Hi Reader,
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
This quote is from Russell Vought, who was President Donald Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first administration and has now resumed the same position following his Senate confirmation last week. Vought said these words in a private speech delivered in 2023 that described his goal of defunding and debasing federal bureaucracies under a second Trump administration, should Trump be reelected.
Now, three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, we are watching this plan unfold: “We feel terrorized,” said one of the more than 20 current EPA employees who communicated with ProPublica about their experience of working at the agency under the second Trump administration.
ProPublica isn’t just watching, though. We are documenting, investigating, digging deep and talking to sources, and we’ll report back to you everything we find (once it is fact-checked).
Just these last few days, we’ve revealed what it’s like on the inside of the EPA, where more than 300 career employees have left in the face of the administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape the agency and reverse environmental protections. We’re also exposing more details about what’s happening with USAID, looking at how a 60-year-old agency was dismantled in the course of a week, what laws may have been broken in the process and what the recourse might be. And ProPublica is attempting to document Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew, the employees from Musk’s companies and those of his allies, as well as young staffers he’s recruited, who are wresting authority from career workers and commandeering computer systems.
We’re knee-deep in investigations right now, and we can use your help. As a people-powered, nonprofit newsroom that’s fiercely independent, I’m asking you to get involved.
Please do one, two or all three of these things, if you can:
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We’re in unprecedented times. Entire swaths of the federal government are being completely overhauled. ProPublica is here to cover it all. We’re independent. And we work for you.
Thanks so much,
Robin Sparkman
President, ProPublica
Proud ProPublican
