New US Surgeon General Nominee Is RFK Jr.’s Favorite ‘Wellness Influencer’

Failures

from the clownshow dept

The state of American health is in crisis at the moment due to a confluence of things entirely created by the current administration. Putting RFK Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services (HHS) never felt like anything other than a move designed to troll Trump’s detractors and it shows. As the measles outbreak that began earlier this year continues to grow, Kennedy is busying himself going on talk shows to promise to end chemtrails or else claiming he’ll have the origins of autism solved in a few months. Musk’s DOGE, meanwhile, has produced a 1/8th cut of HHS’ workforce and slashed its funding while this is all going on. Thanks to DOGE and an obedient Kennedy, HHS has less capability to keep us healthy than it did before.

The health of a nation isn’t some joke. The people in charge of it should be more qualified to run it than simply having a famous last name and a penchant for spouting conspiracy theories about health concerns. And when the latest nominee for Surgeon General is best described as Kennedy’s favorite “wellness influencer,” well, we have a problem.

Dr. Casey Means is the nominee and, to be fair to her, she has a medical degree from Stanford and has done medical research work for the government and several prominent universities in the past. The previous nominee, Janette Nesheiwat, just withdrew without much explanation. Reports seem to indicate that this resulted from harsh pushback from alt-right gremlin Laura Loomer.

Means has no experience in government administration, however, and dropped her residency some time ago. Now she runs a tech company and hocks health supplements.

Casey Means has no government experience and dropped out of her surgical residency program, saying she became disillusioned with traditional medicine. She founded a health tech company, Levels, that helps users track blood sugar and other metrics. She also makes money from dietary supplements, creams, teas and other products sponsored on her social media accounts.

Means has mostly steered clear of Kennedy’s controversial and debunked views on vaccines. But on her website, she has called for more investigation into their safety and recommends making it easier for patients to sue drugmakers in the event of vaccine injuries. Since the late 1980s, federal law has shielded those companies from legal liability to encourage development of vaccines without the threat of costly personal injury lawsuits.

And this is going to be America’s doctor. Someone who is at least lightly skeptical of vaccines and who’s main qualification for the job appears to be that she supported Kennedy and he likes her.

Apparently other supporters, such as Kennedy’s running mate in his failed presidential bid, are quite skeptical of the nomination.

“Yes, it’s very strange. Doesn’t make any sense,” philanthropist Nicole Shanahan said in a post on X, responding to a separate post that was criticizing Trump’s decision to select Means. Means is primarily known as a wellness influencer.

“I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment (and that people much more qualified would be),” Shanahan continued, referring to Means and her brother, Calley Means. “I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on. It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn’t President Trump).”

You can also add the previously mentioned Laura Loomer to Means’ detractors as well.

I agree with them, though I’m sure on vastly different grounds. Trump’s desire for media-first personalities within government positions is nothing knew, of course, but dipping so low as to put an “influencer” in as the nation’s top doctor is plainly absurd. To do it at the moment when there is a measles outbreak occurring is all the more so.

The need to remove Kennedy from his post is only becoming all the more clear.

Filed Under: casey means, influencer, rfk jr., surgeon general, wellness

Gavin Newsom Is Normalizing Trump’s Constitutional Violations

Politics

from the don't-accept-the-framing dept

Gavin Newsom’s rightward shift represents not just a strategic miscalculation but a profound moral abdication based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both democratic principles and political reality.

Newsom appears to have convinced himself that the path to defeating Trumpism lies in adopting its language, accepting its framing, and finding “common ground” with an administration actively dismantling constitutional governance. This calculation rests on a dangerous conflation of popularity with principle—the belief that because Trump won an election, his approach must be what “middle America” wants and therefore what Democrats should emulate.

This logic fails on multiple levels. First, it fundamentally misunderstands why many Americans voted for Trump. They didn’t necessarily embrace constitutional violations, the weaponization of government against critics, or the abandonment of democratic norms—though many have come to excuse them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be moved by moral clarity when it’s offered without condescension. Many voted based on specific economic anxieties, cultural concerns, or—crucially—because they believed demonstrable falsehoods about both Trump and his opponents. Winning their support doesn’t require adopting Trump’s authoritarian tendencies but addressing their legitimate concerns while providing a clear alternative to his approach to governance.

