A sprawling storm was bringing powerful winds, snow and freezing conditions from the Midwest to the Northeast on Monday, causing power outages and disrupting travel as conditions were expected to worsen through the week. As one storm was moving away from New England — and was expected to continue producing strong, gusty winds across the Northeast and Great Lakes over the next couple of days — the next winter storm was hitting the Central Plains and Midwest on Monday. It was likely then moving to the Mid-Atlantic by Wednesday and the Northeast by Thursday. Millions were under extreme cold warnings, from the Upper Midwest and Plains down to Oklahoma and parts of Texas. High temperatures were expected to remain below freezing for many areas between central Texas and the southern Mid-Atlantic, the National Weather Service said. The lowest wind chills over the next few days are forecast from northeast Montana to North Dakota, where the Weather Service predicted it would feel as cold as 60 degrees below zero. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “This level of cold is life threatening and could shortly lead to frostbite and hypothermia,” the Weather Service said. By midweek, lows across much of the Northeast, Midwest, and parts of the southern Plains, including Oklahoma and northwest Texas, were expected to dip into the single digits. In North Dakota, Gov. Kelly Armstrong signed an executive order waiving service requirements for drivers of commercial vehicles hauling propane and other petroleum products that could be used for heating, his office said on Monday. At least 10 people died as a result of severe weather in the South over the weekend, which included flooding in parts of Tennessee and Kentucky. In some flooded areas, temperatures had already dropped below freezing, and would continue to drop, said David Roth, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service The floodwaters could become icy, slowing their retreat, Mr. Roth added, noting that the bitter conditions would persist through Friday. In southwest Detroit, where temperatures had already dropped to the single digits, a broken water main flooded roads and homes in the region, city officials said. Photos and videos posted to social media appeared to show residents being rescued by boat from icy waters that reached up to car windows. In Nebraska, a state trooper was killed in a car crash while responding to another crash, the Nebraska State Patrol said on social media. The crash was related to the severe weather, a representative from the State Patrol said. Further details were not immediately available on Monday. High wind warnings were in effect across the Northeast, from parts of Delaware to Northeastern Maine, until Monday evening. Gusts in Nantucket, Mass., had reached 52 miles per hour, and at least 40 m.p.h. in Provincetown, Mass., Newark, N.J., and in parts of Pennsylvania, Mr. Roth said. Blizzard warnings also remained in effect for the western slopes of the central Appalachian Mountains because of strong winds, although they were expected to taper off later on Monday. The American Avalanche Association and the U.S. Forest Service’s National Avalanche Center warned of a high risk of avalanche in some parts of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, including near Salt Lake City. Winds on Sunday delivered gusts approaching or exceeding hurricane strength, including 76 m.p.h. gusts at Camp David, located about 1,841 feet in the Catoctin Mountains in northern Frederick County, Md., according to the Weather Service. Sustained hurricane force winds start at 74 m.p.h. Wind gusts of 71 m.p.h. were recorded at Atlantic City International Airport on Sunday, according to the Weather Service. At Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the winds were recorded up to 65 m.p.h., said Connor Belak, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. One woman died in Philadelphia after a tree fell onto her vehicle on Sunday evening, the Philadelphia Police Department said. The high winds led to widespread power outages across much of the Mid-Atlantic, according to Poweroutage.us, which tracks power outages. Travel was largely back to normal on Monday after hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled in New York on Sunday, according to the airline tracking website FlightAware.

A mid-level probationary worker with the U.S. Department of Agriculture read the letter in disbelief. It was from the USDA's human resources department explaining he no longer had a job. The letter said the decision had been made "based on your performance." But it didn't make sense to him. “There’s no way to tie me to a specific performance issue because I’m six weeks on the job," says the employee, who works out of Phoenix and, like others interviewed for this report, spoke with TIME on the condition of anonymity. He says no one had mentioned any issues with his work before receiving the letter. The USDA employee was among thousands of federal workers across the country hit with layoffs that began on Thursday with little prior notice, targeting probationary workers—those who have been employed by the federal government for less than one or two years and are easier to fire. The Trump Administration has ordered most agencies to let go of nearly all probationary employees who haven’t yet gained civil service protection. The layoffs have shaken both federal employees and the unions that represent them, prompting widespread condemnation and setting the stage for future legal battles. Many in the federal workforce see the aggressive nature of the cuts as proof that the Trump Administration isn’t just trying to cut costs, but dismantle the federal workforce and reduce its capacity to serve the public. “I feel like right now the administration is kind of demonizing federal workers,” says a senior IRS agent from New York who was hired in July and “fully expects” to receive a termination notice in the coming days. The firings are part of a broader push spearheaded by the Trump Administration and the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative run by billionaire Elon Musk to streamline government operations. Musk has gone so far as to suggest that entire agencies should be “deleted,” likening them to “weeds” in need of eradication. Legal experts and union representatives argue many of DOGE’s actions are not legal. The letter for the USDA employee, viewed by TIME, cited guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, claiming that probationary employees have “the burden to demonstrate why it is in the public interest for the Government to finalize an appointment to the civil service for this particular individual.” Soon after Trump’s inauguration, the leadership at OPM was replaced with Musk allies. Elsewhere, thousands of workers were laid off in group calls or via pre-recorded messages, with their government access revoked immediately. Others were told they would be formally fired by emails. The Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides crucial services and benefits to military veterans, laid off more than 1,000 employees on Thursday alone, with VA Secretary Doug Collins claiming that the move would save the department $98 million per year. The vast majority of probationary employees, including those in the VA’s health care system, were exempted from the layoffs. The abrupt and seemingly callous manner of conducting layoffs has left many workers stunned. One HR manager at the Veterans Health Administration, who has worked for the department for more than two decades, said that he had never witnessed anything like this in all his years of service. “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” he says. At a staff meeting on Friday, he says leadership told them they were finding out about the terminations at the same time as the rest of the agency’s staff, and that the decisions were being made by a small group in the Office of Personnel Management backed by DOGE. “We're paralyzed because we don't know what's happening tomorrow,” he adds. The HR manager noted that he voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections and “will never make that mistake again.” “If the GOP wants to win someone like me back, they would need to start making changes right now,” he says. “I have not voted for a Democrat in two decades. I will vote Democrat in the midterms and the next presidential race for sure.” Other federal employees who mentioned voting for Trump in the past say they are reconsidering their support for the Republican administration. The layoffs come soon after a federal judge in Massachusetts allowed the Trump Administration to proceed with an offer for federal employees to leave their jobs with the promise of continuing to be paid through September. That offer expired on Wednesday, Trump officials said. The White House said that 77,000 workers, or around 3% of the civilian workforce, agreed to the buyout. Jourdain Solis, a 27-year-old fuel compliance officer at the Internal Revenue Service in Fresno, Calif., accepted the buyout earlier this month, feeling it offered more security than staying in a job that didn’t seem like a priority under the new Administration. “I couldn’t guarantee that my program would stick around,” he said. “Taking this offer would have been much better than being laid off and only qualifying for unemployment.” Solis also acknowledges feeling undervalued by the government with the ongoing rhetoric about job cuts and waste. “Our value as public servants gets questioned all the time,” he says. “So I just really didn't want to work for a country that doesn't respect public servants as much as they should.” But many federal workers declined to take the resignation offer, in part because they were worried about its validity. The buyouts are technically not funded, as Congress hasn’t appropriated funding beyond March 14. “There are too many questions and concerns,” one worker at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told TIME. “It’s a joke,” says the probationary IRS agent. “There's all kinds of issues with the funding. Nobody trusted it.” Solis admits he still has some questions about the legality of it all but says he’s prepared to take legal action if the government doesn’t follow through with the offer. The ramifications of the staff reductions go far beyond the individual workers, potentially shifting the government’s relationship with the rest of its workforce. