Latest news with #MandateforLeadership
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
RFK Jr.'s NIH slashed science funding across states that backed Trump
Photo by Getty Images. The National Institutes of Health's sweeping cuts of grants that fund scientific research are inflicting pain almost universally across the U.S., including in most states that backed President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. A KFF Health News analysis underscores that the terminations are sparing no part of the country, politically or geographically. About 40% of organizations whose grants the NIH cut in its first month of slashing, which started Feb. 28, are in states Trump won in November. The Trump administration has singled out Ivy League universities including Columbia and Harvard for broad federal funding cuts. But the spending reductions at the NIH, the nation's foremost source of funding for biomedical research, go much further: Of about 220 organizations that had grants terminated, at least 94 were public universities, including flagship state schools in places such as Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Nebraska and Texas. The Trump administration has canceled hundreds of grants supporting research on topics such as vaccination; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and the health of LGBTQ+ populations. Some of the terminations are a result of Trump's executive orders to abandon federal work on diversity and equity issues. Others followed the Senate confirmation of anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH. Many mirror the ambitions laid out in Project 2025's 'Mandate for Leadership,' the conservative playbook for Trump's second term. Affected researchers say Trump administration officials are taking a cudgel to efforts to improve the lives of people who often experience worse health outcomes — ignoring a scientific reality that diseases and other conditions do not affect all Americans equally. KFF Health News found that the NIH terminated about 780 grants or parts of grants between Feb. 28 and March 28, based on documents published by the Department of Health and Human Services and a list maintained by academic researchers. Some grants were canceled in full, while in other cases, only supplements — extra funding related to the main grant, usually for a shorter-term, related project — were terminated. Among U.S. recipients, 96 of the institutions that lost grants in the first month are in politically conservative states including Florida, Ohio, and Indiana, where Republicans control the state government or voters reliably support the GOP in presidential campaigns, or in purple states such as North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that were presidential battleground states. An additional 124 institutions are in blue states. Sybil Hosek, a research professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, helps run a network that focuses on improving care for people 13 to 24 years old who are living with or at risk for HIV. The NIH awarded Florida State University $73 million to lead the HIV project. 'We never thought they would destroy an entire network dedicated to young Americans,' said Hosek, one of the principal investigators of the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions. The termination 'doesn't make sense to us.' NIH official Michelle Bulls is director of the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration, which oversees grants policy and compliance across NIH institutes. In terminating the grant March 21, Bulls wrote that research 'based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.' Adolescents and young adults ages 13 to 24 accounted for 1 in 5 new HIV infections in the U.S. in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 'It's science in its highest form,' said Lisa Hightow-Weidman, a professor at Florida State University who co-leads the network. 'I don't think we can make America healthy again if we leave youth behind.' HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said in an emailed statement that 'NIH is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities.' The NIH and the White House didn't respond to requests for comment. 'As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it's important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans. We will leave no stone unturned in identifying the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic as part of our mission to Make America Healthy Again,' Hilliard said. The NIH, with its nearly $48 billion annual budget, is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, awarding nearly 59,000 grants in the 2023 fiscal year. The Trump administration has upended funding for projects that were already underway, stymied money for new applications, and sought to reduce how much recipients can spend on overhead expenses. Those changes — plus the firing of 1,200 agency employees as part of mass layoffs across the government — are alarming scientists and NIH workers, who warn that they will undermine progress in combating diseases and other threats to the nation's public health. On April 2, the American Public Health Association, Ibis Reproductive Health, and affected researchers, among others, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the NIH and HHS to halt the grant cancellations. Two National Cancer Institute employees, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press and feared retaliation, said its staff receives batches of grants to terminate almost daily. On Feb. 27, the cancer institute had more than 10,800 active projects, the highest share of the NIH's roughly