BRIEF: Don’t know thyself
Big thought, small step, deep breath — for March 18, 2025
BIG THOUGHT
Privatizing understanding
It looks like the 2025 hurricane season is off to an early start, as the National Hurricane Center has begun tracking a low-pressure system in the North Atlantic. While it’s highly unlikely this little disturbance will develop into a significant storm, the year ahead is likely to be a test of just how certain we can be about such things in the future.
Why? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been a longtime target of the far right (Project 2025’s authors took issue with the NOAA’s work on climate change), and the agency has already been subject to at least two rounds of DOGE staffing cuts. National Hurricane Center researchers have already been fired (and some rehired). On the chopping block now? The Storm Prediction Center, which tracks tornadoes on the mainland. Just as a late-winter system killed 39 people across the South.
We’re pretty used to relying on accurate weather forecasting. And all told, the rounds of cuts could deprive us of that critical function of government — not just as we enter 2025’s storm season, but year after year as we move into a future where weather is far more volatile and unpredictable. Because of climate change — the thing the far right doesn’t want to think about.
It’s all of a piece with the attacks on other agencies. Firings at the Centers for Disease Control threaten our understanding of gun violence, opioid abuse, and suicide. The dismantling of medical research at the National Institutes of Health threatens further research into the promise of mRNA vaccines — the technology that won the initial battle against the Covid pandemic and holds promise for everything from cancer treatments to, of course, managing future pandemics.
Among the casualties at the Department of Education were most of the staff of the Institute of Education Sciences, which houses the National Center of Education Statistics — which runs the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the student achievement tracking program that you are likely familiar with if you've had children in public school. It’s the survey that tracks how well American kids are doing in math, science, and reading — the nation’s report card, so to speak. With the staff slashed from 100 people to three (really, three), there’s no way to run the NAEP going forward, and without it, we’ll all have much less insight into how successful American educational efforts are in the future.
As former NCES commissioner James (Lynn) Woodworth puts it: “The data belongs to the people. “It doesn’t belong to the president. It belongs to the public. It is a public asset.”
These attacks on agency knowledge are attacks on our collective (self-)understanding — the way we know the world, and ourselves, as a society. They create the kinds of absences that drive mistrust in knowledge — like the increasing suspicion with which a majority of Republicans view CDC advice. That's the kind of mistrust that has driven people away from vaccines — the mistrust that’s led to the country’s biggest measles outbreak in a quarter of a century.
Whatever the ultimate goal is — whether the institutions by which we understand the world are simply collateral damage in the long libertarian battle against the power of government or it’s all just random slashing and burning — these leave us blind to future threats, weaker, sicker, and poorer. It’s the kind of lesson the tech oligarchs who are hard at work remaking America into a libertarian dystopia seem to have forgotten, along with the public money and resources that made them in the first place.
Sure, it’s possible that once DOGE is done, private concerns could step in and provide some of the services that have been disappeared — but the incentives for a business just aren’t the same. In fact, the more savvy businesses that you might think would be well-placed to take the place of government institutions — like AccuWeather — realize that they aren’t in the same business as national-scale research and data services like the NOAA and that the public maintenance of critical knowledge is not just essential for the public, but a critical element of private enterprise’s success.
The Trump-Musk administration is trying to rewrite history by sweeping inconvenient data — about climate change, about public health threats, about education — under the rug. They’re making the case for privatization, just by breaking things — it’s easier, then, to argue that you don’t need them.
But those things they want to sell off don’t belong to DOGE, they don’t belong to Trump. They belong to all of us — and they need defending. Because sometimes you do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
SMALL STEP
Signed, sealed, delivered
Like getting things in the mail? Want that to keep happening? Like the institutions we just talked about, the Postal Service has been under serious attack by conservatives for decades — and, speaking of breaking things so they can be gotten rid of, it was saddled with unreasonable liabilities under the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 that have left it unable to respond to the new challenges of the digital age. The post office is still a critical resource, however: it’s a lifeline for rural Americans since it serves every U.S. address, even those that would be unprofitable for private alternatives to reach; it’s also a key element of election infrastructure.
Now, the Post Office is in line for the DOGE treatment, and there’s even talk of privatization. The American Postal Workers Union — one of four unions that represent the nation’s postal workers — isn’t having it, and they’re planning a national day of action on Thursday, March 20 to call attention to what they’re doing to fight back. To learn more, or to find out what you can do, visit the APWU’s Day of Action resource page.
DEEP BREATH
The art of war
A couple of years back, journalist Sam Biddle acquired some boxes of slides at auction that proved to be a treasure trove of Cold War information design — a journey through the art of a bygone age of well-funded government institutions, for good or ill. Since then, he’s cataloged the whole thing and has made the collection available through the Internet Archive.
Before you peruse, check out Jon Keegan’s introductory tour of the slides over at Beautiful Public Data.
A programming note: We’re going Live!
Join us Thursday, March 20, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern (a half-hour later than usual), when we’ll be joined again by messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, with some of the best insights into our times — and ideas on how you can act. We hope to see you there!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
The dismantling of our government has been a long time coming. Republicans have railed against many of our institutions for decades and as they become increasingly libertarian as well as embracing a technocratic take over of public services we are being forced to watch the demise of our way of life. This is not to say that reform was and is not necessary, but Musk and his tech entourage are not interested in reform. They want to change the world to accord with their vacant, abysmal, and bankrupt vision. They are using Trump to further their own ends. Of course, Trump has his own dismal agenda of revenge and greed. The country seems to have a strange death wish; millions voted for Trump and are not yet alarmed at what is happening. Once they awaken to the devastation, it might be too late. I hope not. I work daily to stay engaged while staving off despair. Despair is what they want us to feel, resisting it is essential! There are strands of light and hope; this daily brief and the insightful interviews Anand conducts help!!!
Just a thought about all those cuts, cancellations and planned attacks on government agencies it would profit TrumpMusk&Co. to hinder--especially as many of them seem to benefit the middle and working class people they obviously hold beneath contempt, and those government functions dedicated to telling us the truth about our health, our safety, our progress: We voted to establish, maintain and in some cases expand them. So this administration is tossing aside valuable assets we bought and paid for. Also, is anyone tracking the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars Trump himself, the (er) private person is spending on his golfing jaunts, self-congratulatory parties (in which he also solicits bribes), his new Air Force One, his trip to the campaign event previously known as the Super Bowl? Hmm. Just hmm. I won't even get into their defiance of the law, because this is even more evil, conniving and flat out threatening to every single one of us, potentially.