New York Tackles the Myth That Solar is Swallowing Farmland

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In rural areas across the US, solar power opponents keep leaning on the argument that utility-scale arrays are gobbling up valuable farmland. But plenty of evidence proves that’s just not true, and now, New York is tackling the misinformation head-on.

After the Trump administration accused the state of fast-tracking solar farms on prime farmland, New York leaders fired back last week, saying that renewables ​“empower our farmers to keep their land in use and in their family, while avoiding the threat of permanent conversion or abandonment.” That’s because farmers can lease a plot to solar developers and return it to agricultural use at the end of the array’s life, as the state officials explained in their 11-page letter.

“A recent study by Cornell found that the overwhelming majority of farmers who received solar lease payments used that income to continue or even expand farming on their land, not to exit farming or scale back operations,” the leaders wrote. ​“Discouraging or inhibiting property owners’ ability to independently make choices about what they can and cannot do with their land can cause financial harm and undermine fundamental property rights.”

Anti-solar advocates often ignore the good that the clean energy source can do for farmers nationwide.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has more proof that solar and farming can work hand in hand, and outlined all that in a major guidebook it released last year. Sheep and cattle are munching below panels on several New York farms, the guidebook notes, and the state has zoning rules and protections in place to preserve undeveloped land.

New York’s pushback squares with the findings of a recent report from the Solar Energy Industries Association. That study shows solar farms currently take up a mere 0.13 percent of New York’s roughly 13,000 square miles of federally designated prime farmland, a stat that resonates across the country. Solar covers just 0.07 percent of all US farmland, according to SEIA. That’s three times less than golf courses and six times less than suburban development.

And yet solar panels, not cul-de-sacs, are the focus of a particularly potent campaign from upstate New York influencer Alexandra Fasulo. Fasulo has amassed more than a million followers across TikTok and other social platforms, where she’s constantly posting videos that inflate solar’s threats to agricultural and undeveloped land. Similar sentiments are being spread on social media by John Rich. He’s one half of the ​“Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” guys, and was recently hired by the White House to advocate for landowners on a national scale.

These and other anti-solar advocates often ignore the good that the clean energy source can do for farmers nationwide. In California’s Central Valley, for example, years of drought have led hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land to go fallow. Economics and water availability have driven farmers to stop growing there, but they can still make money and hold on to their land by leasing their plots to solar developers.

Plus, as New York’s guidebook points out, farming is still happening alongside solar installations. I recently visited an Illinois solar farm where sheep were grazing underneath and around panels—an arrangement that the sheep’s owners love because they don’t have to maintain expansive pastures back at home. Meanwhile, researchers have found that tomatoes, saffron, and other crops can thrive below panels, and so can native plants.

That’s not to mention the climate benefits of ditching planet-warming fossil fuels, which are driving droughts, floods, and other weather disasters that are legitimately threatening farms in the US and beyond.

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Oh Look, Another Far-Right Extremist at the Pentagon

I’ve written before about how US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has ties to an ascendant Christian nationalist movement. Specifically, he attends a church in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a denomination founded by Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who has said that women’s suffrage was “a mistake” and suggested that homosexuality should be considered a crime. Hegseth invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon earlier this year, where he exhorted the troops to renew their focus on Christ.

A senior defense official in Hegseth’s department appears to share these ties—and has expressed Christian nationalist and far-right views on social media. Justin Overbaugh, a retired US Army colonel, currently serves as Deputy Under Secretary of War for Intelligence and Security. According to Overbaugh’s Department of War profile, he is responsible for “overseeing defense intelligence and security agencies and shaping policy to advance national security and military operations.” In other words, the role comes with considerable responsibility and visibility. After being hand-picked by Hegseth, Overbaugh was confirmed with little controversy last September.

Overbaugh is a decorated veteran who led intelligence operations in the Middle East as well as in the United States and Europe for 25 years. Yet despite this extensive experience in sensitive communications, his social media presence has a freewheeling quality about it. Machismo is a central theme: On his personal X account, he frequently posts a black-and-white image of an AK-47, accompanied by the text “Come and Take It.” Another favorite refrain is the phrase, “Weak men create hard times.” In response to a tweet showing a child’s drawing of a soldier killing someone along with the words “I hope you kill a lot of people in the war,” Overbaugh asked in a reply if the child was “old enough to join the Army? If so, have we got an opportunity for him!” He has advocated for people to carry weapons to attend church and referred to lax immigration policies as “suicidal empathy.”

He has advocated for people to carry weapons to attend church and referred to lax immigration policies as “suicidal empathy.”

Overbaugh rails frequently against immigration, sometimes veering into unapologetic extreme nationalism. In February 2025, Overbaugh tweeted, “I love Germany and Germans. I hope Germany remains German.” He included a link to the website of the far-right populist political party in Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (AFD), some factions of which have ties to neo-Nazi movements. He has also tweeted in support of Tommy Robinson, the British far-right, anti-Islam activist who has crusaded against Muslim immigrants in England.

Overbaugh regularly hypes Wilson’s CREC denomination and posts about going to Christ Church DC, whichWilson planted last year in the nation’s capital. He has tweeted links to sermons given by leaders at Wilson’s church in Moscow, Idaho. In keeping with Wilson’s CREC ethos, Overbaugh sometimes advocates for government-endorsed Christianity. In response to a tweet about Texas’ new law that requires Bible stories and verses in public schools, for instance, he tweeted a quote from the Old Testament book of Proverbs: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”

Overbaugh’s enthusiasm for Christian nationalist ideals is also apparent in his endorsement of Stephen Wolfe, author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, published by Canon Press, which Wilson founded in the 1980s. In this book, Wolfe argued in favor of a “civil magistrate” to govern the United States, who “must restrain and punish the public expression of false religion, blasphemy, and heresy.” At a conference a few years back, he argued, “If we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

Last week, Wolfe announced a new project called The Institute of Christian Politics, a training program based in North Carolina “to help lay the intellectual foundation for a renewal of serious Protestant leadership and to prepare gifted young men for responsible service in American institutions and public life,” according to its website. In a video announcing the project, Wolfe tells viewers that Christians “are making real progress in electoral politics and the practical work of government. We have office holders, staffers, organizers, writers, and institutions that train people in the practical art of politics.” But, he says, there is more to be done in connecting “talented young Christians” to “the institutions that shape public thought and national leadership.” That, he says, is where his new project comes in. In response to Wolfe’s tweet announcing the project, Overbaugh replied, “How can I help?”

Outside of social media, Overbaugh has been busy at the Pentagon. In a February hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, he vowed to transform the agency “from a cumbersome bureaucracy to an agile organization that can serve as a model for the rest of the government.” A major focus has been a modernization of the National Background Investigation Services, including an expansion of a program that allows agencies to onboard employees “with an interim clearance while awaiting a full investigation.”

Jacob Bliss, a Pentagon deputy press secretary, did not answer any of the questions Mother Jones emailed for this story; instead, he called Overbaugh “a qualified, patriotic professional” and said the agency was “proud to have him as a political appointee at the Department of War.” In June, the Pentagon declined to comment on my colleague Anna Merlan’s reporting on the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering posting references to the QAnon conspiracy theory. Last year, the department also didn’t respond to Merlan’s request for comment on the hiring of deputy press secretary Kingsley Wilson, who has also expressed extremist beliefs, including support for Germany’s AFD party.

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As For-Profit Companies Battle Over ICE Contracts, Immigrants Are Caught in the Middle

This story is a collaboration between Mother Jones, POGO Investigates, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.

William Walters is fighting to hang on to a massive government contract. Since last year, Walters’ firm—Salus Worldwide Solutions—has been running a high-profile Trump administration program that offers free flights and cash to undocumented immigrants who agree to “self-deport.” And for nearly as long, Walters’ detractors and competitors have been trying to pry this work away from his firm.

The lucrative contract—worth up to $915 million—has drawn backlash on Capitol Hill following allegations that Salus won the award through a procurement process that seemed to favor the company. In response, Walters has asserted that his company’s troubles are being ginned up by rival contractors. He has taken aim at the private prison giant GEO Group and CSI Aviation, a firm that handles non-voluntary deportation flights. Those companies, Walters argues, are working to undermine Salus’ self-deportation efforts because they will make more money if migrants remain behind bars for longer periods of time, before being forcibly deported.

“GEO Group and CSI Aviation…stand to profit the most from longer detention and custodial deportation of immigrants in chains,” Walters recently charged after Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, urged the Department of Homeland Security to cancel Salus’ contract.

So far, Walters has not provided direct evidence proving his claims that these companies have “engineered” congressional or media scrutiny of Salus, although CSI Aviation and GEO Group do lobby Congress on issues related to immigration. GEO Group and CSI Aviation did not respond to multiple requests for comment; Navigators Global, a DC lobbying firm that works with both companies, did not respond to a query.

“The Trump administration opened the floodgates for these predatory companies to come in and profit off of detaining human beings.”

But there is little question that Salus, CSI, and GEO are fighting over portions of the Trump-era mass-deportation industry. In this growing market, people facing deportation—whether they are detained in squalid camps, forcibly flown out of the country, or agree to leave under the threat of detention—are seen as commodities.

“The Trump administration opened the floodgates for these predatory companies to come in and profit off of detaining human beings,” said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel with the National Immigration Law Center. She noted that beyond aviation and private prison companies, firms are profiting by providing food, laundry, and varied other services to the tens of thousands of people in ICE confinement every day. “There is so much money right now in detaining people,” she said**.**

DHS’s self-deportation campaign has become a central pillar of the administration’s efforts to remove millions of immigrants from the country. In theory, the idea is relatively straightforward: faced with the specter of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, undocumented immigrants can choose to end their legal efforts to remain in the United States and voluntarily return to their countries of origin. Since the White House launched Project Homecoming in May of last year, the administration has used a barrage of social media posts, television appearances, and flyers in immigration courts and detention facilities to push immigrants to “leave on their own terms.”

Salus, the sole company with a federal contract to facilitate self-deportations, has taken the campaign to dozens of ICE detention centers around the country. The company’s DHS contract tasks it with supporting Project Homecoming by signing up detained people to self-deport, buying them plane tickets, processing “exit payments,” chartering flights, and delivering other services. Salus provides the “only on-site personnel dedicated to identifying and assisting with processing voluntary departure candidates,” according to a court filing.

Salus says that, compared to the harsh realities of prolonged ICE detention, its self-deportation program offers a “more humane and dignified approach to the departure of illegal aliens.” Yet some critics, including attorneys for migrants who have been approached by the company’s representatives, say the choice being offered to detainees can be coercive.

The administration has often touted harsh detention as a feature, not a bug.

According to Emilie Raber, a senior attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, conditions in ICE facilities are one of the most significant factors detainees tend to weigh when deciding whether to continue pursuing their immigration cases in court or voluntarily leave the country. Those conditions can be dismal, even deadly; fatalities in ICE facilities this year are on track to exceed the number of deaths in 2004, the highest number in a year to date. The administration has often touted harsh detention as a feature, not a bug, notably in the case of Florida’s now-shuttered “Alligator Alcatraz.”

The implicit threat is hard to miss. “Leave on your OWN terms,” ICE warned migrants in a social media post last September. “AVOID THE JAIL CELL. AVOID THE HUMILIATION.” Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem last year launched a $220 million ad campaign touting that message with images of cuffed detainees being forcibly placed on planes.

Salus’ self-deportation operations stretch far and wide. A review of job postings shows the company and its subcontractor, BDR Strategic Services, have been hiring “facility enrollment managers” and “detainee support officers” near detention centers across the country. In a December court filing, Salus said it had dispatched two-person “enrollment management teams” to facilities to recruit migrants for the program. As of early July, its employees have entered at least 50 facilities across the country, according to a document that Walters shared. The company claims it has facilitated nearly 80,000 self-deportations.

In mid-April, a Salus employee approached a Central American immigrant with a set of self-deportation papers in a Louisiana ICE detention facility, according to Raber and Amelia Dagen, who represent the detainee. The attorneys declined to name the client over concerns for his privacy and because his case is sensitive. In an email to Raber, an assistant US attorney confirmed Salus’ involvement.

According to Raber, Salus was pitching its program to many detainees in the facility as a way to leave detention. The papers weren’t in her client’s native Spanish, but the client understood that Salus was offering “voluntary departure.” Raber said her client had a preexisting medical issue, which went untreated while he was detained. (We could not independently verify the detainee’s medical condition, but inadequate health care is common in ICE detention facilities.) Still, the client declined to sign the papers.

A Salus spokesperson said the company did not have enough information to comment on this specific case but added in an email that “while DHS-specific forms are in English, forms specific to Project Homecoming are presented in English and Spanish.” The company spokesperson also said all eligibility decisions are ultimately the government’s: “Salus does not determine eligibility for or authorize voluntary departure. Those decisions are made exclusively by DHS.”

Voluntary departures existed before Trump reentered office, but the administration’s self-deportation push has drawn concerns from some immigration attorneys who say that, in practice, it does not appear to have the same procedural guardrails as before. Dagen says it’s unclear whether self-deportation, as it now exists, always enables detainees to exercise their right to an attorney or holds ICE to the benefits, like exit payments and legal relief, that the government is promising them. “If self-deportation is asking people to give up their opportunity to go to court,” Dagen cautions, “they are also giving up the right to hear their rights and then pursue them.”

“Given that detention is inherently coercive, the best way for an individual to make an informed decision is by getting a chance to speak to an immigration attorney about the details of their specific case,” adds Whitlock of the National Immigration Law Center. “It is highly unlikely that a private government contractor, who isn’t an attorney, is acting in the best interest of someone in detention.”

In response to questions, a DHS spokesperson asserted that ICE gives all detainees a court-approved list of free or low-cost attorneys and access to law libraries, translation services, and phones to contact their lawyers. But attorneys for detainees have said their clients don’t always receive sufficient access to counsel while in detention. In a January court declaration, for example, one Minnesota-based attorney recounted spending many hours calling the ICE field officer number they’d been instructed to use to locate and get access to their clients. Only once did someone pick up, according to the declaration.

Salus’ contract quickly ran into controversy. Walters, critics noted, has cultivated MAGA ties, including an October 2024 donation to a PAC linked to Noem, who was DHS secretary when the contract was awarded. As Mother Jones and POGO Investigates reported, CSI Aviation last year sued DHS in an attempt to nullify the contract, arguing that the department had conducted a “sham” competition to award this work to Salus. CSI claimed DHS actions blocked it from competing and improperly benefited Salus.

The suit turned up a government acknowledgement that, prior to awarding the contract, DHS officials had “shared high-level budget and task information with Salus that was not available to the public.” According to a government court filing, a DHS official at one point observed that the department’s actions “created an appearance of favoritism toward Salus.” (That official ultimately concluded the department had taken sufficient steps to mitigate the problems.)

In May 2026, a judge ruled against CSI after finding CSI hadn’t shown it could have performed the work. The judge also wrote that he was “confident” DHS’s actions were proper, “at least based on the administrative record before this Court.” Still, the deal faced skepticism from congressional Democrats and even some Trump administration officials. In July, DHS announced plans for a new competition to replace the contract Salus currently holds.

Salus has blamed the scrutiny in part on its corporate rivals.

Walters and the web of companies linked to him have faced other controversy. Mother Jones and POGO Investigates reported in March on the role of Walters-connected firms in procuring luxury jets and other planes for DHS. That includes the now-infamous “Big, Beautiful Jet” that Noem and her top aide, Corey Lewandowski, flew on. The jet became a focal point of criticism of Noem during congressional hearings in March that precipitated her firing.

Salus has blamed the scrutiny in part on its corporate rivals. In a letter to Congress in April, Walters noted that these competitors control a far larger portion of the deportation industry than Salus does, and he argued that their dominance is costing taxpayers billions of dollars and increasing the amount of time immigrants spend in detention. “Between 2022 and 2025, four of those companies that have built their business around private detention centers and forced deportation flights, have received more than $7 billion in contract awards which is more than the next 43 ICE contractors combined,” he wrote.

According to Walters, Salus’ work facilitating self-deportations since May 2025 “has saved DHS more than $2 billion over forced deportation.” This, he said, was a direct threat to the bottom line of companies like GEO and CSI that “take a less humane approach.”

For its part, GEO Group has consistently denied that it lobbies to increase the time that detainees spend in its facilities. “We do not take a position on nor have we ever advocated for or against criminal justice or immigration policies such as whether to criminalize behavior, the length of criminal sentences, or the basis for or length of an individual’s incarceration or detention,” the company says on its website.

In his letter to lawmakers, Walters also took aim at a March 19 NBC News story that cited an anonymous source who alleged that Salus had pressured an unidentified “marketing firm” seeking a subcontract to partner with a company linked to Lewandowski. That story had prompted Rep. Robert Garcia, the leading Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, to ask Walters if Lewandowski or anyone tied to Lewandowski had ever solicited anything of value from Salus in exchange for favorable treatment, or if Salus had offered or delivered anything of value to Lewandowski. Lewandowski and Salus have denied doing so.

Responding to the lawmakers, Walters implied that his rivals were behind negative stories about his company. “When those competitors could not win in a fair contract competition that they were not qualified for, and when DHS had the temerity to push back against their bid protest in federal court, they turned to lobbyists and unethical ‘reporters’ to mislead you and accuse us of crimes as implausible as they are outrageous,” Walters wrote. (Salus has not alleged that any reporting by Mother Jones and POGO is inaccurate.)

Walters also provided lawmakers emails that Salus’ lawyer David Panzer sent to an NBC reporter prior to the NBC story’s publication, including one calling the claims the reporter asked about “entirely false.”

“Salus has concerns that you may be being fed false information,” Panzer wrote to the reporter on March 16. After the story ran, Panzer wrote to NBC’s general counsel, demanding the network retract its reporting and threatening a lawsuit. Days later, NBC updated its story with additional comments from Salus.

