Letters from an American - March 17, 2025

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

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March 17, 2025. From 1942 to 1945, the Code Talkers were key to every major operation of the Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater. The Code Talkers were Indigenous Americans who used codes based in their native languages to transmit messages that the Axis powers never cracked. The Army recognized the ability of tribal members to send coded language in World War I and realized the codes could not be easily interpreted, in part because many indigenous languages had never been written down. The Army expanded

the use of code talkers in World War II using members of 34 different tribes in the program. Indigenous Americans always enlisted in the military in higher proportions than any other demographic group. In World War II, more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between 19 and 50 joined the service. And the participation of the Code Talkers was key to the invasion of Iwo Jima, for example, when they sent more than 800 messages without error. Were it not for the Navajos, Major Howard Connor said,

the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima. Today, Aaron Alberti of Axios reported that at least 10 articles about the Code Talkers have disappeared from U.S. military websites. Broken URLs are now labeled DEI, an abbreviation for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Axios found that web pages associated with the Department of Defense have also put DEI labels on now missing pages that honored prominent black veterans.

Similarly missing is information about women who served in the military, including the Women Air Force Service Pilots, or WASPs, of World War II. A profile of Army Major General Charles Rogers, who received the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, was similarly changed, but the Defense Department replaced the missing page and removed DEI from the

URL today after a public outcry. Two days ago, media outlets noted that the Arlington National Cemetery website had deleted content about Black, female, and Hispanic veterans. The erasure of indigenous, black, Hispanic, and female veterans from our military history is an attempt to elevate white men as the sole actors in our history. It's also an attempt to erase a vision of a nation in which Americans of all backgrounds come together to work and fight for the common good. After World War II, Americans came together in a similar spirit to create a government that works for all of us. It is that government and the worldview it advances that the Trump administration

is currently dismantling. The most obvious attack on that government is the attempt to undermine social security, a system by which Congress in 1935 pulled Americans together to support the nation's most vulnerable. President Donald Trump and his sidekick, billionaire Elon Musk, have been asserting, falsely, that Social Security is mired in fraud and corruption. Today, Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that an internal memo from the Social Security Administration written by Acting Deputy Commissioner Doris Diaz called for requiring beneficiaries

to visit a field office to provide identification if they cannot access the internet to complete verification there. Diaz estimated that implementing this policy would require the administration to receive 75,000 to 85,000 in-person visitors a week. But Social Security Administration offices no longer accept walk-ins and the current wait time for a visit already averages more than a month, while this change would create a 14% increase in visits. The Administration is currently closing Social Security offices. Diaz predicted service disruption, operational strain, and budget shortfalls that would

create increased challenges for vulnerable populations. She also predicted legal challenges and congressional scrutiny. In the news over the weekend has been the story of 82 year old Ned Johnson of Seattle, Washington, who lost his Social Security benefits after he was mistakenly declared dead. Upon that declaration, the government clawed back $5,201 from Johnson's bank account, canceled his Medicare coverage, and warned credit agencies that he was deceased, do not issue credit. While Musk's Department of Government Efficiency said the error had zero connection to its work, it is at least an unfortunate coincidence that Musk has repeatedly

insisted that dead people are collecting benefits. Various recent reports show the cost of the destruction of the government that worked for everyone. Kate Nibbs of Wired reported today that cuts at the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, have decimated the teams that inspect plant and food imports, creating risks from invasive pests and leaving food to rot as it waits for inspection. Today, Sharon LaFreniere, Minho Kim, and Julie Tate of the New York Times reported that cuts to the top secret National Nuclear Security Administration have meant the loss of critical employees from scientists and engineers through accountants and lawyers at the agency that manages the nation's 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads.

The agency was already shorthanded as it worked to modernize the arsenal and was hiring to handle the additional workload. Now it appears to have lost many of its leaders who were most likely to be able to land top jobs in the private sector. Republicans convinced Americans to vote to undermine a government that enables all of us to look out for each other by pushing a narrative that says

such a government is dangerous because it gives power to undesirables and lets crime run rampant in the US. On Friday, Musk reposted an outrageous tweet saying that dictators Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn't murder millions of people, their public sector employees did. The idea that a government that works for everyone is dangerous is at the heart of the administration's rhetoric about the men it has deported to El Salvador without the due process of law. Although we have no idea who those men are, the administration insists they are violent criminals

and that anyone trying to protect the rule of law is somehow siding with rapists and murderers. On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a statement saying that the judge insisting on the rule of law was supporting terrorists over the safety of Americans. In place of a world in which the government works for all Americans, President Donald Trump and his supporters are imposing authoritarianism.

