Anticipatory Obedience at the Library of Congress; ACRLog: Blogging by and for academic and research librarians, March 28, 2025

 Violet Fox,  ACRLog: Blogging by and for academic and research librarians; Anticipatory Obedience at the Library of Congress

"Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Violet Fox to the ACRLog team. Violet is a Cataloging & Metadata Librarian at Northwestern University’s Galter Health Sciences Library. She is the creator of the Cataloging Lab, a wiki designed to encourage collaboration in library metadata. Violet is passionate about critical cataloging, zine librarianship, and promoting the mental health of library workers. 

On February 18, the Library of Congress (LC) sent an email announcement through its regular channels about a special list of revisions in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). This list contained 45 proposed revisions to LCSH relating to Trump’s Executive Order 14172 “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” These revisions would change the LCSH for Gulf of Mexico to America, Gulf of, and would change the LCSH for Mount Denali back to McKinley, Mount (Alaska).

Geographic names in LCSH generally follow the form of name decided on by the US Board on Geographic Names, a body under the Secretary of the Interior. (This relationship is laid out in the LC Subject Heading Manual instruction sheet H 690 Formulating Geographic Headings.) The Board on Geographic Names takes its cues from the State Department, taking into account which countries the US has recognized.

It was not surprising that LC would follow the example of the US Board of Geographic Names, as that’s standard operating procedure. What wasn’t standard was the speed at which this revision was pushed through."

Trump Administration Moves to Shutter Library Agency; The New York Times, March 31, 2025

Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times; Trump Administration Moves to Shutter Library Agency

"The future of grant programs was not immediately clear. But the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing staff members, said in a statement that in the absence of staff all work processing applications for 2025 grants “has ended.”

“Without staff to administer the programs, it is likely that most grants will be terminated,” it said.

The agency, created in 1996 and reauthorized most recently in 2018 in legislation signed by Mr. Trump, has an annual budget of nearly $290 million, larger than either the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities. It provides funding to libraries and museums in every state and territory, with the bulk going to support essential but unglamorous functions like database systems and collections management.

Its largest program, known as Grants to States, delivers roughly $160 million annually to state library agencies, which covers one-third to one-half of their budgets, according the Chief Officers of State Library Associations, an independent group representing library officials.

Mr. Trump’s executive order prompted widespread mobilization by library and museum advocates, who issued multiple statements defending the agency and questioning the legality of moves against it. A bipartisan group of senators, including the Democrats Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, and Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, sent a letter calling on Mr. Sonderling to continue the agency’s mission."

Trump’s Mass Purge Finally Hits Museums and Libraries; The New Republic, March 31, 2025

 Malcolm Ferguson, The New Republic; Trump’s Mass Purge Finally Hits Museums and Libraries

"Elon Musk and DOGE just soft-fired everyone at the federal agency that supports local libraries and museums nationwide. 

All 70 Institute of Museum and Library Services employees were sent an email on Monday placing them on an immediate paid administrative leave, according to the American Federation of Government Employees union. 

This comes just two weeks after President Trump signed an executive order calling for IMLS to be shut down, and days after DOGE operatives infiltrated the IMLS facility while purging its leadership. 

“Earlier today, the Institute of Museum and Library Services notified the entire staff that they are being placed on administrative leave immediately. The notification followed a brief meeting between DOGE staff and IMLS leadership,” a statement from AFGE  read. “Employees were required to turn in all government property prior to exiting the building, and email accounts are being disabled today. Museums and libraries will no longer be able to contact IMLS staff for updates about the funding they rely upon.”

The IMLS has a $313 million annual budget and distributes taxpayer money to museums and libraries across the country. Its stated goal is to “advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development.”"

The Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America; Vanity Fair, March 31, 2025

  KEZIAH WEIR, Vanity Fair; The Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America

"Jason Stanley has spent the last two decades writing about power, language, and the ways both are corruptible. He is an expert on authoritarian regimes and the author of seven books, including 2018’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and last year’s Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, and has been a member of the Yale University faculty since 2013.

Last week, in what he calls an “impulsive” decision prompted by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump administration demands, he decided to leave—not just Yale, but the country altogether. This fall he’ll decamp to the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, where he was offered the position of Bissell Hyatt Chair in American Studies.