NBC News did not respond to a request for comment.

Among the reasons Walters bristles at accusations that his company has benefited from government favoritism is that, in his view, the system is actually rigged against him. GEO and CSI Aviation have extensive ties to the administration. ICE’s new acting director is former GEO Group executive David Venturella. White House Border Czar Tom Homan formerly worked as a GEO consultant. CSI CEO Allen Weh hosted a campaign rally for Trump days before the 2024 election.

“The record shows the same recurring pattern,” Salus argued in a document attached to Walters’ letter to Congress, “the repeated use of sole-source, limited source, follow-on bridge contracts, solicitations with one offeror, or other materially noncompetitive vehicles” that benefit CSI and other Salus competitors.

One of those no-bid “interim” contracts has been singled out for criticism in a new class-action lawsuit against CSI and its subcontractor GlobalX brought by Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. The lawsuit notes that CSI and ICE agreed to modify their contract the day before the rendition planes took off. The no-bid contract and the modification, the suit says, “were plainly aimed at implementing the U.S.–El Salvador agreement to render Venezuelan migrants to CECOT.” Neither company responded to a request for comment on the suit.

But for all the bad blood and legal brawling, Salus’ self-deportation business seems to benefit from his rivals’ harsh detention and deportation tactics. In an email, a DHS spokesperson disputed the notion that the arrangement was coercive, declaring it “categorically false [that] we would pressure someone to self-deport.”

But in the same email, the spokesperson wrote that “being in detention is a choice,” adding, “We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App.” The spokesperson wrote that immigrants should “take advantage” of the $2,600 and free flights. “If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”

And the public messaging campaign continues. In a July 23 press release, DHS claimed it had imposed $84 billion in fines on “illegal aliens who refuse to leave the United States.”

“Our message to illegal aliens is clear,” a department official said in the release. “LEAVE NOW. If you don’t you will face the consequences, including fines, arrest, and deportation.”

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Does the Washington Post Want Democracy to Die in Darkness?

The Washington Post sure seems bent out of shapeover wealth taxes. And I suppose that makes sense, given that the once-storied publication is owned by one of the five richest dudes on the planet, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who put the kibosh on the paper’s 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris, proceeded to kiss the ring of Donald Trump, and has remade the Post’s once-respected opinion section in his own image, declaring in February 2025 that its coverage would henceforth focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” Opinions Editor David Shipley promptly quit, to be replaced by Adam O’Neal, who jumped ship on Friday, citing personal reasons.

In any case, the Post has been pulling out all the stops when it comes to the wealth tax. They’ve run no less than 10 opinion pieces since March arguing against state and federal taxes on wealth and unrealized income—the “paper” gains that constitute the vast majority of the income of the richest Americans. The fact that the IRS can’t touch that income is how Bezos, according to ProPublica, managed to pay a true income tax rate of less than 1 percent from 2014 to 2018.

Here’s the Post’s recent lineup:

• March 2: “Bernie Sanders’s 2028 litmus test would strangle America’s golden goose” (Editorial board)
• March 8: “The myth of the billionaire wealth tax” (Megan McCardle)
• April 17: “This tax would rain a wealth of unintended consequences” (George Will)
• June 5: “The ‘buy, borrow, die’ myth” (Editorial board)
• June 27: “Gavin Newsom’s wealth tax two-step” (Editorial board)
• July 3: “Lower inequality does not guarantee better democracy” (Editorial board)
• July 16: “Socialists think wealth is stolen. They’re wrong.” (Marian L. Tupy, Cato Institute)
• July 21: “‘It should be laughed out of the room’: Four writers on midterm ballot measures” (Megan McCardle, again)
• July 19: “Medicare-for-all means taxes-for-all” (Editorial board)
• July 23: “I’m from Nebraska. Here’s what wealth-tax advocates don’t realize.” (Ben Nelson, former US senator; senior adviser for Saving America’s Family Enterprises)

This last one is particularly problematic for a publication whose editorial slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Saving America’s Family Enterprises (SAFE), the organizationpaying Nelson to promote its talking points, is a “dark money” group—a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that isn’t obligated to disclose who is funding it.

We’ll talk more about SAFE, but first let’s deconstruct this op-ed.

“As a factual matter, the threat of taxing the family farm out of existence is a myth.”

Nelson, an 85-year-old former Nebraska senator, was the Joe Manchin of his time—a Republican in Democrat clothing. Backed by the NRA and the notoriously anti-tax US Chamber of Commerce, he’s a staunch opponent of abortion rights and same sex marriage. More to the point, he was the only Democrat who voted for both of George W. Bush’s tax cut packages—Arlen Specter switched to Democrat only after doing so. In 2009, Nelson was the only Democratic lawmaker to sign Grover Nordquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a vow to oppose all tax increases.

His big revelation in the Post is that passing any of the proposedfederal wealth taxes, or state-level proposals like California’s Billionaire Tax Act ballot measure, would be devastating…for farmers!

Are we stuck in a time warp?

That’s a semi-serious question. As I noted in 2024, and countless others have pointed out before me, the claim that wealth taxes—or the estate tax, in this case—hurts “family farmers” is “a well-worn Republican trope that amounts, fittingly enough, to a heap of cow manure.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, according to an exhaustive analysis published last year in Iowa Law Review, anti-tax zealots “discovered and capitalized upon an incredibly powerful image in the minds of voters: the threat to family farms. Tax opponents authored publications and held hearings detailing ‘family farm horror stories’ involving farms that would potentially have to be sold to pay the estate tax. It turned out not to matter that no policymaker, scholar, or journalist was ever able to uncover an actual example of a family farm that was sold to pay the estate tax.”

“As a factual matter,” notes the paper’s author, Kathleen DeLaney Thomas, a University of North Carolina law school professor and tax expert, “the threat of taxing the family farm out of existence is a myth.”

So, the Post knowingly published a pro-oligarchy opinion piece written on behalf of a dark money group and based on long-ago debunked propaganda, which makes one wonder whether the publishers view the paper’s slogan as aspirational.

Nelson (or whoeverghost-wrote his op-ed) concedes that most wealth tax proposals only target billionaires, but, he cautions, it’s a slippery slope. He cites a Hoover Institution study that concluded California would ultimately lose $25 billion in tax revenue if this one-time wealth tax passes, because billionaires would flee the state. But is that analysis any good? Not according to a group of prominent economists who support the wealth tax. In their rebuttal, they say the Hoover crew mischaracterized the proposal and made revenue estimates that rely “on a crucial and highly unlikely assumption.”

One hundred people were responsible for half the 2024 presidential election spending. That’s a democracy killer.

Speaking of billionaires, how many would actually leave the state? Nobody really knows. Peter Thiel, who purchased citizenship in New Zealand nearly a decade ago and is now reportedly trying to abscond to Argentina, never seemed inclined to remain in California. Allen Prohofsky, a former longtime chief economist for California’s Franchise Tax Board, told me that anyone who claims with certainty that a given tax change will cause an exodus iseither lying or “delusional.”

“The people who really hate, hate, hate taxes? Most of them have already left California,” he says. But for people thinking about it “there’s a host of variables: Where can I get employment? Where does my spouse want to live? What’s the cost of housing?”

“Where are your grandchildren in school? Where is your health provider?” adds Harvey Dale, a tax law professor at New York University who advises billionaire clients in his private practice. Leaving one’s state, or nation, is “a very complicated and ultimately personal decision,” Dale says, “but it doesn’t blend down easily into something simple.”

Nelson’s conclusion: The IRS should simply collect the estimated $700 billion in taxes that go uncollected each year, and that way “farmers wouldn’t be forced to sell their assets.”

Yes! The IRS should do that. But the agency couldn’t manage it even before Donald Trump rose to power. Historically, every time IRS special agents encounter rich Americans who are cheating the government and start digging in, the oligarchs call in favors and next thing you know the agency is defunded again and the investigations are shut down. Trump’s IRS will never collect the money. His minions and (former) trillionaire Elon Musk gutted the agency to such an extentthat it can’t even handle basic customer service,as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer recently revealed.

Even the fact we’re talking about Musk in this context should be the most compelling argument for taxing the unrealized gains his wealth was built on. The nation’s growing cadre of billionaires, more now than ever, is exercising vast, undeserved power over public affairs. As Jeffrey Winters, a scholar of oligarchy at Northwestern University, noted in a Mother Jones excerpt of his latest book, Musk was the biggest influencer of federal elections during the 2024 cycle, spending more than $291 million—a fortune for most, but a pittance for him.

What’s more, Winters wrote:

Former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s grandson Timothy, a man few Americans knew existed, spent about $197 million, and [Sheldon] Adelson’s widow, Miriam, ranked third with more than $148 million. All told, 100 individuals invested $2.4 billion in the 2024 election—almost half the total cost of the presidential contest and 16 percent of all federal election spending. The problem is bipartisan—oligarchs poured money in for Democrats and Republicans alike.

One hundred individuals. Half the presidential election spending. That, my friends, is a democracy killer, which underscores how the Post, with its relentless anti-tax rhetoric, is complicit.

Given that SAFE and its hired gun Ben Nelson want the taxman to collect all of those unpaid taxes, you might think that restoring ample funding for IRS enforcement would be among the group’s goals.

It is not.

According to IRS filings, SAFE exists “to advocate against federal tax proposals that complicate the tax code, encourage tax avoidance, or harm small businesses, family farmers, homeowners and the middle class.” Indeed, these salt-of-the-earth farmers, concerned young homeowners, and earnest middle-class folks (or actors portraying them) star in some highly misleading videos posted on SAFE’s website to warn against taxing unrealized gains.

One video implies, for example, that someone who buys a $500,000 house could be taxed annually on the increase in the home’s value. That’s completely false. If a couple buys a $500,000 house today and sells it for $1 million after two years—a realized gain, by the way—they won’t owe a dime, because the IRS exempts $250,000 in home-sale profits ($500k for a couple) from taxation.

This aligns with a standard—and false—Republican scare tactic: The IRS is coming for your middle-class family!

So whom does SAFE really represent? It doesn’t disclose its donors, but some clues can be gleaned from its personnel. Its president from June 2023 through May 2026 was Jim Doyle. He’s the owner of Portico Policy Advisors, “a research and strategic communications firm that conducts policy analysis for leading corporations, financial service firms, venture capitalists and nonprofits.” You may recognize some of his clients, like JPMorganChase, Citi, and TPG—an asset management firm with $306 billion under management that offers, among other things, “global wealth solutions.”

And nothing says “middle class” like global wealth solutions.

The vast majority of untaxed, unrealized income belongs to the richest 10 percent of Americans. Middle-class families have little.

SAFE’s treasurer is Matthew Mazzanti, a former intern for Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. Mazzanti, eight years out of college, is also Chief Administration Officer at PPHC, “a family of premier advisory firms specializing in government relations, public affairs, and strategic communications” that includes lobbying shops like Crossroads Strategies, which in 2020 merged with the lobby practice of former Republican House Majority Leader Trent Lott and former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), both now Crossroads principals and board members. The PPHC conglomerate is led by, in its own words, “established founders and seasoned corporate executives.” It boasts: “Our clients include nearly half of the Fortune 100.”

And I’m sure it’s very concerned with the travails of middle-class America.

In September 2023, SAFE and Breaux co-filed a friend of the court brief in the Supreme Court case Moore v. United States. Like Nelson, Breaux supported the Bush Jr’s 2001 tax cut package. He also sided with a Republican attempt to repeal the estate tax—which the lawyers for America’s upper crust have turned into a punchline. His position on Moore was therefore no surprise; the brief asks the court to rule that taxing unrealized gains is unconstitutional.

It never came to that, because Charles Moore’s gains were in fact realized, the court found, even if the money in question wasn’t distributed to him and his wife. But the opinions of conservative justices in the case shocked many legal observers by making clear that the Roberts court would not tolerate taxes on unrealized gains (Federal wealth taxes are already, for all practical purposes, unconstitutional, as I explained in my recent piece “How to Tax a Billionaire,” though states are not beholden to the federal rules.)

The constitutional issue is really the only decent argument against such a tax—not farmers, logistics, venue-shopping moguls, or the concerns of first-time homeowners with infants. And certainly not to protect the interests anyone below the 90th wealth percentile. The richest 10 percent of Americans, after all, own 87.4 percent of all corporate stock and mutual funds. Most families have little to no unrealized gains—and those would be exempted in any piece of legislation intended to rein in the out-of-control, republic-distorting, oligarchic wealth disparities between affluent households and those just scraping by.

Maybe the Washington Post can just spare us the propaganda next time, and tell the truth: The Roberts Supreme Court, Trump administration, and oligarchs of both parties (including Mr. Bezos), care more about wealth protection than American democracy—would that it survives the presentdarkness.

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DHS Wants To Build A Border Wall Through Tohono O’odham Land. It’s Another Instance of The US Undermining Tribal Sovereignty.

In May, the Department of Homeland Security informed the Tohono O’odham Nation, the largest Native nation located along an international border, that it was beginning construction on a border wall that would cut through its reservation. But DHS failed to ask the Tohono O’odham’s authorization to cut through its lands, which include present-day Arizona and the northwest Mexican state of Sonora. The nation sued the Trump administration in June, seeking a preliminary injunction to block border wall construction on its lands. The border wall “would have devastating effects on the Nation’s lands and its people,” according to the complaint.

Experts say DHS’s failure to seek the tribe’s consent fits into a long history of the United States failing to honor tribal sovereignty, especially when that sovereignty conflicts with the US’s own plans. Any time the federal government tries to interfere with the borders of a Native nation, it is inherently “threatening the territorial sovereignty of a tribal nation,” said Dr. Keith Richotte, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and law professor at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona.

Since its inception, the United States has frequently flip-flopped on its understanding of tribal sovereignty. Former Justice Antonin Scalia reportedly once said the nation’s highest court was “just making it up” when it came to Indian law. It’s a remark that, years later, still best sums up the US government’s attitude toward tribal sovereignty—and DHS’s border wall plans are just the latest example.

Native nations are sovereign governments with nation-to-nation relationships with the federal government. Their sovereignty pre-dates the United States, and though Indigenous people were granted US citizenship under the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, it didn’t make tribal nations any less sovereign. Instead, it stratified Native identity, making Indigenous peoples citizens of their respective tribal nations and of the United States.

When the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution, they established treaty obligations as the “supreme law of the land,” along with the Constitution and federal law. The first treaty between the US and a Native nation was written in 1778. Over the next 93 years, the United States entered into some 368 treaties with Indigenous nations—most of which were subsequently broken. These early treaties are a sign that from its inception, the US acknowledged tribal nations’ sovereignty—even though it typically failed to honor it. In its infancy, the United States used treaty-making with Native nations as the foundation for its own sovereignty, said Caroline LaPorte, an Immediate Descendant of Little River Band of Ottawa Indians and staff attorney for the Indian Law Resource Center. “They saw [treaty making as] an inherent necessity—something that was required for them to be able to establish themselves as a sovereign power,” LaPorte told me.

Because of its 62-mile stretch of reservation land bordering Mexico, the Tohono O’odham Nation has a longstanding cooperative relationship with Homeland Security and other federal agencies like the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. In the complaint, the Nation says that it spends an average of $3 million of its own funds annually to maintain border security, but that the federal government is now crossing a line.

But Indigenous communities and the US government have different views on sovereignty. LaPorte said that the even the term “sovereignty” is a “very western word,” tied up in a western understanding of power. Early settlers viewed sovereignty in a top-down manner, in which an actual sovereign, like a king or queen, ruled over a people—it’s the exact kind of power early American colonists were fleeing. That idea of sovereignty still shapes the US’s relationship to Native nations today.

“Western understandings and their ideals make claims to not just ownership, but dominion over the land,” Richotte said. “Whereas Native communities have tended to recognize that there’s not necessarily ownership of [land], but that there’s an engagement and a participation with it.” He explained that Indigenous communities often see the land as the source of everything they need—food, water, clothing, religion. When that land is taken away, it represents a fundamental attack on how Indigenous people understand the world and their capacity for survival. For the Tohono O’odham Nation, a border wall would create a physical separation between the nation’s communities on opposite sides of the border, but it would also impede on religious rituals and practices, threaten sacred plants and animals, and destroy sacred mountain peaks, including Baboquivari Mountain—the home of the O’odham Creator I’itoi.

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has become just the latest excuse for the federal government to trample over tribal sovereignty.

Even with policy and treaties in place that have established reservation borders and tribal sovereignty, the US still likes to wield power against Native nations when it’s convenient. Though the US initially valued treaty-making as a means to establish its own legitimacy and acquire land, its attitude toward tribes soured as it established military dominance and economic power on the continent. When the US wanted to continue its expansion South, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and facilitated the forced removal of thousands of Indigenous peoples from the southeastern United States to Indian Country. And when Manifest Destiny called for US expansion West, the Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the government to take more than 90 million acres of land from Indigenous peoples. “If Native peoples are ever in the way of the collection of resources—which again is the purpose of colonialism—then there’s going to be friction,” Richotte said.

The debate over the border wallis just the latest example of the federal government choosing to ignore tribal sovereignty whenever it’s politically convenient. It also isn’t the first time the Trump administration has trampled over tribal sovereignty to enforce its immigration agenda: The recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center was located in Big Cypress National Preserve in the Everglades, the homelands of the Miccosukee Tribe. The detention center was built within 1,000 feet of Miccosukee villages, but despite that, the tribe was not consulted in its construction. The tribe, which has called the detention center a direct violation of its sovereignty, is now involved in a lawsuit against DHS, Florida, and Miami-Dade County.

