Politics

PoliticusUSA is news that you can rely on, but we need your support. Please consider supporting us by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now Democrats have long been held back by their desire to be right or to do the right thing, while Republicans are obsessed with gaining and keeping power. It could be argued that the Biden presidency is the most recent example of Democrats attempting to do the right thing through governance while overlooking the politics necessary to maintain power. However, without power, policies can’t be enacted. As the nation is currently witnessing, Democrats can’t protect and enhance democracy or do things that help people without power. The need to get back into power ahead of anything else was something that Beto O’Rourke discussed on CNN. Video: While talking about the proposed Republican gerrymander of Texas, O’Rourke said: Governor Gavin Newsom in California has talked about a redistricting in his state. I think it’s time that we match fire with fire. I think Democrats in the past too often have been more concerned with being right than being in power. Read more

PoliticusUSA is corporate-free and proudly independent. Please consider supporting us by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now Trump can’t make the Jeffrey Epstein questions go away. He continues to try all of the tricks that he knows, but his own supporters won’t pressure him and demand the release of the Epstein files. The president even called his supporters stupid and tried to blame Democrats, but it didn’t work. MAGA still wants the Epstein files. Trump’s newest effort at distraction was to post on Truth Social: The Washington “Whatever’s” should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!! Trump’s demand is both weird and sad. It also reveals a great deal about the limitations of Donald Trump’s style of politics. Trump doesn’t have the ability to lift up and bring together. Donald Trump is America’s tyranny of the minority president, and his hold on power is based on his ability to keep people divided. Trump has exploited cultural fault lines and culture war issues to gain and maintain power. The answer to why Trump chose now to suddenly demand the return of sports teams’ names and mascots that are racial slurs can be found in a different Truth Social post from the president on Sunday morning. Trump wrote: My Poll Numbers within the Republican Party, and MAGA, have gone up, significantly, since the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax was exposed by the Radical Left Democrats and, just plain “troublemakers.” They have hit 90%, 92%, 93%, and 95%, in various polls, and are all Republican Party records. The General Election numbers are my highest, EVER! People like Strong Borders, and all of the many other things I have done. GOD BLESS AMERICA. MAGA! Yeah, Trump was lying. His overall MAGA approval rating doesn’t tell the whole story. MAGA is split over his handling of the Epstein files, according to a new CBS News Poll: Just as a divided House can not stand, a divided party will struggle to win the midterm election. The damage being done will be reflected in congressional races and Republican turnout in 2026, not Trump’s approval ratings. Trump is still trying to do damage control, and he is really sinking to new lows and grasping for anything, including slurring Native Americans, to keep his party together. What do you think about Trump slurring Native Americans? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment

The program known as PEPFAR is one of the most effective and popular U.S. foreign aid projects in history, and the government says it has saved the lives of over 25 million people around the world with HIV. But despite years of bipartisan support, PEPFAR has faced a severe threat as the Trump administration dismantles most U.S. foreign aid. PEPFAR on Tuesday appeared to be spared a $400 million cut as Republicans acted in rare defiance of a request by President Donald Trump. But governments, health experts and people with HIV around the world are alarmed by the effects of other U.S. aid cuts and chaos that are already disrupting the crucial supply of HIV drugs — which are meant to be taken daily. Here’s a look at PEPFAR and how it affects millions of people globally. Fears of an AIDS resurgence Today, many babies are born infection-free to mothers with HIV — the U.S. State Department says PEPFAR has been responsible for 5.5 million such