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents many of those dismissed, has vowed to challenge the firings in court, calling them a violation of workers’ rights. "These firings are not about poor performance," said Everett Kelley, the union’s president. “There is no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants. They are about power. They are about gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.” As the cuts continue, agencies are bracing for more uncertainty, and federal workers remain on edge. “I can feel it in my interactions with people,” said the former USDA employee. “People are nervous because they don't know what's going on with their jobs. And even the senior leadership at most of the agencies doesn’t know what's going on.” Some of these workers say they had hoped the changes under the new administration would be gradual. The speed and abrupt nature of it all has left many feeling blindsided. Federal workers typically have the option to appeal layoffs or suspensions to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a process that involves an initial review by administrative judges before a final decision is made by the board itself. However, many workers fear that these legal avenues may not be enough to protect their rights in the face of an administration determined to impose sweeping changes. For many, the recent firings are a stark reminder of how quickly the administration is willing to reshape the government, even if it might undermine its effectiveness. Asked about DOGE’s operations, the VA employee said: “They obviously are out of their depth and are struggling desperately to make whatever it is that they are trying to do work,” he adds. “I don't think they will succeed.” Adds the probationary senior IRS agent who expects to soon be out of a job: “It's funny because we have very smart businessmen running this whole thing, and the last thing you do in business is cut your revenue stream,” he says. “The IRS is the revenue stream, especially the auditors. It wouldn’t make any sense to cut us.”

To mark Valentine’s Day, the White House posted a meme across its X, Instagram, and Facebook social media accounts. The post included a new take on the popular “roses are red, violets are blue” refrain. But in lieu of a traditional love poem, the White House instead came up with a rhyme that targeted illegal immigration. “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you,” the text of the Valentine’s Day message read. Against a pink backdrop, the poem was accompanied by the faces of President Donald Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan. The caption read “Happy Valentines Day,” with a red heart emoji. Voto Latino, an organization that works to engage Latino communities in the voting process, called the post “offensive and divisive.” “This post was deliberately crafted to provoke and sow division, but the struggles of immigrant families are not a joke,” the organization said. “Using a lighthearted holiday to demean and target communities is not only irresponsible—it is beneath the dignity of the presidency.” Elsewhere, the Hispanic Federation spoke out against the post, saying that more people need to “step up” and say they will not tolerate this kind of commentary. Frankie Miranda, president and CEO of Hispanic Federation, said: “Let me be clear, this action from the White House is not a lighthearted joke.” Miranda went on to reference when a comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at a Trump rally last year, highlighting that “this is already a pattern that is beneath the Office of the President of the United States.” The White House’s Valentine’s Day post comes as Trump begins to implement his immigration enforcement efforts and policies, which include targeting sanctuary cities, the intent to progress with mass deportations, efforts to redefine birthright citizenship, and the declaration of a national emergency at the Southern border of the U.S. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has also embarked upon raids to ramp up deportation efforts.

Donald Trump set off a firestorm of criticism over the weekend with a tweet. It might seem like nothing new, but critics say the President’s recent post is more than offensive—they say it’s dictatorial. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social as well as on Elon Musk’s X platform (formerly Twitter) on Saturday. The White House account on X also shared the message alongside Trump’s official presidential photograph. — The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 15, 2025 A version of the phrase is often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the French general who crowned himself emperor in 1804 and was known for his authoritarian rule—and whom Trump has quoted before. The quotation was also posted last year by El Salvador’s populist authoritarian President Nayib Bukele, whom Trump and Musk have expressed admiration for. Trump’s latest Napoleonic invocation has rankled Democrats and liberal commentators. Sen. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) responded to Trump on X: “Spoken like a true dictator.” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie described it as “the single most un-american and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an american president” on social media platform Bluesky. Some anti-Trump conservatives have also voiced their unease. Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as White House communications director during Trump’s first term before becoming a vocal intraparty critic, reposted Trump’s statement, adding: “Wants to be a dictator. If you don’t see it it means you don’t want to.” Former Vice President Mike Pence appeared to implicitly rebuke Trump’s post by resharing an essay he’d written in 2010, titled “The Presidency and the Constitution,” in which he wrote: “A president who slights the Constitution is like a rider who hates his horse: he will be thrown, and the nation along with him. The president solemnly swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He does not solemnly swear to ignore, overlook, supplement, or reinterpret it.” Dan McLaughlin, a senior writer at the National Review who wrote in November about writing in Pence for the 2024 election, posted on X about Trump’s declaration: “This is some un-American monarchical nonsense. The president is above *some* laws, because there are things legally only he may do. But his entire office remains a creature of law.” Bill Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and a prominent Trump critic, posted on Bluesky, “We’re getting into real Führerprinzip territory here”—referencing the Nazi Germany principle that Führer Adolf Hitler’s word was above the law. Billy Binion, a reporter for libertarian magazine Reason, posted on X: “I know many conservatives still care about the Constitution. But it is genuinely depressing that the leader of the Republican Party is someone who is openly OK with violating the rule of law as long as it serves his political ends. That’s…bad. I miss real conservatism.” Former RNC Chair Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff during his first term, dismissed the criticisms of Trump’s post, excusing the provocative statement as mere trolling and “catnip for the media.” “It’s entertainment for Trump. It’s a distraction,” Priebus said on ABC News’ This Week on Sunday. “This is what the President does.” Some of Trump’s supporters, however, have welcomed the Napoleonic declaration. “Thank you, President Trump. We love you,” controversial right-wing activist Laura Loomer responded to Trump’s post on X. Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency, reposted Trump’s message on X, appending 14 U.S. flag emojis. And right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec also shared Trump’s message, adding “America will be saved” and “What must be done will be done.” It’s not the first time Trump or his allies have suggested that the rule of law should not get in the way of his agenda. As the Trump Administration already faces dozens of lawsuits, Vice President J.D. Vance posted on X on Feb. 9 that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” And Musk has called for the impeachment of judges “who are undermining the will of the people.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also previously accused the media of “fearmongering” about a “constitutional crisis,” saying during a news briefing on Feb. 12: “The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges in liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority.” The Constitution, however, established the three separate branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) specifically to act as a system of checks and balances—with the courts, in particular, empowered to rule on the constitutionality of laws and presidential actions. On Tuesday, Feb. 18, Musk posted “True” in response to El Salvador’s Bukele asserting—in reference to the dismissal of judges opposed to his administration in 2021, which critics called a “coup” at the time—“‘Checks and balances’ don’t truly exist unless the judicial branch can also be checked and balanced.” As for the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity last year, it stipulated that Presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken within their “constitutional authority” and presumptive immunity for other official acts, but that: “The President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law.”

