SCOOP: The Trump administration has installed a new acting director of the Census Bureau, @npr.org has learned. George Cook takes over the federal government’s largest statistical agency after it's been thrust into the middle of a renewed attempt by President Trump to alter the national head count

The Department of Homeland Security, with help from DOGE, has rolled out a tool that purports to be able to check the citizenship status of almost all Americans.

Disappeared Tufts Human Dev. PhD student Rumesya Ozturk is also a graduate of Teachers College - she’s a dev. psychologist studying children’s media & prosocial development. She also bakes without recipes and binge-watches cartoons. She is our colleague & she was abducted on the street w/ our tax $.

NEW: An @npr.org review of thousands of pages of records across more than a dozen federal lawsuits finds an alarming pattern across agencies, where DOGE has given conflicting information about what data it has accessed, who has that access, and most importantly — why. w/@jennamclaughlin.bsky.social

One of the most important things I have learned from the study of history: Our circumstances are contingent, the result of countless overlapping developments. And that means that nothing is inevitable. What comes next will be the product of the choices we make.

EPIC is backing an effort by Rep Trahan to gather info from the public about how the Privacy Act of 1974 should be updated. Adopted in the aftermath of Watergate, the Privacy Act is the principal law governing the collection & disclosure of personal info held by fed agencies
epic.org/epic-backs-r...

Totally get this.

It’s imperfect, but I think our kind of work has 3 roles right now:

- to document & remember (radical when time feels unmoored)

- to think & speak with precision (when so much noise rejects rigour)

- to see seemingly familiar things anew (articulating alternatives is a way out)

✨New Work✨ by me, @allisonkoe.bsky.social, and @kizilcec.bsky.social forthcoming at #CHI2025:

"Don't Forget the Teachers": Towards an Educator-Centered Understanding of Harms from Large Language Models in Education

🔗: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14592

As I write a book on the long history of the US government's use of information on individuals, I am reminded that it's not so much that we're doomed to repeat history, as it is that the same social conditions that brought about historical events predictably bring them about again.

ICYMI: Concern is growing over threats to public trust in the Census Bureau and its independence from political interference — and if you have information you think the public should know, I'm a @npr.org correspondent who's available on Signal at hansi.01

New, from me: DOGE's mass firings of probationary employees are a masterclass in how not to manage public organizations.
They don’t have a plan to fix what they are breaking because they don’t understand or care about the damage they are doing. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doge-misma...