'Not a happy departure': Famed NY Times columnist sounds off after abrupt exit

Paul Krugman , the Nobel Prize-winning economist who recently retired from The New York Times after 25 years, tried to set the record straight Tuesday about his abrupt exit, blasting the paper for what he felt were increasingly unnecessarily tight editorial controls — that resulted in "sober, dull opinion pieces." Krugman — who gave a bleak farewell last month — minced no words in opening his latest piece, posted to his blog "The Contrarian." "Despite the encomiums issued by the Times, it was not a happy departure," he said.

ALSO READ: Top GOPer's ‘most immediate’ priority for new committee includes probing a MAGA conspiracy Krugman said his relationship with the Times "degenerated to a point" where he felt he couldn’t stay. The economist said for his first 24 years he faced few editorial constraints, and his drafts mostly received lighter copyedits, even as some of his positions unnerved leadership at the paper. "So I was dismayed to find out this past year, when the current Times editors and I began to discuss our differences, that current management and top editors appear to have been completely unaware of this important bit of the paper’s history and my role in it.



Krugman lamented that his popular blog where he could dive deeper into topics with charts and graphs got the axe from the Times in 2017. Twitter threads, he said, proved to be an insufficient substitute, leading him to launch a Substack blog for the more "technical material." But the Times pushed back, ultimately caving to allow him to publish the more in-depth content in the Times newsletter twice a week.

Until September, when his newsletter "was suddenly suspended by the Times." "The only reason I was given was 'a problem of cadence': according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper.

Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers," he wrote. To boot, said Krugman, the "light touch" edits went to "extremely intrusive" — including "substantial rewrites." "These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence," he wrote.

The end result felt "flat and colorless," he added. Krugman also complained that Times editors told him he'd already written about a topic, insisting it can take multiple columns to sufficiently cover a subject. "If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion.

Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, 'we are being lied into war," he said. Krugman was left with the impression that his "byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer" his.

As such, he departed. Political observers from both sides of the aisle didn’t hold back unloading on President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke former Gen. Mark Milley’s government-funded security detail, which newly minted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was poised to announce he is “immediately pulling,” according to media reports.

Milley, the retired U.S. Army general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, became the latest in a growing list of former Trump administration officials turned critics who have had their security protections ended in the days after Trump returned to the White House last week.

That list also includes former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his top aide, Brian Hook, as well as former National Security Adviser John Bolton – all of whom, like Milley, had been targeted by Iran for assassination. But for Milley, who during the 2024 campaign described Trump as "fascist to the core," the retribution will go a step further. Hegseth is also said to be assembling a review board to establish if there is enough evidence to strip Milley of a star based on his actions in Trump’s first term to “undermine the chain of command," Fox News reported .

The new development prompted a mix of outrage on social media for both Trump and Hegseth. ALSO READ: Top GOPer's ‘most immediate’ priority for new committee includes probing a MAGA conspiracy “Hegseth is pathetic,” political consultant and Army veteran Fred Wellman told his followers on Bluesky. “He isn't half the man as Mark Milley.

” “These dolts are tougher on Mark Milley than Vladimir Putin,” attorney Heath Mayo, founder of the conservative-leaning group Principles First, wrote on Twitter. “Wake up, America. We elected dummies.

” Former Trump administration communications aide Alyssa Farah Griffin reminded her followers of the extent of Milley’s military career. “Is this how America treats its heroes?” Griffin, a co-host on ABC’s “The View,” said in an X post . “Regardless of your politics, Milley served in the US Army for 4 decades in roles including with the 82nd Airborne Division, 5th Special Forces Group,7th Infantry Division, 2nd Infantry Division, & 25th Infantry Division.

Shameful.” Former Tea Party Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) warned his followers on Bluesky that “Trump is Turning The Presidency into A Dictatorship - Where The Hell Are You Democrats ?” “Dear Americans who voted for Trump,” Walsh wrote .

“You voted to put an incredibly small, petty, pathetic, un-American person in charge. You voted to make America more divided and less secure. That’s such a shame.

” “You will recall, Trump was afraid of going to Vietnam to serve his country and got deferments for ‘bone spurs,’" podcast host Jack Hopkins reminded his followers on Bluesky. “Milley received the Defense Superior Service Medal and was nominated for a valor award for his actions in Iraq.” Democratic strategist Chris Jackson called the decision “a move of cowardice” and criticized Hegseth in an X post before adding “what a pathetic man.

