Letters from an American - April 21, 2025

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

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April 21st, 2025. Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, Pope Francis performed his final public act when he waved to worshippers in St. Peter's Square. He died today at 88. Born in Argentina, he was the first pope to come from the Americas. He was also the first Jesuit to serve as pope, bringing new perspectives to the Catholic Church and hoping to focus the church on the poor. The stock market plunged again today after President Donald J. Trump continued to harass Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The threat of instability if Trump continued to harass Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The threat of instability if Trump tries to fire Powell, added to the instability already

created by Trump's tariff policies, saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average fall 971.83 points or 2.48 percent. The S&P 500 dropped 2.36% and the Nasdaq composite fell 2.55%. The dollar hit a three-year low while the value of gold soared. Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that since Trump took office the Dow has fallen 13.8%, the S&P 500 is down 15.5%, and the NASDAQ is down 20.5%. Hannah Aaron Lang of the Wall Street Journal reported that, the Trump route is taking on historic dimensions. She noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is headed for its worst April performance since 1932, when the country

was in the midst of the Great Depression. Scott Ladner, Chief Investment Officer at Horizon Investments, told Lange, it's impossible to commit capital to an economy that is unstable and unknowable because of policy structure. The Trump administration announced on April 11th that it would withhold from Harvard University 2.2 billion dollars in grants already awarded and a 60 million dollar contract unless Harvard permitted the federal government to control the university's admissions and intellectual content. Today Harvard sued the government for violating the First Amendment and overstepping its legal

authority under the guise of addressing anti-Semitism. The complaint notes the arbitrary and capricious nature of the government's demands and says the government has not and cannot identify any rational connection between anti-Semitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives, foster American success, preserve American security, and maintain America's position as a global leader in innovation. University President Alan Garber explained that the freeze would jeopardize research on how cancer spreads throughout the body to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield. He continued as

opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease are on the horizon, the government is slamming on the brakes. The victims will be future patients and their loved ones who will suffer the heartbreak of illnesses that might have been prevented or treated more effectively. Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation's ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America's position as a global leader in innovation. Harvard is suing the departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, Education, Energy

and Defense, the General Services Administration or GSA, the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, NASA, and the leaders of those agencies. After news broke yesterday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had disclosed classified information on a second unsecure signal chat, this one on his unsecure personal cell phone, and his former spokesperson told Politico the Pentagon was in total chaos, and he fired three of his top aides, media articles today wrote that officials were looking for a new Secretary of Defense. But Hegseth blamed the media for the exposure of his signal chats, and Trump stood by Hegseth.

According to Dasha Burns, Eli Stokols, and Jake Traylor of Politico, the president doesn't want to validate the stories about disarray at the Pentagon by firing Hegseth. He's doing a great job, the president told reporters. It's just fake news. While the visible side of the administration appears to be floundering, news stories suggest that the less visible side, the Department of Government Efficiency, has dug into U.S. data in alarming ways. On April 15th, Jenna McLaughlin of NPR reported on an official whistleblower disclosure that as soon as members of the Department of Government Efficiency

or DOGIE arrived at the National Labor Relations Board or NLRB, they appeared to be hacking into secure data. While they claimed to be hacking into secure data. While they claimed to be looking for places to cut costs, the behavior of the doggy team suggested something else was going on. They demanded the highest level of access, tried to hide their activities in the system,

turned off monitoring tools, and then manually deleted the record of their tracks. All behaviors that cybersecurity experts told McLaughlin sounded like what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do. Staffers noticed that an IP address in Russia was trying to log into the system using a newly created do Doggie account with correct username and password, and later saw that a large amount of sensitive data was leaving the agency. Cybersecurity experts identified that spike as a sign of a breach in the system, creating

the potential for that data to be sold, stolen, or used to hurt companies, while the head of Doggie himself could use the information for his own businesses. All of this is alarming," Russ Handorf, who worked in cybersecurity for the FBI, told McLaughlin. "'If this was a publicly traded company, I would have to report this breach to the Securities and Exchange Commission." When the whistleblower brought his concerns to someone at NLRB, he received threats. If he didn't know the backstory, any chief information security officer worth his salt

would look at network activity like this and assume it's a nation-state attack from China or Russia, Jake Braun, former acting principal deputy national cyber director at the White House, told McLaughlin. McLaughlin noted that the story of what happened at the NLRB is not uncommon. When challenged by judges, Doggie has offered conflicting and vague answers to the questions of why it needs access to sensitive information and has dismissed concerns about cyber security and privacy. The administration has slashed through the agencies that protect systems from attack and Trump has signed an executive order urging

government departments to eliminate information silos and to share their information. Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard Law School's Center for Labor and a Just Economy and a former NLRB board member, told McLaughlin, I can see about what DOGE is doing that follows any of the standard procedures for how you do an audit that has integrity and that's meaningful and will actually produce results that serve the normal auditing function, which is to look for fraud, waste, and abuse. The mismatch between what they're doing and the established professional way to do what they say they're doing, that just kind of gives away the store that they are not actually about finding more efficient

ways for the government to operate. On April 18th, Makina Kelly and Vitoria Elliott of Wired reported that Doggie is building a master database that knits together information from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, the Social Security Administration, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida. This appears to be designed to find and pressure undocumented immigrants, Kelly and Elliott reported, but the effects of the consolidation of data are not limited to them. On April 15th, the top Democrat on the House Committee on

Oversight and Government Reform, Gerald Connolly of Virginia, asked the acting Inspector General at the Department of Labor and the Inspector General at the NLRB to investigate any and all attempts to exfiltrate data and any attempts to cover up their activities. Two days later, he made a similar request to the Acting Inspector General for the Social Security Administration. Connolly wrote, I am concerned that DOGE is moving personal information across agencies without the notification required under the Privacy Act or related laws, such that the American people are wholly unaware

their data is being manipulated in this way. On April 17, Christopher Bing and Avi Asher Shapiro of ProPublica, reported that the administration is looking to replace the federal government's $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay, with a contract awarded to the private company, Ramp. Ramp is backed by investment firms tied to Trump and Musk. While administration officials insist that SmartPay is wasteful, both Republican and Democratic budget experts say that's wrong, according to Bing and Asher Shapiro. SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government, former General Services Administration Commissioner

Sonny Hashmi told the reporters. It's a well-run program that solves real-world problems with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in. There's a lot of money to be made by a new company coming in here, said Hashmi. But you have to ask, what is the problem that's being solved? ["Dead in Massachusetts"] Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts.

Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.