A Few of the Zillion Ways the Administration is Weakening the U.S.

 

Wherever one looks, the Administration is weakening our nation.

A major U.S. strength has been our attraction of foreign-born scientists, most famously in developing the atomic bomb first. Roughly 40% of recent U.S. Nobel Prizes in the sciences were won by immigrants or immigrants’ children. They’ve also founded more than 40% of U.S. unicorn startups.

Wanna kill that strength? Declare war on universities, drastically cut research and education funding, appoint political hacks to undermine scientific objectivity, torture some immigrants, and bar foreign scientists from the country for criticizing Donald Trump. Above all, start emulating the authoritarian governments many immigrants fled.

Most of the world is facing climate craziness. China is aggressively positioning itself to lead in developing ways to mitigate it. The U.S. isn’t. Mr. Trump says it’s all a hoax. So we’ll go slow on developing what everyone will need.

Cutting IRS enforcement jobs lets tax cheats skate free, particularly large cheats whose cases might be complex. That’ll cost more money than it saves, jacking up taxes on citizens and small businesses. And grow the deficit.

It’s a great time for crime: of 10,000 Justice Department attorneys last year, about half are gone. Judges are mocking department lawyers. While high-quality lawyers used to like the challenging work and highly competent co-workers, few qualified applicants apply now. Would you? Do an honest job, you’re fired.

It’s a great time for war. A rookie Defense Secretary is firing battle-tested top leadership arbitrarily, and hasn’t the least experience running anything, let alone our defense system. It’s especially good for cyberwarfare. In 2020 Trump fired respected, nonpartisan cybersecurity head Christopher Krebs, whom Trump had appointed, for saying the 2020 election was secure. That disrupted an important defense agency’s work, and made officials fear that speaking truth was a door to unemployment. That deters good people from applying or remaining. I’m no Commander in Chief; but if I were, I’d want subordinates telling me the truth, even unappetizing truths.

It’s a great day for poisoning air and water: the EPA has lost staff to detect, investigate, and punish violations.

Meanwhile, bizarre, inexplicable tariffs are weakening the economy. Economists can’t make sense of them, and Trump sure can’t explain ‘em. He keeps thinking foreigners pay ‘em, not us!

We’ve a huge doctor shortage. Medical education is long and costly. So part of Trump’s big, beautiful law puts an unrealistically low cap ($200,000 total lifetime) on federal graduate student loans. ($200K? But 70% of medical students have loans, the average debt load is $223,130, and 20% graduate owing $300,000+. The cap will keep lower-income students from trying. Just when we need ‘em – and we’re scaring away the immigrants.

Again, Mr. Trump isn’t solving the problem, but worsening it.

Internationally? Trump thinks unpredictability intimidates. But bizarre conduct and reneging on trade deals, and quitting alliances and climate organizations, weakens us and cedes leadership to some more trustworthy nation.

These examples of deterioration matter. Collectively, they weaken our resilience, and our government’s ability to handle crises. They limit our ability to compete globally, and impose future costs. They’ll also accentuate the dissipation of public trust in government – and teach other nations’ they can’t trust us.

Pushing people into unnecessary illnesses (and healthcare-caused bankruptcies) ultimately costs us. Yeah, the Administration loathes the very idea of helping folks with medical care, because Trump is trying to mark territory he associates with Obama. But those folks don’t just disappear.

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The above column appeared today, 16 November 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and will presently be on the newspaper’s website and KRWG’s website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]

[It just happens too often that I shake my aging head in wonder at the sheer breadth and depth – and meanness and pettiness – of the Administration’s conduct, and how a vast amount of that conduct not only enriches Mr. Trump and punishes immigrants, ethnic minorities, and “woke” folks, but just plain weakens us: you fire top military leaders to put in pals, including a Secretary of War with no managerial experience whatsoever, you weaken our military – and perhaps guess enemies won’t notice. Tariffs screw up our economy. All the misconduct concerning the Justice Department doesn’t matter to criminals or most of us, but it sure should matter to the folks who keep screaming about rising crime rates. Etc., etc. ]

Jupiter - a County Embarrassment, So Far!

Does our County Commission care more for Project Jupiter than for following state transparency laws or protecting our environment?

The project promises jobs, but will have a huge negative impact on our environment, and seriously undermine the state’s ambitions to cut our greenhouse gas production and help combat climate craziness. Too few of the proponents’ many promises appeared in the contract; and that contract is enforceable solely against the specific entity that signed it. If that goes belly-up, the real owners just laugh at those promises.

The process was embarrassing and likely unlawful.

Commissioner Susana Chaparro objected to approving a contract marked “draft,” containing blank pages and material she hadn’t seen. State Senator Jeff Steinborn was appalled that the Commission approved material with missing pages. A lawsuit alleges that the County approved industrial development bonds that didn’t meet certain requirements, including environmental impact.

County Commissioners should not have been reading project documents marked secret, and being told not to let us seem them. Legal concerns were then exacerbated when the Commission, approving the deal, authorized Commission Chair Christopher Schaljo-Hernandez to tinker with it. After local journalist Heath Haussamen criticized the deal, he received a “final” version of the contract that seemed to make some vague promises enforceable. Days later, there was a new version. Chaparro said, “There is no permanent document yet, even though we’ve already voted on it, and that is just wrong.”

