“He’s So Scared”: More Venezuelans Face Imminent Deportation Under the Alien Enemies Act

On Friday, Omar Cárdenas Martínez called a relative from the Bluebonnet detention center in Texas to say that he had just been given a notice. Cárdenas had arrived there earlier this week, after being transferred from another US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, Prairieland, aboutthree hours awayin Alvarado. The document statedthat Cárdenas was going to be deported under the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely invoked law from 1798 that the Trump administration has been using to deprive Venezuelans it accuses of gang membership of due process.

Cárdenas told Jaime, a pseudonym for the relative, who lives in the United States and fears potential retaliation, that he believed he was going to be removed from the country on Friday. According to Jaime, who broke down in despair during parts of the call with Mother Jones, Cárdenas said that he could see bags that held detainees’ personal belongings.

On Friday afternoon, the American Civil Liberties Union reported that Venezuelans held at Bluebonnet were being loaded onto buses, potentially in preparation for removal from the country. The ACLU filed an emergency motion in the US District Court for the District of Columbia asking Judge James Boasberg—who first tried to stop the March 15 flights to El Salvador, and has found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in contempt for violating his orders—block imminent removals under the Alien Enemies Act.

Boasberg quickly scheduled a hearing for Friday evening to gather information about the potential removals and assess whether he had legal authority to block future flights. Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign said at the hearing that no removal flights were scheduled for Friday, and that none were planned for Saturday. But he did not contest that Venezuelans were being given notice in Texas that they were slated for removal under the Alien Enemies Act as alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Ensign also said the administrationreserved the right to remove Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act on Saturday, even if flights are not currently scheduled.

The judge seemed doubtful that the notice being provided by the Trump administration to the Venezuelans complied with the Supreme Court’s mandate that people facing Alien Enemies Act–based deportation be given a chance to adequately contest their designations as members of Tren de Aragua. But Boasberg was also skeptical of his own legal authority to block anyflights, given that the Supreme Court has said that removals should be challenged before federal courts in the districts where people are detained, and because the matter is already before another federal judge in Texas. As a result, Boasberg ultimately did not grant the ACLU’s request to temporarily halt deportations from Texas.

It is not clear where Cárdenas and other Venezuelans will be sent if removed. Thus far, the Trump administration has used the Alien Enemies Act to disappear more than 100 Venezuelans into one of the worst prisons in the world, El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. When Mother Jones spoke with Jaime on Friday morning, that possibility was almost too awful to contemplate.

“He’s afraid of being sent back to his own country,” Jaime said of Cárdenas, who has a pending immigration case in the United States. “Imagine how scared he would be to be sent to El Salvador.”

“He’s afraid of being sent back to his own country. Imagine how scared he would be to be sent to El Salvador.”

The ACLU has separately filed an emergency legal motion in Texas to try to block the summary removal of Venezuelans now at the Bluebonnet detention center, located west of Dallas in the small city of Anson, under the Alien Enemies Act. It is uncertain whether that effort will succeed, despite the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that they must be given a “reasonable” amount of time to file a legal challenge.

In an additional 28-page filing with the Supreme Court on Friday, the ACLU sought to stop the removals of “dozens or hundreds” of detainees in the Northern District of Texas, arguing the government hasn’t provided a “realistic opportunity” for them to fight their impending deportation. “Removal without sufficient notice and time to seek habeas relief,” the brief states, would be a clear violation of the justices’ order.

Michelle Brané, a former Department of Homeland Security official in charge of the Biden administration’s family reunification task force and the executive director of Together and Free, a nonprofit group that supports asylum seekers, told Mother Jones that her organization has heard from two families that Venezuelans at Bluebonnet are facing potentially imminent removal under the Alien Enemies Act. The New York Times, citing two people with knowledge of the situation, reported that more than 50 Venezuelans were scheduled to be removed from the country.

“The real issue here is that the administration is wrongly using the [Alien Enemies Act] to remove people into a black hole without any process,” Brané said. “People disappear and there is no way to know who has been sent or who will be next. We know they have already made mistakes. It endangers everyone in the United States.”

According to court documents and interviews,Cárdenas appears to be one of many Venezuelans at imminent risk of removal under the act. As with the previous group of deportees—many of whom were sent to El Salvador in apparentviolation of Boasberg’s court order last month—the men are being accused by the Trump administration of membership in the criminal organization Tren de Aragua, which the US government claims has invaded the country. It is using the invasion claim to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and summarily remove Venezuelans without allowing them to go before an immigration judge.

In a court hearing earlier this month concerning potential removals under the Alien Enemies Act, a Justice Department attorney declined to commit to providing Venezuelans at least 24 hours to dispute their removal. The notice now being provided to theVenezuelans at Bluebonnet does not provide any information about how to contest their removal—it merely states, “If you desire to make a phone call, you will be permitted to do so.” (The ACLU has said it is only aware of the notice being provided in English, although Ensign said at the Friday hearing that it has also been provided in Spanish.)

One of the two plaintiffs in the ACLU case was moved from a county jail in Minnesota to Bluebonnet on April 14. The man came to the United States in 2023, fleeing political persecution in Venezuela for protesting the government of Nicolás Maduro. He has a pending application for asylum and other forms of reprieve from deportation, such as withholding of removal and protection under the Convention Against Torture, with a hearing scheduled later this month. The petition states that ICE detained the man in March whileon his way to work, and that he was targeted because of “tattoos and associates that indicated membership in the Tren de Aragua gang.” His tattoos include one of a clock with the date and time of his son’s birth, as well as one of the Virgin Mary and a cross.

His tattoos include a clock with the date and time of his son’s birth, as well as one of the Virgin Mary and a cross.

On Thursday night, Brané spoke to a relative of another man, Luis Yoender Mercado. The relative said she had talked to Mercado that afternoon and that he was very worried about potentially being sent to El Salvador. Brané said Mercado has an immigration hearing scheduled for April 23, and added that family members are in complete panic about the possibility of their loved ones being removed from the United States while their cases are still pending.

In response to questions from Mother Jones, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin wrote in an email, “We are not going to reveal the details of counter terrorism operations, but we are complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling.”

The ACLU has said in legal filings that in recent days the government has transferred Venezuelans from detention centers across the country—including Minnesota, California, and Louisiana—to the Bluebonnet facility. Jaime said his relative, Cárdenas, arrived there around Wednesday and was initially forced to sleep on the floor. That mirrors how Venezuelans were concentrated at another Texas facility, the El Valle detention center, before being sent to El Salvador last month.

In a declaration, attorney Karene Brown of the Legal Aid Society said her client called from Bluebonnet on Thursday evening to say ICE had handed him a notice in English alleging he was a member of Tren de Aragua. The client, who Brown said only speaks Spanish and doesn’t have a final order of removal from an immigration judge, declined to sign. ICE then told the man the papers “were coming from the President, and that he will be deported even if he did not sign it.” According to another court filing, immigration attorneys and family members of detainees at Bluebonnet have reported that “forms are being passed out widely to the dozens of Venezuelan men who have been brought there over the past few days.”

On Thursday, a Trump-appointed judge in the Northern District of Texas, James Wesley Hendrix, denied the ACLU’s initial request for a temporary restraining order, finding that the detainees at Bluebonnet were not at “imminent risk of summary removal” because the government had assured the court that they would not deport the two plaintiffs “pending resolution of their habeas petition” and that they would inform the court of any changes. The ACLU filed another emergency request after hearing that Venezuelans were being given documents designating them Tren de Aragua members. It has now elevated that request to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In his order, Hendrix cited a 5-4 Supreme Court decision earlier this month that lifted a district court’s temporary restraining order, which had blocked the Trump administration from removing Venezuelans via the Alien Enemies Act. The Supreme Court’s majority ruled that plaintiffs should have brought challenges in the jurisdiction where they were being detained; as a result, habeas petitions have since been filed across the country.

The justices also reaffirmed that those subject to deportation based on the wartime law should be given appropriate and timely notice and the opportunity to challenge their removal and their designation as members of Tren de Aragua. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the government’s failure to allow detainees to seek relief would be “in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court.”

As Mother Jones has reported, many of the men deported to El Salvador last month were sent based on flimsy evidence and unsubstantiated claims that their tattoos indicated gang affiliation. One of those men was Neri Alvarado Borges, a 25-year-old whose most prominent tattoo is an autism awareness ribbon on his leg, in honor of his teenage brother, who has autism.

DHS has repeatedly refused to provide evidence to support allegations of gang membership. In response to a detailed request for comment from Mother Jones earlier this month, a senior DHS official said, “We aren’t going to share intelligence reports and undermine national security every time a gang member denies he is one.”

“That would be insane,” the DHS official said.

Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder and CEO of Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), said that from what she has heard, the removals seem imminent. Toczylowski, whose organization represents Andry José Hernández Romero, the makeup artist sent to El Salvador on March 15, said that the group, much like last month, is monitoring closely to see if any removal flights take off from Texas to the Central American country.

“The Trump administration appears afraid to give people due process,” she told Mother Jones, “because they know that if given a day in court to show how flimsy the evidence that they are using to send people to a prison in El Salvador is, they would certainly be defeated in those proceedings.”

Toczylowski also said ImmDef has tried, but not been able, to locate several of their other young Venezuelan clients who had been transferred to other states from California. As of this morning, they no longer appeared to be held in the same facilities. When the group called the Bluebonnet detention center, Toczylowski said, they were told the clients hadn’t been sent there.

“For us, having a Venezuelan client who we can’t confirm has been either removed to Venezuela or can’t confirm what facility they’re in,” she said, “obviously, we are concerned that they’re potentially being staged for removal under the Alien Enemies Act.”

ImmDef is also representing as many as seven Venezuelans currently detained and held incommunicado at CECOT. Toczylowski fears that if the detainees at Bluebonnet join the hundreds of others in the mega-prison in El Salvador, attorneys like her will have few options as they attempt to fight for their clients’ safety and legal rights. Caught in a special kind of trap, at least one of ImmDef’s clients has had their case terminated in absentia by a US immigration judge because they had been sent to El Salvador and couldn’t appear in court for their hearing.

“We know how incredibly complicated and legally tenuous their situation becomes once they’re sitting in a prison in a foreign country,” Toczylowski said.

Mother Jones first spoke to Jaime shortly after Cárdenas was arrested by ICE in Texas on March 20. At the time, ICE had just shared Cárdenas’ photo on Facebook and Instagram in posts that accused him of being a member of Tren de Aragua.

In a videointerview earlier this month, Jaime said that Cárdenas called him in desperation as he was being detained in March. He told Jaime that the agents taking him into custody had a photo of him and a document that accused him of being a member of a criminal organization.

A photo of Cardenas provided by his relative.

“Why are they accusing you of that?” the relative recalled asking Cárdenas at the time.

“They say it’s because of the tattoos I have,” Cárdenas replied, according to his relative.

Though Cárdenas now has a lawyer working on his case, that may not matter if he is removed under the Alien Enemies Act and deprived of his due process rights. Mother Jones has reviewed some of the documents that could be used to demonstrate that—as Jaime insists—he is not a member of Tren de Aragua. They include a form showing that he has no criminal record in Venezuela, annotated photos of his tattoos that explain why they are not related to any criminal organization, and records demonstrating that he was studying business administration at university before fleeing Venezuela.

Cárdenas’ aunt Belkis Martínez, who lives in Venezuela, vouched for his character during the video call. “I’ve known him since he was in his mother’s womb,” she said. “I saw him grow up as a child, a teenager, a young man. Omar has always been a very calm, respectful, hardworking, and studious young man.”

“He had to leave the way he did because of the political situation in this country. It was dangerous for him to stay. That’s how he ended up in the United States,” she added. “And from the moment he arrived, he’s used the proper legal channels.”

She and Jaime explained that he entered the country in 2023 after making an appointment through the CBP One app, which the Biden Administration used to encourage migrants to come to an official port of entry. He applied for Temporary Protected Status and eventually received a work permit and Social Security card. Jaime said he was working at an H-E-B supermarket at the time of his arrest.

A gift card that Jaime said Cardenas’ manager at H-E-B gave to thank him for his hard work. Translated into English, it reads, “Thank you for helping us so much! I appreciate you! Thank you for always working so hard!”

“He’s a very hard-working guy. Very noble. Very loved,” Jaime stressed on Friday. “He hasn’t done anything at all. He is not a criminal, as he is being portrayed. He is completely and utterly innocent.”

Later on Friday, Jaime received another call from his relative. Cárdenas said he was being moved again. This time, he had no idea where.

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Noem to Ban Harvard International Students if Trump’s Demands Not Met

On April 11, the Trump administration sent Harvard University a sweeping set of demands—among them that the university report international students to the federal government for violation of student conduct policies—ostensibly to curb antisemitism on campus. Three days later, Harvard president Alan Garber announced that the school would “continue to follow the law”; Harvard, he said, would not comply with Trump’s demands. The administration promptly froze $2.2 billion in federal funding to the university.

The backlash didn’t stop there. On Tuesday, Trump proposed revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status for “pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting Sickness,” following similar threats leveled at other prominent universities. And on Wednesday, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem sent Harvard yet another letter: On top of actualizing earlier threats to withdraw federal funds—$2.7 million dollars in her agency’s grants, she announced, would be paused—Noem now threatened to revoke Harvard’s eligibility to host any international students, describing the institution as “a cesspool of extremist riots…with anti-American, pro-Hamas ideology poisoning its campus and classrooms” and international students as “foreign visa-holding rioters.”

If Harvard did not comply by April 30, Noem said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement would remove the university from its Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). “The withdrawal will not be subject to appeal,” she wrote. (An ICE website updated in mid-March says that students whose schools are removed from SEVP must seek to transfer to another institution, change their status, or depart the United States.)

Wednesday’s letter sent Harvard’s international student community into a panic. A group of students organized a rally the following day, pushing for Harvard to stand firm in its refusal to “allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” as lawyers for Harvard President Alan Garber put it. “Harvard will not accept the government’s terms,” the lawyers wrote—terms which included providing the names and records of international students disciplined “as a result of participating in protests” or for “obstruction of the school learning environment.”

More than 500 people showed up to Thursday’s rally—but only two international students were prepared to speak publicly.

Abdullah Shahid Sial, a 20-year-old sophomore from Pakistan, was one of them. Sial, who is the incoming co-president of Harvard’s undergraduate student body, considered it a duty to speak on behalf of Harvard’s 6,700 international students, who comprise over a quarter of the school’s total population. But he understood why few international students were joining him.

“Speaking out comes at a very high personal risk,” Sial admitted. “I don’t want to get sent back home on a free flight…but I’ve made peace with that worst-case scenario. I would probably be sent back home in a very undignified manner, first to Louisiana and maybe somewhere else.” Some of his fellow students, he said, are considering preemptively leaving the country: “They don’t want to get ICE involved.”

“People are scared. I’ve seen so many texts, so many calls about whether it’s wise to, you know, book a flight home,” Sial said. “International students are being played as poker chips, as negotiating tools…being disrespected and dehumanized.”

Harvard is only one of dozens of educational institutions nationwide where students are getting letters out of the blue saying their visas have been withdrawn. More than 1,550 students nationwide have had their visas revoked by the State Department since mid-March, according to Inside Higher Ed—often for arbitrary or unclear reasons.

Harvard, however, is the first school to be threatened with wholesale visa revocation for its entire international student body.

Leo Gerdén, a 22-year-old Harvard undergraduate from Sweden, is set to get his degree this spring. “The risk [of speaking] is somewhat more acceptable for me,” Gerdén said; he plans to leave the country after graduation.

“There is no Harvard without the international community. And what Trump is trying to do right now is divide us,” Gerdén said. “He’s telling us to point fingers and turn in the names of our friends so that we can keep our own student visas. And that is what we have to stand up against.”

If the university sends in the names of student protesters now, Gerdén and Sial said, there’s still no guarantee that the Trump administration won’t demand more. Last month, Columbia University caved to a series of Trump administration demands for more campus private security, a ban on face masks, and an external overseer for its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Africana Studies department. Two weeks later, undeterred,a Senate committee led by Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy renewed demands for extensive information on student protesters at Columbia, and on campus groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine.

“Trump wants us to turn on each other,” said Sial. “But even if we comply now, there will be a new demand letter next week.”

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Pandemic Truthers Take Over HHS Covid Site

As of Friday, Covid.gov, the Department of Health and Human Services COVID-19 resource launched in 2022, is no longer providing information and resources about Covid—and Covidtests.gov, the website used to order free Covid tests from the government, isn’t, either.

Both now redirect to a White House page promoting the “lab leak theory,” which contends that the virus originated from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The website, touting the “true origins of Covid-19,” depicts President Donald Trump strolling out from between the words “Lab” and “Leak.”

The change was shared widely by Trump supporters, including by right-wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec on X: Posobiec, a frequent amplifier of Russian intelligence–backed website Southfront, white nationalist ideas and anti-vaccination misinformation, commented, “This is amazing.”

The new site centers blame on the HHS, NIH, the World Health Organization, and, of course, China.

The pagedoes more than seek to refute evidence against the lab leak theory. It criticizes much of the federal government’s Covid response, and that of the state of New York, beginning with a 2020 research paper titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” that was published by the National Institutes of Health underDr. Anthony Fauci, a target of the MAGA base.

As you continue scrolling, the page runs through various conservative talking points about the ineffectiveness of pandemic measures like masking, social distancing, and lockdowns. It also claims that “the federal government demonized alternative treatments and disfavored narratives, such as the lab leak theory, in a shameful effort to coerce and control the American people’s health decisions.” Beyond just policy critique, the new site centers blame on the HHS, NIH, the World Health Organization, and, of course, China.

Support for the lab leak theory has continued to grow over the last few years, as reported by ProPublica and as expounded in government analyses and by intelligence agencies, though many scientists believe research points to the virus originating in a market selling live animals. Regardless, Covid remains prevalent in the US and across the world—and the erasure of guidance by the federal government hangs Americans out to dry.

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Trump’s DOJ Claims Academic Journals Hold “Partisan” Stance in Scientific Debates

The publisher of CHEST, a prestigious, peer-reviewed medical journal focused on respiratory health, received a letter from the Trump administration seeking information about how its editors handle scientific controversies and “competing viewpoints.” Some medical professionals see the missive as an attempt to stifle academic freedom.

“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” reads the letter, signed by Ed Martin Jr., acting US attorney for DC. Some journals, the letter vaguely claims, “have a position for which they are advocating” due to “advertisement” or “sponsorship.” “The public has certain expectations and you have certain responsibilities.” (The letter was first posted online by Dr. Eric Reinhart, a Chicago-based clinician, and first reported by MedPage Today.)

Some medical professionals see the missive as an attempt to stifle academic freedom.

It’s unclear why CHEST was targeted or what “scientific debates” the administration hopes to investigate. Laura DiMasi, a spokesperson for the journal, confirmed in an email to Mother Jones that it “received a letter from the US Department of Justice, and its content was posted online without our knowledge.” She shared that “legal counsel is currently reviewing the DOJ request” but declined to comment further. According to MedPage Today, at least two other journals have received similar letters.

In the April 14 letter, Martin asks CHEST’s editor-in-chief, Dr. Peter Mazzone, to answer five questions, including how the journal assesses its responsibility to “protect the public from misinformation,” whether it accepts articles from “competing viewpoints,” and how it “handle[s] allegations” that authors “may have misled their readers.”

In a statement Friday, the American College of Chest Physicians, which publishes CHEST, defended its editorial practices. “In its 90-year history, CHEST has published numerous articles that were breakthroughs in scientific research and clinical treatment, advancing the medical profession and improving the health and well-being of patients worldwide,” the statement reads. The journal publishes “review articles, offers commentaries, and fosters debate on emerging controversies.”

Reading between the lines, some academics interpreted the letter as a thinly veiled threat. “I’m jealous of whichever lawyer gets to write the response,” Charlotte Garden, a University of Minnesota Law School professor, wrote on Bluesky.

Others saw it as an attempt to dictate how academic journals operate. As Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, told MedPage Today, it “should send a chill down the spine of scientists and physicians.” ‪

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RFK Jr. Knows Amazingly Little About Autism

While his anti-vaccine allies swooned and scientists cringed, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his first-ever press conference this week, in response to new data showing an apparent increase in the number of autistic kids, to promote a variety of debunked, half-true, and deeply ableist ideas about autism. He painted the condition as a terrifying “disease” that “destroys,” as he put it, children and their families. Kennedy made it clear he planned to use his powerful role as the person in charge of a massive federal agency devoted to protecting public health to promote the idea that autism is caused by “environmental factors,” a still-speculative thesis that’s clearly a short walk towards advancing his real aim: blaming vaccines.

Kennedy has spent the last 20 years promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric, falsely and repeatedly claiming that vaccines are linked to autism. Yet as the press conference made clear, Kennedy knows startlingly little about autism. In the course of his remarks, he detoured into a rabbit hole filled with pseudoscience about the condition, providing a vast display of all the things he does not seem to know about current research and basic facts about the condition.

Here’s a list of just a few of the major pieces of misinformation Kennedy shared.

Falsely framing autism as a debilitating “disease” and an “epidemic”

Kennedy’s ableist and factually incorrect framing of autism relies on explicitly calling it a “disease,” when most scientists refer to it as a “disorder.” Many autistic self-advocates object to that framing too, saying that autism is part of the wide range of human neurodiversity. According to data released in 2021, roughly 61.8 million people worldwide are believed to be somewhere on the autism spectrum.