Between Alligator Alcatraz and the border wall on Tohono O’odham lands, it seems that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has become just the latest excuse for the federal government to trample over tribal sovereignty. “We’re dealing with an administration right now that is not particularly conciliatory in any way…and [is] willing to move far outside of the boundaries which other administrations have been willing to operate under,” Richotte said. “What that means for Indian Country is hard to tell right now, but it is a reminder that the fight for sovereignty is constant, and one needs to be ever vigilant.”

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Environmentalists Are Rolling Their Eyes at Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”

_This story was originally published b_y the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump has announced that about 200 entities have signed on to his non-binding “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” expanding a voluntary commitment that claims to ensure US consumers will not bear the cost of the AI data center build-out.

Trump delivered remarks on Thursday at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters, alongside Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, and Chris Wright, the energy secretary. Other attendees included governors who signed on to the pledge, including Brian Kemp of Georgia, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Spencer Cox of Utah, and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.

The pledge, first announced in March, was initially signed by seven tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI, and Amazon. It will now cover companies delivering 80 percent of all power to US homes and businesses, according to the White House.

“We have kept rates down, way down,” said Trump.

“The American people … need relief from soaring energy bills month after month and real action from these companies to pay their fair share and bring down high costs.”

Twenty-three Republican governors have signed on to the scheme, Trump announced on Thursday, as have major utilities including Nextera and Duke Energy, data center developers and electricity cooperatives.

“Electricity rates for 80 percent of the power distributed in America are now being kept in check by the plan,” Trump said at a press conference.

The announcement came amid a growing backlash to the artificial intelligence boom and the data centers powering it, as electricity bills rise ahead of November’s midterm elections. In June, utility prices were up 4 percent year-over-year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

On Thursday, Trump said “radical left communists” are the ones who “want to shut down all new development, kill our most successful industries, destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, and surrender the AI race to China.”

Yet opposition to data centers has become a bipartisan issue, with voters concerned not only about utility rates, but also the environmental and social impacts of AI.

More than a dozen states have considered moratoria on data centers, and New York became the first US state to enact a temporary ban this month. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have also proposed a national moratorium. And on Thursday, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, called for a ban on data center development in rural Texas; he is now among the governors who signed on to the pledge.

“[The] pledge is a paper-thin commitment to families who are struggling to keep the lights on as bills soar.”

The pledge will “ensure everyone involved in building and powering data centers covers their own costs instead of passing them on to American families,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, told the Guardian.

“The President’s bold action is turning data centers into engines of growth for local communities, while cementing America’s dominance in the global AI race,” Rogers said.

Green groups are largely unimpressed with the non-binding pledge.

“The American people don’t care about the weak pledges and empty promises; they need relief from soaring energy bills month after month and real action from these companies to pay their fair share and bring down high costs,” said Patrick Drupp, climate policy director at the national environmental advocacy organization Sierra Club. “[The] pledge is a paper-thin commitment to families who are struggling to keep the lights on as bills soar. The companies signing on have done nothing to show their work on how they will lower costs.”

Lena Moffitt, executive director of climate advocacy organization Evergreen Action, called Trump’s announcement a “photo op with big tech” that “won’t lower a single family’s electric bill.”

“Trump promised again and again to cut Americans’ energy costs, but instead he’s letting the same corporations driving up demand write their own rules—a voluntary pledge with no teeth and no consequences if they break it,” she said.

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I Like Baseball Now.

Admittedly, I don’t know much about baseball—but I do know that watching the first home run of the Women’s Professional Baseball League on Saturday night was incrediblycool.

You have to watch the New York Heights’ Denae Benites smash it out of the park during a rain-filled game against the Los Angeles Queens:

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I love the spin and jump from the pitcher, Ayami Sato—the starter for Japan’s national women’s team—in following the hit as she watches the ball sail above everyone’s head. At the same time, Benites runs around the bases and then through a tunnel of her jubilant teammates.

Yes, it’s a historic home run, but it’s also a familiar scene to any sports fan—the celebration from Benites’ team, the disappointment from the Los Angeles Queens (that disappointment didn’t last long though—the Queens responded with six unanswered runs in the last two innings to win). Even though I had never been much of a baseball fan, the long-overdue debut of the WPBLhas me excited about the sport for the first time (I even learned what an RBI is!). If you missed the first game, I’d urge you to check out the league’s inaugural season, which runsthrough mid-September.

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Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno Says Max Miller is Unfit to Hold Office

Shortly after Congressman Max Miller (R-Ohio) went live on X to defend himself against recent reporting by Mother Jones documenting allegations of domestic violence against his ex-wife, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) posted his first in-depth public comment on the matter, saying Miller is unfit to hold office.

“As he has admitted privately, Max Miller needs serious psychological help. He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno, whose daughter was married to Miller, wrote. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives. I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake. I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does.”

As Mother Jones reported on July 18, Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno, told detectives that Miller had previously held a gun to her head, thrown hot water at her, and shoved her against the wall. She told police about these alleged incidents as they were investigating how Miller and Moreno’s toddler ended up with a broken collarbone. (The investigation into potential child abuse was ultimately “unsubstantiated”—meaning there was not enough evidence to prove neglect or abuse.)

Miller has denied ever hurting women. In his X live video Sunday morning, he blamed the “left-wing media” for reporting on allegations made by a woman with “mental health challenges.”

But Emily Moreno is not the only woman that Miller has been accused of perpetrating violence against. In 2021, Politico cited multiple witnesses in reporting that Miller had thrown a woman down the stairs after she rejected his advances. That woman recently told Mother Jones that the night in question remains “one of the more traumatic nights of my life.”

During the first Trump administration, Miller’s behavior toward women also came under scrutiny when former White House press Secretary Stephanie Grisham accused a fellow Trump staffer of assaulting her. Miller sued Grisham for defamation at the time, stating in his lawsuit that people knew she was referring to him. Miller denied hurting her, too, and the two reached a confidential settlement in the lawsuit. Grisham is now suing Miller for violating the terms of that settlement.

Sen. Moreno is now the first Republican lawmaker to speak publicly about the allegations Miller faces; however, Politico reported earlier this week that some Republicans are “silently sweating” the accusations, with one operative calling the situation, “Graham Platner on steroids.”

Alex Nguyen contributed reporting.

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A Battle Over Rock Climbing Exposes a Bigger Crisis in America’s Wilderness

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A decades-long debate over how to manage wilderness climbing may be nearing a close. Land-management agencies, including the US Forest Service and agencies within the Department of Interior, released draft guidance in mid-June on the use of permanent anchors—basically metal points of attachment for ropes—in wilderness areas, as directed by Congress’ 2025 Protecting America’s Rock Climbing (PARC) Act.

“A lot of people and user types are vying for the same piece of real estate, and climbers are part of that,” said Erik Murdock, deputy director of programs, policy and government affairs at the Access Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for climbing access and environmental conservation. The new guidance helps secure climbers’ place in the mix, he said. But some wilderness advocates argue that it too loosely regulates uses that violate the Wilderness Act’s intention. Even though climbing has long been a popular activity in designated wilderness areas, and, in many places, it predates their creation, the Wilderness Act generally prohibits permanent infrastructure—and this is where the controversy arises.

“We’re squeezing wildlife into smaller and smaller pockets of protected space…and we have a lot of people waiting in line for more access.”

When climbers scale a rock wall, they periodically place protective devices in the rock face to secure their ropes so they can be safely caught if they fall. They may also do so at the top of a route, so that they can rappel back down. There are a variety of ways to do this, and certain kinds of protection—such as spring-loaded cams that can expand to fit in a crack along the route—are removable. But others are permanent, or “fixed,” anchors. On long stretches without cracks to place gear, for example, climbers might drill bolts directly into the rock to attach metal loops called hangers. Where there are small cracks, they might hammer in a small spike with a loop at one end, called a piton. Or they might install ropes or slings around a boulder, tree, or other object and leave them there to enable a safe descent by rappel.

The rules proposed in June for these permanent fixtures vary by agency. The National Park Service, for example, would require climbers to seek special-use permits or broad permission from a superintendent before drilling new bolts. But climbers on Bureau of Land Management land could place a small number of bolts without authorization. The Forest Service, which manages half of the country’s public-land climbing, directs local offices to work with climbers and climbing groups to create management plans for wilderness and non-wilderness climbing areas. While Murdock and other climbers quibble with some of the details, he said they were “overall workable policies.”

“There are plenty of places in the wilderness where you don’t need a fixed anchor, and typically the ethic has been if you don’t need a fixed anchor, you don’t bring one.”

Others worry that the new guidance could initiate a climbing free-for-all in the country’s last protected spaces. Several Forest Service regional offices have lost many or all of their wilderness staff over the past 18 months to deferred resignations and cuts by the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. They likely lack the capacity to create new plans or monitor new and existing routes that contain permanent anchors, said Dana Johnson, policy director with the Montana-based environmental nonprofit Wilderness Watch. “We’re squeezing wildlife into smaller and smaller pockets of protected space,” she said, “and we have a lot of people waiting in line for more access.”

Johnson’s concerns mirror those of some Biden administration officials. Fears of damaging protected areas through overcrowding and using too many permanent bolts led the administration to propose a national directive in 2023 prohibiting new fixed anchors in all wilderness areas and requiring review of existing climbing routes. Two years later, Congress reversed that course with the PARC Act, which codified recreational climbing—including using, placing, and maintaining fixed anchors—as an appropriate use in wilderness areas.

But the fight over permanent anchors misses the bigger issue, said Zach Lentsch, who owns Wyoming Mountain Guides and frequently takes clients into designated wilderness areas. Hikers, backpackers, and other quiet recreationists also contribute to wilderness overcrowding, he pointed out. Places like Lonesome Lake near the famous Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range contain dangerous levels of E. coli from human poop, for example, and banning a narrow use like fixed anchors would never solve that problem. Instead, he argued, agencies should work with all wilderness users to create permit systems to limit use where needed, or require campers to use special bags to contain and pack out their feces.

“If you’re not a climber, it might seem like climbers are going out there willy-nilly and putting ugly hardware into the walls,” he said. “There are plenty of places in the wilderness where you don’t need a fixed anchor, and typically the ethic has been if you don’t need a fixed anchor, you don’t bring one.”

The public comment period on the Forest Service proposal ended July 20, and the Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service comment periods end August 14.

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“The ICE Agent Behind Me Grabbed the Back of My Shirt and Just Threw Me Like a Sack of Trash”

A 68-year-old nurse who brought her mobile clinic to serve visitors at an ICE detention center, only to be thrown to the ground by ICE agents. A pair of cemetery workers who were maced and handcuffed at work after ICE agents broke through a gate to reach them. A family of six wrongly detained for a month. A trans man forced to labor without pay in ICE detention, and a legal observer beat with a baton at the scene of Alex Pretti’s killing.

These are some of the 54 people who filed tort claims against federal agents this week as part of a nationwide ACLU push for ICE accountability. 32 are US citizens, 22 are immigrants. And they’re all seeking monetary damages for harm sustained during Donald Trump’s ICE surge.

Under US law, it is near-impossible for a person to file a civil rights lawsuit against an individual federal agent, the way someone who’s been hurt by a local or state police officer could. But an increasing number of people harmed by ICE and DHS agents are filing tort claims: demanding monetary compensation from the federal government for what has been done to them.

Two US citizens who work as groundskeepers at a cemetery outside Chicago, were maced, handcuffed, and detained after masked officers broke into a gated area of their workplace.

Norma Bowe, the nurse attacked outside a detention center, is suing in New Jersey. For years, Bowe has operated a mobile health clinic out of an RV, traveling to underserved areas of the state to provide vaccines, diabetes screenings, and stroke assessments.

When the husband of one of her students was detained a week before graduation, Bowe and her volunteer team took her clinic to the notorious Delaney Hall detention center. There, they served families who came to visit detained loved ones—and, as protests outside and inside the detention center heated up this summer, they provided first aid.

“Mostly it was, can I have a band aid? Do you have any feminine hygiene products? I need diapers for my baby,” Bowe said. But on May 25, things changed when Bowe tried to help a woman who ICE agents were dragging across the ground. “This young woman was yelling, ‘Help me! Help me!’ I’m thinking I’m going to help her up,” Bowe told Mother Jones. “And the ICE agent behind me grabbed the back of my shirt and just threw me like a sack of trash.”

Bowe was in shock. “I thought of Alex Pretti, because he was also a nurse, and he was also helping someone who’d been knocked down.” Bowe was treated for a concussion, and for a kneecap fracture. She’s now suing ICE for $500,000.

Some of the other people filing tort claims against ICE weren’t even at a detention center or at a protest. Darren Eichler and Daniel Greer, two US citizens who work as groundskeepers at a cemetery outside Chicago, were maced, handcuffed, and detained after masked officers broke into a gated area of their workplace. Eichler was taken to the hospital, and Greer was held in an unmarked DHS facility, they said.

“The ICE agents that attacked me followed me by transport in one of their unmarked vehicles to the hospital, and then came into my room with me in a trauma unit while I was trying to be treated,” Eichler said. His eyes burned for hours, since he had contact lenses in when he was maced.

Both were released after several hours without charges—though the agent in the hospital with Eichler forgot to remove Eichler’s handcuffs before leaving, and a nurse had to chase him down, the men told Mother Jones. They say they both still get flashbacks when they hear a police car or helicopter go by.

“Without accountability, you know this is just going to continue, and continue, and continue,” said Bowe, the nurse from New Jersey. “How many people have been injured by these folks and cannot speak for themselves, cannot do anything in fear of retaliation?”

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George Santos Got Busted For Manipulating Political Betting Markets—and Seems to Have Little Remorse

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced Friday that former congressman and current legend George Santos has been fined $35,000 for attempting to place bets on his own attendance of the State of the Union in February. He’s also been banned from the prediction-market platform Kalshi for 3 years.

According to the CFTC:

While buying and selling positions in this market, Santos posted on social media about his plans to attend or not attend the SOTU. In his social media posts, Santos made a series of material misrepresentations and omissions about whether he would attend the SOTU. After these posts, the SOTU contract prices moved in a direction that was favorable to Santos’ positions which allowed him to make over $17,500.

A day before the State of the Union, Santos said in a video he posted to X: “I’m going to be there for the State of Union in the gallery, guys.” He posted on Instagram asking his followers if he should wear a “bedazzled suit” or a more toned-down option. Then, he didn’t show up.

Santos was expelled from Congress in 2023 after he was charged with a litany of offenses that included identity theft and pilfering campaign funds. He was sentenced to prison for 87 months, though Donald Trump commuted his sentence and he was released after 84 days.

Santos’ lawyer, Joseph Murray, wrote in a statement that the former congressman held “no intent to deceive any person, nor intent to manipulate any market,” when he placed Kalshi bets on his own potential travel to the State of the Union. Murray added that Santos has settled with the CFTC and intends to “put this matter behind him.”

Santos, however, does not seem to have moved past this just yet: he has posted on X about Kalshi five times in the past 24 hours, calling it a predatory platform, demanding that its founder be deported, and threatening to have it “legislated out of existence.”

We need @Kalshi to be regulated as a gambling platform and remove them from the protection veil of “contract swaps” I’m going to embark on a full blown advocacy effort and I have them legislated out of existence!

Touché bitches let’s see who wins!

Place your bets while y’all…

— George Santos (@Georgesantos) August 1, 2026

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The Ticks Are Winning

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ticks are taking over the United States. Due to climate change, changing land use, and an explosion in the deer population, ticks have been expanding their territory and infecting more people than ever. They carry pathogens that cause everything from Lyme disease to the red meat allergy-inducing Alpha gal syndrome. In some cases, tick bites can be fatal.

Ticks usually lurk in the tall grass in wooded areas. That means going on a hike or even just hanging out in your backyard or a park can expose you to a tick bite. In many parts, of the country fear of ticks is changing how people live their lives, including the way they dress, how they enjoy their hobbies, or even whether they spend much outdoors at all.

The tick surge is catching public health officials off guard. Emergency room visits due to tick bites are the highest they’ve been since 2017. In spite of the uptick, most public health departments still focus on lowering the population of mosquitos in their areas over ticks.

“Thanks to warmer winters, ticks are expanding their hunting season.”

Climate reporter Jonathan Mingle says we can fix this problem. As Mingle explained in a recent New York Times op-ed, encouraging the public to do tick checks and use bug spray is a part of the solution, but we’re leaving a bunch of larger interventions on the table. Mingle joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to explain why ticks are expanding their range and what we can do about it.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

We covered Lyme disease and tick bites on this show back in 2018 because the tick situation was getting out of hand. How much more out of hand has it become since then?

You know, some experts I talked to used the word exponential. So what’s happening is that some of these tick species are spreading into areas where people aren’t familiar with them, and doctors aren’t familiar with them. Thanks to warmer winters, ticks are expanding their hunting season. You may have a day that’s like 40 degrees in January; ticks are out looking for you, waiting for you to walk by and grab on and grab a meal.

“Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?”

In 2024, a pilot named Brian Weitzel, father of three in northern New Jersey, had a hamburger at a barbecue, went home to mow his lawn, and a few hours later was unresponsive on the floor, and he died that night. His family was left in shock, of course, trying to figure out why he had died. And it turned out that he had likely been bitten by the lone star tick and had developed an allergy to red meat. This is referred to as Alpha-gal syndrome, which is just the latest entrant into the files of all the many ways tick bites can make us sick. The most familiar one, of course, is Lyme disease. Each year, about half a million people are treated for Lyme disease. It’s the fastest-growing vector-borne disease in the US. Cases have more than doubled over the past decade, and those cases are mostly as a result of getting bitten by the black-legged tick or the deer tick. The thing is, both of these ticks—and many other ticks that are also marching northward and westward and expanding their empires rapidly across North America—can deliver all kinds of pathogens.

