Trump’s confusing storm of orders impacts the personal and bureaucratic
Over the weekend, I briefly caught up with a friend in Washington, D.C., who works as an engineer with the U.S. Navy. In his mid-20s, the clean-cut man in a two-piece suit wasted no time around the bush.
“Oh, you know, just waiting to get fired,” he said through a tight smile. After a playful dig about his lack of professional skill, the conversation hit a more serious groove. He believes his job will ultimately be safe, but as the Trump administration works to slash the federal workforce, uncertainty about the machete’s next target has created confusion and damaged morale.
The following day, a mutual friend who, coincidentally, also works for the Navy told me she was recently placed on leave without pay. President Donald Trump’s Day 1 executive order to end the federal government’s telework programs meant she would need to return to the office. However, my friend, who recently earned her master’s degree in machine learning from UC Berkeley, is recovering from a traumatic brain injury; she needs to live close to family and doctors, 150 miles away from the physical office. She is now looking for other work.
The confusion and upheaval of Trump’s first month back in office has reached into personal lives as well as the operation of local governments, which are struggling to keep up with the seismic shifts from a Trump administration that appears to change the rules daily.
The most recent example happened on Friday, when a federal judge in Maryland temporarily blocked the Trump administration from cutting federal funding from government programs that support diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. Trump’s executive order to end federal support of equity-related grants and contracts may violate the Constitution, the judge said.
While the temporary hold could come as good news for some, it also muddies an already confusing landscape for local governments such as Santa Cruz County, where 50% of the government’s $754 million general-fund budget relies on federal support.
Last week, I spoke with Carlos Palacios, the county government’s chief executive, who said he had already received some “concerning” letters from the federal government about local programs that could lose funding due to DEI policies. Palacios didn’t provide specifics, but cited some public health programs and homelessness grants as vulnerable. The county, he said, is doing a comprehensive analysis that not only shows which programs are at risk, but how the county could make amendments that protect the funding.
On Tuesday, Palacios’ staff will provide a midyear budget review to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. Marcus Pimentel, the county’s budget officer, told me he expects the topic of federal funding to be touched on only lightly. However, as the county starts building its 2025-26 budget this spring, the federal government’s role in supporting county programs will likely be front and center.
For more from Palacios on how the Trump administration’s cuts could affect the county, including the vulnerability of hundreds of millions of dollars in social safety net funding, check out my conversation with the county executive from last week.
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OF NOTE
Local Trump supporters speak out after truck vandalism: On Valentine’s Day, the owner of a red Chevy Silverado — whose back window had a small pro-Trump decal — dropped off his pickup truck to be serviced at Santa Cruz Tire & Auto. By the next morning, the truck’s windows had been shattered, tires slashed, headlights smashed, with anti-Trump language spray-painted across its broadsides. Angry local Trump supporters said the vandalism was nothing new in deep-blue Santa Cruz County.
The batteries are a’burnin’: Weeks after a high-profile fire sparked at a lithium-ion battery plant in Moss Landing, the facility flared up again last week, setting off new alarm bells for a community already on edge about the environmental and public health impacts of the initial blaze. Days later, the Santa Cruz County government released the results from its environmental testing following the first fire, and is now asking residents to participate in a survey to collect more data.
POINTS FOR PARTICIPATION
Money where its morals are: In December, when the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors recommitted to its sanctuary county policy and vowed to support its immigrant population, many wondered whether the move would go beyond symbolic signaling. On Tuesday, the supervisors will vote on whether to place $100,000 into a immigration legal defense fund, and another $100,000 into LGBTQ+ community support services.
Santa Cruz City Council again postpones landlord-rent cap compromise: The Santa Cruz City Council has again pushed back a vote on creating a complicated program for landlords of certain government-assisted rental properties looking to increase rents. The move stems from a lawsuit filed by GVC St. George, the owner of the St. George apartment building downtown, challenging the city’s September ordinance to cap rent hikes for low-income apartment buildings that are phasing out of their affordability requirements. In a story published last month, my colleague Max Chun, who has followed this issue since last year, eloquently laid out the details of this rather byzantine compromise. The city council initially planned to vote in January, but rescheduled the item for Tuesday; however, it has postponed the vote again, to March 11.
ONE GREAT READ
The profile Hemingway could never live down, by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker
This month, The New Yorker celebrated its 100th anniversary by publishing a thick, special issue featuring some extraordinary reporting and, in my opinion, a bit of navel-gazing well-earned by a century in the biz.
My favorite of the latter genre reexamines one of the magazine’s most infamous stories: Lillian Ross’s 1950 profile of Ernest Hemingway. The piece stretched the profile form — the style of writing that lured me into this profession — into something more novelistic, paving the way for classics such as Gay Talese’s profile of Frank Sinatra, and Nathan Heller’s of director James Gray.
When The New Yorker published the piece, many read Ross’ depiction as an indictment of Hemingway, which painted him as a dense, self-serious patriarch, rum-soaked and past his prime. Yet, as New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik writes in this reexamination of the piece, letters between Ross and Hemingway show that the novelist did not view the profile as particularly hurtful or harmful.
“I get so tired of reading how you devastated, destroyed me and did me irreparable harm in that profile,” Hemingway wrote to Ross. “I always explain to people that we are good friends and that you had no malice toward me and they act as though I were getting soft in the brain and could not tell when I had been devastated and irreparably harmed. … I joke all the time at myself and everybody else and at everything and most literary critics are very solemn and without humour and they resent that.”
But Gopnik also sees that even if Ross didn’t set out to humiliate Hemingway, and Hemingway didn’t feel harmed, different intentions may have been held by The New Yorker’s editor at the time, William Shawn, who would go on to have a decadeslong affair with Ross.