Most significantly, autism is widely agreed to exist on a spectrum—hence its clinical name, “autism spectrum disorder”—and autistic people have a wide range of abilities and ways that their autism expresses itself. In remarks that drew the most scrutiny, Kennedy depicted profound autism as something that inevitably robs children of their abilities, proclaiming: “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” (Our colleague Julia Métraux interviewed autistic poet and attorney Elizabeth McClellan earlier this week, who said his remarks are “useless eaters rhetoric,” the eugenicist idea used by Nazi Germany in the 1930s to dehumanize and eventually murder disabled people.) A press release issued by HHS this week even referred to autistic children as “afflicted.”

Kennedy previously claimed that under his guidance, HHS intends to uncover the causes of autism by September, a timeline as improbable as it is highly specific. One autism researcher, who asked to speak anonymously in order to freely address their concerns, told Mother Jones that framing autism as a “disease” with environmental causes seemed designed to set up Kennedy “as the ‘savior’ to the autism community” when he claims to have discovered its cause. The notion that there is a single cause of autism is, to put it mildly, not at all backed up by the decades of research on this highly complex diagnosis.

Framing autism as a “disease” with environmental causes seemed designed to set up Kennedy “as the ‘savior’ to the autism community” when he claims to have discovered its cause.

Declaring that autism is “clearly” caused by “environmental toxins”

But Kennedy took on step towards meeting this self-imposed deadline by stating, “This is coming from an environmental toxin,” adding the provocative assertion, “And somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food.” He promised that within two to three weeks “we’re going to announce a series of new studies to identify precisely what environmental toxins are causing it.” He also floated the idea of using AI to help in those studies.

The causes of autism are still being studied, but it’s widely thought that both genetics and environmental factors likely play a role in who develops it. Nor are those environmental factors necessarily “toxins.”

Dr. Paul Offit is a virologist, a pediatrician, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine used in infants. He told Mother Jones that a variety of factors can contribute to the risk of developing autism, including advanced maternal or paternal age, intrauterine infections when the mother is pregnant, genetics, and maternal health.

“What those four things all have in common is that you’re born with autism,” he says. All the evidence, he says, “is that these are events that are occurring while the child is in the womb,” rather than what anti-vaccine advocates have suggested many times, that autism is caused by vaccines received after the child is born.

Craig Newschaffer, a professor of biobehavioral health and an autism researcher at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Health and Human Development, said that while he believes environmental exposures could play a role in autism, the interaction between those and other factors is incredibly complex. “There’s probably a constellation of environmental factors that could be involved here that they probably account on their own for small increases in risk,” he said, “and they probably work in concert with genetic mechanisms.”

Rejecting the idea that increased autism rates are due in part to better diagnosis and surveillance

The press conference was called to respond to a new CDC report which showed a small increase in the number of 8-year-olds diagnosed with autism. Kennedy repeatedly rejected the idea that the increase was due to better autism diagnosis tools and surveillance, declaring that making that argument amounted to “epidemic denial,” and saying that genes “don’t cause epidemics.”

Kennedy also said that the root causes of autism could be found much faster “because of A.I. and because of the digitalization of health records that are now available to us.”

Craig Newschaffer, who has spent the better part of his career studying potential causes of autism, called Kennedy’s idea of using artificial intelligence to quickly solve the mystery of autism “extremely infeasible.” He noted large-scale efforts are already underway to use machine learning to analyze existing autism datasets—but the results of those studies, he said, are at least five years away.

Yet Penn State’s Newschaffer said his research had suggested that expanded diagnostic capabilities were indeed an important contributor to increasing autism rates. “There’s been lots of accumulation [of evidence] that the diagnostic tendency is a strong, strong factor in this,” he said.

Claiming there are “no” older autistic adults

To bolster his claim that environmental exposures are causing autism rates to climb, Kennedy argued that older adults are not autistic. “Have you ever seen anybody our age—I’m 71 years old—with full-blown autism?” he asked. “Headbanging, nonverbal, non-toilet-trained, stimming, toe-walking, these other stereotypical features—where are these people walking around the mall?”

Putting aside the scornful and stigmatizing way Kennedy spoke about profoundly autistic people, it’s simply not true that there are no older autistic adults, which we know for many reasons, including the fact that their health outcomes have been studied for years.Autistic elderly people are at greater risk than the general population for a range of health conditions, including cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and they’re also more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression. Older autistic adults report loneliness at higher rates than the general population, and research suggests that many of them could benefit from the social services and support they do not currently receive. All of these factors could limit the likelihood that Kennedy might see them “walking around the mall.”

Relying on an expert who has connections to pseudoscience groups

Kennedy also brought Dr. Walter Zahorodny to join him on the stage. An associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers University’s medical school, he has beena lead researcher on the New Jersey Autism Study, which has monitored the state’s autism rate for two decades.

Zahorodny said during the press conference that he believed that the uptick in autism rates could not be explained by expanded diagnostic criteria. “I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether we call it an epidemic tsunami or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don’t understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental or risk factors,” he said, echoing Kennedy who has also claimed it is triggered by “toxic exposure.”

Zahorodny has collaborated with researchers and groups who deal in pseudoscience or are controversial in the autism community. He appeared in a 2018 video produced by SafeMinds, a group that has suggested that mercury in vaccines causes autism and regularly works with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense. In 2020, Zahorodny co-authored a study of autism rates in Black and Hispanic children with Cynthia Nevison, a University of Colorado climate scientist who is also a contributor to Children’s Health Defense. There, she writes not about climate but rather about her frustration with the lack of research into the “root causes” of autism. In addition, Zahorodny appeared on a 2020 episode of a podcast produced by the National Council on Severe Autism, which has come under fire for its support of the use of restraints for autistic people.

Melissa Alfieri Collins, an anti-vaccine activist in New Jersey, said in an email to Mother Jones that she had worked with Zahorodny in 2019 on her effort to defeat a bill that would have eliminated religious exemptions for childhood vaccination requirements. Zahorodny, Collins recalled, briefed legislators and “stated that vaccines could not currently be ruled out as one of multiple possible causes of sharply increasing autism prevalence.” The bill ultimately failed. Zahorodny did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Overall, Kennedy’s message worried autism researchers and mainstream scientists. But it was received ecstatically by the anti-vaccine community he’s long been a part of. Anti-vaccine activist Larry Cook, a California naturopath and one-man anti-vaccine clearinghouse, approvingly shared a tweet from Kennedy, underlining the places where the secretary referred to the “autism epidemic” and characterized autism as being “preventable.”

“We had the answers over 40 years ago,” Cook tweeted. “They were buried, dismissed, ridiculed, assassinated.”

Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine activist and the former spokesperson for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, who’s now the CEO of a group he co-founded with Kennedy called MAHA Action, also expressed his enthusiasm.

“For decades we have been gaslit by every HHS Secretary that stood at this podium and denied that autism was an epidemic as it climbed from 1 in 10k to 1 in 31 (1 in 12.5 boys in CA),” he tweeted. “If you are watching a news organization that is not celebrating RFKJ in this historic moment it’s time to cancel your subscription forever. It’s now clear who they work for. #MAHA”

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Why Trump’s Embattled US Attorney in DC Is Talking About Russia

Ed Martin, the acting US attorney in Washington, who has earned some notoriety through attempts to use his office to attack political opponents of the Trump administration, recently turned his sights on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to help President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

But Martin’s latest effort—a letter alleging misconduct by a former Mueller prosecutor—appears to lift language directly from an article that appeared five years ago in a conservative news outlet, and comes after Martin hired a press aide with a public vendetta against the Mueller team members who investigated him.

On Monday, Martin wrote to Aaron Zelinsky, a former federal prosecutor, who as part of Mueller’s team won convictions of political operative Roger Stone (for lying to Congress about his role in the leaking of Democratic emails stolen by Russian hackers) and offormer Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos (for lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts). Trump pardoned both men in late 2020.

In the April 14 letter, Martin asserts that Zelinsky, while prosecuting Papadopoulos, made “false statements” that helped send “an innocent man to jail in an attempt to advance the false narrative that the campaign of a serving President had colluded with Russia to win the presidency.”

As a prominent former member of the Mueller team, Zelinsky is a target for Trump allies still looking to discredit that probe and erase Mueller’s findings that Moscow, with the knowledge of Trump aides, interfered in the 2016 election to assist Trump. Zelinsky also testified before the House Judiciary Committee in 2020 that then-Attorney General William Barr had pressured prosecutors to lower their recommended sentence for Stone due to Stone’s ties to Trump.

Martin’s letter to Zelinsky was reported on Tuesday by the New York Sun, a conservative publication, and posted online by a pro-Trump writer. Its disclosure came shortly after Martin hired Michael Caputo, a veteran GOP operative and longtime colleague and friend of Stone, as a press adviser. Martin also recently hired Neil McCabe, a former reporter for far-right outlets Breitbart and One America News, as another media aide.

Caputo was investigated by Mueller’s team over his own Russian contacts in 2016, though he was not charged with any wrongdoing. He has since regularly expressed anger over the probe. As recently as December, Caputo called for the prosecution of what he calls the “perpetrators” of the Russia investigation.

Martin’s letter cites an August 2018 sentencing memo signed by Zelinsky, which notes that Papadopoulos’ lies to FBI agents “impeded the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election” and hindered their ability to question a suspected Russian agent. That man, Joseph Mifsud, had contacted Papadopolous in London in 2016, and informed him, before it was public knowledge, that Russian hackers had stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and planned to anonymously release them.

Martin’s letter includes, without attribution, a paragraph that appears to be copied verbatim from a February 2020 article published by Just the News, a right-leaning outlet launched that year by John Solomon, who at the time was under fire for working closely with Trump allies who were pushing bogus claims about Joe Biden’s involvement in Ukraine.

“But FBI 302 reports detailing agents’ interviews with Papadopoulos show that he had in fact supplied information that would have enabled investigators to challenge or potentially detain or arrest Mifsud while he was in the United States,” that passage lifted from Just the News says.

Martin’s letter contends that Zelinsky should have noted in court filings that Papadopoulos offered information that might have helped agents track Mifsud. Martin does not dispute that Papadopoulos lied to FBI agents about his contacts with Mifsud by claiming the interaction came before he joined the Trump campaign—a crime that Papadopoulos admitted as part of a guilty plea and for which he served a 14-day sentence.

Martin’s spokespersons did not respond to questions about the letter, including why he chose this week to borrow wording from a five-year-old story to attack the Mueller investigation. Zelinsky did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Martin’s letter to Zelinsky came a day after Stone on Sunday morning tweeted out the Just the News story, along with a prediction that Zelinsky’s “indictment is imminent.” Caputo followed suit about 45 minutes later. Neither mentioned that the story was old news.

THIS IS FULL BLOWN CORRUPTION!

Declassified FBI memos undercut Mueller team claims that Papadopoulos hindered Russia probe | Just The News https://t.co/RFdjM3DUDT

— Michael R. Caputo (@MichaelRCaputo) April 13, 2025

Zelinsky was part of a team of Mueller investigators who investigated Caputo and Stone’s contacts with Russians in 2016, when both were aiding the Trump campaign. The investigation examined a May 2016 meeting between Caputo and Stone and a Russian expat living in Florida, who offered to sell damaging information about Hillary Clinton. No deal was reached, but as the Washington Post reported, the meeting caused legal worries for Stone and Caputo, each of whom told the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 that they had not had any contact with Russians during the 2016 campaign. Both later said they had forgotten about the meeting.

Caputo was not charged in the case. Stone was indicted in 2019 for lying extensively to the lawmakers about another matter—his efforts to influence WikiLeaks’ release of hacked Democratic emails—and for witness tampering.

Caputo, who has credited Stone with acting as a professional mentor, raised money for Stone’s legal defense, attended his trial, and was even ejected from the courtroom for turning his back on the jury after Stone’s conviction.

Both Stone and Caputo have since expressed animus toward people involved in the investigation. Last year, Mediate reported audio from 2020 in which Stone told an associate, a former New York City police officer, to “abduct” and “punish” Zelinsky. Stone later claimed the tape was “AI manipulation.”

Caputo was again involved in alleged Russian maneuvers after he hosted a January 2020 film aired by One America News titled “The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder.”

In 2021, a US intelligence report said alleged Russian agents—including Andriy Derkach, a former Ukrainian legislator whom the Treasury Department has called a Russian intelligence asset, and Konstantin Kilimnik, whom a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report identified as “a Russian intelligence officer”—had “met with and provided materials to Trump administration-linked US persons” in an effort to help Trump win the 2020 election. As part of that endeavor, the men and their associates “helped produce” a documentary. In 2021 Mother Jones reported this was a reference to the OAN program Caputo hosted. Caputo said at the time that he was not aware of Russian government involvement in the segment and had not spoken to Derkach or Kilimnik about the film.

Martin has also been involved with Russian propaganda. He appeared more than 150 times between 2016 and 2024 on RT and Sputnik, the Washington Post recently reported, and failed to mention those appearances in a Senate disclosure form. Those are Russian government-funded networks that various US government reports have said function as Kremlin propaganda arms. In some of those appearances, Martin repeated dubious Russian talking points. In early 2022, for instance, Martin criticized US government warnings that Russia was preparing to attack Ukraine. He claimed there was “no evidence” of a Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border. That statement came nine days before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Martin’s Russian TV appearances, and his flubbed attack on Zelinsky, are the latest in a long list of stumbles by the activist turned US attorney, who faces disbarment efforts, along with bi-partisan opposition to his Senate nomination, including a hold placed by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif). The embattled US Attorney is unlikely to win confirmation without help from Trump. Martin appears to be working hard to try to secure that.

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Just Do Something

When Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland announced this week that he would travel to El Salvador to push for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man wrongfully sent to the mega-prison at the center of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, Van Hollen was met with plenty of skepticism. Neither the United States nor El Salvador had felt compelled to show evidence that Abrego Garcia was even alive; why would they grant a Democratic senator, one not exactly prominent on the national stage, a chance to meet with him? An escalating showdown between the Trump administration and the courts over Abrego Garcia’s detention only appeared to underscore the inevitable failure of Van Hollen’s pursuit.

And resistance certainly came: Salvadoran soldiers stopped Van Hollen at a checkpoint three miles away from the mega-prison; repeated requests to meet with Abrego Garcia, even virtually, were denied. But on Thursday evening, Van Hollen’s persistence paid off.

I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.

— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@vanhollen.senate.gov) 2025-04-18T01:02:08.991Z

The photo was the first piece of confirmation, amid weeks of uncertainty, that Abrego Garcia was alive. “It was very overwhelming,” Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, told ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday. “The most important thing for me, my children, his mom, his brother, his sibling, was to see him alive, and we saw him alive.”

Vasquez Sura’s relief here, delivered in a single photo, is palpable. It is at once simple and tremendous: an anguished family, after weeks of cruelty imposed by the US government, now knows that their fight for Abrego Garcia’s release had not been in vain. In fact, it will continue. “I won’t stop fighting until he returns home,” Vasquez Sura confirmed on Friday, signaling a sense of reinvigoration after Van Hollen’s meeting. Meanwhile, Trump on Friday piggybacked on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s mockery of the successful sit-down, and attacked Van Hollen as a “GRANDSTANDER!!!” The once little-known senator, now a symbol of what it looks like to challenge this president by simply doing something, was now in Trump’s crosshairs.

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This Company is Spending Millions to Profit Off Veterans’ Benefits. Why Won’t Lawmakers Stop It?

This article first appeared on The War Horse_,_ an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

It started in 2017 with a group of friends and colleagues—the first 40 clients whom US Army veterans Scott Greenblatt and Bill Taylor signed up to help.

They had come home from combat zones weary and weakened by illness and injury, with a promise of monthly disability payments from the country they served. But first, they had to navigate the lumbering bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Soon, those 40 veterans grew to 275 a month. Then 275 soared to 500. Last year, Taylor and Greenblatt’s company Veterans Guardian assisted about 30,000 veterans with benefits claims, according to Taylor. “We have your back,” the company’s website says. “Together we can uncover all the benefits you deserve.”

The one problem with their success story: Veterans Guardian’s business model runs afoul of the law, lawmakers and attorneys general across the country say. But nobody has been able to stop them.

With no accreditation, the company is charging veterans thousands of dollars for guidance that veterans service organizations and other nonprofits advise vets on for free.

A whistleblower lawsuit from one of Veterans Guardian’s former employees claims the firm’s business practices are “permeated with fraud and deceit” and cheating the federal government out of millions of dollars. A lawsuit filed by veterans alleges the company “preys on disabled veterans by unfairly and deceptively taking tens of millions of dollars of their disability benefits in violation of federal law.”

Lawmakers in nearly 40 states and Congress have moved to crack down on unaccredited companies like Veterans Guardian that are part of an industry that has only grown since the 2022 PACT Act led to the largest expansion of veterans benefits in decades. And, the Department of Veterans Affairs warned the firm back in 2019 in a cease and desist letter that it “is prohibited by law from assisting Veterans in the preparation, presentation, or prosecution of their VA benefits.” A congressional oversight panel rebuked Veterans Guardian three years later for denying such a letter even existed.

But instead of backing down, the Pinehurst, North Carolina-based company is spending millions of dollars to fight back—an indication, experts say, of just how much money is at stake in the highly politicized world of veterans benefits. One of Veterans Guardian’s competitors estimated in a 2021 SEC filing that the VA claims consulting market was worth a staggering $73 billion a year.

“Numerous large companies are siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars a year in veterans benefits,” Rep. Morgan McGarvey, a Democrat from Kentucky, said last month during a hearing on Capitol Hill, “all to make a quick dollar on what has for decades been a free service.”

“Numerous large companies are siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars a year in veterans benefits, all to make a quick dollar on what has for decades been a free service.”

The War Horse reviewed hundreds of pages of court filings, campaign finance records, and lobbying disclosures from two dozen states across the political spectrum and interviewed current and former employees to map out how Veterans Guardian courts veterans and wields influence on Capitol Hill and state capitals across the country.

The investigation found Veterans Guardian stood out from its peers by spending $2.3 million in the last three years to lobby Congress and hundreds of thousands more on lobbying state legislators.

But in an hour-long interview with The War Horse, Taylor passionately defended Veterans Guardian, insisting VA’s beleaguered benefits claims system is the real problem. Veterans are paying the price, he said, and companies like his are offering veterans a choice. He said 70 percent of Veterans Guardian’s clients have already tried to use a VA-accredited free service, like those provided by Disabled American Veterans and Veterans of Foreign Wars, to apply for benefits.

“If they know the free services are there and they’ve used them and they’re still coming to me,” he said, “that tells you that there’s something wrong.”

Leslie Carico had been working as a document control specialist at Veterans Guardian for about five months in May 2019 when she began discussing concerns with a coworker. It wasn’t long before “disloyalty” cost her the job, according to a whistleblower lawsuit she filed in 2020.

Her dramatic claims emerged last year when the US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina unsealed the case. In a complaint that spans more than 60 pages, she detailed how Veterans Guardian “hijacks the application process, wresting control of it from the veteran” with a “singular focus”: a 100 percent disability rating for the maximum VA benefit possible so the company can charge the largest commission.

Among the alleged tactics, according to the lawsuit:

• Claims strategists with no medical background interviewed veterans and quickly assessed which health issues should be listed on their forms.
• The company referred veterans to the same psychologist for remote exams— sometimes conducted by the psychologist’s family members—and mental health forms were auto-populated with identical checkmarks.
• Employees changed scores on depression self-evaluations if they felt the score was too low, sometimes without the veterans’ knowledge.
• Applicants were coached to look “tired and shabby” for appointments with VA medical examiners. They were advised not to shave, told to use a cane or wheelchair if they had one, and to use buzz words such as “depressed,” “sad,” and “no motivation.”
• Veterans Guardian employees routinely tacked on secondary conditions like erectile dysfunction and headaches to a veteran’s diagnosis if resubmitting an application was necessary.
• Employees were instructed to tell prospective customers that the VA “could not be trusted to deal with veterans fairly. Misrepresentations may have to be made.”

The reason that the company went to these lengths, Carico’s lawsuit said, was simple: money. The company charged a one-time fee of five times the amount of a veteran’s monthly disability benefit increase. For a veteran going from a 0 to 100 percent rating, this could amount to up to $4,500 a month—a payout of more than $22,000 for Veterans Guardian. The company charged nothing to a veteran who received no benefit rating increase, but this was rare. In interviews with The War Horse, three former employees said the company “cherry-picked” who to help, turning away veterans who did not have a strong case.

Carico’s lawyers did not make her available for an interview with The War Horse. But two current and four former Veterans Guardian employees said in interviews they had seen many of Carico’s claims firsthand.

Bill Taylor, left, and Scott Greenblatt, both U.S. Army retired lieutenant colonels, started Veterans Guardian in 2017. C-SPAN/Ted Fitzgerald/The Pilot

When asked about Carico’s lawsuit, a Veterans Guardian spokesperson said in a statement, “This complaint was filed by a former employee who was terminated for toxic behavior and has since been accused of harassment and cyberstalking other Veterans Guardian employees.”

In an emailed statement to The War Horse, Carico’s lawyers called the allegation baseless, “designed to discredit a whistleblower revealing serious fraud,” and “a familiar tactic used against women who speak truth to power.”

Taylor wouldn’t directly address the lawsuit in the interview. He called accusations that the company “cherry-picked” clients “categorically false” and said the average one-time fee Veterans Guardian makes from a veteran is less than $4,000.

“I might be able to convince one or two people, maybe three to do something nefarious,” Taylor said in his interview with The War Horse. “There is no way I can convince this many people to cheat veterans, to take advantage of veterans. We’re proud of what we do.”