The Open Meetings Act requires such decisions to be made in front of us. Sure, the Commission can delegate purely ministerial tasks such at signing it and filling in the effective date, and that sort of non-substantive change; but where changes actually alter the parties’ obligations to each other, in substantive ways, large or small, that’s not allowed.

For example, such AI data center campuses normally use huge amounts of water for cooling. In a desert suffering from serious drought, that matters. Responding to critics, proponents promised that this was not really a problem because a closed-loop cooling system would minimize water usage. Otherwise, this thing could wipe out water supplies of poor citizens in the south county. Altering such a material provision, after the vote, can’t be consistent with the open meetings law. All commissioners must be heard, either representing their constituents or honestly own a failure to do so. We should have some theoretical chance to talk a little sense into them.

Huge power requirements and environmental degradation are issues. This will be a data center campus. It will definitely use vast amounts of energy – and could possibly keep using gas-fired electricity plants for more than the next twenty years. Elsewhere, the plants have significantly increased people’s electricity costs.

The Open Meetings Act seems quite clear. Further, NMAG Opinion 98-01 confirms that ministerial acts (signing, executing, transmitting) are not “meetings” under the Act. More substantive changes would be. The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government sees this as a clear OMA violation, and likely will tell the county so.

Schaljo-Hernandez says the deal is complete, and follows the Memorandum of Understanding, and denies that laws were violated. But bond closing dates keep shifting.

We’ll eventually see what a judge or the present state attorney-general thinks. Meanwhile I’d hate to be the bond attorney who has to give an unqualified opinion that the bonds were properly approved. Or a Santa Teresa family worrying about water availability and electricity rates.

Or someone who likes to breathe.

                              – 30 –

 

[The above column appeared today, 9 November 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and will presently be on the newspaper’s website and KRWG’s website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]

[I wrote the column a couple of weeks ago, but screwed up sending it in. Last week, the situation was still unsettled, and it appeared that the lawsuits and legal questions might be holding things up. Whatever the legal rulings turn out to be, this has been a sloppy and embarrassing performance by our county commissioners, many of whom I have respected for years.]

Blowing up Boats and Lying

 The U.S. Navy saved two loathsome drug dealers from drowning recently.

Trump proudly ordered the Navy to fire on small boats leaving Venezuela. As Rand Paul notes, about a quarter of the time authorities think someone is carrying illegal drugs, they’re wrong. So destroying four boats leaving Venezuela (where we lack a police presence) it’s likely one or two of those murdered crews wasn’t transporting drugs.

Amazingly, the Navy rescuing two men from a boat the Navy had just destroyed. Given the reasonable possibility that those guys wouldn’t be guilty of anything, I figured the standing order might be to let ‘em drown. Executing all the folks you branded “criminals” would be effectively scare the pants off drug dealers without some embarrassing acquittal of a fisherman.

Quite likely Donald Trump was amazed to hear of the rescues, too. “Dead men tell no tales.”

Trump bragged that 25,000 Americans would have died if those drugs had gotten through to the U.S. How absurd is that? In 2023, 108,000 died of drug overdoses in this country. So 25,000 would be a quarter of the nation’s annual total for a year. (That 108,000 figure decreased to about 80,000 in 2024, a statistic Mr. Trump would be waving around like a pardon, if he’d been president then.) Those 81,000 last year included both illegal drug overdoses and prescription drug overdoses. (Usually, 75% involve illegal drugs, so 60,000.) Trump’s 25,000 would be 42%. From one boat. Not blood likely. Further, fentanyl is responsible for 70-75% of the deaths. Venezuela is just not a major producer, exporter, or transit country for fentanyl. The large-scale flow is from China and Mexico. But you can’t massacre their fishermen so casually.

So Trump wanted to threaten Venezuela. He didn’t want his scheme disrupted by unsuccessfully trying some poor fisherman. Note that the rescued men were sent home to their countries, not tried or imprisoned.

I’d bet this irritate Trump.

The overall Navy commander for that area was a four-star admiral with a sterling record. That very same day – not even, say, a week later! – he was fired for no known reason. (I figured Hegseth fired him for being Black.) He was just 60. He’d taken over that job less than a year ago, and reportedly was doing it competently. We may never know, but I gotta wonder if Mr. Trump was so furious about the rescues that he lashed out. When reporters found that one man killed in one of these attacks was a lifelong fisherman, with no known drug involvement, and the disabled boat had sent a distress signal and was waiting (in Colombian waters) for rescue, and Colombia’s president complained, Trump called him a drug dealer, cut off aid to Colombia, and hit Colombia with a new tariff. (Impulse control, anyone? Can the Supreme Court impose “time outs?”)

So, yeah, we’re killing people without trial. Normally, the U.S. doesn’t execute criminals without first establishing that they are criminals, and guilty of a worse crime than drug-dealing. But Mr. Trump has been ordering our sailors to do just that. His story that a small boat leaving Venezuela carried enough of some drug to kill 40% of the people who die this year of illegal drug overdoses? Does he believe that nonsense, or has he such contempt for voters that he figures we will?

Worse than extrajudicial killings is being defended by an infant lacking the least impulse-control.

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[The above Las Cruces Sun-News column will presently be on the newspaper’s website and KRWG’s website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]