A bit OT, but what a gorgeous whale of a sentence! As always, the literary prowess of NTSB writers does not disappoint.
A bit OT, but what a gorgeous whale of a sentence! As always, the literary prowess of NTSB writers does not disappoint.
The goals are both obvious and specific; it’s a culture war being fought at the funding level.
Look at weather service cuts. They're gutting the National Weather Service while Trump's appointees have ties to companies like AccuWeather and Satellogic that would profit from privatizing weather data.
It's about class interests. Agencies that serve everyone or that rich people depend on stay funded. Programs that only help poor people get cut, or get privatized to benefit specific wealthy interests. Make the wealthy better off through tax cuts and new business opportunities, make poor people worse off through service cuts.
The cuts go way beyond climate though. They're cutting 107,000 federal jobs across agencies while defense spending increases 13%. Framing this as ideological makes it sound like an abstract battle of ideas, but it's not abstract at all. Real people are losing health insurance, real hospitals are closing, real communities are losing weather warnings. Meanwhile wealthy people get tax cuts and connected companies get business opportunities. It's about material interests, not ideology.