This morning, Trump declared the presidential pardons issued by his predecessor, President Joe Biden, void, vacant, and of no further force or effect, and went on to say that members of the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the US Capitol should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level. The Constitution does not have any provision

to undo a presidential pardon. And Sean McCrish of the New York Times noted that implicit in his post was Mr. Trump's belief that the nation's laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. After White House Press Secretary, Caroline Leavitt, walked back Trump's insistence that Biden's pardons were invalid by saying that Trump was just suggesting that Biden was mentally incompetent when he signed the pardons, Trump pulled the Secret Service protection from Biden's children, Hunter and Ashley, apparently to demonstrate that he could. The rejection of a government that works for all Americans in order to concentrate power in the executive branch appears to serve individuals like Musk rather than the American people. Isaac Stanley Becker reported in the Atlantic on March 9th that although the government awarded Verizon a $2.4 billion contract to upgrade the Federal Aviation Administration's communications network.

Musk has instructed his SpaceX company to install its equipment in that network. Those installations seem designed to make the U.S. air traffic control system dependent on SpaceX, whose equipment, Stanley Becker notes, has not gone through strict U.S. government security and risk management review. When Evan Feynman, who directed the $42.5 billion rural broadband program, left his position on Friday, he wrote an email to his former colleagues warning that there would be pressure to turn to SpaceX's Starlink for internet connection in rural areas. Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world's richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington," he wrote.

Cuts to the traditional U.S. government also appear to serve Russia. Over the weekend, the administration killed the Voice of America media system that has spread independent democratic journalism across the world for 83 years. About 360 million people listened to its broadcasts. The system was a thorn in the side first of the Soviet Union and now of Russia and China. Now it is silent, signaling the end of US soft power that spread democratic values. The world's autocrats are doing somersaults, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote. And maybe those two things go hand in hand.

Maggie Haberman, Kate Conger, Eileen Sullivan, and Ryan Mack of the New York Times reported today that Starlink has been installed across the White House campus. Officials say that Musk has donated the service, although because of security concerns, individuals typically cannot simply give technology to the government. Waldo Jackwith, who worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama and who specializes in best practices for government procurement of custom software, posted on social media, I'm the guy who used to oversee the federal government's agency

IT telecommunications contracts. This is extremely bad. There is absolutely no need for this. Not only is it a huge security exposure, but the simplest explanation for this is that it is meant to be a security exposure. The test of whether Americans will accept the destruction of a government that works for the common good and its replacement with one that works for the president and his cronies

might well come from the need to address disasters like the storm system that hit the Deep South and the Plains over the weekend. At least 40 people died including four in Oklahoma, three in Arkansas, six in Mississippi, three in Alabama, eight in Kansas, four in Texas, and at least 12 in Missouri. High winds, tornadoes, and fires did extraordinary damage across the region. The destruction caused by a hurricane that flattened Galveston, Texas in 1900 was a key factor in developing the modern idea of a nonpartisan government that could efficiently provide relief after a disaster and help in the process of rebuilding. As Alex Fitzpatrick of Axios reported last week, Trump has suggested fundamentally overhauling

or reforming the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, or even getting rid of it entirely, turning emergency relief over to the states. A new analysis by the Carnegie Disaster Dollar database shows that Republican-dominated states receive a lot of that assistance. Sarah Labowitz, who led the study, told Fitzpatrick, �Up to now, when there is a disaster, the government responds. They clean up the debris, they rebuild the schools, they run shelters, they clean the drinking water. All of that is supported by a federal disaster relief ecosystem that spreads the risk around the country, spreads the costs around the country. And if we stop spreading the costs around the country,

then it's going to fall on states, and it's going to fall on states really unevenly. 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.