Parents really like the convenience and the feeling of safety they get when their kid has a phone. If they have to change school pickup plans they'd much rather text their kid than call and leave a message with the school office and then hope that the office gets the message to their kid.
We're so used to being able to get in touch with our family members at all times that it feels really unnerving when your kid isn't immediately accessible.
And the parents who complain think that their kids aren't the ones who are addicted to their phones.
That's why these bans needed to happen at the state or school district level - expecting individual teachers to have to spend their time arguing with parents and kids over cell phones was just not realistic.
This letter is from a leading defamation law firm but it does not actually threaten legal action, it just asks the Times to "do right by its readers" (maybe that's after the first four pages that are shown in this tweet). If they thought they had a good case, they would make that very clear. The fact that they spend a lot of time complaining about things that the Times didn't actually report and complaining that he was treated differently than other people tells me that this is all for PR.
I've followed DOGE closely and haven't heard anything that would indicate they were even trying to reduce unnecessary medicare spending. Where I have heard that they've tried to touch healthcare spending, they've made a huge mess. For instance, they cancelled a lot of support contracts at the VA, but many of those contracts did necessary things, like maintaining complex machinery. If you read ProPublica's article on DOGE at the VA, it's pretty clear that this was done incredibly quickly by a guy with zero healthcare knowledge using a minimal prompt and wasn't even directing the AI to read the most important parts of the contract. https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doge-veterans-affai...
There seems to be some indication that they hired some incompetent people and/or were prohibited from cutting some of the things that ought to be cut. And I don't think there is any question that the deadline they set for themselves was unrealistically aggressive.
Which means we need someone to go back and do it properly, not that it doesn't need to be done.
Sure it can, by the atorneys general. A core part of their job is identifying, stopping, and prosecuting fraud and waste spending in the government.
Doge was never legal, but there were agencies that had the statutory power to do what doge wanted. However, they also could investigate things like emoluments violations which is precisely why they were some of the first to be fired.
It assumes that 100% of the funding went to treating children with malnutrition. First of all its doubtful that even the intent of the program was to spend 100% of the money on that in particular. And even if it was, this is clearly false because even a super efficiently run program to help starving children is going to have massive overhead, so not even close to 100% of the funding would be spent that way. It's not like starving children of the world are located around major logistics hubs, so I would be absolutely shocked if they could even get close to 50% here. It also assumes that you only have to treat each child once. So ok, you treat a child for malnutrition and then what? You send him back out into the same place where he couldn't get food in the first place? There's just so much wrong with this number that I have a hard time believing you are even asking in good faith.
If you look at the sources for the $100-200 figure, she's looking at a particular form of humanitarian aid - community-based therapeutic care for children with severe acute malnutrition. There are other models like inpatient programs that are more expensive, but also reach fewer children, and then if you're supporting people who don't have severe acute malnutrition it's presumably much less expensive because you don't have to include the healthcare costs.
If you look at the papers that are being cited, these programs are incredibly effective:
> A total of 328 patient cards/records of children treated in the programs were reviewed; out of which 306 (157 CTC and 149 TFC) were traced back to their households to interview their caretakers. The cure rate in TFC was 95.36% compared to 94.30% in CTC. The death rate in TFC was 0% and in CTC 1.2%. The mean cost per child treated was $284.56 in TFC and $134.88 in CTC.
If you look at what they mean by CTC program, it's ongoing support in addition to the treatment for acute malnutrition, so it's not just throwing a child back into the same environment:
> CTC programs use decentralized networks of outpatient treatment sites (usually located at existing primary health-care facilities), small inpatient units (usually located in existing local hospital facilities), and large numbers of community-based volunteers to provide case detection and some follow-up of patients in their home environments. Patients with severe malnutrition, with good appetite, and without medical complications are treated in an outpatient therapeutic program (OTP) that provides ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) and medicines to treat simple medical conditions. The food and medicines are taken at home, and the patient attends an OTP site weekly or fortnightly for monitoring and resupply.
In terms of overhead, the overhead for the organization providing care is already accounted for in the $100-200 figure, including the costs of managing the program from the capital. Presumably Save The Children takes a chunk of the grant for its own overhead but I believe these costs are typically capped by the US government at something like 10%. Similarly, USAID has its own costs but I'm not sure if those are accounted for in the $168m line item or if they're accounted for elsewhere.
So, sure, Nichols' paper is using a cost estimate that's based on specific types of programs and generalizing that. Given the number of countries and organizations involved, I'm not sure how much more accurate you could get.
But your cynicism is also pretty unfounded. The sources take into account the organization's overhead, the logistics of reaching remote areas (the Ethiopia paper points out that much of the overhead goes to vehicle rental and gives a distribution of patients by how far they have to walk to get to the treatment center). It accounts for ongoing vs acute care.
