The Week Magazine March 28, 2025

No administration in Washington has ever had trouble finding ways to spend money, but it’s unlikely that any was quite as proudly vocal about its spending as the Biden White House. Take the CHIPS Act, a centerpiece of the Biden administration’s industrial push (see Best Business Columns, p.34). The law allocated $52 billion in subsidies for projects that would have happened anyway, or for ones that are already imploding. Intel, the biggest beneficiary under the act, has pushed back the completion date of its new Ohio plant from 2025 to 2031—a date that sounds suspiciously like “never.” And then there is the Environmental Protection Agency, whose mandate the Trump administration is drastically rolling back (see Talking Points, p.17). The powers of the EPA, always expansive, multiplied after climate change…

What happened President Trump this week demanded the impeachment of a federal judge who ordered a halt to the mass deportation of Venezuelan nationals under rarely used wartime powers—an order his administration seemingly defied by sending several planeloads of migrants to a Salvadoran prison. The president invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 last week to justify the arrest and deportation of 137 alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; another 124 migrants were deported under normal immigration proceedings. After advocacy groups sued to stop five Venezuelans from being removed under the act, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued a two-week block on such deportations and ordered that any flights carrying deportees be returned to the U.S. But three planes—one of which left the U.S. after Boasberg’s…

“Clashes between executive and judicial power are all but certain to reach the Supreme Court in the weeks ahead,” said Jess Bravin in The Wall Street Journal. Amid the deportation fight, Trump has challenged the legality of preemptive pardons issued by former President Joe Biden before he left office. Trump claimed the pardons, designed to protect family members and officials who’d crossed or investigated Trump, were “null and void” because they’d been signed with an autopen, a common practice. Legal experts say there’s “little to no support in the law” for the gambit; Trump said it will “be up to a court” to decide. Meanwhile, in a “grievance-filled” speech at the Department of Justice, Trump vowed “vengeance” on his enemies, said Alan Feuer in The New York Times. He…

What happened Russian President Vladimir Putin this week nixed President Trump’s 30-day cease-fire plan, which Ukraine had accepted, and insisted that peace would require the U.S. and Europe to halt all military and intelligence aid to Ukraine. In a two-hour phone call, the two leaders settled on a lesser cease-fire: a 30-day pause on attacks on power plants and refineries plus a prisoner swap. The White House readout of the call said the agreement barred strikes on “energy and infrastructure,” and Trump later told Fox News, “We didn’t talk about aid at all.” But the Kremlin’s readout maintained that only attacks on “energy infrastructure” would be paused and that Putin had insisted the “key condition” to peace was a total halt to foreign military and intelligence aid to Kyiv.…

■ Elena Hershey, 53, was already planning to donate a kidney when she found out through friends that her high school prom date, Shawn Moyer, was on the list for a transplant but faced a 10-year wait. Although they weren’t a blood match, Hershey enrolled in a National Kidney Registry program to donate a kidney to an anonymous recipient in exchange for a voucher that moved Moyer up the list. Moyer’s wait plummeted to a few months, and he received a living donor’s kidney in February. ■ When Máximo Napa Castro set out from the Peruvian port of Marcona on his fishing boat in December, he expected to spend a month at sea. But 13 days later he was stranded in the Pacific Ocean when his engine stopped working.…

This really could be “the end of the university as we know it,” said Meghan O’Rourke in The New York Times. After canceling $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University, the Trump administration last week ordered that the school make a series of drastic changes—including placing its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under “academic receivership”—to get the money back. Ostensibly, this is intended to rectify Columbia’s “continued inaction” against antisemitism, but that rationale is highly questionable. Last year’s campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza led to the resignation of Columbia’s then-president, the expulsion of several students, and the creation of an antisemitism task force at the school. More to the point, it’s hard to see how cutting funds for research into breast cancer and…