Second, Newsom’s strategy assumes that political victory is worth any moral cost. That defending constitutional principles, standing for truth, and maintaining democratic norms are luxuries that can be sacrificed for electoral advantage. This isn’t just cynical—it’s self-defeating. If Democrats adopt Trump’s rhetoric, accept his constitutional violations as mere
“distractions,” and seek partnership with his administration, what alternative do they actually offer? They become not an opposition but an echo. Not a choice, but a counterfeit.

American voters are not looking for Democratic candidates who behave like junior varsity Trumpists. They’re looking for clarity. For conviction. When Democrats blur that contrast, they don’t win converts—they confirm Trump’s dominance of the political terrain. Voters can smell incoherence and opportunism from miles away. When leaders abandon their principles for perceived political advantage, they don’t gain credibility—they lose the very foundation of trust upon which political leadership must stand.

What Newsom fails to grasp is that the most powerful response to Trumpism isn’t accommodation but clear moral contrast. Not moving toward Trump but standing firmly on democratic principles. Not adopting his language but offering an alternative vision of governance based on truth, constitutional fidelity, and democratic values. The voters who might be swayed by a genuine alternative won’t be impressed by Democratic leaders who seem willing to abandon their principles for political advantage.

Perhaps most disturbing is how Newsom’s approach reveals a fundamental lack of faith in Americans’ capacity for democratic citizenship. It assumes citizens cannot be persuaded by truth, cannot be moved by appeals to democratic principles, cannot recognize the difference between governance and demagoguery. It treats voters not as citizens capable of democratic judgment but as consumers to be won through marketing and positioning—giving them what polling suggests they want rather than what democratic governance requires.

This approach directly contributes to the crisis of meaning I’ve documented throughout Notes From The Circus. When political leaders on both sides treat truth as optional, principles as negotiable, and constitutional violations as mere tactical concerns, they reinforce the nihilistic view that nothing is real, nothing matters, and power is the only currency worth pursuing. They don’t just fail to counter Trumpism; they actively strengthen its foundations.

Political leaders who convince themselves that accommodating authoritarianism is the path to defeating it have already surrendered the moral ground from which effective resistance must operate. They haven’t found a clever strategy; they’ve abandoned the very principles they claim to defend.

The center must be held—not by moving rightward in pursuit of imagined political advantage, but by standing firmly on the constitutional principles and democratic values that make legitimate political competition possible at all. Not by treating truth as optional but by insisting on its centrality to democratic governance. Not by dismissing constitutional violations as distractions but by recognizing them as fundamental threats requiring clear moral response.

The ground approaches. And those who respond by triangulating, accommodating, and seeking “partnership” with the forces undermining democratic governance may find they’ve not only failed to defeat Trumpism but actively enabled its transformation from political movement to governing regime.

At this point, Newsom isn’t just forgetting what’s real—he’s surrendering the very possibility of its defense.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Balwin

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Filed Under: democrats, donald trump, gavin newsom, principles

IRS-ICE Immigrant Data Sharing Agreement Betrays Data Privacy And Taxpayers’ Trust

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the destroying-trust dept

In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently reached an agreement allowing the IRS to share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taxpayer information of certain immigrants. The redacted 15-page memorandum of understanding (MOU) was exposed in a court case, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent, which seeks to prevent the IRS from unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information for immigration enforcement purposes. Weaponizing government data vital to the functioning and funding of public goods and services by repurposing it for law enforcement and surveillance is an affront to a democratic society. In addition to the human rights abuses this data-sharing agreement empowers, this move threatens to erode trust in public institutions in ways that could bear consequences for decades. 