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance laid out his version of the relationship between the presidency and the courts. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he wrote, in a post on X. Mr. Vance’s post was “as wrong as it is reckless,” responded 17 attorneys general from 17 states in a joint statement. “No one is above the law.” Was Mr. Vance demanding that presidents be allowed to make their own rules, regardless of what the courts say? Everything depends on what he meant by the word “legitimate.” Who gets to decide the limit of the executive’s power? The Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted for more than 200 years, offers a clear answer: judges. “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases arising under this Constitution,” says the Constitution itself, in Article III, which establishes the federal court system and its powers. And that is exactly what the federal judiciary is trying to do now. Federal judges have issued preliminary orders that block some of the administration’s most aggressive assertions of power: a freeze on as much as $3 trillion in federal spending, the termination of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee to birthright citizenship, the firing of civil servants before the end of their statutorily defined terms, the forced transfer of trans women in prison to men’s facilities and the turnover of sensitive data and systems to a newly minted quasi-agency headed by Elon Musk. More than 60 lawsuits have been filed against the second Trump administration — more than two for each day that the president has been in office. Many of the plaintiffs allege that the Trump administration’s actions are ultra vires, literally “beyond the powers,” meaning that Mr. Trump has wielded power in ways that go beyond his lawful authority. In one case, a dispute over the funding freeze before Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, the court has found the government to be defying its ruling and granted a “motion to enforce,” essentially a nudge. On Tuesday afternoon, as his administration sought out new, more justifiable reasons for keeping the same money frozen, Mr. Trump insisted that “I always abide by the courts, and then I’ll have to appeal it.” That is the closest the administration has come to clarifying Mr. Vance’s provocatively ambiguous post. None of these cases have been decided. At least some are very likely to be taken up by the Supreme Court. Some legal commentators believe that the Trump administration’s strategy is to flood the zone with extreme executive actions in hopes that the Supreme Court will find some of them to be legal, and in so doing, expand the White House’s legitimate constitutional power. Mr. Vance’s post raises another possibility: that the administration could decide that it, and not the courts, is the constitutionally designated arbiter of the limits on its own authorities, and choose to ignore judicial rulings. That would represent an extreme rupture to the constitutional order. Yet the ideological foundation for such a moment has been emerging for decades. Mr. Vance is among an increasing number of elected Republicans who are influenced by new strains of conservative legal thought that entail a radical reinterpretation of the Constitution, particularly the powers it bestows on the president. Many can be traced back to originalism, a set of doctrines that American conservatives have relied on since the 1980s. Originalism comes in many stripes, but its essence is that the plain words of the Constitution — what they see as its “original public meaning” at the time of the country’s founding — can be deployed to roll back what they perceive to be the progressive excesses of the judiciary during the mid-to-late 20th century. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT But as originalism has become more dominant — “we are all originalists,” Justice Elena Kagan said at her confirmation hearing — some conservatives have grown dissatisfied. A group of right-wing thinkers is putting forward a new set of doctrines: Call it “post-originalism.” The Godfather of Post-Originalism Until recently, Adrian Vermeule’s public profile has been modest. Mr. Vermeule, a 56-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, is the author of scores of academic books and law review articles. He would most likely take issue with the label “post-originalist.” He has called himself a “classical legal theorist,” and his work is buttressed by quotes and footnotes that demonstrate his mastery of the classical legal canon — Justinian’s Digest, Aquinas’s Summa, the Institutes of Gaius. He argues that a robust understanding of the Constitution requires being steeped in ancient sources and theories about natural law, divine law and Roman law, all of which, he claims, influenced the founders and are baked into the Constitution. But among conservatives who believe that originalism isn’t enough to get them the policy results they want, he is an ideological lodestar. The day before Mr. Vance posted that “judges aren’t allowed to control the limits of the executive’s legitimate power,” he shared a post from Mr. Vermeule: “Judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers.” On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion essay in which Mr. Vermeule defended Mr. Vance’s post, explaining that the vice president was simply “referring to legal doctrines of justiciability, reviewability, standing and the so-called political-question doctrine.” Worries that Mr. Vance was calling for the defiance of judicial orders were “unbalanced reactions,” Mr. Vermeule wrote in a longer version of the essay. At least one prominent left-leaning legal commentator appeared to agree. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Vermeule’s acknowledgment of the judiciary as a “coequal” branch of government puts him at the milder end of post-originalist thinking. In his book “Regime Change,” Patrick Deneen, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and a prominent thinker on the new right, calls for “the raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism.” To achieve “the creation of a new elite that is aligned with the values and needs of ordinary working people,” Mr. Deneen proposes setting aside the goal of “a form of ‘democratic pluralism’ that imagines a successful regime comprised of checks and balances.” Jesse Merriam, a professor at Patrick Henry College, has criticized originalists for embracing Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that found racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. The “canonization” and “weaponization” of Brown, Mr. Merriam argues, paved the way for “the ​​antiracist constitutional order.” Just as Mr. Vance’s post appeared to tiptoe to the line of constitutional crisis, Mr. Merriam’s demand that “we must be free to debate Brown and the broader civil rights revolution,” by “opening up space to dissent on racial matters” risks sounding like an affirmative case for segregation. As a website of legal writing to which Mr. Vermeule has contributed puts it: Originalism and textualism had to be discarded as they “have proven impotent in opposing the liberal concept of the good.” It’s hard to get a handle on post-originalism without first understanding its beginnings in the conservative movement’s growing impatience with originalism. That doctrine holds that judges who want to interpret the Constitution should look backward, taking into account various blends of text, meaning and the founders’ intent, sometimes supplemented by “history and tradition” as well. Originalism’s offshoots can be grouped into two camps: One group, the scholars, sees originalist interpretation as an end in itself, and will follow it anywhere. A second camp, the soldiers, see originalism as a useful tool for pushing jurisprudence rightward on issues like environmental regulation, reproductive rights and gun control. While the scholars want to understand the founding period from the inside out, the soldiers want results. They can often be heard calling for conservative judges to be “bold” and “fearless,” while decrying their purist cousins as spineless “libertarians.” The soldiers felt betrayed by Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 2020 opinion for the majority in the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which prohibited employers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. “If we’ve been fighting for originalism and textualism, and this is the result of that,” Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, said in a speech on Bostock, “then I have to say it turns out that we haven’t been fighting for very much.” Bostock “represents the end of the conservative legal movement,” Mr. Hawley said. He called for “a new beginning.” The Bostock ruling arrived against a backdrop of anguished soul-searching on the right. For many, the combination of the Black Lives Matter protests and the Covid lockdowns appeared to validate what voices on the fringe of the conservative movement had been saying for years — the fights happening at the polls and in the courts against progressive values were, in fact, the front lines of an existential struggle for the future of Western civilization. This was familiar terrain for many of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters. They had been equating Democrats with America’s foreign enemies for years while half-jokingly referring to Mr. Trump as their “God-Emperor,” or, perhaps with more seriousness, extolling the virtues of monarchism. But it took the post-2020 reaction against “wokeness” to bring those ideas into the conservative mainstream. All that was missing was a grand unifying theory — a vocabulary to give voice to these intense cultural frustrations and draw a legitimizing connection between them and the Constitution. Enter Mr. Vermeule’s “Beyond Originalism,” an essay published in The Atlantic at the height of the pandemic, between the time Bostock was argued and when it was decided. Mr. Vermeule was already well-known among some Catholic scholars for being, as one political science professor put it, “the foremost defender in the United States” of integralism, which seeks to bring state power in line with church teachings. (Mr. Vermeule would most likely contest that label, too.) After