births — and most people around the world no longer see an infection as a death sentence. Governments in Africa and elsewhere had even begun to worry about complacency as people, especially youths, took the widespread availability of HIV drugs for granted. In another significant step forward, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved for use the world’s only twice-a-year shot to prevent HIV. But the abrupt U.S. aid cuts have health officials in developing countries warning of a return to the early days of the AIDS pandemic, when drugs were nonexistent or severely limited and clinics were filled with the dying. PEPFAR was launched in 2004 in response to those grim scenes. Related | Trump administration is happy to let kids starve Also known as the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the program has partnered with nonprofit groups to provide HIV medication — including the preventative PrEP — to millions around the world. It has strengthened national health care systems, cared for children orphaned by AIDS and provided job training for people at risk. It has played an important role in testing for and tracking HIV infections. HIV/AIDS has no cure, and it has killed over 40 million people globally over the years. Now the U.N. agency on AIDS is warning that analysis suggests 4 million additional AIDS-related deaths between now and 2029, including 300,000 additional children’s deaths, if programs permanently lose PEPFAR’s support. From widespread support to baseless claims Since PEPFAR’s creation by Congress and Republican President George W. Bush, the program has largely enjoyed support across the political spectrum — and gratitude from countries whose health systems have been poorly equipped to care for millions with HIV. George W. Bush marks 20 years of PEPFAR at the Peace Institute in Washington in Feb. 2023. But misinformation has crept in. The Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative Washington think tank, accused the Biden administration of using PEPFAR “to promote its domestic radical social agenda overseas.” Conservatives claimed there were efforts to integrate abortion with HIV/AIDS prevention, a claim the Biden administration denied. Similar claims linger under the Trump administration. Trump and his officials also claim widespread waste and fraud as they seek to dismantle U.S. foreign aid. But PEPFAR has been repeatedly scrutinized. Last year, the government said the State Department’s Office of Inspector General had conducted 80 audits, inspections, and special reviews that included oversight of PEPFAR programs, “including 21 thematic reviews and audits specifically focused on PEPFAR.” Impossible to replace US funding The $400 million proposed cut to PEPFAR still could be restored, in part or in full, as the bill on spending cuts faces a final vote in the Senate, a vote in the House of Representatives and Trump’s signature before a Friday deadline. “We must stay vigilant,” International AIDS Society President Beatriz Grinsztejn said in a statement Wednesday after PEPFAR appeared to be spared. No matter what, countries and health experts say it will be impossible to fill the funding gap left by the overall U.S. withdrawal of billions of dollars in aid for the global HIV response, including via PEPFAR. Last month, a UNAIDS report said the abrupt cuts have “destabilized supply chains, led to the closure of health facilities, left thousands of health clinics without staff, set back prevention programs, disrupted HIV testing efforts and forced many community organizations to reduce or halt their HIV activities.” South Africa, where more people live with HIV than anywhere else in the world, has said 12 specialized HIV clinics that were funded by the U.S. have had to close down and over 8,000 health workers in its national HIV program are out of work. Related | Trump’s retreat from the world has been great for China Now health workers there and elsewhere are trying to track down an unknown number of people who have lost access to HIV medication. The stakes are deadly. Stopping the drugs allows the virus to start multiplying again. HIV can rebound to detectable levels in people’s blood in just a few weeks, putting sexual partners at risk. The virus could even become drug-resistant. “It has really been hectic for us,” said Mbonisiwe Hlongwane, manager of the HIV program at the Bertha Gxowa public hospital in Germiston, east of Johannesburg. And the uncertainty only continues.