They’re claiming more and more of the map, and they’re claiming more and more of our psychic map, right? I tell people I’m not a tick expert, although I’ve talked to a bunch of them, but I’ve become a tick expert in the sense that I am very familiar with tick paranoia and how it can keep you from venturing out into the places you love: hiking paths or picnic grounds or parks. And so that was part of the story I wanted to write about, too—Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?

And why is it? Are we not fighting back against the ticks?

Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we’re barely even trying. One way of understanding that is to think about two numbers. One number is 90 percent. 90 percent of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks.

90 percent?

Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90 percent of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city and county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80 percent of what they do is mosquito control, and only about 10 or 11 percent of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control. So why is that? It’s a familiar story in the public health world. It’s not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, and deploying new approaches to controlling ticks.

Even though people are dying?

We’re just kind of taking for granted that, ‘Oh, well, what can you do? You just tuck your pants in and spray some insecticide on your boots, and that’s all you can do.’ It’s like, well, actually we have a long history of going to war with mosquitoes. Before there was tick control, there was mosquito control. The CDC was founded with the sole mandate in 1946 of wiping out malaria and fighting mosquitoes.

It feels like they lost that fight because in my neighborhood you can’t go out between the hours of seven and nine o’clock.

The mosquitoes haven’t gone away, but malaria did, for the most part. You know, in talking to experts today, including folks at the CDC, they told me that there’s a suite of tools we could be using if we wanted to get serious about fighting ticks. As one veteran tick expert at the CDC told me, if you want to make a dent in this problem, you have to get to the deer. The deer are the engine driving a lot of these tick species spreading, and we just have way more deer than we did decades ago, especially in the eastern US and suburban parts of America. So how do you get to the deer? I had people in the comments section of my piece saying the clear answer is just we should all be hunting deer. But in talking to the experts, they’ll tell you it’s not really a feasible solution. You would have to knock deer populations way down to make a dent in the tick populations.

“We’re not even funding this research in a serious way. “

What is more promising is a combined approach of stuff like vaccines. There are people developing vaccines that you could deliver to deer or to rodents, which are another important host for these ticks, so that when the tick bites them, they’ll die. That, I learned from talking to folks who do this kind of research for a living, is a more promising avenue for controlling ticks than all of us picking up crossbows and becoming deer hunters.

So why is it that we’re not doing anything?

What I heard from experts is that we’re not even funding this research in a serious way. We do this stuff for mosquitoes. People don’t realize it, but your local county health agency they go out, and they find where the mosquito breeding grounds are and stagnant pools of water, and they treat it. It takes this sustained quiet effort.

We saw the consequences of not doing that recently. This is a bit tangential, but screwworm. Screwworm was this flesh-eating larval pest that devastates cattle herds; it was eradicated in the US in 1966, and it was kept at bay by the vigilance of people at USDA and USAID who ran these programs to release millions of sterile screwworm males out of airplanes. It created this wall that kept the screwworm from coming into the southern US. And probably if we stopped doing the mosquito control at a local scale, we’d see more cases of dengue fever, West Nile virus, and all these other rare but serious illnesses that climate change is making more of a threat here in the US.

Could you just practically help people understand how they can protect themselves in the absence of, I don’t know, a functional government?

Doing tick checks. And we do it in my household pretty much daily when you come home: do a thorough tick check, throw your clothes in the dryer. Ticks hate heat. And some people like to use permethrin spray, which is this insecticide that’s designed to kill ticks on your boots or your pants when you go out for a hike. Researchers have known these things are really effective if you keep doing them, if you stay vigilant. And all it takes is that one time, that one time you go out for a hike and you come back and you forget to do the tick check.

So we need those kinds of personal measures of vigilance and protection, but we still need to kind of push for a bigger public health response to this. The ticks are going to keep spreading into the calendar, too, in the sense that as winters get warmer, more and more days of the year when you’re outdoors, you’re going to encounter ticks who are hungry, and they’re looking for you.

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“If I Prove That You Can Win Statewide Taking on AIPAC, That is Catastrophic”

On July 8, Abdul El-Sayed had just wrapped up a campaign stop inside a sweltering church auditorium in Ferndale, Michigan. The room was packed with supporters fanning themselves with campaign signs, many braving the summer heat to hear the progressive Senate candidate make his case against his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens.

Then came the applause.

It wasn’t for Medicare for All or his warnings about the rise of data centers. It was for a message that has come to define what is expected to be the most expensive Democratic Senate primary in history.

“The central corrupting feature of our politics right now is the power of money to buy politicians so that government is captured by them, not for us,” El-Sayed said as he fielded questions from the stagefrom the stage, wearing his signature black T-shirt and blue jeans. “AIPAC will spend huge amounts of money if you’re uppity like me and you speak out of turn to beat you, and you’re seeing it play out on TV every day.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliated groups have poured more than $30 million into the race in support of Stevens. It is the largest investment the organization has made in an electoral contest since launching its United Democracy Project super PAC in 2021.

“I have been very clear, consistent and transparent, and I have continued to be,” Stevens said during a recent televised debate when asked about AIPAC’s support for her campaign. “I want to see long-term peace. I want to see a two-state solution. I am deeply proud to represent one of the largest Jewish populations in a congressional district in the country.”

The stakes in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary extend far beyond the state. The winner will face Republican Mike Rogers in one of the country’s marquee general election contests, and Democrats need to win races like Michigan if they hope to take control of the Senate.

But first, Democratic voters are deciding a different question: whether the party’s future lies with its establishment, represented by Stevens, or with an ascendant progressive movement embodied by candidates like El-Sayed. The race has become a proxy fight over money in politics, the influence of pro-Israel groups such as AIPAC, and whether Democratic candidates can openly criticize U.S. support for Israel without sacrificing electability.

It is also unfolding in the shadow of Michigan’s 2024 Uncommitted movement, which turned the state into the epicenter of Democratic dissent over the war in Gaza and exposed fractures that continue to divide the party’s coalition, including an ongoing debate over how much the issue contributed to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat.

We spoke with El-Sayed earlier this summer about AIPAC, electability and what he believes his race means for the future of Democratic politics.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Nearly two years ago, you joined members of the Uncommitted Movement at the Democratic National Convention asking them to have a Palestinian speak on stage. What was your involvement in that group?

I thought we needed to take a shot across the bow to remind the Biden administration that Arab and Muslim voters were an important part of his coalition, and that we would not stand by and watch him use our tax dollars to drop bombs on other people and their kids to do a genocide, and that he was at risk of losing a lot of important voters if they didn’t course correct.

When Vice President Harris became the nominee, I was the first Arab or Muslim leader to endorse her openly. I took it on the chin, you can imagine.

In both instances, I was trying to lead with my values. Because if you saw this election from the eyes of a child in Detroit, where I was leading Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services, or you saw it from the eyes of a child in Gaza, Trump would be worse.

But how does that contrast with the idea of where are now, where a number of progressive candidates who have campaigned around the issue of Palestine are winning Democratic primaries across the country?

That’s how democracy works. Democracy is supposed to work by giving the voters a choice about what vision they want. And I think voters are choosing their morals rather than political expediency.

When you started your campaign, it seemed like you had a Bernie-style approach centering on issues like Medicare for All. You even had a video where you interviewed a veteran who responded to the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. When did your race become so foreign policy focused?

My campaign is not really this heavy on foreign policy. It just happens to be what all y’all in the media want to talk to me about.

Respectfully, you bring it up yourself sometimes.

When a $30 million super PAC spend is being dropped on your face by an organization whose key interest is something happening over there, then it would be ridiculous not to name it. AIPAC is the biggest spender in this race by far, and that’s pretty insane. And they’re not spending to keep our money here, they’re spending to send our money there. So they’ve made it an issue, and it’s just another example of why we have to get money out of politics. Because so long as they can spend that kind of money buying attack ads against me, we are going to continue to watch as too many politicians bow out of having any kind of moral courage to keep our money here at home and actually do the things that we need here at home.

But I’m running on getting money out of politics, putting money in your pocket, passing Medicare for all.

It just so happens that the question right now that everybody’s asking is, “How are you gonna pay for it?” Well, look at what we’re doing abroad. Look at this ridiculous war we never should have fought or have been fighting. Think about the genocide that we backstopped, the apartheid that continues to be done, the attempted annexation of Lebanon. Like, why?

And what could we do with that money if we kept it here?

So all I’m saying is, if we wanna have nice things here, it’s better to use our money to do nice things here than to do bad things there. It’s not that hard.

You mention AIPAC repeatedly in your campaign speeches, debate responses and on and I’m curious why you think calling them out resonates with voters?

AIPAC is the biggest spender in this race, so you can’t talk about money out of politics without talking about AIPAC. You just can’t. Like, it’d be like ignoring the elephant.

But this is nothing new, no?

But I want people to see it anew. Because you’re right, it’s nothing new. It is so common in our politics that we take it for granted, and that’s some ridiculous shit. Like, it’s ridiculous that we take it for granted that we have a bipartisan consensus on the idea that your US senators wanna send your money to some other country to buy bombs and tanks instead of keeping your money here. And it’s not just about Israel, by the way. It’s also Egypt. It’s also Pakistan. It’s also Saudi Arabia. It’s all of these places where we send foreign military aid where we should not.

What do you say to Democratic old heads who are, you know, might look at your campaign, might look at you and be like, “You’re just throwing some, some red meat to, to the lefties,” so to speak, when it comes to the issue of Palestine, that this is politically advantageous for you?

People are asking two questions: what do you say you’re gonna fight for, and then do I believe that you’re gonna fight for it? The Democratic Party brand is in the shitter because nobody actually believes that we’re gonna show up and fight for the things that we say we wanna fight for. You know why? Because we say we’re for human rights, and then we watch them get viciously violated, and then we say nothing. So what that tells me is you’re gonna back down. So I would tell them, how about our party finds some courage, and I’m just telling you exactly what I believe, come what may. So when we beat $50 million of spending from AIPAC, I’d love to have a conversation with them.

What do you think Palestine or Israel or the two of them together symbolize for this year’s midterms?

Moral Rorschach test. Are you someone who is willing to be courageous and truthful, or are you someone who is willing to bend to money and power? And people are showing themselves in real time.

What do you say to people that think you are being divisive in your rhetoric, and that if you’re trying to coalition build, being this brash or loud only hurts your cause?

I’m building a coalition on the truth. And sometimes when a coalition is built on falsehood, you have to make sure that you can move it to the truth. And I’m finding that we’re building a much bigger coalition than the one that they think, you know, we’re breaking apart, because a lot of people wanna be a part of the truth. They want their kids to have good healthcare. They want to be able to travel good roads. They want good schools, and they wanna know that our tax dollars aren’t hurting other people.

What do you think the outcome of your race will say about the future of the party?

A lot. I think everybody and their mom running for president is watching this race with a very keen eye. And if we can demonstrate that campaigning on, on truth and on courage can win in Michigan, it can win anywhere.

If I prove that you can win statewide, taking on AIPAC and winning, that is catastrophic because of what it says about the future of the party. It is existential to oppose it. I think this race is going to change a lot of minds, and it’s going to scramble a lot of expectations.

This interview was originally conducted as part of an upcoming episode of Reveal, slated for release later this September about the role Israel has in reshaping American politics.

Subscribe to Reveal wherever you get your podcasts to hear the conversation and many more around this topic and other news of the day.

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The Post-Roe Surprise: More Abortions

Access to medication abortion in the years since Covid and the fall of Roe v. Wade has completely reshaped the abortion access landscape in America.

“There’s this irony that’s actually happened,” says Dr. Angel Foster, an abortion provider and researcher. “Tragically, 33 to 40 percent of women of reproductive age now have less of a right to an abortion. But access for many people has increased.”

Foster is the founder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, a clinic whose work is one major player in why abortions are up. Massachusetts and almost half the states in the US have passed shield laws that legally protect abortion providers. The one Foster operates under allows her to prescribe abortion pills to patients in states with abortion bans.

And while the battleground may be shifting as medication abortions grow more common, the war is far from over.

This week on Reveal, we explore post-Roe America through the eyes of three women with three very different missions: Foster, who offers medication abortions nationwide; a courier who risks arrest to stockpile abortion pills for an uncertain future; and a conservative activist whose life’s work is trying to stop them both.

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How Michigan Became the Most Expensive Democratic Primary Ever

Next Tuesday’s contest in Michigan between Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens holds a dubious distinction: No Democratic congressional primary in history has ever attracted so much super PAC cash. The overwhelming majority of the outside money has gone toward ensuring that Stevens, a moderate, pro-Israel Democrat, defeats El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed champion of Medicare for All and Israel critic.

More than $60 million of outside spending has poured into the Senate contest, according to records from the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Communications Commission. The vast majority has come from super PACs that—unlike El-Sayed’s and Stevens’ own campaigns—can accept unlimited donations.

Brendan Glavin, the director of insights at OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics, said the level of outside spending in Michigan far exceeds the top Senate races from 2024. “We’re taking this huge leap up,” he explained. “It’s really exploded.” Only this year’s Republican Senate primary in Texas, where John Cornyn lost to Ken Paxton despite a large funding advantage, appears to have attracted more outside money.

The biggest spender by far in Michigan is the United Democracy Project, a super PAC backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that works to elect pro-Israel candidates. UDP has spent more $30 million backing Stevens, according to FEC records—twice as much as it has ever spent on a single race. (The super PAC hit its previous high in 2024, when it spent more than $14 million to defeat former Rep. Jamaal Bowman in a Democratic House primary in New York.) Additional records show that Stevens has also benefitted from a super PAC that in the past has received donations from companies including Chevron and a subsidiary of the tobacco giant Philip Morris.

The race in Michigan—an open seat that Democrats need to hold to take back the Senate—started out as a competitive three-person contest that initially included Mallory McMorrow, a state senator backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who tried to occupy the ideological lane between El-Sayed and Stevens. But despite strong fundraising and early polling, McMorrow struggled to remain competitive and dropped out in early July.

It means that Michigan primary voters now have an unusually clear choice to make. El-Sayed has the endorsement of key players on the left like Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and the United Auto Workers. Stevens is understood to be the favorite of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and was recently endorsed by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

At a national level, the results on Tuesday will be closely watched to see if populist outsiders like El-Sayed can continue to topple favorites of the Democratic establishment from coast to coast. It will also be a measure of whether AIPAC can still upend Democratic primaries in which voters increasingly oppose its agenda. If El-Sayed wins, the general election will then test how left-wing candidates perform in swing states.

El-Sayed, a 41-year-old Rhodes scholar and doctor, worked as the head of Wayne County’s department of health before running for Senate. In 2018, he unsuccessfully ran for governor in Michigan. After the race, he hosted a podcast for Crooked Media and further established his left-wing credentials by writing a book on Medicare for All that included a foreword by Sanders.

In this year’s Senate race, El-Sayed is not being outspent due to poor fundraising. His campaign raised more than $14.5 million through July 15, according to FEC records. Stevens’ campaign raised less than $12 million by the same date, despite her being a sitting member of Congress. Stevens’ advantage comes entirely from super PACs and other outside groups that can spend independently to support her.

The outside spending has become a major issue in the race. At a May debate, Stevens made national news for dodging a question from a moderator about what AIPAC does or doesn’t get from backing her campaign. El-Sayed returned to the theme at a July debate when he asked Stevens what she had “given away” for AIPAC’s support. Stevens replied that no one owns her vote and then claimed that anyone spending on her behalf was doing so because of her record of “fighting for Michigan.”

El-Sayed talked more about AIPAC’s role in the race in an interview earlier this month with my colleague Najib Aminy. “AIPAC is the biggest spender in this race by far, and that’s pretty insane,” he said. “And they’re not spending to keep our money here, they’re spending to send our money there … it’s just another example of why we have to get money out of politics.”

The Senate race is not the first time that UDP has backed Stevens. In 2022, the group spent more than $4 million to help her defeat Rep. Andy Levin in a Michigan House primary. Although Levin is Jewish and Stevens is not, he was deemed too critical of Israel by AIPAC despite having served as the president of his synagogue. Since her 2022 victory, Stevens has remained an ardent supporter of Israel, a nation that she has said “comes to me in my dreams.”

El-Sayed, on the other hand, has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide and campaigned with the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker. UDP’s unprecedented spending is a recognition of the threat that El-Sayed poses to its agenda. But the super PAC is also aware that focusing on Israel is not the best way to win. Like in other races, its ads in support of Stevens appear to make no mention of Israel.

The full extent of pro-Israel funding being deployed against El-Sayed may significantly exceed the more than $30 million spent by UDP so far. In October 2025, Delaware corporate records show a new entity called the Center for Democratic Priorities was incorporated in the state.

The Center for Democratic Priorities quickly spent $6.5 million backing Stevens, the New York Times has reported. But the ads did not explicitly tell Michiganders to vote for Stevens. Instead, one ad touted Stevens’ efforts to “hold ICE accountable.” Michael Beckel, an expert on money in politics at the nonprofit Issue One, explained that, due to the vagaries of campaign finance law, groups like the Center for Democratic Priorities can skip reporting to the FEC by avoiding direct endorsements and running ads more than 30 days before an election.

As a result, it is even harder than usual to know who funded the group. But there are potential identifiers. In 2024, a super PAC called Blue Wave Action sprang up to help elect Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) in his House primary in Detroit. After the election, FEC records showed that most of the $2.4 million that Blue Wave Action received came from UDP and a related pro-Israel group.

As the Detroit Metro Times has reported, federal records show that a “John Jones” filed paperwork for both Blue Wave Action and the Center for Democratic Priorities. Federal Communications Commission filings I reviewed strongly suggest that the same John Jones worked with both groups: Jones signed paperwork for both groups using Docusign; both signatures have the same string of 15 identifying numbers and letters that are unique to an individual’s account on the digital signing service.