“Educational authoritarianism is frequently accompanied by more general restrictions on knowledge,” he writes in Erasing History, “and by attempts to push mythic representations in place of that knowledge.” In the book he likens conservative activist groups seeking book bans to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels keeping lists of books to be censored, and outlines attacks on the rights of LGBTQ+ people by various fascist regimes throughout history (among which he counts the Trump administration). When I ask whether he sees warning signs in sectors outside of education, he responds, “Are you fucking with me?”"...

[Vanity Fair] I think an anxiety for many people is, will we only really realize how bad things are once it becomes too late to do anything about it? How would you counsel people who are wondering how you know that it’s time to try to get out?

[Jason Stanley] Not my business. My business is to describe what’s happening. And you can read what I write and decide for yourself, but I’m not going to make other people’s decisions for them. I’m not into moralizing or lecturing; that’s not my thing. I’m an intellectual. What I do is I describe reality as I see it. I would love to live in the United States, but I want to live in the United States because it’s a place that is free. A lot of Americans don’t care about freedom. If you look at the polls, they say that Americans don’t value democracy at all. I have a different set of values. Democracy comes before the price of eggs. But what I think is particularly foolish and naive and stupid is to give up democracy and raise the price of eggs."

"Reading builds empathy": The case for saving America's libraries; Salon, March 30, 2025

 MELANIE MCFARLAND,

Salon; "Reading builds empathy": The case for saving America's libraries

"Libraries are the nexuses of democratized access to culture, community expertise, diverse perspectives on history and the instruments that further that knowledge. They also are gathering spots and safe spaces for the vulnerable.

“People who are in library leadership, on boards, and certainly librarians even today, are not interested in limiting, shaping, prescribing how that creative and generative expression should be had,” says John Chrastka, Executive Director and founder of the non-profit advocacy organization EveryLibrary. “They're just interested in making sure that everybody's got a fair shake to get to it.”

This may be why the Trump administration is set on starving our nation’s libraries to death, or close enough to it."

America’s Future Is Hungary; The Atlantic, May 2025

 Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic; America’s Future Is Hungary

MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

"He rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.

Orbán also talks a lot about “the people” while using his near-absolute power not to build Hungarian prosperity but to enrich a small group of wealthy businessmen, some of whom are members of his family. In Budapest, these oligarchs are sometimes called NER, or NER-people, or NERistan—nicknames that come from Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere or System of National Cooperation, the Orwellian name that Orbán gave to his political system—and they benefit directly from their proximity to the leader. Direkt36, one of the few remaining investigative-journalism teams in Hungary, recently made a documentary, The Dynasty, showing, for example, how competitions for state- and EU-funded contracts, starting in about 2010, were deliberately designed so that Elios Innovatív, an energy company co-owned by Orbán’s son-in-law István Tiborcz, would win them. The EU eventually looked into 35 contracts and found serious irregularities in many of them, as well as evidence of a conflict of interest. (In a 2018 statement, Elios said that it had followed legal regulations, which is no doubt true; the whole point of this system is that it is legal.)"

The power of boycotts; The Ink, March 31, 2025

Anand Giridharadas, The Ink; The power of boycotts

"Elon Musk’s feelings are hurt. His companies are suffering.

Weird, coming from the guy who denounced empathy as Western civilization’s “fundamental weakness.” While a little needling by Tim Walz about Tesla’s plummeting share price may have set him off, the real pain point is the #teslatakedown movement, which this past Saturday put on a worldwide day of action.

Folks on the right like to complain about boycotts. They’ve called them illegal. They’ve tried to intimidate those who’d dare use their economic power. They’ve threatened to criminalize the very idea. They’ve commingled peaceful calls for investors and shoppers to withhold their hard-earned dollars with acts of vandalism, and have tried to paint the entire movement as terrorism. But, as you might expect, accusations are confessions: what far-right political figures mean when they denounce boycotts is that they want to decide who gets boycotted.

So what is it that scares the guy who wants to privatize everything? Members of the public, exercising their private power to decide, and doing it collectively (Musk famously hates that whole collective thing). Because when that power is clearly targeted and well organized, it gets results. Maybe it’s the sheer gumption of speaking truth to power in its native language — money — that pains Musk. But that’s the free market, isn’t it?"

