The Trump Team Turns to Education

Happy Friday! Scientists have announced that Saturn has acquired 128 new moons. Is that a good or bad omen? We’ll let you decide. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Greenland will rebuff any attempts by President Donald Trump to extend U.S. control over the island, its likely new prime minister said Wednesday. “We don’t want to be Americans. No, we don’t want to be Danes,” Jens-Frederik Nielsen, whose center-right Demokraatit party won in Greenland’s parliamentary elections on Tuesday, told Britain’s Sky News. Nielsen and his party support a gradual path to independence for the Danish territory. During a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Thursday, Trump reiterated his desire to annex Greenland, citing national security concerns.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said that Moscow still had unspecified conditions that needed to be met before it could agree to a ceasefire with Ukraine, but claimed to be open to a deal. “We need to talk to our American colleagues and partners about this, maybe call President Trump and discuss it with him,” he said, adding that any temporary truce should be tied to a broader deal that addresses “the causes of this crisis.” Later that day, Putin met with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, who presented him with the ceasefire proposal that emerged following talks between U.S. and Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the Russian military claimed Thursday to have retaken most of Kursk—a Russian region where Ukrainian forces have controlled pockets of territory since launching a surprise offensive in August.
• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said Thursday that he would support the Republican-led government funding bill recently passed by the House, making it likely that there will be enough votes today to override a Senate filibuster and avoid a government shutdown. “A shutdown would give Donald Trump the keys to the city, the state and the country,” Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor, citing fears that efforts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to radically shrink the size of the federal workforce would be strengthened by a shutdown. Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, has already committed to voting for the funding bill, meaning it would only need six more votes to pass the upper chamber.
• U.S. District Judge William Alsup on Thursday ordered the federal government to rehire potentially tens of thousands of probationary employees whose jobs had been terminated by mass firings in recent weeks. The layoffs were directed by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which Alsup said did not have the authority to order such an action. The judge mandated that the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, the Interior, and the Treasury offer to reinstate employees fired on or around February 13 and 14. The OPM’s acting director, Charles Ezell, did not appear in court to testify in defense of the administration’s actions.
• The White House on Thursday abruptly withdrew its nomination of Dave Weldon as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just hours before his confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee was set to begin. Weldon—a doctor, vaccine skeptic, and former U.S. congressman from Florida—reportedly did not have enough “yes” votes to receive the committee’s approval. “The concern of many people is that Big Pharma was behind this which is probably true,” Weldon wrote in a statement following the announcement. 
• The number of migrants passing through the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle pathway through Panama and a major thoroughfare for migrants, has fallen to its lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new data from a Panamanian migration agency. The dramatic decline mirrors the rapid decrease in the number of migrants attempting to illegally cross the southern border of the United States since the beginning of aggressive enforcement actions against illegal immigrants by the Trump administration. 
• Lawyers representing President Trump asked the Supreme Court Thursday to end a nationwide injunction from a lower court blocking an executive order revoking automatic citizenship for all children born in the United States. The order, which Trump signed in a direct challenge to more than a hundred years of constitutional interpretation, was blocked by three federal judges in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Washington state. The filings from acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris argue that the nationwide injunctions are an unconstitutional overreach of courts’ powers and ask that the orders apply only to the plaintiffs in each of the three cases that led to the rulings. 
• Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, died Thursday from complications stemming from cancer treatment. He was 77 years old. Grijalva had served in the House of Representatives since 2002 and co-chaired the Progressive Caucus from 2009 to 2019. A committed environmentalist, he also chaired the House Natural Resources Committee. He is the fifth sitting House Democrat to die in the past 12 months. 

The Department of Education in the Crosshairs

On Thursday, a small group of teachers and students gathered outside the Department of Education’s Washington, D.C., headquarters to protest the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the federal agency. Bearing signs reading “kids deserve good schools,” “stop defunding our futures,” and “fund schools not billionaires,” the demonstrators argued that the White House was sacrificing the country’s young people on the altar of tech CEO Elon Musk’s cost-saving initiative. 

“They didn’t go to public school,” a D.C. educator told WUSA9. “They didn’t need these government programs.”

Two days earlier, the Education Department announced plans to cut its workforce by nearly half, from 4,133 employees to 2,183. But the sweeping layoffs were likely just an opening salvo. President Donald Trump has long advocated for disbanding the Cabinet agency, selecting Linda McMahon as education secretary to, in his words, “put herself out of a job.” The department’s remaining employees are now bracing for the president’s next steps.

“The president’s mandate, his directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we’ll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished,” McMahon told Fox News on Tuesday, when asked about the mass firings. “But what we did today was to take the first step, eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat.”

But even proponents of reforming the department are skeptical …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. You can read our 1,287-word item on Trump’s efforts to dissolve the Department of Education in the members-only version of TMD.

Today’s Must-Read

Toeing the Company Line

Worth Your Time

• President Donald Trump’s defenders often point to the late-19^th century President William McKinley’s “reciprocal” tariffs as a historical example for the U.S. to follow. But writing for the Wall Street Journal, economists Donald J. Boudreaux and Phil Gramm argued that proponents of reciprocal tariffs have seriously misunderstood McKinley’s aims: “Reciprocal trade policy as envisioned by President William McKinley, whom Mr. Trump often cites as his role model, recognized that by the dawn of the 20th century America had emerged as an economic colossus capable of producing an abundance of products that could be profitably exported. As McKinley explained, ‘the expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable’… The Trump perversion of reciprocal trade co-opts a politically appealing phrase to justify his preferred policy. While the president uses European and Japanese tariffs on American cars to justify comparable tariffs on U.S. imports, nowhere does he propose real reciprocity. He could eliminate the 25% U.S. tariff on imported trucks as an inducement to other countries to eliminate their tariffs on U.S. automobiles. Mr. Trump denounces high tariffs on U.S. exports to Central and South America and would use his theory of reciprocity as an excuse to raise U.S. tariffs on imports from those countries. But real reciprocity would be achieved by eliminating the quota on U.S. imports of sugar, for which Americans pay twice the world price, in return for Central and South American countries lowering their tariffs against U.S. products.”

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In the Zeitgeist

The baseball movie is back: Eephus, about older men playing their last game of baseball before their field is torn down to build a school, was released on March 7. We’re readying ourselves for the nostalgia.