Who John Jones is has been a mystery but FCC records contain significant clues. Advertising agreements that Jones signed for Blue Wave Action in 2024 list the group’s address as a UPS Store in East Lansing and also include a Gmail address for him. According to open source records, the email address is tied to the LinkedIn page of a John Jones who previously worked on government affairs for Sprint and now handles fundraising for a Christian school in Lansing.

Jones did not respond to multiple requests for comment via email and phone. A colleague at the Christian school where he works was surprised to hear that he may be involved in the Michigan race. His wife, Sandi Jones, who co-owns a Michigan lobbying firm, told me that she did not think the Gmail address listed on FCC records belongs to her husband. But there is reason to doubt whether that is correct. Among other things, the avatar for that Gmail account is a photo of a man who appears to be her husband, the same account has written Google reviews for businesses near the Jones’ Michigan home as recently as this month, and the East Lansing UPS store listed as Blue Wave Action’s address in 2024 is about 15 minutes from their home.

Who funded the the Center for Democratic Priorities remains unclear. AIPAC has denied being behind it, but there is no way to verify that from public records. Down to the common name of its director, the group appears designed to be as opaque as possible.

The second largest spender in the Michigan race is another innocuously named super PAC called A Stronger Michigan. FEC records show that the group has spent more than $17 million supporting Stevens—more than El-Sayed’s entire campaign had raised as of mid-July.

A Stronger Michigan, which did not register with the FEC until June, is based at a residential address associated with Jeff Murray, a Virginia-based lobbyist who has represented groups ranging from the Boy Scouts to the tobacco giant Altria. Murray has longstanding ties to Center Forward, a nonprofitthat backs moderate Democrats and Republicans that is the source of nearly all the donations disclosed by A Stronger Michigan. (A related super PAC called Center Forward Committee has spent about $1 million backing Stevens in addition to the money routed through A Stronger Michigan.)

As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, Center Forward does not have to disclose its donors. But it is possible to put together a partial picture of its funding from other public records. The group, for example, has received millions of dollars from PhRMA, a trade group that represents drug manufacturers. The related Center Forward Committee, formed by Murray in 2014, lists only three corporate donors this election cycle: Chevron, a subsidiary of Philip Morris, and UnitedHealth Group. But those donations do not show where the specific funds given to A Stronger Michigan to support Stevens came from. Murray did not respond to a request for comment.

The outside spending picture for El-Sayed looks much different. The biggest individual donor to Fighting for Michigan—El-Sayed’s main outside backer—is the candidate’s father-in-law, a nephrologist at a Detroit hospital who had given $300,000 as of July 15. Overall, the super PAC has expended about about $2.8 million—less than one tenth of what has been spent against El-Sayed by the United Democracy Project alone.

When it comes to the role of AIPAC and UDP, El-Sayed sees the results next Tuesday as being about about much more than a single Senate seat. “If I prove that you can win statewide, taking on AIPAC and winning, that is catastrophic because of what it says about the future of the party,” he said. “It is existential to oppose it. I think this race is going to change a lot of minds, and it’s going to scramble a lot of expectations.”

Additional reporting by Najib Aminy.

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How Can US Factories Get Cleaner Heat? These Ideas May Help.

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

American households are all too familiar with the pain of high electric bills, which are climbing nationwide. The same problem is quietly hindering the country’s factories from cleaning up their operations, too.

Hundreds of thousands of US manufacturing facilities burn fossil fuels to produce the heat they need to make packaged foods, bottled drinks, construction materials, and likely everything in your bathroom cabinet. It’s why the industrial sector accounts for nearly one-third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions from energy use.

Cleaner technologies like industrial heat pumps, electric boilers, and heat-storing batteries are already commercially available. Yet even companies that are committed to decarbonizing can find it hard to justify making the switch. The underlying problem is that in virtually every state, electricity costs more than natural gas for industrial users.

“We have to have solutions that are at the very least competitive with the existing cost of fuel,” said Neil Brown, a chemical engineer at Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical, which has over a dozen manufacturing sites in the US and more abroad. ​“In some places where Eastman operates, in parts of the Southeast and Texas, it is very difficult to compete with the low cost of natural gas.”

Brown was speaking on a webinar last month held by the Renewable Thermal Collaborative and Industrial Heat Pump Alliance. The groups looked at electrifying low- to medium-temperature processes, and estimated it would add roughly 250 terawatt-hours to the industrial sector’s annual electricity demand by 2035—or nearly 25 percent more power than manufacturers currently use.

On the plus side, deploying clean industrial technologies could generate around $471 billion in total economic output over the next decade, even when accounting for the lost jobs and diminished business activities of gas utilities and equipment makers, according to the groups’ June report.

“In states where you have very good solar quality and natural gas prices are high, … it makes economic sense for the industry to do this.”

But reaping those benefits will first require finding ways to drive down the cost of electricity for manufacturers. A growing number of climate and energy experts are studying that challenge and proposing solutions for policymakers and utilities to consider.

One of those strategies could be to build renewable energy projects directly beside factories.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, recently modeled what would happen if factories themselves installed off-grid solar or wind projects on-site and used the clean electricity to power thermal storage systems and heat pumps. The team looked at nearly 3,600 locations across the country, evaluating land availability, solar-power potential, and local natural gas prices for each site.

Renewable-powered heat systems could economically supply up to one-third of the studied industrial heat demand by 2035, they said in an analysis announced last week.

The researchers found that such an approach would make it more cost-effective to run heat pumps than gas boilers for industrial processes below 200 degrees C (392 degrees F)—a broad category that includes beer making, paper production, and textile manufacturing. Meanwhile, thermal batteries would offer ​“competitive or lower costs” for scorching-hot operations like glass melting and steel manufacturing.

“In states where you have very good solar quality and natural gas prices are high, like in California, it makes economic sense for the industry to do this, because they will save some money on their heating costs,” said Amol Phadke, a co-author of the report and an adjunct associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.

However, even states without California’s abundant sunshine can still produce low-cost solar power, thanks to declining solar-panel prices. The vast majority of sites in the study have sufficient buildable land to install solar projects.

Phadke added that building off-grid systems would give factories faster access to renewables, since grid-tied wind and solar farms have to wait in long interconnection queues, which can delay projects for years. Ditching the utility would also let manufacturers avoid paying steep grid-delivery charges and other expenses—and sidestep competition with data center operators for power from an increasingly strained grid.

The new site-level data ​“is really helpful for project developers and technology developers to know how to prioritize their efforts, in terms of where to go and pitch industries on,” said José Domínguez, the study’s lead author and a research affiliate at the Goldman School.

The fact remains, though, that many factories will continue to rely on the electric grid in the near term. To get these facilities to consider transitioning to cleaner heat, the cost of electricity needs to come down.

The concept of electricity rate reform is gaining traction among decarbonization advocates, state policymakers, and manufacturers like Eastman as a tool for narrowing the gap between electricity and natural gas prices.

“Reforming electric rates is a good way to improve the economics of electrification while taking advantage of our clean electricity generation.”

In California, Senate Bill 943 would authorize the state’s Public Utilities Commission to fix utility rates and fees to make it more affordable for large industrial and commercial customers to switch from fossil fuels to electric heat. The bill passed the Senate in May and is now headed to the state Assembly’s Appropriations Committee.

In the Upper Midwest, the utility Otter Tail Power recently developed a novel electricity tariff that is designed to boost the bottom line of thermal energy systems and to ensure they benefit everyone on the grid. The first project to take advantage of this new rate is Antora Energy​’s 5-gigawatt-hour battery in South Dakota, which turns cheap wind energy into clean industrial steam for Poet​’s nearby ethanol-production plant.

“Reforming electric rates is a good way to improve the economics of electrification while taking advantage of our clean electricity generation,” said Lauren Kubiak, a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council who works on California climate and energy policy.

Kubiak led a new study analyzing how this strategy could improve the costs of operating industrial heat pumps in two major manufacturing states: California and Michigan. While heat pumps are significantly more energy-efficient than gas-fueled boilers, they’re typically not cost-effective to operate in either state, given current electricity prices.

The study examined what would happen if companies paid only ​“marginal” electricity costs, which reflect the actual cost of generating and transporting an additional unit of electricity. Today, ratepayers also pay ​“non-marginal” costs that help cover things like grid maintenance and infrastructure upgrades, net-metering programs for rooftop solar, and, in California, wildfire-prevention efforts.

“In California, [marginal-cost] rates enabled heat pumps to become pretty cost-competitive with gas boilers,” Kubiak said. That’s particularly true for major subsectors that require low-temperature heating.

For Michigan manufacturers, the impact is more muted, since the state’s electricity rates are lower than California’s and don’t include as many non-marginal costs. However, charging factories marginal rates would still reduce the size of the electricity-gas cost gap, enough that layering on other industrial policies—such as a tax credit that rewards low-carbon heat production—could bridge that divide almost entirely.

In the report, Kubiak and her co-authors suggest that utilities could offer marginal cost rates only to new heat pumps that displace fossil fuel–generated heat. These rates could also be set to encourage manufacturers to use electricity during times when solar projects are producing excess electricity, or when overall grid demand is low. That should help avoid saddling other ratepayers with the non-marginal costs that these new heat pumps won’t be paying.

“Electric rate reform is a tool in our toolbox that hasn’t been used to its fullest extent just yet,” Kubiak said.

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Can Opposing Data Centers Help Progressives Win?

When Donald Trump came to Michigan last week to speak at a General Motors vehicle-testing facility, he likely expected to find a friendly crowd.

That wasn’t entirely the case. A group of protesters holding yellow signs that read “stop data centers” interrupted the president, chanting, “Data centers no, people pay the bill,” until they were removed by security.

Will Lawrence, a progressive Democratic candidate in Michigan’s seventh congressional district—where that General Motors plant is located—was unsurprised by the protesters’ fury. “That’s what we’re tapping into,” he posted on social media.

People across Michigan have pushed back on data center proposals in recent months, raising concerns about the facilities’ energy demands. In response, Lawrence, a climate activist turned politician, has made opposition to hyperscale data centers central to his campaign. And he’s betting that standing up to data centers will help him get votes from across the aisle, too.

“Since I declared my candidacy last August, we’ve had four major data centers, including three hyperscalers, proposed in the district in Lansing, in Mason, in Howell Township, and in Lyon Township,” Lawrence said at a panel discussion earlier this month. He has been attending township meetings as Michiganders try to stop the often-secretive data center permitting process in its tracks. MAGA Republicans and true-blue Democrats all stood up to protest, Lawrence said. “It became very clearly obvious to me that this is a totally cross-partisan rebellion that’s happening from the bottom up.”

America’s data center backlash refuses to stick cleanly to partisan boundaries, with opposition to data center buildout nearly as high among Republicans as it is among Democrats. In his first major TV ad, Lawrence took aim at “tech billionaires” who he said want to turn Michigan’s farms into data centers that will “jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values.”

Lawrence is just one of a growing crop of progressive candidates who see, in opposing AI data center buildout—and condemning the tech oligarchs behind it—a path to victory.

“Fights all over the country about AI data centers and AI more broadly are shifting the usual political lines,” said Saul Levin, a Michigan community organizer who runs a podcast about data centers called The Hum. That political shift is happening in battleground states like Michigan, but also in more clearly Democratic states like Colorado.

Melat Kiros, who recently won Denver’s Democratic congressional primary, credits her win in part to her ability to vocalize constituents’ anger about the data center permitting process, which can operate in near-total secrecy: companies often ask municipal decisionmakers to sign non-disclosure agreements, which can mean that people don’t find out a data center is moving into their neighborhood until the process is half-complete.

That secrecy and anger can translate to votes. “There’s a lot of candidates that are making this a front and center issue and are winning as a result of it,” Kiros said.

In Memphis, Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson has made opposition to Elon Musk’s xAI data center, and its associated neighborhood-polluting gas turbines, a core part of his campaign for Congress. In his district, voters are worried about becoming sick thanks to Musk’s data centers—which Trump’s Justice Department has thrown its weight behind.

The Department of Justice intervened in a lawsuit against xAI, saying they should not have to conform to the Clean Air Act—because Grok, which xAI powers, is being used to bomb Iran. “That’s the logic,” Pearson said. “Violate the Clean Air Act, allow the pollution to kill American citizens because we’re killing people overseas with this technology.” And even in communities less directly affected by data centers than Memphis, populist opposition to their construction is gaining strength.

Candidates for governor in at least 12 states are running on data center moratoria, per Newsweek. Centrist Democrats, meanwhile, are more likely than ever to experience voter pushback when they’re perceived to be overly friendly to data center developers. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer appeared onstage with OpenAI’s Sam Altman earlier this year, and was roundly condemned for doing so by Democratic and Republican constituents alike.

Some, like Lawrence, blame the governor in part for bringing the data centers to Michigan. “Here in Michigan, the reason why this all started to arrive in late 2025 is because in late 2024 the state passed a set of tax breaks for data center development, and that was passed through the state legislature on a bipartisan basis and signed by our Democratic governor.”

“I think people see that the ruling class is united behind this plan to push data centers in our communities,” Lawrence said. “That’s a place that you can fight from.”

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The Next Victim of Trump’s Political Prosecutions? Congressional Oversight.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who helped lead the national response to the Covid-19 pandemic as the country’s longtime chief infectious disease expert, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at least 90 times Wednesday in a contentious hearing focused on the origins of the virus in China. Fauci was clear about his reason for pleading the 5th: He believes the hearing was a set-up for a perjury investigation by the Justice Department—a realistic assessment of how the Trump administration is wielding its prosecutorial powers to go after people the president doesn’t like.

The hearing was chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a harsh Fauci critic. “Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me,” the NIH veteran said in his opening statement, “the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”

This isn’t a hypothetical concern, and it’s not simply animated by Paul’s animosity toward Fauci. Congressional Republicans and the Justice Department, now under the control of former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, have repeatedly used testimony to gin up perjury investigations and charges against people the president doesn’t like. That’s turned testimony before Congress—which should be a public service sharing information to inform our laws—intothe first step toward a criminal investigation.

Pleading the Fifth is not a clean solution.

Just a week ago, House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent the DOJ a criminal referral accusing former special counsel Jack Smith of lying to Congress in testimony last December. During his confirmation hearing, Blanche told the Senate that the department, like his boss the president, is serious about investigating Smith. Similarly, federal prosecutors are already investigating former CIA director John Brennan, a Trump critic, over testimony he gave in 2023, also via a Jordan referral. Perjury before Congress is also one of the speciouscharges the department unsuccessfully brought against former FBI Director James Comey. An accusation of lying to Congressis alsohow the DOJ set out to pressure and possibly oust Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell before that investigation was dropped to smooth the way for Senate confirmation of Kevin Warsh as Fed chair.

Though wise as a form of self-preservation, it’s unclear if Fauci’s use of the Fifth is kosher. On Bluesky, Georgetown Law professor Josh Chafetz commented that he didn’t see a legal basis for it. “It certainly sounds like Fauci is saying that he thinks Paul is trying to trick him into perjuring himself,” he posted. “But that can’t justify invoking the Fifth Amendment, otherwise anyone could get out of testifying anytime by claiming that, if they testified, they might lie. That can’t be right.” Later, he added, “I don’t want a world in which witnesses get to decide for themselves whether or not a congressional investigation is a farce and therefore whether or not they’ll ‘play along.’”

Clearly, Fauci’s lawyers don’t think the threat of prosecution is idle, and there are at least four other former officials they can point to explain why. At the close of the hearing, Paul said the committee would meet next week to vote on holding Fauci in contempt of Congress, which would have to be upheld by a vote in the full Senate.

Paul could have assuaged Fauci’s fears and elicited testimony in the public interest if the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee had granted him immunity for anything said in his testimony, a rare move but one within the committee’s power. In Fauci’s case, this would not have let him off the hook for any crime that theoretically could come to light during questioning—because President Joe Biden already did that when he granted Fauci a sweeping, preemptive pardon covering the his last nine years in government.

Some Republicans on the committee argued that this pardon meansFauci shouldn’t be able to plead the Fifth. “You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you’ve been pardoned, as you very well know,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said. Paul said the question is unsettled. But Fauci’s lawyers evidently disagree; indeed, it makes little sense that a perjury investigation into current statements would be ruled out by a pardon for past offenses.

Either way, the politicization of DOJ complicates the situation: Fauci might not fear actually committing perjury, but it is reasonable to assume that he was at risk of saying something that could form the basis of an investigation that could drain his bank account and make life much more difficult for years, even if it doesn’t end in a guilty verdict.

Bynot offering immunity, Republicans on the committee are preserving the possibility of an investigation based on his testimony. That tells us that Paul and his fellow Republicans are more interested in prosecuting Fauci than learning more about the origins of Covid-19.

Wherever the courts come down on Fauci pleading the Fifth, it’s yet another example of how the theory of expansive presidential power endorsed by the Supreme Court and deployed by this president crashes into not just norms, but also laws and the Constitution. Over the past few years, the court’s Republican-appointed majority has increasingly expanded the powers of the president and clarified that the prosecutorial functions at DOJ are not independent enforcement of the rule of law but rather under the sole purview of the president, who can even direct completely unfounded prosecutions.

In his second term, Trump has embraced this power as he demands the prosecutions of his perceived enemies. One result is a loss of faith in the Justice Department. Ironically, on Wednesday evening, Senate Republicans delayed a vote to confirm Trump’s next pick for attorney general, Todd Blanche, because Blanche would not commit to reversing his decision to give Trump immunity from tax investigations—an indication that Blanche, currently the acting attorney general, is not just working at the behest of Trump to punish the president’s critics, but using the DOJ to prevent any scrutiny of his actions. It’s the latest sign that the DOJ has been transformed from an entity walled-off from presidential interference to one in which the president calls all the shots.