two dozen institutes and centers, according to the NIH's website. At least 47 grants that NCI awarded were terminated in the first month. Kennedy has said the NIH should take a years-long pause from funding infectious disease research. In November 2023, he told an anti-vaccine group, 'I'm gonna say to NIH scientists, 'God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We're going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years,'' according to NBC News. For years, Kennedy has peddled falsehoods about vaccines — including that 'no vaccine' is 'safe and effective,' and that 'there are other studies out there' showing a connection between vaccines and autism, a link that has repeatedly been debunked — and claimed falsely that HIV is not the only cause of AIDS. KFF Health News found that grants in blue states were disproportionately affected, making up roughly two-thirds of terminated grants, many of them at Columbia University. The university had more grants terminated than all organizations in politically red states combined. On April 4, Democratic attorneys general in 16 states sued HHS and the NIH to block the agency from canceling funds. Researchers whose funding was stripped said they stopped clinical trials and other work on improving care for people with HIV, reducing vaping and smoking rates among LGBTQ+ teens and young adults, and increasing vaccination rates for young children. NIH grants routinely span several years. For example, Hosek said that when the youth HIV/AIDS network's funding was terminated, she and her colleagues were preparing to launch a clinical trial examining whether a particular antibiotic that is effective for men to prevent sexually transmitted infections would also work for women. 'This is a critically important health initiative focused on young women in the United States,' she said. 'Without that study, women don't have access to something that men have.' Other scientists said they were testing how to improve health outcomes among newborns in rural areas with genetic abnormalities, or researching how to improve flu vaccination rates among Black children, who are more likely to be hospitalized and die from the virus than non-Hispanic white children. 'It's important for people to know that — if, you know, they are wondering if this is just a waste of time and money. No, no. It was a beautiful and rare thing that we did,' said Joshua Williams, a pediatric primary care doctor at Denver Health in Colorado who was researching whether sharing stories about harm experienced due to vaccine-preventable diseases — from missed birthdays to hospitalizations and job loss — might inspire caregivers to get their children vaccinated against the flu. He and his colleagues had recruited 200 families, assembled a community advisory board to understand which vaccinations were top priorities, created short videos with people who had experienced vaccine-preventable illness, and texted those videos to half of the caregivers participating in the study. They were just about to crack open the medical records and see if it had worked: Were the group who received the videos more likely to follow through on vaccinations for their children? That's when he got the notice from the NIH. 'It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment,' the notice read. Williams said the work was already having an impact as other institutions were using the idea to start projects related to cancer and dialysis. Congress previously tried to ensure that NIH grants also went to states that historically have had less success obtaining biomedical research funding from the government. Now those places aren't immune to the NIH's terminations. Sophia Newcomer, an associate professor of public health at the University of Montana, said she had 18 months of work left on a study examining undervaccination among infants, which means they were late in receiving recommended childhood vaccines or didn't receive the vaccines at all. Newcomer had been analyzing 10 years of CDC data about children's vaccinations and had already found that most U.S. infants from 0 to 19 months old were not adequately vaccinated. Her grant was terminated March 10, with the NIH letter stating the project 'no longer effectuates agency priorities,' a phrase replicated in other termination letters KFF Health News has reviewed. 'States like Montana don't get a lot of funding for health research, and health researchers in rural areas of the country are working on solutions to improve rural health care,' Newcomer said. 'And so cuts like this really have an impact on the work we're able to do.' Montana is one of 23 states, along with Puerto Rico, that are eligible for the NIH's Institutional Development Award program, meant to bolster NIH funding in states that historically have received less investment. Congress established the program in 1993. The NIH's grant terminations hit institutions in 15 of those states, more than half that qualify, plus Puerto Rico. The NIH's research funds are deeply entrenched in the U.S. health care system and academia. Rarely does an awarded grant stay within the four walls of a university that received it. One grant's money is divvied up among other universities, hospitals, community nonprofits, and other government agencies, researchers said. Erin Kahle, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, said she was working with Emory University in Georgia and the CDC as part of her study. She was researching the impact of intimate partner violence on HIV treatment among men living with the virus. 