” A cohort of subordinates of tech billionaire Elon Musk have taken over an important federal agency, in a move that according to WIRED Magazine unnerves experts, and "one official found reminiscent of Stalin." People working in the government report "that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government — are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall.

Scott Kupor, a managing partner at the powerful investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, stands as Trump’s nominee to run the OPM . But already in place, according to sources, are a variety of people who seem ready to carry out Musk’s mission of cutting staff and disrupting the government." Some figures now embedded in OPM include chief of staff Amanda Scales, who worked at Musk's xAI company, senior adviser Riccardo Biasini, who directed Musk's experimental "Vegas Loop" underground Tesla tunnel network, and a pair of extremely young software engineers, one of whom worked at Musk's brain-implant company Neuralink, and another of whom worked for Palantir, the data analytics firm run by longtime Musk associate and right-wing megadonor Peter Thiel.

ALSO READ: Top GOPer's ‘most immediate’ priority for new committee includes probing a MAGA conspiracy University of Michigan public policy professor Don Moynihan told WIRED that the risk is that Trump could use the software talent injected into OPM to further his goal of reclassifying federal workers to strip them of job protections: “I think on the tech side, the concern is potentially the use of AI to try and engage in large-scale searches of people's job descriptions to try and identify who would be identified for Schedule F reclassification.” Musk, who bankrolled much of Trump's voter outreach operation last year, has no official position in the government but runs Trump's "Department of Government Efficiency" task force to recommend ways to slash federal programs. He was reportedly pushing to get an office in the West Wing , but Trump's chief of staff Susie Wiles put her foot down .

The billionaire has come under fire in recent days for making a gesture that has drawn comparisons to a Nazi salute at the president's inauguration rally. He vehemently denies that was the intent of the gesture. "This story was originally published by Grist .

Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here ." While President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of far-reaching decrees during his first week in office, one relatively niche issue has received a disproportionate share of the president’s ire and attention: California water policy. That might make sense if the remedies he’s pursuing could help stem deadly fires like those that have killed at least 29 people in the Los Angeles area in recent weeks.

Indeed, the president has claimed that “firefighters were unable to fight the blaze due to dry hydrants, empty reservoirs, and inadequate water infrastructure.” But unfortunately for future fire victims, the sole apparent aim of the president’s new policies is to deliver more water to farmers hundreds of miles away from the state’s fire zones. ALSO READ: Top GOPer's ‘most immediate’ priority for new committee includes probing a MAGA conspiracy On his first day as president, Trump issued an executive order that directed his Interior Department to “route more water” to the southern part of the state.

Then, on Sunday he issued another order that directed the department to immediately “override” the state’s management of its water, even if it meant overruling California law. The order also suggested Trump could withhold federal wildfire aid if the state failed to comply to his satisfaction. But the new measures wouldn’t deliver any more water to Los Angeles at all.

Instead, his attempt to relax water restrictions would move more water to large farms in the state’s sparsely populated Central Valley, a longtime pet issue for the president, who attempted a similar maneuver during his first term. This time he’s going further, proposing to gut endangered species rules and overrule state policy to deliver a win for the influential farmers who backed all three of his campaigns . None of this has any relation to wildfires in Los Angeles.

For one thing, the city isn’t experiencing a water shortage. It was ferocious, hurricane-force winds that fanned the Palisades and Eaton Fires — not a lack of water to contain the blazes. While some local water tanks in the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades did run out of water, that was only because the city couldn’t pump new supplies up to the hillside neighborhood fast enough to keep up with skyrocketing demand during the fire, not because there wasn’t enough water available to send there.

Even if Los Angeles were low on water, Trump’s executive orders wouldn’t help with that, because the federal government’s canal system doesn’t actually deliver any water to the Los Angeles area. More than 90 percent of that water goes to farms in the Central Valley, with the rest going to far-away cities around San Francisco and Sacramento. All this water is already spoken for, and during dry years the government can’t even fulfill all its existing contracts.

The most it can do is potentially ease environmental rules that limit some of the pumping, which farmers have long opposed. But even some farm advocates are skeptical of the sweeping scope of Trump’s most recent order, and its specious connection to wildfire. “I am always appreciative of attempts to create more flexibility for moving water around the state, but [federal] water by and large goes to agricultural contractors,” said Alex Biering, the senior policy advocate at the California Farm Bureau Federation, the state’s leading agricultural lobby.

“I don’t believe that any amount of additional water coming from the federal project would be able to be applied to stop that fire. It’s an attempt to tie water supply to a natural disaster, but those connections don’t exist in reality.” Environmental groups, meanwhile, have blasted Trump’s attempt to strongarm California water policy, saying his most recent order would be devastating for the state’s vulnerable fish species — and the integrity of the federal Endangered Species Act as a whole.