It’s tough to keep track of all the ways in which billionaire Elon Musk has enriched himself with your tax dollars. But that windfall seemingly wasn’t enough for Musk, whose brain-chip company Neuralink reportedly lied on federal forms, falsely calling itself a “small disadvantaged business.” The outlet Musk Watch unearthed the filing, dated April 24, which was when Musk was still a “special government employee” of the federal government. Hello, DOGE? Here is some apparent fraud and waste for you to discover! To qualify as a small disadvantaged business, the majority ownership of a company must be held by members of a “socially and economically disadvantaged” group. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, socially disadvantaged people are those “subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias within American society.” Economically disadvantaged individuals are those with a net worth of less than $850,000. As of midday Friday, Musk’s net worth is over $413 billion. He’s a white, straight man and is not subject to any prejudice, which means he meets neither prong of the SDB requirements.  To be fair, perhaps Musk’s company thought it could claim Musk was suffering ethnic prejudice because he is a white South African, given that both he and Trump believe so fervently that white South Africans are the most persecuted people in existence, basically the only people oppressed enough to get refugee status these days. Demonstrators protest against Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency outside a Tesla dealership on April 12 in Kansas City, Missouri. This doesn’t appear to be a onetime error, either. Musk Watch found that Neuralink has claimed this same designation in 11 different federal filings since 2017. It isn’t clear if Neuralink has actually received any money from the government via this apparent scam, but that isn’t really the point. The mere act of signing off on the federal forms would be fraud—the exact sort of fraud that the administration has pretended it is rooting out.  All of this is especially ironic given that Musk otherwise actively scorns diversity efforts.  Things at Tesla, his electric vehicle company, have allegedly been so racist that last year a California state judge ruled that 6,000 of its Black workers could jointly sue the company as a class because they alleged Tesla had a “pattern or practice” of failing to address and prevent discrimination against Black workers.  Additionally, under then-President Joe Biden in 2023, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Tesla for allegedly tolerating racist harassment and retaliating against workers who opposed the harassment. It’s unclear what will happen with that suit, but Tesla already got a gift from the Trump administration, which reportedly dropped a Department of Labor investigation into discrimination at the company.  Musk has also been eager to attack any diversity efforts and has gleefully slashed funding for related initiatives. He turned Twitter into X, a neo-Nazi hangout whose chatbot turned so antisemitic that Musk had to shut it down. This is not a person who believes the government should lend a helping hand to people who have suffered racial, ethnic, or cultural prejudice.  That said, Neuralink’s reported actions make perfect sense within the paradigm of the Trump administration. In that worldview, the people who actually qualify for the small-disadvantaged-business designation don’t deserve it, because they weren’t chosen on the basis of merit. To them, the real racism is anything that doesn’t reward white people. So why shouldn’t Musk’s company seemingly engage in a little light fraud to get the advantage it believes it so richly deserves?

A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Trump and MAGA turn on each other over Epstein files

 Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 270 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new. I have covered multiple genres of Black music here over the years, but I have to admit that I have rarely touched upon rap and hip-hop. This is probably due to my age and generation, since I was born in 1947.  That generational point-of-view gets a very thorough examination in this 2023 interview conducted by Guy Emerson Mount, at Black Perspectives. “The Hip-Hop Generation”: An Interview with Bakari Kitwana  This is an interview with Guy Emerson Mount, Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies at Wake Forest University, and Bakari Kitwana, the internationally known cultural critic, journalist, activist, and thought leader in the area of hip-hop, youth culture, and Black political engagement. Kitwana is the Executive Director of Rap Sessions, which for the last fourteen years has conducted over 150 townhall meetings around the nation on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop and millennial generations. His most recent book is the co-edited volume, Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People (The New Press, 2020). Guy Emerson Mount (GEM): As we reflect on the last fifty years of what we now call Hip Hop, I was hoping we might begin with your take on