At first, so were the Veterans Guardian current and former employees who spoke to The War Horse on the condition they would not be named because they feared they would lose their jobs or experience retaliation. All six of them said they joined the company because they wanted to help veterans. Each was a veteran themself or a military family member. “Some veterans come back to you and say, ‘I got my increase, I went from 10 to 90 percent, my family is saved,’” one of the former employees said. “I was brought to tears a lot of times by the work that we did.”

Yet during that employee’s time at the company, things started to change. “We just felt there was a little more greed,” the former employee said. “It really became about statistics, quotas, the numbers.”

Before January, employees who booked more than 70 mental health appointments with veterans each month could be eligible for a $30,000 annual bonus, according to a company employment offer letter reviewed by The War Horse. Under a new pay structure, however, a company contract reviewed by The War Horse states that employees become ineligible for full bonuses if their calls with veterans run longer than eight minutes.

“Do I make any extra money and try to provide for my kids better? Or do I give these veterans the time and the attention that they deserve? That’s our option.”

“Do I make any extra money and try to provide for my kids better?” one of the current employees said in an interview. “Or do I give these veterans the time and the attention that they deserve? That’s our option.”

It might be hard to imagine that a veteran would willingly pay thousands of dollars to a company when they could get help from a lawyer or veterans service organization for free. But for some veterans entangled in VA’s bureaucracy, it might seem like a fair price.

“The VA disability claims process is horribly broken, it’s not well run, and it can be very despairing and understandably discouraging for veterans,” said Rose Carmen Goldberg, a lawyer accredited by VA to assist with benefit claims who also serves as associate director at the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford University.

An influx of veterans filing for benefits since the PACT Act has strained the system, which has had a backlog of disability claims for years. As of March 2025, there were more than 240,000 cases in the queue. It can take an average of four and a half months for a decision on a claim. And with the Trump administration’s deep cuts across the federal government underway, veterans advocates fear things will get worse.

“I think that’s part of why these companies can be so alluring,” Goldberg said, “because they make promises about high success rates and speed.”

If an accredited agent acts unethically or makes a mistake on a claims submission then they are responsible. But lawyers and advocates warn that veterans could be the ones on the hook if any of the medical claims in their packets turn out to be fabricated or overstated by a claims consulting company.

No matter who helps a veteran file for benefits, all claims are sent to the same VA offices to be reviewed and processed by the same people, said Mike Figlioli, director of VFW National Veterans Service. VFW is one of the nonprofit groups advocating against Veterans Guardian in Congress and state legislatures.

“I think veterans that either had a bad experience with VA or a VSO think that these people have some kind of magic bullet, but there isn’t,” Figlioli said. “There’s nothing that cuts down on the processing time. What there is, is a potential for fraud.”

Mike Figlioli, director of VFW National Veterans Service, has been testifying against Veterans Guardian and other for-profit claims consultants in Congress and state legislatures. Photo courtesy of VFW

Veterans Guardian is among a growing group of “claims consulting” companies—called “claim sharks” by opponents—that the VA says are operating outside of the law because they aren’t accredited to perform the work and shouldn’t be charging for their services.

Trajector Medical, Veteran Benefits Guide, and VA Claims Insider are just some of Veterans Guardian’s competitors—and, in some cases, its allies. In 2023, Veterans Guardian joined forces with Veteran Benefits Guide to create a new trade organization: the National Association for Veterans Rights, helmed by Peter O’Rourke, who served as acting secretary for Veterans Affairs during President Trump’s first term.

“Veterans are making conscious, informed decisions to seek help outside the VA’s current system, and no one should be outraged that they now have a choice,” O’Rourke told a House Veterans Affairs subcommittee at a hearing in March.

Until 2006, there were criminal penalties for companies that took fees from veterans for filing disability claims. That year, however, the penalties disappeared in an update to federal law.

“We don’t have a clear answer why it was taken away,” said Rep. Chris Pappas, a Democrat from New Hampshire, who has introduced legislation to restore those criminal penalties.

Right now, if the VA finds out an unaccredited company is charging veterans for the preparation of their benefits claims, the department can send a cease and desist letter, like the one sent to Veterans Guardian in 2019. If that letter goes unanswered, the department can only report the matter to a state or federal agency, such as an attorney general, and hope it gains more traction.

The War Horse tried repeatedly to reach the Department of Veterans Affairs through phone calls and email, but the agency would not provide a comment for this story. The agency’s top watchdog was among more than a dozen inspectors general fired by President Trump during his first week back in office in a highly unusual purge. But before Trump’s return, then-VA Inspector General Michael J. Missal told The War Horse in an email that his office was aware of the issue, and “it is not appropriate for any unaccredited ‘claims consultants’ or other representatives to charge veterans a percentage of future payments or fees to assist with filing initial benefit claims.”

Taylor is careful when he describes how, in his view, Veterans Guardian complies with the law.

“What the current statute says is that you can’t assist a veteran as an agent or attorney without being accredited by the VA,” he said. They’re not attorneys, Taylor said, and “agent” has a dictionary definition that Veterans Guardian doesn’t fit.

“The purpose of the company is to provide veterans with the best represent—” Taylor stopped himself midsentence. “Actually, I need to rephrase that,” he said. “Not representation, because we do not represent them, but with the best consulting advice to help them navigate the process.”

The company has its fans and boasts a 4.8-star rating with over 2,000 reviews on Google. “They help us get what we have earned!” one recent review states. “Nothing more, and absolutely nothing less!”

Veterans Guardian points to its positive reviews online. Google

But several veterans were so unhappy with Veterans Guardian that they filed a lawsuit that alleges the company “routinely violates federal regulations” in a scheme that “has harmed and continues to harm veterans and their dependents.”

Eric Beard is one of those veterans. The former Army intelligence analyst gave the company access to his military and medical records, according to the lawsuit, and Veterans Guardian took care of the rest. It coordinated a private medical examination to assess his PTSD. It drafted and prepared all the necessary official VA forms and mailed him a packet. All he had to do, according to the lawsuit, was sign and date on the marked lines and put the prestamped, pre-addressed envelope in the mail.

When the VA required Beard to do an additional medical examination, Veterans Guardian coached him on how to present his symptoms to a VA medical examiner.

Eventually, Beard heard back from the VA: He got a 100 percent disability rating and was suddenly eligible for payments of about $4,200 per month. It also meant that Veterans Guardian came to collect its fee—to the tune of more than $21,000. The lawsuit said Beard never would have entered into an agreement with the company if he knew it was against the law to charge vets for such services.

“There’s no gray zone whatsoever,” said Wesley McCauley, a Georgia-based VA accredited claims agent. “It’s 100 percent illegal.”

For his part, Taylor called the lawsuit “baseless claims of wrongdoing” and pointed out that the veterans in the suit “received an increase in their benefits by choosing to hire Veterans Guardian.”

Though Taylor insists that Veterans Guardian doesn’t act as an agent, the company does skirt the line. Sometimes when veterans don’t let them know they got a ratings increase, Taylor said the company will call a hotline managed by the VA and use a veteran’s Social Security number to see if a veteran has gotten a rate increase. The majority of clients, however, just call and let them know, Taylor said. “Most of them are very happy.”

A House subcommittee wasn’t happy with Taylor in 2022 after his testimony at an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill. When asked if the VA had ever issued Veterans Guardian a cease and desist letter, Taylor testified that it had not.

But the committee managed to track down the letter that the VA had sent Veterans Guardian in January 2019. Not until lawmakers cited federal law that it was a crime to willfully make a false statement to Congress did Veterans Guardian’s attorney acknowledge the company had received the letter in question.

Showdowns with lawmakers would continue.

On February 2, 2024, Maryland Delegate Nick Allen, an Army veteran who was sent to Afghanistan twice, introduced a new bill in the Maryland General Assembly that would prohibit people from charging a fee or receiving compensation for providing veterans benefits services. Allen said he was motivated to craft the bill, along with Andy Gross, a Maryland VA accredited lawyer, to keep bad actors out of the state.

“It does seem like a lot of people are probably benefiting from the dysfunction in the VA,” Allen said, “and I think that’s creating kind of a perverse incentive to not fix the dysfunction and not actually help the veterans.”

Soon after the legislation was proposed, however, Veterans Guardian brought representatives and lobbyists to Maryland to kill the bill.

“We proposed the bill, they swooped in,” Gross said. “They were getting meetings with the committee chair and pushing hard against the bill.”

A similar story has played out across the country, as states race to use consumer protection laws to fill the gap left by the federal government’s inaction. Stacey Travers saw it in Arizona, when the Army veteran and state representative introduced a bill similar to Maryland’s that same month.

“We had been sandbagged and sabotaged.”

“We had been sandbagged and sabotaged,” she said. Despite bipartisan support, a hostile amendment was introduced, she said, gutting her bill, which eventually died.

Not all states mandate that lobbyists make their financial disclosures public. But after searching through lobbyist disclosures in 24 states with relevant legislation, The War Horse found that Veterans Guardian spent more than $420,000 on state lobbying in 2024.

When the lobbying doesn’t work, Veterans Guardian employs other tactics. Two states, New Jersey and Maine, recently passed laws that make the company’s practices illegal in those states. Almost immediately, the company sued the states’ attorneys general, alleging that its First Amendment rights had been violated.

These lawsuits could be creating a chilling effect. Allen said that among Maryland lawmakers there may have been some hesitation to pass the bill because they were worried about signing their attorney general, a veteran himself, up for a lawsuit.

“It’s kind of a nasty way to do business,” said Patrick Murray, past legislative director at VFW.

Last year, Veterans Guardian spent 2 1/2 times more on federal lobbying compared to what they’ve spent on a state level.

Their target? The Governing Unaccredited Representatives Defrauding VA Benefits Act, also known as the GUARD Act. Pappas, the New Hampshire Democrat, introduced the bill in 2022. It has strong backing from organizations like the VFW and attorneys general in more than 40 states.

“We’re putting penalties back in so it’s enforcing the law” that already exists, Murray said.

Veterans Guardian has lobbied strongly against it, testifying against the bill in Congress and spending millions of dollars on lobbyists. According to publicly disclosed lobbying records, the company spent more than $1 million on federal lobbyists in 2024, and more than $2 million in the three years since the GUARD Act was introduced.

“We can’t fight that kind of money,” said Murray of the VFW, which spent a total of $160,000 to lobby Congress on a variety of issues in 2024, public disclosure records show.

The fight keeps getting bigger: Veterans Guardian and its allies now have a bill that would benefit them.

In March 2023, Rep. Jack Bergman, a Republican and Marine Corps veteran from Michigan, introduced the Preserving Lawful Utilization of Services for Veterans Act, or the PLUS Act. The bill—co-sponsored at that time by Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican—would cap fees at $12,500 and allow individuals who charge veterans for preparing disability claims, like those who work at Veterans Guardian, to get VA accreditation.

The company set up its own political action committee, Veterans Guardian VA Claims Consulting PAC, made up of donations from Greenblatt, Taylor, other executives, and their family members. Donations from Veterans Guardian affiliates were in the top five campaign contributions for both Bergman and Mace, according to the campaign finance tracking database OpenSecrets. Bergman received $26,200 from these donors for 2024, and Mace received $19,700.

The War Horse reached out to Bergman and Mace multiple times through their offices by phone and email and did not receive a reply.

In a March 2023 legislative hearing in the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, Bergman touted the PLUS Act, name-dropping Veterans Guardian as Taylor sat in front of him.

“This bill seeks to strike a balance,” he said, by, “improving the accreditation system to allow businesses like Veterans Guardian and others to continue to do their good work.”

Both the GUARD Act and the PLUS Act have been reintroduced for the 2025 legislative session, though Mace is no longer co-sponsoring the PLUS Act. In fact, the South Carolina Republican grilled Taylor at a House subcommittee hearing in March, peppering him with questions about Veterans Guardian’s revenues and business practices.

​When Taylor said he wasn’t prepared to answer whether his company made more or less than $100 million a year, Mace shot back: “Of course not.”

Why Mace has gone on the offensive against Veterans Guardian was unclear.

But new cosponsors have come forward for the PLUS Act, including three Republicans from Veterans Guardian’s home state: Pat Harrigan, Addison McDowell, and David Rouzer. Veterans Guardian-affiliated individuals donated $10,000 to Rouzer’s campaign for 2024, $26,400 to Harrigan’s campaign, and $42,900 to McDowell, according to OpenSecrets.

“I fully support the PLUS Act,” McDowell said in an emailed statement to The War Horse, stating that the legislation “will protect veterans from fraud, abuse, and bad actors.”

Rouzer and Harrigan did not respond to The War Horse’s request for comment.

Lobbying, Taylor told The War Horse, is an unfortunate necessity for operating a business. The amount of money he and his associates have spent, Taylor said, “That’s hurt. But it’s either do that, or I shut my business down.”

Taylor said for the last several years, he has not just been focused on trying to defeat the GUARD Act. “I’ve actually been trying to reform accreditation,” he said.

Taylor suggests that a better solution than banning companies like his that charge fees would be to cap fees and put other guardrails in place to keep bad actors out of the system. “I want oversight,” he said, “but you have to change accreditation to make that possible.”

When it was pointed out that he could become accredited right now, he would just have to provide his services for free, Taylor acknowledged that was true.

“I could do that for free,” he said, “but I mean, you know, we live in the real world here, and I’m operating this as a business.”

This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Leah Rosenbaum is a freelance reporter who covers healthcare. Her reporting and editing have been featured in Business Insider_,_ Forbes_,_ Science News_,_ STAT News, and other publications. She has a master’s in journalism and a master’s of public health from UC Berkeley. She can be reached on her website or on Twitter at @leah_rosenbaum

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A Former IRS Chief on Trump’s Attempts to Gut—and Weaponize—His Agency

The Internal Revenue Service, as the New York Times reported this week, is mulling Donald Trump’s request to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University after Harvard refused to cave in to the president’s demands for a sweeping right-wing overhaul. The Times also reported, just yesterday, that a Treasury official had emailed a high-level official at IRS to find out whether Mike Lindell, a wealthy supporter of the president and spreader of Trump’s Big Lie, was “inappropriately targeted” for an audit.

John Koskinen is appalled. As the tax agency’s commissioner from 2013 through 2017, he understands, more than most, the importance of an independent IRS, and that no president has the right to weaponize the agency to curry favor or settle grudges. We haven’t witnessed this sort of nonsense since, well, Richard Nixon—and look how well that worked out for him.

“This has to be the worst time for the agency I can remember.”

Harvard was just the latest salvo. Republicans have waged an all-out war on the IRS since 1994, calling for its abolition and slashing its budgets—which is not how you behave if you are legitimately concerned about deficits and the national debt. Koskinen, appointed by President Barack Obama, has been hauled before Congress to defend his agency and its employees against an onslaught of tea party–fueled attacks. House Republicans even tried to impeach him, albeit unsuccessfully.

But what he’s seeing now is on another level. Trump is gutting the IRS workforce without congressional consent, and has grown increasingly brazen in his attempts to have the agency do his bidding. IRS is now sharing taxpayer information with Homeland Security to aid in Trump’s deportation efforts, a breach of privacy and independence Koskinen never would have abided.

Now 85 and (finally) retired—”I’ve flunked retirement a couple times,” he says—Koskinen was appointed commissioner at a time when federal agencies were, for the most part, still run by competent and experienced people, and not, to quote Thomas Friedman, “knuckleheads.”

Over a long and illustrious career, he has served under mayors, senators, judges, and presidents. He was a high level staffer for the Kerner Commission, ran the US Soccer Foundation, and chaired the 1994 World Cup host committee. He held a high position in President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget and chaired Clinton’s council on the “Y2K problem,” so successfully that nothing happened—which was the point. As the deputy city administrator of Washington, DC, from 2000 to 2003, “I was there for 9/11, for anthrax, for the sniper,” he told me. “I thought, ‘People are gonna think this guy’s got a black cloud, like Joe Btfsplk in the old Andy Capp comic.'”

He also spent decades in the private sector as a fixer, working to get tottering entities such as the Penn Central company, Levitt and Sons, and the Teamsters Pension Fund, back on track. One of his retirement “flunks” came about in 2009, when he was tapped to chair Freddie Mac—in the midst of a global mortage meltdown. (Black cloud indeed.)

As for who runs the IRS now, well, what day is it? Commissioner Daniel Werfel, a Biden appointee, stepped down shortly after Trump’s inauguration and well before the end of his five-year term. To replace him, Trump tapped Billy Long, a former congressman from Missouri who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Acting Commissioner Doug O’Donnell, a career employee, quit after about a month on the job, when he was asked to share IRS data with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was replaced by Melanie Krause, who pledged to cooperate with DOGE, only to resign after Homeland got its mitts on private taxpayer information—a development that prompted the exodus of a number of other IRS officials with “chief” in their titles, who probably didn’t want to be associated with whatever came next.

The speed and scope of the staff cuts, tens of thousands to date, could well make the next tax season a “disaster,” Koskinen says. And while Republicans often say that the government should be run like a business, what company in its right mind would deliberately alienate customers, encourage cheating, and undermine its own ability to collect revenue?

“A lot of these people come out of the private sector; you would think they would understand that,” Koskinen says. “Instead, they are barreling ahead. And the only explanation is that they think it’ll be good for them—they won’t get audited. It really is nonsensical if you’re concerned about the deficit.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The IRS has been under siege for decades, including on your watch. Does what’s happening now feel fundamentally different?

Yes, this feels more like a total frontal attack, and not only the budget—it’s the attempt to get access to protected data. And from the president suggesting that Harvard’s tax-exempt status ought to be reviewed, it’s just a small step to start ordering audits, even though that’s illegal, and we start moving back toward the Nixon “enemies list.” It also seems that this is an attempt to make the IRS less effective.

And this is one federal agency with a positive return on investment.

It’s never been disputed that if you give money to the IRS, you get more money in return. It goes the other way, too. If you take money away from the IRS, you lose multiples of whatever it is you think you’re saving. In my days, even the Freedom Caucus never disagreed with that.

The New York Times reports that about 22,000 IRS employees accepted a buyout. What happens when you eliminate so many people so quickly?

I am confident that includes a significant number of very experienced managers and executives. Over 30 percent of the IRS has always been eligible for retirement, but they don’t retire, because they’re committed to the mission. When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership. You’re losing guidance and mentoring. You really are disabling the IRS.

What people don’t understand is the IRS starts preparing for the next tax season in June or July. There’s a tremendous amount of reprogramming that has to go on. And then you have to make sure it works. And the underfunding? A lot of that money is coming out of IT.

What do the mass resignations tell you about agency morale?

Well, it has to be a problem. My theory has always been, if you want to know what’s going on in an organization, go talk to the people doing the work. When I was there, I went to two large IRS offices a week for three and a half months, holding town halls and lunches, and was just delighted with the level of [commitment].

“If the money is short, that’ll be a good reason to cut social programs—’We just don’t have the funds.‘”

The IRS was under tea party attack and people’s primary concern—these were employees, not managers—was how to get the work done with fewer people. We lost about 20,000 in the four years I was there because of the budget cuts, but that happened over time; we just didn’t replace people who left. Now, with the rattling of the cage that’s gone on, and the demeaning of government workers and attacks on the IRS, it’s not nearly as much fun to work there. This has to be the worst time for the agency I can remember.

Do you think Trump’s people will succeed in making the IRS a tool of his retribution?

They’re trying. I mean, they started out wanting access to all sorts of information about taxpayers, and they got pushback from the interim commissioners. So then we got [the shareable information] down to a narrower category. But even that is a broad category, and nobody seems to have paid attention to the documents: It’s criminal prosecutions and those under criminal investigation—without any explanation of what that means or how they’re measuring it.

Everybody is subject to being under criminal investigation as a way of getting access to your tax materials.

As for Harvard, that’s just the first step. This is an administration priding itself on revenge, and the FBI director and the Department of Justice people are out there saying, in effect, “We’re going to get our opponents.” They’re talking about investigating every member of Congress on the January 6 panel.

It’s one thing to have the agency not collect taxes well enough. It’s another if the administration doesn’t like me or my views, so the next thing I know I could be audited. And even if I don’t have any problem, being audited takes time and money, and you need a CPA or a lawyer or somebody to represent you.

They’ll make your life hell.

Yeah, and the threats to law firms and the press will be designed to intimidate people. You know George Orwell, right? You intimidate lawyers, you intimidate the press, and you intimidate universities. You try to make it so people do what you want, so their view of life is yours.

Then the administration can put out facts and information and there’s nobody to disagree. The head of HHS can say, well, we really do think autism is caused by vaccines, and people will say, Gee, if I object, I’ll lose my contract or grant or I’ll get audited. This is not beanbag anymore.

What do you mean?

This is not kid’s play. This is serious—a threat to the country and the democracy as we know it.

What do you hear from current IRS staffers?

It’s interesting. I hear from almost no one because they are so ingrained to protect taxpayers and their returns and the agency. Even at the executive level—and I know a lot of those people extremely well—they’ve all been very careful not to send me emails or complain or reveal anything. It’s to their great credit.

Michael Lewis just published a book called Who Is Government? Hes says that’s a default trait of federal employees: They aren’t clock-watchers. They tend to work obsessively, for low pay, and never seek credit. It’s just so different from the picture painted by guys like Elon Musk and Russell Vought. And Republican lawmakers, too. When Biden was working to boost IRS funding, they unleashed a propaganda campaign falsely claiming the agency would hire 87,000 new agents—basically jack-booted thugs—to harass ordinary people and small business owners.

They were going to come and get everybody! Yeah, it was just a stunning exaggeration.

The overwhelming majority of the layoffs to date have been probationary employees—Biden hires. Many of them actually had special skills, right?

Yes. They were easier to terminate. But probationary sounds like they’re just out of college. A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds and experience in technology and tax law management. They weren’t 25-year-olds. They were filling important positions. When you lose them, that’s not good.