“It’s unrecognizable as anything that anybody who knows anything about California water would write,” said Jon Rosenfield, the science director at San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental nonprofit in the Golden State. “It’s not from this planet. California’s water system has been the subject of heated political debate for decades.

Over the course of the 20th century, the federal government and the state of California built a complex series of dams and canals designed to move water from the northern parts of the state, which see substantial precipitation and snowmelt, down to the agriculture-rich Central Valley and the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The federal government operates dams, canals, and pumping stations that push water south through the valley, and then the state operates the canal that extends down to Los Angeles. The system provides water to around 30 million Californians and irrigates around 4 million acres of the nation’s most productive farmland.

The crux of this transport system is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a sensitive marshland region where two of the state’s largest rivers converge and flow out into the San Francisco Bay. This area is also the point where endangered fish species like Chinook salmon enter from the Pacific and swim upstream to spawn. If the federal and state pumps move too much water out of the Delta for farms and cities, they reverse current flows, pulling fish toward their predators or sucking them into the pumps.

This is a violation of the Endangered Species Act. One of these vulnerable fish species, the 2-inch gray baitfish known as the Delta smelt, is particularly sensitive to these current changes, and the government often limits its pumping to protect it. On Monday night, Trump erroneously claimed in a Truth Social post that he had the military “turn on the water .

.. flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond” by activating the pumps, which had been offline for a few days for maintenance.

The pumped water does not come from the Pacific Northwest, and because the federal government already controls the pumps and uses them all the time, such an action does not require the involvement of the military. It’s California’s own state-run canal system that actually delivers water to Los Angeles and numerous other cities in Southern California — and the federal government has no jurisdiction over this. The state government curtails these water deliveries somewhat during dry years to maintain a robust supply, and it seldom provides all the water that each city requests.

However, deliveries to Los Angeles were typical last year, and reservoir levels in the state are above average. (Furthermore, the Los Angeles metro gets a larger share of its water from other sources, like the Colorado River and the Owens Valley.) Despite his East Coast upbringing, Donald Trump has fixated on Central Valley water issues for years.

He chose David Bernhardt, who has lobbied for the influential Westlands Water District, to lead the Department of the Interior during his first administration. He also hosted multiple rallies in the region during his 2020 campaign, during which he frequently foregrounded water policy. During his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast last year, then-candidate Trump led the host through a diatribe about water, describing dried-out farmland he saw while traveling through the region with Central Valley members of Congress years earlier.

“We’re driving up, and I had never seen it before,” he said. “I said, ‘Do you have a drought? They said, ‘No ..

. in order to protect a tiny little fish, the water gets routed into the Pacific.’ So I see this, and I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.

’” During his first term, Trump did draft new rules in an attempt to accelerate water deliveries from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Those rules proposed that pumping should be limited only when smelt-friendly turbid waters are present in the Delta, but they also contained a few provisions that farm groups said led to wasted water during recent wet periods, and failed to prevent salmon death even by their own metrics. After Joe Biden succeeded Trump in office, the Democratic president tweaked those rules in a joint effort with the state of California — and many environmental groups have criticized Biden’s rules as worse for fish than Trump’s.

Trump may go much further this time. His most recent executive order calls for another wholesale rewrite of the pumping rules, proposes building new dams around the state, and even suggests that his administration could declare the Delta smelt functionally extinct. It also proposes to convene the federal committee known colloquially as the “God Squad,” a group of agency heads that can grant exemptions to the Endangered Species Act.

This has only happened a few times since the law took effect, but in theory the “God Squad” could allow the government to pump much more water to farms, even if it means jeopardizing the very existence of smelt or salmon runs — or drying out the Delta. Some of California’s most powerful water districts, which are typically run by large agricultural landowners, have praised the executive order, although they haven’t followed Trump in connecting it to the fires. For instance, the Westlands Water District, which covers more than half a million acres on the west side of the Central Valley, said in a statement that they “welcomed” Trump’s “leadership in addressing the barriers to water delivery.

” But despite the bluster of the White House actions, it’s far from clear that any of these changes will come to pass, at least in the short term. California water is one of the most heavily litigated issues in the United States, and even small tweaks to the state’s pumping system would likely raise legal challenges. “They can try a lot of this stuff,” said Biering, the California Farm Bureau advocate.

“It’s just about: How many times do you want to get sued?” This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/trump-california-water-los-angeles-fire/ . Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

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