how the history of Hip Hop is currently being narrated both within popular culture as well as within scholarly discourses. What do we get right and what do we get wrong about the origin story of Hip Hop? Bakari Kitwana (BK): Hip-hop as a musical expression is relatively young. Its creation story and mythologies are routinely challenged, as its perceptions in popular culture meet the scrutiny of an emerging hip-hop scholarship. Some argue that the birth date is arbitrary. Others suggest that there are iterations of hip-hop that predate August 1973, including other musical forms and practices that hinted at hip-hop before hip-hop. All that aside, what the current Hip-Hop 50 celebrations across the country revel is that there are lots of takeaways from what has been achieved in this brief half century. The countless signed and unsigned artists, the many innovations and disruptions, the cross fertilization of Black diasporic youth cultures as they meet new technologies. There is lots to agree on and lots to debate fare beyond the origin story that answers the question, “What has 50 years of hip-hop history meant to the world?” Who is the greatest emcee of all time? Who’s on your top 10 list? What have different regions beyond the East and West coasts contributed to the hip-hop story? So, there is the debatable but there is also the indisputable: that hip-hop music emerged out of a cross cultural fertilization that impacted the American and world music scenes, that Black American vernacular was and remains central in its verbal expression; that DJ Kool Herc who hailed from Jamaica was one of its early innovators, that many emcees and djs came after, looked back at these earlier innovators and pioneers and attempted to build on their practices with varying degrees of success and depending on exposure captured the imagination of millions. And all of it has given us countless hours of music to listen to and lots of hip-hop history to reflect on. What we get wrong in the origin story, as is true of any history are the unsung. Let’s make sure we lift them up. GEM: How do you conceptualize Hip-Hop? What does it mean to you? BK: First and foremost, I think of hip-hop as a Black generational phenomenon. It was a theoretical framework that placed our generation in conversation with others most seamlessly. This was particularly essential for a generation coming of age in the aftermath of the civil rights and Black Power movements. In my earlier years as a hip-hop writer, I sought out the pioneering practitioners who I also deemed theorists because of their careful thinking about what is hip-hop. It’s important to understand that not every practitioner makes a worthy theorist. However, there are important exceptions. DJ Kool Herc. Africa Bambaataa. KRS-One, Chuck D, Popmaster Fabel were among the voices that not only gave a great deal of thought to what they were doing and where it was coming from, but also carefully articulated what they saw. Of course, there were others, but in my mind, they were among the dominant theoreticians whose thinking about the question “what is hip-hop” created a knowledge center that spread out from there and was adopted as the gospel by many. Countless hip-hop fans to this day cite their theories about hip-hop, many without realizing their origin. Scholars like Tricia Rose, Mark Anthony Neal, Joan Morgan, Marcyliena Morgan, Dawn-Elissa Fischer, James Peterson, Raquel Rivera, among others, have documented some of these theories and solidified their preservation with the study of hip-hop in the academy and in their books and scholarly essays. Equally important are hip-hop arts practitioners who sit at intersection of art and academia. 9th Wonder, Bun B, Lupe Fiasco, Akua Naru immediately come to mind. But of course, there are others. What hip-hop means to me? As someone preoccupied with the way American society and white supremacy suppresses Black folks as a general practice, hip-hop for me has always pointed to possibility within a specific generational moment for how we get free. Its emergence from and continued rootedness in the Black grassroots gives it special appeal and power to transform the world as we know it. We see hints of that as hip-hop meets high school education, academia, politics, entrepreneurship, etc, but in my estimation, despite hip-hop’s commercialization, to a large degree much of its revolutionary and transformative potential in this regard, remains off the radar. To that end, we are just getting started.   There’s about a 20-year age difference between me and Kitwana, and as such, I can claim

Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. Over the last two weeks, President Donald Trump has been at odds with his MAGA base like never before. His administration has said it will not disclose any further information on the case of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and Trump has railed against his own supporters for not falling in line with the current narrative. President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in 1992. Meanwhile, Democrats have taken him to task, highlighting how the right claimed that Trump’s election would lead to further disclosures. But now the GOP has stonewalled any attempts at transparency and possibly implicating Trump himself in the fallout. Led by Trump, conservatives spent years pushing conspiracy theories about Epstein and his death because it fed into longstanding narratives about the elite and Democrats. Supporters told themselves that Epstein’s sex trafficking was used to benefit the super-rich and that Democrats were covering it all up for the purported “globalists” they work in concert with. But this isn’t a recent development. Modern conservatism has always been obsessed with this kind of wild conspiracy thinking. The John Birch right takes control The extremist John Birch Society rose to prominence on the right in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the rise of the so-called “liberal” world order under leaders like Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.  But it wasn’t enough for Birchers to simply oppose liberal ideas; they had to indulge in bizarre conspiracies, like the notion that the population was being brainwashed to support communism via fluoridated water. After the conservative uprising that led to Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and his acolytes taking control of the party—and losing the 1964 election in a landslide—the conspiracy-first mindset, described as “the paranoid style,” became the default on the right. Paranoia goes mainstream While some GOP leaders like Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush stoked conspiratorial fires over and over, there was an understanding that this brand of extremism was a political nonstarter.  Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton The Republican establishment wanted the votes of conspiracy true believers without the public humiliation of standing by easily debunked absurdities. This began to change after President Bill Clinton ascended to the White House in 1993. Frustrated by Clinton’s win, conservatives openly accused him and Hillary Clinton of operating a drug-trafficking ring and committing a series of murders, among many other easily debunked conspiracies. This reached a fevered pitch when President Barack Obama was elected. The right couldn’t accept the legitimacy of a Black president and embraced the “birther” conspiracy, claiming that his birth certificate was false and that he was really Kenyan. Of course, Trump was the most prominent booster of this racist smear. Figures once on the outside, like Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, became normalized under Trump and the MAGA movement. Suddenly, the right began openly accusing Democrats of being part of a child sex-trafficking ring called “Pizzagate,” which inspired believers to commit crimes, including the Alex Jones fan who stalked a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant to liberate children from the establishment’s nonexistent basement. Conspiracies mean simple answers In a complex world with horrible things constantly happening that seem to defy explanation, conspiracy theories help to make things “make sense.” The right grasps onto these theories as a way to explain why the world doesn’t go their way. Trump supporters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection of the U.S. Capitol ignited by the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen. For instance, many Republicans have simply never believed that a Black person is qualified to be president. Obama purportedly being a Kenyan with a sprawling conspiracy keeping him in office appears to them as a rational explanation. Similarly, following Trump’s disastrous first term, many on the right had convinced themselves that he did a great job. Instead of reckoning with failures like the COVID-119 death toll on his watch, the right—led by Trump—argued that the 2020 election was stolen. Republicans have capitalized on this mindset, feeding their supporters a steady stream of conspiratorial nonsense, including debunked theories about the origins of COVID-19 and the QAnon conspiracy that involves elites attacking children for their blood. Trapped in their own trap Conspiratorial thinking is the domain of the right. But in the Epstein saga, Republicans are suffering from backlash to something that they created. The story has morphed from something to easily associate with the left into a story being suppressed by one of their own, Trump. Related | Trump and MAGA turn on each other over Epstein files Now, a culture that has told conservatives not to believe evidence that they witness with their own eyes is instructing them to simply drop it and move on. That is proving difficult for many and impossible for some. Trump wants the right to shut up about this storyline, either because his administration realizes there’s nothing there to expose, or because Trump himself is directly implicated. But his own MAGA world has been told for so long that this event is the easy solution to so many of their problems, so they aren’t so willing to let it go. The right needs this conspiracy to be true so reality can be explained away. Trump can’t stop it, he’s just along for the ride.