The Washington Post said almost half of the planned job cuts would come from the compliance division, which oversees audits and criminal investigations into tax fraud and money laundering. What message does that send?

As I used to say, “It’s a tax cut for tax cheats.” I mean, you encourage people not to file, because they’re not going to get caught. You encourage people to take deductions they aren’t eligible for—they figure, well, the worst that happens if I ever get audited, which I probably won’t, is they charge me interest or a penalty.

About 85 percent of Americans try to be compliant, because if you aren’t, the IRS will get you. If word starts to spread—and it will spread first among wealthy people with sophisticated CPAs and attorneys—that the audit rate has gone down by 80 percent, a lot of people are going to try to take advantage of that.

Say more about who benefits, and who pays the price.

When revenue agents and revenue officers were cut by 30 percent or 35 percent while I was there, large partnerships basically didn’t get audited. Everybody knew who was involved in those: usually wealthy investors and Wall Street types advised by sophisticated counsel. And those people knew the audit rate had to be cut. You can’t just go after rich people—even though you’d get more money that way—because you need to encourage compliance across the board. So ultimately you lose billions of dollars in collections. Then at some point the politicians raise taxes, and the compliant people pay for the taxes not paid by wealthy people.

Or…the politicians use the lower revenues to justify more budget cuts.

That exactly! If the money is short, that’ll be a good reason to cut social programs—we just don’t have the funds.

Do you think that’s the administration’s end game?

I don’t know whether they started out that way, but that’s clearly where it’s going to end up. A number of these people, historically, have thought the best government is no government.

Is there anything about these cuts you’ve found surprising?

The scope of them has surprised me. The irony is, those of us who have spent a lot of time in the government would say you can always find—and it’s important!—ways to be efficient and effective. The administration has missed a great opportunity to do that appropriately.

Having spent 20 years doing turnarounds of large, failed enterprises, the last thing I ever thought was, well, let’s starve the revenue arm. The salespeople—cut them back! No, your goal was to maximize revenues to give them the running room to do what was needed.

The IRS is easy to scapegoat, because Americans are kind of conditioned to hate the agency and hate paying taxes. What would you say to change their minds?

I would say the vast majority of people rely on social programs, some of which they don’t even realize are funded by the federal government. All of those are at risk. When you cut park rangers, suddenly there are long lines trying to get into a park. People are gonna say, “I didn’t mean get rid of a program I rely on.”

“If you cut the IRS by 40 percent, you’re at a minimum going to cut revenue collection by $500 billion a year.”

At the IRS, my approach was to be available and transparent and to try to get people to understand that we spent a lot of time and money trying to help people be compliant. If you had financial difficulties, we could arrange payment systems. You could do offers and compromise.

If you’re trying to be compliant, I used to say, we’re here to help you. If you’re trying to cheat or not file or not pay your fair share, then I’m happy to chase you to the ends of the Earth. I would hope that more people would understand you’ve got to protect the agency, because it’s how the government funds itself and it’s a way of making sure everybody pays their fair share. I don’t want to pay my fair share and have rich guys get away with not paying.

Speaking of helping people, the IRS recently rolled out free online tax filing. But now Trump, who took a $1 million inaugural donation from Intuit, which makes the TurboTax software, reportedly aims to kill it.

DirectFile is a good example of the government providing an important service, allowing people to file at no cost. Since most people aren’t thrilled about paying taxes, making it as easy and inexpensive for them as possible was a great goal. It’s a shame that this option has been arbitrarily taken away from them.

Another blow for compliance.

Even when they get through disabling all these agencies, they won’t have dealt with the deficit problem significantly, especially if they’re collecting less revenues. Just the undocumented immigrants pay almost $70 billion a year in taxes—or they did. Now that Homeland Security has negotiated [with IRS] to find out who they are, where they live, the estimate is half of that money is not going to get paid.

And that’s a tiny slice of what won’t be coming in.

Yes, there are estimates that, if you cut the IRS by 40 percent, you’re at a minimum going to cut revenue collection capacity by 10 percent—$500 billion a year.

And encourage cheating.

Yeah. There are people today who don’t file because they think the chances getting caught haven’t been large for the last 15 or 20 years.

So, does it worry you to see the DOGE kids mucking around in IRS systems?

It certainly does. These are people have no idea about how the place runs. Somebody told me that they had decided on Monday, the day before the tax filing deadline, to fiddle around with the website, and parts of it either had bad spelling or didn’t work. Who in their right mind would touch anything in the last week—or month—before the filing season ends?

You really are fixing the plane while you’re flying it. You can’t just shut down for a couple months and say nobody can file. Filing season ended on Tuesday, but a lot of people filed extensions and there’ll be returns, and the system will have to operate through October 15—and by then they’ll be testing the system to get ready for January 1.

After cutting so many people, I gather it would take quite a while to put things right.

Yes. Part of the problem is Trump’s people have no background in government and how things operate, and they tend to come from the private sector. They think, Well, they’re all fungible. We’ll cut them and then, if we need them, we’ll hire some new people back.

But the level of complexity of these programs and agencies is such that you just can’t hire people off the street who, like people at the IRS, understand the IT systems and the processes for dealing with complicated tax situations and dealing with things internationally. When you lose experienced people, you can’t replace them overnight. They are going to destroy the efficiency of agencies, and it’ll take years to build it back.

Too bad we don’t all know someone who works there, to put a face on the IRS.

When I was talking to these thousands of employees, I’d say I understand how, when people ask what you do, you say, “I work for the government.” And where in the government? “Well, the Treasury Department.” And where in the Treasury Department? “Well, I actually work for the IRS.”

“They are going to destroy the efficiency of agencies, and it’ll take years to build it back.”

I’m not saying you should wear an IRS hat to the grocery store, but people know you personally through the PTA or church or the soccer team, and they know you’re a good person. And if you work for the IRS and like it, it must be okay. We needed 80,000 ambassadors to say, “I work at the IRS and I love it!”

Reminds me how Harvard people would always say, Oh, I went to college in Boston.

Well, I went to law school at Yale. I’ve never been a Harvard guy, but you’ve got to hand it to them that they took the position they did. It’s like with the law firms caving. There’s strength in numbers, and if you get picked off one at a time, it’s hard to fight back.

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Tariffs Are About to Hit Lifesaving Medical Equipment

For millions of disabled people, essential health devices known as durable medical equipment, or DME—think of CPAP machines or in-home dialysis equipment—help them both remain at home and stay alive. Donald Trump’s recent wave of tariffs, extremely broad in both the imports and countries they target, are still at a new 10 percent baseline in many cases—but they’re likely to raise the costs of medical devices, putting people’s ability to afford it (and providers’ ability to supply it) in jeopardy. That’s especially true for people who are low-income, including disabled people on Medicaid, or on fixed incomes, like many retirees on Medicare.

DME can include oxygen equipment, suction pumps, some diabetes supplies, and mobility devices like wheelchairs—all indispensable to the day-to-day lives of people who use them. Although states are compelled to cover such devices through Medicaid, they have flexibility in how far that coverage extends: like how often equipment will be replaced, how many items will be sent during a given time period, and how much the co-pay.

That’s particularly true of Medicare, which isn’t required to cover as many of the costs associated with letting disabled people remain in their homes. If tariffs drive up the cost of a piece of home medical gear, and if states don’t agree to quickly negotiate, people under Medicaid could be sent fewer supplies in a period, or may face greater co-pays. For Medicaid users, even a cost increase that an insurer or provider would treat as marginal—say, around $50 more per month for medical equipment—can be devastating.

Research from data analytics and consulting firm GlobalData found that around 75 percent of US-marketed medical devices are, at least in part, manufactured abroad. It also found that respiratory devices—one of the most common medical device imports, and very much not optional for those who rely on them—are likely to be one of the more seriously impacted products. Unlike with some consumer products, says Andrew Thompson, a director on GlobalData’s medical devices team, “the demand doesn’t go away” for medical devices.

Given that China is a major supplier of medical devices and is the target of massive US tariffs in Trump’s escalating trade war with the country, Thompson said firms may be incentivized to look at even cheaper factories in other countries. “The FDA inspects and approves the factories where these devices are made, in the US and overseas,” he said. If a company switches from China to Vietnam, Thompson says, “you have to go for the approvals again”—and due to thousands of layoffs at the FDA, that process is likely to take even longer.

The US instituting a 10 percent tariff should not, on its own, be a major problem when it comes to supply chains and costs, Thompson told me; the United Kingdom does the same. What causes issues, he says, is the “moment of uncertainty.”

To anticipate the potential impact of further tariff-driven caps to DME, Harvard University assistant professor of health policy and management Ari Ne’eman looks to the past.

“Some state Medicaid agencies in the 1990s put in place a prescription drug cap that really limited the extent to which people with disabilities enrolled in Medicaid could access prescription medications,” Ne’eman says. “One of the things we saw come out of that was people were forced into nursing homes in order to be able to bypass the prescription drug cap and get the medication they needed.”

Around a quarterof American adults with diabetes below the age of 65 are on Medicaid. Outside of medicine like insulin, durable medical equipment that people with diabetes need includes blood glucose meters, test strips, syringes and continuous glucose monitors.

Washington state chapter #Insulin4All organizer Kevin Wren is worried about having to ration continuous glucose monitors; he also sources his insulin pumps from China, where exporters are still coming to grips with a wide variety of tariffs that can stack in unpredictable ways.

“If you ration this thing [CGM] at the top, then you’re really making it much harder to manage an already difficult disease,” Wren said, who is on Medicaid; he has already been without his CGM sensors for some stretches because he had been through three in less than a month.

The tariff saga and its impact on disabled people cannot be separated from the administration’s brutal cuts to Medicaid, said Allie Gardner, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Both houses of Congress passed a budget reconciliation bill in April that will result in up to $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade. According to a KFF brief, these cuts “would represent 29 percent of state-financed Medicaid spending per resident.”

“All of that is likely going to have put pressure on states to make difficult decisions about reassessing eligibility benefits and reimbursement rates, all of which would directly affect people’s coverage and access to care,” Gardner said.

In addition, Ne’eman says, “anytime you’re taking hundreds of billions of dollars away from Medicaid, disabled people will be impacted.”

If states are prioritizing keeping their eligibility levels the same, Gardner says, “they could increase out-of-pocket costs”—a reality that is already on the table for DME in some states, if tariffs raise the cost of medical devices.

If people do die as a consequence of tariff-driven cost increases and supply issues with medical equipment, then their deaths, Wren is concerned, will be written off as expected.

“The full impact won’t be captured,” Wren said. “It’s really the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable Medicaid patients who need technologies to live.”

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Cement Is a Carbon Bomb, and Trump Just Made It Harder to Defuse

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Concrete built much of the modern world. It paves highways, shelters millions, and forms the foundations of countless buildings.

But cement, the crucial powder that serves as the binder in concrete, has become one of the planet’s biggest climate threats, generating about 8 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. And now, efforts to curb its pollution are facing new political headwinds.

Moves to decarbonize the cement industry picked up speed during the administration of President Joe Biden, which channeled billions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) money toward reducing the carbon footprint of concrete and other construction materials.

The Trump administration has reversed course. In January, the Environmental Protection Agency canceled 21 grants aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from concrete, cement and other construction materials, according to a spreadsheet compiled by the Sierra Club from EPA records. “There’s definitely concern that the momentum is broken,” said Yong Kwon, senior campaign advisor for Sierra Club’s Industrial Transformation Campaign.

The EPA didn’t respond to Floodlight’s questions about why it canceled those grants. Instead the agency’s press office sent a two-sentence response:

“As with any change in Administration, the agency is reviewing each grant program to ensure it is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with Administration priorities. The agency determined that the grant application no longer supports Administration priorities, and the awards have been cancelled.”

Prized for its strength, durability and versatility, concrete is the second-most used substance on Earth, behind only water.

But the explosive growth in its use has also heightened concerns about a warming planet. Carbon dioxide emissions from cement production have nearly tripled over the past 30 years. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the world’s fifth largest carbon polluter. Global demand is expected to soar by 50 percent by 2050.

Cement serves as the glue in concrete, binding together aggregate materials like sand and gravel. Key to giving cement its strength and hardening ability is a manufactured substance known as clinker. But in the process of making clinker, cement factories release massive amounts of carbon dioxide.

Some emissions result from the kilns used in the manufacturing process. Those kilns, commonly fired by fossil fuels in the United States, typically reach about 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit—roughly a quarter of the sun’s surface temperature. The chemical process used to convert limestone into lime, a key compound required for clinker, generates even more carbon dioxide.

Many of the efforts to reduce the cement industry’s carbon footprint have focused on reducing or replacing clinker with other materials, such as slag from the blast furnaces used to make iron, and fly ash, a byproduct of coal combustion in power plants.

“I think certainly industry, American industry, sees this as an opportunity to broaden its horizons.”

Other companies are using alternative fuels to power kilns. But that’s far more common in Europe than domestically. “Today, the US lags behind Europe and other parts of the world in adopting low-carbon approaches,” according to a 2023 report about low-carbon cement by the Department of Energy. “The EU uses alternative fuels for about 50 percent of primary energy consumption in cement, compared to just about 15 percent in the US.”

The Biden administration had begun funding an array of cement decarbonization efforts.

Last year, the DOE awarded $1.5 billion in grants to six projects designed to curb carbon emissions by the cement industry. It’s not yet clear whether any of that money will be held up under the Trump administration. The department did not respond to Floodlight’s emailed questions about the status of those grants.

The IRA, Biden’s massive climate law, also provided $2.2 billion for the purchase of low-carbon construction materials for planned federal buildings.

Concrete is poured at the site of an affordable housing complex in Greenville, NC, last February.(City of Greenville, N.C. via Wikimedia)

As of January, about $1.6 billion of that money had not yet been spent, according to the IRA Tracker, a joint project of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Environmental Defense Fund. It’s unclear how much or whether any of the remaining money will be spent on green materials.

But a bipartisan effort in Congress could advance efforts to decarbonize the cement industry. The so-called Impact Act, passed by the House last month on a vote of 350-73, would establish a DOE program to support production of low-emission cement, concrete and asphalt.

A second House bill, now under consideration, would provide grants to states to encourage the purchase of green cement, concrete and asphalt. The Senate has introduced similar legislation that includes features from both House bills.

Rep. Valerie Foushee—a North Carolina Democrat who, along with Republican Max Miller of Ohio, sponsored both House bills—told Floodlight she understands there’s support for the legislation in the Senate, too.

“This opportunity for a bipartisan, bicameral way of reducing carbon emissions for the production of cement, concrete, and asphalt is very important, and this is a good time to do it,” Foushee said. “The time is now. We have the opportunity.”

Caught between Congress and the Trump administration, DOE is receiving “mixed signals” on decarbonizing the cement industry, according to Harry Manin, the Sierra Club’s deputy legislative director on industrial policy and trade.

“While there are incredible headwinds under this administration … there still seems to be some awareness by some Republicans that it would be to our advantage to continue down this path,” Manin said. “And I think certainly industry, American industry, sees this as an opportunity to broaden its horizons.”

Limestone-containing cement, which has a smaller carbon footprint than traditional cement, was used in this concrete slab for a large warehouse in Jacksonville, Florida.

Politics isn’t the only obstacle in reducing the industry’s impact on global warming.

Creating demand for low-carbon cement and concrete is challenging, partly because those products are more expensive, experts told Floodlight.

Another hurdle: Some low-carbon concrete takes longer to cure, according to Lionel Lemay, executive vice president of structures and sustainability for the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association. In a construction industry where time is money, that makes it a tougher sell, he said: “In reality, the demand for low-carbon concrete is still relatively low.”

Builders and other customers also want to know that low-carbon cements will be as reliable as conventional cement.

“It’s a pretty risk-averse industry,” said Ben Skinner, who focuses on cement for RMI, a nonprofit research group that works to reduce emissions. “And for good reason. If these buildings do fail, there’s serious consequences that may involve physical injuries.”

Given the uncertainty about what will happen with federal support for decarbonization over the next four years, much of the focus is now on efforts by private industry and the states.

A number of them—including New York, Minnesota, and Colorado—have created “buy clean” programs to prioritize the purchase of construction materials with a lower carbon footprint. Said Kwon of the Sierra Club: “State governments have a huge role to play now.”

A technician for Prometheus Materials shovels aggregate into a mixer to make a “bio-concrete,” whose properties are comparable or superior to traditional concrete, the company says.(Prometheus Materials)

The Portland Cement Association, a leading trade group, is among those whose EPA grants were canceled.

“Regardless of administration, our goal is carbon neutrality by 2050—that has not changed,” Bohan said. “That will be achieved.”

Will the industry really decarbonize without government help and pressure?

The National Ready Mixed Concrete Association also got word earlier this year that it lost its EPA funding. The association was planning to use its $9.6 million grant to help concrete producers develop “environmental product declarations” so government agencies and other customers could identify which products have a low-carbon footprint.

The grant would have boosted demand for low-carbon products, Lemay said. But the Trump administration’s EPA canceled it along with 48 others. “That just means that we’re not going to have the benefit of the federal government accelerating our progress,” Lemay said. “That would have helped. Clearly.”

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A Conservative Judge Just Issued a Dire Warning About the Abrego Garcia Case

A conservative federal judge just issued a dire warning: The government must bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States after he was illegally deported to a brutal Salvadoran prison, or else the country will descend into lawlessness. The opinion, from the 4th Circuit’s J. Harvie Wilkinson III and joined by two colleagues, is an extraordinary document—and is all the more notable coming froma judge who has long championed presidential power.

“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country
in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” Wilksinson wrote in an opinion Thursday rejecting the government’s request to halt a district court order that it takes affirmative steps to retrieve Abrego Garcia and vacate an order for discovery into these efforts. “Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.”

Justto recap what has happened thus far: On March 15,the Trump administration flew Abrego Garcia on the third of three flights taking immigrants to El Salvador’s notorious terrorism confinement center, known as CECOT, where prisoners are only expected to leave in a coffin. It did so illegally because in 2019, an immigration judge had issued an order that Abrego Garcia not be returned to El Salvador, his country of origin. The administration has admitted in court that the deportation happened due to “administrative error”—but it has argued that despite that error, it will not and cannot return him. “That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said during a press conference Monday. The logic is terrifying not onlyfor Abrego Garcia: No matter the law, you can be taken to a foreign prison and left to rot.

One week ago, the Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. It instructed the district court to act “with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs” but also expected that the administration would comply and “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Thursday’s opinion grasps the gravity of the situation.It orders the government to take active steps to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States and rejects the government’s assertion that the courts cannot require it to actively seek his release.

“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?”

For the past week, the government has argued that it needs to do virtually nothing. “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” Wilkinson wrote. “And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”

Wilkinson’s words will likely be taken seriously by Chief Justice John Roberts and possibly the other GOP-appointed justices because he is one of them. A Reagan appointee, Wilkinson is a conservative jurist who, during the height of the War on Terror, wrote an opinion upholding the president’s wartime authority to detain US citizens indefinitely. And it was Wilkinson’s concurrence in this same case that gave the Supreme Court the “facilitate” language it had recently adopted. Wilkinson’s clarion warning today sends a strong signal to the justices, the conservative legal community, and the country that we are careening toward crisis. What remains unknown is if there’s any way to stop it now.

In concluding his opinion, Wilkinson accurately warns that without compliance, the checks and balances of our system will fail. And he essentially pleads with the Trump administration to come to its senses. “We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos,” he wrote. “This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.”

Wilkinson’s writing also, if implicitly, is directed at the Supreme Court, where this case may be headed once again. A week ago, the Supreme Court stressed deference to the executive all while upholding the district court’s effort to return Abrego Garcia. But at some point, the justices will either have to call out the administration for failing to act—or throw up their hands and sanction Trump’s lawlessness. Wilkinson’s opinion is a warning to avoid that outcome.

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RFK Jr. Says There Are No Autistic Poets. We Asked an Autistic Poet.

To Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—and contrary to medical consensus and decades of study—autism is an appalling, family-destroying “disease.” To pediatric psychiatrists and autism experts like Vanderbilt University’s Zachary Warren, speaking Wednesday to National Public Radio, autism “isn’t a single thing; it is a word we use in an attempt to capture a spectrum of behavioral strengths, differences, and vulnerabilities.”

During a startling recent press conference, and following a pledge to establish the “cause” of autism by September, the HHS secretary sparked further outrage—by, as my colleague Anna Merlan reported yesterday, saying the following:

“These are kids who will never pay taxes,” Kennedy declared. “They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children.”

Kennedy’s years of anti-vaccine activism have centered in large part on autism, framing it as a “preventable disease” and epidemic driven by environmental contaminants. A lawyer by training, with no medical background beyond freelance taxidermy, Kennedy has consistently peddled misinformation about autism and autistic people, presenting the condition as a vaccine-driven scourge.

Increasingly, Kennedy has papered over some of the most problematic elements of his crusade—and licensed himself to ignore opposition and criticism from autistic people—by insisting that he’s referring to “profound” autism, or autism with high support needs. It’s a distinction that he’s happy to deploy when it serves his case, or to gloss over when promising to end autism once and for all; and, by definition, it excludes his autistic critics from the conversation.

A crucial slogan of the disability rights movement is “Nothing about us without us”—so it seemed appropriate to get the reaction of an autistic poet. I spoke with Elizabeth McClellan, an award-winning poet, attorney, and legal educator based in Memphis, Tennessee.

Could you tell me about yourself and your work as a poet?

I have been publishing poetry professionally since 2009, on and off. I primarily do genre poetry, which is poetry that falls sort of in the speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, [and] horror spaces. I have a book of horror poetry that will be coming soon from Kith Books that’s found poetry from Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart Is a Chainsaw. Poetry doesn’t generally pay for itself, most poets are not just poets. That’s why I supplement it with my work as an attorney.

