I’ve been under the weather. That partly explains missing two days of posts. But another reason is a feeling of repetition. Everything I see in our politics right now — or at least at the pinnacle where Donald Trump dominates all the visuals and attention — has a feeling of drift, spectacle and fragmentation. Trump’s ballroom epitomizes it — crass, stupid, vulgar, unacceptable and yet ultimately meaningless. It’s the full-size version of having his stacked Kennedy Center board, of which he is the chairman, rename the institution after him. That was, I believe, Wednesday, though the days run together. Then there’s his new hall of presidents, a sick-burn tweet storm embedded on a wall of what remains of the White House. These all have the feeling of a man who is bored, tapped out, losing coherence and energy and who others are trying to keep distracted.
Continue reading “Trump in Winter … Drift, Fragmentation and Just Low Energy”Potential Disaster Averted as Bid to Undermine Judicial Branch Fails
Editor’s Note: Don’t miss the news at the end of today’s Morning Memo about the first-ever Morning Memo Live event.
A Trojan Horse Case
A Trojan horse Freedom of Information Act case in which Stephen Miller’s old group was trying to get a court to declare that the administrative functions of the judicial branch are part of the executive branch has been dismissed by U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden of D.C., a Trump appointee.
This case, which has been covered by my colleague Josh Kovensky, had the potential to provide a legal basis for the Trump White House to exercise considerable control — or at least pressure — over the judicial branch. There was never any indication that the White House had any hand in the case, but it didn’t seem like a stretch to assume it would have seized on a favorable ruling to assert more control over the Judicial Conference of the United States and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
It was always weird that a FOIA lawsuit was the vehicle for this effort. In that sense, McFadden’s ruling doesn’t tell us much about the larger constitutional interplay between the executive and judicial branches. He simply ruled that Congress had exempted itself and the courts from FOIA. The America First Legal Foundation argued that the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office weren’t part of the courts but part of the executive branch, and therefore not exempt from FOIA. McFadden ultimately ruled:
Because the Judicial Conference] and the Administrative Office indeed fall outside FOIA’s reach, the Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction over the records request. So it will grant the motion to dismiss.
When the lawsuit was originally filed earlier this year, it came at a time of unprecedented conflict between the Trump administration and the judiciary. For the first time, the White House had tried to communicate with judicial branch employees directly via mass email. The General Services Administration was unilaterally talking about closing federal buildings around the country that house federal courts and court services. Federal judges were even expressing concern that their security protection by U.S. marshals — an executive branch agency — might be revoked or made contingent.
For now, an obscure FOIA lawsuit won’t be a backdoor way for the Trump White House to bring some critical elements of the judicial branch under its control.
Wisconsin Judge Convicted of Interfering With ICE
Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan was convicted on one felony count and acquitted on one misdemeanor account for interfering with the ICE arrest of an undocumented immigrant in her courthouse. My sense is all three of these things are true:
- The jury was careful and attentive and and took its job seriously.
- There are good grounds for Dugan to appeal.
- This case would never have been prosecuted under any other administration.
Always a Disproportionate Reaction
No doubt some of Trump’s appeal to some people is his willingness to act — to do something — even if it’s disproportionate, results in collective punishment, and is ultimately ineffective or even counterproductive.
On that note, last night the Trump administration immediately suspended the green card lottery system that allowed the Brown University/MIT shooter to enter the country during Trump I.
The Undocumented Underground
TPM’s Hunter Walker: How a ‘Habeas Machine’ Reunited One Family That Was Pulled Apart by ICE
Lawless U.S. Boat Strikes Have Killed 104 People
Another unlawful U.S. attack on two alleged drug-smuggling boats killed five people, brings the campaign’s known death toll to 104.
Meanwhile, CNN reports that the top lawyer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised Chairman Gen. Dan Caine in November that military commanders should request to retire if they receive an unlawful order.
Saber-Rattling Watch
- NYT: Trump Relies on Distortions to Support His Pressure Campaign on Venezuela
- WSJ: Trump Ups Pressure on Venezuela but Repeatedly Shifts the Rationale
- WaPo: Stephen Miller’s hard-line Mexico strategy morphed into deadly boat strikes
Colorado Senators Try to Save NCAR
Colorado’s two Democratic senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, are holding up the Senate appropriations package until Congress agrees to fully fund the National Center for Atmospheric Research and prevent its dismantling by the Trump administration. Miffed that Colorado officials rebuffed President Trump’s symbolic pardon of Tina Peters, the OMB announced it was breaking up the world-class research center in Boulder.
When the Chips Are Down, Attack Trans People
In a predictable pivot to a familiar page in their political playbook, Republicans are trying to distract from their bankrupt health care policies by attacking gender-affirming care for trans Americans.
Coast Guard Can’t Make Up Its Mind
In yet another in a series of flip-flops, the Coast Guard abruptly deleted language from its new workplace harassment policy that had downgraded swastikas and nooses from overt hate symbols to “potentially divisive,” the WaPo reports.
