100 DAYS OF CHAOS
As I sat in the Capitol Rotunda on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day for the inauguration of Donal Trump as President, I kept thinking about the question Dr. King pondered over the last year of his life: Where do we go from here: chaos or community? We now have our answer.
The first 100 days of the Trump Administration brought chaos and confusion to the federal government, our economy, and our communities. His claims last year to know nothing about it notwithstanding, President Trump and his Administration quickly got to work implementing Project 2025, with most of their actions exceeding presidential authority under the U.S. Constitution.
The Trump Administration’s Director of the Office Management and Budget Russell Vought set out to traumatize our federal workforce. With Elon Musk at the helm of DOGE, a bogus “agency” Trump created with no congressional authority, the Administration gave an unelected and unvetted billionaire and his friends free reign to wreak havoc on our civil service — and, by extension, the services they provide to the American people. The Fourth District is home to 18,000 of the over 300,000 federal employees that live or work in Virginia. Nearly all of them have felt the devastating impacts of this Administration, and the popular services they provide to the American people have suffered.
Vought and DOGE also began an unlawful money grab — freezing or refusing to pay funds appropriated by Congress for a wide variety of programs and grants across the federal government. These actions have put our national security and the health and well-being of the American people at risk, impacting everything from foreign aid to farmers to health care providers and more. These funding cuts also place a larger fiscal burden on state and local governments and leave them between the rock of cutting popular and needed services across the board and the hard place of raising state and local taxes.
Escalating a trade war and playing a “will-they-won’t-they” game with tariffs has caused massive uncertainty for families and businesses in our district, across the U.S. and beyond. His tariff whiplash has caused market volatility that hits our economy, retirement savings, and more hard. Trump’s tariffs raise costs on everything from gas to groceries, health care to housing, and toys to technology, and beyond. They also put American exports in jeopardy as countries retaliate.
Trump’s obsession with “cracking down” on illegal immigration has also put our fundamental civil rights in jeopardy. Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s story is just one example of how the Trump Administration’s disregard for the right to due process threatens ALL of us. Now, the Trump Administration has deported American citizens — and children as young as two years old — with no due process.
Trump’s war on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion seeks to erase history that makes him uncomfortable and undo progress that we have made addressing the lingering impact of that history on our communities that lead to disparities in health care, housing, educational achievement, economic opportunities, the justice system, environmental policy, and more.
Trump launched an all-out assault on public education across our country. His unlawful attempt to dismantle the Department of Education makes it harder for the federal government to protect student civil rights, especially those with disabilities. State and local officials worry that they cannot shoulder the burden of shifting these responsibilities from the federal agency. Virginia K-12 schools receive roughly $2.5 billion in federal funding per year to fill gaps in funding for at-risk students that state and local governments cannot fill, and the General Assembly or localities will have to make up the difference through significant cuts in services they provide or raising taxes. You can read my op-ed for more on this here.
On Trump’s first day in office, he pardoned 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to take by force what they could not win at the ballot box. They trashed public property, attacked Capitol Police, and threatened members of Congress and the Vice President — and Trump cheered them on for it.
This is not even close to all of the ways in which Trump and his Administration have failed the American people, undoing decades of progress and throwing millions of people’s lives and livelihoods in danger. From his failed promise of peace between Ukraine and Russia to a disastrous lack of attention to environmental justice and climate action — Donald Trump has not met this critical moment in history.
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