So you’re living evidence that someone can be both autistic and a poet.

I am not only living evidence that someone can be autistic and a poet, I will challenge RFK Jr. to write a poem as good as me any day of the week, because I don’t think he can do it.

“He’s trying to eradicate support, especially with education, that could help people live the kind of lives where they do get to write poetry.”

What was your reaction to Kennedy saying that an increase in autism diagnoses is bad in part because autistic people can’t “write a poem”? (Not that there’s anything wrong in more people getting diagnosed.)

It’s completely dehumanizing. He didn’t lead with “poet.” He led with they’ll never pay taxes, they’ll never have a job. It’s just “useless eaters” rhetoric. And then he fluffs it up with, they’ll never write a poem. They’ll never play baseball. Some people won’t—some people have higher support needs. They are still people. They have a right to live and a right to dignity. And that’s not what he wants for us. He is using the straight-up eugenicist playbook. People who can’t go to the toilet by themselves are still people. People who can’t write a poem are still people. I doubt [Kennedy] can write a poem, but he’s still a person.

You can’t eradicate autism without eradicating autistic people. It’s genocidal rhetoric against us that’s justified by “autism destroys families. It destroys children.” No, it doesn’t. It’s bias against autistic people.

His taking an axe to the Department of Health and Human Services means that a lot of autistic people are not going to have the support that they need to thrive and survive. Now, I’ve had support to thrive and survive. I don’t need a whole lot of support to do what I do, but I need it, and I probably would have had a less miserable childhood if the diagnosis were more available. [RFK Jr.] falls into using language like Asperger’s, which, of course, was the distinction that was used to decide who would die and who would work under the Nazis.

“What does he do? He chainsaws the heads off dead whales and leaves bear cubs in Central Park.”

There are many autistic poets. There’s already a call for a special issue of poetry by autistic poets that will pay those poets just to do an autistic resistance. There are poets writing short poems just to help all of us recover from this person with a great deal of power saying our lives are worth nothing. He’s trying to eradicate support, especially with education, that could help people live the kind of lives where they do get to write poetry.

With poetry, you have to be creative. RFK Jr.’s hostility to autistic people seems to indicate the opposite.

He’s the antithesis of creativity. I’ve never seen his book of collected poems. Who are you to tell us that we can’t write poetry? When you don’t write poetry, that’s not a thing that you do. You’re not a poet. You don’t get to tell us who gets to be poets. I know so many autistic poets. I know so many poets with various kinds of neurodivergence and that adds to the way that we see the world in our unique way, and that adds to our unique voice as poets.

Allistic people can write poetry too, but we have a different way of seeing the world, and that inspired some of us to take up this particular art form. Others of us paint. What does he do? He chainsaws the heads off dead whales and leaves bear cubs in Central Park. And I don’t think it’s performance art. I think it’s just that he’s creepy. What has he ever really done, other than have a last name?

What this is all really about is capitalism. “Oh, they’ll never go to the toilet by themselves. That’s a miserable existence.” Plenty of people need assistance going to the bathroom whose lives are rich and full—who will write poems, who will paint pictures, who will do things, and he doesn’t actually care whether we’re creative or not. He doesn’t actually care whether we’re writing poetry or not. It’s just the same old rhetoric over and over again that we get from eugenicists.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Abortions Are Rising—Even After Dobbs. A New Book Explains Why.

New data released this week reaffirmed a seemingly paradoxical reality of the post-Roe v. Wade era: Abortion rates have continued to rise despite the increasing restrictions nationwide.

The latest data, compiled by the abortion rights research and policy organization the Guttmacher Institute, shows that throughout 2024, clinicians provided more than one million abortions in states without total abortion bans, a slight increase compared to 2023. A closer look at the data reflects how healthcare providers and patients have adapted to changing circumstances—which have made access both more difficult and, in some ways, easier—since the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revoking the constitutional right to abortion.

About 14,000 fewer people traveled out-of-state for an abortion in 2024 compared to 2023. This can be partially explained by state bans that force people to travel further for care, as well as the logistical and financial difficulties travel involves. There were, however, about 40,000 more abortions provided through online-only clinics, which may be an undercount, since it doesn’t include medication abortions that are accessible through telehealth under shield laws. These laws seek to protect providers from prosecution for virtually prescribing and mailing abortion pills to people in states with abortion bans. (Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is currently testing the limits of such laws by suing an abortion provider in New York—which has a shield law—for mailing abortion pills to a Texas patient.) Other research estimates telehealth provision of abortions under shield laws accounted for about 10,000 abortions a month in the first half of last year alone—most of which occurred in states with total or six-week bans, according to the Society of Family Planning, a reproductive rights research organization.

A new book co-authored by reproductive rights experts Carole Joffe, a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Davis, and David Cohen, a professor of law at Drexel University, helps explain how this came to be—and it’s not only because of the relative ease of access to abortion pills. After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe But Not Abortiondigs into the various strategies providers have pursued to continue offering abortions, and the ways advocates have helped people access them. Just a few examples: Providers moved clinics out of banned states, prescribed pills online, and mailed them to patients, while advocates coordinated patients’ travel and raised money to help them get to their appointments.

“It was a half-century mission to overturn Roe, and the result is that there are more abortions than before.”

To write the book, Joffe and Cohen conducted interviews, which began before the Dobbs’ decision, with two dozen abortion providers and advocates throughout 2022. They then continued to track what unfolded just after, and at the end of the year. In the process, they learned how providers, patients, and advocates adapted to their new realities. Ultimately, what they found surprised them: Their interviewees were clear-eyed about the new risks and barriers they faced, but also defiant. “I think when we started, we expected to write a much more sobering and much sadder book than what actually emerged,” Joffe told me.

“It’s a story of resistance and resilience and hope,” Cohen added. “But better than hope, it also offers strategies for thinking about how to make people’s lives better and fight against oppression.”

We spoke via Zoom to discuss the post-Roe paradox, the “creative alternatives” providers are pursuing, and the increased risks they face now compared to the pre-Roe era.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

You write in the book: “By any account, with the data we have so far, Dobbs has not had the devastating impact on overall abortion numbers that many predicted.” How would you characterize what a “devastating impact” looks like? Did you expect this would be the case when you began research for the book at the start of 2022?

Carole Joffe:“Devastating impact” would be thousands of people not being able to get the abortions they needed; “devastating impact” would be women who were ill, who should not be pregnant. I thought there would be deaths—which in fact, there have been, though we don’t know how many—but we have seen a rise in maternal mortality. ProPublica and other journalists have documented some deaths. I have every reason to believe from what I’ve read and been told by abortion doctors there have been more that have not been documented.

“It was never in my conception of what would happen after Roe was overturned that abortion numbers would go up.”

I knew that abortion provision would go on. David and I have studied this field for years. We know the dedication of the people who work in it and their allies at the funds and in the national organizations. I did not anticipate that the number of abortions would actually rise. I think our book helps explain that, documenting the extraordinary efforts, not just of the provider community but the people getting the people who needed abortions to the clinics.

David Cohen: I thought increases in abortion-related deaths would be staggeringly high and there would be prosecutions all the time. Those things have happened in much, much smaller numbers than we expected, and there hasn’t been a decrease in the number of abortions. It was never in my conception of what would happen after Roe was overturned that abortion numbers would go up.

Which of the “creative alternatives,” as you call them in the book, that providers have used to continue offering abortions most surprised you in terms of effectiveness?

CJ: I think what surprised me a lot was the incredible, rapid response of the patient navigators. We saw them at the National Abortion Federation and at local abortion funds. What really sticks in my head was having a doctor tell us, “We had a patient who was scheduled to come, but there was a snowstorm, so right away the patient navigator changed the flights and got her an appointment in Las Vegas where it wasn’t snowing.” In abortion care in general, time is of the essence—if it takes two weeks to arrange something, someone goes from the first trimester to the second, or the second to the third. Just the ability to move that quickly to arrange care for patients—it was extraordinary to see.

DC: Yeah, that’s been amazing. The other part for me is the telehealth shield provision of abortion and the impact on patients stuck in states where there are abortion bans.

This reminds me of a quote from Francine Coeuytaux, co-founder of the abortion pill information website Plan C, that you included in the book. She said she believes “there is better access these days” because of the greater awareness people have about how to access abortion after Dobbs. There are a few similar quotes from other people in the book. Do you agree?

DC: I think for a lot of people, it’s much easier now than it was before. Pills are available and cheaper. More people know about pills than ever before. There’s a lot more variety in delivery mechanisms. There’s a lot more support in terms of people who travel. But I do think there’s a big asterisk next to that statement—it doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone.

There are a lot of people for whom travel is just really difficult—whether it’s because of kids, work, concerns about being racially profiled, they don’t have a car, they don’t have the executive capacity or time to deal with all of the different appointments and people to talk to about the funding. So that can be really hard. For people who are dealing with emergency pregnancy complications, they might have the resources to travel from the middle of Texas to Colorado, but when you’re in sepsis, traveling is not easy. That’s catastrophic for people’s lives. Other people just didn’t even know about all these options we’re talking about, so thery are left out of this equation.

CJ: For the very sick, what’s going on is still barbaric. Women who are near death are not getting the care they need.

DC: For the states that are pro-choice, Dobbs was really a kick in the ass in terms of changing policy. People like us have been pushing them to change their policy, get rid of restrictions, fund abortion under Medicaid, and support providers. We’ve been pushing them to do this for decades, and a lot of them just ignored it because they didn’t think there was a problem. But once Dobbs happened, they re-evaluated their own laws and got rid of barriers that existed even in some of the most liberal states.

You write that Dr. Curtis Boyd, a Baptist preacher turned abortion provider in Texas and New Mexico, “predicted that relatively few doctors would perform illegal abortions in this new era.” Do you see these alternative methods—such as providing pills via telehealth or moving clinics across state lines—as replacements for back-alley abortions that were occurring pre- Roe ?

CJ: There were different kinds of abortion provisions before Roe. “Back alley,” we normally code as bad—and they were bad, they were unsafe, and the people who did them were very unethical. There were also very decent doctors, like Dr. Boyd, who did abortions as a matter of conscience. So “back alley” did not mean defiance, but losers who wanted to make money off decent people like Dr. Boyd, who worked with the Clergy Consultation Service [a group of clergy members who helped people travel to access abortion] and took on great risks.

“People who don’t want to be pregnant will always search for abortion. This is a historical constant across societies.”

Speaking as someone who has studied that era, what I would say is, in those days, there were risks. There were some prosecutions—very few, as it turned out, against doctors, mostly against non-physicians who did them. When doctors were prosecuted and found guilty, the jail terms were typically one or two years. Several well-known African-American doctors were jailed, and their sentences were around two years. Now, in Texas and Alabama, it’s up to 99 years in prison for doctors. So risk-taking takes on a very different calculus. It’s very difficult for a grief-stricken provider who is going crazy because she can’t help her patients. But that has to be weighed against many years of imprisonment, losing her medical license, and having a huge fine.

As long as abortion remains legal in the states where it is not legal, I don’t see people doing illegal procedures. I see them continuing to still do the workarounds, whether it’s doing pills or moving across state lines.

DC: I think there are two other factors. Pills are just a huge difference from before Roe, because there weren’t pills that you could get somewhat freely on the internet, and now you can. The other big difference is social media and the internet. There were doctors before Roe who provided care, but they didn’t have the social media and the internet blaring this to everyone in the world that they were doing it. There was the doctor in Pennsylvania, Robert Spencer, who provided close to 40,000 abortions before Roe [Spencer claimed the amount was much higher: up to 100,000 abortions]. So people knew about him, but there weren’t websites devoted to telling authorities that he was doing this everywhere in the world. If someone starts doing illegal abortions now, there’s going to be a mob after them because of the internet.

Do you think the anti-abortion movement was prepared for the proliferation of these “creative alternatives” after Dobbs ?

DC: I think they knew that pills would become a big story post-Dobbs. But I think they’ve been caught pretty flat-footed with how to respond to all of this. They have not been able to effectively stop pills—yet. They have not been able to stop most referendums. They have not been able to get complete bans in some states where we thought there were going to be complete bans, whether because legislatures don’t want to go that far or state courts have stopped them. And they haven’t stopped abortion travel.

I don’t know if many of these things would have surprised them, but I think they probably hoped they had better strategies to deal with them, and they just haven’t. It was a half-century mission to overturn Roe, and the result is that there are more abortions than before.

Do you see the persistence of the provision of abortions as a reason for hope at a time when it seems like many other civil liberties are at risk?

DC: I do, but not necessarily hope, as opposed to illustrating there are effective ways to go about resistance in a time of oppression. Certainly, it would be better if there were a national right and abortion were legal and accessible everywhere. As a result of that not being the case, there’s oppression happening. But there are people fighting back. This is a story of people who are looking at the situation and saying, “I am not okay with it, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that people are not as negatively impacted by this oppression as they could be.”

CJ: Whatever happens legally, pregnant people who don’t want to be pregnant will always search for abortion. This is a historical constant across societies.

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Trump’s Order Targeting State Climate Laws Is Probably Unconstitutional

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

President Donald Trump continued dismantling US climate policy this week when he directed the Justice Department to challenge state laws aimed at addressing the crisis—a campaign legal scholars called unconstitutional and climate activists said is sure to fail.

The president, who has called climate change a “hoax,” issued an executive order restricting state laws that he claimed have burdened fossil fuel companies and “threatened American energy dominance.” His directive, signed Tuesday night, is the latest in a series of moves that have included undermining federal climate and environmental justice programs, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, and promising to expand oil and gas leases.

It specifically mentions California, Vermont, and New York, three states that have been particularly assertive in pursuing climate action. The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to identify and report state laws that focus on climate change or promote environmental, social, and governance initiatives, and to halt any that “the attorney general determines to be illegal.”

That directive almost certainly includes the climate superfund laws that New York and Vermont recently passed. The statutes require fossil fuel companies to pay damages for their emissions, a move the executive order deems “extortion.” The president’s order also gives Bondi 60 days to prepare a report outlining state programs like carbon taxes and fees, along with those mentioning terms like “environmental justice” and “greenhouse gas emissions.”

“These state laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my administration’s objective to unleash American energy,” the executive order reads. “They should not stand.”

“The only thing the Trump administration’s actions accomplish is chaos and uncertainty.”

Legal scholars, environmental advocates, and at least one governor have said Trump’s effort to roll back state legislation is unconstitutional, and court challenges are sure to follow. “The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority,” New York governor Kathy Hochul said in a statement on behalf of the United States Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 states working toward emissions reductions.

Although critics of the move said Trump is on shaky legal ground, forcing state and local governments to litigate can have a chilling effect on climate action. Beyond signaling the administration’s allegiance to the fossil fuel interests that helped bankroll his campaign, Trump’s order is “seeking to intimidate,” said Kathy Mulvey, the accountability campaign director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“It seems pretty hypocritical for the party that claims to be about the rights of states to be taking on or seeking to prevent states from taking action,” she said.

The American Petroleum Institute praised the order, saying it would “address this state overreach” and “help restore the rule of law.”

Trump’s order comes several weeks after fossil fuel executives gathered at the White House to warn the president about increasing pressure from state lawsuits, including moves to claim polluters are guilty of homicide. Trump told the executives he would take action, according to E&E News.

“This executive order parrots some of the arguments that we’ve seen from companies like ExxonMobil, as they’ve sought to have climate cases removed from federal court and then dismissed in the state courts,” Mulvey says.

The president announced the move while standing in front of coal miners gathered for a White House ceremony during which he signed a separate executive order supporting what he called the “beautiful, clean coal” industry. That order removed air pollution limits and other regulations adopted by former president Joe Biden’s administration. “The ceremony as a whole was mainly about theatrics and bullying,” said Kit Kennedy, managing director of power, climate, and energy at Natural Resources Defense Council.

Experts say economics makes a resurgence of coal unlikely. For the last two decades, the industry has steeply declined as utilities have embraced gas and renewables like wind and solar, all of which are far cheaper. In California, which banned utilities from buying power from coal-fired plants in other states in 2007 and established a cap-and-trade program where power plants have to buy credits to pay for their pollution, emissions have fallen while the economy has grown. Such programs may be targeted by the president’s recent executive orders.

“It should be clear by now that the only thing the Trump administration’s actions accomplish is chaos and uncertainty,” Liane Randolph, who chairs the California Air Resources Board, said in a statement.

It remains unclear how the executive order will be implemented. “The executive branch doesn’t actually have authority to throw out state laws,” Mulvey said. States have a well-established primacy over environmental policies within their borders. The executive order would turn that on its head. “It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the DOJ challenging the states on these policies would be successful,” Kennedy said.

That’s not to say the Trump administration can’t take steps to fulfill the objectives outlined in the order. Even if the executive order doesn’t overturn state laws directly, climate advocates worry the Trump administration will threaten to withhold federal funding for other programs, like highways, if they don’t comply.

“The executive order itself has no legal impact, but the actions that government agencies will take in pursuit would, and many of those will be vigorously challenged in court,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

It was immediately clear that at least some states aren’t going to back down. “This is the world the Trump administration wants your kids to live in,” California governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “California’s efforts to cut harmful pollution won’t be derailed by a glorified press release masquerading as an executive order.”

Republican states benefited the most from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, a strategy some advocated could make the bipartisan legislation harder for future administrations to rescind. Ironically, Kennedy says, they aren’t necessarily labeled as climate policies, potentially sparing funding for things like battery-manufacturing facilities in the South from the executive order. “They’re simply going about the business of creating the clean energy economy,” Kennedy said.

That progress makes the executive order’s “lawless assault” galling, said Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. “Not only does this latest Big Oil fever dream violate state sovereignty,” he wrote to Grist, “it tries to void decades of state-enacted policies that lower energy costs for families, protect clean air and water, reduce the carbon pollution responsible for climate change, and protect Americans from the price shocks of dependence on fossil fuels.”

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RFK Jr. Is Using a New Study on Autism Rates to Push His Anti-Vaccine Agenda

In a press conference Wednesday morning that surely delighted his allies in the anti-vaccine movement, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to a report about apparent rising autism rates with a vow to look at “environmental factors” as a possible cause. While Kennedy didn’t explicitly discuss vaccines, his remarks made it clear, again, that he’ll likely use the power and money of the federal government to prop up the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. He also repeatedly made crude and stigmatizing references to people with profound autism (which he calls “severe” autism,” an outdated term) painting a picture of such people as a burden on society and to their families.

“These are kids who will never pay taxes,” Kennedy declared. “They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children.”

“The epidemic,” Kennedy said at another point, “is real.” Autism, he added, “destroys families and more importantly it destroys our greatest resource, our children.” Many children, he claimed, were “fully functional” and “regressed.”

RFK Jr. called today’s press conference to discuss new findings published this week in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which found an increase in apparent autism rates, from 1 in 36 children to 1 in 31. The report, based on 2022 data, found that the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder was higher in 8-year-old children than in previous years, and higher in Black, Hispanic and Asian Pacific Islander children than in white children.

Kennedy made it clear that he believes “environmental factors” are driving the increase in the condition, not genetics. In his previous role as chairman of Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy repeatedly claimed that vaccines cause autism, which they do not, and accused the CDC of lying to “minimize the crisis.” (Among other things, a massive study of 10 million children published in Denmark in 2019 showed no link between the MMR vaccine and autism.)

From the podium on Wednesday, Kennedy declared that “overall, autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate” and called it “shocking” and “relentless.” He added, again, and without apparent basis, that “most causes are now severe” and insisted that 25 percent of boys diagnosed with autism “are non-verbal, non toilet-trained and have other stereotypical features” including “stimming and toe-walking,” traits he has brought up frequently in past remarks and cast in a negative light. (Stimming can be a self-soothing behavior, but autistic adults have reported trying to mask it to reduce stigma from others.)

“Obviously there are people who don’t want us to look at environmental exposures,” he proclaimed. He said that the newly created Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), which part of HHS, would be responsible for overseeing autism rates. The AHA merged several previously independent offices; HHS has also faced deep cuts and layoffs throughout the agency. Kennedy said future autism studies may look at medication, mold, food addivities, air and water pollution and advanced parental age as other possible factors.

There’s long been a scientific debate about how much of the rise in apparent autism rates is due to better diagnosis and detection, with most serious researchers agreeing that better screening plays a major role. Kennedy rejected the idea that autism increases are the result of enhanced diagnostic criteria or better detection. He also trotted out a new phrase, “epidemic denial,” that he clearly plans to use against scientists and media outlets who disagree with his framing of autism rates or their potential causes. At several points, he called people who question or contextualize increased autism rates “deniers” and said they are engaging in “the myth of epidemic denial.” (Kennedy himself has dabbled in AIDS denialism.)

At the conference, Kennedy also briefly ceded the podium to Rutgers autism researcher Walter Zahorodny, who, among other things, also declared that autism is “real” and “not a quirky personality” trait, and concurred with Kennedy that the CDC report did not simply show better detection but a true increase in autism rates. It “strongly suggests that not only is this a high point in autism prevalence, but in the future rates can only be higher” he added.

The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network said in a press release that the new data is “explained by better access to screening and improved understanding of autism.” The group added that more work needs to be done to address the economic and racial disparities that affect which kids receive early, accurate autism diagnoses; for instance, a higher income was related to “a higher diagnosis rate for Black, Hispanic, and Asian and Pacific Islander children.”

”We will continue to advocate to address diagnostic disparities, improve access to diagnosis and support, and protect the programs and services that make this possible,” ASN added.