converting to Catholicism in 2016, he praised the church as a defense against “the universal deluge of economic-technical dominance.” His Atlantic essay proposed what he called “common-good constitutionalism,” a vision of the public good that both incorporates and somehow transcends the written law, a vision that elected governments are obliged to realize. “Strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate,” he wrote. The essay provoked angry responses from both originalists and Reagan-era conservatives. Mr. Vermeule’s theories were “un-American,” wrote the Washington Post columnist George F. Will, who accused him of succumbing to the “allure of tyranny.” Mr. Vermeule “seems to enjoy provoking members of the liberal intelligentsia by coyly advancing almost-forbidden ideas,” wrote another Catholic scholar. “Beyond Originalism” also drew strong reactions from more liberal commentators. Garrett Epps, a retired law professor, called it “an argument for authoritarian extremism,” an “anti-constitutional philosophy” and an augur of “post-legal times.” Traditional conservatives have long pushed for a more expansive view of presidential power, often with something called the unitary executive theory, the idea that the president personally embodies an entire branch of government. Mr. Vermeule goes further. “The American president is more like a Roman emperor than many would like to admit and that fact is legitimized by the state of American law,” he wrote in a 2023 paper titled “The Many and the Few.” Even critics of this approach have to acknowledge how much power Congress and the courts have handed over to the presidency. Congress has effectively relinquished its constitutional power to declare war through the combination of the 1973 War Powers Act and the 2001 law that authorized the use of military force against terrorists and the countries that harbor them after the Sept. 11 attacks. With the 2024 Trump v. U.S. decision, the Supreme Court held that the courts could not find any president criminally liable for performing his constitutional duties. While the project of essentially legitimizing the imperial presidency can appear threatening to America’s system of divided government, it also raises a difficult question: If America really wanted a separation of powers, why have two of the three branches chosen to give so much of their power away? The law, Mr. Vermeule wrote in 2022, “is to a large degree what the President and the agencies say it is,” and presidential power is “roughly comparable to the aggregate of powers held by Augustus and his successors.” Those powers were given to them by the Roman people to supplant “the corrupt government of the senatorial class,” which served only “the self-interest of a predatory elite.” Into the Courts? Mr. Vermeule’s “common-good constitutionalism” is gaining traction in some corners of the U.S. judiciary, particularly among judges — roughly one quarter of the bench — who were appointed during Mr. Trump’s first term. A 2022 conference at Harvard on common-good constitutionalism was attended by two Trump-nominated appellate court judges: James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who is sometimes mentioned as a possible Supreme Court pick, and Paul Matey of the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Mr. Vermeule has posted some of Judge Matey’s essays on his Substack. References to “Common Good Constitutionalism,” the book that developed from Mr. Vermeule’s Atlantic essay, have begun turning up in the footnotes of appellate court decisions. As the Trump administration fights the onslaught of lawsuits against its executive orders and other actions, the Justice Department’s lawyers are arguing that the administration’s actions are legal, rather than that the president is above the law. But at the same time, many of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters — especially those who are most plugged into new conservative intellectual currents — are following Mr. Vance’s lead and trying to undermine the authority of any judge who rules against the president. Senator Mike Lee of Utah has called on Congress to “impeach corrupt judges” and “investigate lawfare.” Elon Musk suggested that “the worst 1%” of the judiciary “be fired every year.” “Outrageous,” posted Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas when a judge barred Mr. Musk’s team from having access to sensitive Treasury Department data. It is hard to find much precedent for this moment. President Nixon’s behavior caused grave tensions between the three branches of government, but the buildup was protracted and gradual. Presidents Jackson and Lincoln both ignored important court rulings, according to the Federal Judicial Center. But those prior instances of presidential recalcitrance — just two, spread out over 248 years — were narrow. Mr. Vance hints at something very different: wholesale ultra vires executive-branch impunity. That idea is increasingly part of the Republican mainstream. A correction was made on Feb. 15, 2025: An earlier version of this article misquoted Vice President JD Vance’s social media post. He wrote, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” not “Judges aren’t allowed to control the limits of the executive’s legitimate power.”

At least 10 people, including a child, were dead after a severe rainstorm pounded a large section of the South and left hundreds of thousands of people without power on Sunday morning and communities contending with flash flooding. In Tennessee, the National Weather Service in Memphis issued a flash flood emergency on Sunday afternoon after a levee along the community of Rives failed, causing “rapid onset flooding” there and in the surrounding areas. “Get to high ground now,’’ the Weather Service warned on social media. Rives, which is northeast of Memphis, has a population about 300. The Tipton County Fire Department said that about 200 people needed to be rescued. Steve Carr, the Obion County mayor, declared a state of emergency on Sunday in response to the severe flooding. He said on Facebook that there would be mandatory evacuations in Rives because of “the rising water, no electricity, and freezing temperature creating a life-threatening situation.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Some evacuees were taken to the hospital, according to the Obion County Emergency Management Agency. Mr. Carr added that other low-lying areas, including the town of Kenton about 13 miles south of Rives, also faced “imminent threats” because of the flooding. The Rives fire chief, Campbell Rice, pleaded on a Facebook livestream for residents to evacuate immediately. He said he had responded to floods every year for the past 35 years, but “this one is totally different from the ones in the past.” The levee was designed to hold back the Obion River, a major tributary of the Mississippi River. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for maintaining the levee. Kentucky was hit particularly hard by the rain and at least nine people died there because of the storms, Gov. Andy Beshear said on Sunday. He said at a news conference in the afternoon that officials expected the death toll to rise. Governor Beshear said there had been more than 1,000 rescues and there were more than 300 road closures. The governor said weather conditions were still dangerous in the state. And a snowstorm was expected to bring several inches of snow on Tuesday night. In Kentucky, a woman and her 7-year-old child died after the mother’s vehicle was swept away during flash flooding in Hart County, said Anthony Roberts, the county’s coroner. Donald K. Nicholson, 72, of Manchester, Ky., died when he was driving on Kentucky Route 80, said Jason Abner, the Clay County coroner. Mr. Nicholson got out of his vehicle when the road became impassable and was swept several hundred feet, Mr. Abner said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Beshear said three other people also died in floodwaters and two people died in motor vehicle accidents. He confirmed another weather-related death in Pike County on Sunday evening. In Georgia, a person was killed in Atlanta after an “extremely large tree,” fell on a house during a thunderstorm early on Sunday, Capt. Scott Powell of the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department told reporters.In Virginia, there were over 150 water rescues and evacuations on Sunday, according to a news release from the governor’s office. The James River and other waterways reached their highest levels since 1977, according to the release. The weather system spawned at least two tornadoes over the weekend, one in Alabama on Saturday, four in Mississippi on Saturday evening and another in Tennessee on Sunday, according to the Weather Service. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT L.D. Mosley, a 70-year-old retired coal company electrician, had just finished fixing his shed when a wall of mud, rocks and trees slammed into it on Saturday. The landslide came off the mountain behind his home in Hindman, Ky., which is about 130 miles southeast of Lexington. Mr. Mosley estimated that as much as 80 tons of earth covered his property. “I’m just so heartsick of it right now, I’d like to just throw my hands up and leave,” Mr. Mosley said. In the nearby community of Krypton, Ky., Scott McReynolds had lost power at his home and was stuck inside because of the water at the end of his driveway. Mr. McReynolds, the executive director of a housing nonprofit called the Housing Development Alliance, is involved in a statewide effort to move vulnerable residents out of floodplains and onto former strip mines that provide flat land for building new neighborhoods. He has lived in the region since 1992 and said that recent floods have been overwhelming. “The flood in 2021 was awful, and in 2022 it was unbelievable,” Mr. McReynolds said. “Now we’re doing it again.” In Hazard, a city about 14 miles southeast of Krypton, the Kentucky River had crested at 30.5 feet, the highest since 1984. Hazard’s downtown coordinator, Bailey Richards, said more than 40 businesses had flooded since the rain began on Saturday, including a diner and the fire and police departments. “It got so much higher than expected,” Ms. Richards said. “Most of the areas I didn’t consider could possibly flood ended up flooding.”