Good Read
The Guardian: Inside DoJ’s controversial prosecution of a Texas ‘antifa cell’ charged with terrorism
Hard Read
Rolling Stone: Melissa Hortman Died in a Shocking Act of Political Violence. This Is the Story of Her Life
The Corruption: Pardons Editions
WaPo: “At least 20 people who have received clemency from Trump so far this year — cutting their sentence short, restoring their civil rights after imprisonment or allowing them to avoid prison altogether — were also forgiven of financial penalties totaling tens of millions of dollars.”
‘Don’s Best Friend’
From a NYT deep-dive on Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein:
One woman, then a model and college student in her early 20s living in Manhattan, said she attended four parties at the mansion. She cannot recall the names of most of the men she met at the gatherings, not even those Mr. Epstein directed her to “take care of” at two of them. Recruited by Ms. Maxwell and then abused by Mr. Epstein, she buried her shame and kept their secrets for years. But Mr. Trump’s presence stood out, she told The Times. He was a household name, someone Mr. Epstein often bragged about to the women around him, yet also seemed to compete with.
A Personalist Regime
After allegedly muting one dissenting member on the call, the Trump-stacked board of directors of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to rename it the “Trump-Kennedy Center” — even though the original name was designated by Congress in its authorizing legislation.
Save the Date!
Before we get swept up into the heart of the holiday season, I wanted to flag for you that we’re holding the first-ever Morning Memo Live event on Jan. 29, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
I’ll be hosting a panel discussion on an issue that encompasses so much of what Morning Memo has been covering over the past couple of years: the politicization of the Justice Department.
Morning Memo readers know how many different Trump-era stories are connected to the abuse of DOJ and the FBI. It’s the most significant of the many Trump II transgressions because it enables and reinforces a myriad of other abuses of power.
I’ll be joined at the event by:
- Stacey Young, a former 18-year DOJ veteran who is the founder and executive director of Justice Connection, a network of DOJ alumni providing support to current and recent DOJ employees;
- Aaron Zelinsky, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland who served on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, where he prosecuted Roger Stone, and who is now a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder in Baltimore; and
- Anna Bower, a senior editor at Lawfare who covers rule of law issues and fields wacky Signal messages from Lindsey Halligan.
We’ll discuss as much as we can squeeze into one evening, including the weaponization of the Justice Department as both sword and shield; the campaign of retribution against prosecutors and investigators; and the obliteration of DOJ’s traditional independence from the White House. We’ll save time for your questions.
Tickets to the event are going on sale starting … now. We’re keeping it relatively small: only 100 tickets will be sold. We want it to be a relatively intimate event so that we can have a productive discussion.
I look forward to seeing you there.
She’s Still Got It at 84
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How the Trump Administration Is Quietly Resegregating the American Workforce
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
When President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, the national unemployment rate was at 4 percent overall, and at 5.3 percent for Black workers. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its November 2025 dataset, and although the total unemployment rate is at 4.6 percent, the Black unemployment rate has soared to 8.3 percent — the highest level since August 2021.
One contributing factor is Trump’s mass firings of federal employees. Black people disproportionately work in the public sector, representing nearly 19 percent of the federal workforce compared to 13 percent of the civilian workforce. And they have been disproportionately impacted by Trump’s purges: Analyses by ProPublica and The New York Times found that the administration conducted its steepest staff cuts at the agencies with the most nonwhite and women workers, like the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
But the federal layoffs offer only a partial explanation. What the data is beginning to reveal is the devastating cumulative effects of the Trump administration’s policies for workers of color.
In January, for instance, Trump revoked an executive order that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1965 which prohibited companies with government contracts from engaging in racial discrimination. Johnson’s order required contractors to “take affirmative action” to ensure that applicants are hired (and employees are treated) without regard to their race.
For decades, Johnson’s executive order helped increase the representation of people of color and white women. For example, a longitudinal study spanning from 1973 to 2003 found that the affirmative action initiatives increased Native American employment by nearly 4 percent. Another analysis of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data from 1978 to 2004 concluded that the share of Black workers at government contractors continued to increase even after a contract ended and the employer was no longer subject to the regulations.
Now, Trump is blocking that important vehicle for integrating the workplace, characterizing it as “illegal DEI,” referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Instead of requiring companies to take affirmative action, Trump is requiring companies to certify that they are not “promoting DEI.” The administration also did not define the term, effectively discouraging companies that want to keep their government contracts from engaging in any activity that could conceivably be characterized as DEI. For reference, to date, the things the administration has decried as DEI include the Calibri font and indoor plumbing in Black neighborhoods.