Specifically, the government justifies the MOU by citing Executive Order 14161, which was issued on January 20, 2025. The Executive Order directs the heads of several agencies, including DHS, to identify and remove individuals unlawfully present in the country. Making several leaps, the MOU states that DHS has identified “numerous” individuals who are unlawfully present and have final orders of removal, and that each of these individuals is “under criminal investigation” for violation of federal law—namely, “failure to depart” the country under 8 U.S.C. § 1253(a)(1). The MOU uses this basis for the IRS disclosing to ICE taxpayer information that is otherwise confidential under the tax code.  

In practice, this new data-sharing process works like this: ICE makes a request for an individual’s name and address, taxable periods for which the return information pertains, the federal criminal statute being investigated, and reasons why disclosure of this information is relevant to the criminal investigation. Once the IRS receives this request from ICE, the agency reviews it to determine whether it falls under an exception to the statutory authority requiring confidentiality and provides an explanation if the request cannot be processed. 

But there are two big reasons why this MOU fails to pass muster. 

First, as the NYU Tax Law Center identified:

“While the MOU references criminal investigations, DHS recently reportedly told IRS officials that ‘they would hope to use tax information to help deport as many as seven million people.’ That is far more people than the government could plausibly investigate, or who are plausibly subject to criminal immigration penalties, and suggests DHS’s actual reason for pursuing the tax data is to locate people for civil deportation, making any ‘criminal investigation’ a false pretext to get around the law.” 

Second, it’s unclear how the IRS would verify the accuracy of ICE’s requests. Recent events have demonstrated that ICE’s deportation mandate trumps all else—with ICE obfuscating, ignoring, or outright lying about how they conduct their operations and who they target. While ICE has fueled narratives about deporting “criminals” to a notorious El Salvador prison, reports have repeatedly shown that most of those deported had no criminal histories. ICE has even arrested U.S. citizens based on erroneous information and blatant racial profiling. But ICE’s lack of accuracy isn’t new—in fact, a recent settlement in the case Gonzalez v. ICE bars ICE from relying on its network of erroneous databases to issue detainer requests. In that case, EFF filed an amicus brief identifying the dizzying array of ICE’s interconnected databases, many of which were out of date and incomplete and yet were still relied upon to deprive people of their liberty. 

In the wake of the MOU’s signing, several top IRS officials have resigned. For decades, the agency expressed interest in only collecting tax revenue and promised to keep that information confidential. Undocumented immigrants were encouraged to file taxes, despite being unable to reap benefits like Social Security because of their status. Many did, often because any promise of a future pathway to legalizing their immigration status hinged on having fulfilled their tax obligations. Others did because as part of mixed-status families, they were able to claim certain tax benefits for their U.S. citizen children. The MOU weaponizes that trust and puts immigrants in an impossible situation—either fail to comply with tax law or risk facing deportation if their tax data ends up in ICE’s clutches. 

This MOU is also sure to have a financial impact. In 2023, it was estimated that undocumented immigrants contributed $66 billion in federal and payroll taxes alone. Experts anticipate that due to the data-sharing agreement, fewer undocumented immigrants will file taxes, resulting in over $313 billion in lost tax revenue over 10 years. 

This move by the federal government not only betrays taxpayers and erodes vital trust in necessary civic institutions—it also reminds us of how little we have learned from U.S. history. After all, it was a piece of legislation passed in a time of emergency, the Second War Powers Act, that included the provision that allowed once-protected census data to assist in the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. As the White House wrote in a report on big data in 2014, “At its core, public-sector use of big data heightens concerns about the balance of power between government and the individual. Once information about citizens is compiled for a defined purpose, the temptation to use it for other purposes can be considerable.” Rather than heeding this caution, this data-sharing agreement seeks to exploit it. This is yet another attempt by the current administration to sweep up and disclose large amounts of sensitive and confidential data. Courts must put a stop to these efforts to destroy data privacy, especially for vulnerable groups.

Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Filed Under: data sharing, dhs, ice, irs, privacy, surveillance

Daily Deal: LabsDigest Subscription

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

LabsDigest is built for those who learn best by doing. Whether you’re preparing for a CompTIA certification or diving into Python development, our platform offers interactive labs that simulate real-world tasks—no passive watching or reading, just real experience. Work through performance-based exercises for CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, and more, or sharpen your coding skills with hands-on Python projects. Learn by solving problems, fixing bugs, and applying your knowledge in practical scenarios that prepare you for the real world. It’s on sale for $30.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Nassau County Legislators Want To Create A Moving 15-Foot Halo For Its Officers

Legal Issues

from the protected-class dept

Oh, so we’re still doing this, huh. Despite pretty much every effort of this type being rejected by courts as, shall we say, constitutionally-improbable, legislators continue to believe that cops should be protected from the people they serve by laws that allow them to violate the rights of the people they serve.

Here’s the latest effort. Fortunately, even if passed, its effect is limited to residents of Long Island, who are probably used to this sort of marginalization.

Nassau County lawmakers want to make it illegal to stand within 15 feet of cops and other emergency workers — but critics say the “buffer zone” would be unconstitutional.

Civilians who enter the “zone” for police, firefighters and other first responders during an emergency would be slapped with a misdemeanor and a $1,000 fine — with the possibility of up to a year behind bars, according to a new bill introduced by Republicans in the county Board of Legislators.

I appreciate this depth of reporting from the New York Post, the cop-friendliest publication in the city. It went so far as to note the bill was introduced by Republicans, which is helpful, if unnecessary. Of course it was introduced by Republicans. This is the sort of thing they do when they can’t get a book ban bill into committee.

It’s a hobby. It’s fun for hobbyists and annoying for everyone else. I may enjoy the sound of piercing guitar feedback in my music but I’m not asking for a minimum feedback-per-minute rate over government-funded airwaves. Nassau County Republicans may desire to free cops from the constant menace of being recorded while engaged in their public service efforts, but that’s the sort of kink that should stay within the walls of their domiciles, rather than splattered across the legislative docket like it’s actually a serious bit of lawmaking.

Supporters of the bill claim this will protect “emergency responders” from threats, harassment, and interference. And yet, supporters can’t explain why it’s always cops complaining about this sort of thing while their “emergency responder” brethren are always given the time, space, and opportunity to render their public services.

Three guesses and two of them wrong will lead you to the only conclusion: the cops like to work in the shadows where they can do they stuff they want to do without worrying about being caught doing it. The other responders actually just want to help people.

Besides, there’s already a law on the books that does what this law does — one that covers cops, even when they’re pretending to be “first responders.”

State law already punishes people who interfere with first responders with up to a year in jail, three years of probation, or a $1,000 fine.

So, despite the misuse of the phrase “emergency responder,” this bill is all about cops. It only wants cops to have a moving 15-foot halo in which to do their cop business, which generally isn’t being the first wave of emergency response. And because it’s a moving halo, all a cop has to do to generate a violation is move closer to the person they want to arrest for violating the law.

It’s a garbage proposal and hopefully it will die a quick death when offered up for a vote. But we know how politicians love cops, even when their love has been proven irrational time and time again. This is a special right just for law enforcement officers that’s had the usual “first responder” gloss applied to it. This sort of thing has rarely fooled courts. If it’s signed into law, there’s little chance this one will be the one that finally convinces a court cops should be considered more equal than others.

Filed Under: halo law, nassau county, nassau county police, police misconduct

Trump Using Pointless, Shitty Tariffs To Bully Countries Into Coddling Elon Musk’s Starlink

Broadband

from the cronyism-on-steroids dept

By now most sentient people realize Trump’s tariffs are a mindlessly descructive gambit that’s going to decimate inventory, drive smaller companies out of business, and significantly drive up costs for American consumers. There’s bottomless evidence that the clumsy effort to bully the planet was concocted by imbeciles, and most countries have justifiably told the Trump administration to go fuck itself.