President Donald Trump is a disrupter-in-chief. His political rise is inextricably linked to his willingness to break with American norms. Yet his decision to abruptly freeze nearly $72 billion in U.S. foreign aid has still managed to send shockwaves at home and abroad—because of just how much it would undermine American interests and global stability. The decision marks a dangerous retreat from America’s defense of freedom around the world. USAID was established by President John F. Kennedy and the National Endowment for Democracy was a product of Ronald Reagan’s vision to foster global democracy. Together, they have defended countless in the face of abhorrent human rights abuses, and served as a bulwark against corruption and authoritarian creep. USAID, with its partners in civil society, have been first defenders of U.S. interests for over 60 years. It provides as much as 40% of global aid and the sudden funding freeze creates a power vacuum that enemies—including China, Russia, and Iran—will step in to fill. As Kennedy once said: “[U.S. aid cuts] would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive. Our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperiled.” Read More: Inside the Chaos, Confusion, and Heartbreak of Trump’s Foreign-Aid Freeze In mere days, the funding freeze has achieved what the Presidents of Russia and Belarus have desired for several decades: taking an axe to the remnants of independent media in the former Soviet countries. Meduza, which provided independent coverage on topics censored by the Putin regime, now faces an uncertain future. Tellingly, Moscow praised Trump’s move. In Ukraine, USAID backed the Anti-Corruption Action Center—which exposes oligarchic corruption. In Southeast Asia, the program supports the Freedom Collaborative, which works to rescue victims of human trafficking from cyber scam compounds that defraud millions of dollars from U.S. citizens each year. China Labor Watch, supported by NED, combats the forced labor of Chinese workers by carrying out investigations, supporting victims of trafficking, and advancing the enforcement of laws. Gutting the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)—a George W. Bush initiative—also endangers millions of lives across Africa. These initiatives and countless others are now in peril. President Jimmy Carter once declared that “every American embassy should be looked upon as a haven for those who suffer from human rights abuse.” Indeed, the U.S. Government gave literal shelter to Cardinal József Mindszenty, who opposed the communist dictatorship in Hungary, between 1956 to 1971. As a Hungarian-American, I deeply honor the legacy of the 1956 revolution, which lasted 12 days before Soviet troops crushed it. Supporting democracy is personal to me. My family and friends back home have spent over a decade living with the consequences of democratic backsliding. Me and my organization, Action for Democracy, have even been targeted by the pro-Putin premiership of Viktor Orbán. I thought I had found a safe haven in America—where the defense of democracy is a national value that binds us all. We must carry the torch forward. The U.S. is a nation of immigrants uniquely qualified to support global democracy. By activating our diaspora communities and channeling their energy, knowledge, and resources, we can persist even when the federal government wavers. Cities, states, private citizens, and civil society groups must now step up and step in. We should all choose and adopt a cause we support abroad, in addition to those who already donate at home. The rest of the world has a duty, too. Democracies must mobilize their own resources on a new scale. The European Endowment for Democracy should be strengthened and its mission made global. The U.K. has a unique chance to leverage its Britain Reconnected strategy. Canada should double down on its Pro-Dem Fund and its leading role in the Media Freedom Coalition. South Africa should revitalize the African Renaissance and International Cooperation Fund to further its vision of a democratic, conflict-free continent. Brazil should leverage its position as the largest democracy in South America to fill in the gap left by the U.S.’s retreat. Brazil and South Africa, as democratic members of BRICS, should exploit their weight in the organization to counteract the potentially corrosive efforts of authoritarian members. We have no time to waste. The need for humanitarian aid is a moral and strategic imperative to keep America free and safe—and the hope for a more democratic world alive.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. The myopia is blinding. As President Donald Trump blasts through a Washington that is clearly struggling to keep pace with his disruptive moves on everything from names on maps to the fate of backwater parts of the bureaucracy to the new, confusing U.S. strategy on the future of Ukraine, keeping the establishment perpetually off balance may well be the prevailing vibe over the next four years. What almost everyone is missing: This country has roughly one month until the government runs out of money, and things like paychecks to troops, food-inspection programs, disaster-relief payments, and aid to low-income families could all be caught up in a chaotic game of chicken. Republicans could keep the lights on all on their own, but probably won’t. “They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters last week, setting up a blame-game preamble. Jeffries is factually correct. Even still, Republicans may end up needing a bailout from Democratic lawmakers before March 14. That gives Democrats their first real leverage in Trump’s second term, but it’s entirely unclear if they will use it or to what end. While a unified plan has yet to emerge, wisps of fight-ready ambitions are starting to move from the fringes to the mainstream, albeit more slowly than most rank-and-file Democrats would like. That’s not to say Republicans have their own house in order. Even though House Republicans pushed through a budget outline on Thursday after 12 hours of debate, there’s no guarantee that it proves sufficiently lean for budget hardliners on the Right. Meanwhile, the Senate has plenty of ideas for its own spending plan, including possibly splitting Trump’s agenda into two discrete pieces. That is setting up an intra-party collision that is all too familiar from the first Trump term. It’s not a stretch to say that Democrats could end up being needed to pass a bill they abhor to avoid a catastrophic collapse entirely not of their making—but within their power to avert. Lost to no one is the man sitting in the Oval Office already holds the record for the longest government shutdown in history, the 35-day shutdown in 2018 into 2019 over Trump’s demands for $5.7 billion in border fencing. (He eventually wrestled $1.375 billion for it, while the total cost of the shutdown to the whole U.S. economy hit $11 billion, according to the non-partisan congressional scorekeepers.) Like so much of his first term, the shutdown let Trump create a problem and then take credit for ending it. He saw that as a win. As odds of shutdown grow, here are the realities facing Washington that are coloring the negotiations, and the possible offramps from the status quo. Trump is setting up a constitutional crisis All the signs are here. The White House says it is charging forward despite federal judges telling officials to, at a minimum, pump the brakes. Whether it actually upends the United States’ system of checks and balances in the coming weeks will shape the budget negotiations. If Trump and Elon Musk continue to treat the spending laws already passed by Congress as mere suggestions, there won’t be much faith that the next spending bills will bind Trump’s team to actually following the orders from Capitol Hill. Trump has already nixed most of the workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development, scorched the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and is set to dismantle the Education Department—all created and funded by Congress. On Thursday, Trump’s H.R. arm told as many as 200,000 feds with less than two years in their jobs that their careers as civil servants were over. The move, if it survives any legal challenges, will gut the federal government of its next generation of career professionals. Federal judges say so much of what Trump is creating is afield from what’s