A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | DOJ’s latest firing ensures Epstein scandal won’t go away

A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | RFK Jr. is steering public health agencies off a cliff

Federal housing officials spent years investigating cities from Chicago to Memphis to Corpus Christi for putting industrial plants and unwanted facilities in poor, nonwhite neighborhoods. Now, under Trump, the agency plans to drop the cases. By Jesse Coburn for ProPublica The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is preparing to shut down seven major investigations and cases concerning alleged housing discrimination and segregation, including some where the agency already found civil rights violations, according to HUD records obtained by ProPublica. The high-profile cases involve allegations that state and local governments across the South and Midwest illegally discriminated against people of color by placing industrial plants or low-income housing in their neighborhoods, and by steering similar facilities away from white neighborhoods, among other allegations. HUD has been pursuing these cases — which range from instances where the agency has issued a formal charge of discrimination to newer investigations — for as many as seven years. In three of them, HUD officials had determined that the defendants had violated the Fair Housing Act or related civil rights laws. A HUD staffer familiar with the other four investigations believes civil rights violations occurred in each, the official told ProPublica. Under President Donald Trump, the agency now plans to abruptly end all of them, regardless of prior findings of wrongdoing. Four HUD officials said they could recall no precedent for the plan, which they said signals an acceleration of the administration’s retreat from fair housing enforcement. “No administration previously has so aggressively rolled back the basic protections that help people who are being harmed in their community,” one of the officials said. “The civil rights protections that HUD enforces are intended to protect the most vulnerable people in society.” In the short term, closing the cases would allow the local governments in question to continue allegedly mistreating minority communities, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. In the long term, they said, it could embolden local politicians and developers elsewhere to take actions that entrench segregation, without fear of punishment from the federal government. Related | Yes, Trump’s trying to make America segregated again HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett declined to answer questions, saying “HUD does not comment on active 3 matters or individual personnel.” Three of the cases involve accusations that local governments clustered polluting industrial facilities in minority neighborhoods. One concerned a protracted dispute over a scrap metal shredding plant in Chicago. The facility had operated for years in the largely white neighborhood of Lincoln Park. But residents complained ceaselessly of the fumes, debris, noise and, occasionally, smoke emanating from the plant. So the city allegedly pressured the recycling company to close the old facility and open a new one in a minority neighborhood in southeast Chicago. In 2022, HUD found that “relocating the Facility to the Southeast Site will bring environmental benefits to a neighborhood that is 80% White and environmental harms to a neighborhood that is 83% Black and Hispanic.” Chicago’s mayor called allegations of discrimination “preposterous,” then settled the case and agreed to reforms in 2023. (The new plant has not opened; its owner has sued the city.) Related | Chicago’s plan to replace lead pipes puts it 30 years behind the federal deadline In another case, a predominantly white Michigan township allowed an asphalt plant to open on its outskirts, away from its population centers but near subsidized housing complexes in the neighboring poor, mostly Black city of Flint. The township did not respond to a ProPublica inquiry about the case. Still another case involved a plan pushed by the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, to build a water desalination plant in a historically Black neighborhood already fringed by oil refineries and other industrial facilities. (Rates of cancer and birth defects in the area are disproportionately high, and average life expectancy is 15 years lower than elsewhere in the city, researchers found.) The city denied the allegations. Construction of the plant is expected to conclude in 2028. Three other cases involve allegations of discrimination in municipal land use decisions. In Memphis, Tennessee, the city and its utility allegedly coerced residents of a poor Black neighborhood to sell their homes so that it could build a new facility there. In Cincinnati, the city has allegedly concentrated low-income housing in poor Black neighborhoods and kept it out of white neighborhoods. And in Chicago, the city has given local politicians veto power over development proposals in their districts, resulting in little new affordable housing in white neighborhoods. (Memphis, its utility and Chicago have disputed the allegations; Cincinnati declined to comment on them.) The last case involved a Texas state agency allegedly diverting $1 billion in disaster mitigation money away from Houston and other communities of color hit hard by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and toward more rural, white communities less damaged by the storm. The agency has disputed the allegations. Flood-damaged debris from homes lines the street in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Houston in Sept. 2017. All of the investigations and cases are now slated to be closed. HUD is also planning to stop enforcing the settlement it reached in the Chicago recycling case, the records show. The move to drop the cases is being directed by Brian Hawkins, a recent Trump administration hire at HUD who serves as a senior adviser in the Fair Housing Office, two agency officials said. Hawkins has no law degree or prior experience in housing, according to his LinkedIn profile. But this month, he circulated a list within HUD of the seven cases that indicated the agency’s plans for them. In the cases that involve Cincinnati, Corpus Christi, Flint and Houston, the agency would “find no cause on [the] merits,” the list reads. In the two Chicago cases and the one involving Memphis, HUD would rescind letters documenting the agency’s prior findings. Hawkins did not respond to a request for comment. The list does not offer a legal justification for dropping the cases. But Hawkins also circulated a memo that indicates the reasoning behind dropping one — the Chicago recycling case. The memo cites an executive order issued by Trump in April eliminating federal