Good morning. It is February 7th. Out the window, there's some sun coming through some clouds here in New York City and the temperature has passed its daily high and is due to keep on sliding down the rest of the way, leading into a forecast of heavy wintry mix Saturday evening into Saturday night. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast on your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news.

Last night, the Senate voted to make Russell Vought the director of the Office of Management and Budget. It was a straight party line vote after Democrats had put things off by extending debate as long as possible. Vought is a principal author of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and has described his goal as putting the civil service in trauma. He will now be directing the dismantling of the government that had been left to Elon Musk and his Army of Young Creeps. 

That army lost one member yesterday as Marco Elez, a 25-year-old who'd previously worked for Musk at X and at Starlink, resigned in response to the Wall Street Journal finding one of his old social media accounts in which he'd written, among many other things, “just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” and “you could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” and various sentiments against Indian immigrants. 

Wired, meanwhile, reports that despite the Trump administration's claims that Elez had read-only access to the Treasury Department's computer systems, he in fact had the ability to rewrite the code of the payment system through which the vast majority of federal spending flows. Not only that, Wired adds, “but sources tell Wired that at least one note was added to Treasury records indicating that he no longer had write access before senior IT staff stated it was actually rescinded.”

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine in an interview with the Portland Press Herald said, “I think the president's representatives, Elon Musk and his team have clearly exceeded their authority under the law.” Collins, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, also said that the Trump administration's spending freezes violated the law by usurping control of spending from Congress, but then told the paper she was going to go ahead and vote for Russell Vought. Despite his longtime advocacy for having presidents seize and impound funds against Congress's express wishes. “If there are impoundments,” Collins said, “I believe it will end up in court. And my hope is the court will rule in favor of the 1974 Impoundment and Budget Control Act.” 

This is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee expressing her “hope” that after she refuses to use her position to defend congressional authority over spending, a judge might step in and do what she wouldn't do. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column is more news analysis. Struggling still, again, to put a rational frame around Donald Trump's irrational announcement that he wants to seize Gaza. “Trump’s Plan Reflects Goal Beyond Gaza / Israel and U.S. Talk of Annexing West Bank.” “President Trump's statements on Tuesday,” the Times writes, “about an American takeover of the Gaza Strip and displacing millions of Palestinians were immediately dismissed by many as reckless and half-baked pronouncements, a provocative threat that Mr. Trump was unlikely to enforce. At the same time, his comments are the latest example of how government officials on the right in both the United States and Israel now speak publicly about a shared goal: the takeover of Palestinian land.”  The big picture is just as coherent as the small and medium pictures are incoherent.

The goal is the elimination of anything that could pass for a Palestinian state and in one way or another of the Palestinians themselves. Across from the jump on that on page 8, the grim but accurate headline is “Told his idea won't work. Trump brings it up again.” A headline that could apply to most anything. But here it's about that answer he's offering to the Palestinian question.

“President Trump on Thursday defended his proposal for the United States to take charge of post-war Gaza and resettle its Palestinian residents, but stressed that he would not deploy U.S. troops to the enclave, as Israel's defense minister announced that he had ordered the military to draft a plan to allow people to voluntarily leave. The developments add to a swirl of confusion over the proposal by Mr. Trump to take over the Gaza Strip and for the roughly two million Palestinians living there to move elsewhere. The forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population,” the Times writes, “is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime, and a crime against humanity, experts say. Mr. Trump's plan has already provoked furious opposition around the world, with some critics likening it to ethnic cleansing.” Not sure why you need “some critics” to do any “likening” to a plan that's explicitly and directly about moving a particular ethnic group of people out of the territory in which they currently live, to replace them with other people. There isn't some interpretive lens in which it becomes something else. Anyway, the Times writes, “it is far from clear whether and how the proposal would be carried out. And Mr. Trump's comments did not resolve some of the biggest questions about it, including where Israeli and American authorities hoped Gazans would go, how many people they imagined would actually leave willingly, and who would govern and secure the enclave.” Again, those are immediate and mid-range details, but as long as they focus on the end goal, the total elimination of Palestinians, history says the authorities tend to figure out a solution. 

Speaking of eliminationism, below that on page one, “N.C.A.A. Bars Trans Athletes Across Women’s Competitions,” as the college sports authority hastily aligned itself with Donald Trump's anti-trans executive order defying the national governing bodies of its various constituent sports, and packaging this complete capitulation as a simple, practical embrace of clarity. “‘We strongly believe that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today's student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions,’ Charlie Baker, the president of the NCAA, said in a statement. To that end, President Trump's order provides a clear national standard.” This strong belief that a patchwork system was not good enough had somehow not manifested itself before this week. After the jump, the story notes, “appearing before Congress last year, Mr. Baker said there were fewer than 10 transgender athletes among the 500,000 plus students who play NCAA sports.” That's a set of numbers the New York Times might also have considered before it decided to make a major front page scandal out of trans participation in sports. 

Back up to the top of the front page, the number two news column is, “Clinical Trials Left in Lurch By Aid Freeze / Health Fears for Those in U.S.A.I.D. Studies.” It starts with one person and then moves outward. “Asanda Zondi received a startling phone call last Thursday, with orders to make her way to a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection. The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her. The device, a silicone ring inserted into her vagina, needed to be removed right away. Ms. Zandi's trial,” the Times writes, “is one of dozens that have been abruptly frozen, leaving people around the world with experimental drugs and medical products in their bodies, cut off from the researchers who were monitoring them and generating waves of suspicion and fear. The State Department,” the Times writes, “which now oversees USAID, replied to a request for comment by directing a reporter to USAID.gov, which no longer contains any information except that all permanent employees have been placed on administrative leave. The shutdowns violate both medical guidelines and international law. The Times,” the story continues, “identified more than 30 frozen studies that had volunteers already in the care of researchers, including trials of malaria treatment in children under age five in Mozambique, treatment for cholera in Bangladesh, a screen and treat method for cervical cancer in Malawi, tuberculosis treatment for children and teenagers in Peru and South Africa, nutritional support for children in Ethiopia, early childhood development interventions in Cambodia, ways to support pregnant and breastfeeding women to reduce malnutrition in Jordan, and an mRNA vaccine technology for HIV in South Africa. It is difficult to know the total number of trials shut down,” the Times writes, “or how many people are affected. because the swift demolition of USAID in recent days has erased the public record. In addition to the disabled website, the agency no longer has a communications department. And the stop work order prohibits any implementing agency from speaking publicly about what has happened.” In the case of the woman in the lead, the Times writes, “the stop work order was so immediate and sweeping that the research staff would be violating it if they helped the women remove the rings. But Dr. Leila Mansoor, a scientist with the Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa, and an investigator on the trial decided she and her team would do so anyway. ‘For me, ethics and participants come first, she said. There is a line.’” 

On page A10, the headline is, “Rubio asks a USAID official for trust and patience. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday told an official with the United States Agency for International Development that foreign aid was ‘the least popular thing government spends money on and had become increasingly difficult to defend,’ according to a transcript of a private embassy event. Rubio told the USAID's mission director in Guatemala, ‘I know it's hard to ask for patience. I know it's hard to ask for trust because you've never met me before. I've never been in charge of the State Department. I've never been acting USAID administrator before.’” Then he repeated the Trump administration's unsubstantiated claims that people were making improper payments, and the Times writes, “said the workers were ‘almost inviting themselves to be getting in trouble so they can make a news story out of it.’”

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep our podcasting going with your paid subscriptions and tips. Please do keep those coming if you can. Stay warm and dry through the weekend and if nothing unforeseen gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.