But amusingly (?), the Trump administration still seems to think it can leverage the threat of tariffs to try and force companies into using Elon Musk’s Starlink service, according to the Washington Post:

“A series of internal government messages obtained by The Post reveal how U.S. embassies and the State Department have pushed nations to clear hurdles for U.S. satellite companies, often mentioning Starlink by name. The documents do not show that the Trump team has explicitly demanded favors for Starlink in exchange for lower tariffs. But they do indicate that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has increasingly instructed officials to push for regulatory approvals for Musk’s satellite firm at a moment when the White House is calling for wide-ranging talks on trade.”

When asked by WAPO, the State Department just insisted they were being patriotic:

“Starlink is an American-made product that has been game-changing in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity. Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.”

A growing number of countries are trying to move away from Starlink because of Musk’s unhinged support of racism and conspiratorial fascism, and the fact they’re not sure they can trust Musk to be objective or reliable when it comes to military and political communications.

Germany and Ukraine, for example, are starting to more heavily use France’s Eutelsat fledgling low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite services after Musk restricted Ukraine’s access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine’s military aims (defending itself from unprovoked invasion by a fascist).

The U.S. certainly has a long history of promoting U.S. corporate interests globally. But even this level of naked cronyism is an extreme outlier. Everywhere you look, the Trump administration is looking to coddle Trump’s rich benefactor, who donated $277 million to ensure Trump’s election victory.

They’ve duct-taped Starlink terminals to the White House roof, creating all sorts of new cybersecurity vulnerabilities by bypassing government security protocols. They’ve installed Starlink at the FAA, in a bid to oust Verizon out of a $2 billion agency telecom contract. They’re rewriting the infrastructure bill grant program to drive as much taxpayer money as possible to Elon Musk.

The head of the Trump FCC, Brendan Carr, has been going around acting like a used car salesmen, telling countries that refuse to sign up for Starlink service that they’re effectively aiding communism. Carr’s been falsely claiming that countries either have the choice of Starlink or compromised Chinese satellite service, ignoring a growing array of looming French, European, Canadian, and Jeff Bezos’ alternatives.

This is, of course, just transparently corrupt effort to reward the authoritarian administration’s top donor. And while Starlink certainly has its uses (disasters, war, or the middle of nowhere rural America–assuming you can afford it), it’s ill-suited for this sort of “use everywhere, for everything” approach.

The technology has been criticized for harming astronomy research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics, launch logistics, and capacity constraints means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable and will get worse, and making it scale to meet real-world demand is many years away. There are real questions about whether the network is even permanently sustainable.

It’s not an improved solution for White House broadband access (unless you’re trying to hide administration communications from transparency requirements). It’s not a good upgrade over Verizon fiber or 5G at the FAA. And it’s a very problematic a downgrade from the kind of high-capacity, future-proof fiber deployments the infrastructure bill was funding.

This is all before you get to the fact that Starlink is being run by an overt white supremacist openly embracing authoritarianism, who is actively decimating the country’s science, arts, consumer protection, and public safety infrastructure for his own amusement. Musk may be enjoying the fruits of his investments into Trump now, but the longer-term stain and stink on his brands may prove difficult to wash off as the full scope of the administration’s damage begins to penetrate thicker electorate skulls.

Filed Under: authoritarian, communications, corruption, low earth orbit, military, satellite, security, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink

RFK Jr.’s Measles Policy: Deaths Are Expected And It’s The Victim’s Fault

Failures

from the tiny-little-coffins dept

I’ve ranted and raved enough about how RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department are completely fucking up the response to the current measles outbreak enough that I’m confident you all don’t need me to rehash the entire thing in this opening. We can leave it at this: we’re probably going to lose our measles elimination status under Kennedy’s watch, Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer no matter how much he attempts to state otherwise, his advice for alternative therapies and/or that everyone should just get measles are bullshit, and he has a habit of victim-blaming those who get measles to boot.

It’s that last bit that’s most important here. The post I linked to is one in which Kennedy claims that malnutrition is to blame for serious outcomes from measles infections. But he’s said so much more on the topic, including in a March interview on Fox News.