Responding to Kennedy’s characterizations of autistic people, Alycia Halladay, the chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation, told Mother Jones that Kennedy “failed to recognize the diverse spectrum of autism.” Of the apparent increase in autism rates, she said, “All of the scientific evidence points to an improvement in access to services as being a driving force,” adding, “Also, about 20% of autism is caused by a known genetic variant, and there is no evidence that 85% of the increase in prevalence is due to environmental ‘toxins.'”

Kennedy has previously vowed to find the cause of rising autism rates by September, which is not how science works. At the conference today, he seemed to slightly walk back that pledge, saying he expected to see “some answers” by September and vowing to “remove the taboo” so that scientists could freely study this issue, which he implied they could not do previously without being “gaslit” or having their licenses taken away.

To add to the concern that any RFK-led studies won’t be serious ones, the Washington Post reported in March that HHS hired David Geier to study vaccine-autism data. Geier is a longtime anti-vaccine figure who, with his father, former physician Mark Geier, purported to study autism and often acted as expert witnesses in cases of alleged vaccine injury. David Geier was disciplined by the Maryland Board of Physicians in 2012 for practicing medicine without a license, while his father’s license was revoked. Neither David Geier nor HHS have responded to repeated requests for comment from Mother Jones. Kennedy promised on Wednesday that HHS’ autism studies would be “thorough and comprehensive.”

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How the Establishment Is Helping Trump’s Revenge-a-thon

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land_. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial._

Let’s go back to June 2, 2024. That morning, Fox & Friends Weekend aired an interview with Donald Trump conducted by the show’s hosts—Pete Hegseth, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and Will Cain. Three days earlier, Trump was found guilty in his porn-star/hush-money case. (Remember, he’s a convicted felon!) And Campos-Duffy brought up a subject that’s long been of great interest to Trump: revenge. As I’ve written many times, Trump’s three most powerful psychological motivations are revenge, revenge, and revenge. (Last month in this newsletter, I traced some of his history as a “revenge junkie.”) In the aftermath of the verdict that found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide his $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, Campos-Duffy gently prodded him: “You [previously] said, ‘My revenge will be success for America.’ You just had this verdict. Do you still feel the same?”

“I say it, and it sounds beautiful: ‘My revenge will be success,'” Trump said on a Fox News appearance in June 2024. “I mean that.”

“It’s a really tough question in one way because these are bad people,” Trump replied, referring to his critics and those who had brought criminal cases against him. “These people are sick.” He rambled about how tough he was and bragged about how during his first term he had fired FBI Director Jim Comey. He then returned to the issue of retribution: “Look it’s a very interesting question. I say it, and it sounds beautiful: ‘My revenge will be success.’ I mean that. But it’s awfully hard when you see what they’ve done. These people are so evil.”

A far-too-sympathetic Cain tried to push Trump toward a clearer answer. “I hear you struggling with it. I hear you say it’s a tough question—a bit unsure. You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’ You declined to do that as president.”

Trump responded: “I beat her. It’s easier when you win. They all said lock her up and I could’ve done it. But I thought that would have been a terrible thing. And then this [verdict] happened to me. So, I may feel differently about it. I can’t tell you. I’m not sure I can answer the question.”

Here was a more interesting and revealing exchange than most of Trump’s softball sessions with Fox sycophants. He was still tethered to his lifelong obsession with revenge—if they screw you, screw ’em back 10 times worse, he often said when asked to describe his key to business success—but he knew it was unwise to vow vengeance during his comeback campaign. Yet he could not promise to abandon revenge altogether, as if he realized it was impossible for him to pass up an opportunity for retribution. In a rare (for him) moment, he said he could not provide a firm answer. He seemed to be saying, It would be great to promise I won’t be fixated on vengeance if I’m elected president, but I know me—and that ain’t me.

Trump has abused the power of the presidency to go after his enemies in ways Richard Nixon could never have imagined.

It sure isn’t. Trump cannot escape his compulsions, and perhaps his most powerful one is to get even. It was always obvious that score-settling would be job No. 1, should he return to the White House. An insecure man who’s always had a chip on his shoulder the size of a mountain, he’s defined his life by his relentless accounting and pursuit of grudges. The only surprise has been that his revenge-a-thon has been so extensive, so vicious, and that it has been so successful and generated such little pushback.

Trump has abused the power of the presidency to go after his enemies in ways Richard Nixon could never have imagined. He has pulled security details and/or security clearances from his political opponents and critics, such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and others. He has extorted law firms that employed lawyers who previously challenged him politically or legally, and in mob-boss fashion he has forced them to pledge hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services to his favorite causes (other than himself).

This past week, Trump signed executive orders targeting two officials who served in his first administration: Chris Krebs, who was then the nation’s cybersecurity chief, and Miles Taylor, a Department of Homeland Security official who anonymously wrote an op-ed and then a book criticizing Trump. The president called Taylor a traitor and instructed the Justice Department to investigate him. Krebs’ sin was having declared the 2020 election, which Trump lost, free of fraud. Trump went so far as to revoke security clearances for employees of SentinelOne, a cybersecurity firm where Krebs now works. Trump has also trained his ire on universities (including Columbia University, Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater), cultural institutions (the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution), and assorted news organizations.

In any previous era, this orgy of vengeance would be the top political story. Yet with the flood of Trump-spurred outrages underway since January 20, it does not dominate the headlines. Moreover, the surrender of many of his targets undermines criticism of Trump’s revenge frenzy. Trump has used the capitulation of these law firms as proof that he is right to assail them as hotbeds of evil scheming that threatens the nation. On Wednesday, he claimed that the settlements signed by these firms—some previously associated with Democratic causes—was proof the 2020 election was stolen from him: “The election was rigged. It’s been proven…When you look at all these lawyers and law firms that are signing, giving us hundreds of millions of dollars. It was proven by so many different ways…It was a very corrupt election.”

Trump claims it’s proven that the 2020 election was rigged, citing the fact that law firms are giving him money

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-04-09T20:21:39.294Z

ABC News settled with Trump ($15 million); Meta settled with Trump ($25 million). CBS has been considering settling a case that Trump filed against its news division. It’s all encouragement for worse and more dangerous conduct.

Of course, Trump was lying about that. But embedded in that lie was an important point. By yielding and offering Trump hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono work, these firms were indeed bolstering the notion they had done something wrong—whatever that may have been—when they had not. Each white flag waved in the face of a Trump attack strengthens him and his authoritarian bullying.

When Trump first targeted Paul, Weiss, that law firm explored joining with other firms to mount a united front against Trump’s assault. But it quickly folded, and that effort evaporated. Reuters reported on Thursday that the cybersecurity industry was declining to rally behind SentinelOne and Krebs. Columbia University complied with Trump strong-arming last month by agreeing to a list of onerous demands from Trump to regain the $400 million in federal funding he suspended. Was that sufficient? Absolutely not.In response, the Trump White House did not resume the funding and raised the prospect of slapping a consent decree on Columbia that would place the school even more so under the thumb of the administration. Feed the leopard, and the leopard wants more. (Brown, Princeton, and Harvard have told Trump to get lost.)

ABC News settled with Trump ($15 million); Meta settled with Trump ($25 million). CBS has been considering settling a case that Trump filed against its news division. It’s all encouragement for worse and more dangerous conduct. On Sunday night, after 60 Minutes aired two stories about Trump, he called on Brendan Carr, his loyalist running the Federal Communications Commission, to revoke CBS’ broadcast license. (In his first days as FCC chief, Carr ordered investigations of NPR and PBS.)

I don’t expect these careerist MAGA cultists to make a peep. But I confess I am disappointed in the Establishment.

What the last few weeks have taught Trump is not only that revenge is sweet; it’s also so easy! Why cease? Many of his foes fold, and there’s been no political cost for his perversions of power. Republicans and conservatives once were eager to decry excessive presidential flexing. They screamed about Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden issuing too many executive orders and governing through these directives. Remember the outrage when Biden tried to wipe out some student debt through an executive order? Now these fretters about presidential abuses are silent. As are those Republicans and right-wingers who in the past railed about the so-called “weaponization” of government, such as, notably, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Trump is literally exploiting his position to demean and destroy his detractors and his perceived enemies, even ordering the Justice Department to investigate a critic. Yet…crickets.

I know: You are stunned by the hypocrisy.

I don’t expect these careerist MAGA cultists to make a peep. But I confess I am disappointed in the Establishment: those law firms, universities, media organizations, and corporate leaders who are either bending the knee or not protesting Trump’s arguably illegal blackmail operation. With their silence, they are all complicit in Trump’s war on America and enabling his march toward autocracy. “This is the Vichy moment. It’s a classic collaborationist dilemma,” says Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, which has not yet been assaulted by Trump. “You can have preserved your school, but you live in a sea of authoritarianism.”

Trump’s latest attack on a law firm (as of this writing) demonstrated how absurd and dangerous is the mad king. His target was Susman Godfrey, and the executive order he signed denounced the firm for alleged efforts to “weaponize the American legal system and degrade the quality of American elections.” Like similar directives, it did not specify the firm’s supposed misdeeds. But we know why Trump is after it. Susman Godfrey successfully represented Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News in the defamation case that accused the right-wing network of knowingly spreading Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and won the company a $787 million settlement from Fox. It also has represented Dominion in lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani, former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, and others who peddled pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. And it has handled Dominion’s similar lawsuit against Newsmax.

Here’s another way for Trump to keep fighting for his Big Lie—and to punish those who have helped expose it as utter bullcrap. (The executive order also excoriates Susman Godfrey for offering financial awards and employment opportunities to “students of color.”) As with the other firms on his hit list, Trump ordered the suspension of security clearances held by its attorneys, limited government interactions with the firm, and barred its lawyers’ access to federal buildings.

Susman, to its credit, is fighting back, as are Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block. These other law firms, each a target of a similar executive order, have sued Trump and won preliminary rulings that found Trumps’ directives violated the Constitution. In the lawsuit Susman filed against the Trump administration on Friday, it summarized the emergency at hand:

It ought to be a point of widespread consensus: A president should not use the authority of the federal government to pursue his personal vendettas.

In America we have, in the words of John Adams, a government of laws and not men. President Trump’s campaign of Executive Orders against law firms and others, including the Executive Order he signed on April 9, 2025 against Susman Godfrey, is a grave threat to this foundational premise of our Republic. The President is abusing the powers of his office to wield the might of the Executive Branch in retaliation against organizations and people that he dislikes. Nothing in our Constitution or laws grants a President such power; to the contrary, the specific provisions and overall design of our Constitution were adopted in large measure to ensure that presidents cannot exercise arbitrary, absolute power in the way that the President seeks to do in these Executive Orders.”

The firm added: “If President Trump’s Executive Orders are allowed to stand, future presidents will face no constraint when they seek to retaliate against a different set of perceived foes. What for two centuries has been beyond the pale will become the new normal. Put simply, this could be any of us.”

More than 500 law firms and hundreds of law professors and former judges have filed amicus briefs to support the law firms Trump has attacked. Still, many leaders in the legal world and elsewhere have stayed mum, cowed by Trump. It ought to be a point of widespread consensus: A president should not use the authority of the federal government to pursue his personal vendettas. In fact, Trump’s flagrant abuse of power might constitute an impeachable offense.

So far, Trump has (mostly) gotten away with it. Even if he loses in court, he has blackballed law firms, and potential clients with interests before the federal government have been sent a signal: Don’t hire these guys. The acquiescence and silence, no doubt, emboldens Trump. Who know who he’ll come after next? Corporations, nonprofits, Hollywood studios, think tanks? With many in the powers-that-be class yielding to Trump’s revenge-palooza or declining to protest it, there’s likely no end in sight. After all, a junkie is always looking for the next fix.

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What Trump’s Tariff Shock Will Cost You

Justin Wolfers teaches economics 101 at the University of Michigan. It’s an introductory course about supply, demand, and trade. The basics. He wishes President Donald Trump hadattended.

Wolfers, an Australian known for his research on how happiness relates to income, is one of the more prominent economists speaking out against Trump’s sweeping tariffs. He says they not only betray the most basic laws of economics, but could very well tip the US into a completely avoidable recession.

In early April, Trump announced a series of tariffs not seen in the US since the Depression. The plan roiled the stock market, unsettled the bond market, and is resulting in an unprecedented global trade war. A week later, Trump backed off somewhat by announcing a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, but remained in an escalating tit-for-tat with China, with no end in sight.

Trump has always argued that tariffs are needed to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US, which have been declining for half a century. But Wolfers says the president’s vision is misguided and steeped in fantasy. Even if the US can claw back manufacturing power in the future, he says, it will be dominated by automation and robotics, not humans.

“What we have here is an economic policy that’s fundamentally driven by nostalgia,” Wolfers says. “This is not how you rebuild the middle class.” He doesn’t know what the future of work will look like in the US but adds: “What I want to do is trust that people will make their own damn choices.”

On this episode of More To The Story, Wolfers sits down with host Al Letson to discuss why today’s tariffs are markedly different from the ones Trump imposed in 2018, the likelihood that the US tips into a recession, and ultimately how Trump’s tumultuous tariff plan might affect you.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

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If Trump Doesn’t Fix This Blunder, “People Would Die in Their Homes”

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

The summer of 2021 was brutal for residents of the Pacific Northwest. Cities across the region from Portland, Oregon, to Quillayute, Washington, broke temperature records by several degrees. In Washington, as the searing heat wave settled over the state, 125 people died from heat-related illnesses such as strokes and heart attacks, making it the deadliest weather event in the state’s history.

As officials recognized the heat wave’s disproportionate effect on low-income and unhoused people unable to access air-conditioning, they made a crucial change to the state’s energy assistance program. Since the early 1980s, states, tribes, and territories have received funds each year to help low-income people pay their electricity bills and install energy-efficiency upgrades through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP.

Congress appropriates funds for the program, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), doles it out to states in late fall. Until the summer of 2021, the initiative primarily provided heating assistance during Washington’s cold winter months. But that year, officials expanded the program to cover cooling expenses.

Last year, Congress appropriated $4.1 billion for the effort, and HHS disbursed 90 percent of the funds. But the program is now in jeopardy.

For states, replacing the program would be “a nearly impossible task.” They “can’t have enough bake sales.”

Earlier this month, HHS, led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off 10,000 employees, including the roughly dozen or so people tasked with running LIHEAP. The agency was supposed to send out an additional $378 million this year, but those funds are now stuck in federal coffers without the staff needed to move the money out.

LIHEAP helps roughly 6 million people survive freezing winters and blistering summers, many of whom face greater risks now that the year’s warm season has already brought unusually high temperatures. Residents of Phoenix are expected to have their first 100-degree high any day now.

“We’re seeing the warm-weather states really coming up short with the funding necessary to assist people in the summer with extreme heat,” said one of the HHS employees who worked on the LIHEAP program and was recently laid off. Losing the people that ran the program is “absolutely devastating,” they said, because agency staff helped states and tribes understand the flexibilities in the program to serve people effectively, assistance that became extremely important with increasingly erratic weather patterns across the country.

In typical years, once Congress appropriates LIHEAP funds, HHS distributes the money in the fall in time for the colder months. States and other entities then make critical decisions about how much they spend during the winter and how much they save for the summer.

The need for LIHEAP funds has always been greater than what has been available. Only about 1 in 5 households that meet the program’s eligibility requirements receive funds. As a result, states often run out of money by the summer. At least a quarter of LIHEAP grant recipients run out of money at some point during the year, the former employee said.

“That remaining 10 percent would be really important to establish cooling assistance during the hot summer months, which is increasingly important,” said Katrina Metzler, executive director of the National Energy and Utility Affordability Coalition, a group of nonprofits and utilities that advances the needs of low-income people. “If LIHEAP were to disappear, people would die in their homes. That’s the most critical issue. It saves people.”

In addition to Washington, many other states have expanded their programs to provide both heating and cooling programs. Arizona, Texas, and Oregon now offer year-round cooling assistance.

HHS staff plays a crucial role in running LIHEAP. They assess how much each state, tribe, and territory will receive. They set rules for how the money could be used. They audit local programs to ensure funds are being spent as intended. All that may now be lost.

But according to Metzler, there are some steps that HHS could take to ensure that the program continues to be administered as Congress intended. First, and most obvious, the agency could reinstate those who were fired. Short of that, the agency could move the program to another department within HHS or contract out the responsibilities.

But ultimately, Metzler continued, LIHEAP funds need to be distributed so those in need can access it. “Replacing the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program is a nearly impossible task,” she said. States “can’t have enough bake sales to replace” it.

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How to Call Congress—When the Phone Isn’t an Option

As someone who is deaf, Sara Nović says, “the phone has long been my nemesis.”

Nović, an organizer and author of the novel True Biz, has tried to call their representatives in Congress by phone—but they’ve been hung up on. When they started organizing earlier this year with fellow deaf people on issues like Donald Trump’s attacks on the federal Department of Education, Novic wrote in an email, “we started getting feedback from reliable sources that, due to the offices being overloaded, they were only really counting phone calls, and either not tallying emails or weighing those contacts less.”

At protests and rallies since Trump’s return to office, organizers often encourage people to call their representatives in order to fight changes that harm Americans. The pressure to call, not email, is just one of many challenges to disabled people’s participation in democracy—despite new urgency to resist the Trump administration’s attacks on disability rights through its campaigns against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the dismantling of the Administration for Community Living, and more.

“It’s my dream that all activist efforts would be planned for the broadest possible accessibility.”

Calling representatives has long been a straightforward way to push for political change; although there’s growing demand for such calls as part of the wave of protest action that has followed Trump’s return, some disabled people have long been left out by accessibility challenges.

There is assistive technology: video relays that connect Deaf people, for example, to American Sign Language interpreters who read out their messages. But there’s an often unfamiliar lag associated with that, Nović explained, and people on the other end tend to hang up.

A former legislative director for a Democratic member of Congress, now working in advocacy, told me phone calls tend to be encouraged because they can better disrupt business as usual.

“If you got a thousand phone calls in a day, phones ringing off the hook, that’s an audible thing in the office,” the former legislative director said. “It is probably overwhelming the more junior and front-line staff who typically field the phone calls, so more senior staff are having to pitch in and answer calls.”

Emails, the legislative director said, are for the most part put into batches based on the issue and how the constituent feels: “They will send the same letter to everybody who is writing, who are saying the tariffs are bad,” he said by way of example, “that will express their boss’ viewpoint.”

At the same time, another disabled person living with hearing sensitivity told me they wished that activism groups would put more of an emphasis on allowing for email-based advocacy, too: “It’s my dream that all activist efforts would be planned for the broadest possible accessibility and inclusivity,” they wrote in an email.

The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN) has responded to concerns that some disabled people’s voices aren’t being heard by setting up a proxy calling system for issues with significant impact for disabled people. The system, first established in 2019, can accommodate six to nine action items each year. Disabled people—they do not have to be autistic—can fill out a form and have a volunteer call on their behalf, ASAN communications manager Dean Strauss told me.

“It takes a huge step forward in terms of advocacy, especially for nonspeaking autistic folks, that you don’t have to have a friend or a caregiver make the call for you,” he said. “You get to decide what you want to say and what’s going to happen because you get to make your voice heard.”

ASAN has about 50 volunteers helping to make proxy calls, who can make an impact by picking up even just a few calls at a time, with no set hours; it received 24 call requests in the first week after a call for action to protect Medicaid was announced in March.

“We do get folks who are excited, like, ‘I have an autistic child, and I want to be able to help the community,’” Strauss said, “but we also get a lot of like, ‘I am an autistic person, and I want to help my community.’”

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In First Post-Presidency Speech, Biden Calls to Treat Disabled People With Dignity

On Tuesday, former President Joe Biden gave his first speech following the end of his presidency in January, at the Chicago national conference of Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled.

“Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity,” Biden said in a speech that ran just under 30 minutes. “That means making sure that more than 60 million Americans who live with disabilities are treated with dignity. That is who we are as Americans.”

His successor may disagree. In addition to current President Donald Trump’s ableist comments—including ones about his own disabled grand-nephew—his Project 2025-inspired dismantling of the Department of Education, and the recent shutdown of the Administration for Community Living by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., greatly harm disabled people.

“Fewer than 100 days into this new administration, they have done so much damage and destruction,” Biden said. “It is kind of breathtaking it could happen that soon.”

Biden also noted his role as a co-sponsor of the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act in the Senate, calling it “one of the most consequential civil rights laws in American history.”

Moreover, the federal Social Security program has been under attack since Trump’s return to office. As former Social Security Administrator Martin O’Malley, who introduced Biden, said at the event, the Trump administration is spreading misinformation about undocumented people draining Social Security funds, along with false claims about dead people on the agency’s rolls.

That hunt for benefits fraud, which audits suggest is quite rare, puts Americans’ well-being—including that of many disabled people—in jeopardy. “Social Security is more than a government program,” Biden said. “It’s a sacred promise.”

Biden sees that promise at risk, he elaborated, not just from spurious fraud claims but other Trump White House actions—like mass firings at the already understaffed agency, and service cuts leading to growing lines and access burdens at the Social Security Administration’s remaining offices.

Biden also criticized the disruptions led by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” which he said had led to “a lot of needless pain and sleepless nights” for the millions of people, including disabled people, who depend on Social Security.

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Meet the Miami Lobbyist Who Helped Bukele Seduce MAGA

Nayib Bukele is so popular with the US right that his refusal Monday to free a Maryland man with no criminal record mistakenly sent to a supermax prison in a foreign country was greeted by MAGA types as being, basically, badass.