On top of trying to prevent people of color from entering the workforce, the administration is making it easier to kick them out. Since taking office, Trump has claimed to possess limitless power to fire executive branch officers for any reason, including reasons that violate federal antidiscrimination law. Earlier this month, former immigration judge Tania Nemer sued the Trump administration and alleged that Trump fired her because of her sex, national origin, and political affiliation. Before she filed a complaint in federal court, she filed a complaint with the Department of Justice, arguing that her termination violated the Civil Rights Act. But the DOJ dismissed her complaint, writing that as an “inferior officer” under the Constitution, Nemer’s removal was “beyond the purview” of federal equal employment opportunity laws.
“Article II of the Constitution allows the President and heads of departments exercising his power to remove inferior officers without cause, subject to only narrow exceptions that do not apply to your former position,” said the DOJ letter. “No statute provides otherwise, and even if it did, the statute would run afoul of Article II.” Quite literally, this amounts to a claim of constitutional power for the president to fire thousands of government workers who are designated as “inferior officers,” based on their sex, race, or on any number of other legally protected characteristics.
The Trump administration has had the opportunity to back away from this implication. Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter, the case about Trump’s attempts to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission who enjoy statutory job protections. Justice Clarence Thomas directly asked Solicitor General D. John Sauer for an example of a permissible restriction on the president’s removal authority. Sauer provided none, because, he says, none exists. “We don’t believe there are permissible restrictions on principal officers of the United States who exercise the executive power,” said Sauer.
Now, the Trump administration is trying to dismantle legal structures that allow people of color to challenge discrimination in the workplace. Congress and the courts recognized decades ago that even policies which may appear neutral on their face can disproportionately harm people of color. Because of this, many antidiscrimination laws incorporate disparate impact liability, a legal framework that asks if a rule is disproportionately harming a group of people, and if so, if that rule is actually necessary. If it is not, courts can take action to stop it.
Yet last week, the Department of Justice announced that it would no longer enforce disparate impact liability under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating based on race. Specifically, the rule would mean that anyone who receives DOJ funding — chiefly, local law enforcement agencies — would be free to engage in conduct that disproportionately harms people of color without worrying about Title VI enforcement action. In a press release, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon criticized disparate impact liability for allowing challenges to “neutral policies” without “evidence of intentional discrimination.”
This is wrong. What Dhillon’s analysis ignores is that disparate impact liability is the framework that allows courts to find out if a policy is indeed neutral, or if it merely disguises intentional discrimination. By limiting liability only to cases where there is open evidence of intentional discrimination, millions of people of color who interact with recipients of federal funds — whether applying for jobs, going to work, or just going about their lives — will be cut off from recourse for anything but the most obvious and explicit discrimination.
The Trump administration’s policies work in tandem. It is harder for people of color to enter the workforce. It is harder for them to remain in the workforce. And if they are victimized by illegal discrimination, it is harder for them to do anything about it.
How The 2020 Big Lie Is Now Threatening a World-Class Research Center
The Destruction: NCAR Edition
The Trump White House isn’t really doing much to disguise at least one of its motivations for moving to dismantle a critical scientific research center in Boulder: It wants to free Big Lie supporter Tina Peters from prison in Colorado.
Colorado officials have refused to play along with President Trump’s purported pardon of Peters for her state conviction for tampering with election machines. While a presidential pardon for state crimes isn’t a real thing, the White House wants you to know that Colorado is paying a price for that perceived defiance: “Maybe if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump, his constituents would be better served,” a senior White House official told NOTUS.
If that doesn’t seem like a direct link to the Peters pardon, trust me. It’s the response the White House gave to multiple other outlets, including the NYT and WaPo, who linked Colorado’s rejection of the Peters pardon with the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
It doesn’t have to be either/or. OMB Director Russ Vought may simply have seized on the Peters pardon as something near and dear to Trump’s heart and used it to justify disruption and chaos that he wanted to sow anyway.
But the bottom line is here were are five years after the 2020 election subversion scheme and the drive to craft a revisionist history of that effort is jeopardizing an innocent bystander that provides critical research into atmospheric science.
All of this is prompting a truly desperate response from scientific circles:
- WaPo: “The announcement drew outrage and concern from scientists and local lawmakers, who said it could imperil the country’s weather and climate forecasting, and appeared to take officials and employees by surprise.”
- Meteorologist Matt Lanza: “I cannot begin to tell you what a bad, bad, bad decision this is. Objectively so. This will absolutely cripple and devastate weather research in the U.S.”
- NYT: “The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.”
The Destruction: CFPB Edition
A glimmer of good news as the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a panel decision by Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both Trump appointees, that cleared the way for the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The full appeals court will now consider the appeal.
The Retribution: Letitia James Edition
Disqualified interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan has made another mess of things, according to a new report from Politico.
After a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, declined last week to re-indict New York Attorney General Letitia James on bogus mortgage fraud charges, the foreperson of the grand jury presented the no-true bill in open court. Apparently, Halligan and her team didn’t want the failure or the details of the failed indictment to become public, but the assistant U.S. attorney who signed the draft indictment wasn’t in court to stop it, according to an order issued in the case.