'They are relying on our funds, too,' she said. Kahle said her top priority was to ethically and safely wind down her nationwide study, which included 418 people, half of whom were still participating when her grant was terminated in late March. Kahle said that includes providing resources to participants for whom sharing experiences of intimate partner violence may cause trauma or mental health distress. Rachel Hess, the co-director of the Clinical & Translational Science Institute at the University of Utah, said the University of Nevada-Reno and Intermountain Health, one of the largest hospital systems in the West, had received funds from a $38 million grant that was awarded to the University of Utah and was terminated March 12. The institute, which aims to make scientific research more efficient to speed up the availability of treatments for patients, supported more than 5,000 projects last year, including 550 clinical trials with 7,000 participants. Hess said that, for example, the institute was helping design a multisite study involving people who have had heart attacks to figure out the ideal mix of medications 'to keep them alive' before they get to the hospital, a challenge that's more acute in rural communities. After pushback from the university — the institute's projects included work to reduce health care disparities between rural and urban areas — the NIH restored its grant March 29. Among the people the Utah center thanked in its announcement about the reversal were the state's congressional delegation, which consists entirely of Republican lawmakers. 'We are grateful to University of Utah leadership, the University of Utah Board of Trustees, our legislative delegation, and the Utah community for their support,' it said. Hilliard, of HHS, said that 'some grants have been reinstated following the appeals process, and the agency will continue to carry out the remaining appeals as planned to determine their alignment.' She declined to say how many had been reinstated, or why the University of Utah grant was among them. Other researchers haven't had the same luck. Kahle, in Michigan, said projects like hers can take a dozen years from start to finish — applying for and receiving NIH funds, conducting the research, and completing follow-up work. 'Even if there are changes in the next administration, we're looking at at least a decade of setting back the research,' Kahle said. 'It's not as easy as like, 'OK, we'll just do it again later.' It doesn't really work that way.' KFF Health News analyzed National Institutes of Health grant data to determine the states and organizations most affected by the Trump administration's cuts. We tallied the number of terminated NIH grants using two sources: a Department of Health and Human Services list of terminated grants published April 4; and a crowdsourced list maintained by Noam Ross of rOpenSci and Scott Delaney of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, as of April 8. We focused on the first month of terminations: from Feb. 28 to March 28. We found that 780 awards were terminated in total, with 770 of them going to recipients based in U.S. states and two to recipients in Puerto Rico. The analysis does not account for potential grant reinstatements, which we know happened in at least one instance. Additional information on the recipients, such as location and business type, came from the Award Data Archive. There were 222 U.S. recipients in total. At least 94 of them were public higher education institutions. Forty-one percent of organizations that had NIH grants cut in the first month were in states that President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election. Some recipients, including the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, are medical facilities associated with higher education institutions. We classified these as hospitals/medical centers. We also wanted to see whether the grant cuts affected states across the political spectrum. We generally classified states as blue if Democrats control the state government or Democratic candidates won them in the last three presidential elections, and red if they followed this pattern but for Republicans. Purple states are generally presidential battleground states or those where voters regularly split their support between the two parties: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The result was 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states. The District of Columbia was also blue. We found that, of affected U.S. institutions, 96 were in red or purple states and 124 were in blue states. KFF Health News intern Henry Larweh contributed to this report. This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
The Independent
04-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
How Trump fast-tracked Project 2025 and why it's worse than you think
No one can accuse Donald Trump of easing his way slowly into the job the second time around; of slouching back in his chair in the Oval Office, Fox News on the big screen, remote in hand. In 100 days he's managed to lay off 12,000 federal workers in the name of government efficiency, alienate countless allies, threatened to invade Greenland and take over the Panama Canal, humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky, told Canada he wants to see it become the 51st state (prompting a historic win for Mark Carney) and imposed tariffs on Europe and elsewhere that signal an end to free trade. But perhaps most notable in terms of his policy agenda is that he has essentially governed by executive order – more than 140 of which have bypassed Congress entirely. And these orders have targeted everything from immigration to education to the detention of 6 January defendants. All in