The Salvadorian president who has dubbed himself “the world’s coolest dictator” was already a Trumpworld darling partly because of his gift for authoritarian showmanship— and his apparent success reducing crime by jailing alleged criminals with little due process. But his US popularity is also the product of a years-long courtship of American right-wing influencers, media, and politicians organized by Damian Merlo, a 50-year-old Miami-based lobbyist who has become, as the Central American newspaper El Faro put it last year, “a sort of ambassador to the Trump-aligned Right” for Latin American leaders.

Merlo earned more than $1.5 million for his firm since 2022 by pitching Bukele to right-leaning lawmakers and influencers, as Anna Massoglia reported Monday in her Influence Brief newsletter. Merlo did not respond to inquiries from Mother Jones.

Bukele’s willingness to accept and indefinitely imprison Trump administration deportees who have not been charged with a crime or afforded any meaningful due process is a policy reward that followed three years of partisan outreach overseen by Merlo. This is a new kind of foreign influence campaign that Trump has made possible: Lobbying that relies on far-right to far-right ideological affinity and aggressive embrace of MAGA messaging to win access and sway with the new administration.

Traditionally, many foreign leaders have hedged their bets in the US by hiring lobbyists with ties on both sides of the aisle. But Bukele, who was elected president in 2019, has recently employed only Merlo, a guy who posted a photo of himself wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt just before the 2022 midterms and has dispensed with any pretense of outreach to Democrats. It’s working for now, though the disdain with which Bukele treated critics of Trump’s policies may prove problematic for the Salvadorian president should Democrats return to power in coming years.

Merlo got his start in the business of lobbying on behalf of foreign strongmen when he worked as a vice president at Otto Reich and Associates, according to an online bio. That’s the lobbying firm founded by Reich, the Cuban-American extremist exile who played a prominent role in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration. From his post as head of the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, Reich worked with Col. Oliver North to manipulate the US media to generate support for the Nicaraguan guerillas against the Sandinista government. In 1987, a report from the Comptroller General found that Reich’s office engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” that were “beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.” Reich in 2006 famously praised Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet claiming that he had “saved Chilean democracy from communist takeover.”

Merlo later worked for the International Republican Institute, a right-leaning nonprofit group that has been accused of working to overthrow Democratic governments it dislikes, including Haiti’s in 2004. Still, after striking out on his own, Merlo also worked as a special assistant to Haiti’s former president Michel Martelly, and as a lobbyist for that country. Last year, the US government officially sanctioned Martelly for his involvement in drug trafficking and ties to the armed criminal gangs that have terrorized the poor country. Merlo, who is Argentinian, has also worked for Argentina’s President Javier Milei.

According to FARA filings, he began working for Bukele in 2020, helping efforts to boost US investment in El Salvador. Merlo has said that he helped arrange that country’s much-hyped adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, a policy which, under IMF pressure, was quietly undone last month. But as a PR stunt, the move was a success, drawing attention to El Salvador as a crypto-friendly outpost, at least according to Merlo. “We call it the Great Rebranding. It was genius,” Merlo told Time. “We could have paid millions to a PR firm to rebrand El Salvador. Instead, we just adopted Bitcoin.” (Merlo has since become a lobbyist for the crypto-currency company Tether.)

Merlo in 2023 and 2024 lobbied MAGA figures including Donald Trump Jr., Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Rep. Lauren Boebert, (R-Colo.,) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) for Bukele, according to Foreign Agent Registration Act filings and news reports. Last November, Merlo met with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). Merlo’s recent filing said, vaguely, that all his lobbying contacts were “about the importance of fostering strong dialogue between the US and El Salvador.”

Merlo has made himself a fixture in Trumpworld, with appearances at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago—“It’s the place to be and the place to be seen,” he told Fortune last year—accompanying Bukele on a trip to visit SpaceX with Elon Musk, and meeting at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference with Matt Schlapp, chairman of the conference, and Schlapp’s wife Mercedes, who is one of Trump’s former communications directors.

What an honor to join @nayibbukele and @elonmusk – aim for the stars and you’ll get to mars – maybe meet a few aliens along the way! @SpaceX @Tesla pic.twitter.com/5XyXKsEQC8

— Damian (@Damianmerlo) September 21, 2024

Merlo has also had extensive contacts with right-wing media, including Tucker Carlson. In May last year, the former Fox News host interviewed Bukele, characterizing his leadership as a model for the US. “President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador,” Tucker gushed in a post promoting the interview. “He may have the blueprint for saving the world.”

President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador. He may have the blueprint for saving the world. pic.twitter.com/92etFh7sSI

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2024

Carlson has been a reliable Bukele booster, even promoting a February interview in which Bukele claimed that “MS-13 participates in Satanic child sacrifice rituals.”

The Salvadoran constitution limits the national presidency to a single five-year term. But after taking office in 2019, Bukele systematically purged the judicial system of independent judges and replaced the members of the Supreme Court with his loyalists, who green-lighted his run for a second term. Merlo sprung into action, arranging for MAGA luminaires to attend Bukele’s swearing-in last June.

The power grab didn’t stop a gaggle of Americans from celebrating Bukele’s reelection. Trump Jr., his then-girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, since nominated as US Ambassador to Greece, Carlson, Lee, and Gaetz were among the attendees. Democratic Reps. Lou Correa of California and Vincente Gonzalez of Texas also attended the inauguration, in a small nod at bipartisanship.

The US visitors were ushered to restaurants and new Google offices, taken on a tour of the newly safe downtown San Salvador, and watched as Bukele—clad in what Time called “a striking suit with a stiff, gold-embroidered collar and cuffs that evoked a cross between Latin American revolutionary war heroes and Star Wars”—was inaugurated for what has been seen as an illegal second term. Merlo celebrated the event as “the hottest ticket in the Americas.”

After returning to the US, Gaetz helped form a new El Salvador Caucus in Congress. The former Florida congressman described it as a sort of Bukele fan club, saying it aimed to “nurture and advance the US-El Salvador relationship to encourage strong borders, strong culture, and the strong reforms that President Bukele has put into effect.”

“Through the inspiration from El Salvador’s astonishing transformation, the great American rejuvenation can become a reality as well,” Gaetz said. “So that we can experience a triumphant return of safety and prosperity that we once inspired in others.”

“Through the inspiration from El Salvador’s astonishing transformation, the great American rejuvenation can become a reality as well.”

Soon after, Gaetz headed south again to visit the notorious CECOT prison, where the Trump administration is now sending Venezuelan immigrants and where the president has discussed sending American citizens. Gaetz touted the prison in a slickly-produced video, touted by Bukele on X, that foreshadowed the video of Venezuelan migrants arriving there, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s infamous Rolex-accessorized appearance at the facility.

Behind the scenes, Merlo was involved. He appeared in a still shot of a sunglasses-adorned Gaetz standing in a hallway amid cells in a video that CNN used in a story on Gaetz’s visit. “Courtesy Damian Merlo,” the photo’s tagline says.

Shortly after Trump’s election last year, Merlo penned an op-ed in the Miami Herald, bashing Joe Biden’s policies and urging the incoming Trump administration to look to El Salvador as a “model” for addressing the root causes of illegal immigration. “President Bukele’s crackdown on crime has made El Salvador the safest country in the region, fueling economic growth and even reversing migration flows,” Merlo wrote. Rubio, whom Trump had just nominated as Secretary of State, “understands this model well, having visited El Salvador and witnessed its success under Bukele’s leadership,” Merlo noted.

The op-ed identified Merlo as “a Republican strategist and Latin America expert” and “president of the Latin America Advisory Group, a PR and government relations firm based in Miami.” It did not say that Merlo worked for Bukele.

Following an inquiry by Mother Jones, the Herald updated the tagline of the piece with a correction stating that the paper had failed to follow its guidelines on the piece. “The Herald did not disclose in this commentary that Merlo’s company had El Salvador as a client,” the note said.

One lobbying priority for El Salvador, promoted by Gaetz and the El Salvador caucus, has been to have the State Department to upgrade the country’s travel advisory to Level One, a designation that ranked the country as a safer tourist spot than many European countries. Last week the State Department complied, upgrading its guidance for El Salvador, long known for its US-trained death squads and MS-13 gangs, suggesting it is now a safer place for Americans to vacation than France. (The advisory presumably is not intended for Venezuelan asylum seekers forcibly sent to El Salvador because they have tattoos.) Announcing the change, Rubio credited Buklele’s leadership as “crucial in improving the security of his country for foreign travelers.”

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Trump to the USA: There Is No Rule of Law

In the future, April 14, 2025, may well be recognized as a monumental day in US history. That is, of course, if there is honest history in the future. Becausethis is the day that President Donald Trump sent a clear message to the nation: There is no rule of law in the United States.

It happened in the Oval Office. Trump was hosting El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele—who has referred to himself as a “dictator”—and an obvious issue hovered over the session: the Trump administration’s wrongful deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he has been locked up in the country’s notorious CECOT megaprison for the last three weeks.

The US government has conceded that Abrego Garcia was rounded up and shipped off with other immigrants to El Salvador by mistake. Yet at this tete-a-tete, both leaders made clear they intended to do nothing to redress this act of profound injustice. Asked by a reporter if he would return Abrego Garcia to the United States, a grinning Bukele, sitting next to Trump, replied, “How can I return him to the United States? Am I going to smuggle him? Of course, I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?”

There is no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist or any sort of criminal.

At the meeting, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to address the matter. She said Abrego Garcia’s return is “not up to us. If [El Salvador] wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio piped up to dismiss the Supreme Court ruling that declared the Trump administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States—a ruling that backed much of US District Judge Paula Xinis’ order that required his “return” to the country. “No court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States,” Rubio huffed.

Never has such a toxic brew of cruelty, absurdity, and danger been on display in the White House. Trump and his crew were saying that the US government could mistakenly apprehend a resident, ship him to El Salvador to be imprisoned possibly for life in brutal conditions, and not have to take any steps to undo this violation of due process and decency—even after courts instructed it to do so.

Their message: The law doesn’t matter, we can do what we want. This is authoritarianism.

And their refusal was presented like a mordantjoke. A Kafkaesque charade. An evil Catch-22. The Salvadoran autocrat said he couldn’t do anything; the Trump posse said, it’s not on us. So nothing can be done to prevent an innocent man from rotting in a hellhole. Of course, this is untrue. They don’t want to fix the horrific situation they created.

There are obvious reasons why. Were Abrego Garcia to be returned to the United States, he would become a symbol of the outrageous excesses of Trump’s deportation crusade. The Trump administration initially contended Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, a violent transnational street gang. But in her ruling, Xinis pointed out that “the ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived.”

If he were brought back to the United States, he would receive much attention in the media and serve as a constant reminder of Trump’s extremism and the perils of this campaign. His presence in the debate would keep raising questions about the program and future deportations. To prevent this bad PR, the White House wants him disappeared. And it appears that Bukele gets that and is eager to be an accomplice.

So the Trumpers are waging a war here to protect their deportation effort, and they don’t mind sacrificing Abrego Garcia. Hours before the White House meeting, senior Trump aide Stephen Miller, during an interview with Fox News, exclaimed that Abrego Garcia “was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador…This was the right person sent to the right place.” Yet Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, an ICE field office director, and a Justice Department lawyer each conceded during court proceedings that Abrego Garcia was erroneously removed to El Salvador. (Bondi’s Justice Department suspended the lawyer who made that admission.) Miller’s rant was in keeping with a top rule of the Trump gang: Never admit fault; never apologize.

The Supreme Court, in a 9-0 decision, ruled that Xinis’ “order properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” The only way to ensure that—to abide by the court’s decision—would be for the Trump administration to bring him back, which, no doubt, it could do with a simple request to Bukele.

Yet, as of now, Trump, has not acted to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision. This is the moment that has long been anticipated: the authoritarian-minded Trump defying a court order and essentially claiming that he is above the law and that the rules do not apply to him. He is signaling that he can use government force in the most egregious manner and no one—no court—can stop him. What might he try next? Illegal arrests or deportations of American citizens? In this case, one man has been unjustly condemned to a nightmarish imprisonment. But now all of us are threatened.

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Trump Keeps Falsely Claiming Ukraine Started the War With Russia

On Sunday night, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired an interview featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who once again deplored the fact that US officials have been promoting Russian disinformation about the war between the two countries. By Monday morning, President Donald Trump proved his point once more.

Through a translator, Zelenskyy told 60 Minutes Correspondent Scott Pelley: “I believe, sadly, (that) Russian narratives are prevailing in the US.”

“How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors, that they did not start this war?” he continued. “This speaks to the enormous influence of Russia’s information policy on America, on US politics and US politicians.”

Referring to Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy is a “dictator” and the now-infamous February sit-down in the Oval Office, during which Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Zelenskyy and demanded he thank the United States for its support, Zelenskyy told Pelley through a translator: “It’s a shift in tone, a shift in reality..and I don’t want to engage in the altered reality that is being presented to me. First and foremost, we did not launch an attack [to start the war]. It seems to me that the Vice President is somehow justifying Putin’s actions.”

“How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors?” asks Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. WATCH ⏱️ youtu.be/odFTqgm0984?…

[image or embed]

— 60 Minutes (@60minutes.bsky.social) April 14, 2025 at 12:40 PM

The comments appeared to trigger Trump, who took to his Truth Social platform on Sunday night to lambast CBS for airing the interview. “They did not one, but TWO, major stories on ‘TRUMP,’ one having to do with Ukraine, which I say is a War that would never have happened if the 2020 Election had not been RIGGED, in other words, if I were President and, the other story was having to do with Greenland, casting our Country, as led by me, falsely, inaccurately, and fraudulently,” Trump wrote. “I am so honored to be suing 60 Minutes, CBS Fake News, and Paramount, over their fraudulent, beyond recognition, reporting.”(Trump is, indeed, suing the network and television show, alleging they deceptively edited an interview with former Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to make her look better; CBS has said the lawsuit is “without merit.”)

Trump went on to argue that CBS “should lose their license” and urged his Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Brendan Carr, to “impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.”

“CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this,” Trump concluded.

But for all his bluster, Trump managed to prove Zelenskyy’s point less than 24 hours after the CBS interview aired. In another early morning meltdown on Monday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the war is “Biden’s war, not mine,” adding, “President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin.”

Still, the facts remain: It was Russian President Vladimir Putin who invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, Russian forces have committed war crimes and likely crimes against humanity, according to Amnesty International. One of those alleged crimes includes kidnapping and deporting Ukrainian children to Russia, for which the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for both Putin and another Russian official in March 2023. Russia’s aggression has continued, with Ukrainian civilians among the victims. Earlier this month, Russia launched a missile at a site near a Ukrainian playground, killing 19 people, including nine children. On Sunday, two Russian missiles reportedly hit the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy, killing 35 people and wounding 117 more, according to Ukrainian officials. Trump called that attack “terrible,” “a mistake,” and “a horrible thing” on Air Force One on Sunday, according to the White House Pool Report.

But by Monday, during remarks in the Oval Office alongside President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Trump had reverted to his pro-Russia talking points, repeating the false claim that Ukraine started the war with Russia. “He’s always looking to purchase missiles,” Trump said of Zelenskyy. “Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win the war. You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”

Trump has fully turned on Zelenskyy: "He's always looking to purchase missiles. Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war. You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 14, 2025 at 11:56 AM

At another point during that meeting, Trump insulted Zelenskyy’s intelligence, stating, “The mistake was letting the war happen. If Biden were competent and if Zelensky were competent—and I don’t know that he is. We had a rough session with this guy over here,” Trump said, referring to the February Oval Office blowup. “He just kept asking for more and more.”

Trump also propped up Putin while also doubling down on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. “I went four years and Putin wouldn’t even bring it up. And as soon as the election was rigged, and I wasn’t here, that war started, there was no way that war should have been allowed to happen, and Biden should have stopped it,” he said. “And and you take a look at Putin. I’m not saying anybody’s an angel, but I will tell you I went four years and it wasn’t even a question. I told him, ‘don’t do it, you’re not going to do it.'”

Reporter: You mentioned last night that Russia's attack on Ukraine was a mistake— what is the is mistake?

Trump: The mistake was letting the war happen. If Biden were competent, and if Zelenskyy were competent— I don’t know that he is. pic.twitter.com/yhoHWWpiuQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2025

Let’s not forget, though, that for all of Trump’s claims that the war is not his problem, he promised he would end it within 24 hours if he was reelected. More than—checks notes—2,000 hours later, and the war is still raging while Trump spreads disinformation about who really started it.

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The Real Reason El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele Cozied Up to Trump

Donald Trump’s deepening partnership with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, was on display as the two leaders rejected the idea of returning a man mistakenly deported by the U.S. and locked up in a Salvadoran mega-prison. Meeting at the White House, they indicated Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia would remain in Salvadoran custody despite a ruling by the Supreme Court instructing the Trump administration to take steps to return him to the U.S. Trump epeated his interest in sending American citizens convicted of violent crimes to Bukele’s prison in El Salvador and said his attorney general was studying the legal feasibility. Trump called Bukele “one hell of a president.”

Few media organizations have covered the rise of Bukele, as closely or fearlessly, as El Faro, founded in 1998 as the first digital newspaper in Latin America. In 2020, El Faro began publishing a blockbuster investigation that exposed secret negotiations between the Bukele administration and leaders of the MS-13 gang who were imprisoned in El Salvador. The goal was to reduce violence on the streets and win the gang’s support in mid-term elections in exchange for prison privileges. Some of the MS-13 leaders were eventually released as part of the deal, according to El Faro’s reporting. It was later discovered that during this period El Faro’s staff was the target of a massive cyber attack with Pegasus spyware. Experts suspected it was a state-sanctioned hack. The Pegasus attack on El Faro was featured in a Reveal episode in September, 2023.

In the run up to Bukele’s meeting with Donald Trump, Reveal host Al Letson spoke with El Faro director Carlos Dada about the emerging security alliance between the U.S. and El Salvador and the controversial deal to send deported U.S. migrants to the country’s notorious Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Al Letson: So I want to start by asking you about this mega-prison, CECOT. It was built after the Bukele administration declared a state of emergency in 2022 to deal with violent gangs which were still controlling large parts of the country. The government suspended some civil liberties, including the right to due process. What are conditions like in that prison?

Carlos Dada: CECOT is a poster child of our prison system. It’s a high security prison, built allegedly to exclusively hold gang members. It has been heavily used by Bukele’s propaganda machine, producing, as you might have seen, highly professional videos in which every single image is meticulously taken care of. If you see something from that prison, it is because the regime wants you to see it. But that prison is only one of 32 in our system.

So some people have described CECOT as basically a black hole. Is that accurate?

I think it is a good description. No one can enter this prison. Relatives of the prisoners cannot visit them. They are not allowed to receive anything from outside. According to President Bukele, they don’t see the light of the sun ever.

It sounds like from your reporting, the director of El Salvador’s prison system, Osiris Luna, is somewhat notorious.

Osiris Luna was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department and also by the Treasury Department for corruption and for allowing the secret agreement with the gangs to take place. We have published several stories about Mr. Osiris Luna’s use of prison resources, including prisoners for his private benefit. Even El Salvador’s police intelligence unit has described him as an important piece of a criminal organization that distributes drugs. His administration of the prison system has brought back systematic torture to our prisons, something we thought was part of our most painful past.

It wasn’t just Venezuelans who were deported to El Salvador on March 15th and ended up at CECOT. Who else was on those planes?

As far as we know, there are at least four different categories of people who came in those first three flights. One, Venezuelans suspected of belonging to the Tren de Aragua crime organization. Two, Venezuelan undocumented migrants, completely unrelated to this criminal organization. Three, Salvadoran undocumented migrants. Four, Salvadoran members of the MS-13 gang. This included at least one gang boss who was preparing to stand trial in the United States alongside 26 other big bosses of the MS-13, some of them who had been freed from prison by the Bukele administration as part of the secret agreement his administration had negotiated with the gang.

Based on El Faro’s reporting, I gather that some of these gang leaders potentially had a lot of dirt on Bukele.

That’s right. Bukele made that secret agreement with the gangs five years ago that helped his party win elections. In exchange, Mr. Bukele freed some of the gang bosses, including a few who were facing extradition to the U.S. After leaving El Salvador they were captured in Mexico and sent to the United States where they were indicted. Some of the indictments include allegations of the gang’s collusion with authorities in El Salvador. We also know that when Mr. Bukele offered Marco Rubio to receive deportees and criminals, he also requested that the gang bosses be sent back to El Salvador, and at least one of them was included in those first flights.

Is Bukele asking for the U.S. to deport these gang leaders to El Salvador specifically to bury any information that they might have — I mean, to put them in jail so they can’t tell their secrets?.

That’s what we think. As you know, MS-13 is now considered a terrorist organization in the United States. If the trial in New York proves Mr. Bukele’s deals with them, it could potentially be very damaging since it would mean that he had illegal deals with a terrorist organization and also illegally freed some of the terrorist organization leaders.

So what happened to the charges that the US had against these MS-13 leaders?

We only know of one so far. In this specific case of this one single person, we found federal court documents indicating the Justice Department and U.S. attorney assigned to the case asked the judge to dismiss the charges against this gang leader in order for him to be deported. And that’s what happened.

How would you qualify Bukele’s regime? I’ve seen it described as bordering on fascist.

I would qualify Mr. Bukele as an authoritarian populist. That is not ideological, but rather a project of accumulation of power. Until recently, Nayib Bukele was a member of the former guerilla party, the extreme leftist FMLN, and benefited from the Venezuelan government’s Alba Petróleos fund.Then quite suddenly he became almost libertarian and started to flirt with authoritarian and extreme rightist movements all over the world, including, of course, the United States. So I would say that his project is not ideological, but rather the complete grab of the state to accumulate power and wealth.