Prosecutors waited to the next day to ask a magistrate judge to seal the court records, including the draft indictment, but he denied their motion since the cat was already out of the bag.
This was the second time a grand jury has declined to re-indict James since the original indictment was dismissed because Halligan was not validly appointed U.S. attorney. In this go-around, prosecutors tacked on to the draft indictment a new third count of making a false statement. It apparently wasn’t enough to persuade the grand jury.
As to why the grand jury foreperson did what they did, the magistrate judge wrote: “the Court will not speculate why the grand jury disclosed the no bill in open court.”
The Retribution: Jack Smith Edition
I understand the journalistic imperative to report what former Special Counsel Jack Smith told House Republicans in closed-door testimony yesterday, but the only important context here is that Smith is being targeted for retribution by the President Trump — and his GOP allies on the Hill are carrying his water.
If you need additional evidence, here’s how the retribution machine works, in part: Ahead of Smith’s testimony, the Trump DOJ and FBI supplied Congress with selective internal communications showing that some FBI agents expressed concerns about the Mar-a-Lago search in the summer of 2022. Those concerns have already been reported long ago, but it didn’t stop a senior Trump DOJ official from publicly trumpeting the document dump as a “bombshell.”
For Your Radar …
Today is the deadline for federal law enforcement to ship their intelligence files on “Antifa” and “Antifa-related” activities to the FBI for review by Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the WaPo notes, as part of the Trump White House’s broad targeting of its political opposition.
Venezuela Watch
- The U.S. conducted its 26th lawless boat strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, killing four people and bringing the total death total in the high seas campaign to at least 99.
- The U.S. military was blindsided by President Trump’s announcement of a blockade of Venezuela, the NYT reports:
Mr. Trump’s announcement of a “blockade” caught senior officials at the Pentagon and at Southern Command in Florida by surprise. On Wednesday, they scrambled to figure out the U.S. military’s role in the action, U.S. officials said.
Punitive and Performative
The Trump administration is planning to dramatically ramp up efforts to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, according to internal guidance obtained by the NYT. The plan calls for a massive increase in the number of such cases each month, straining government capacity and heightening the risk of due process violations:
The guidance, issued on Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, asks that they “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year. If the cases are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts said. By comparison, between 2017 and this year to date, there had been just over 120 cases filed, according to the Justice Department.
It’s not at all clear that the plan is feasible, but that may not really be the point.
Mass Deportation Watch
- A unanimous three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said President Trump can keep the National Guard deployed in the nation’s capital while an appeal of the case proceeds. The decision largely swung on D.C.’s status as a federal district, not a state. The panel called into question the deployment of out-of-state national guards to states without their consent, calling it “constitutionally troubling.”
- U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb of D.C. blocked a new Trump administration policy limiting members of Congress from visiting ICE detention facilities, ruling that existing statutes provided for the visits for oversight purposes.
- Chris Geidner takes a look at the last 100 days of Kavanaugh stops.
The White Nationalist Presidency, Part I
Democratic Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D) and Jacky Rosen (D) put a hold on the nomination of Adm. Kevin Lunday to lead the Coast Guard over its new workplace harassment policy downgrading swastikas and nooses from hate symbols to merely “potentially divisive.”
The White Nationalist Presidency, Part II
Madiba K. Dennie: How the Trump Administration Is Quietly Resegregating the American Workforce
Dersh Can’t Stop Dershing
Alan Dershowitz hand-delivered to the president in the Oval Office this week a draft of his upcoming book “Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term?” and told Trump the Constitution wasn’t clear on the issue, the WSJ reports.
Quote of the Day
Vanity Fair photographer Christopher Anderson:
I’ll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you want to be portrayed?” We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye. And he says to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do, too.”
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
How a ‘Habeas Machine’ Reunited One Family That Was Pulled Apart by ICE
The agents were on the hunt, but as they staked out the hallway in 26 Federal Plaza looking for immigrants to detain, they had other prey in mind.
“I’ve never had kangaroo. I want to try,” said Samantha Camlica, an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who has developed a reputation for aggression among the regular observers who monitor the court.
The other four agents flanking the corridor with her on that morning late last month were wearing masks. Camlica, who has declined to comment for this series, was the only one in the group whose affiliation was clearly visible.
Amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, ICE officers have been assisted by personnel from a slew of other federal agencies as they round up undocumented migrants. In New York City, more than anywhere else in the country, those detentions have taken place in the halls of 26 Federal Plaza and other courthouses as immigrants show up for required check-ins and hearings.
Another one of the agents volunteered that they had been offered dog meat on a trip to Korea.
“The translator said ‘roof roof,’” the agent explained.
Camlica noted she doesn’t “get how people could be vegetarian or vegan.”
“I like meat too much,” she said.
While the masked agents are a constant, menacing presence for the immigrants in the halls, they are not always an active one. On some days, no one is taken. Others have long lulls filled with quiet or aimless conversation. Then, suddenly there will be an explosion of activity and shouting as someone is grabbed and dragged into a stairwell.