allowed, but there’s a limit on what they can do. And the White House knows it. Being held in contempt is about the worst of it, after all. Meanwhile, Trump cannot stop jabbering about serving a potential third term, a blatant violation of the Constitution’s cap on terms Presidents can serve these days. For Democrats in particular, this all makes it harder for them to consider helping Trump’s party look responsible enough to keep the government functioning at the most basic level. Republicans in Congress remain terrified of Trump Yet with few exceptions, the top leaders in the GOP are deferring to the White House on these big moves, even as it is increasingly clear to them that Musk’s woodchipper is advancing Trump’s agenda in ways they imagined only they could do. Even though there have been plenty of grumblings—some more stage-whispered than others—about the executive branch’s seemingly vamped approach to foreign policy, domestic spending, and personnel, Trump has mostly gotten his way. “We need to come to terms” with Trump’s tariff strategy, said the top Republican on a Ways and Means subcommittee on trade, Rep. Adrian Smith of farm-export-heavy Nebraska. Smith understands tariffs are a part of Trump’s approach to negotiations—but nevertheless is glad agreements with Canada, Mexico, and Colombia were reached before the threatened tariffs went into place. Translation: whatever Trump wants is what the GOP supports. Similarly, there were plenty of folks unamused with the nominations of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth. Yet Trump got his way on all of them, and Hegseth is already telling Ukraine that its aspirations to join NATO are not going to happen and that its borders are never returning to pre-invasion places despite plenty—if uneven—of support for Kyiv from Congress. When Trump has needed to, the threat of primaries has cowed the skeptics back into line. (Just ask Sen. Thom Tillis what motivated his brazen capitulation on Hegseth. Or Sen. Susan Collins’ baffling blink on the whole lot of them.) That compliance has only fueled Trump’s indifference to courts or the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. While there are spots of concern for Republicans—many on Capitol Hill recognize Trump’s efforts on the economy have fallen short of his campaign rhetoric and his pledges to take over Gaza and expel millions of Palestinians have been unhelpful—they also see a party leader who, at the moment, has little reason to check himself. By and large, voters seem to have positive reactions to his early moves, according to a CBS News poll released this week. While 85% of Democrats and 51% of indies disapprove of Trump, they’re still not enough to tank his overall 53% job approval rating. A separate YouGov poll finds both Trump’s net approval and net favorability numbers are higher than at any point during his first term. While the post-Inauguration surge has faded, he’s still above water and raging at anyone who dares defy him. Put simply: as long as the President is not dragging down other Republicans, they’re fine tethering themselves to him. A shutdown, though, is a tough sell to voters who sent Trump back to Washington to shake things up, not send it spiraling. Democrats don’t have a plan But they have frustrations. For the last three weeks, Democrats up and down the seniority list have been stuck playing an especially frustrating game of Whac-a-Mole: smack the outrage of the hour and then race to hit the next one, never quite leveling the field. Prosecutors are being booted, FBI agents are being purged, criminal cases are being dropped, watchdogs are being shown the doors, commissions and boards are being gutted, and whole agencies are being mothballed. The gush of news has been impossible to keep arms around, and Democrats’ messaging machine has been lurching and lunging without a clear direction. “I’m getting more and more furious,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told The New York Times. But fury is not a strategy. Some Democrats are calling for cooperation on parts of Trump’s agenda that make sense for their constituents. (Rust Belt lawmakers are particularly open to Trump’s protectionist posture on trade.) Others are of the mind to extract maximum concessions if they’re going to have to help maintain a functioning government. (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been at the vanguard of this wing.) Yet others are realistic: any action here will anger some corner of the Democratic coalition that, at the moment, is far from unified or confident that their team in Washington knows what’s next. But they have to do something. The congressional phone system, which typically handles about 40 calls per minute to the 540 offices is now fielding more than 1,500 each minute. That public response, along with not-so-subtle threats from groups on the Left, is forcing Democrats to think again about their path forward, and see if there’s any outcome where they don't end up taking blame for it. Still, this spending plan is going to be done under the cover of a procedural trick that both parties have used in the past to get things across the finish line with a bare majority, meaning Senate Republicans don’t need a single Democratic vote to get this done. But that assumes House Republicans remain unified, a risky bet at best in a party beset by factionalism, which leaves Democrats with a choice between keeping the government’s doors open or letting them slam shut, and allowing at least some conservative outlets and influencers to pin the outcome on them at least as much as the party in control. (Keep in mind, about 80% of federal workers go to jobs beyond the Beltway, so this becomes a local story in almost every corner of the country.) Then there’s this grim reality: House Speaker Mike Johnson might not be able to keep his job if he repeatedly has to rely on Democratic goodwill. Democrats have said they might help only in exchange for some of their own priorities, and concessions to Democrats traditionally have been career poison for Johnson’s predecessors. “Given the Republican majority’s attempts to completely gut the federal government, any concession necessary for the Democratic Party to assist them in passing a (continuing resolution) must be incredibly substantial,” Ocasio-Cortez said, setting up another power play that tempts the GOP leadership into a short-term trap. The reality hasn’t yet registered with voters If you haven’t heard about this looming shutdown, expect to hear a lot in the next few weeks from lawmakers, especially if you live in a Democratic enclave. That’s because, in a rare show of coordination, House Democrats plan to use the current recess to tell constituents back home about the ticking threat buried in the rubble of Trump’s march through Washington. But for most voters, this is all too familiar. A brinksmanship game is now almost passe in Washington, and most of the time both parties find an off-ramp at the eleventh hour that leaves everyone a little sour. Unless they don’t. Voters’ minds are fleeting and blame has a quick half-life in Washington. Trump’s record showdown tanked his poll numbers, but it took less than a month of restored government for him to climb out of the pre-standoff rut. (The government reopened on Jan. 25, 2019, and Trump’s polling on Feb. 22 had him stronger than before he presided over darkened federal machinery.) This time around, the government faces another make-or-break funding deadline on March 14, and both parties at the Capitol say they are way, way apart on how to fix it. The churn coming out of the White House madlibs machine of headlines is tough to mute, but the responsible caucus in both parties is quietly trying to navigate in the background lest things blow apart. For once, a kick-the-can-down-the-road band-aid seems responsible given how unpredictable the rest of Washington is behaving. Because, to be clear, the proposals on the table cover spending only through Oct. 1, and there remain serious disagreements between House and Senate Republicans about just how big of a bite to take right now. Yet without Trump’s blessing, that fight-another-day cohort is working without any real guarantees the White House or even their party leadership will endorse it. Publicly, neither side has said a Plan B is worth considering. Real lives are impacted by the chaos. It could get much worse. Almost $40 million in U.S.