The night the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) was taken over, March 17th, staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) walked round its headquarters smoking cigars and drinking beers while they dismantled the signage and disabled the computer systems. The takeover of the USIP building in Washington, DC, earlier that afternoon was one of the more notable moments of President Donald Trump’s revolution in the capital, because the think-tank is not actually part of the executive branch. The Institute’s board and president, George Moose, a veteran diplomat, were summarily fired. He and other senior staff were ultimately forced out of the building at the behest of three different police agencies. Then a DOGE staffer handed over the keys to the building to the federal government.

AMERICA’S MEASLES outbreak is alarming for several reasons. What began as a handful of cases in Texas in January has now surpassed 800 across several states, with many more cases probably going unreported. It is the worst outbreak in 30 years and has already killed three people. Other smaller outbreaks bring the total number of cases recorded in 2025 so far to over 1,000. But above all, public-health experts worry that the situation now is a sign of worse to come. Falling vaccination rates and cuts to public-health services could make such outbreaks more frequent and impossible to curb, eventually making measles endemic in the country again.

“IT’LL BE somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer,” was how Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, described the emerging Republican approach to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Joe Biden’s signature climate law. Pressure from companies and congressmen with clean-energy projects benefiting from its subsidies in their districts (most are found in Republican counties) suggested surgical precision would prevail. But relentless pressure to abolish the IRA from the president, who is a fan of drilling, baby, drilling and denounced the law as the “Green New Scam,” pointed instead to brute force. The president reinforced this by dropping in on a private party caucus on May 20th to strong-arm waverers and threaten dissenters with a MAGA primary challenge. “They won’t be Republicans much longer…they’d be knocked out so fast,” he declared.