As they mused about eating meat, Camlica and the other agents were on the verge of one of these violent moments that would see a young Venezuelan man pulled away from his parents. It would also activate a partnership between activists and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who have developed a method for quickly responding and trying to secure the release of immigrants who are taken.
Continue reading “How a ‘Habeas Machine’ Reunited One Family That Was Pulled Apart by ICE “Under Trump, More Than 1,000 Nonprofits Strip DEI Language From Tax Forms
This post first appeared at ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
According to this year’s tax filing, the American Athletic Conference, the $150 million collegiate sports league that includes schools like Rice and Tulane, is striving to be a leader in inclusion, but no longer in diversity or equity.
UNICEF USA, which supports the United Nations’ humanitarian children’s mission, no longer wants a more equitable world for every child — just a better one.
And the National Association of Community Health Centers, whose tax filing once said it focused on medically underserved populations, is now “patient-centered for all.”
The changes reflect a broader retreat underway in the nonprofit world. After President Donald Trump ordered his administration to root out “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion efforts earlier this year, opening the door to investigations and funding cuts for offenders, more than 1,000 charities rewrote their mission statements in forms they filed this year with the Internal Revenue Service, removing or minimizing language tied to race, inequity and historically disadvantaged communities, ProPublica found.
Some went further, scrubbing diversity initiatives from their websites along with commitments to building more inclusive institutions. They changed the job titles of leaders and, in some cases, even renamed themselves. An Ohio nonprofit once called the Financial Alliance for Racial Equity, for example, is now the Financial Alliance for Representation and Empowerment.
The organizations range from large nonprofits such as Seattle Children’s Hospital to smaller ones like a Minnesota-based nonprofit that promotes time with horses as a form of therapy. While many rely on government dollars — a sixth spent more than $750,000 in federal funding last year — about half of the charities that watered down their missions reported receiving no form of government funding.
“The administration’s attacks on DEI and equal opportunity efforts have created a chilling effect through fear, intimidation and confusion,” said Maya Raghu, who leads an initiative to protect DEI at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which did not change its mission statement.
The Trump administration’s flurry of orders declared diversity programs “pernicious discrimination,” codifying an anti-DEI agenda long animated by claims that such programs disadvantage white men.
Raghu’s group has defended nonprofits from Trump’s crackdown, winning an injunction earlier this year against a Trump rule requiring government contractors to certify they did not have what it deemed unlawful DEI programs.
A separate effort by the National Urban League and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago brought a lawsuit against the Trump administration earlier this year, arguing that its executive orders were unconstitutional. The leader of one of the groups said that the administration’s actions were “based on a blatant and corrosive lie.” The group sought an injunction against the executive orders, but the effort was unsuccessful. The case is ongoing.
To identify organizations that removed DEI language from the mission statements in their tax filings, ProPublica developed its own list of about 20 DEI-related terms, including “disadvantaged” and “underrepresented.” About three quarters of the changes made to the mission statements explicitly removed at least one word on the list. The other organizations made more subtle edits to remove an emphasis on diversity and inclusion.
ProPublica reached out to hundreds of these nonprofits, big and small. Nearly all declined to discuss their changes in depth. Three organizations said they had already removed DEI language from their mission statements before Trump was elected for a second time, as part of routine strategic planning. Others, including the National Association of Community Health Centers, made distinctions between the mission statements they include in their 990 forms and their actual mission statements and said they remain committed to DEI.
“We want to be clear: NACHC’s mission to support Community Health Centers in serving medically underserved populations has not and – will not – change,” a spokesperson said in a statement. The group has used its new 990 language on its website for years but recently revised it, too. Now the group says on its website it wants to improve “health for all.”
Tom Fenstermaker, the director of communications for the American Athletic Conference, described the organization’s removal of references to diversity and equity as “simply a change in words” and emphasized the group’s commitment to “inclusive excellence.”
UNICEF USA did not respond to requests for comment.
The White House and the IRS also did not respond to requests for comment.
Adapt or DEI
For some organizations, the commitment to diversity appears to swing like a pendulum.
In the spring of 2020, as the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer spurred a racial reckoning, institutions across the public and private sectors scrambled to meet the public’s demand for action.
Scores of public companies promised lofty investments: Comcast pledged to invest $100 million to “fight injustice and inequality.” Facebook committed $200 million to Black-owned businesses and organizations.
Nonprofit tax records filed between 2019 and 2025 show a notable increase in references to many common DEI terms in mission statements filed after Floyd’s death. Those records also reflect a substantial increase in the number of leaders whose titles include some reference to DEI.
In October 2020, Teach for America, the $200 million nonprofit that places recent college graduates in schools serving low-income students, announced a new hire to lead its efforts centering DEI across the institution’s work. Longtime former CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard appointed Barbara Logan Smith as its newest head of diversity, equity and inclusiveness. The announcement described how “TFA is grounded in a commitment” to these values and linked to a page on the organization’s website that prominently displayed its pledge.
It wasn’t the charity’s first such commitment. The group adopted a diversity statement in 2007 and later created an Office of Diversity and Inclusiveness, but scrapped the department within the decade, according to news reports.
Since Trump took office earlier this year, the tides have turned again. Teach for America removed the DEI section from its website, cut out references to equity in the mission statement in its tax filings and changed Smith’s title to chief of experience and belonging.
Other nonprofits have made similar pivots. The National Council on Aging, which calls itself the first national voice for older adults and reported $100 million in revenue last year, revealed an ambitious plan in 2021 to address health disparities among aging Americans, aiming to assist those “that have been left behind for so many years [and] that have experienced so many disadvantages,” its president and chief executive officer, Ramsey Alwin, said at the time.
But in its latest tax filings, the organization eliminated references to “vulnerable” and “disadvantaged” communities in its mission statement; it has also removed the “Equity Promise” page on its website.
In a statement, a Teach for America spokesperson emphasized its commitment to cultivating educators in rural and urban areas, and ensuring that every child in the country has access to quality education.
“We have made changes to our language to make our commitment to all children clearer,” the statement read.
The National Council on Aging did not respond to a list of questions about its DEI efforts and the changes it made to its mission statement.
Even organizations that have long used DEI language to describe their work are changing their messaging. Galt Foundation, a staffing firm focused on expanding access to employment opportunities for people with disabilities, referenced diversity and inclusion in its tax filings for almost a decade until it removed the terms from its most recent disclosure.
Galt’s leader, Lisa Doyle, told ProPublica that removing references to diversity and inclusion on its tax filings was a business decision and that the group’s actual mission has not changed.
“We have a responsibility to adapt while staying true to our mission,” Doyle said in an interview. “So if we have to adapt our language to make sure that we’re able to continue to create that access, then that’s what we need to do.”
Trigger Warning
As the Trump administration deployed AI tools to identify and root out so-called woke ideology in government-funded programs, institutions across the country were forced to consider pragmatic changes to manage potential risk.
The administration has been aggressive in what it labels as DEI: A ProPublica review of grants terminated by the National Institutes of Health earlier this year found that projects swept up in the dragnet included those to curb stillbirths, child suicides and infant brain damage. Funding for some of those projects was reinstated following a lawsuit, but many remain canceled.
Institutions rushed to erase language that might trigger a reaction; their edit trails provide insight into the calculations on how far is too far when acknowledging inequality and advocating against it.
The changes to charity mission statements reveal common strategies that organizations appear to be using to reframe their work without DEI.
CodePath, AI4ALL and America On Tech did not respond to questions about why they made the edits.
Such changes haven’t helped at least one group evade notice.
Not long after Trump’s second inauguration, the Center for Workforce Inclusion, a nonprofit that helps older workers with job training and placement, changed the mission statement on its website to remove a commitment to “especially” helping low-income and disadvantaged adults.
By March, the group had gone a step further and changed its name to CWI Works.
Despite the edits, the White House still called CWI Works a “leftist, DEI-promoting” entity in May, when the administration proposed sweeping cuts to the Senior Community Service Employment Program, a critical source of funding for the group. CWI’s tax records, filed with the IRS later that month, listed its new name and mission.
The administration’s actions have had an acute impact on the organization’s work. In a LinkedIn post, the group’s president and CEO said CWI, like other grant recipients, was placed in the “truly awful” position of having to furlough tens of thousands of older job seekers and some of its own staff after the Trump administration froze funding for the SCSEP grant program.
Rita Santelli, a spokesperson for CWI, said the group is committed to ensuring that its programming is “accessible and effective for all older workers.”
Gene Takagi, a lawyer whose firm specializes in working with nonprofits, said there isn’t a single right answer on whether nonprofits should remove DEI language.
In a recent blog post, he suggested that organizations could mitigate risks of “unfair government intrusion” by removing references to DEI terms in public communications like 990s, but reaffirm their commitment to diversity and inclusion in direct messages to stakeholders and funders.
In an interview with ProPublica, Takagi compared the Trump administration’s actions to a bully drawing a line in the sand and acknowledged that things could get worse if organizations publicly retreat from their DEI values en masse.
“It’s not until somebody takes a step forward and says, ‘No, I don’t accept that,’ that things are going to change,” Takagi said.
Some charities have kept their missions intact, even in documents filed to the government.
BrightSpark Early Learning Services is a nonprofit in the Seattle area providing affordable child care services to families, many of whom are low-income. The organization’s curriculum has long been rooted in a racial equity lens, and its mission statement explicitly mentions its “anti-racist” approach to education. More than a quarter of the organization’s revenue came from federal grants last year.