under four months. Why anyone is surprised, however, is the question. In Project 2025, the sweeping, dystopian blueprint for his second term crafted by The Heritage Foundation, he was presented with the instruction manual of how to govern. While on the campaign trail, he disavowed it, saying: 'I haven't read it, I don't want to read it.' But from day one, it feels as if his administration has been following the right-wing plan to disrupt and tear down key government infrastructure. They have set about erasing federal language around gender identity and reproductive health, targeted DEI initiatives, dismantled climate policies, and have been busy stacking the bureaucracy with loyalists. It is clear to anyone following American politics, Project 2025 is not theoretical anymore – it's happening in real time. And it's gone further than any of the architects of Project 2025 surely ever imagined. Legal challenges have swelled, too, with the administration accused of sidestepping court orders, including a Supreme Court mandate to return a wrongfully deported migrant. The White House, meanwhile, insists it's reclaiming power from what it views as an entrenched, unelected judicial bureaucracy. A key check and balance put in by the founding fathers to protect democracy from segueing into an autocracy. Meanwhile, the religious undercurrent of the document is hiding in plain sight too. DOGE and ICE have ramped up enforcement: raiding clubs, arresting judges, and launching task forces with culture war missions like targeting 'anti-Christian bias'. This was the dream scenario sketched out in Mandate for Leadership, the 900-page document that serves as the ideological spine of Project 2025. But Trump hasn't just followed its recommendations – he's outpaced them. He handed Elon Musk the keys to the federal government and shuttered the United States Agency for International Development, triggering lawsuits from federal employee unions and mass protests. David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author of The Making of Donald Trump and It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America says that his second book, which was published during Trump's first administration, showed that they set out to destroy the federal government – an endeavour they're continuing in his second. 'Steve Bannon said they were going to deconstruct the administrative state. And in a few places, where he had competent or zealous managers, they did. They damaged the Environmental Protection Agency. But in most cases, they had little to no success because Donald doesn't know what he's doing.' Now though, Johnston, who is currently a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, says Trump has become more successful because he is surrounded by people who have dreamed of dismantling the government for years. 'And they are now his attack team.' A year ago, New York Times opinion columnist Carlos Lozada said Mandate for Leadership called 'for a relentless politicising of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds.' Back in February, in a piece for The Independent, I wrote: 'Some of the verbiage in that document is eye-opening.' That in its pages it states, 'America's vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth'; that 'conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children.' And 'the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service … and other components [have] become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity'. Project 2025 also argued that the president should have absolute authority over the executive branch. But the boldness with which the second Trump administration has, in the words of Michele Goodwin, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown Law, issued executive orders 'in a way that's devastating to democracy' has shocked many. Johnston said the speed and scale of Trump's bulldozing is unprecedented. 'He took the best-performing economy in the world and flushed it. The stock market has dropped significantly, and although it's popping up and down day-to-day, that's not a good sign. Unemployment is going to go up. He has turned close allies into sceptics, if not hostile countries. The level of ignorance is appalling. 'Businesses are complaining they don't have any certainty as to what's going on. No one is investing. And meanwhile, Donald flip-flops: today there's a tariff, tomorrow there isn't a tariff. And President Xi is not blinking.' Not that any of this is being admitted by Trump himself, of course. Despite the almost daily rollback of his tariff programme, which has directly harmed his Maga allies, at a rally to mark his 100th day in power, he declared: '100 days of greatness.' Johnston, who has studied Trump's rise for decades, puts it bluntly: 'Trump believes he is our king. He has no idea what's in the constitution. He's appallingly ignorant. He thought [19th-century abolitionist] Frederick Douglass was alive, and he thought that Finland was an oblast of Russia.' But to understand the 100-day sprint, you have to understand the long game. This was always about power consolidation. Steve Bannon once promised they'd 'deconstruct the administrative state'. Now, they're doing it. But in their quest for control, Johnston believes Trump's team has overplayed their hand – particularly in targeting Medicaid, the federal health insurance plan which disproportionately supports Trump's own red-state base. 