The Trump administration has praised Bukele for slashing crime in El Salvador, and yet just two years ago, the State Department cited reports of arbitrary killings, forced disappearances and torture. Is the Trump administration ignoring this evidence or is there something in Bukele’s harsh policies that they connect with?

I can’t answer that. I think you know much more about the nature of Mr. Trump’s administration. What I can say is that Mr. Bukele is an important figure in this far-right, authoritarian populism all over the world because he has been very successful in grabbing power and still keeping his popularity high. So that makes him a very attractive person for all the people in this movement.

For your typical Salvadoran, is life better because of some of the moves Bukele has made to reduce the power of the gangs?

Mr. Bukele has effectively taken the gangs out of the communities of Salvadorian people and lowered the murder rate in the country. So life is apparently better, but we know how in exchange for this so-called security, one person or one group of people is grabbing power, dismantling democracy, and there’s no more accountability. He has brought the army back to our political life, which was something we thought was over in 1992 when the peace agreements ended our civil war and built the basis for our democracy. Those pillars that started our democratic life came tumbling down. They are not there anymore. There’s no more checks and balances. There’s a lot of violence still in El Salvador but now it’s been inflicted by the authorities. Police and the army now can make arrests without a judge’s order and hold anyone in prison almost indefinitely. Seventy-thousand people have been detained in these years, which makes El Salvador the country with the highest incarceration rate, even above the United States. I don’t know of any experience when only through repression you really canceled a violence that has grown out of a society that is not functioning. Let me quote Archbishop Romero, who was killed in El Salvador in 1980. He used to say, violence will not be eradicated unless we address its root causes. And we have to know that gangs are just the most radical, the most horrible, and the most violent expression of a dysfunctional society. But if we don’t address the causes that built a fertile ground for these young kids to become so violent, then we are not solving any problem.

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US and El Salvador Celebrate Their Refusal to Return Man Wrongly Deported to “Gulag”

On Monday, a month after the US government shipped more than 230 Venezuelans and other migrants to a megaprison in El Salvador with seemingly no chance of return, President Donald Trump extended the red carpet to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.

It was a brazenshow of solidarity between the two leaders. The White House meeting with Bukele happened as the Trump administration continues to stonewall court orders to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran-born Maryland father wrongfully sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in mid-March.

The two men shook hands over the unjustified, indefinite imprisonment of people convicted of nothing.

During the friendly meeting celebrating the partnership, Bukele said he didn’t have the power to “smuggle” what he called a “terrorist” into the United States. “Of course, I’m not going to do it,” he told the press from the Oval Office. “The question is preposterous.” The Salvadoran president also indicated that he wouldn’t release Abrego Garcia from CECOT, saying, “We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.”

Those statements from the very men in a position to do something add to an already terrifying reality for Abrego Garcia and his family. Bukele is falsely stating that he cannot return Abrego Garcia to the United States. The Trump administration is falsely claiming that it cannot force Bukele’s hand to release Abrego Garcia. The end result is that a man sent to one of the world’s worst prisons by mistake, along with hundreds of Venezuelans also stuck there, have no clear path to getting out.

The Trump administration has loudly claimed that the men sent to El Salvador are terrorists and criminals. But it has refused to provide evidence to support the summary deportations of the migrants it accuses of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. As we previously reported, many of the Venezuelans now being held incommunicado in El Salvador have no proven ties to the gang or criminal records in the United States or Venezuela. In many cases, their families suspect they were targeted because of their tattoos—including one of an autism awareness ribbon.

When Mother Jones sought comment from the Department of Homeland Security, a senior official said that it stood by “law enforcement’s intelligence” and that sharing evidence of the men’s ties to Tren de Aragua “would be insane.”

Monday’s meeting also marks a shift in tone from Trump, who just last year had far less amicable words for El Salvador and its leader. At the Republican National Convention, the then-presidential candidate bashed Bukele, accusing him of sending “his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails” to the United States. Now, the two strongmen are shaking hands over the unjustified, indefinite imprisonment of people convicted of nothing.

“We have bad ones, too. I’m all for it,” Trump said of sending US citizens to El Salvador.

When asked how many more people he was willing to send to El Salvador, Trump responded “as many as possible.” Trump said, once again, that he would like to imprison US citizens abroad if it is deemed permissible under US law. And he mentioned that he’d asked Bukele whether El Salvador could build additional prison capacity, presumably to hold more people sent from the United States.

“We have bad ones, too. I’m all for it,” Trump said of US citizens after describing violent crimes. “Because we can do things with the [Salvadoran] president for less money and have great security.” As part of an agreement with El Salvador, the US government is disbursing $6 million to hold the Venezuelans now at CECOT for at least a year.

Kerri Talbot, co-executive director of the Immigration Hub, said in a statement: “Trump’s proposal to deport and jail American citizens in a foreign gulag and his open defiance of a Supreme Court ruling lay bare the authoritarian ideology that underpins his alliance with Bukele.”

Before being sent to El Salvador in what the administration concedes was an “administrative error,” Abrego Garcia had been granted protection from deportation to El Salvador by an immigration judge who determined that he was more likely than not to face persecution there. Abrego Garcia has no criminal record in the United States. He and his wife, who is a US citizen, were raising three children, including a 5-year-old who has autism.

Last week, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that required the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody and to “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” The justices added that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

District Court Judge Paula Xinis, who initially ordered Abrego Garcia be brought back, then required the Trump administration to provide information about where Abrego Garcia is now and what they are doing to comply with the Supreme Court decision. The administration responded by defying Xinis. It confirmed that Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in El Salvador but provided no information about what it was doing to bring him back.

That led to Xinis ruling on Friday that the administration had violated a court order. She is now requiring the government to report on a daily basis about what it is doing to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. The administration has mostly defied that order, too. The updates provided to the court on Saturday and Sunday are largely nonresponsive.

The government has chosen to interpret “facilitate” as narrowly as possible to mean the removal of “domestic” obstacles that would prevent Abrego Garcia’s return. It is using that to effectively argue that it cannot be forced by Xinis to do anything to bring Abrego Garcia back. The administration has tried to justify that by seizing on a part of the ruling that directs the district court to show “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

In a Monday appearance on Fox News, Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for policy, doubled down on the federal government’s defiance of the court orders and rhetorical gymnastics to deflect any responsibility for rectifying its mistake. The anti-immigrant hardliner claimed bringing back Abrego Garcia to the United States would require the US government to “kidnap a Salvadoran citizen against the will of his government and fly him back to America, which would be an unimaginable act and an invasion of El Salvador’s sovereignty.” He went on to say Abrego Garcia “was the right person sent to the right place.”

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Trump’s “Opening Salvo” in His War Against Criminal Justice Reform Starts With This One Nonprofit

Earlier this month, the Vera Institute of Justice, a national criminal justice reform nonprofit, was notified that all five of its federal grants had been abruptly canceled by the Department of Justice. The lost funding, totaling approximately $5 million, had supported ongoing programs to improve prison conditions and mental health crisis response, as well as training law enforcement to better serve deaf survivors of domestic violence—all of which, they say, have bolstered public safety across the country.

“It is just an opening salvo,” Insha Rahman, Vera’s vice president for advocacy and partnerships, told me. “Vera might be the first organization to lose its federal funding, but I am certain we will not be the last in the criminal justice field.”

Since taking office in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi has made sweeping moves to align the Department of Justice with President Donald Trump’s policy priorities. The day she was sworn in, Bondi directed the department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate what she described as “illegal DEI and DEIA discrimination and preferences.” Under her leadership, the department dropped criminal cases against the president’s allies and removed top career officials from their posts. On Fox News, Bondi promised to “root out” DOJ and FBI employees who “despise” Trump.

Coupled with DOGE‘s cost-cutting rampage, it may have been inevitable that officials would take a closer look at the DOJ’s largest grant-making entity, the Office of Justice Programs. OJP distributes more than $4 billion in funding towards law enforcement training, violence prevention, victim services, and criminal justice research. Some of the grants are awarded to city and county governments, while others go to local and national nonprofits. Before leaving office earlier this year, two Biden-era officials said the OJP had expanded access to grants for communities most impacted by violence, writing that “those partnerships significantly contributed to the recent downward trajectory of violence in a majority of our cities and communities throughout our country.”

The Vera Institute, established in 1961, is among the oldest, largest, and most prominent criminal justice nonprofits in the country. In the 2023 fiscal year, its total revenue was $263 million, according to its public tax filings. The organization’s president, Nick Turner, said that the impacted programs would continue operating while it formally appeals the funding termination.

Given the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to federal spending, Rahman wasn’t surprised when the Vera Institute received the termination letter on April 4. In it, the DOJ wrote that Vera Institute’s work “no longer effectuate[s] the program goals or agency priorities.” What was unusual, Rahman said, was that Vera was alone in having its funding cut.

“It leads us to believe that the only reason our funding was cut is that we have been singularly vocal in our opposition to this administration’s actions.”

“It leads us to believe that the only reason our funding was cut is that we have been singularly vocal in our opposition to this administration’s actions,” Rahman said. The Vera Institute has condemned the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda and detention of pro-Palestine student protestors.

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Other criminal justice reform and direct service organizations are far more reliant on federal funding and so far have been able to continue operating. But Rahman saidthat what happened to the Vera Institute will make it far more difficult for those groups to speak out, given widespread fear that it will draw unwanted attention from the Trump administration.

“So we think it’s important to stand up and call this out publicly,” Rahman said. “We are doing so because we have to look back at this moment in history and know that we have done the right and principled thing.”

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Donald Trump Wants to Save the Coal Industry. He’s Too Late.

This story was originally published b_y WIRED a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump held a press conference to announce the signing of executive orders intended to shape American energy policy in favor of one particular source: coal, the most carbon-intense fossil fuel.

“I call it beautiful, clean coal,” President Trump said while flanked by a crowd of miners at the White House. The crowd chuckled knowingly at the now-familiar phrase. “I tell my people never use the word coal unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it.”

Trump has talked about saving coal, and coal jobs, for as long as he’s been in politics. This time, he’s got a convenient vehicle for his policies: the growth of AI and data centers, which could potentially supercharge American energy demand over the coming years. One of the executive orders signed Tuesday includes instructions to designate coal as a “critical mineral,” expedite coal leasing on federal land, and identify opportunities for expanding coal-fired power to support data centers.

Using coal to drive AI “would be one of the great technology ironies of all time: Let’s go to a 1700s technology in order to power 21st-century technology.”

Using coal to drive AI “would be one of the great technology ironies of all time: Let’s go to a 1700s technology in order to power 21st-century technology,” says Seth Feaster, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “It really is a vast oversimplification of how power markets, power production, and the grid works in the US.”

In Tuesday’s presser, Trump, trodding familiar territory, targeted Democrats for the destruction of coal jobs as part of a “Green New Scam,” laying the blame on both Joe Biden and Barack Obama. In truth, though, coal retirement isn’t a function of who’s in the White House. More coal-fired power came offline under Trump’s first presidency than under either of Obama’s terms.

Unfortunately for Trump, the US coal industry suffers from some truly unavoidable economic realities. The last large coal-fired power plant built in the US came online in 2013; coal plants in the US are, on average, 45 years old. This aging fleet also has higher maintenance and upkeep costs for equipment than competing types of power. The fracking revolution in the 2010s—as well as the increasing availability of cheap renewables—has also made coal-fired power increasingly expensive. In 2023, just 16 percent of the US’s power generation was from coal, down from 51 percent in 2001.

With the executive order, Trump is “putting the thumb on one energy source in particular that happens to be one of the highest-cost energy sources,” says John Moore, a director at the National Resource Defense Council. “There are much cheaper and cleaner options.”

While coal’s downward turn in the US has been predictable, something has changed since the last time Trump was in office: AI. After remaining flat for several decades, various industry forecasts now predict skyrocketing demand for energy as companies talk a big game around plans for data centers. In September, Bloomberg Intelligence found that data center electricity use in the US could increase fourfold over the next five years, driven in large part by generative AI. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, said in February that global energy demand from data centers could increase 165 percent by the end of the decade.

The promise of new demand is driving some utilities to reconsider scheduled coal plant retirements. In Virginia, where Amazon Web Services keeps 96 data centers and is investing $35 million to expand its campuses, the regional transmission organization, PJM Interconnection, requested a delayed retirement of two coal plants due to increased demand from data centers. Demand from Google and Meta data centers has also kept a coal-fired power plant in Nebraska online past its retirement date.

But keeping a patient on life support is substantially different than bringing a corpse back from the dead. A PJM executive said at a conference last month that he wasn’t sure if the market was “sending the signal right now that coal should actually stick around.” Building new, technologically up-to-date coal plants—an idea Trump floated at Tuesday’s presser—would be a hard sell in an economy where investors are wary of big capital investments for outdated technology. Tech companies, meanwhile, are focusing long-term energy investments on nuclear power, as well as renewables and battery technologies.

Even in states where coal wields political power, data centers haven’t proven to be a savior. In March, lawmakers in West Virginia attached provisions to juice up coal use to a bill intended to jump-start the data center industry in the state. Despite cheerleading from the governor, the bill ultimately passed without the coal provisions after Appalachian Power, West Virginia’s largest utility, intervened, claiming that the coal requirements would raise bills for customers. An executive told lawmakers that even a big new customer like a data center wouldn’t spur the utility to buy more coal-fired power; the regulatory and financial reality, he said, favors natural gas.

Regulations on coal plant emissions are a clear target for this administration. Last month, the EPA rolled out a suite of attacks on a wide swath of regulations, signaling its intent to reconsider everything from rules on power plant emissions to greenhouse gas reporting. The agency also created an email address to allow polluters to petition for a temporary exemption from mercury and air toxics standards set out under the Clean Air Act—known as the MATS rule—as the agency reconsidered a host of pollution rules. Montana’s Colstrip power plant—one of the dirtiest coal plants in the country, which was fighting upgrades mandated by an updated pollution rule—has already requested an exemption.

If the new executive orders are any suggestion, the Trump administration sees this deregulation, and the targeting of climate change policies, as a key element of propping up coal. A separate presidential proclamation released Tuesday extends the MATS exemption for an unknown number of coal plants, while another executive order tasks the attorney general with attacking state-level climate regulations, singling out Vermont, New York, and California.

It’s possible that costs for coal could come down slightly with fewer climate regulations. “You can run all these coal plants without environmental regulations or reduced environmental regulations—I’m sure that will save industry money,” Feaster says. “Whether or not the communities around those places really want that is another issue. Those environmental regulations are there for a reason.”

Costs, after all, aren’t just measured in dollars. Coal emissions include a mix of heavy metals and chemicals, including sulfur dioxide, that can be deadly to people living around power plants. A study published in 2023 in Science estimated that between 1999 and 2020, coal-fired power plants were responsible for 460,000 excess deaths in the US alone. Coal waste, meanwhile, is stored in toxic ponds of ash; spills have cost some utilities millions of dollars in settlements.

Utilities, Feaster says, have priced in the health risks of coal and the liabilities that come with coal into their decisions. But it’s not clear if the Trump administration understands these risks. Cuts at Health and Human Services this month have expelled workers involved in black lung research and other protections for coal miners at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

On Wednesday, as international markets melted down, Donald Trump posted an invite on TruthSocial to companies to move their business to the US. “No Environmental Delays,” he wrote. “DON’T WAIT, DO IT NOW!”

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ICYMI: Trump Passed His Annual Physical

Last week, as the world reeled from a potential financial meltdown triggered by his highly unpredictable tariff policies, President Donald Trump went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in suburban Maryland for his annual physical. The White House released the findings on Sunday and the news for the McDonald’s enthusiast and oldest man ever sworn into office as president was good.

“President Trump remains in excellent health,” White House physician Capt. Sean Barbabella wrote, noting that his high cholesterol is managed with medication and that he exhibits “robust cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and general physical function.”

The language in this report, though positive throughout, contrasts sharply with a December 2015 letter from his personal doctor in New York, the late Dr. Harold Bornstein, describing Trump as potentially being “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Not only was his medical exam positive but “his physical strength and stamina are extraordinary.” Bornstein later acknowledged to CNN that Trump had “dictated that whole letter.“

The report today outlined several details, such as “diverticulosis and a benign polyp,” and that his right ear is scarred from the assassination attempt. Trump aced the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test with a 30 out of 30. (“I got every answer right,” Trump said before the findings were announced Sunday.) No depression or anxiety troubles the president, and for someone of his age, his medication intake is minimal: a little aspirin for cardiac health, two for his cholesterol, and a cream to address some damage from all that time in the sun. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his anti-vaccine head of the Department of Health and Human Services, might note that his boss is up to date on his vaccines.

The secret of his fitness? “His lifestyle continues to contribute significantly to his well-being,” Barbeabella writes. “President Trump’s days include participation in multiple meetings, press availability, and frequent victories in golf events.” The world can be reassured that he is “fully fit to execute the duties of Commander-in-Cheif and Head of State.”

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When It Comes to Tariffs Trump Officials Can’t Get Their Message Straight

The Trump administration’s only consistency with its tariff policy has been its inconsistency.

On April 2—a day President Donald Trump dubbed “Liberation Day”—the president announced a baseline 10 percent tariff, but rates much higher than that on countries all over the world. The methodology used to calculate the seemingly haphazard rates was generally considered by economists to be dubious. Then, as the bond market appeared to be teetering, Trump abruptly changed course on some tariffs at the end of last week, first announcing a 90-day pause of the most draconian tariffs for most countries while dramatically increasing them to 125 percent for China. Friday evening he then exempted nearly two dozen different electronics—including smartphones, computers, and various other electronics made in China—from the tariffs completely.

On Sunday, some of his key economic advisers took to the news shows, but in their attempts to further clarify the situation before the markets open Monday, they only added to the confusion**.** They insisted that the new exceptions the White House announced Friday night were not, in fact, meaningful carve-outs.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick may have offered the most head-scratching comments when he told Jonathan Karl of ABC’s This Week that the new exceptions the White House announced were actually just temporary, and that they would be reinstated “in the next month or two.”

“Semiconductors and pharmaceuticals will have a tariff model in order to encourage them to reshore, to be built in America,” Lutnick told Karl. “This is not, like, a permanent sort of exemption,” Lutnick added. “[Trump is] just clarifying that these are not available to be negotiated away by countries.”

After Pres. Trump exempts tech like phones, computers and chips from new tariffs, Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick tells @JonKarl they will be included in semiconductor tariffs to be released in coming months.

“This is not a permanent sort of exemption.” https://t.co/p9xXrT2Xvx pic.twitter.com/RoVH72kfM1

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) April 13, 2025

This is not the first time Lutnick and Trump appear to be reading from different scripts. Last month, the Commerce Secretary famously guaranteed tariffs would not lead to a recession, even as Trump said he could not make such a guarantee. Butif tariffs will be reimposed on electronics coming from China, experts say American consumers could expect to see prices for products like Apple iPhones rise. Indeed, before Friday’s exemption for electronics was announced, Apple had arranged to have 1.5 million iPhones weighing 600 tons airlifted to the US from Indiato avoid paying the higher tariffs facing China.

Meanwhile, on Face the Nation on CBS, US Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer said the same thingto host Margaret Brennan. “It’s not really an exception—that’s not even the right word for it,” he said. “It’s shifting from one bucket of tariffs to another bucket of potential tariffs.” Earlier last week,Greer said that the president had “been clear” that he did not intend to make exceptions on tariffs.

U.S. Trade Representative Amb. Jamieson Greer says the electronics that were exempted from President Donald Trump's reciprocal tariffs will still be subject to tariffs, just under a different category. Tariffs are "shifting from one bucket of tariffs to a different bucket of… pic.twitter.com/GlAMMsbWX2

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) April 13, 2025

As CNN host Jake Tapper told Trump’s economic adviser, Kevin Hasset, “It’s a contradictory message. I understand you’re saying that this was the plan all along, but it seems like nobody told Lutnick and Greer.” Hasset disagreed. “I don’t think it was rushed or disorganized at all,” he insisted.

“I don’t think it was rushed or disorganized at all.”

Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett defends the administration’s tariff rollout amid contradictory messages from top White House officials. pic.twitter.com/GOl75reRTh

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) April 13, 2025

Peter Navarro also doubled down on the claim that the Friday night announcement from the White House did not constitute a reversal, telling Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, “The policy is no exemptions, no exclusions.” But Welker pointed out, “Even the White House called it an exclusion.” Further adding to the confusion, Navarro, Greer, and Hasset all claimed on Sundaythat Trump would be using Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to investigate whether importing the same electronics he said will be exempt from tariffs on Friday could threaten national security. A White House official also confirmed this story to Politico.

Democrats seized on the apparent about-face, arguing that the exceptions were intended to benefit Trump’s tech bro friends. In a post on X, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said, “The companies that make the high-tech products, that profit off the cheap labor in China, they’re giving money to Donald Trump,” noting that Apple CEO Tim Cook, for example, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made a similar observation on X, noting, “Looks like [Cook’s] getting a big return on his investment.” On CNN, Warren told Tapper, “Investors will not invest in the United States when Donald Trump is playing red light, green light with tariffs and saying, oh, and for my special donors, you get a special exception.”

"Chaos and corruption."@ewarren tells @jaketapper: "Investors will not invest in the United States when Donald Trump is playing red light, green light with tariffs and saying, oh, and for my special donors, you get a special exception." pic.twitter.com/oaeGkCxKPU

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) April 13, 2025

Meanwhile, a new poll out Sunday from CBS/YouGov shows that three-quarters of Americans believe tariffs will increase prices in the short term, and nearly half believe they will increase prices in the long term. A majority of Americans—65 percent—also believe the tariffs will make the US economy worse in the short term and 58 percent oppose new tariffs on imported goods. Most also believe that Trump is only using them for negotiations and will remove them later.

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