News & Articles

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” President  Abraham Lincoln 

“If President Trump wants to change our nation’s laws he has the right to ask Congress to change them. He does not have the right to violate the United States Constitution. He is not a king.” Senator Bernie Sanders.

Our country is in crisis. Our govern-ment has been seized by a dictator wannabee and a cabal of super-wealthy, authoritarian extremists who want to destroy all the social progress of the last 150 years. 

They want to return to a time when wealth and big business ruled supreme with no restrictions on profit or the damage done to people or the environment.

The avalanche of illegal, unconsti-tutional and simply crazy executive orders are proof that the Trump administration has no regard for demo-cracy, the rule of law, decency or the “common good.” They are upending the constitutional balance of powers and changing our democracy into an autocracy. He told us he would be a “dictator on day one” and for once he wasn’t lying. 

In his first two weeks, Trump has signed 54 executive orders and revoked a record 96 previous executive orders. Most of these repealed executive orders dealt with voting rights, equal rights or environmental protection.

Now, as former Republican Senator Liz Cheney warned us before the election, “...we’ll be living in a nation that’s unrecognizable...” 

Clearly the purpose of these executive orders, the bizarre, inane proposals (i.e., about Greenland, Canada, Panama, Gaza) and the unilateral, authoritarian push to cut federal spending is to: 

1) overwhelm the ability of opposition to react, and 

2) have enough of these abrogations of power stick to establish a de facto dictatorship.

These actions also create the illusion that Trump is a strong, decisive leader taking bold action to deal with the country’s problems. This is enhancing his poll numbers, but only because many people are ignorant of the facts and damage being done. 

Case in point: foreign aid funding is minuscule (less than 1% of federal spending) but the public thinks it is much  larger. There is little waste to be cut from these small expenditures. Plus these activities are important for national security. 

As General James Mattis, Trump’s former Secretary of Defense, said “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition...”

Likewise declaring a “national energy emergency” when the U.S. is currently the world’s biggest exporter of fossil fuel products is nonsensical. This is only a smoke screen to justify more drilling (and profits for oil companies) in Alaska.

Executive orders, memoranda or proclamations cannot override federal laws or the Constitution. Only the House of Representatives has the power to initiate spending, and once passed, the executive branch has limited authority as to how that money is, or is not, spent. 

Trump has no authority to cut existing funding without congressional approval. Neither can he end birth-right citizenship established in the Fourteenth Amendment. 

He has no authority to create a new federal agency (the ”Department or Government Efficiency”), or abolish agencies, without congressional author-ization. The Constitution, federal law and Supreme Court decisions make this very clear (for more on this see the two links below).

I can think of very few instances when conservative Republicans supported anything good for ordinary people. Their agenda for decades has been to oppose, water down or under fund everything good for people. 

Now, with Project 2025 and Trump’s unilateral actions, they intend to dismantle everything they couldn’t scuttle in the past.

The Trump attacks on long accepted public expenditures have nothing to do with ending fraud, waste or improving “efficiency” in government. There is nothing “efficient” about cutting  Head Start, a cost-effective program of education for poor children. There is nothing “efficient” (or rational) about cutting public health programs, public education, environmental protection, scientific research, work place safety, consumer protection and the many other beneficial “public goods” and federal programs. 

What is happening is simple “penny wise and pound foolish” and we will pay larger social and financial costs in the long run.

If these radicals were serious about saving taxpayer money, eliminating waste and inefficiency in government, they would be going after the trillion dollar Pentagon budget, the two trillion dollars being wasted on nuclear weapons, and the huge costs of endless war. 

Ending the business tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts and contracting abuse would save many more dollars than closing the Department of Education or laying off federal employees who are doing important public work.

Clearly the American people are being bamboozled and it will not be just the poor, young disabled or minorities who pay the price. Middle and upper income people will also suffer. Disease, natural disasters, climate change, inflation and economic crashes impact all of us.

Government is the foundation of the economy. It is a major employer and a major buyer of goods and services in the economy. All federal dollars are spent in the economy producing jobs whether one might consider those expenditures “wasteful ” or not. 

Cut federal funding, or federal employ-ment, and many for-profit and nonprofit businesses are going to be laying off employees. The drastic, mindless cuts being imposed – along the economic impact or mass deportation and tariff increases – will likely crash the economy.

Federal cuts will also impact local economies. Wisconsin has about 18,000 federal employees doing a wide range of duties. Most Wisconsin federal employees work at Veterans Administration facilities providing health care to aging and injured veterans (Thank the troops by cutting the VA? Aren’t we “great”!). 

These and other federal employers are scattered around the state with a big impact on local communities. In addition, federal dollars fund many state and local government activities which fund jobs and support private sector businesses and jobs.

Clearly these supposedly smart, wealthy businessmen currently taking an axe to our society don’t know what the are doing. Even worse they don’t care about the consequences. America is being destroyed by their greed, selfishness and ignorance.

Additional reading: The American Civil Liberties Union, “What is an Executive Order and How Does it Work?,” Christopher Anders, February 4, 2025, aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/what-is-an-executive-order-and-how-does-it-work  

The Center for Budget and Policies Priorities, “FAQs on Impoundment: Presidential Actions Are Constrained by Long-Standing Constitutional Restrictions,” Richard Kogan, November 21, 2024, cbpp.org/research/federal-budget.