“It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” Kennedy falsely said during a March Fox Nation interview. “We see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regime.” Coupled with his disturbing statements on autism and long-standing belief that vaccinations cause the condition, Kennedy is circling a dark idea: that the value of one’s life can be tabulated in accordance with diagnoses and preexisting conditions. Since his appointment as secretary of health and human services (HHS), he has pursued a brutal vision of American health that several experts liken to a sort of eugenics. Kennedy has made it clear that certain deaths are acceptable or even preferable to a world where every child is vaccinated.

“There’s a sort of Darwin-esque notion that only the fittest survive,” says Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist, virologist, and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “But these viruses can kill anybody, so that’s just wrong.” In the recent deaths, the first from measles in a decade, no underlying medication conditions have been reported. Both of the Texas children were reportedly healthy before they contracted measles. They could have stayed that way.

Now, here’s where I have to be very careful about stating that this is an opinion piece in which I will draw conclusions based on Kennedy’s words and actions, along with the analysis in that post from The Verge. Why? Because of this following statement.

Alluding to survival of the fittest on its own is already a problematic stance to take when we’re talking about a disease that has already resulted in two tiny little coffins made to fit for children. It’s already problematic because it’s also just fucking wrong; otherwise fit people have gotten severely sick and died from this outbreak. But if you couple the “survival of the fittest” stance with the “everyone should just get infected to gain immunity stance,” what you have is a combined policy that is tolerant of many unnecessary deaths and major illness in people whom Kennedy says are deficient in some way, and that is damned close to a policy of eugenics.

The underlying message of Kennedy’s campaign is that measles deaths are expected and admissible, because the people who don’t survive the disease were flawed anyway, says Laura Appleman, a professor of law at Willamette University in Oregon. Kennedy has talked up the “measles parties” of past decades — discounting that sometimes those parties proved deadly. “I think there’s a real subtext here saying that, ‘no, that’s ok, because in the old days the ones who survived were the strong ones,’” she adds.

Appleman has studied and written about the history of eugenics in the U.S., in the context of the criminal justice system, as well as that of public health and the covid-19 pandemic. The current rhetoric coming from Kennedy is an amplification of what’s long persisted in American culture and politics, she says. “I talk a lot about the long tail of eugenics [in the US]. And I think certainly, lately, the tail is not so hidden anymore.”

“He’s pretty much coming out and saying these things,” Appleman says. “Who deserves to live and who is it okay to not mourn? And this is from someone who runs the HHS. This is profoundly disturbing.”

And if you think that is a bridge too far, couple it further with Kennedy’s absolutely ignorant comments on autism, which he has falsely linked historically to vaccinations, particularly the MMR vaccine.

During the press conference, Kennedy asserted that autism “destroys” families and children. He said that children with autism, “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

“It doesn’t get much closer, that I can imagine, to ‘useless eaters’ than that,” says David Gorski, a surgeon and oncologist at Wayne State University and prolific health blogger, who cofounded the website Science-Based Medicine. “Useless eaters” was a phrase coined by German eugenicists Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche in a 1920 book that advocated for culling people with disabilities — which the Nazi regime would later use to justify mass murder.

This isn’t to suggest that Kennedy himself is a Nazi or is sympathetic to Nazi ideology, to be clear. But he’s adopting a position that is at least similar to the one the Nazis used to eliminate all kinds of people they claimed were poisoning the gene pool. And when you package all of this in with the current administration’s work to defund or otherwise deprioritize all kinds of research, help, and government programs for certain classes of people, well, the comparison begins to get unavoidable.

Additionally proposed and already enacted cuts within HHS include eliminating the national suicide hotline’s program for LGBTQ youth, ending programs focused on preventing childhood lead poisoning, eliminating domestic HIV prevention efforts and research, and scrapping multiple measures for treating drug addiction and opioid overdoses, including grants for supplying emergency responders with Narcan.

Altogether, the changes fit cleanly with the idea that certain lives aren’t worth investing in or protecting, Fox says. “All of these things could be explained through that lens,” she notes — the lens of acceptable death. Refracted through the looking glass, “a lot of things come into focus,” and the road to an America made “healthy again” looks treacherous.