'You'll start hearing stories – a working mother whose child is dying because of the cuts they made to Medicaid. Or a single mother saying her husband died because insulin went from $35 to $1,000. That's stupid because you're slapping your support base in the face … These people don't know what they're doing; they're just a wrecking crew.' But with a House and Senate in Republican hands, and so compliant, why hasn't he bothered asking them to even rubber stamp those policies? 'Because Donald … is our dictator,' Johnston said. 'Why would you go to Congress when you think you can just rule by executive order? Part of the scheme [behind governing by] executive order is to put out so many that nobody can keep track of them. I think the thrust of it is ignoring the courts and ignoring the legislative process and basically declaring, 'My people and I are going to do whatever we want.'' What Johnston is saying is that there's no pretence of any compromise. This isn't policy reform. It's a regime change. A blitzkrieg of executive action designed to overwhelm institutions before they can push back. And when they do – like the courts have, sporadically – the response is either defiance or circumvention. The exception? The US Supreme Court. On 1 July 2024, the court ruled in a 6-3 decision that former presidents are entitled to broad immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office. Johnston said he wouldn't be surprised if it directly or indirectly revisits that immunity decision because it can't live with Trump claiming that he doesn't have to follow the orders of the courts. 'John Glover Roberts Jr [the chief justice of the United States] is an institutionalist, and he has got to be having trouble sleeping at night because of the nightmare that he realises he created.' If Trump loses the next election in 2028 – assuming he leaves the White House, which some doubt – and a Democratic president gets the keys, Johnston said he or she could dispense with all Trump's executive orders en masse. 'But Donald's not worried about that. He isn't planning to leave. It took Rome 40 years to go from a democracy to a dictatorship. Hitler pulled it off in less than two months. Donald Trump pulled it off in less than one.' At his 100th day rally in Michigan, Trump made a direct attack on 'communist radical left judges' for trying to seize his power, warning, 'nothing will stop me'. It is a warning, Johnston says, that we should heed: 'All the people who are doing Donald Trump's bidding are putting themselves at very serious risk of criminal prosecution and civil litigation because the immunity decision does not extend to them. 'And if you're carrying out illegal acts on behalf of Donald Trump, you're not going to be protected. This also means that they will be very motivated to help subvert or prevent future elections that would put them at risk.' We've now got to wait 1,370 days to find out if that happens.
Zawya
30-04-2025
- Business
- Zawya
US exit from IMF would be true dollar shock: Mike Dolan
LONDON - The U.S. dollar has suffered its worst start to any year since 1989 as the Trump administration has put forward once unthinkable economic policies, unnerving global investors. But one proposed shift would be of a different order altogether: an exit by the U.S. from the International Monetary Fund. Sweeping global trade barriers, broken alliances and blistering verbal attacks on the U.S. central bank and other federal institutions have taken a toll on what many consider an already over-valued U.S. currency and assets. In the process, the dollar index has shed 8.4% so far in 2025. That compounds heavy Wall Street losses for global funds that have driven U.S. markets higher for more than a decade. Consider that dollar weakness transformed a 6% drop in the S&P 500 index into a 15% hit for unhedged euro-based investors, who would have also seen modest Treasury losses in dollar terms turned into drops of almost 10%. If nothing else, the fog of uncertainty surrounding Washington has seriously dented the attraction of U.S. Treasuries and the dollar as predictable havens amid global trouble. But the impact of an IMF exit on the greenback would go far beyond frayed trust or investment rethinks. That's because this step - openly advocated by the controversial "Project 2025" conservative wish-list for President Donald Trump's second administration - would mechanically unravel overseas dollar reserve holdings. Many observers breathed sighs of relief at the IMF and World Bank spring meetings last week when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent merely demanded reform of these multilateral institutions rather than broaching U.S. withdrawal. But Project 2025's "Mandate for Leadership" document, compiled ahead of last year's U.S. elections by the Heritage Foundation, held nothing back about what it thinks should happen with what it termed "expensive middle men". "The Treasury Department plays an important role in these international institutions and should force reforms and new policies," it stated. "The U.S., however, should withdraw from both the World Bank and the IMF and terminate its financial contribution to both institutions." Trump doubled down on that idea after his inauguration in January, issuing one executive order on membership of "all international intergovernmental organizations" that set in motion a 180-day review to "provide recommendations as to whether the United States should withdraw from any such organizations, conventions, or treaties." That review is due in July. Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, World Health Organization and effective exit from the World Trade Organization already speak clearly to the administration's wider intentions. 