But the Fauci debacle shows thatthe blast radius goes far beyond DOJ’s sullied reputation and political vendettas. Prosecutors going on fishing expeditions through congressionaltestimony at the behest of a vengeful president will ultimately harm lawmakers’ ability to do the critical work ofholding hearings and gathering testimony,along withwitnesses’ ability to give that testimony. Fauci was compelled to testify under subpoena, and yet Congress was still deprived of his answers.

Pleading the Fifth is not a clean solution for Fauci either; he couldstill be prosecuted if the Senate votes to hold him in contempt. If that happens, then the courts—even the Supreme Court, which helped create this mess—may ultimately decide how to resolve the spreading fallout from a politicized prosecutorial machine. Will Fifth Amendment rights win out over Congress’ fact-finding powers? Or will Congressional testimony become an accepted precursor to unwarranted criminal investigation? Either way, the problem lies not with Fauci, butwith the weaponization of the Justice Department.

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The Kushner-Backed FIFA Takeover Tearing the Soccer World Apart

For a long time, Gianni Infantino, the ubiquitous president of FIFA, and Jared Kushner, the businessman and Middle East peace envoy, have seemed inseparable. When the US was awarded a joint bid to host this year’s men’s World Cup, all the way back in 2018, Jared was quick to take credit. It was Jared who arranged Infantino’s first meeting with Trump, at the White House in 2018, where the president flashed a red card at the assembled members of the press. They have had dinner together on the exclusive island in South Florida where President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and his wife, Ivanka, now live. Infantino invited Kushner and his family to participate in the official draw for the 2025 Club World Cup and they currently serve together on Board of Peace. Kushner, according to New York Magazine, has done so many favors for the head of FIFA that he calls himself an “unpaid intern.” But when Infantino had a plan to sell a stake in the world’s game to private equity…well, he went to Josh.

Infantino, with help from JP Morgan, is proposing to sell an up-to-20-percent stake in FIFA’s marketing and events business to a “geographically-diversified investor group” of investors helmed by Thrive Capital, the investment shop run by Jared’s younger brother, Josh Kushner. Under the proposal, Thrive and its partners would raise $4.2 billion and FIFA’s 211 member nations would each walk away with a onetime $40 million payday. As it happens, those 211 associations are also the ones who are supposed to vote on this proposal. A simple majority is needed to pass, and without being too coy about it, money has historically proven to be a powerful motivator in FIFA politics. The proposal hit the world of soccer this week like a free kick to the face. The Independent called it “an existential threat to football.” A source told the Telegraph it was a “nuclear bomb.”

The proposal, which Infantino reportedly cooked up without much, if any, consultation from other high-ranking officials, also amounts to a potential golden parachute for the Swiss-Italian bureaucrat. Infantino would be term-limited after his expected re-election next year. According to the The Athletic, the deal would create a new position, analogous to an NFL commissioner, with pay in the range of roughly $60 million a year, and which Infantino would be expected to fill. If that were to happen, Infantino would end up making orders of magnitude more money out of this deal than the soccer federations it purports to enrich.

For the soccer world, this marks a dramatic escalation on two fronts. One of them is something you should care about if you care about soccer, and the other is something you should care about if you care about anything else. The first concerns a conflict between FIFA and its European confederation, UEFA, which is the hegemon of club soccer and also home to most of the world’s top national teams, but which comprises a fraction of FIFA’s voting membership. FIFA and UEFA have clashed in the past over similar cash grabs, and Infantino—despite hailing from Switzerland—has drawn much of his political support and financial backing from outside the continent. If the plan does fail, it will be because Europe was willing to use its substantial non-voting leverage to blow it up. On Thursday, after a hastily-arranged meeting, UEFA pledged to boycott all FIFA competitions not just until after this proposal is tabled, but until FIFA formally commits to never proposing anything like it again. It is not hyperbole to say it is a showdown over the entire structure of the sport.

But the other conflict goes beyond the game, to some familiar questions about finance and politics and power. This FIFA story resonates not because it has been proposed happening at FIFA but because the thing that is happening at FIFA is happening everywhere—investors swooping in to buy a stake in something that doesn’t feel like it should really be anyone’s to sell.

Not all private investment shops are the same, of course. Some of them are sell-off specialists. Some of them just bleed service-oriented professions and make them progressively worse. Some of them, indeed, inject much-needed capital in the right place at the right time. And some of them embed themselves in a venerable kind of place, in a put-together and normal-sounding way, until you wake up one day and realize it’s becoming the kind of thing it was never meant to be. Aside from the extremely self-interested and not necessarily altruistic suits of Europe, that is the fear above all fears: Inviting private investment into your organization is a recipe for private investment dictating what your organization is and does. Maybe sometimes the result is “better marketing and streaming deals.” But probably it’s more tournaments, more teams, more product. The incentives change. The demands change. And the accumulated century-plus of tradition and joy and sweat equity becomes an asset on someone else’s books.

FIFA has been synonymous with big, dubious deals for a long time, of course. But as I explained in a recent episode of Reveal, Infantino’s FIFA marks a significant departure from the sort of corruption that defined the organization under his predecessor, Sepp Blatter.

In the old system, people handed out literal envelopes of money to people you’ve probably never heard of for TV rights to events you probably didn’t watch. That was a very specific kind of corruption. There was a unique FIFA flair to it—a weird tri-state guy and a Trinidadian member of parliament and a bunch of former players and sportocrats hashing out deals in a literal underground chamber in a $250 million compound in a place in Zurich called “Dividend Hill.” It is the kind of arrangement that could only exist in international soccer, and at a particular point in time, when the cash flows were growing at a rate that exceeded the sport’s capacity to exploit it in an organized and notarized way. On balance, it was not a particularly good way of conducting business and the outcomes were scandalous but you have to admit that sometimes it was also pretty funny.

But FIFA under Infantino has become something different. The scandals aren’t necessarily illegal nor are they happening in secret (even if the planning process for this was). The money is on a different level, and the people who want a piece of it are too. Before there was Josh Kushner and JP Morgan and a stake in the World Cup, there was Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and SoftBank trying to do the same for the FIFA Club World Cup.

Infantino’s FIFA has crossed the threshold from a sports story involving money and power to a money and power story involving sports, and the scandals of his tenure, while draped in a distinctive soccer-like gloss, have concerned the kinds of mergers and acquisitions that have disrupted seemingly every other sector as well. International soccer is an uniquely prominent front in a familiar battleground: A few rich guys stepping in to extract value in perpetuity from something they didn’t build, in exchange for an extremely unevenly distributed short-term windfall. Europe just might succeed in killing it off this time. But you’ll experience it again soon enough wherever you are.

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Democrats Call For Ethics Investigation into Congressman Max Miller

Several Democratic members of Congress are requesting the House Ethics Committee investigate their colleague, Congressman Max Miller (R-OH), over allegations that he assaulted his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, and possibly injured their child.

“The recent reports of domestic violence and child abuse against Representative Max Miller are deeply disturbing, and Congress can’t ignore them. Allegations of violence against women and children have to be met with the utmost seriousness. We therefore call on the House Committee on Ethics to swiftly and thoroughly investigate these allegations,” said a statement by the 96-member Democratic Women’s Caucus chairwoman Leger Fernandez (D-NM), and vice chairs Hillary Scholten (D-MI) and Emilia Sykes (D-OH).

Their calls for a formal probe into the embattled Congressman follow the publication of a July 18 profile in Mother Jones that drew from thousands of pages of public records alleging numerous episodes of misconduct. As I wrote in the story:

The summary of the Zoom meeting and investigative report are among more than 2,000 pages of court filings and police reports pertaining to Miller that Mother Jones obtained through public records requests. The trove of documents contains allegations of drug use by Miller, misogyny and verbal abuse, and violent behavior against multiple women. The filings also include evidence that Miller implicitly threatened his ex-father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno.

Some of the allegations were documented in a police report regarding an investigation into potential child abuse after Miller’s daughter wound up with a broken collarbone.

Neither the child’s father, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), nor mother, conservative policy adviser Emily Moreno, admitted to knowing what caused their daughter’s injury or that it occurred while their daughter was under their care. Miller’s primary theory was that the bruising resembled marks from a seat belt. Moreno, who discovered the bruises and took the child to an emergency room, suggested the cause may have been something more sinister. Records of the investigation into potential child abuse show that Moreno told detectives that Miller had previously thrown hot water at her, shoved her, and held a gun to her head; therefore, she couldn’t rule out that Miller caused their daughter’s fracture. Moreover, a child protection specialist reviewing the incident had characterized the bruising near the fracture as resembling a “handprint.”

The police investigation into possible child abuse was ultimately “unsubstantiated.” That means there was not enough evidence to support a finding of neglect or abuse.

Though Miller repeatedly declined to answer questions from Mother Jones, he has elsewhere denied ever being violent towards women.

“Every woman and child deserves to live free from fear of violence, especially within the sanctity of their own home, and we will not stop fighting until that’s the reality,” wrote the leaders of the Democratic Women’s Caucus in a statement first provided to Mother Jones.

The caucus was joined in calling for the investigation by several lawmakers. Rep. Sam Liccardo, a California Democrat, wrote on X Wednesday, “Allegations that Max Miller abused his wife and child demand an immediate House Ethics Committee investigation. Congress must never serve as a safe harbor for abusers.”

He was joined by Rep. Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin Democrat who has previously spoken about surviving domestic violence, told Mother Jones, “The domestic abuse allegations against my colleague, Rep. Max Miller, are disturbing.” She added, “I am especially concerned about the claims of abuse against his 2-year-old daughter whose collarbone was broken. Every child deserves to feel safe in their home, and that is the responsibility of all investigative authorities involved.”

No Republican members of Congress have yet called for an investigation into Miller—including Miller’s former father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno.

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France Had Never Seen a “Fire Cloud” Until This Month’s Record-Smashing Blazes

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Firefighters in France are confronting a phenomenon never seen in the region before: fire clouds. It’s a sign of the intensity of the blazes burning—and how climate change is upping the odds that they appear.

A wave of fires has swept over France and Spain, sending hundreds of thousands fleeing. Firefighters on the front lines are facing what a spokesperson for the French firefighter association told AFP was an “operational impossibility”—in other words, a “natural force beyond our control.”

As evidence of how out of control the wildfires in France are, look no further than the skies where the blazes have, in some cases, created their own weather. To form a fire cloud—what meteorologists call a pyrocumulonimbus or the even more metal-sounding cumulonimbus flammagenitus—you first need heat, which fires have in spades.

While the country is no stranger to wildfires, the size and ferocity of this summer’s blazes is well outside the normal.

But just as important are dry conditions near the ground and cool, relatively moist conditions aloft in the atmosphere. As superheated smoke rises miles above the flames and into the cool atmosphere, water vapor condenses around the particles of ash to form water droplets. (Yes, water vapor and water droplets are two different things.) As the air keeps rising, those water droplets eventually become ice crystals.

At this point, the smoke and water droplets have created a cloud, but unfortunately one that’s unlikely to provide much relief in the form of rain. Instead, these towering fire clouds can unleash lightning strikes that start more fires and generate powerful downdrafts that reach the ground to fan flames further. At their worst, pyrocumulonimbus clouds can even spawn tornadoes.

Pyrocumulonimbus clouds have been documented in the US, Canada, and Australia, among a handful of other locations. But until now, there were no documented fire clouds in France. While the country is no stranger to wildfires, the size and ferocity of this summer’s blazes are well outside the norm.

Last week was France’s single most destructive week for wildfires over the past 20 years, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System. It more than doubled the previous record during that period, which coincides with accurate satellite data. This isn’t an isolated bad week either. More than 220,000 acres have burned across the country so far, six times the annual average. That’s 61,000 acres higher than the previous yearly record.

If that sounds like a familiar trend, well, it unfortunately is. Burning fossil fuels has heated the planet up, making explosive wildfires more common and destructive around the world. A 2024 study found the incidence of extreme fires globally more than doubled from 2003 to 2023. Six of the seven most extreme years have happened since 2016.

After a slight weekend reprieve as temperatures dipped, they’re expected to rocket back up above 104 degrees F (40 degrees C) in France and 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Spain later this week. That means firefighters will have to contend with more extreme fire weather—including the possibility of clouds created by the blazes themselves.

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California Does Medicaid Home Care Well. They’re Being Punished For It.

On July 21, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who heads Medicaid programs federally, announced they’re deferring over $850 million from the state of California over its Medicaid-funded home and community-based services program called In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS). The Trump administration has attacked IHSS for the program’s growth over the past decade.

Their argument: the program is so successful there must be rampant fraud.

Home and community-based services got started under President Ronald Regean to help disabled people remain in their communities with the assistance of paid aides, including family members, instead of being institutionalized. From a purely economic standpoint, home and community-based services care is cheaper than care in hospitals or nursing homes. And disabled people find the right to remain in their communities to be so crucial that it has become an essential tenet of disability rights activism.

Hagar Dickman, who directs California-focused long-term services and support at Justice in Aging, told methat disabled people “are entitled to the life that we expect to have of independence, of autonomy, of self-actualization, and agency.”

As of May 2026, nearly a million disabled and aging Californians are authorized for home and community-based services through IHSS. Unlike in some states, like Texas, where people can lag on waiting lists for over a decade, once a disabled Californian goes through the process of qualifying for IHSS, they are able to get services to help them live independently immediately.

The program’s growth, according to Tyler Sadwith, who directs Medicaid services in the state, is proof that it’s working. In February, Sadwith wrote a letter to Dr. Oz’s agency defending it against allegations of fraud. “Outcomes that CMS has repeatedly endorsed and promoted through federal approvals of California’s IHSS and [home and community-based services] programs, because they deliver care at a fraction of institutional costs.”

Experts I spoke with are concerned that the attacks specifically on California could be used to make an example of paid caregiving, which Kennedy has attacked profusely. Attacks on paid caregiving are also happening at the same time that the Department of Justice is trying to undermine Olmstead, a Supreme Court decision which granted disabled people the right to remain in their communities, in addition to brutal federal Medicaid cuts.

“One of the incredible things about paid family caregiving models is that it allows people to have culturally competent care,” Sabrina Epstein, Disability Rights California policy analyst, told me. “The program is set up for people with needs above and beyond the usual care that a family member would provide, and so these claims of fraud are ableist and racist.”

And unlike attacks towards Minnesota and Medicare-funded home health in Los Angeles, there isn’t even a “few bad apples” argument to be made when attacking IHSS. California, like every state, also investigates Medicaid fraud.

“There’s an existing framework to ensure that there’s not fraud. You can’t bill for more hours than you’re allotted,” Elizabeth Zirker, a senior attorney with National Health Law Program, told me. Additionally, Zirker notes, in California, Medicaid home care is not administered through private companies, unlike some other states.

Additionally, getting IHSS is not automatic for disabled Californians on Medicaid who apply. “It’s not as simple as applying for in-home supportive services and then being awarded hours,” Zirker said. “Counties are not incentivized to pay for services people don’t need.”

And California’s model is still not perfect; experts I spoke with cited waiting lists for some smaller Medicaid-funded programs outside of IHSS, people needing more hours than they are given and pay for care workers needing to be higher.

“The whole assumption that you know growth means fraud is absurd,” Dickman said, “especially given all of the investments that the state has made to actually intentionally grow the program in order to benefit its disabled population and to support people living at home.”

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Covid Truthers Are Claiming Fauci’s Diary Was “Scrubbed”

On Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released a trove of diary entries from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old immunologist and public health veteran who led the US response to the Covid pandemic in 2020. On X, Paul posted an AI-generated image of a grinning, pastel-sweater-clad Anthony Fauci lying on his stomach on a purple shag carpet, poring over a unicorn-themed diary and surrounded by teen girl accoutrements. Paul explained to his 5.9 million followers that the image was “What Anthony Fauci looked like every night when he wrote about how great he is in his diary.”

The diary entries contain plenty of cringeworthy moments—Fauci congratulating himself on how famous he had become, for example, and basking in the attention of female celebrities like Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand. What they don’t contain—much to the dismay of Paul and Fauci’s other critics—is any kind of smoking gun proving that the public health leader deliberately misled the American people.

Undeterred, Covid truthers have only amped up their efforts to prove that Fauci lied—and they’re spinning up conspiracy theories about crucial information they say is missing from the diary.

In an email newsletter Wednesday morning, MAHA Action, the political lobbying group founded by key allies of Health and Human Services Secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., presented a complex theory concerning University of North Carolina coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric’s absence from the diaries. He has emerged as an important figure for people seeking to prove definitively that Covid came from a lab. Margaret Menge, the author of the newsletter who describes herself on LinkedIn as a “truth seeker and news innovator,” argues that the diary’s omission of Baric is fishy, because Fauci was meeting with him in 2020. “What did Fauci really know or suspect about the origin of the virus?” Menge writes and then expands her thesis. “It’s not in the diary entries. But leaving Baric’s name off the list is a sign that he was hiding something, and an indication he suspected that the diary entries would one day be made public.”

If Fauci had imagined a future diary release scenario, would he not have allowed that his Barbra Streisand fangirling might make him seem, well, uncool?

While it’s theoretically possible that this happened, the idea of Fauci practicing self-restraint by deliberately omitting the name of a virologist seems dubious, considering the verbose nature of the rest of the diary. If Fauci had imagined a future diary release scenario, would he not have allowed that his Barbra Streisand fangirling might make him seem, well, uncool?

