@SRLevine it's trying. CalExit is gathering signatures again.

the US is experiencing rapid unscheduled disassembly.

The president fired the current heads of the coast guard and TSA and all members of an aviation security committee (while leaving the committee technically still in existence) as part of a broader purge addressing "misuse of resources." We've also sworn in a new transportation secretary who promises to reduce regulations on self-driving cars and "restore confidence" in Boeing.

About an hour ago, a passenger plane landing at Ronald Regan nat'l airport (that's near Washington DC, not Washington state, for anyone confused by the headlines) collided with a military helicopter. Details still incoming.

The president wants to "clear out" remaining Palestinians from Gaza and move them to Jordan or Egypt. Pretty much everyone is angry about this.

We've made our second attempt to withdraw from the WHO. (The first one was reversed after Biden took office.) The WHO coordinates globally in instances of pandemics but also serves the public in more routine matters like establishing best practices and guidelines. And apparently air traffic control (https://time.com/7208937/us-world-health-organization-trump-withdrawal/).

I mentioned upthread that we halted a bunch of foreign aid, and some of this is also global health related: there's an immediate freeze on the distribution of HIV antiretrovirals to countries that have been receiving that form of aid (https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/01/25/g-s1-44762/pepfar-trump-hiv-foreign-aid). There are programs for other global health issues that will be similarly affected.

There is a massive push for US dominance in AI. This involves revoking and rewriting policies to favor AI across multiple sectors.

Only days after (if I have my timeline right), a Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a model trained with vastly fewer resources than US competitors and performing as well. OpenAI feels very threatened and NVIDIA stocks lost $600 billion (although they've partly recovered).

The Gulf of Mexico is to be renamed the Gulf of America (Google is apparently going to make this change immediately, at least when accessed from the US) and it sounds like some other landmarks are being renamed or un-renamed, such as Denali to Mt. McKinley.

Jumping around a bit... we've apparently expressed interest in absorbing Greenland and possibly Canada. They have not expressed interest in joining us.

Federally funded research grants have all been put on hold. Grant reviews are not happening, grant-funded purchases of routine supplies are reportedly not happening, and all NIH grant-funded researchers are barred from publishing, traveling, or external meetings of any kind until further notice (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00231-y). Unclear to me at this stage what else is NIH specific and what is more sweeping, but I think NSF has now followed suit.

It's typical for there to be a short (a day, a few days) pause on things like NIH spending while a new set of people is appointed, but the length and breadth of this freeze is radical. Much of this is percolating through unofficial channels too, so there's a lot of uncertainty as well. We don't know if grant-funded academic researchers will keep getting paid, for example.

All federal employees under DEI titles have apparently been dismissed, all DEI programs disbanded, and DEI as a concept reclassified as discrimination so that any associated group, event, etc. can be purged. This again spans multiple EOs and has sweeping effects.

First and foremost, definitions have changed. DEI is not the collection of efforts to remove prejudice and systemic barriers so that individuals can be judged and treated fairly, it's the discriminatory practice of anybody else taking the place of a white man. By defining DEI as discriminatory, existing laws can be repurposed in all manner of perverse ways.

Anecdotally, we've seen gender equity resource groups, AAPI groups, etc. disbanded pretty much instantly, and DEI related messaging -- even things like wearing rainbow lanyards -- is all banned. Any federal employee whose job responsibilities were DEI related isn't going to be reassigned elsewhere either, they're just fired.

And more recently, a huge swath of federal employees were given the option to resign immediately and get paid through September. They're really cleaning house.