YWCA USA, a social justice organization whose mission includes a commitment to “eliminating racism [and] empowering women,” has also stood behind its strong language. Several dozen of the local YWCA associations around the country have followed suit.
Neither BrightSpark nor YWCA USA agreed to speak with ProPublica, nor did any other charity that kept a commitment to DEI in their mission statements intact.
How We Reported This Story
ProPublica assembled a list of nonprofit organizations that have submitted electronic tax filings to the IRS in 2025. We used those filings to compare mission statements to those from the previous fiscal year. There are two places on the Form 990 where organizations are asked to describe their mission statement: in the “Summary” section in Part 1 and the “Statement of Program Service Accomplishments” in Part 3. Our analysis relied on the text included in Part 3, where organizations typically give the most expansive descriptions of their mission, but we checked the statements included in Part 1 to see if DEI commitments appeared there.
To assess whether organizations removed any language connected to diversity, equity and inclusion, we developed a list of keywords commonly associated with DEI and checked whether they had been removed. We did not distinguish between differences in punctuation. Then we used artificial intelligence to flag more subtle changes that did not include those keywords. The list of keywords included iterations of the words diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, racism, people of color, underserved, underrepresented, oppressed, disadvantaged, minority, BIPOC, indigenous, marginalized, gender, LGBT, discrimination and low-income. Sometimes an organization removed one of the keywords but still kept a clear commitment to diversity and inclusion in its mission statement. These organizations were removed from the final tally when reporters manually reviewed each organization’s two most recent mission statements.
GOP Senator Grills Trump Nominee on Statement that Marriage Is Not Intended for Disabled People
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), a generally reliable Republican foot soldier, grilled a Trump judicial nominee Wednesday about his bigoted preachings.
Continue reading “GOP Senator Grills Trump Nominee on Statement that Marriage Is Not Intended for Disabled People”Join Us In This Super Fun Thing!
As the year winds down, we have a fun little project I want to pitch you on. It’s a key, incremental part of keeping TPM strong, vital and moving forward into the new year and beyond. Right now, we are 279 subscriptions short of a net increase of 3,000 subscribers for the year. True, this is not a bumper-sticker ready declaration. But it’s an important one. We want and need to keep growing like that as we move forward and the 3,000 net new members is a big milestone. So if you’ve been thinking about subscribing, please consider doing it before the new year.
And here’s the incentive. We have a supply of high-end TPM t-shirts and baseball caps from TPM’s 25th anniversary. These isn’t your standard made-on-demand online merch stuff. This is high end, plush, well made. I’m not saying it’s quite Louis Vuitton. But if you went to the campus bookstore at your alma mater and thought of getting a sweatshirt or something, it’d be that level of quality. If you are a non-member and you sign up for a TPM AF (ad free) annual membership we will give you a choice of either a T-shirt or a cap. This is while supplies last. We’ll update each day to tell you what we have left. If you are currently a TPM Prime member and you upgrade to ad free, we will make the same offer. Just to be super clear, we cannot do this for a regular TPM Prime membership. This does not mean that we don’t want you to sign up or that we’re not super grateful but these are pricey and we are trying to offer these as an additional incentive. (I’ll note how to claim your merch below.) Mainly, the reason to do this is to join our community and support our team’s work. People are often amazed that this little organization remains when so many other bigger ones, richer ones, hotter ones, have fallen by the wayside. This is why. We have this community who wants to be part of what we do and support what we do for the relatively small cost of a subscription. Click here to join right now.
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INSTRUCTIONS: If you sign up for a new TPM PRIME AF (ad free) annual membership, here’s what you do to claim your merch. Sign up or upgrade to the new membership. You’ll get a receipt by email. Someone at TPM will then follow up later (that day or the next) by email to get the details about your merch preferences and where to send it. That’s it. As I said, we will do this while supplies last and we are making the offer through this week. We will update on the Editor’s Blog if we run out of merch by the end of the week.
Group of House Republicans Join Dem Effort to Force Vote on ACA Subsidies Extension
Four House Republicans joined a Democratic discharge petition Wednesday morning to force a floor vote on the Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year.
Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Mike Lawler (R-NY), Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) and Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) signed the discharge petition to help Democrats get to the 218 signatures they needed. This effectively forces the Republican House leadership to bring the ACA extension vote to the House floor.
Continue reading “Group of House Republicans Join Dem Effort to Force Vote on ACA Subsidies Extension”First at TPM: In Shift, Trump Admin Returns Wrongfully Deported Man
Not How Abrego Garcia Was Handled
In what appears to be a dramatic reversal from its reaction to other wrongful deportations this year, the Trump administration has quietly returned Faustino Pablo Pablo from Guatemala, according to a court order issued in the case yesterday.
The administration was under a court-imposed deadline of Dec. 12 to return the Guatemalan national. He was apparently returned on Dec. 11, according to the order issued by U.S. District Judge David C. Guaderrama of the Western District of Texas.