Baric’s absence isn’t the only thing that Covid skeptics find suspicious about the diary. There are the theories from Mary Talley Bowden, the Texas otolaryngologist who gained notoriety during the pandemic for her advocacy around discredited Covid treatments and criticism of vaccines. “I think Fauci scrubbed his diary of all mentions of ivermectin when we sued the FDA and overcame their motion to dismiss,” she posted to her 641,000 followers on X. “It’s odd that there is no mention of it at all. What else have you noticed that’s missing?” The lawsuit she refers to is one that she and several colleagues filed in 2022, accusing the US Food and Drug Administration of overstepping its authority by issuing public warnings advising against using one of President Donald Trump’s treatments of choice, ivermectin, to treat Covid. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately ruled in favor of Bowden, saying the FDA had gone too far in its warnings—but overwhelming evidence still suggests that the horse dewormer ivermectin isn’t an effective Covid treatment.

While the MAHA Action newsletter writer and Bowden appear to believe that Fauci was censoring himself, others in the Covid denialist universe seem to think that nefarious government forces censored the diary. KanekoaTheGreat, an anonymous right-wing account with a million followers, notes that a June 2021 entry about a lung blood clot that Fauci suffered was originally published and then redacted. “Did Fauci’s lawyers demand the redaction?” reads the post. “Why scrub a lung blood clot from 2021 after it went public?”

While KanekoaTheGreat doesn’t allege that the blood clot was connected to Fauci receiving a Covid vaccine, anti-vaccine activists were quick to spin it that way. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group co-founded by RFK Jr., published an article titled “Fauci Treated for Pulmonary Infarction Months After Getting COVID Vaccine, Diaries Show.” Vince Langman, a MAGA influencer with 565,000 followers on X, posted, “I was suspended from Twitter 1.0 for telling people the Covid Vaccine can cause blood clots! This makes my blood boil!” But there’s a much simpler explanation for the redaction: It contained personal health information, which would put Paul in violation of federal medical privacy protocol.

At a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer Rand’s questions, arguing that the hearing was little more than a witch hunt. “The sole reason [Rand] is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,'” Fauci said. “Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.”

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Maine Just Told ICE to Get Out

A suite of new laws restricting cooperation between Maine law enforcement and Department of Homeland Security agents is set to take effect today, less than three weeks after an ICE agent shot and killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. These “ICE Out laws,” as they’re collectively known, will limit collaboration between state and local police and federal agents, and forbid landlords, hospitals, and schools from sharing personal information with ICE.

“What we saw in Biddeford was not an aberration,” said Zach Heiden of the ACLU of Maine at a press conference Tuesday. “It was the result of intentional changes at ICE that have unleashed thousands of masked and menacing agents on communities across the country.”

The new laws, Heiden explained, are meant to reshape the relationship between those agents and local institutions such as elementary schools, libraries and the DMV. “These new laws will affect hundreds of entities, including 253 school districts, 107 police departments, and 17 housing authorities,” Heiden said.

Since the start of Donald Trump’s second term,a dozen states have passed similar laws. These are outgrowths of the “sanctuary city” and “sanctuary state” laws of the first Trump term, which generally limited local police partnerships with ICE. Those policies, according to a landmark Stanford study released in 2020, did effectively reduce deportations—and, contradicting right-wing narratives about immigration, did not lead to an increase in crime rates. But laws like Maine’s go further, extending these non-cooperation agreements beyond police.

“That includes not just police departments and sheriff’s offices, but also state agencies responsible for enforcing labor law, environmental law, housing law, or any other state or local law,” said Michael Kebede of the ACLU of Maine at Tuesday’s press conference. The goal is to “make sure local resources are not used to support the deportation machine.”

Data from the Migration Policy Institute shows that the number of state-level laws relating to immigration surged in the first year of Trump’s second term. A total of 106 immigration-related laws were enacted in 2024—which more than doubled to 213 in 2025. Meanwhile, tracking by the National Immigration Law Center indicates that at least 12 states have passed laws this year restricting ICE’s operations within their borders. But at least eight states have passed laws mandating local agency cooperation with ICE, instead. These states now require participation in 287(g) deputization programs, and some have outlawed local sanctuary policies.

Maine advocates hope that new “ICE Out” policies—signed into law months before Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s death, but only now coming into effect weeks after he was killed—will help prevent further violence.

“Every day, we hear from families who are afraid to participate in ordinary life, workers who are afraid to speak up, parents who are afraid to take their children outside, send them to school, or seek medical care,” said Ruben Torres of the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition.

“We see businesses lose employees, communities lose opportunities, and all of us lose something when fear becomes a part of everyday life.” Because ICE is a federal agency, Maine cannot fully bar it from operating in the state—but there are some things states can do to restrict the agency’s movement. ICE Out laws, Torres said, “offer a different path.”

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What “You Only Get 18 Summers” Gets Right About Parenting

Technically speaking, August is not the last month of summer; the season officially ends on September 21. But among faithful disciples of the fun season, it prompts urgency, for it contains what seems like the final stretch before grim responsibility sets in and the self-serious soup fans come out in earnest. It is during these weeks when last-minute beach trips are summoned. When we commit ourselves to plans defined by leisure, not labor. Will it ever be this good again, we ask.

Now, the soup people like to argue that it is precisely this attitude, one they dismiss as panicked and mawkish, that informs much of their opposition to summer. There’s so much pressure, they argue, to build out action-packed days and perfect vacation photos. Let me say emphatically: This camp is wrong. And the same forces that guide them animate the hum of outrage over the sentiment, “You only get 18 summers with your kids.”

Not familiar? Well, like most sources of derision on the internet, “you only get 18 summers” is something of a Rorschach test; its meaning, as much as there is one, depends on who you ask. But lately, my algorithm is brimming with denunciations from parents who see it as just another form of “mom guilt.” As a popular Instagram account for parents wrote in May, the phrase creates “pressure to make every summer magical. Every moment meaningful. Every memory count.” Another influencer lamented similarly on Substack: “The pressure of the ‘you only have 18 summers with your child’ content [pushes] us towards trying to create core memories every summer, to try and make it unforgettable for our kids, while maintaining our jobs, cooking 3 meals a day, and making sure everyone has their basic needs met.”

Does it? I searched for the same militant instructions to build five-star memories, but they eluded me. Instead, I was surprised to find the phrase to be an oddly useful, even if corny, reminder to drop one of the worst habits I have as a parent: constantly counting down to the next activity, whatever thing that gets me closer to an imaginary finish line. To stop planning the next memory, quit all that counting, and just sit in it.

Now, finding an internet headline like “you only get 18” meaningful is a bit embarrassing to admit, like finding insight in “life’s a beach.” But for me, “you only get 18” echoes one of the most cosmic things I’ve discovered about parenting: the feeling of nostalgia for the present, even when it sucks. It’s a bittersweet yearning that defies logic, and yet, for so many of us, it’s real. As Stephanie Murray wrote in the Atlantic about why we long for difficult days of parenting:

Only with distance from the minute-to-minute anxieties of caring for a small child does its sweeping beauty come into full view. But this isn’t so much a shortcoming of youth as it is a gift of age. The experiences that follow early parenthood enrich our understanding of it, allowing us to ponder it anew. Hindsight allows us to put suffering into context and recognize the purpose it served in our lives. Hohlbaum likened it to laying bricks in a road: Only after we find out where the path leads are we able to see the purpose each brick served in getting us there. People with grown children have a deeper appreciation for the initial years of parenthood, because they are observing it from a perspective that only time can grant.

Don’t get me wrong. I relate, so acutely, to the parts of parenting that can reel the mind. (This includes the gauntlet of summer activities that, as Caitlin Murray of Big Time Adulting said in a recent video, can leave parents feeling like we are stuck in a “wet paper bag.”) Still, I can’t help but find the irritation over “you only get 18 summers” misplaced. Is it not an invitation for gentleness, to pause and consider, even mawkishly, to give grace to ourselves when we’re in the wet paper bag? Nothing about parenting will ever be perfect, just like those final weeks of August will never deliver the perfect summer. But it’s never been about the pursuit of some elusive perfect summer anyway. Summer is a season that celebrates saying fuck it: Slam those sweating hot dogs even when the meal prep is right there. Trade nice drinks in favor of cheap, ice-cold beers. Celebrate magic in the ordinary flecks of sunlight. Couldn’t we all use that reminder once in a while?

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Big Oil Is Getting Sued for Heat Deaths. It’s Fighting Back With an Army of Immunity Laws.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Could the oil industry be held responsible for fueling the extreme heat that led to a woman’s death?

That’s the question at the heart of a novel lawsuit in Washington state. Misti Leon’s mother died from overheating during the hottest day in state history in June 2021, when temperatures climbed to 108 degrees F. Scientists said the unusual heat dome that descended on the Pacific Northwest would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. So last year, Leon sued Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, and other oil majors for wrongful death, alleging that they had known for decades that fossil fuel emissions would lead to destructive consequences, but deceived the public about it, delaying action that could have prevented her mother’s death. An estimated 1,200 people in the region perished from the heat during that simmering week in June.

Earlier this month, a King County judge ruled against the oil companies’ motions to dismiss Leon’s lawsuit, allowing it to proceed toward trial. The ruling was a signal that this kind of case has merit, said Mike Meno, the communications director at the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit supporting climate accountability cases. “It’s the latest type of legal liability that the oil companies are absolutely terrified of and are going to fight like hell to try to escape,” he said.

“Quite simply, Big Oil is in panic mode.”

More than a decade after investigations found that Exxon Mobil had known about the dangers of global warming since the 1970s but publicly downplayed the threat, lawsuits against oil companies have proliferated. There are nearly 40 of these cases pending across the country, according to Margaret Barry, who manages a climate litigation database at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center. After years of delay tactics from the oil industry, at least five of these lawsuits—from Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, and Honolulu—have proceeded to the discovery stage, in which both sides try to uncover evidence to bolster their case in court. That’s the last major step before a trial, when oil executives would be forced to defend their actions in front of a jury.

Some cases are on hold as judges wait to hear how the Supreme Court handles a lawsuit from Boulder, Colorado, this fall. The city and county of Boulder allege that Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy violated state laws by concealing the dangers of their products and they want money to pay for the rising costs of improving infrastructure to deal with heat waves, wildfires, and floods. The outcome could affect existing climate lawsuits, or push plaintiffs to take different approaches.

In the meantime, the industry has been mobilizing a counterattack against the lawsuits with the help of the Trump administration and Republican politicians. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s biggest lobbying group, has said that one of its priorities for 2026 was to “stop extreme climate liability policy.” The industry has begun challenging “attribution science,” a rapidly developing field that seeks to quantify how climate change, and even emissions from specific companies, have intensified extreme weather.

The flurry of activity suggests that the industry feels like it’s under threat, Meno said. “Quite simply, Big Oil is in panic mode.”

Republicans are trying to pass laws to grant oil majors immunity to these kinds of lawsuits, with success in several states so far. Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Louisiana have recently signed laws shielding fossil fuel companies from lawsuits related to greenhouse gas emissions, while Montana and Utah (again) reformed existing laws to narrowly define what counts as a “public nuisance,” effectively blocking lawsuits against oil companies to recover damages from climate change under that legal theory. The effort has gone national: Republicans in both chambers of Congress introduced bills this spring that would give oil companies broad immunity from lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable for climate damages, with the backing of the American Petroleum Institute.

In April, an investigation from ProPublica revealed a coordinated effort behind these “liability shield” laws from conservative groups tied to the activist Leonard Leo. Evidence provided to Grist from the watchdog group Fieldnotes shows that Koch Industries and Exxon, in particular, have extensive ties to the organizations pushing for these laws, including the American Legislative Exchange Council and the American Tort Reform Association.

“If these companies have done nothing wrong and they think the law is on their side, why are they lobbying Congress for immunity?” Meno said.

Oil executives have also gotten help from the federal government, following an executive order from President Donald Trump last year directing the attorney general to prioritize blocking climate lawsuits by states. This May, the Justice Department responded to Minnesota’s climate lawsuit against Big Oil with a lawsuit of its own, just as the state’s case was moving into the discovery phase. It said Minnesota was undermining “American energy dominance” and attempting to regulate greenhouse gases, which should fall under the purview of federal law—echoing the oil industry’s well-known argument. In a related development, Robert Levy, a longtime Exxon lawyer, recently joined the Department of Justice in the newly dubbed “Energy and Natural Resources Division” (instead of the “Environment and Natural Resources Division”).

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The Rapid Rise of Right-Wing Militias

A photo went viral on Independence Day this year. It showed a Black woman on a Metro train in Washington, DC, surrounded by members of Patriot Front, a far-right white nationalist group. The picture, taken on America’s 250th anniversary, seemed to encapsulate not only the continuing story of race in America, but also this current moment when right-wing groups seem louder, prouder, and more public than they’ve been in decades.

Mary McCord has been working to prosecute groups like Patriot Front for years. Following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor successfully won a consent decree that banned the rally’s lead organizer from planning future paramilitary activity in the city. Still, McCord says right-wing militias are benefiting from a friendly administration that has stretched back to Donald Trump’s earliest days campaigning for the presidency.

The president is “aligned with them, whether he believes in white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or not,” McCord says, referring to far-right groups. “That permission that he started giving back in 2016 and 2017 is just even greater permission now.”

On this week’s More To The Story, McCord sits down with host Al Letson to talk about Patriot Front’s origins, a decade of growing white nationalism in America, and the troubling direction of the US Department of Justice under the Trump administration.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

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Trump Administration Moves to Open American Samoa’s Waters to Deep-Sea Mining

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration is moving closer to opening up US waters for deep-sea mining—a contentious and largely untested industry focused on extracting mineral-rich deposits from the ocean floor containing cobalt, copper, nickel, and manganese.

Last week, the Department of the Interior’s newly created Marine Minerals Administration (MMA) announced a proposal to hold a lease sale for deep-sea mining activities in federal waters off the coast of American Samoa in the South Pacific. If the plans move forward, it would be the first deep-sea mining lease sale in the world. Interested deep-sea mining companies could bid for 20 years of mining rights across more than 31 million acres of American Samoa’s outer continental shelf in an auction tentatively scheduled for November 19, 2026.

The announcement has drawn widespread criticism from environmental advocates and scientists who say any deep-sea mining activities, including preliminary exploratory activities, could pose irreparable harm to the marine environment and the American Samoan people, whose culture and livelihoods are deeply entwined with the ocean.

“Pacific people have made our position clear: we do not want deep-sea mining in our waters,” Sabrina Suluai-Mahuka, founder of Finafinau, an environmental advocacy group in American Samoa, said in a press release. “Our ocean is our home, our food, our culture, and our future, and we are calling on the Administration to stop this reckless lease sale before irreversible harm is done.”

The proposal marks the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to pave the way for deep-sea mining in the US and abroad. Since President Donald Trump signed an executive order last April directing federal agencies to fast-track the issuance of seabed mining permits, the government has sought to position the US as a leader of the emerging industry, despite global opposition.

Supporters of deep-sea mining say critical minerals found on the seafloor may be eventually used to manufacture green technologies and military defense systems.

“It is an incredibly reckless and destructive move to deep seabed mine in this area.”

“Critical minerals have become a strategic asset in global competition, and China’s dominance in the supply of many of these materials creates unacceptable risks for America’s energy, defense and manufacturing sectors,” said Matt Giacona, acting director of the Marine Minerals Administration, in a statement about the latest proposed lease sale. “Advancing this notice is an important step toward building a secure domestic critical minerals supply chain, strengthening US economic and national security, and ensuring America can compete and win in the 21st century.”

But deep-sea mining has not yet been conducted at a commercial scale anywhere in the world. There are still no formalized regulations to govern the industry in the US or globally.

In fact, global delegates are gathering this month in Kingston, Jamaica, at the International Seabed Authority to continue negotiating a long-debated Mining Code that would regulate activities related to extracting deep-sea minerals, including prospecting, exploration, and commercial exploitation in international waters.

Forging ahead without such regulations in place and paving the way for future mining near American Samoa will inevitably result in harm to critical marine ecosystems and the people who depend on them, said Taryn Kiekow Heimer, a senior attorney and director for ocean energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“It is an incredibly reckless and destructive move to deep seabed mine in this area,” she said.

In a statement to Inside Climate News, the MMA wrote that “plans will not be approved before completion of additional technical and environmental reviews to ensure that the activities described will be carried out in a safe and environmentally responsible manner.”

Directly adjacent to the proposed lease area is the Rose Atoll, a national wildlife refuge and marine national monument that was established by President George W. Bush in 2009.

For generations, the remote coral atoll served as a waypoint for Polynesian navigators, and it is still highly revered amongst Indigenous peoples in the Pacific as part of their cultural heritage.

Activities associated with deep sea mining would likely disrupt this precious interconnected ecosystem.

From an ecological standpoint, this atoll is extremely important, said Alan Friedlander, an affiliate researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, based at the University of Hawaii, who conducted a survey of the area with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in the early 2000s.

“It’s one of the last largely intact marine ecosystems that we have under US jurisdiction,” Friedlander said.

Its remote location and protected status have allowed its colorful reefs to flourish even as others around the world suffer from global warming and threats like overfishing, dredging, and pollution. The corals are largely nourished by nutrients deposited by thousands of seabirds that nest on the remote atoll’s two islands. Sharks and other apex predators are abundant in surrounding waters, as are giant clams, which are now scarce throughout much of the Pacific due to overharvesting. Migrating humpbacks pass by the atoll, and critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles also nest on its shores.

Activities associated with deep-sea mining would likely disrupt this precious interconnected ecosystem, Friedlander said. That includes everything from increased shipping traffic and underwater noise to sediment plumes generated by some of the machinery that is needed to extract mineral deposits from the seabed.

“We probably should take the precautionary approach to this, and try to understand this complex ecosystem better before we go into activities that potentially have pretty long-term deleterious effects,” he said.

