Response Center

The Social Security Administration cut personnel, physical offices, and key programs serving beneficiaries with disabilities, making it more challenging to access benefits.

The Social Security Administration and DOGE announced a series of changes to the agency that will severely impact the ability of people with disabilities to receive their benefits. SSA is planning to cut personnel and close regional and local offices, increasing wait times for assistance and crowding the remaining offices. The agency also eliminated the Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity, and the Office of Transformation. Finally, SSA announced a series of changes that would have made it harder to file benefits claims by phone, but later walked that back.

This order unlawfully declared a national economic emergency to invoke significant tariffs on countries around the world.

This Executive Order declared a national economic emergency over the United States' trade deficit in order to invoke significant tariffs on countries around the world. These tariffs included a 10% universal tariff, applying to goods from all U.S. trading partners, and individualized “reciprocal" tariffs of up to 50% on about ninety countries. This EO had no basis in fact, and likely will have severe economic impacts. The EO immediately caused a decline in the stock market of more than six trillion dollars and economists believe that the tariffs will drastically shrink the US economy and increase costs for families across the country.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has unlawfully cancelled billions of dollars worth of grants already distributed through the Inflation Reduction Act and other environmental programs.

The grants cancelled by the Trump administration were intended for projects reducing pollution, improving climate resiliency, increasing water quality, accelerating clean energy, and more. Without federal money, grant recipients may have to lay off staff and shutter projects, putting communities across the country at greater risk of suffering the dangerous effects of pollution, extreme weather, and unaffordable energy costs.

Media reports indicate that senior officials use personal email and autodeleting message applications to conduct official business.

Senior national security officials have used personal devices and autodeleting messaging apps such as Signal to text about highly sensitive national security matters, including plans to launch a military strike in Yemen. This reckless use threatens national security by putting classified or other sensitive information into un-secure channels, susceptible to hacking or spyware. It also increases the risk of these officials inadvertently sending this information to the wrong recipients, as they did when then-National Security Advisor Mike Waltz added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to a Signal group chat. In addition to these national security threats, using autodeleting message apps may violate federal records law and undermines the public's right to a transparent and accountable government.

This executive order attempts to legitimize questionable monetary policies through the purchase of bitcoin.

This Executive Order creating a "strategic bitcoin reserve" in the United States attempts to legitimize volatile and risky asset class that does not benefit the US economy. This EO builds on other questionable pro-cryptocurrency policies of the Trump administration, including directing the SEC to reduce its enforcement efforts against cryptocurrency interests.

This order directs the federal government to embark on a reckless and unlawful deregulatory agenda.

This executive order directs senior government officials, including those associated with DOGE, to initiate a process to review all government regulations. According to the EO, the review is for the purposes of modifying or rescinding regulations, and in some cases, deprioritizing agency actions to enforce them. Under the guise of confronting "federal overreach," this EO is likely to lead the federal government to engage in a reckless campaign of deregulation, undermining or eliminating important regulations that are essential for the public health, economic stability, and environmental safety.