat intelligence expert, said there were many scenarios wherein a foreign government could gain access to those chats, without the need to directly compromise Hegseth’s devices.
“Pete Hegseth is texting his wife and his wife is posting on Instagram, clicks a link, and gets malware on her phone,” said Goldsmith, describing a hypothetical scenario. “Then the Chinese or the Iranians or the Russians just happen to be like, ‘Oh, ****, we’ve got Mrs Hegseth, [without] even targeting her.’”
To Goldsmith, Hegseth, who came into power on the heels of publicly characterizing the Pentagon as a “woke” shambles after years of ignoring “war fighters”, has already undermined the overall power of the US military in his months-long reign.
“These kinds of leaks, anticipating troop movements, anticipating attacks – those can put our adversaries in position to intercept pilots or convoys or ships, which could create an international incident,” he said. “It could mean a nuclear or a biological or a chemical crisis of some kind.”
Within the geopolitical competition between the US, Russia and China, assigning teams of capable intelligence agents trailing, hacking and spying on the every move of your top officials is an open secret. Protecting those officials and the sanctity of their communications from those interventions is a well-trodden and technical mission that calls in some of America’s most secretive agencies.
But if the advice, devices and apps provided to those officials go ignored, foreign adversaries have an opening.
Hegseth’s adherence to operational security, “opsec” for short among national security professionals, referring to the general tradecraft of preventing sensitive information from being leaked, has advertised to foreign adversaries how to compromise him.
“Well, they know what he’s operating on,” said Joe Plenzler, a retired veteran of the United States Marine Corps who served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Signal is better than most other commercial apps, but it’s not military-grade encryption.”
Plenzler, who was a public affairs officer in the Iraq war under the former secretary of defense Gen James Mattis, a senior figure in Trump’s first administration, said he and his boss understood the importance of respecting the secrecy of communications in the field.
“If any officer or enlisted member had passed classified information over an unsecured or unauthorized [device], we would have been immediately removed [them] from our position, investigated, most likely prosecuted,” he said. “For an officer, it’s a career killer.”
Plenzler said Mattis told his subordinates: “‘When you’re leading marines you have to lead by example. The fastest thing that will crack the morale of any unit is the leader that says, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’”
Plenzler added that Hegseth’s conduct was “inexcusable”, especially when divulging some of the kinds of sources and methods, gleaned from intelligence-gathering, that can put people’s lives in danger.
“What sources are getting burned when secrets get out? People are risking their lives to help the United States, to protect our citizens and our allies, and when these things go sideways, some people are very literally running for their lives,” he said. “When my former boss was sitting in the chair, I felt a lot better.”
On Monday, during the White House Easter egg roll event, Hegseth was chatty and defiant with the press in attendance.
“Signal chat controversy?” he said to reporters. “This is what the media does – they take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.”
Trump agreed, backing Hegseth.
“He’s doing a great job,” Trump said, dismissively, at the same event.