Outrage erupts as word spreads Merced County is mulling library privatization; Merced County Times, March 19, 2025

Jonathan Whitaker, Merced County Times; Outrage erupts as word spreads Merced County is mulling library privatization

"UPDATE TO STORY: On Thursday morning, March 20, Merced County released the following statement:

“Setting The Record Straight: No decisions have been made regarding privatization of the Merced County Library system. County Executive Office (CEO) staff is in the very early stages of exploring potential efficiencies as we routinely do with all of our departments, but no changes to library operations are currently underway. Merced County is always seeking ways to optimize services that benefit taxpayers and the community, but there are no plans or discussions to close libraries or to reduce services in any way, shape or form. Libraries are essential as they provide access to knowledge, foster lifelong learning, and offer a space for individuals to connect, grow and thrive.”...

Having worked in the librarian field for decades, Walsh said she knows of only one private enterprise that works in California with a county government — Riverside County — to provide library services. That firm is called Library Systems and Services or LS&S. According to the company’s website: “As the nation’s only company focused on operating public libraries, LS&S is trusted by community leaders to provide long-term library vitality, growth and service excellence. Through extensive experience partnering with communities, LS&S powers strong libraries by balancing cost and service.”...

On behalf of the League of Women Voters of Merced County, Walsh sent the following statement to the Times: “Reflecting on our commitment to fair, open, transparent, and democratic local government as well as our commitment to public libraries, the League has many concerns about the proposal to privatize the Merced County Public Library system. Here are two:

“Since the purported goal of the privatization of the Merced County Library is saving money, the LWV Merced County questions how money can be saved from such a thinly staffed, poorly supported system (in the bottom 10 percent of California county public library per capita funding)? How will efficiencies be made without drastic cuts to staff, services, materials, and perhaps even branches? What rubric is being used to measure such cuts against the damage that might be done to branch library holdings, databases, and services? What attention has been given to the loss of thousands of dollars that are raised in communities to support a public library system that will no longer be given to a privatized one?

“The LWV Merced County also questions how the planning of a proposal to privatize a fundamental county service serving thousands of county residents has come this far without once being mentioned in a Board of Supervisors meeting either on the agenda or in Board comments or without being agendized and discussed before the Merced County Library Commission? The fundamental question is how exactly did this situation develop given the specific restrictions of the Ralph M. Brown California open meetings law?”"

SLA ANNOUNCES DISSOLUTION; SLA, March 26, 2025

SLA ; SLA ANNOUNCES DISSOLUTION

"The Special Libraries Association (SLA), a global organization dedicated to supporting information professionals and specialized librarians, has announced it will begin a dissolution process after 116 years of service to the profession.

Since its founding in 1909, SLA has been a cornerstone for knowledge management, research, and information services across industries, providing invaluable networking, professional development opportunities, and advocacy for its members. After careful evaluation of the organization’s financial sustainability and the evolving needs of the profession, the SLA Board of Directors has made the difficult decision to begin the dissolution process of the Association. 

"This decision was not made lightly," said Hildy Dworkin, President of SLA. "For over a century, SLA has been a leader in the information profession, fostering collaboration and innovation among our members. However, shifting industry dynamics, changing professional needs, and financial realities have led us to this moment. We are incredibly proud of the legacy SLA leaves behind and the impact it has had on generations of professionals.""

‘It reminds you of a fascist state’: Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history; The Guardian, March 30, 2025

  David Smith, The Guardian; ‘It reminds you of a fascist state’: Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history

"The US president, who has sought to root out “wokeness” since returning to power in January, accused the Smithsonian of trying to rewrite history on issues of race and gender. In an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, he directed the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from its storied museums.

The move was met with dismay from historians who saw it as an attempt to whitewash the past and suppress discussions of systemic racism and social justice. With Trump having also taken over the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, there are fears that, in authoritarian fashion, he is aiming to control the future by controlling the past.

“It is a five-alarm fire for public history, science and education in America,” said Samuel Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst."

Two more law firms targeted by Trump sue to block punishing executive orders; Politico, March 28, 2025

 KYLE CHENEY and DANIEL BARNES, Politico; 

Two more law firms targeted by Trump sue to block punishing executive orders

"Two law firms targeted by President Donald Trump sued Friday to bar enforcement of his executive orders seeking to shut them out of government business and strip key lawyers of their security clearances.

In separate suits, Big Law firms Jenner & Block and WilmerHale say Trump’s effort to target them amounts to an unprecedented attack on the legal profession in retaliation for their work for past clients he doesn’t like and for past causes with which he disagrees. If carried out, they say, the orders would devastate their practices and have already begun to cause anxiety among their hundreds clients with government business."

Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for ‘improper ideology’; Associated Press via The Guardian, March 27, 2025

 Associated Press via The Guardian; Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for ‘improper ideology’

[Kip Currier: This Trump executive order is deeply disconcerting but not at all surprising: weeks ago, it was clear Trump 2.0 will target and attempt to reshape -- in its ideological image -- any institution that provides access to information, data, and the historical record, i.e. libraries, archives, and museums.]

[Excerpt]

"Donald Trump revealed his intentions to reshape the Smithsonian Institution with an executive order on Thursday that targets funding to programs with “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology”.

The president said there has been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite US history by replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”.

He signed an executive order putting JD Vance in charge of an effort to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

Trump’s order specifically names the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Women’s history museum, which is in development.

“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn – not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” the order said."

Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward; NPR, March 27, 2025

 Bobby Allyn, NPR ; Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward

"A federal judge on Wednesday rejected OpenAI's request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times that alleges that the tech company exploited the newspaper's content without permission or payment.

In an order allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, narrowed the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the case's main copyright infringement claims to go forward.

Stein did not immediately release an opinion but promised one would come "expeditiously."

The decision is a victory for the newspaper, which has joined forces with other publishers, including The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, to challenge the way that OpenAI collected vast amounts of data from the web to train its popular artificial intelligence service, ChatGPT."

U.S. to End Vaccine Funds for Poor Countries; The New York Times, March 26, 2025

 Stephanie Nolen, The New York Times; U.S. to End Vaccine Funds for Poor Countries

[Kip Currier: Luke: 12:48: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be required; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked."

What a tragic policy decision -- by the richest country on earth -- to stop financial support for vital vaccines that save lives and protect at-risk Global South children and adults.

As a nation, we have a moral imperative and calling to share our abundance with people in need.]

[Excerpt]

"The Trump administration intends to terminate the United States’ financial support for Gavi, the organization that has helped purchase critical vaccines for children in developing countries, saving millions of lives over the past quarter century, and to significantly scale back support for efforts to combat malaria, one of the biggest killers globally.

The administration has decided to continue some key grants for medications to treat H.I.V. and tuberculosis, and food aid to countries facing civil wars and natural disasters.

Those decisions are included in a 281-page spreadsheet that the United States Agency for International Development sent to Congress Monday night, listing the foreign aid projects it plans to continue and to terminate. The New York Times obtained a copy of the spreadsheet and other documents describing the plans.

The documents provide a sweeping overview of the extraordinary scale of the administration’s retreat from a half-century-long effort to present the United States to the developing world as a compassionate ally and to lead the fight against infectious diseases that kill millions of people annually."

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal; The Atlantic, March 26, 2025

 Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris , The Atlantic; Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

"On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat—the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz—we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared."

Remember when ethics in government mattered?; Virginia Mercury, March 25, 2025

 Ivy Main , Virginia Mercury; Remember when ethics in government mattered?

"Trading favors among the rich and powerful seems to be how it works in Trump’s America. Anyone who isn’t using his public position for his own gain is a chump. And while the laws prohibiting corruption are still on the books, Trump has ensured there are no federal prosecutors left with the independence to go after his allies. 

Besides which, in the unlikely event your cupidity actually gets you convicted of a crime, the president has a history going back to his first term of handing out pardons to MAGA loyalists regardless of their crimes. Sufficiently demonstrating fealty to the president may be enough to secure your place in his No Grifter Left Behind program. Frankly, the judge who sentences you has more to fear from the president than you do.  

By design, Trump’s attacks on American government, civil society and the world order have been so various and extreme as to leave opponents breathless. The resistance looks like a team of firefighters trying to deal with a large and very determined pack of juvenile arsonists. 

Yet, of all the fires now burning, Trump’s attacks on the rule of law might pose the single greatest threat to the country’s stability and prosperity. Trump’s firing of government watchdogs, blacklisting a law firm that represented his enemies, and defying judges who rule against him are unprecedented in modern U.S. history. Our economy as well as our democracy was built on a system of checks and balances that made corruption the newsworthy exception rather than the dismal norm."

Academic Publishers Braced for Slowdown as Trump DEI Purge Bites; Inside Higher Ed, March 21, 2025

 Jack Grove for Times Higher Education; Academic Publishers Braced for Slowdown as Trump DEI Purge Bites

"Academic presses may face a slump in sales as U.S. university librarians become more cautious about buying books related to gender, politics or race in light of Donald Trump’s attack on “woke” research, publishers have warned."

Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works; Variety, March 17, 2025

 Todd Spangler , Variety; Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works

"More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies.

The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others — which included Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Cord Jefferson, Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Taika Waititi — were submitting comments for the Trump administration’s U.S. AI Action Plan⁠. The letter specifically was penned in response to recent submissions to the Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI and Google, which asserted that U.S. copyright law allows (or should allow) allow AI companies to train their system on copyrighted works without obtaining permission from (or compensating) rights holders."

In His Second Term, Trump Fuels a ‘Machinery’ of Misinformation; The New York Times, March 24, 2025

  Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times; In His Second Term, Trump Fuels a ‘Machinery’ of Misinformation

"This time, Mr. Trump is joined by a coterie of cabinet officials and advisers who have amplified them and even spread their own. Together, they are effectively institutionalizing disinformation.

While it is still early in his term, and many of his executive orders face legal challenges that could blunt the impact of any falsehoods driving them, Mr. Trump and his advisers have ushered the country into a new era of post-truth politics, where facts are contested and fictions used to pursue policy goals."

Delete your DNA from 23andMe right now; The Washington Post, March 24, 2025

 Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Washington Post; Delete your DNA from 23andMe right now

"The company said there will be “no changes” to the way it protects consumer data while in bankruptcy court. But unless you take action, there is a risk your genetic information could end up in someone else’s hands — and used in ways you had never considered. It took me just a minute to delete my data on the 23andMe website, and I’ve got instructions on how to do it below.

It’s a privacy nightmare, but also an example of how state privacy laws pioneered in California can help protect Americans — at least the proactive ones...

The California Consumer Protection Act of 2018 gives you the right to delete data from businesses that collect it. While the law specifically applies to California residents, many other states have passed similar laws.

And California also has a separate law pertaining to DNA data, called the Genetic Information Privacy Act. It gives you the right to delete your account, have your biological sample destroyed, and revoke consent you may have previously given to use or disclose your genetic data."

Nasa drops plan to land first woman and first person of color on the moon; The Guardian, March 21, 2025

 Richard Luscombe  , The Guardian; Nasa drops plan to land first woman and first person of color on the moon

"Nasa has dropped its longstanding public commitment to land the first woman and person of color on the moon, in response to Donald Trump’s directives to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices at federal agencies.

The promise was a central plank of the space agency’s Artemis program, which is scheduled to return humans to the lunar surface in 2027 for the first time since the final Apollo mission in December 1972.

The Artemis landing page of Nasa’s website previously included the words: “Nasa will land the first woman, first person of color, and first international partner astronaut on the Moon using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.”

The version of the page live on the website on Friday, however, appears with the phrase removed...

The move by Nasa is particularly notable because the creation of the Artemis program, and decision to land the first woman and person of color on the moon, were made in 2019 during the first Trump administration, according to the science journal Ars Technica.

The agency has made strides in recent years to embrace diversity and move away from its reputation as being staffed by old, white men. All 12 people who walked on the moon during six Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972 were white men aged between 36 and 47.

The first spaceflight by a US woman did not take place until 1983, when Sally Ride flew on the space shuttle Challenger. Nasa’s first Black astronaut in space was Guion Bluford, who flew a mission on Challenger later the same year."

Legal experts say Trump official broke law by saying ‘Buy Tesla’ stock but don’t expect a crackdown; AP, March 21, 2025

 BERNARD CONDON , AP; Legal experts say Trump official broke law by saying ‘Buy Tesla’ stock but don’t expect a crackdown

"A week after President Donald Trump turned the White House lawn into a Tesla infomercial for Elon Musk’s cars, a second sales pitch by a U.S. official occurred, this time for Tesla stock.

“It will never be this cheap,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Wednesday. “Buy Tesla.”

Government ethics experts say Lutnick broke a 1989 law prohibiting federal employees from using “public office for private gain,” later detailed to include a ban on ”endorsements.” Although presidents are generally exempt from government ethics rules, most federal employees are not and are often punished for violations, including rebukes like the one Conway got.

As of Friday, no public action had been taken against Lutnick and it was unclear whether he would suffer a similar fate.

“They’re not even thinking of ethics,” said Trump critic and former Republican White House ethics czar Richard Painter of administration officials."