'OWN GOAL' Hesitation about departure from the IMF may be related to the scale of the financial disentanglement likely involved - one with potentially ominous implications for the dollar's global reserve status and its value on open exchanges. In a op-ed for the Financial Times last week, former Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs Ted Truman detailed the gigantic financial implications of a U.S. exit from the IMF that he said would be a "significant own goal" and "dramatically diminish" the dollar's global role. Truman said the vast bulk of IMF operations is conducted in dollars, as that's what distressed sovereign borrowers typically need and seek, and countries as a result pool their dollar reserves. He argues that the dollar would be excluded from use by the fund if the U.S. were no longer a member, raising the question: "What nation would want to hold assets in a currency that cannot be used in IMF transactions issued by a country that has abdicated its international financial responsibilities?" The IMF's unit of account - Special Drawing Rights (SDR) - is a structure of five main currencies. The dollar currently holds the biggest weight at 43%, the euro 29%, the yuan 12%, the yen 8% and sterling 7% - and global reserves piles are often held roughly in those measures. A U.S. exit would see redistribution of shares and voting rights around the biggest remaining members, with the yuan and the euro set for much higher weightings in the SDR, which would expand those currencies' international roles as a result. Consequently, what to date has been a glacial drift away from dollar reserve holdings over the past decade could accelerate sharply. "Withdrawal from the IMF would spell the end of America's status as the principal reserve provider to the rest of the world," Truman wrote. The exchange rate implication of that could be huge. While a dollar devaluation on that scale may be welcomed by many administration advisers who see it as another way to regain global competitiveness for U.S. goods, the big question - much like higher import tariffs - is whether that is worth the price of massive U.S. financial disruption. It's possible the whole IMF membership question will get sidelined. But the prospect will remain another powerful weight on the dollar as long as it lingers. The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters (By Mike Dolan; Editing by Paul Simao)
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
In Trump's First 100 Days, a Fault Line Between DOGE and Project 2025 Has Become Clear
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. A helpful way to think about the 'Mandate for Leadership'—the radical policy blueprint laid out as part of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025—is as a kind of 'political time capsule' reflecting the world as conservatives saw it in April 2023, when the document was first published. Bearing this in mind is important, because that world was very different from the one 19 months later, when President Donald Trump secured his reelection—or even the one on his second Inauguration Day, nearly two years after the mandate was released. A lot transpired over those months and years, including, most notably, the emergence of Elon Musk as an influential player in Trump's orbit, and DOGE—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk devised as an institutional vehicle for carrying out the new administration's early agenda. Still, those intervening developments have done little to quell the public's fears over the influence Project 2025 is having on Trump's second term, particularly with respect to its plans to limit abortion access, crack down on LGBTQ+ rights, and concentrate even greater power in the hands of the presidency. The vaunted 100-day mark of this new administration offers as good an excuse as any to take stock of whether those fears have borne out—and of the extent to which DOGE has contributed to or distracted from Project 2025's agenda. At least on domestic policy, the administration has in a short period of time made a remarkable amount of progress on implementing the mandate's recommendations. Of the more than 530 executive actions across 20 agencies that the document advises, 28 percent have already been undertaken or completed. This progress is all the more remarkable when one considers the administration's myriad other activities these past few months that, while not fulfilling the letter of Project 2025, arguably embody its spirit. Actions like rechristening the 'Gulf of America' and extorting free labor from elite law firms contribute to its same basic goals of hindering potential accountability mechanisms and projecting knuckle-dragging belligerence on the global stage. This is also noteworthy, given the administration's sustained attention to issues like the pro-Palestine campus protests, which wouldn't emerge until well after the mandate's publication. Even more to the point, the White House appears to be on the cusp of checking off even more action items on the Project 2025 to-do list in the near future. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency will likely fulfill a number of the recommendations on internal office reorganization as part of a broader DOGE-led effort to gut agency capacity across the executive branch. Indeed, as this last example suggests, DOGE has been instrumental in—even central to—the administration's efforts to effectuate Project 2025's agenda. This early convergence between DOGE and Project 2025 makes sense, given that both share the common goal of bringing about the 'deconstruction of the administrative state'—something that has long been a rallying point for the broader conservative movement. Where the two diverge, however, is their preferred means for accomplishing that goal. By and large, Project 2025 has set out to figuratively hack federal agencies by exploiting weaknesses in an obscure body of law known as administrative law, which governs how those agencies are supposed to operate. For example, it calls on the 'next conservative president'—in this case Trump—to abuse loopholes in a statute called the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to make it easier to install leaders at agencies without having to put nominees through the standard Senate confirmation process. In contrast, DOGE has focused on literally hacking federal agencies and their operations by exploiting weaknesses in the government's information-technology infrastructure. This strategy was on display when DOGE-affiliated personnel commandeered the Office of Personnel Management's email servers to send out threatening messages to all career civil servants—including the now-infamous 'Fork in the Road' and '5 things' emails—and when they captured the Treasury Department's payment systems in an attempt to shut down the flow of federal money to the U.S. Agency for International Development. A closer look at their respective strategies reveals another subtle difference: In seeking to deconstruct the administrative state, Project 2025's recommendations include a mix of gutting agency capacity and weakening or rescinding the regulations and policies they implement—often through the standard administrative process, which can be time-consuming and involves a fair degree of expertise and care. In contrast, DOGE goes all in on gutting agency capacity with scant attention to actual policy change. Why go through the hassle of eliminating disfavored policies when you can simply render them dead letters by depriving agencies of mission-critical staff and other essential support resources necessary for their enforcement? Notably, this difference in approach might explain some of the Trump administration's biggest departures from the Project 2025 playbook—and thus reveal the extent of DOGE's early influence. For instance, rather than seeking USAID's wholesale elimination, as the administration has pursued, 'Mandate for Leadership' calls merely for scaling back its actions and purging any so-called woke elements of the agency's agenda, such as the promotion of LGBTQ+ rights abroad. Of even greater significance, though, is the potential conflict these contrasting approaches portend for the Trump administration in the months ahead. Conceptually speaking, tearing down agencies and programs, which has been the focus so far, was the relatively easy part. But Project 2025 also embraced a distinctive 'rebuilding plan,' which involved transforming the administrative state—including by strengthening components of this apparatus—into a tool for instituting its archconservative vision of society. Among other things, the mandate's drafters imagine a Christian nationalist state in which our legal and other social institutions are aligned with fundamentalist Christian dogma, a social hierarchy built around patriarchy and white supremacy, and an economy that is extractive and heavily stratified in structure. Needless to say, accomplishing all of this requires an enormous amount of state capacity. Yet, it is far from clear that this is the kind of society that Elon Musk would sink considerable resources into building through his DOGE project. More likely, he would embrace some version of the techno-libertarianism that most Silicon Valley elites have increasingly coalesced around since the dawn of the dot-com era. In general, this vision aspires to a future in which the nation-state-centered global world order is largely abandoned. In its place, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and other technological innovation would supply a new basis for restructuring our economic and social relationships. According to its supporters, a tech utopia would demolish existing power structures, leaving individuals freer to thrive according to their inherent merits. Conveniently, though, large tech-focused multinational corporations would no doubt take on an even greater prominence—perhaps somewhat akin to the nation-state—if the techno-libertarian dream were ever to be realized. The fundamental incompatibility between these Project 2025 and DOGE visions is immediately obvious. (Of course, even some overlap remains. For instance, techno-libertarians would no doubt fully embrace Project 2025's calls for significant privatization of essential government functions, such as weather forecasting and national security intelligence.) DOGE's elimination of USAID is suggestive of the conflict that may lie ahead. Project 2025 ultimately envisioned this agency being repurposed into a tool for spreading the tenets of Christian nationalism (and ultimately using foreign-aid programs to induce receiving nations to realign their domestic policies with Christian fundamentalism). In contrast, something like USAID would have no role to play in Musk's vision of the future. This might explain DOGE's attempts to abolish the agency altogether. The irony of all of this is that the individual who will ultimately be responsible for resolving this inevitable conflict is Trump, who famously lacks anything approaching a coherent political vision. Whatever rebuilding project his administration ends up pursuing will likely be a jumbled, self-contradictory mishmash of the Project 2025 and DOGE visions—defined more by whatever happens to stroke Trump's ego than by ideological heft. Time will tell whether this compromise, such as it is, is sufficient to keep intact the fragile coalition that managed to get Trump elected twice, or whether it will hasten its demise.
