Work in Progress: What Trump Took Away
One thing I’ve been attempting to track under Trump 2.0 are all the nice things Americans used to have that Trump has deliberately taken away. This is the running list, which will be a page (like my DOGE Debunking and lawsuit declaration pages) here.
I’m posting this now in super raw form for several reasons.
- I’m missing a ton! Especially datasets that have been taken down (some of the stuff that was memory-holed appears in the main list). Let me know what I’m missing below.
- I’m wondering how this will be most useful. Obviously, right now I’ve just been capturing links when I see stories. Are these links sufficient?
- Steal my work! I’m hoping someone with more resources can do a better version of this. So if you want to steal this list and expand on it, feel free!
General EOs
Lower drug prices
Infrastructure
Free wind energy
Health and Science
NIH matching funds
Immunotherapy cancer cures
Bird flu (rehired)
Telehealth and cheaper broadband
Protections for the disabled
USAID programs targeting polio, malaria, TB, HIV, and malnourishment
Indian Health Services (rehired)
Fentanyl disruption in Mexico
Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam
Energy and Environmental
Grants for farmers in IRA
Renewable energy for farmers
Other farm grants
Halting EV plug-ins (including at government buildings)
Bonneville Power Service (rehired)
New oil drilling
Weather forecasting stations
Volcano warnings
Keeping the Colorado River flowing
National Park Service (partly rehired, plus seasonal hires)
Michigan sea lamprey eradication
Prairie education
Food aid for schools
Financial
Investigations for rich tax cheats
Consumer protection from financial entities
Easy tax returns
Experts on complex tax collection
Affordable housing
Security
National Security research
Terrorism research
FAA Litigation (tracking pilots who shouldn’t fly and flight schools who shoudn’t teach)
Union protections for TSA workers
Bird flu workers (attempted reversal)
NNSA (attempted reversal)
Justice
Complaints about tech companies
International
Finding kidnapped Ukrainian children
Data
Climate change
Air quality (internationally)
Personnel
Eight Inspectors General who found $183B in waste, fraud and abuse (from this complaint)
USAID economist Dean Karlan resigns
NIH principal deputy director Tabak resigns
NIH head Francis Collins resigns
Genome project lead Eric Green ousted
David Lebryk leaves Treasury
Doug O’Donnell leaves IRS
Not sure which list it goes under: the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which provides federal grants and other funding to institutions across the country. Some statements on the EO:
https://www.everylibrary.org/statementimls2025
https://www.ala.org/news/2025/03/ala-statement-white-house-assault-institute-museum-and-library-services
And thanks for this, and all of the other work you’re doing.
Love this list! Much needed. As an aside, not being too fluent in the legal world, how is your lawsuit declaration page different than these two:
https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenges-trump-administration/
https://www.courtwatch.news/p/lawsuits-related-to-trump-admin-executive-orders?_bhlid=05e8d4fd2fc24fcb4b9b27a3f974351905787019&utm_campaign=114-ai-hating-vegan-death-cults&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=www.courtwatch.news
Bureau of Land Management
The local BLM office had been trying to get some positions filled for several years and, recently, were able to bring on people with critical, but scarce, skills. They were feeling pretty good getting their vacancy numbers under 20%.
The DOGE and “POOF!”. This included a loss of all their GIS people, which is a big deal for a federal land-owning agency.
And GIS involving land is harder than sales/marketing stuff. You have to gt the boundaries right.
(I was in GIS at a utility company, where we were doing a special database for their more critical stuff. It including GPS locations to 8 (!) decimal places – that’s a small fraction on an inch in accuracy. I read maps, work orders, aerial photos, land-based photos…)
Absolutely! The GIS system those folks put together was created as the front end of the lidar integration — measures building and tree line heights, topo at 2-foot intervals, utilities, even road grading and depths of water bodies, plus rectified aerial photography. Amazingly accurate stuff. Developers, architects, engineers and construction firms use the govt GIS voraciously. This is really going to affect the construction industry. (to say nothing of the history of the USGS — the surveys done by the WPA built on the Homestead Act surveys and even Lewis & Clark. That’s the legacy they’re throwing out!) And we’re losing the NOAA GIS data-integrated mapping as well. Terrible loss.
I met a survey done in the early 70s, that was a resurvey of one from the early 1860s. It had a note about the original surveyor’s field notes, where there was, fortunately for them, a copy filed in L.A., and the original notes were at the office in S.F. They even found some of the original stakes, still in place.
And then we get to emergency response…
When I was a county emergency manager, we has a small, but high interest, oil spill in the harbor. A command center was set up in a hotel ballroom with all the players there: Responsible party, cleanup contractor, federal, state, and county. One time I noticed that there was a huddle going on off to the side. It was all the GIS folks from all the agencies. They were doing something like Trade-A-Layer, sharing information collectively — including cultural areas.
Update re: USAID
Re #3: Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Tom Lehrer . . .
Lobachevsky
“Only be sure always to call it please, research.”
Fired a bunch of National Park Rangers and maintenance staff and removed the ability to hire seasonal personnel.
When they ‘took out’ NOAA staff, it was also the National Marine Fisheries Service, which lost biologists and people that set seasons, quotas, and monitor catch rates in ocean fisheries.
Is anyone aware of any sales of government buildings?
Allegedly, the building sale list was taken down — don’t know if that means they are not selling those or not. But one building on the list was the Capitol Power Plant, that actually still supplies heat and chilled water cooling to the Capitol. This is actually an historical building, designed by McKim Mead & White and constructed in 1910. Beautiful structure. The building has been expanded numerous times (no, the additions don’t come close to the architecture of the original). But, what was DOGE expecting to do for heat for the Capitol complex that includes the Senate and House office buildings? Must have been the DOGE kids thinking it was some old useless building.
p.s. I think landmarking was proposed one year, but I don’t think that happened. Not that a landmark would stop DOGE anyway.
Sales take time to arrange, and a buyer is going to want to be damn sure that whoever is offering it for sale has the right to do so. The last thing they want is to have to spend more money to salvage a purchase they thought they had made.
But more critical will be leases for oil, gas, and mineral rights. Those can go through much more quickly.
Inspired by the website web3isgoinggreat-dot-com I’m tempted to stand up the site dogeisgoinggreat-dot-org to capture all of this. I’m rather concerned that it could become a full time job (but then I am retired, so….)/
I own the URL ImpeachPresidentMusk.com and have been trying to figure out how best to use it. Reach out to me on Signal at cdd.48 if you want to talk. (I’m not looking to make money, I’m just looking for “good trouble”.)
Feds pull grant funding from Illinois fair housing orgs that investigate discrimination
You’ve been given free access to an article from Crain’s Chicago Business for the next 48 hours.
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/politics/feds-pull-grant-funding-illinois-fair-housing-orgs-investigate-discrimination?share-code=17422486314991665-195a6496ec2&utm_id=gfta-em-250317
This also implicates the Fair Housing Act, Illinois Human Rights Act, segregation, race & other discrimination enforcement