Good morning. It is the 28th of March. It is a cloudy morning here in New York City. It's supposed to get up to 65 today before spiking to 79 on Saturday and then dropping to a high of 57 on Sunday. Why should the weather be immune to the chaos any more than anything else is? And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news.

An immensely powerful earthquake north of Mandalay in Myanmar close to the surface and estimated at 7.7 on the Richter scale has devastated a long stretch of Southeast Asia. In Bangkok, more than 500 miles away. The AP reports that a 33-story tower under construction collapsed killing at least three people and leaving 90 missing.

“The extent of death, injury and destruction,” the AP writes, “especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times was not yet clear. The U S geological survey estimates that more than four and a half million people were exposed to severe or violent shaking and estimates that the fatalities are likely in the thousands and probably above 10,000.” 

President Donald Trump issued an executive order last night claiming the power to terminate collective bargaining agreements across more than 10 different federal agencies, thereby de-unionizing hundreds of thousands of workers. His formal claim is that the agencies have national security responsibilities, which would give the president the power to overrule their labor agreements. These national security agencies would include the FDA, the International Trade Commission, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Veterans Affairs, among many, many others with no identifiable connection to frontline national security. 

The order exempts police and firefighters, the unions that the right wing supports. It also, since the Supreme Court has ruled that the motives behind the president's actions cannot be examined, goes ahead and declares the unlawful motive that certain federal unions have declared war on president Trump's agenda. 

Trump also put out another executive order Demanding that federal historic sites and the Smithsonian be purged of Ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history Including an ideological reformation of the national zoo Among the impermissible claims being promoted by the Smithsonian according to the executive order is the view that race is not a biological reality, but a social construct. Pure elemental racism is now official White House policy. 

Elon Musk, in an effort to throw Wisconsin's upcoming Supreme Court election to a right-wing candidate, announced that he plans to travel to Wisconsin and deliver a public speech at which he has said he will personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each to people who have voted in the election that he is trying to influence. 

The New York Times, in its endless campaign against directly publishing the truth, described this maneuver as a “legally contentious escalation of Musk's spending to encourage right-wing voters.” By legally contentious, what the Times means is that it is clearly and straightforwardly illegal. 

The Senate voted yesterday to cancel the $5 limit on bank overdraft fees that the Biden administration had put in place using the Congressional Review Act. Josh Hawley was the only Republican to cross party lines and vote against letting banks rip people off. The Times quotes the chief executive of the American Bankers Association, Rob Nichols, as complaining that “the rule would force many banks to limit or eliminate overdraft protection as we know it.” If by overdraft protection as you know it, you mean huge predatory hits on people's resources at the moment when they are, by definition, at their brokest, yeah, it sure would. “Absent the rule,” the story notes, “fees are typically $35 per overdraft.” 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column is “U.S. HEALTH DEPT. TO LAY OFF 10,000 IN MAJOR REVAMP CUTS AT F.D.A. AND C.D.C. / Restructuring Is Aimed to Put Functions Under Kennedy’s Control.”

This round of slashing, at the orders of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Would, the Times writes, “pare the health department down to about 62,000 employees after having been at 82,000 before the Trump administration set about cutting it. ‘We're going to do more with less, Mr. Kennedy said.’” 

Next to that in the second column, the Times tries to keep the Signal chat scandal going. “In Past, Leak Would Prompt A Harder Line / Such Disclosures Were Often Prosecuted.” 

“Defense secretaries,” the story says, “usually take a hard line when it comes to the disclosure of classified information on their watch. During President George W. Bush's administration, Donald H. Rumsfeld said that those who break federal law in doing so should be imprisoned. His successor, Robert Gates, said it should be a career-ending offense for anyone in the Defense Department. But,” the Times writes, “after a leak on a commercial messaging app, the Trump administration has played down the episode and signaled there is little chance of an investigation.” 

Coverage of how this should be a severe scandal, but probably won’t, takes up almost a full two page spread inside the paper. There's the jump of the front page story accompanied by “Bondi signals justice department won't pursue chat inquiry,” quoting attorney general Pam Bondi in her role as the Trump presidency's personal legal defender saying “what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission.” And then pivoting to complaining about Hillary Clinton's email server and Joe Biden's possession of classified documents. “She did not,” the Times writes, “mention the prosecution of Donald J. Trump over his handling of classified documents after his first term in office.” 

On the next page, it's “Fighter pilots angry over breach and Hegseth's refusal to admit error.” 

“The mistaken inclusion of the editor in chief of the Atlantic in the chat, and Mr. Hegseth's insistence that he did nothing wrong by disclosing the secret plans,” the Times writes, “upend decades of military doctrine about operational security, a dozen Air Force and Navy fighter pilots said.” 

On the question of whether the specific information about airplane launch times that Pete Hegseth put in the chat could have gotten American forces killed, the Times quotes Vice Admiral Kevin Donaghan, a former commander of U.S. Naval forces in the Middle East, saying, “assuming the timeline and information reported is true, the likelihood of anything getting to anyone who could have done anything in such a short time was very low. In the end, our planes did not get shot down and no US service personnel were injured or died. But,” the Times continues, “one former senior Defense Department official with military experience, not quite as clear a portrait of expertise as former commander of US Naval forces in the Middle East, said the Times writes, “Mr. Hegseth's text describing launch times and the type of strike aircraft was indeed classified information that could have jeopardized pilots lives if it had been released or obtained.” 

The Times also looked at the video of FAA-18 Hornets taking off from the aircraft carrier on the mission and noted that they were “armed with 500 pound and thousand pound bombs that could only be dropped well within range of the Houthis air defenses.” 

Below that, “Trump administration deflects blame for the leak of a signal chat at every turn,” a rundown of the various ways that nobody took responsibility. Headings include “Mr. Hegseth said the details he shared were not technically war plans,” and “Tulsi Gabbard, the spy chief, said she wasn't really involved,” and “John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, insisted he personally did nothing wrong,” and “Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump's special envoy to the Middle East said he didn't have his phone on him as the plans were under discussion.” 

That's because Witkoff is the one who was traveling in Russia when the chat happened. In a post on social media, the Times writes, “he denied that he had his phone with him, saying he only had a secure phone provided by the government for special circumstances when you travel to regions where you do not want your devices compromised.” 

The one non-signal chat story on that two page spread is the news that all out Trump loyalist representative Elise Stefanik had her nomination to be the ambassador to the UN withdrawn by President Trump “amid concern,” the Times writes, “about the minuscule voting margin that Republicans hold in the House. Ms. Stefanik,” the Times writes, “had apparently expected her wait to be confirmed would soon be over. She has spent the past week on Instagram posting a nostalgic retrospective of her time in Congress as she prepared for her tenure there to end. And she participated in a farewell tour across her district in upstate New York.” 

After promoting Mike Waltz from Congress to be his national security advisor, from which position he was apparently the one to bring Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg into the signal chat. Trump is now worried that the special election to fill his spot, which is supposed to be a safe Republican seat, may not be a guaranteed Republican victory after all. 

Earlier this week in a Pennsylvania state Senate special election, a Democratic candidate flipped a seat that had been in a district that voted for Trump by 15 points, and the administration may be unwilling to test how unpopular its policies are in a special election for Stefanik's seat. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you can, and if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.