So I wouldn't take 168,000 number especially seriously - and I would note that the author adds some very large error bars - but I also wouldn't dismiss it as a complete fiction.
DOGE represents all the worst aspects of startup culture.
These guys saw all the existing expertise in the federal government as lazy, stupid, old-fashioned, and wasteful, and they thought that they were basically supermen - smarter, harder working, infused with AI superpowers. So they ripped up institutions that have been built at great public cost over generations. These institutions deal with incredibly complex real-world problems. But the DOGE people thought that with AI they could make better decisions in a few seconds than people with decades of experience.
The results were pretty much what you would expect. Much of what they trashed was valuable, even lifesaving. (USAID is the prime example). Destroying it saved the US government a relative pittance (the US government spent more money in 2025 than 2024) but the human cost was enormous.
Imagine being a young political leader in a developing country. You've grown up thinking favorably about the US because of the positive engagement we've made with your country - not just humanitarian aid, but also elites in your country have gone to school in the US and felt welcomed here. Now, you've just seen that the US will abandon all its promises to you in a heartbeat and leave your country with a humanitarian catastrophe. Why would you ever see the US favorably?
Or imagine that you're a small business owner who provided some valuable product or service to the US government. You've made business plans based on the understanding that the US government is a reliable customer. Then an AI told a 23 year old with no experience in your field that your contract was wasteful.
The DOGE guys will move on to other cushy startup jobs. They'll make a ton of money in their careers. The rest of us will be left to deal with the fallout.
These guys need to face the music imo. If people don't face prosecution it will be damaging.
Elon must needs to be investigated. All previous investigation need to be reviewed and if DOGE stopped or slowed any of them they need to be turned up to 10000000.
This has been everyone else's experience of the Trump regime, as well.
Here in Australia we've been "America's Poodle" for generations, enthusiastically joined in on every war and bizarre colonial adventure that the USA has started. And then we get slapped with tariffs and insulted by the President. Our politicians are slowly grappling with the new reality that the USA is not our friend and ally any more.
Europe has a similar experience. No longer is the West "shoulder to shoulder" fighting the authoritarian regimes and defending shared values. Suddenly Europe is not an ally, possibly an economic enemy, and is being insulted by the President.
The damage that the last 9 months have done to the USA's standing with the rest of the world is unbelievable. As has been said before; Trump may not be a Russian agent, but it's hard to see what a Russian agent would have done differently.
And that includes DOGE - ripping up government institutions that have taken decades to build is not a productive measure, it's destructive. It's what the USA's enemies would do to it if they could.
The halfway competent folks in the US realize that this has happened, and that the repercussions will last for a decade or more. Regaining international trust, and all the privileges that came with it, will not be easy or pleasant. I fear that it may not be possible, if China steps up too quickly.
Many people make an analogy to Brexit, where a democracy intentionally commits economic and political suicide. I fear the impact on the US will be far worse than Brexit's impact on the UK.
Makes no sense in economics, the whole history since industrialization is that the economy gets bigger and bigger, both in absolute terms and per capita.
The position in the world will. At its peak, Britain was truly the empire on which the sun never sets, but these colonies were not assimilated by British culture to become part of Britain. Therefore, they were ultimately lost. Britain will eventually revert to the position befitting a small island nation—insignificant in the realm of geopolitics.
> Do companies run by Elon Musk violate ethical and environmental regulations much more often than other similar companies, or does it just seem that way as a casual news reader because it is more worthwhile for outlets to publish a story when it happens?
He's contemptuous of regulators, doesn't care about his or his company's reputation (or at least negative publicity doesn't seem to change his behavior, although he whines when people criticize him), has an extreme tolerance for risk, knows that he has unlimited resources to fight off lawsuits and regulators, has donated vast sums of money to the current president, and at least at Twitter, got rid of all the people who were working on safety issues.
So it's not a surprise that there are more ethics violations then at a company where the executives still go by the "don't do anything that would get your name in The New York Times" rule.
This is not a case where the government is telling employees that they cannot say certain things while on the job. That would be reasonable (see the Hatch Act, for instance, which the Trump administration violates constantly). It is compelled speech. They are sending out a message from that person without that person's knowledge or consent. The first amendment prohibits the government from forcing someone to say something that they do not want to say. That is true even for government employees (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_v._AFSCME)
We're so used to being able to get in touch with our family members at all times that it feels really unnerving when your kid isn't immediately accessible.
And the parents who complain think that their kids aren't the ones who are addicted to their phones.
That's why these bans needed to happen at the state or school district level - expecting individual teachers to have to spend their time arguing with parents and kids over cell phones was just not realistic.