-grown humanitarian food aid is sitting in Houston, at risk of rotting or spoiling. A similar scene is playing out in warehouses, ships, and ports across the world, all adding up to roughly half-a-billion-dollars in such goods going to waste because of Trump abruptly ending U.S.A.I.D. programs, and moving to sack most of its 10,000 employees. And that’s just one example of how real lives at home and abroad are becoming collateral damage of Trump’s hasty moves. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers stand to be canned in short order. Criminal cases are being dismissed against prospective Trump allies and brought against his perceived enemies. Immigration crises are only just starting to be understood. Student civil rights and loans alike are on the chopping block. And countless wonks have been shown the door in an effort to rid Trump’s government of expertise. All of this very real harm comes while the federal government’s lights are still on. The ongoing spending spat is heading toward a violent collision unless both parties’ leaders figure out how to get to a mutually disappointing outcome. On their own, Republicans probably cannot get the package out of the House. That means Johnson is probably going to need to rely on a handful of votes from Jeffries to keep Democrats’ priorities like HeadStart, food stamps, troop funding, and rent assistance humming along. Democrats have proven willing to help in the past, deciding a line-in-the-sand moment that would pause government is never worth chasing. Just witness last year, when 185 House Democrats and 47 Senate Democrats backed a funding bill that banned Pride flags flying over embassies. Joe Biden signed it rather than see his last year in office include a first lapse in government functionality heading into a presidential campaign. Republicans are betting that same sober approach—suck it up on imperfect bills in service of keeping the doors open at federal offices—would prevail again. But unlike the Democrats’ help during the Biden era, there’s no telling if Trump even wants to maintain any of the tools of government. Given his ongoing assault on the government he leads, and serious questions about whether Trump would even heed the spending plan they send him and he signs, the state of play in Washington over the next month has rarely looked this muddled. It’s why anyone who relies on government for anything should have March 14 circled in Sharpie, like the one Trump might ultimately use to sign legislation to avoid the lights going dark.

Hamida organized rural women's health clinics and a network of midwives. Mohammad guarded detainees for the U.S. Army. Hekmatullah's brother worked on U.S. government projects. Suhrab's father was a high-level judge who presided over sensitive cases. Kheyal trained fieldworkers for an international aid organization. All of them fled Afghanistan with their families for Pakistan, sometime after the messy withdrawal of the U.S. military in 2021. They worked their way through the lengthy process of legally entering the United States as refugees. Several of them had plane tickets to America. Now they are stuck. One of the first things President Donald Trump did when he arrived in office was to suspend the Refugee Admissions Program for 90 days. This effectively meant all work stopped on processing the paperwork of people fleeing to the U.S. because of persecution. One refugee agency told TIME that more than 500 flights for more than 1,000 already vetted refugees from the region were canceled. Shortly after the Executive Order was signed, the government of Pakistan, which says it houses some 1.5 million refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan (some of whom arrived during the Soviet occupation ), announced that Afghan residents who could not find a country to take them had to leave Rawalpindi and Islamabad—the cities where most of them live because they have access to the internet and government and aid offices—by March 31. After that time they will be repatriated. According to according to Shawn VanDiver, founder of #AfghanEvac,a coalition of veterans and other groups working in the region, 15,000 or so Pakistan-based Afghan refugees were approved as ready to travel. They are now at a terrifying impasse. They cannot push forward, nor can they pull back. Their cases will not progress until at least April 25, and possibly never. They will be even more unwelcome in Pakistan beyond March 31 and nothing but poverty and jeopardy await them in Afghanistan, where recent returnees are viewed with deep suspicion or worse. One refugee says he was warned of "unknown armed men" killing returnees. "The only armed men in Afghanistan are Taliban," he adds. TIME talked to several people who were stranded by the pause, and agreed to use only one of their or their relatives' names to prevent reprisals by the Afghan authorities or discovery by the Pakistani authorities. Hamida was due to fly to Doha and then Pennsylvania on Feb. 3, with her husband and young child. On Jan. 25, she got an email from her contact at the International Organization for Migration informing her that she would not be traveling. She had left Afghanistan on the pleading of her father-in-law, who said he had been told by the local authorities that her prior work with maternal-health NGOs would mean her presence at their compound could endanger the whole family. She is terrified of returning. Once they figure out who she is, she says, "I'm 100% sure I won't be alive more than a week there." She currently lives in a one-room home. The 30-month visa process, during which her claim to refugee status was vetted and approved, has depleted their savings. To avoid being picked up by Pakistani police, they lock the door of their one-room apartment and stay hidden for most of the day. Her husband no longer goes to the laboring jobs he used to do. Their child rarely goes outside. They shop for groceries at night. Now the former project manager with a staff of 60 supports her family doing at-home tailoring work. "We will try to survive here if we can," she says. "I don't know what we will do, but I'm sure we will not go to Afghanistan." In many ways Hekmatullah's brother is luckier than Hamida. Hekmatullah arrived in the U.S. a year ago on a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), which is given to those who served alongside the U.S. Army. (This program is also currently not operating.) He can support his brother financially. But in other ways he's in the same boat. Hekmatullah was told to expect his brother to arrive in Missouri on Feb. 5, but on Jan. 25 he got an email from his local refugee resettlement agency saying the trip had been canceled. His brother, who worked for several American NGOs during the conflict is now on the move, staying at different rentals and friends' homes every few nights to avoid being caught and sent back to Afghanistan. "The Pakistan government is searching for the Afghan refugees everywhere in Pakistan to arrest them and deport them to their country," says Hekmatullah. "But in Afghanistan, you're not getting deported. They will arrest you." (The Pakistani embassy did not answer questions sent via email.) Kheyal's family completed the paperwork and their travel documents were requested in December. He, his wife, and children were expecting their flight details any day. "Until 20 January, we were really hopeful every day," he says. They are surviving on savings from his previous job, which he quit partly because he was expecting to move to the U.S. Recently the Pakistani government started requiring monthly rather than six-month extensions on visas. Each one, with what might euphemistically be called "handling fees," costs $200. The police visit his apartment building frequently. It is 3 a.m. where he is when he speaks to TIME, but Kheyal says nobody in his house is sleeping. "Once we heard that the process is suspended, then we cannot sleep, we cannot eat," he says. "My children are depressed. They have access to social media. They hear everything. I cannot hide anything from them." He's hoping to wait out the pause in Pakistan. Suhrab's family cannot wait. His father was a judge who had to hide in relatives' homes when the Taliban took power, as people he sentenced came to take revenge. The judge and his family arrived in Pakistan in January 2022. Their resettlement was being handled by Welcome Corps, a Biden-era program in which a group of