Donald Trump has achieved his first global peace deal. China, Japan and South Korea have kissed and made up after years of trade quarrels. read more
Since Jan. 17, the Friday before Inauguration Day, the U.S. stock market has seen $9.6 trillion in value erased, according to data from FactSet and Dow Jones Market Data. read more
The Wall Street Journal editorial board: Blowing up the world trading system has consequences that the President isn't advertising. read more
"When McKinley put tariffs on in 1890, they lost 50 percent of their seats ... When Smoot-Hawley put their tariffs In the early 1930s, we lost the House and Senate for 60 years," Sen. Rand Paul said. "So not only bad economically, they are bad politically." read more
A federal judge dismissed the criminal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The case was dismissed "with prejudice," which means the Department of Justice is permanently barred from resurrecting the charges against Adams based on the same evidence used in the case. read more
Even if you think Trump is right about this spectacular exercise in economic self harm, if you're a Republican politician, odds are strong that you disagreed with what he's claiming 10 years " and in some cases 10 hours " ago. Maybe you've been studying the flimsy protectionist literature of the last decade and been convinced. But you probably are just outsourcing your judgment to partisan or personality cult --------. And if you're not speaking out against this garbage you're passively supporting it. Congrats. You own this crap. " Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) April 2, 2025
The Republican Congress could end this nonsense tomorrow by simply yanking back *their* tariff power that previous congresses stupidly handed over to the president. But they won't. It is their choice as much as Trump's to make this happen." David French (@DavidAFrench) April 3, 2025
It keeps getting worse.
Waltz's team set up at least 20 Signal group chats for crises across the world
Data source:
doge.gov/savings " cancelled federal grants and contracts
USAspending.gov " contract/grant recipient info
github.com & github.com " county-level election data
Tools: Matlab
Methodology: see bsky.app
I retrieved all publicly available cancellations from DOGE on 3/22, which according to DOGE is a subset of all cancellations.
I then cross-referenced them to official spending data on USAspending using links provided by DOGE and ended up with 5,137 and 4,679 contracts and grants with rich metadata.
These metadata include total dollar amounts obligated, dates, and information on contract/grant recipients (address, county, congressional district, etc).
More: I extracted county info (FIPS code) and cross-referenced them to county-level presidential election data from 2024.
For each contract/grant, I found Trump's popular vote margin over Harris in the recipient county.
I plotted every cancellation in red, with total dollar amount obligated on the y axis against Trump-over-Harris margin on x.
There's a bias for more cancellations in Harris counties. But does this reflect true bias or simply more contracts/grants awarded to Harris counties?
To answer this, I need a good background/control set. I compiled all contracts/grants from FY2021-2025 on USAspending, totaling ~19M/24M. ~99% of all cancelled contracts/grants were from this period.
Clearly, the background/control sets (plotted in gray) are distributed across the Trump-Harris spectrum, but the cancellations are biased towards Harris counties.
Potential caveat: DOGE doesn't specify how it chose certain contract/grant cancellations to disclose. They claim the ones disclosed represent "~30% of total savings". It is therefore possible that they made cancellations unbiasedly across the Trump-Harris political spectrum but preferentially disclosed ones to Harris counties for publicity purposes.
This is the kind of stuff cartoon criminals do.