A Sociological Eye

  Here’s something ironic: lawyers have gotten this individual’s statements about his DOGE activities cancelling basically all federal grants for work in the humanities taken down from YouTube, based on claims that he is now being cancelled by people on the internet.  We really need to talk about what it means to cancel something or someone, because those actions are not equivalent. . .  So: here is the context. The National Endowment for the Humanities is the US federal agency tasked with funding work in the humanities—including history, literature, philosophy, linguistics, languages, law, classics, ethics, and subjects MAGA particularly disdains like gender and women’s studies, ethnic studies, and sexuality studies.  A year ago, in March 2025, DOGE was let loose on the NEH, and within the space of 22 days, 97% of all NEH grants had been cancelled . Basically all work in the humanities other than preserving the papers of George Washington was defunded.  In May ...

  The last institutional barrier between us and the presidential narcissist who would be emperor is falling. It’s going to be up to us to stand up. Here’s your overview: the federal government has three branches that are supposed to serve as checks and balances to ensure the U.S. never has a king. Congress is supposed to make the laws, the president enforce them, and the courts rule on the constitutionality and legality of the actions of the first two branches. Our current self-worshipping president and his awful clown car of minions have decided that they get to make the laws, and can use them to stomp on all of their declared enemies. Whatever existing laws they don't like, they ignore. Who's going to stop them? Well, Congress is supposed to do that. But the Republicans who hold the slim majority either worship their Great Leader, or imagine they are slyly using him, or are terrified that if they don't bend to his every whim, his followers--their voters--will descend on t...

  There’s a fantasy out there. And it’s being used to justify a flood of actions that are stupid, counterproductive, meanspirited—oh, and often illegal. Actions like firing FBI agents, prosecutors, and inspectors general who protect Americans. “Throwing into the woodchipper” entire federal agencies doing vital work—like USAID (which saves the lives of starving children and those suffering from dangerous diseases in other countries), or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which saves Americans from being ripped off by credit card companies and banks). Shutting down a wide range of grants to charities that help people in need or assess the impacts of discrimination. Slashing the funding of research—and through that action, yanking back hundreds of millions of dollars from universities and hospitals that rely on that funding. Firing people from across all federal agencies randomly, based on their not having served the full two years or one year of probationary status, with n...

So: yesterday by means of a memo, the Trump administration stopped huge swaths of the government from spending money. Not Social Security or Medicare--those checks would still go out. But small businesses will not get their loans. No money will be sent to charity organizations that had won federal grants to provide services from suicide hotlines to disability accommodations to arts education. Laboratories studying cancer cures can't conduct their studies. All foreign aid is shut down, much of it lifesaving. Can the Trump administration do that? Well, in a word, no. Not legally, anyway, and not Constitutionally. The president is not a dictator. A president can't decide they don't like the laws Congress passed or the money Congress decided to allocate and just refuse to let the government spend the money. That's called "impounding" the funds. Our system of government is defined in the Constitution by a balance of powers between Congress, the president, and the c...