A healthcare policy in which death is an acceptable outcome. Might as well make that HHS’s motto.

Filed Under: eugenics, hhs, measles, rfk jr.

DOGE Aide Who Helped Gut CFPB Was Warned About Potential Conflicts Of Interest

Failures

from the the-conflict-is-the-interest dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Last month, a Department of Government Efficiency aide at the nation’s consumer watchdog agency was told by ethics attorneys that he held stock in companies that employees are forbidden from owning — and was advised not to participate in any actions that could benefit him personally, according to a person familiar with the warning.

But days later, court records show, Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old software engineer who has been detailed to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since early March, went ahead and participated in mass layoffs at the agency anyway, including the firings of the ethics lawyers who had warned him.

Experts said that Kliger’s actions, which ProPublica first reported on last week, constitute a conflict of interest that could violate federal criminal ethics laws. Such measures are designed to ensure that federal employees serve the public interest and don’t use their government power to enrich themselves. At the CFPB, which regulates companies that provide financial services, there are strict prohibitions on the investments that employees can maintain.

As ProPublica previously reported, Kliger owns as much as $365,000 worth of shares in Apple Inc., Tesla Inc. and two cryptocurrencies, according to his public financial report. Investments in those businesses are off limits to employees since the bureau can regulate them. A further review now shows that he’s invested in even more companies that are on the agency’s “Prohibited Holdings” list. Kliger also disclosed owning as much as $350,000 worth of stock in Google parent Alphabet Inc., Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.

That means, at a maximum, Kliger could own as much as $715,000 of investments in seven barred companies, the records show.

Experts said a defanged and downsized consumer watchdog is unlikely to aggressively regulate those and other companies, freeing them of compliance costs and the risk associated with examinations and enforcement actions. That in turn could boost their stock prices and benefit investors like Kliger.

Don Fox, a former general counsel of the independent federal agency that advises executive branch workers on their ethical obligations, said that “this looks like a pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Richard Briffault, a government ethics expert at Columbia Law School, said the fact that Kliger was warned not to take any actions that could benefit him personally showed that “he’s on notice that this is a problem, as opposed to doing this by accident, or unintentionally.”

But Briffault said there would likely be no recourse for Kliger’s actions given that the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump has “greatly deprioritized public integrity, ethics and public corruption as issues for them.” The New York Times reported last week that the section handling such cases is down to just a handful of lawyers.

From the outset, the Trump administration has been dogged by ethics controversies, from the president’s own foray into the cryptocurrency industry to Elon Musk’s dual roles as both the head of DOGE and a major federal contractor. Kliger’s case is “a nice illustration of how even on this micro level, they are violating the law, acting in ways that positively should cause people to not trust what they’re doing because there is no question that these corporations will benefit,” said Kathleen Clark, an expert on government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Kliger hasn’t returned a phone call or email seeking comment. The CFPB didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The White House didn’t answer questions about the warning, whether Kliger had sought ethics waivers or if he was in the process of divesting. Instead, a spokesperson provided ProPublica the same statement it previously had, writing that Kliger “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.” A spokesperson said that Kliger had until May 8 to divest.

The April 10 ethics warning came amid a heated legal battle over the future of the CFPB.

The following day, an appeals court in Washington, D.C., allowed the agency’s acting director, Russell Vought, to implement mass firings after a lower court judge had stayed them. The court instructed Vought to conduct a “particularized assessment” of the bureau and to lay off only those employees who were deemed to be “unnecessary” to perform the agency’s statutorily required duties. In court filings, the government has said that review was done by the bureau’s chief legal officer, Mark Paoletta, and two other attorneys. In court papers, Paoletta has said the cuts are designed to achieve a “streamlined and right-sized Bureau.”

