Unbreaking
unbreaking.org
Unbreaking
@unbreaking.org
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us. All of our content is free to republish and remix. https://unbreaking.org/
The fight against authoritarianism has many fronts. At Unbreaking, we choose to work against information overload and for collective understanding. On our Immigration timeline, we track major and representative events from across the US—now filterable by legal case:

unbreaking.org/issues/immig...
November 25, 2025 at 4:27 PM
The federal government continues to roll new datasets into its surveillance operation and use them to target immigrants. We learned this week that ICE’s Mobile Companion app now includes driver’s license data:

www.404media.co/this-app-let...
This App Lets ICE Track Vehicles and Owners Across the Country
Material viewed by 404 Media shows data giant Thomson Reuters enriches license plate data with marriage, voter, and ownership records. The tool can predict where a car may be in the future.
www.404media.co
November 21, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Reposted by Unbreaking
Thanks to the work of @unbreaking.org's website team, we can filter on tags now! The immigration page is starting with tags for court cases, which is how we know that we are following nearly 50 of the things.

unbreaking.org/issues/immig...
Immigration — Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
unbreaking.org
November 21, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Unbreaking
We quietly launched a new thing over on @unbreaking.org: letting folks filter our *in-depth* timelines down into the pieces they care about, to help them pull out the threads that are most relevant to them.

This was a real team effort; can’t wait to see more of our pages roll out their own filters.
We are working on *lots of things* but last night we soft-launched a change I am psyched about that makes our timelines filterable. Now you can see all of a case's entries on a given timeline in one place:

unbreaking.org/issues/immig...
November 21, 2025 at 6:27 PM
This week, we updated our pages on data security and surveillance, immigration, the federal workforce, and medical research funding. Our brisk, rigorously cited weekly briefing is live at Unbreaking:

unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...
Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
Unbreaking.org
November 21, 2025 at 12:50 AM
Earlier this month, @propublica.org published a fascinating (and frankly horrifying) investigation into the Trump administration’s failure to inspect overseas facilities that process food for US consumers.

You can read their report in full here: www.propublica.org/article/fore...
Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts
The dramatic shift in oversight comes at a time when the U.S. has never been more reliant on foreign food, which accounts for the vast majority of the nation’s seafood and more than half its fresh fru...
www.propublica.org
November 19, 2025 at 5:13 PM
Last Wednesday marked the end of the longest government shutdown in US history, and Unbreaking will continue to update our resources as its effects become clear. In the meantime, our most recent briefing explores Medicaid and the loss of federal food safety oversight: unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...
This week at Unbreaking, November 13 — Unbreaking
As of yesterday, the longest-ever shutdown of the federal government has ended. We’ll be updating our timelines and explainers as the implications of this resolution become clear for all the issues we...
unbreaking.org
November 18, 2025 at 10:44 PM
Our weekly briefing is out, this one touching on Medicaid but mostly looking at what we’re losing in federal food safety oversight. Spoiler, it is “things that keep our food from making us sick.”

unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...
This week at Unbreaking, November 13 — Unbreaking
Unbreaking is built to be an antidote to information overload. Since we launched, we have been meticulously documenting lawsuits, executive orders, court rulings, countermoves, and other key events.
unbreaking.org
November 13, 2025 at 10:57 PM
The biggest news we have on the federal workforce this week relates to a lawsuit we’ve been watching in California. On October 28, the judge in that case indefinitely blocked mass layoffs during the government shutdown:

www.npr.org/2025/10/28/n...
Judge indefinitely halts shutdown layoffs noting human toll
A federal judge in San Francisco has indefinitely halted thousands of layoffs of federal employees announced by the Trump administration since Oct. 1.
www.npr.org
November 6, 2025 at 9:58 PM
We have a new timeline up today on our Medical Research Funding page, documenting the onslaught of political, legal, and bureaucratic attacks on medical research since January:

unbreaking.org/issues/medic...
Medical Research Funding: Timeline — Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
unbreaking.org
November 6, 2025 at 9:58 PM
Our Immigration and Data Security teams worked together this week to understand how immigration-linked data grabs and shoddy facial recognition apps are laying the groundwork for a surveillance state.

unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...
This week at Unbreaking, November 6 — Unbreaking
Unbreaking is built to be an antidote to information overload. Since we launched, we have been meticulously documenting lawsuits, executive orders, court rulings, countermoves, and other key events.
unbreaking.org
November 6, 2025 at 9:57 PM
We have a new timeline up today on our Food Safety page, documenting how individual events continue to chip away at the personnel, regulations, and oversight mechanisms that make up our food safety systems:
unbreaking.org/issues/food-...
Food Safety: Timeline — Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
unbreaking.org
October 30, 2025 at 10:52 PM
The continued government shutdown means that NIH staff remain furloughed, with grant review panels postponed and delays of new and existing grants: www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
Researchers, Colleges Face Federal Shutdown Impacts
Two weeks into the government shutdown with no resolution in sight, higher ed associations and researchers say the inability of scientists to contact federal agency workers or get new grants approved ...
www.insidehighered.com
October 24, 2025 at 2:54 AM
In Immigration this week, we saw more ICE raids around the country, expansions of immigration enforcement—often under the guise of crime reduction—in blue cities, and great reporting on the assembly of an unaccountable national police force. Our briefing is up:
unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...
This week at Unbreaking, October 23 — Unbreaking
We caught up on what’s been happening in data security, immigration, and medical research funding, along with what’s happened in the federal workforce since the government shutdown began October 1.
unbreaking.org
October 24, 2025 at 2:53 AM
We caught up on what’s been happening with the federal workforce since the shutdown began. Since January 20, the Trump admin’s DOGE has been linked to 289,000 job cuts. Federal job losses dramatically exceed every other kind of job loss this year:
unbreaking.org/issues/equal...
Equality at Work: Explainer — Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
unbreaking.org
October 24, 2025 at 2:50 AM
This week, the administration continued to amass sensitive personal information about people in the US and also undermined more systems that protect data once the federal government holds it. People and states keep fighting back.
unbreaking.org/issues/data-...
Data Security — Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
unbreaking.org
October 24, 2025 at 2:49 AM
Congressional Democrats are refusing to authorize short-term measures to keep the government open unless Republicans agree to renew ACA subsidies, and possibly to reverse Medicaid cuts as well. As the shutdown enters its third week, we look at the ripple effects of this summer’s healthcare cuts.
October 16, 2025 at 7:58 PM
The Trump administration has slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs this year, leaving many vital federal functions un- or under-staffed, and they don’t seem to be letting up. We updated our Equality at Work timeline this week, and here’s what we saw: unbreaking.org/issues/equal...
Equality at Work: Timeline — Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
unbreaking.org
October 10, 2025 at 8:06 PM
In its latest attack on academic freedom, the administration offered nine universities preferential access to federal funds in exchange for scrapping DEI, capping international student enrollment, and promoting conservative views on campus:
www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...
Exclusive | White House Asks Colleges to Sign Sweeping Agreement to Get Funding Advantage
An initial round of nine schools, including Dartmouth, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, are being asked to sign a wide-ranging “compact.”
www.wsj.com
October 10, 2025 at 8:03 PM
Since our last update, the administration ramped up its quest for voter data, suing six more states that refused to give their voter rolls to the DOJ:
www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
DOJ Sues Six States, Escalating Campaign to Seize Private Voter Data
Read more here.
www.democracydocket.com
October 10, 2025 at 8:00 PM
The clear story in Immigration this week is the escalation of—and pushback against—the Trump administration’s militarized raids and warrantless stops in Democrat-run major cities. We’ve updated our timeline with a lot of events in this zone:

unbreaking.org/issues/immig...
Immigration — Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
unbreaking.org
October 10, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Amidst the other chaos of the government shutdown you might have missed the fact that the House’s version of the appropriations bill bans federal funding for all gender-affirming care, for any patient of any age. transitics.substack.com/p/the-new-ho...
The New House Appropriations Bill Doesn’t Just Target Trans Care, But All LGBTQ+ Americans
Breaking down the potential implications of the worst legislative attack LGBTQ+ Americans have faced in years.
transitics.substack.com
October 3, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Despite the ongoing massive cuts, we saw some wins for research at major universities in this update for our Medical Research Funding page:
unbreaking.org/issues/medic...
Medical Research Funding — Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
unbreaking.org
September 26, 2025 at 4:10 PM
In Data Security, we continue to see the Trump administration attempt to acquire & weaponize ever-larger swathes of personal data, including voting & medical records, financial data, & detailed information on benefits recipients. But states & judges are pushing back.

unbreaking.org/issues/data-...
Data Security — Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
unbreaking.org
September 26, 2025 at 4:08 PM
Many of the Trump administration’s immigration actions this summer fell into three connected categories: 1) They are making hundreds of thousands of lawfully present immigrants “illegal” and therefore deportable:
www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-...
Mass Deportation: Analyzing the Trump Administration's Attacks on Immigrants, Democracy, and America - American Immigration Council
The first six months of President Trump’s return to office have marked the most extreme changes to the immigration system in modern U.S. history.
www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org
September 26, 2025 at 3:59 PM