Taylor Tench

Senior Wildlife Policy Analyst with @EIAEnvironment. Tweets about rhinos and saiga a lot.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

Fun Fact: The war in Iran costs us more in one hour than this program costs in a year.

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

ZOHRAN: “TBH, I don’t think too much about how Republicans portray me. The power of an ideology is judged in the worth of its delivery— to be told a city-run grocery store is implausible but $500 MILLION/day to kill ppl in Iran & Lebanon is necessary speaks to a broken politics.”

[Pete Stauber @RepPeteStauber]

BREAKING: A major victory for America and Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District was secured today.

The Senate just passed my bill to reverse Biden’s illegal mining ban in the Superior National Forest – it’s now headed to the President’s desk!

Mining is our past, our present, and our future – and the future looks bright!

[Ben Rhodes @brhodes]

In the best case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with the IRGC demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents - including hundreds of children - dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.

[Taylor Tench @t_tench]

Pure evil

[Carol Leonnig @CarolLeonnig]

ICE seizes DACA recipient on way to visit premature baby in NICU. Trump admin is not renewing "Dreamers" who were given legal status as children to stay in U.S. -- says they can now be detained and deported.
@lbarronlopez
https://t.co/OXxMQ20Iao

[Chris Gloninger, CCM, CBM @ChrisGloninger]

Atmospheric scientist here. Let me tell you what was actually "slashed" today.

Slashed: The Endangerment Finding — a 200-page scientific review upheld by the Supreme Court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and reaffirmed by the National Academies of Sciences in 2025.

Slashed: The legal authority to regulate carbon from cars, power plants, and factories. All of it. Gone in one afternoon.

Now here's what you're "saving":

Yesterday Trump ordered the Pentagon — the largest energy consumer on Earth — to buy coal electricity.

Coal costs $69–$169/MWh.
Wind costs $27–$53/MWh.
Solar costs $38–$78/MWh.

99% of U.S. coal plants cost more to run than replacing them with brand-new solar or wind.

That's your tax dollars buying the most expensive electricity on the market. By executive order. While the Peabody Energy CEO stood in the room.

And the human cost of what you're "saving"?

460,000 American deaths linked to coal pollution in 20 years. Coal PM2.5 is 2.1x deadlier than other air pollution. (Henneman et al., Science, 2023)

All to protect an industry that employs 44,000 people total. Clean energy employs 3.5 million.

[Jon Favreau @jonfavs]

Fuck you, you lying piece of fascist shit.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

- no universal healthcare
- no paid family leave
- no universal childcare
- no living wage as a minimum wage
- no affordable housing
- no tuition-free public college
- rolled back labor laws
- gutted food assistance
- deregulated food safety

Republicans hate American families.

[Jeremy Konyndyk @JeremyKonyndyk]

This is incredibly evil. ICE & CBP are broken beyond salvage. You can't "retrain" an institution that is willing to do this to children.

[Natasha Korecki @natashakorecki]

Watching woman die "will change my life forever," eyewitness says.

"they carried her body out, just like by her limbs, they didn’t even have a stretcher.

"She was carried out like a sack of potatoes."

great reporting by @SuzGamboa

https://t.co/XKBP64RpIz

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

THREAD: Judge Ellis is the first federal judge to review extensive body cam video of DHS's actions in Chicago. She finds that DHS *repeatedly* misled the public and made claims that were disproven by agents' own videos.

I'll go through some of the most egregious ones here.

[Yassamin Ansari @yassaminansari]

The New Yorker story is chilling: shutting down USAID has already killed 600,000 people, most of them children.

For no reason other than Elon Musk’s ego, Marco Rubio’s complicity, & Republican Members of Congress’ cult-like loyalty to Trump. Devastating.
https://t.co/09PYFSEuHV

[Covie @covie_93]

Weird how Republicans can link Tylenol to autism with no evidence but can't see the link between guns and mass shootings despite a mountain of evidence.

[VANITY FAIR @VanityFair]

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlie Kirk and the pundits and politicians sanitizing his legacy. https://t.co/ovxAOYRSnN

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

"D-Somalia"

The racism is as open and brazen as it is disgusting and dangerous.

Ilhan Omar travels with security, and multiple people have been prosecuted for trying to kill her.

Fine here, by the GOP's own standards post Kirk, is inciting violence against her.

[FLIGHT: Protecting Indonesia's Birds @ProtectingBirds]

In the past six months (January–June 2025), at least more than 18,900 wild birds have been rescued from the illegal wildlife trade in Indonesia.

Of that number, 18,500 individuals (97.93%) were songbirds.

[Taylor Tench @t_tench]

Unbelievable…

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: The EPA said it would eliminate its scientific research arm and begin firing hundreds of scientists, after denying that it intended to do so. https://t.co/FPcqIndfvs

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

Al Jazeera has published the names of every journalist killed since Oct 7th.

231 Palestinian journalists have been slaughtered in Gaza. A whole generation of reporters wiped out while many of their colleagues in the West simply shrugged.

[Taylor Tench @t_tench]

39.4 kg of rhino horn seized in Shanghai, China

https://t.co/0DXtTnTTG5