The precise account of what happened in the habeas case isn’t easily accessed by the public in court records (Politico has a request pending with the court to make the records of the case available online.) But the basic outlines of the case emerge in the publicly available orders from Judge Guaderrama.
Pablo was wrongfully deported on Nov. 20 despite an order of withholding issued more than a decade ago by an immigration judge that barred his removal to Guatemala. The immigration judge found that Pablo had “shown it is more likely than not that he will be tortured by, or with the consent or acquiescence of, the Guatemalan government.”
When Pablo, who has lived in California, showed up for a routine check-in appointment with ICE on Nov. 5, he was detained “without notice or explanation,” according to court records in the case. On Nov. 17, Pablo was transferred to the El Paso, Texas, as a precursor to his removal.
On Nov. 18, Pablo filed a writ of habeas corpus in federal court, according to court records. On Nov. 20, he sought an injunction from the court prohibiting the government from removing him from the Western District of Texas while his habeas case was pending.
By then it was too late.
Earlier that same day, at 5 a.m., Pablo was transported to the airport, court records show. At 6 a.m., he was put on a direct flight to Guatemala.
By the time the court, later in the day, issued the injunction barring Pablo’s removal, he had already landed in Guatemala City.
Unlike the very similar case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March despite an immigration judge order barring his removal there, the Trump administration conceded Pablo’s removal was “unlawful” and moved to rectify the situation.
The administration assured the court on Dec. 3 that Pablo was “tentatively scheduled” for a Dec. 4 return flight. When Pablo wasn’t returned on Dec. 4, Judge Guaderrama went ballistic, decrying the “blatant lawlessness” of Pablo’s removal. At that point, Guaderrama gave the administration until Dec. 12 to get Pablo back.
There was some movement after that. On Dec. 10, the administration notified that court that the Guatemala Migration Institute had granted Pablo a passport, ICE had approved him for parole back into the United States; he was booked for a return flight on Dec. 11.
“On December 12, 2025, [the government] filed another Declaration informing the Court that [Pablo] arrived in the United States on December 11, 2025,” the judge said in the new order yesterday. Pablo’s attorneys had said they would withdraw their “Motion for Civil Contempt and Sanctions” if Pablo was returned, and the judge has now deemed it as withdrawn.
It’s not clear if Pablo is out of the woods yet. As in the Abrego Garcia case, the administration has threatened to remove Pablo to a third country upon his return to the United States. “One thing is certain: he is not going to be able to remain in the U.S. We will deport him to another country,” the bombastic DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said on Dec. 6, before Pablo’s return.
The Mass Deportation-Tech Complex
404 Media: How a US Citizen Was Scanned With ICE’s Facial Recognition Tech
Fellow Judge Testifies Against Dugan
State Judge Kristela L. Cervera took the stand for the prosecution yesterday during the trial of Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly interfering with the ICE’s courthouse arrest of a undocumented immigrant. (For real time coverage of the trial, Adam Klasfeld has you covered.)
White House Uses Tragedy to Do More Racism
The Trump White House is continuing to use the shooting of two national guardsmen in D.C. as an excuse to inflict more draconian restrictions on the immigration of people of color, adding 20 more countries to its travel ban list:
Quote of the Day
“If [Russ] Vought is the nation’s shadow president for domestic policy, then Stephen Miller is its shadow president for internal security. Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, is using the president’s authority to try to transform the ethnic mix of the country — to make America white again, or at least whiter than it is now.”–Jamelle Bouie
Coast Guard Performs Double Reversal
After a WaPo report last month that the Coast Guard would no longer classify swastikas and nooses as hate symbols, the military service reversed course. But it subsequently went ahead and implemented the policy that downgrades those symbols to merely “potentially divisive,” the WaPo now reports.
More Fallout Over Carlson-Fuentes Interview
Two more trustees have resigned from the Heritage Foundation’s governing board in the protest over President Kevin D. Roberts’ defense of Tucker Carlson’s October interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes.
Venezuela Colombia Watch
All five of the unlawful strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats over the past month were in the eastern Pacific, not the Caribbean, the NYT reports.
Jack Smith Testifies Today
In one of the abusive investigate-the-investigators schemes, former Special Counsel Jack Smith relented to House GOP demands and will give testimony today behind closed doors on his Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago probes, despite his demands for a public hearing.
ICYMI
Mother Jones: New Justice Department Voting Rights Chief Had Prior Job Suspension for Ties to Election Deniers
The Destruction: NCAR Edition
Meteorologists and climate scientists are aghast that that Trump administration, spearheaded by OMB Director Russ Vought, is moving to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
Federal Judge May Rein in Trump Ballroom
In the lawsuit by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said he would hold the Trump administration to its pledge to submit the vanity ballroom project for federal review and hold a hearing in January on whether to halt construction. But for now he let below-ground construction continue with a warning: “The judge did caution administration officials that they should be prepared to reverse the below-ground steps if he later concludes they sought to lock in a more expansive project than is eventually permitted.”
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