U.S. citizens—in this case, a church in East Tennessee—can sponsor a refugee. That program is suspended. From the safety of the west, Suhrab sometimes works double shifts to support them. His brother, who has also left the region, sends money too. The family and the church group in Tennessee are looking for another country to take them, although very few nations give visas to Afghan passport holders. "I'm super scared," says Suhrab, sitting in his car during a lunch break at work. "What if they catch them and they force them to get out from Pakistan? I don't know what will happen to them." The church group is also taken aback. "It does surprise me that our American government is doing that, especially against refugees," says Melva McGinnis, who coordinated the Welcome Corps program at the church, which has previously sponsored another Afghan family. "The previous government—it was like anyone and their brother can come in, legal or illegal. It isn't fair that people that are trying to come to the States the legal way shouldn't be allowed to come. I think they should." President Trump's move was not unexpected, however. He massively reduced the number of refugees allowed into the country last time he was in office, even before the arrival of COVID-19-related restrictions. Generally surveys show a wide swath of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum support America accepting refugees, and even higher numbers support accepting refugees from Afghanistan who were allied to the American cause. Under President Biden, the number of refugees admitted per year went from a historic low of 11,400 in 2021 to a 30-year high of more than 100,000 in 2024—although the total number during his term is dwarfed by how many refugees were admitted by both President Carter (375,000) and President Reagan (660,000 over two terms). More surprising perhaps is the abandonment of Afghan military personnel who fought alongside the U.S. forces. Mohammad helped guard detainees at a U.S. air base. He has gone through the process of applying to come to America twice. After waiting 18 months for his SIV, he also applied for a refugee visa, but the processing was not finished before the three-month pause began. He, his wife, two brothers, and sister-in-law are living in a shack in a slum. "My situation is no good," he says. "We have no money for food or medicine." He and his family eat once a day, with help from sympathetic locals. VanDiver, of #AfghanEvac, says his bipartisan group is reaching out to Republicans in Congress to see if a carve-out can be made for already-approved refugees stranded in Pakistan or Afghanistan, which he estimates at about 65,000 people, including 50,000 still in Afghanistan. "We have a broad cross section of America that's represented in our ecosystem," he says. "Ninety percent of the American public supports this effort. It is not something that is unpopular." Eric Lebo, a former Navy Reservist, served with Mohammed at the air base. "We couldn't do our job if it wasn't for him and his soldiers," says Lebo, now a truck driver in California. "There's all kinds of refugee and immigration stuff going on," he adds. "But I mean, people like Mohammed are soldiers who served alongside the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Their lives are in danger." Mohammed's brother and parents still live in Afghanistan. Recently, he says—and texts a gruesome photo—his brother was shot in the face. Mohammed thinks the assailants mistook his brother for him.

In an interview just hours after his confirmation as Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. outlined his priorities in response to specific prompts by Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “It’s MAHA time” read a chyron as Kennedy joined the program, later changing to “MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN!”—a variation on Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. Kennedy asserted that the U.S. is “the sickest country in the world,” a talking point he has repeated many times in reference to its low ranking on various metrics among developed nations. He said that Americans face not only a health crisis but also a “spiritual crisis.” Kennedy suggested that addressing “diseases of isolation” would be a major focus of his role in the Trump Administration, saying that disconnection from communities drives chronic diseases, suicide, depression, alcoholism, and addiction. “I think we have to address all of those things at the same time. We can’t just say we’re going to make you physically healthy.” “That’s a tall order,” Ingraham responded before discussing how unconventional a pick Kennedy was for the role he is assuming, playing a clip of Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer criticizing Kennedy’s qualifications. “The qualifications that Senator Schumer is talking about there, are the very qualifications that got us to where we are today,” Kennedy said. “We do need a break. We need somebody different who can come in and say, ‘I’m going to be a disruptor. I’m not going to let the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry run health policy anymore.’” Here’s what else Kennedy spoke about. Read More: ‘Terrifying’: Public Health Experts React to Senate’s Confirmation of RFK Jr. to Lead HHS ‘We shouldn't be subsidizing people to eat poison’ When asked by Ingraham what food additives he’d effectively remove from the U.S., Kennedy did not say he would outright ban any, arguing that Americans should have “freedom of choice.” “If you want to eat Twinkies,” he said, “you ought to be able to eat them.” But he promised to bring about “radical transparency” in informing people of food ingredients and their health effects. Kennedy did say, however, that he would target the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) as well as school lunches for changes. Kennedy has previously criticized the programs for prioritizing ultra-processed foods and sugary drinks, calling for a reorientation toward healthier options. “We shouldn't be subsidizing people to eat poison,” he said. Read More: RFK Jr. Says Ultra-Processed Foods Are ‘Poison’—But That He Won’t Ban Them ‘I’m not going to take away anybody’s vaccine’ Kennedy also said, “I’m not going to take away anybody’s vaccine,” promising instead to publicize more information on their efficacy and side effects, claiming currently insufficient safety studies and surveillance of vaccine effects. “If people are happy with their vaccines, they ought to be able to get them,” Kennedy said. “What we’re going to do is give people good science.” Asked whether he thought the COVID-19 vaccine was safe, Kennedy told Ingraham: “We don’t have good data on it. And that is a crime.” Read More: RFK Jr. Denied He Is Anti-Vaccine During His Confirmation Hearing. Here’s His Record ‘I have a list in my head’ Kennedy also promised firings in the Department and its subagencies—including the world’s major research funder National Institutes of Health. “I have a list in my head,” Kennedy told Ingraham when asked if he had a list of specific people to remove. Kennedy said that lower-level federal employees were “public-spirited, good public servants, good American patriots, and hardworking people.” and that he was more interested in “moving away the people who have made really bad decisions.” When asked if he would cut the Department’s workforce in half, Kennedy said there are 90,000 employees and he’d “be surprised if there were 50% cuts.” “If you’ve been involved in good science—you have nothing to worry about. If you care about public health, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” Read More: Get Ready for a Catastrophic Four Years for Public Health ‘We have now a capacity to really study it’ Ingraham also asked Kennedy about marijuana and abortion drugs, to which he replied that more studies need to be done. Kennedy said he was “worried” about the “catastrophic impacts” that high-THC marijuana can have on youth but added “that worry also has to be balanced” with how 24 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized recreational use of the drug and too many people have been incarcerated over the drug. Kennedy said state-level legalization allows for more intensive studies on the effects of marijuana. Kennedy also said similar safety studies will be done on abortion-inducing drugs, but he didn’t say whether he thinks access to those pills need to be tightened.