There are still several steps that must be completed before the Marine Minerals Administration finalizes the decision to hold a mining lease sale, including the publication of a final leasing notice.

“Issuance of the notice does not guarantee that a lease sale will be held, nor does it guarantee that any exploration or collection activities will occur should MMA move forward with a sale,” officials said in a public statement.

American Samoa’s governor, Pula’ali’i Nikolao Pula, has 60 days to review and comment on the proposed leasing notice.

“The governor does have a chance to object during these next 60 days,” said Kiekow Heimer.

In the meantime, the governor has encouraged his constituents to share their thoughts on deep-sea mining and any recommendations they have.

“This is an opportunity for our community to provide informed input,” Gov. Pula said in a statement. “I remain steadfast in my position that any such development must be fully transparent, responsible, science-based, and carefully managed to protect our environment, safeguard our vital tuna fisheries and cultural heritage, and deliver meaningful, tangible benefits for the people of American Samoa.”

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The IRS Is Imploding

In many years of paying taxes, I’ve never had a problem with the IRS. So, I was surprised to receive a letter dated May 25 informing us that my husband and I owelots more money than we had paid for our 2025 taxes—and of course interest and fines. After reviewing the somewhat cryptic letter, we realized that we did not, in fact, owe any money. The IRS had simply failed to credit quarterly payments thatwe’d made on time. Because we had all the bank records, it seemed as if this would be a relatively straightforward problem to fix—until I picked up the phone and called the IRS.

Two hours on hold later, I gave up. When I tried again a few days later, the outgoing message informed me, “Due to the high call volume, we are unable to answer your call. Please call back later today or tomorrow.” And I was disconnected. After several more fruitless phone calls over the next week, I asked my accountant for advice. Unfortunately, she said, the dedicated lines for tax practitioners were going unanswered, too. She had never seen it so bad. She had clients who had serious issues to resolve, and there was “no contact available at all.”

At that point, I realized the IRS was finally imploding.

Tax professionals, journalists—including those from Mother Jones—members of Congress and former IRS commissioners had warned this would happen. When Elon Musk’s DOGE service swept into the federal government like a buzzsaw in February last year, one of the first agencies it targeted for wholesale destruction was the IRS. DOGE slashed about a third of the entire IRS workforce in just a few short months. The agency hasn’t had a confirmed commissioner since August last year.

“When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership,” former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told my colleague Michael Mechanic last year. “You really are disabling the IRS.”

“You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional. Things are starting to break.”

In October, the administration created what members of Congress have dubbed the “fake job” of IRS CEO, which Congress never authorized. Trump filled the post with former finance executive Frank Bisignano, even though he is simultaneously in charge of the Social Security Administration.

At an April congressional hearing, Bisignano assured lawmakers that IRS customer service had not suffered at all from the sudden, massive cuts in its workforce. He called 2026 “the most successful filing season in IRS history” and claimed that the Trump administration was proving it was possible to have both “less people and better results.”

My experience, that of many other taxpayers and tax professionals I have spoken with over the past month, as well as the IRS’s own data, suggest otherwise. “You can’t get rid of 30 percent of your staff and expect to be functional,” says Traci DiMartini, the former IRS human capital officer who was one of the first high-ranking officials DOGE pushed out last year. “Things are starting to break.”

Members of Congress have also started to notice. “The Administration laid off close to a third of the IRS workforce, sabotaging its mission, and making it impossible to get someone on the phone to answer even the simplest of questions, let alone resolve issues,” Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), ranking member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “Yet this Administration refuses to acknowledge the predictable consequences of gutting an agency and keeps telling taxpayers not to believe what they are experiencing.”

Contacting the IRS has never been easy. The agency has been badly underfunded for decades, as Republicans have made it the bête noir of the federal government and starved it for resources. Several of them, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), have called to abolish the IRS outright. “There are 93,000 agents at the IRS,” he said in June. “I think we should put a padlock on that building and put every one of them down on our southern border.” (His numbers were actually outdated: Thanks to the DOGE cuts, as of January 2026, the IRS had fewer than 75,000 employees, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration.)

In 2022, under President Joe Biden, Democrats in Congress pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act, a kitchen-sink bit of legislation that included some $80 billion over 10 years to shore up and modernize the IRS. The new funding allowed the agency to hire and train thousands of new customer service employees.

Republicans like Cruz, who have long believed that the IRS has unfairly targeted conservatives, immediately launched a conspiracy theory suggesting that Biden was going to use the money to hire a shadow army of 87,000 armed agents to harass innocent Americans. They eventually clawed back most of that funding, but the IRS nonetheless invested what remained in trying to make life better for ordinary taxpayers. In 2024, the service answered more than 1 million more calls from taxpayers during filing season than it had the previous year, and reduced the average hold time from 28 minutes to 3, according to IRS data.

Since Trump took office, all of those metrics have reversed, particularly after the DOGE workforce cuts fully took effect in October. “It’s infinitely worse in 2026 than it was in 2025,” says Richard Champion, a New Jersey lawyer who has practiced tax law for nearly 50 years and represents low-income taxpayers in federal tax court pro bono. When he used to call the IRS practitioner line, he says he used to be able to get into the call-back queue so he didn’t have to sit on hold for hours. That option is increasingly unavailable. Now even when he does manage to reach someone, he says, they are often new and can’t help, so they forward him to someone else, and those calls inevitably get dropped. “I have at least four or five cases where I’m just stymied,” he says.

“There are some days I will literally be on the phone with the IRS five or six hours. And that’s because my call dropped, so I’m calling back again. It’s horrible. It’s the worst that I’ve seen.”

Sakinah Tillman runs the tax clinic at the University of the District of Columbia’s David Clark School of Law. She has worked with low-income taxpayers for more than a decade and says a few years ago, she’d get someone on the phone in 15 minutes. Now, however, “There are some days I will literally be on the phone with the IRS five or six hours,” she told me. “And that’s because my call dropped, so I’m calling back again. It’s horrible. It’s the worst that I’ve seen.” Even more troubling, she told me, is that the managers have all but disappeared. “Every time I’ve been making a request for a manager in the last year,” she said, “I’m not getting a call back.”

These aren’t just anecdotal one-offs. A June report to Congress from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent agency within the IRS, found that live humans answered 20 percent fewer calls during this year’s tax filing season and that hold times jumped anywhere from 81 to 161 percent, depending on the line called. Only 17 percent of the calls handled by the “voicebot” system were completed. Most callers got frustrated and either asked to be transferred to a live person or hung up.

The worst service came on phone lines dedicated to people who owed money and needed help, such as an installment plan. Live operators answered only 30 percent of more than 3 million such calls this year between January and April 18. Those lucky taxpayers who got through waited an average of 45 minutes on hold.

The nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights this year also conducted its own research on how bad the IRS call responsiveness has gotten. The group discovered that the government’s own measurements showed that wait times increased more than 70 percent in 2026, even though the agency received 50 percent fewer calls to its main 1040 help line than during the previous year. CTR testers then called various IRS phone numbers and found that nearly 40 percent of the calls were disconnected—mostly by the IRS.

Nina Olson, the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, ran the Taxpayer Advocate Service inside the IRS for nearly 20 years. She spent a day on hold herself during filing season as part of the study. Since then, she says, the service has likely gotten even worse because the IRS had shuffled staff to cover the phones during that busy time. “Where I deal is the morning after,” she said. “The morning after April 16.” Which is exactly when people like me start getting threatening notices from the IRS and can’t get anyone to pick up the phone. “There’s no one there,” Olson said.

During my many hours on hold with the IRS, the outgoing phone messages encouraged me to try to resolve my issues online. But when I logged into my IRS account, I discovered this message: “Account features limited due to partial outage. While you can still access your account, some features are unavailable, including account balance and payment history. If you don’t see what you need, please come back later.” After more than a month of coming back later, I still couldn’t access my payment history.

Tech problems have been a persistent problem at the chronically underfunded revenue service, which is why Biden’s IRA had allocated money for upgrades. Fixing IT problems, though, requires actual humans to do the work. Last year, the Trump administration pushed out more than 40 percent of the agency’s IT department. Most of the remaining employees were moved to Bisignano’s office or deployed to answer the phones during the greatest filing season of all time. Needless to say, the tech-forward team at DOGE did not improve the IRS technology.

Stephanie Liuzzi, a seismic engineer in California, got a letter from the IRS this year saying her tax payment had been rejected because of a problem with the bank account number on her return. The letter instructed her how to pay online, which she did. But in May, she got another letter saying that not only does she still owe money, but she now also owes penalties. After hours on hold with the IRS, she finally reached someone who confirmed that she had in fact paid her bill. But that person couldn’t waive the penalties and transferred Liuzzi to another line for help, where no one ever picked up. “I think everyone just went home,” she told me.

“It is currently refusing to let me reset my password. It keeps trying to send a text to a cell phone I had years ago. I have emailed in scans of my ID, my passport, but without access to that phone, it won’t let me in.”

After many more fruitless calls, she finally paid an $8 penalty online, but she hasn’t been able to confirm that her case is resolved because she can’t access her online account. “It is currently refusing to let me reset my password,” she told me. “It keeps trying to send a text to a cell phone I had years ago. I have emailed in scans of my ID, my passport, but without access to that phone, it won’t let me in.”

As the deadline for responding to my IRS letter rapidly approached and I continued to fail to reach anyone on the phone, I thought perhaps I could try to seek assistance in person at one of the IRS’s Taxpayer Assistance Centers. The Inflation Reduction Act had included funding to expand them, but the Trump administration has cut the number of fully staffed TACs to 42, from 102, according to a report by the Taxpayer Advocate. But the one where I live is still open, so I was hopeful—until I discovered that taxpayers can’t just walk in without an appointment. And the only way to make an appointment? Call the IRS.

I never got an appointment.

DiMartini, the former IRS human resources chief, has a vivid memory of her first time volunteering to help people with their taxes at a walk-in clinic in Philadelphia in 2024. “It was so humbling,” she recalled. DiMartini encountered lines of people around the block who had been victims of identity theft or unscrupulous tax preparers and women whose ex-husbands had illegally claimed their kids on his taxes. “What are these people going to do now?” she wonders. “As much as the tech bros want to automate everything, you still have to meet people where they’re at. People just want to pay their goddam bills. Why are we making it so hard?”

The IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service can help people cut through the bureaucracy, but Trump has decimated that office, too. Barbara Heggie, the managing attorney of Empire Justice Center’s Tax Advocacy Program in Rochester, NY, told me that now, when she really gets stonewalled by the IRS, she goes straight to Congress. “Every congressional office has staff who work on constituent services dealing with federal agency problems,” she said, “including IRS problems.”

“As much as the tech bros want to automate everything, you still have to meet people where they’re at. People just want to pay their goddam bills. Why are we making it so hard?”

Sadly, I am a disenfranchised resident of the District of Columbia, where we are taxed without representation. The closest thing we have to a member of Congress is Eleanor Holmes Norton, an 89-year-old nonvoting delegate with the same power as someone from Guam. Last year, I wrote about her mental deterioration and figured no one in her office would lift a finger to help resolve my tax issues, even if they did such things.

All of these roadblocks left me with one final option: snail mail.

The US Post Office is the last resort for the ever-growing cadre of people who can’t get through the IRS phone lines. Of course, the Trump administration has also gutted the IRS mail room—with predictable results. According to a recent report by the Taxpayer Advocate, the number of unprocessed correspondence and amended returns languishing at the IRS jumped from 3.8 million in 2025 to 7 million this year. “And that was before all the people like you were sending in letters,” CTR’s Nina Olson told me.

The Biden administration had been making some headway in reducing the mail backlog after it had reached epic proportions during the Covid pandemic. With funding from the IRA, the tax agency was able to staff up critical chokepoints in the system, including the mailroom. Charles Garn was one of the recruits hired in 2024 to work at the massive Ogden, Utah, IRS service center, where he was on the frontline opening the mail and sorting and processing 1040 forms and other correspondence from taxpayers.

Almost as soon as he finished his training, DOGE pushed him out. He left in October, along with thousands of other IRS workers who’d taken the “deferred resignation” plan that paid them not to work for three months and then essentially fired them. But he was there long enough to see first-hand the impact of “crippling” staff losses.

When Garn first started, his division would get a massive delivery of papers first thing in the morning. “We’d wipe it all out by the end of the day,” he explained. By the time the staffing cuts had fully kicked in, “We weren’t clearing out the deliveries. People were working harder and pumping out more, but we still weren’t able to meet what we needed to.”

The IRS might not be opening a lot of the mail it receives, but somehow it’s still sending it out. Even before the deadline to respond to my first letter had passed, the IRS sent me a new one reminding me that I have a past-due balance. “If you don’t act now, the IRS may consider levying (seizing) your income or bank account,” my newest missive warned.

The letter was a stark reminder that the collapse of the IRS customer service functions isn’t just an occasional annoyance for taxpayers. It can literally ruin people’s lives. If a taxpayer fails to respond to letters like the ones I got, and to pay an outstanding balance, even if it’s wrong, the IRS can eventually garnish their wages, seize bank accounts, or even take their cars or houses to settle the bill.

These consequences land heavily on those who can least afford it: the elderly, people whose first language is not English, and of course, poor people of all sorts. “Clients don’t have scanners,” says Tillman, who says a lot of correspondence with the IRS now requires such things. “Some don’t have laptops, or if they do, they don’t know how to use them.”

Low-income people are also particularly vulnerable to fraud. “Tax season is one of the most vulnerable times for low-income taxpayers because you have crooked preparers that prey on them,” Tillman says. She usually sees these clients after they get a letter from the IRS ordering them to repay thousands of dollars of the refund they weren’t entitled to.

The Trump administration’s destruction of the IRS has other less obvious harms—even beyond the nearly $900 billion in revenue it won’t be able to collect over the next decade thanks to the staffing cuts. “A lot of the anti-poverty structure of the safety net is embedded in the tax code,” explains Omeed Firouzi, director of the low-income tax clinic at Temple University law school.

The Earned Income Tax Credit, child tax credit, plus the new provisions in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that exempted tips, overtime and some Social Security payments from taxes—all of that requires people to accurately file a tax return. At the same time, the Big Beautiful Bill also made massive cuts to anti-poverty programs like SNAP and Medicaid, making the credits provided through the tax code even more important.

The Trump administration seems to have grudgingly recognized that the IRS needs more people, if only to collect taxes to pay for its ruinous war in Iran. In February, the Treasury Department gave the IRS permission to hire 8,000 people through September. “These hiring events are an important step in strengthening our workforce and improving the taxpayer experience,” Bisignano said in a June press release announcing a series of hiring fairs across the country.

“Kudos for that, but no one is showing up [to the fairs] because they don’t trust the federal government,” says DiMartini. “It is going to take decades to recover.”

In the meantime, I worked on this story one day to the backdrop of IRS hold music. After an hour and a half of waiting, I stayed on the phone while I went to Sweetgreen and got lunch, ate my salad while I watched Todd Blanche testify before Congress, and then at the two-hour mark … got disconnected.

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EPA Ordered—Again—to Release $2.8 Billion in Climate Justice Funds

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A South Carolina federal judge this week ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to resume distributing funds designed to address environmental and health challenges in underserved communities.

In June, US District Judge Richard Gergel voided the Trump administration’s termination of the $2.8 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program. But the court ruling did not explicitly require the Environmental Protection Agency to resume distributing the block grants.

Although Gergel ruled that the government’s internal actions terminating the grants were “unlawful,” he declined to order the EPA to immediately restart the program, saying such a move would be “impractical.”

Last month, emails between the EPA and the Southern Environmental Law Center, which filed the lawsuit in partnership with the Public Rights Project, showed that government officials believed that no “specific agency action is required to comply” with Gergel’s ruling.

After reviewing additional court filings from both sides, Gergel confirmed this week that the EPA must resume distributing the grant funds. He rejected the Trump administration’s argument that his decision “required no further agency action.”

“When federal agencies ignore court orders, communities pay the price.”

In his latest order, Gergel wrote that the Trump administration’s interpretation of the initial ruling relied on an interpretation of the facts the court had already “specifically rejected.”

“The court made it clear that EPA has to follow the law, not keep making the same arguments the court has already rejected,” Toby Merrill, the litigation director for Public Rights Project, said in an email. “When federal agencies ignore court orders, communities pay the price.”

Gergel ordered that the agency “must comply with its statutory obligations to administer the [Environmental and Climate Justice] Program” through the end of September, when the grants were originally scheduled to expire under President Joe Biden.

Since the latest order was issued, Kym Meyer, the Southern Environmental Law Center’s litigation director, said her organization “hasn’t heard” from the EPA.

The Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program, created under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, was designed to help communities address problems like air pollution and extreme heat and bolster local infrastructure, according to federal budget documents.

“While the EPA has tried to evade the court’s order, families in north Mecklenburg were left waiting for basic transparency about the air they breathe.”

At the start of his current term, President Donald Trump issued executive orders that put the disbursement of Inflation Reduction Act funds on hold and directed agencies to eliminate environmental justice offices and positions, to the maximum extent allowed by law. An EPA official told the court that he decided to terminate the program in February 2025 because of “policy reasons,” court documents show.

One $500,000 grant was intended to help CleanAIRE NC, a North Carolina-based nonprofit, install air quality monitors throughout Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte. Residents there face health impacts from air pollution because of their proximity to major highways and industrial activity.

“While the EPA has tried to evade the court’s order, families in north Mecklenburg were left waiting for basic transparency about the air they breathe,” said Jeffrey Robbins, the executive director of CleanAIRE NC, in an email. “We are ready to put these critical air monitoring resources to work in north Mecklenburg the moment the agency complies.”

In response to questions from Inside Climate News, a spokesperson for the EPA said in an email that the agency “is reviewing the decision and working to comply with the court’s order.”

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