On April 13, Kliger was among a small team of DOGE and agency officials who received an email from Vought about the coming layoffs with the subject line “CFPB RIF Work” — government parlance for reduction in force, according to emails produced in court records. Vought’s email is redacted in the filing, but hours after he sent it, records show the bureau’s chief information officer wrote to Kliger and another DOGE aide regarding a “follow-up on Russ’s note below” and advised Kliger that he’d been granted access to agency computer systems that “should allow you to do what you need to do,” according to the email.

Layoff notices to more than 1,400 bureau employees went out on April 17.

In the preceding 36 hours, “Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough” to get the notices out and “calling them incompetent,” a federal employee on the layoff team using the pseudonym Alex Doe wrote in sworn declaration filed by lawyers for unionized employees trying to stop the administration from dismantling the bureau.

Among those laid off were the agency’s ethics officer and their “entire team” of lawyers, according to court records.

Those are the very employees who’d twice notified Kliger that he was required to identify any investments in companies on the bureau’s Prohibited Holdings list. The warning last month explicitly instructed him not to participate in any bureau activity that could benefit the businesses whose stocks he owned, said the person familiar with the notice, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity.

Last week, the appeals court reversed course and temporarily stopped the firings at the CFPB amid a flurry of legal challenges. Agency officials then notified the more than 1,400 fired employees who’d been told they were being let go that the pink slips were being rescinded.

The court battle over the CFPB’s future is ongoing, though, with oral arguments before appellate judges in Washington, D.C., scheduled for later this month.

Filed Under: cfpb, conflict of interest, doge, ethics, gavin kliger

Greek Authorities Fail In Their Attempt To Make VPN Founder Personally Responsible For The Action Of An Unknown User

Privacy

from the good-but-not-perfect-tools dept

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are not a privacy panacea, but they do empower Internet users in important ways. Proof of that can be found in the constant attempts by governments around the world to control who can use VPNs and for what purpose, most recently in Italy and Brazil. Hackread reports on another such move to bring a VPN operator to heel:

Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that its founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece, following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in connection with an alleged internet offence by an unknown user of the service.

The case centred around a Windscribe-owned server in Finland that was allegedly used to breach a system in Greece. Greek authorities, in cooperation with INTERPOL, traced the IP address to Windscribe’s infrastructure and, unlike standard international procedures, proceeded to initiate criminal proceedings against Sak himself, rather than pursuing information through standard corporate channels.

The issue here is that the Greek authorities chose to prosecute Windscribe’s founder, Yegor Sak, rather than making an official request to the company for information about the alleged breach of the Greek system by a Windscribe user. That approach not only ignored established procedures for investigating such cases, it put a great deal of pressure on Sak — doubtless intentionally — in an attempt to force him to hand over information. Fortunately, the charges against Sak were dismissed last month, as the Greek court “did not find sufficient evidence to implicate Sak or Windscribe in any wrongdoing” according to Hackread.

If Greece had made VPN owners personally responsible for everything their users did online it would have set a terrible precedent, even if it would not have been legally binding elsewhere. In the face of such risks, some VPNs would doubtless have shut down, while others would have been forced to monitor closely what their users were up to. The Greek case was particularly important, because it involved a VPN provider that does not log user activity, and was therefore incapable of providing any information about the alleged abuse, even if ordered to do so.

It’s great news that the charges against Sak were dropped, albeit after a two-year legal battle, probably thanks in part to Windscribe’s no-logging policy. But the fear has to be that more governments will bring in laws that compel VPN services to keep logs in order to allow their users to be tracked and later identified. This is already the case in countries with repressive Internet laws, for example Russia, China, Iran, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. Moreover, as that article on Comparitech notes, even in countries that nominally protect privacy, like the US, UK, Canada and Australia, there are laws that could be used to force VPN services to log users or build in backdoors. It’s another reason why VPNs, useful as they are, should not be regarded as cast-iron protection against surreptitious surveillance by governments and others.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

Filed Under: australia, backdoors, brazil, canada, china, finland, greece, interpol, iran, italy, logging, russia, surveillance, uk, united arab emirates, us, vietnam, vpn, Yegor Sak
Companies: Windscribe