Today's Liberal News

Why DOGE Could Actually Increase the Deficit

Elon Musk has promised he would eliminate the nearly $2 trillion budget deficit in year one. Last night on Fox, he predicted he would get halfway there by the end of May. His critics have insisted that his goal is unrealistic, and that he won’t accomplish nearly as much deficit reduction as he claims.
The critics are understating the case. DOGE won’t just fall short of Musk’s deficit-reduction goals. It will, in all probability, increase the deficit. Probably by a lot.
Begin on the savings side.

The Retired J.P. Morgan Executive Tracking Trump’s Deportation Flights

The Trump administration’s plan to dust off the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was in the works long before March 15. But the precise timing was hazy. Immigration attorneys went to federal court that morning to try to block the government from using the extraordinary wartime authority, which allows deportations without due process. There were few signs that the White House was about to use the law to send planeloads of Venezuelans to a prison complex in El Salvador.

“The Encampments”: New Film on Mahmoud Khalil & Columbia Students Who Sparked Gaza Campus Protests

The new documentary The Encampments, produced by Watermelon Pictures and BreakThrough News, is an insider’s look at the student protest movement to demand divestment from the U.S. and Israeli weapons industry and an end to the genocide in Gaza. The film focuses on last year’s student encampment at Columbia University and features student leaders including Mahmoud Khalil, who was chosen by the university as a liaison between the administration and students. Khalil, a U.S.

Why Trump Won’t ‘Produce a Scalp’ After the Signal Debacle

In the telling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, he was only executing his duties when he shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen in an unclassified group chat on the Signal messaging app. “My job,” he told reporters during a swing through Hawaii, “is to provide updates in real time.”
The implication: Nothing to see here.

Independent Agencies Never Stood a Chance Under Trump

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Updated at 5:37 p.m. ET on March 27, 2025
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence” in the federal government “and seize them,” Russ Vought told The New York Times in 2023. As the Trump administration’s first two months prove, he wasn’t bluffing.

The NIH’s Most Reckless Cuts Yet

By design, clinical trials ask their participants to take on risk. To develop new vaccines, drugs, or therapies, scientists first have to ask volunteers to try out those interventions, with no guarantee that they’ll work or be free of side effects. To minimize harm, researchers promise to care for and monitor participants through a trial’s end, long enough to collect the data necessary to determine if a therapy is effective and at what cost.

The Drink Americans Can’t Quit

A young woman is at a diner with friends, being stared down by a waitress with frosted lipstick and no time to waste. What she wants is a soda—but for whatever reason, she can’t bring herself to have one. Same with the girl at the pool party, and the one at the drive-through, and the one sitting in what looks like a sorority house, and the guy at the convenience store.

Susan Sontag’s Vision

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Some of Susan Sontag’s photographs: Corpses of tortured Chinese rebels (“Five white men standing behind them,” she writes, “posing for the camera”). A woman whose right foot has been transplanted onto her left leg (“This is not a surgical miracle”). Her father in a Tianjin rickshaw, 1931 (“He looks pleased, boyish, shy, absent”).