Reuters
29-04-2025
- Business
- Reuters
US exit from IMF would be true dollar shock: Mike Dolan
LONDON, April 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. dollar has suffered its worst start to any year since 1989 as the Trump administration has put forward once unthinkable economic policies, unnerving global investors. But one proposed shift would be of a different order altogether: an exit by the U.S. from the International Monetary Fund. Sweeping global trade barriers, broken alliances and blistering verbal attacks on the U.S. central bank and other federal institutions have taken a toll on what many consider an already over-valued U.S. currency and assets. In the process, the dollar index (.DXY), opens new tab has shed 8.4% so far in 2025. That compounds heavy Wall Street losses for global funds that have driven U.S. markets higher for more than a decade. Consider that dollar weakness transformed a 6% drop in the S&P 500 index (.SPX), opens new tab into a 15% hit for unhedged euro-based investors, who would have also seen modest Treasury losses in dollar terms turned into drops of almost 10%. If nothing else, the fog of uncertainty surrounding Washington has seriously dented the attraction of U.S. Treasuries and the dollar as predictable havens amid global trouble. But the impact of an IMF exit on the greenback would go far beyond frayed trust or investment rethinks. That's because this step - openly advocated by the controversial"Project 2025", opens new tab conservative wish-list for President Donald Trump's second administration - would mechanically unravel overseas dollar reserve holdings. Many observers breathed sighs of relief at the IMF and World Bank spring meetings last week when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent merely demanded reform of these multilateral institutions rather than broaching U.S. withdrawal. But Project 2025's "Mandate for Leadership" document, compiled ahead of last year's U.S. elections by the Heritage Foundation, held nothing back about what it thinks should happen with what it termed "expensive middle men". "The Treasury Department plays an important role in these international institutions and should force reforms and new policies," it stated. "The U.S., however, should withdraw from both the World Bank and the IMF and terminate its financial contribution to both institutions." Trump doubled down on that idea after his inauguration in January, issuing one executive order, opens new tab on membership of "all international intergovernmental organizations" that set in motion a 180-day review to "provide recommendations as to whether the United States should withdraw from any such organizations, conventions, or treaties." That review is due in July. Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, World Health Organization and effective exit from the World Trade Organization already speak clearly to the administration's wider intentions. 'OWN GOAL' Hesitation about departure from the IMF may be related to the scale of the financial disentanglement likely involved - one with potentially ominous implications for the dollar's global reserve status and its value on open exchanges. In a op-ed for the Financial Times last week, former Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs Ted Truman detailed the gigantic financial implications of a U.S. exit from the IMF that he said would be a "significant own goal" and "dramatically diminish" the dollar's global role. Truman said the vast bulk of IMF operations is conducted in dollars, as that's what distressed sovereign borrowers typically need and seek, and countries as a result pool their dollar reserves. He argues that the dollar would be excluded from use by the fund if the U.S. were no longer a member, raising the question: "What nation would want to hold assets in a currency that cannot be used in IMF transactions issued by a country that has abdicated its international financial responsibilities?" The IMF's unit of account - Special Drawing Rights, opens new tab (SDR) - is a structure of five main currencies. The dollar currently holds the biggest weight at 43%, the euro 29%, the yuan 12%, the yen 8% and sterling 7% - and global reserves piles are often held roughly in those measures. A U.S. exit would see redistribution of shares and voting rights around the biggest remaining members, with the yuan and the euro set for much higher weightings in the SDR, which would expand those currencies' international roles as a result. Consequently, what to date has been a glacial drift away from dollar reserve holdings over the past decade could accelerate sharply. "Withdrawal from the IMF would spell the end of America's status as the principal reserve provider to the rest of the world," Truman wrote. The exchange rate implication of that could be huge. While a dollar devaluation on that scale may be welcomed by many administration advisers who see it as another way to regain global competitiveness for U.S. goods, the big question - much like higher import tariffs - is whether that is worth the price of massive U.S. financial disruption. It's possible the whole IMF membership question will get sidelined. But the prospect will remain another powerful weight on the dollar as long as it lingers. The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters
