Trump-Linked Lobbyists Are Having a Hopping Good Time

Donald Trump doesn’t talk about “draining the swamp” nearly as much as he did in his first term, but his ultra-populist 2024 campaign was built, at least in part, on an anti-Washington message. Yet despite his attack on so many of Washington’s structures, early signs are in that K Street, home to the city’s lobbyists, is doing just fine. In fact, the chaos seems to have potential clients running towards Trump-linked lobbyists.

Ballard Partners, the lobbying firm run by Brian Ballard—a Florida lobbyist who once was a Jeb Bush ally but for the last eight years has reliably stuck by Trump—reported earning more in the first quarter of 2025 than most K Street firms earn all year. According to its quarterly filings, released on Monday night, Ballard Partners earned $14 million, pushing it into the top tier of lobbying firms. In all of 2024, the firm earned just $19.3 million from lobbying—still enough to make it the 15th-biggest firm on K Street—but another three quarters like its most recent one would make Ballard Washington’s second- or third-biggest lobbying firm.

It’s not yet clear how many newclients Ballad will report in the second Trump administration, but according to Politico, that figure has already hit at least 130 since Election Day, including several high-profile targets of the Trump administration, like Harvard University and the Public Broadcasting Service.

The impulse to hire Ballard might not be a bad one for clients facing trouble with the Trump administration. Despite Trump’s history of anti-“swamp” rhetoric, some Ballardalumni have found very high, comfortable perches in the Trump White House—both White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Attorney General Pam Bondi have worked as lobbyists for Ballard (Bondi notably repped Qatar, and Wiles repped General Motors).

Ballard wasn’t the only lobbying firm to see a Trump bump. Mercury Public Affairs, where Wiles briefly worked repping a tobacco company, reported earning $5.1 million from lobbying in the first quarter of 2025—nearly half the $11.4 million it earned in all of 2024. Miller Strategies, run by super-lobbyist Jeff Miller (the firm’s website includes a link to a Wall Street Journal article proclaiming Miller “Trump’s K Street rainmaker” for his prominent role in campaign fundraising) reported earning $8.6 million in the first three months of this year. In all of 2024, it only reported $12.6 million.

To be fair, Trump isn’t hurting the rest of K Street. The totals aren’t in, but the more traditional top lobbying firms—where the number of Republican or Democratic lobbyists may ebb and flow depending on the party in power, but revenue reliably increases—have mostly seen their numbers inch up or hold relatively steady since Trump was elected. Brownstein, Hyatt, which has been the top K Street firm for years, saw a slight decline in lobbying revenue in the first quarter, but others, like Akin Gump and Holland Knight, saw increases—just not ones as large as the swamp’s MAGA contingent.

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The Economic Case for Preserving America’s Wetlands

Nearly 30 years ago, in September 1996, Hurricane Fran swept through North Carolina. It was the most expensive natural disaster in state history—causing an estimated $10 billion in damage in today’s dollars and killing 37 people across the region. Raleigh took a direct hit, with the storm toppling thousands of trees and dumping nearly 9 inches of rain. In Rochester Heights, a historically Black neighborhood southeast of downtown, most homes were flooded.

This, as it turns out, wasn’t a freak accident. The neighborhood, built beginning in 1957, was among the first suburban enclaves marketed to Black families, who were excluded from other areas of then-segregated Raleigh. It was full of attractive, one-story brick homes with wide, grassy lawns. But because the low-lying neighborhood flanked a swamp that received untreated sewage discharge and stormwater runoff from downtown Raleigh, it was prone to flooding during storms. (Construction of Interstate 40 through the neighborhood more than a decade later made the problem worse.) Eventually, the 1972 Clean Water Act banned unpermitted disposal of raw sewage in wetlands, but by then the marshy land had become an illegal dumping ground for other waste, including tires, glass, and old appliances. One resident, 69-year-old Steve Blalock, who’s lived in the neighborhood for much of his life, recalls surfing the sewage discharge in a metal tub as a child.

After Fran, residents decided to take matters into their own hands. Led by local environmental advocate Norman Camp, a coalition of church and community members started cleaning up the wetland, pulling some 60 tons of garbage out of the swamp over the decades, the weight of around 10 African elephants. Eventually, with $1.2 million in funding, the city further restored the swamp and built an education center. Today, the wetland is home to beavers, mink, box turtles, and great blue herons. During my visit in November, the park’s assistant manager, Celia Lechtman, pointed out native plants such as arrow arum and jewelweed, and trees, including green ash, box elder, and red maple. For a time, according to community members, some of the worst flooding subsided.

The neighborhood’s revival is a blip of good news on a relatively bleak landscape. America’s wetlands were historically viewed as useless areas that stood in the way of development. More than half of the 221 million acres of wetlands that existed when Europeans settled have been destroyed, and six states—California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio—have lost at least 85 percent of their wetlands, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

Wetlands act as “natural sponges,” absorbing up to an estimated 1.5 million gallons of water per acre, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they provide more than half of America’s $5.9 billion seafood harvest, including trout, bass, crab, shrimp, and oysters. They also filter pollutants from the water and sequester carbon dioxide. About half of our endangered and threatened species on wetlands.

As sea levels rise and climate change drives more intense storms, flooding is becoming increasingly damaging—and expensive. In 2024 alone, there were 27 weather and climate disasters that will cost at least $1 billion each to recover from, according to NOAA. “You cannot beat wetlands in their natural state for holding back floodwaters,” says Kelly Moser, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. Indeed, according to a 2020 analysis of dozens of tropical storms along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, counties with more coastal wetlands coverage saw less damage, saving an average of more than $4.5 million per square mile (and a median of more than $235,000).

“You cannot beat wetlands in their natural state for holding back floodwaters.”

And yet, the destruction continues. Between 2009 and 2019, the United States lost about 1,047 square miles of wetlands, a 2024 FWS report notes—an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. Making matters worse, in its 2023 Sackett v. EPA decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative ­majority dramatically narrowed the definition of wetlands protected by the Clean Water Act to only those with a “continuous surface connection” to streams, oceans, rivers, or lakes—leading the EPA to exclude up to 63 percent of once-protected wetlands. Project 2025 would strip protections from even more of them.

Further exacerbating the problem, the US Army Corps of Engineers appears poised to expedite hundreds of industry permits that could affect wetlands under President Donald Trump’s “national energy emergency.” And hundreds of federal employees at the primary agencies tasked with protecting wetlands—the EPA, FWS, and NOAA—were fired during Trump’s first weeks back in office.

Building energy infrastructure near wetlands is risky enough, but putting homes on wetlands is often a “double whammy,” explains Todd BenDor, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who studies the environment and urban planning. Doing so can put people in potential flood zones while reducing the wetlands acreage that acts as a safeguard. North Carolina offers buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas. But for every buyout from 1996 to 2017, BenDor and his colleagues found that developers constructed 10 more homes in floodplains—just down the street from the bought-out homes, in some cases.

Flooding remains a problem in Rochester Heights. Restoring the wetland has likely helped, but it hasn’t been enough to make up for all the upstream development in Raleigh, which was crowned the nation’s third-fastest-growing large city last year. Rapid growth means more structures—homes, office buildings, hotels—and therefore more “impervious surfaces” for water to collect and run off into the creeks that feed the park. Wetlands, in other words, are among our best options for fighting flooding, but they can’t be the only solution.

Still, change is afoot. In Raleigh, as of 2023, city project managers are now required to consider the use of “green stormwater infrastructure,” such as rain gardens, green roofs, artificial wetlands, and permeable pavement, in construction. Under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, NOAA has doled out $985 million for coastal habitat protections, including wetlands. The Department of the Interior, which includes the National Park Service and FWS, separately announced hundreds of millions of dollars in ecosystem restoration funding, though it’s unclear whether these programs will continue under the Trump administration.

In the coming years, assistant park manager Lechtman hopes to see “significant changes” in Raleigh’s policies around unchecked development, including planting more native plant species throughout the city and creating opportunities for more kids—like Blalock’s grandchildren—to play and explore the wetland. “We, over generations, have done so much damage to this land,” she told me. “When we take a little bit of time to care for it, it really returns those gifts to us.”

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How We Reported “You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos”

This month, Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias won the Sidney Award for “You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos,” a Mother Jones feature revealing that young Latino men are being deported without due process because of innocuous tattoos. The Trump administration falsely claims the tattoos indicate affiliation with Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang.

This is an interview conducted by the Sidney Hillman Foundation describing how Noah and Isabela reported the story.

How did you find out that men were being deported to Venezuela because of their tattoos?

Isabela: On Saturday, March 15, a day after President Donald Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged gang members without due process, the administration flew three deportation planes to El Salvador. Shortly after, we came across Spanish-language reports and social media posts from families in Venezuela who were growing suspicious that their relatives—many of whom had called to say they were being deported to their home country—had instead been taken to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.

We then started to message the families and log the names of the men we could find on a spreadsheet, even before the list identifying the 238 Venezuelans sent to the mega-prison became public. One of the first cases we looked into was that of aspiring musician Arturo Suárez Trejo. His wife had recognized him in a photo the Salvadoran government published of the detained men, who had their heads shaved and were put in white prison uniforms, because of his tattoos. We kept hearing different versions of that from several of the relatives we contacted and spoke with. The men had tattoos, but their families were adamant that they had no ties to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua or, in most cases, any criminal history.

Describe these tattoos?

Isabela: The tattoos of the men whose families and friends we spoke with can be described as anodyne. One young man, Neri Alvarado Borges, for example, has a colorful tattoo of an autism awareness ribbon. His 15-year-old brother has autism. And, back in Venezuela, Neri taught swimming classes to children with developmental disabilities. Through our reporting, we learned that, according to Neri’s boss, an ICE agent specifically told Neri that he was being targeted because of his tattoos.

We also wrote about another case of a father who was living in North Carolina and was detained by ICE during a routine appointment in January just days before his now two-month-old daughter was born. His wife said the officers kept him to investigate his tattoos: a rose and a crown with his name on it that he got when he was 15 years old. As an immigration lawyer told us in our partnership radio episode with Reveal, these are commonplace tattoos you would see “at any coffeeshop” in America, and by no means indicative of membership in TdA.

Describe the facility that these men have been deported to. What kind of conditions are they being housed in and how long can they expect to stay there?

Noah: CECOT, or the Terrorism Confinement Center, is rightfully infamous. Men are stacked in bunks four high without mattresses, sheets, or pillows. According to CNN, they are generally kept in overcrowded cell blocks for all but 30 minutes a day. Letters and phone calls to family members—much less in-person visits—are prohibited. Human Rights Watch explained in a recent court declaration that the Salvadoran government has boasted that people at the prison “will never leave.” The group added that it is not aware of any cases of people being released from the facility, which opened in 2023. The Salvadoran government often celebrates the cruelty at CECOT in highly-produced propaganda videos like the one released last month when Venezuelans arrived from the United States.

As to how long people sent from the United States can expect to remain there, the unfortunate answer is: We don’t know. Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney in the Alien Enemies Act cases, has said it is possible that these men might never be released. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last week that the people sent there “should stay there for the rest of their lives.” On the other hand, Salvadoran President Bukele and the Trump administration could theoretically change their mind any day and allow the Venezuelans at CECOT to return to their home country. This uncertainty is part of the torture for families with loved ones there—as it surely is for the men themselves.

Is there any evidence that Tren de Aragua has initiation tattoos in the first place?

Isabela: Several experts have explained that tattoos are not a reliable marker of membership in Tren de Aragua, which is a loosely organized group without a clear hierarchy and, it’s worth repeating, not perpetrating an “invasion” of the United States as the Trump administration has claimed. Instead, tattoos are more associated with El Salvador’s MS-13 gang. In court filings and public statements, US officials have disputed the idea that they have relied primarily on tattoos—or clothing and hand gestures—to identify suspected gang members to be sent to El Salvador—but we now know that officers appear to have used a score-based system called “Alien Enemy Validation Guide” whereby having a tattoo accounted for four points out of the eight needed to be deemed deportable. And internal documents from different federal agencies also cast a doubt on tattoos—such as those referencing the Chicago Bulls or Michael Jordan—as a credible signifier of gang affiliation.

Can you give us any updates on the men featured in the story?

Noah: All of the men sent to CECOT by the Trump administration—including the men featured in our story—are still believed to be there. To the best of our knowledge, none of the families have heard anything from their loved ones. As more time passes, the reality that the Trump administration is not planning to rectify its obvious mistakes seems to be setting in. I, understandably, now sense more hopelessness in my interactions with the relatives of people at CECOT. They’ve done most of what they can: They’ve gathered documents showing that their relatives did not have criminal histories in Venezuela; they’ve found photos of their relatives’ tattoos to show they are not gang-related; and they’ve shared their stories with multiple American and Venezuelan reporters. But their loved ones are still there.

What impact might the Supreme Court ruling on the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia have on the guys in your story?

Noah: The Supreme Court ruled last week in a unanimous decision that the Trump administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody and “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” That means bringing him back to the United States.

But the administration is acting in bad faith by effectively arguing that the decision gives them the authority to do nothing to get Abrego Garcia back on US soil. In doing so, they are openly defying rulings from District Court Judge Paula Xinis, whose initial order to return Abrego Garcia the Supreme Court largely upheld last week.

The standoff reached a new low on Monday when Bukele visited the White House and claimed that he didn’t have the power to “smuggle” a “terrorist” into the United States. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has made it clear that it is not planning to do anything to get Bukele to release Abrego Garcia. Both sides absurdly act as if they are powerless to free a man sent to one of the world’s worst prisons in error.

Noah: The Supreme Court ruled last week in a unanimous decision that the Trump administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody and “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” That means bringing him back to the United States.

But the administration is acting in bad faith by effectively arguing that the decision gives them the authority to do nothing to get Abrego Garcia back on US soil. In doing so, they are openly defying rulings from District Court Judge Paula Xinis, whose initial order to return Abrego Garcia the Supreme Court largely upheld last week.

The standoff reached a new low on Monday when Bukele visited the White House and claimed that he didn’t have the power to “smuggle” a “terrorist” into the United States. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has made it clear that it is not planning to do anything to get Bukele to release Abrego Garcia. Both sides absurdly act as if they are powerless to free a man sent to one of the world’s worst prisons in error.

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Another Round of Anti-Trump Protests Slated for Earth Day

This story was originally published by the Guardian a_nd is reproduced here as part of the_ Climate Desk collaboration.

Hundreds of marches, pickets, and cleanup events are taking place across the US in the run-up to Earth Day on Tuesday, as environmental and climate groups step up resistance to the Trump administration’s authoritarianism and its “war on the planet.”

A fortnight after the “Hands Off” mobilization brought millions to the streets, national and grassroots organizers are teaming up with pro-democracy groups for “All Out on Earth Day”—a wave of actions to demand the right to live free, healthy lives.

In New York, thousands of people gathered in lower Manhattan on Saturday for the “Hands Off Migrants march” endorsed by dozens of climate and migrant justice groups, calling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to get out of New York—and New York to get out of fossil fuels. The two movements converged amid Trump’s crackdown on migrants and embrace of fossil fuels, which will drive further climate collapse and forced migration.

Meanwhile in Milwaukee, a Stop the Cuts march organized by Indivisible and 50501 called out Republican lawmakers backing the unprecedented cuts to healthcare, education, environmental protections and climate funding.

“Trump is attacking migrants and the planet by aligning himself with big oil and eroding hard won protections. Climate change is the leading cause of global displacement, these are connected issues,” said Renata Pumarol, the deputy director of the Climate Organizing Hub, which coordinated the New York march. “As we fight the authoritarianism of Trump, climate groups need to be part of the resistance because we are all under threat.”

Trump and his billionaire megadonor Elon Musk have directed the dismantling of federal offices that oversee clean air, drinking water, national parks and forests, conservation, climate smart farming, and environmental justice at dizzying speed, as well as pushing through mass layoffs at core climate and environmental agencies including the National Weather Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Forest Service.

Meanwhile, regulatory standards for fossil fuels, petrochemical plants, mining and other polluting industries have been slashed—along with an unprecedented crackdown on free speech, migrants, and universities.

Trump is also rumored to be mulling an executive order that removes tax-exempt status for some climate groups, which could prove devastating for smaller grassroots organizations. The White House is also pushing the Republican-controlled Congress to pass a budget reconciliation bill that cancels billions of dollars of Biden-era grants for clean energy and environmental protection investments.

The response from the environmental and climate movement to the Trump agenda has, until now, been mostly confined to the courts, with an array of lawsuits challenging everything from mass layoffs, suspended environmental justice funds and the erasure of climate change from federal government websites.

According to some advocates, the resistance on the streets had been somewhat underwhelming—in part down to shock at the scale and pace of Trump’s attacks, as well as efforts by some green groups to stay apolitical to appease funders and the administration. Protest fatigue, they say, may also have played a role, given that the social uprisings in response to the murder of George Floyd and Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, has led to little sustained political change.

Now, three months into a Trump presidency and the capitulation of Congress to his assault on the planet, many in the environmental and climate justice movement will begin rallying behind three major demands: to defend workers and democracy, lower costs for communities and end handouts for corporations and billionaires, and make polluters pay.

“The mobilizations…are the start of something: a wave from below with winnable demands to meet and inspire people where they are,” said Kaniela Ing, the national director of the Green New Deal Network, a coalition of frontline communities, labor organizers, and climate activists. “Rallies, protests, clean-ups…rising up takes many forms, and it all helps, as we need consistent mass non-cooperation to fight against authoritarianism and ensure a livable world.”

On Tuesday, the Planet over Profit and #teslatakedown coalition will picket the New York home of billionaire James Murdoch, a Tesla board member. Musk’s electric vehicle company has faced allegations of air and water pollution around its factories in the US, “and because there’s no greater threat to our ability to live rich, dignified lives on a safe, stable planet than the Trump/Musk regime,” according to organizers.

In Michigan, Jewish organizers are running a phone bank to turn out climate and environmental voters ahead of the May 6 municipal elections. In Duluth, Minnesota, traditional Ojibwe blessings for Mother Earth will open an event featuring students spearheading efforts to install solar energy in local schools and environmental scientists on the need to protect the local EPA water lab.

This year’s Earth Day, which includes climate education in schools and universities, beach-clean ups, and tree planting in the US and globally, is the 55th, but thanks to Trump, it is like no other.

The first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970, when 20 million Americans participated in nationwide events, protests and teach-ins about pollution, the loss of wildlife, and pillaging of natural resources—bringing together disparate issues under the broad banner of what then became the US environmental movement.

This was followed with a campaign to oust 12 members of Congress with terrible environmental voting records in the midterms, with seven of the so-called dirty dozen incumbents losing their seats.

The success sent shockwaves across Washington, and a month later, Congress passed the clean air act by an overwhelming majority, followed by slew of laws that formed the bedrock of environmental protections including the Clean Water, Endangered Species, and National Marine Sanctuaries acts—and Richard Nixon created the EPA.

“For about six years the environmental movement was unstoppable, as we pushed to make the world a healthy place for humans and all diversity of life. There’s always been a pendulum in American politics but nothing like the assault on the environment—and social security, education, health and economy—we see today,” said Denis Hayes, the organizer of the first Earth Day.

“In 2026 we will need to organize aggressively for the election, but this Earth Day is about people with shared values coming together looking for local solutions, some introspection on what we did wrong that allowed Trump to get elected, and finding strategies on how to overcome him.”

A new review of 50 recent studies found that protests tend to sway media coverage and public opinion toward the climate cause—even when disruptive tactics are used. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication researchers found that collective action can also shift people’s voting behavior. In one study in Germany, the Green Party received proportionally more votes in areas where climate protests took place, Grist reported.

The GNDN and the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate justice group, were among those that campaigned to secure the Inflation Reduction and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 and 2022—now under threat by Trump’s pro-fossil fuel, anti-climate action agenda.

“Just three months into the Trump presidency, the damage has already been catastrophic,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement. “This Earth Day, we stand united in defiance of their greed and fight for a future that prioritizes people and the planet over profits.”

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Government Cancels Disinformation Grants in Disinformation-Filled Statement

Lisa Fazio expected her National Science Foundation grant to be cancelled. The associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University had watched, with apprehension, the GOP targeting disinformation in a series of legislative attacks.

She only grew more certain when, on April 18, the National Science Foundation (NSF) put out a statement on how grants would henceforth be evaluated for funding. In addition to limiting the inclusion of underrepresented groups, the statement cited Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” to cut funding for disinformation research:

“NSF will not support research with the goal of combating “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation” that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”

Fazio knew her research—”How false beliefs form and how to correct them“—was toast. Building on the established understanding that the more times a given piece of information is repeated, the more likely people are to believe it—whether or not it’s true—Fazio’s research tested that idea outside the lab in studies based on social media and texting. The question, Fazio said, was, “How can we best design misinformation debunks and misinformation corrections so that they’re as effective as possible?”

She didn’t have to wait long for the news. Hours after the NSF statement was released, Fazio received an email about the termination of the roughly $500,000 grant funding her study. Despite expecting the news, Fazio described it as a “gut punch.”

Mary Feeney, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs, worked as a program officer at NSF under the Biden administration, overseeing its “Science of Science” program, which approved grants in fields like science communication and information quality. Feeney expressed confusion: none of the research she approved, she remarked, could reasonably be said to infringe on the constitutional right to free speech or debate. “No research project I ever recommended for funding, or that I’ve ever heard of, goes out and denies someone from speaking or doing a media report,” Feeney said.

“We know false information is out there, we know it spreads widely, and it’s important for people’s health and for democracy to understand what we can do about it.”

“The work that we’re doing is not censorship,” said Fazio. “We’re telling what the scientific community thinks about topics where there’s consensus on what we think is true or false, based on what we know. That’s not censorship. That’s adding additional speech to the conversation.”

Moreover, said Feeney, NSF doesn’t regulate anyone’s speech; it funds research that leads to “an advancement of knowledge, the delivery of courses, training for junior scientists.”

“I think it’s a big leap between ‘we fund research on X topic’ and ‘the results of that research prevent someone from doing something,'” she said.

But the cuts didn’t surprise her, either. In Feeney’s final year with NSF, she says, leadership asked her to remove the word “misinformation” from grant titles, replacing it with other terms. She believes that the Biden White House “sensed that misinformation was becoming a target word for the incoming administration, and they were trying to kind of move it out of the system.”

Regardless, more than 50 other NSF grants studying how information is disseminated and trusted—worth some $9 million—have been cancelled since Friday, when the body released its new guidelines. Most of those grants funded studies on disinformation.

Fazio is one of the lucky ones. Most of her grant had already been used, with several papers already published. She hopes to continue follow-up research on a smaller scale with private funding, although it’s harder to come by. “Since the federal government started attacking misinformation researchers, nonprofits and foundations have been less interested in funding this research than they were before,” she said.

But she worries about the impacts of the funding loss. Fazio’s next project was going to study the formation of false beliefs broadly—she offered the example of “how repeating false information about immigrants might affect your belief about immigration as a whole.” The loss of NSF funding may make that project impossible.

“We know false information is out there,” Fazio says, “We know it spreads widely, and it’s important for people’s health and for democracy to understand what we can do about it.”

NSF’s “Science of Science” program, Feeney explained, wasn’t just about spotting false narratives but making science more understandable. “Some of it was misinformation, but a lot of it is also trust,” she says. “Misinformation is one component of this broader understanding of science communication.”

The new NSF statement is “creating a false narrative about science in America,” said Fazio. “It’s misinformation [to say] that research on misinformation is actually censoring the general public.”

“The administration is complaining about the censorship while censoring academics and what we research,” she lamented.

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The Latest Supreme Court Case Targeting the ACA Comes from a Longtime Anti-Gay Activist

For over a decade, Americans with private health insurance have enjoyed free access to dozens of types of preventive health care: cholesterol medication, prenatal care, and many types of cancer screenings, as well as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), the “miracle drug” that prevents HIV infection. But on Monday, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could gut the part of the Affordable Care Act that requires insurers to cover these services at zero cost to patients.

Kennedy v. Braidwood Managementis at least the eighth time the Supreme Court has weighed in on a major element of the ACA since the health law was passed during the Obama administration in 2010. The lawsuit—filed by a group of Christian businesses and individuals who object to PrEP on religious grounds and Obamacare on ideological ones—takes aim at the US Preventive Services Task Force, a panel of independent, volunteer experts who rate the effectiveness of different types of preventive care. The ACA requires insurers to fully cover services rated “A” or “B” by the task force.

Currently, members of the task force are appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But the case being heard by the Supreme Court argues that the Constitution requires officials who wield that level of power to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The legal argument is highly technical, and oral arguments on Monday barely touched on the case’s potentially vast consequences for public health. If the justices agree with the plaintiffs, the task force and its recommendations for the last 15 years could be thrown out, and insurers could start denying coverage or imposing out-of-pocket costs on dozens of currently free preventive screenings and services—meaning many fewer patients would choose to get them.

“The people who are going to be hurt most are the people who can’t just pull out a credit card and pay full cost for a service, or pay a $50 co-pay or an $80 co-pay,” says Wayne Turner, senior attorney at the National Health Law Program. “It is a literal lifesaver for people to be able to have some early detection.”

“The people who are going to be hurt most are the people who can’t just pull out a credit card and pay full cost for a service, or pay a $50 co-pay or an $80 co-pay.”

Among the threatened services are free HIV screenings for all, and PrEP for those at increased risk of contracting the virus. While HIV has become much less deadly since the mid-1990s, when more than 40,000 people in the United States were dying of related causes annually, there are still nearly 32,000 new infections and 8,000 HIV-linked deaths in the US every year, according to the health policy think tank KFF. PrEP—first approved by the FDA as a daily pill in 2012—lowers the risk of acquiring HIV through sex by 99 percent, and through injection drug use by 74 percent.

But the drug can cost up to $1,800 per month, so when the Preventive Services Task Force gave it an “A” rating in 2019, making it 100% covered by insurance, use of the drug appears to have soared. In 2015, 3 percent of people recommended for a PrEP prescription got one; in 2022, 31 percent did, according to the HIV and Hepatitis Policy Institute. Kennedy v. Braidwood threatens to reverse this progress.

At the center of the lawsuit are a trio of Texans who have become conservative heroes in the culture wars against LGBTQ and reproductive rights: A powerful anti-LGBTQ activist, a lawyer known for masterminding Texas’ abortion vigilante law, and the judge they like to bring their cases to.

The lead plaintiff, Braidwood Management, is owned by 74-year-old doctor Steven Hotze, a Houston-area alternative medicine guru, conservative powerbroker, far-right activist, and Republican megadonor. As my Mother Jones colleague Tim Murphy has written, Hotze—a former anti-abortion lobbyist—has a history of being very publicly anti-gay going back to at least the 1980s, when he campaigned to make it legal to discriminate against queer people in housing and employment. In 1985, he endorsed a mayoral candidate who said that the best way to fight the AIDS epidemic was to “shoot the queers.” Years later, Hotze crusaded against same-sex marriage, backing Texas’ statewide ban in 2005 and filing a Supreme Court brief in 2015 arguing that gay marriage was “against the Bible.” (Hotze did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2020, Hotze—who had reportedly become fond of Covid conspiracies and QAnon slogans—allegedly paid a former Houston police captain over $260,000 to conduct a private investigation into voter fraud in Harris County. The investigator pursued the outlandish theory that an air conditioner repairman was using his truck to transport more than 750,000 forged mail ballots signed by undocumented Hispanic children, per a lawsuit filed by the repairman. So the investigator ran the repairman’s truck off the road, then held him at gunpoint while an associate searched the truck, which contained only air conditioner parts. Hotze was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, among other crimes, for his alleged role in commissioning the private investigation and knowledge of the ex-cop’s plan to confront the repairman. He has pleaded not guilty and says the prosecution is part of a conspiracy against him.

Now, he’s at the center of a case that could dismantle a key part of the ACA.

Hotze has sued over Obamacare before, challenging the law in 2013 on the grounds that taxation bills must originate in the House, whereas parts of the ACA were first introduced in the Senate. (He also released two techno tracks around that time, with lyrics like: “What would Davey Crockett do? I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to fight Obamacare.”) But lower court judges threw out the case, and in 2016 the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.

In 2020, Braidwood Management and other plaintiffs sued over the ACA again, this time claiming their religious freedom was being violated by the law’s zero-cost preventive services requirement. Hotze specifically objected to mandatory insurance coverage for PrEP medications, which the lawsuit claimed “facilitate behaviors such as homosexual sodomy, prostitution, and intravenous drug use, which are contrary to Dr. Hotze’s sincere religious beliefs.”

“Our first and most immediate goal is to save this Affordable Care Act provision, which is so important for so many people.”

Representing Hotze and the other plaintiffs was none otherthan Jonathan Mitchell, the legal strategist and former Texas solicitor general known for crafting Texas’s “bounty hunter” anti-abortion law, SB 8, which cut off most abortion access in his state even before the fall of Roe v. Wade. Last year, Mitchell served as President Donald Trump‘s lawyer in front of the Supreme Court, arguing (successfully) against Colorado’s attempt to exclude Trump from the 2024 ballot.

Mitchell has represented Braidwood Management before, in a case claiming that Title VII, the federal law banning discrimination in employment, violated Hotze’s religious beliefs. In both that case, and in the current ACA one, Mitchell filed the lawsuit in the Northern District of Texas, where it was duly assigned to yet another Texas conservative hero, federal Judge Reed O’Connor. In a 2018 ruling involving the constitutionality of the ACA’s individual mandate, O’Connor had already proved willing to strike down the law altogether. The 2018 decision was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court, which said that O’Connor should have dismissed the case from the get-go.

In the Braidwood case, O’Connor handed Mitchell and Hotze a partial win—ruling that the PrEP insurance mandate violated Hotze’s religious freedom, and exempting Braidwood Management from that requirement. Crucially, he also sided with them on an additional, more technical claim that members of the US Preventive Services Task Forceare improperly appointed.

It’s that second argument that the Biden administration appealed, and the Supreme Court is now reviewing. Turner, the health policy attorney, says the case comes down to a line in the law that created the task force, declaring it “independent and, to the extent practicable, not subject to political pressure.” Braidwood Management argues that that line makes the task force too unaccountable. (Vaccines and birth control aren’t threatened by this case, since those recommendations are made by other entities—though powerful conservative activists are currently targeting the leading medical group that makes contraception coverage recommendations, as Susan Rinkunas recently reported at Jezebel.)

To the surprise of patient advocacy groups, the Trump administration decided earlier this year to fight back against Braidwood’s challenge. Trump, in the past, has tried to repeal the health care law. But now, his administration argues that the task force is indeed accountable to Trump’s Senate-confirmed Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. During oral arguments on Monday, the administration’s lawyer claimed the secretary has the power to both appoint and remove members at will, and could use those powers to influence task force recommendations.

Turner says it’s a “real concern” that the Trump administration will eventually attempt to exert greater political control over the task force and its recommendations. “We’ve seen the administration do this in other parts of the federal government and other parts of HHS—purge the current leadership, purge the current members, and fill it with cronies who are going to be rubber stamping,” he says. But says it’s a risk worth taking: “In my view, our first and most immediate goal is to save this Affordable Care Act provision, which is so important for so many people.”

After oral arguments on Monday, court observers predicted that the justices would ultimately reject Hotze and Mitchell’s challenge to Obamacare. The ruling is expected by this summer.

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HHS Plans to Cut Funds Used to Investigate Abuse at Group Homes

On Wednesday, a leaked draft Health and Human Services budget document revealed, among other sweeping cuts to health- and disability-related services, that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s department plans to defund protection and advocacy services for people with developmental disabilities—including autistic people, about whom Kennedy also spreads harmful disinformation. The budget document is a proposal, pending official release and eventually congressional approval; it’s also unclear whether suggested cuts originate with Kennedy’s HHS or Project 2025 architect Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget.

Federal funding for nongovernmental organizations to provide legal and advocacy services to people with developmental disabilities started in 1978 with the Developmentally Disabled Assistance and Bill of Rights Act. There are now 57 protection and advocacy agencies—one in every state, every territory, and in Washington, DC—that work to enforce the rights of people with developmental disabilities, those with mental health conditions, and other disabilities. The agencies, known as P&As, are overseen by HHS’s Administration for Community Living—which is being dismantled.

“What they’ve outlined here is eliminating almost all of the disability infrastructure in this country providing for services, supports, [and] research across the board to disabled people,” said Kate Caldwell, director of research and policy at Northwestern University’s Center for Racial and Disability Justice. Protection and advocacy agencies, Caldwell explains, are granted what’s called “access authority,” powers that allow them to independently investigate reports of abuse in facilities and community settings.

Caldwell is also very concerned, she says, about the draft budget’s proposed elimination of funding for the University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities Education, Research, and Services, and for state developmental disability councils.

“There’s been five decades of bipartisan consensus that it’s good to have a network that…can go in and expose abuses.”

Those cuts, as Caldwell noted, can’t just come from the executive branch—and would unquestionably spark legal action. “If HHS withheld funding or dismantled the program without an actual statutory repeal,” Caldwell said, “it would face multiple lawsuits from disability rights organizations, as well as state attorneys general, for violating the law.”

The nonprofit Disability Rights California is one such protection and advocacy agency. It receives a mix of federal funding—including through sources not on the chopping block, such as funding for assistive technology and traumatic brain injury assistance—alongside state and private funds. Its executive director, Andy Imparato, said that his organization stands to lose around $6 million annually from an approximately $50 million budget, if the cuts go through as written—which would also end funding for protection and advocacy agencies’ voting access work.

But his group is an outlier. “California is a little bit of a unicorn in the sense that we have a lot of state funding,” Imparato said. “Most protection and advocacy agencies, over 90 percent of their funding is federal. In our case, it’s only 40 percent.”

HHS’s funding threat was surprising news for Imparato. “There’s been five decades of bipartisan consensus that it’s good to have a network that has access authority,” he said, “and can go in and expose abuses that are happening for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and other disabilities.”

That access allows Imparato’s team to “go to places where people are experiencing abuse and neglect and expose that and address it, even if they are not seeking us out as their lawyers,” he said. “That is kind of a unique thing about the protection and advocacy agencies.”

Amidst the chaos, Imparato does see a silver lining: “I see it as an opportunity for our networks that are affected by these cuts to educate this group of members of Congress,” he said. “Hopefully it puts us in a stronger position to not just survive whatever proposal is coming from this administration, but for members of Congress to feel…that this network matters.”

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Trump May Soon Offer a Motherhood Medal, an Idea Popularized in Nazi Germany

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the Trump Administration is mulling a suite of initiatives aimed at encouraging Americans to have more babies. Some of the suggestions for these programs came from pronatalists, a loose network of activists who believe that the humanity is basically doomed unless people have more kids. A few weeks back, I hung out with some of them in Austin near their conference, which is called, naturally, NatalCon. To say that most of the conference goers leaned right would be an understatement; some of the topics under discussion were the ethics of gene-editing embryos to endow them with desired traits, how having more babies could save “the West,” and why most women should forego careers to be mothers.

Some of the pronatalist proposals that the White House is said to be considering include are practical in nature: issuing a baby bonus of $5,000, reserving 30 percent of Fullbright Scholarships for applicants who are parents or are at least married, and offering classes to women to help them identify the most fertile times in their menstrual cycle.

Other proposals, meanwhile, seem aimed at changing cultural attitudes toward childbearing. A prime example of this is the idea of bestowing a special medal on mothers of six or more children. This suggestion came from Malcolm and Simone Collins, a Pennsylvania couple who seem to have appointed themselves heads of the pronatalist movement and were the belles of the ball at NatalCon. The medal was part of a collection of draft executive orders on pronatalism that the Collinses recently sent to the Trump administration.

But the Collinses can’t take full credit for the idea of a motherhood medal. France has issued a similar medal since 1920, but the idea really picked up steam when Adolf Hitler first conferred a similar honor on German mothers of eight or more children in 1939, calling it the Cross of Honour of the German Mother. (Naturally, Jews were not among the 3 million women who received the medal between 1939 and 1944.) The fascist Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin followed suit, offering a similar medal in 1944. The highest honor went to mothers of nine or more children, though mothers of seven and eight children were also recognized. Since then, the motherhood medal has been especially popular in authoritarian regimes the world over, including in Hungary, Kazakhstan, and Russia.

As I noted in my piece, the Trump administration has shown signs of enthusiasm for a pronatalist agenda. DOGE head Elon Musk, a father of 14, posts regularly on social media about the need for Americans to have more babies; he has also promoted NatalCon on X. Vice President JD Vance has proposed the idea of a weighted voting system, in which the votes cast by parents would be valued more highly than those by the childless. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (a father of nine) signed a memo recommending that his department prioritize “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Last month, during a Women’s History Month event at the White House, Trump said, “We’re gonna have tremendous goodies in the bag for women too. The women, between the fertilization and all the other things we’re talking about, it’s gonna be great. Fertilization. I’m still very proud of it, I don’t care. I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s okay.”

Noticeably lacking from the pronatalist proposals discussed in the New York Times piece were policies that would help families manage the demands of parenting—things like childcare subsidies, expanded access to healthcare, and more support for caregivers of disabled children. Nevertheless, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the New York Times that Trump “is proudly implementing policies to uplift American families.”

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A Judge Told Florida Not to Arrest Undocumented Immigrants. The State Did Anyway.

On February 13, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would allow state law enforcement to arrest and prosecute undocumented immigrants for being in the state without legal status. It was quickly paused. On April 4, United States District Judge Kathleen M. Williams temporarily blocked the law from being enforced, saying that enforcing immigration is strictly the work of the federal government.

But law enforcement from at least one agency, the Florida Highway Patrol, continued to make arrests under the law, according to local reporting and a Mother Jones analysis. The arrests were in clear violation of Williams’ order.

At a court hearing on Friday, attorneys representing immigrant advocacy groups told Williams, the federal judge, that they know of at least 15 such arrests, theMiami Heraldreported. Williams said she was “astounded” that the arrests continued in spite of her order. “When I issued the temporary restraining order, it never occurred to me that police officers would not be bound by it,” Williams said at the hearing. “It never occurred to me that the state attorneys would not give direction to law enforcement so that we would not have these unfortunate arrests.”

Mother Jones has identified at least two of these arrests after reviewing booking logs for several Florida jails. On April 8, four days after the judge’s ruling, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper stopped a 41-year-old man for driving 95 miles per hour in a 70 miles per hour zone in Polk County in central Florida, according to an arrest affidavit. The driver showed the trooper a photo on his phone of his Brazilian driver’s license and passport. The trooper asked dispatch to share the driver’s information with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and found that the man was under removal proceedings. He was arrested on charges of driving without a Florida license and entry of an “unauthorized alien.” He was booked into the Polk County jail, where he is being held for ICE.

In an April 15 traffic stop, another Florida Highway Patrol trooper stopped a 34-year-old driver in Pinellas County on the Gulf Coast of Florida for a “window tint violation,” according to an arrest affidavit. The man was arrested for driving without a valid license, as well as a felony charge under the temporarily blocked law because he had been previously deported in 2013, the trooper wrote. The man was booked into the Pinellas County jail and subsequently released to ICE.

The first arrest to come to light was reported by the Florida Phoenixlast week, when a Florida Highway Patrol trooper arrested a 20-year-old U.S. citizen from Georgia during a traffic stop. According to his arrest affidavit, the Phoenix reported, he was the passenger in a car that was going over the speed limit. He was later released from jail.

At the hearing, an attorney from the state Attorney General’s office explained that the state believed Williams’s order only applied to top officials and not all law enforcement officers, the Herald reported. Williams extended her original order an additional 11 days, with a hearing scheduled for April 29. After the hearing, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier instructed all law enforcement officers to comply with the order.

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New Report: Trump Administration Just Got Hit With Another Signal Chat Scandal

On Sunday evening, The New York Times published details of another potentially damning security scandal involving the chat app Signal and discussions of “detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15″—this time centered on a group chat created by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Citing four people with knowledge of the group chat, the report describes strikingly similar details to those revealed last month by The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who earlier disclosed that he had been inadvertently added to a different Signal group chat discussing the same Yemen war plans.

According to the Times, Hegseth shared information that “included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis” in a “chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.” The Times noted that Hegseth’s brother, Phil, holds a job at the Pentagon, as does his lawyer, Tim Parlatore. His wife, Jennifer, has recently become notable for accompanying her husband to high-profile meetings abroad.

The Times reports:

Unlike the chat in which The Atlantic was mistakenly included, the newly revealed one was created by Mr. Hegseth. It included his wife and about a dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January, before his confirmation as defense secretary ,and was named “Defense | Team Huddle,” the people familiar with the chat said. He used his private phone, rather than his government one, to access the Signal chat.

The continued inclusion following Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation of his wife, brother and personal lawyer, none of whom had any apparent reason to be briefed on operational details of a military operation as it was getting underway, is sure to raise further questions about his adherence to security protocols.

The report cites a US official claiming that there was no national security breach: “Nothing classified was ever discussed on that chat,” the official said. Nonetheless, news of the second Signal group comes amid a dramatic leak probe at the Pentagon that has resulted in the departure of top Hegseth advisors and aides. Read the full Times report here.

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Corporate Chiefs Gave Trump’s Inaugural Committee $250 Billion. Benefits Abound.

Donald Trump’s inaugural committee raised almost $250 million, much of it from donors who are seeking—and in many cases have already received—valuable favors from the administration of the famously transactional president.

The Wall Street Journal, which reviewed the committee’s filing ahead of a Sunday deadline, reported that the funding haul far exceeded what the committee needed for the January 20 event, leaving millions of dollars (it’s not clear exactly how much) in a fund Trump can use for other purposes. His aides have said the surplus will help fund Trump’s planned library and charities aligned with the president.

Donations to the inauguration by tech giants like Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta—apparently eager to display fealty to Trump—have previously drawn criticism, but the new filing reveals that a far larger group of companies and rich Americans also kicked in.

The largest reported donor, at $5 million, was Pilgrim’s Pride, a poultry company that is owned by the massive Brazilian meat conglomerate, JBS. The firm has faced substantial criticism for its business practices. Mother Jones recently reported on the plight of Haitian refugees working at a JBS beef processing facility in Greeley, Colo., which a union has faulted for a dangerously fast factory line. Those workers now face deportation.

JBS has faced various legal problems in the US. A company arm agreed in 2020 to pay more than $250 million to resolve Justice Department allegations that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The White House announced in February that it was suspending enforcement of that law.

Meat-processors like JBS’ Pilgrim’s Pride, the Journal noted, also benefit from a rule announced by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins that extends a waiver allowing pork and poultry facilities to maintain higher production-line speeds.

Foreign companies like JBS are not allowed to donate directly to the inaugural committee. But their US subsidiaries can, giving foreign interests a means to potentially buy influence with Trump.

Mother Jones reported in February that Syngenta, a large agribusiness company owned by a Beijing firm that describes itself as a Chinese “state-owned enterprise,” donated $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural fund. In 2020, Trump barred investment in companies including Syngenta’s parent company, ChemChina, citing a Defense Department finding that they support China’s military and intelligence efforts. The Pentagon issued an updated version of that list on January 7, including ChemChina among firms it labels as “Chinese Military Companies Operating in the United States.”

The inaugural committee also received large donations from the cryptocurrency industry, including $5 million from Ripple; $2 million from Robinhood; and $1 million each from Coinbase and its founder, according to the Journal.

The Securities and Exchange Commission in February dropped a lawsuit against Coinbase, and earlier this month Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department would disband a unit dedicated to investigating fraud in the crypto industry.

The Journal also reported that the inaugural fund received millions of dollars in donations from wealthy Trump backers who Trump subsequently nominated for ambassador jobs and other top posts. Trump announced the nomination of Warren Stephens as ambassador to the United Kingdom on Dec. 2. And “the filings show Stephens’ $4 million donation was received on the same day,” the report notes. Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who Trump picked to run NASA, gave $2 million to the committee. Isaacman is also big investor in Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

There is no proof that any actions that the Trump administration has taken benefiting donors was a direct result of an inaugural gift. But government watchdogs say just the possibility is a problem.

“Even the appearance of such conflicts of interest can diminish public trust in government due to the perception that the corporations may receive special treatment regarding government contracts or regulations,” said Kedric Payne, senior director for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center.

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Far-Right Activist Tied to Jailed Chinese Fraudster Joins Team Trump. He’s Not Alone.

Miles Guo, an exiled Chinese billionaire best known for his ties to Steve Bannon, is in a Brooklyn jail awaiting sentencing following his conviction for orchestrating a massive fraud scheme. But Guo’s years of using his wealth to forge ties with people close to President Donald Trump appear to be bearing fruit.

As my colleague Stephanie Mencimer reported yesterday, far-right activist Gavin Wax just announced he is taking a job as chief of staff to Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington. Wax would be one of several Trump advisers and administration aides who have previously worked for or been paid by Guo or his allies.

Others include top Trump aide Peter Navarro, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and senior Justice Department official Emil Bove.Bannon—whom Guo paid millions between 2017 and 2020 as an adviser—and former campaign aide Jason Miller, who ran Gettr, a social media company that Guo appears to have controlled, hold no official White House roles, but remain Trump advisers.

Guo was accused during his trial of using various forms of intimidation, including encouraging violence, to stop critics within his movement from speaking out. From jail, where he has remained since his March 2023 arrest, Guo has claimed he is poised to be released, through a Trump pardon or other means. There’s no evidence that will happen. But Guo’s thousands of victims, including some who testified against him at trial, have cause to worry he might seek retribution if freed. (Prosecutors recently cited victims’ fears in arguing for expediting Guo’s sentencing, which has been delayed until September, after Guo replaced his lawyers.)

Though he has styled himself as a leading opponent of the Chinese Communist Party, Guo has also been accused in multiple lawsuits of acting as Chinese intelligence agent—a claim he denies. Still, the allegation adds a troubling dimension to his ties to top Trump advisers.

Wax, the former head of the hard right New York Young Republican Club, previously worked as marketing director for Gettr, a platform that, according to former employees and federal prosecutors, Guo secretly controlled prior to his arrest. Other Gettr alumni include Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon deputy press secretary who recently drew scrutiny for her history of bigoted and xenophobic posts, including some widely condemned as antisemitic.

Wax was also part of a stable of right-wing influencers who in 2023 churned out pro-Guo op-eds and other content that in many cases were partly written for them by his supporters.

That group also included Karoline Leavitt, who, as I’ve reported, was paid by Guo supporters to publish op-eds they’d help prepare under her name. (Wax, who has not said if he was compensated for his Guo articles, didn’t respond to an inquiry Sunday.)

Peter Navarro, the Trump adviser closely linked to the administration’s economically damaging tariff policy, also previously worked for Guo, as “international ambassador” for the so-called New Federal State of China. Founded in 2020 by Guo and Bannon, that outfit claimed to be a government-in-waiting prepared to take over China. During Guo’s trial last year, prosecutors said the group was part of a con in which Guo used his supposed anti-CCP activism to win support from the Chinese diaspora, thousands of whom Guo defrauded through bogus investment schemes. Navarro’s role—showing up at events held by Guo and doing interviews with a Chinese-language news outfit Guo launched—helped give the organization the air of legitimacy and a perceived link to Trump. Navarro has not said if he was paid for the job.

Guo also has a former ally in a senior Justice Department role. Emil Bove, now acting Deputy Attorney General, in 2023 worked as a lawyer for Yvette Wang—Guo’s longtime aide and co-defendant. More recently, Bove led the controversial effort to drop federal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, a move both men insist was not part of a quid pro quo.

An attorney familiar with the Guo case told Mother Jones that it was likely that Guo, through companies he controlled, had paid for Bove to represent Wang. Bove, who was forced off that case after government lawyers said he had a conflict due to his past work as a federal prosecutor, has not commented.

Guo’s ties also extend to pro-Trump media. The far right influencers who previously penned fawning op-eds about the mogul include Natalie Winters, who is now covering the White House for Bannon’s War Room broadcast. Since 2017, War Room itself has received monthly payments totaling hundreds of thousands from a Guo-controlled company, according to court filings. That’s in addition to Guo’s direct payments to Bannon.

John Fredericks, a conservative pundit now covering the White House, received at least $175,000 to host Guo supporters on his broadcasts, according to bank records made public as the result of a legal dispute. Fredericks in February used a White House briefing to urge Leavitt to “do away with the entire White House Correspondents Association,” drawing a pledge from Leavitt to limit the access of “legacy media outlets.”

WH Press Team & Trump Admin to Decide What Press Orgs Have Access to Oval Office & Air Force One

In response to Judge McFadden’s remarks on Monday suggesting that the Trump administration could throw out the entire White House Correspondents Association, @PressSec… pic.twitter.com/B9VceraaaB

— John Fredericks (@jfradioshow) February 25, 2025

It is unlikely that many viewers realized that both Fredericks and Leavitt have been on Guo’s payroll, but the imprisoned fraudster may have appreciated the link.

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Trump Nixing Conservation Rule in Favor of Drilling and Mining on Federal Lands

This story was originally published on the substack Public Domain to which you can subscribe here.

At an all-hands meeting of Interior Department employees on April 9, Secretary Doug Burgum stressed that managing and protecting federal public lands “must be held in balance.”

“It says in the mission statement the job of Interior is to ‘manage and protect,’” he said. “It doesn’t just say ‘protect,’ it says ‘manage and protect.’”

Better balance on public lands was precisely what the Biden administration was after with a rule it finalized last year. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the nation’s largest land management agency, has a long history of prioritizing drilling and other extraction. Biden’s so-called Public Lands Rule sought to put conservation and ecosystem restoration on equal footing with drilling and other extractive uses, including by offering new leases for improving and recovering federal lands and offsetting development impacts.

The change promised to improve the conservation track record of an agency that protects far less of its land from development than the Forest Service, the National Park Service, or the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Republicans denounced the rule, arguing it violated the BLM’s multiple-use mandate. And earlier this week, the Trump administration moved to rescind it altogether—part of a broader effort to boost drilling, mining, and other development across federally managed lands.

The rescission notice, which the White House Office of Management and Budget posted on Tuesday, follows a Trump executive order in February that directed federal agencies to identify and revoke “unlawful regulations and regulations that undermine the national interest.”

Rescinding the Biden-era rule flies in the face of public opinion. An analysis by the Center for Western Priorities found that 92 percent of public commenters supported the rule. And the 15th annual “Conservation in the West” poll, released in February, found that 72 percent of voters in eight Western states want the government to prioritize conservation over increased energy development on public lands—the highest level of support in the poll’s history.

In addition to the Public Lands Rule, the White House moved to eliminate a Biden-era rule that barred oil and gas development across more than 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve, on Alaska’s North Slope.

Alison Flint, senior legal director at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement that Trump is “putting himself above the law and planning to slash the safeguards that protect wildlife, clean air and water, and the communities that depend on them.”

“This is not policy—it’s a blatant giveaway to industry that threatens to dismantle decades of conservation progress, shut down public access, harm wildlife and accelerate the reckless sell-off of our natural resources,” she said.

Roque Planas contributed to this report.

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We Asked You to Share Protest Photos. Wow, You Delivered.

This weekend, national protests broke out once again to demand an end to creeping authoritarianism and to defend the rule of law—sparked by the chaotic opening months of the Trump administration, defined by the flouting of judicial authority, executive overreach, and a subservient Congress. You can find a wrap-up of those protests, organized under the banner “50501”—meaning “50 protests, 50 states, 1 day”—here.

Over on Bluesky, we asked readers to share their own images from wherever they showed up, and we were flooded with responses, from tiny towns and a highway overpass, to sprawling cities—all forming a vivid, grassroots tapestry of resistance.

Readers sent photos and videos from Clarksburg, West Virginia; Columbus, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Flagstaff, Arizona; Hartford, Connecticut; Honolulu, Hawaii; Indianapolis, Indiana; Las Vegas, Nevada; Lisle and Macomb, Illinois; Livonia, Michigan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Monterey, Paso Robles, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Thousand Oaks, California; New York City, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; Raleigh, North Carolina; Rochester, New York; Roswell, New Mexico; St. Paul, Minnesota; Suffolk, Virginia; and more.

Here are some of your highlights. Keep them coming. And make sure to follow us to join our thriving Bluesky community.

Monterey,CA

— (@estella09.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:43:55.396Z

Raleigh, NC #50501movement

— SoSayU (@sosayu.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:38:27.508Z

Thousand Oaks, CA. Great turnout and response from passerby. Only about 4 thumbs down or middle fingers. Lol

— (@katgw.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:36:22.800Z

#Indianapolis #FiftyFiftyOne

— Dunes Girl (@pattib-resilience.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:37:56.987Z

Roswell NM

— (@curmudgeongirl.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:36:21.859Z

From Portland Oregon

— TheMoonKnight (@themoonknight.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:35:47.121Z

Clarksburg, WV

— Elise (@bnat4.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:43:14.101Z

Columbus, Ohio

— Linnykins (@linnykins.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:42:23.686Z

We showed up in St Paul, Minnesota. Stand up! Fight back! #resist

— Kim J (@kaj0724.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:41:05.502Z

Sacramento

— Ron Loutzenhiser (@rloutz.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:39:35.960Z

Hartford, CT

— Chris Sands (@ctsands87.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:40:29.357Z

I25 Pedestrian Bridge in Denver

— (@thegreatwoodini.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:40:19.194Z

Young people, old people, veterans, dogs and everyone in between (about 500?) of us came out to #Resist in I’d say edging towards purple, rural Paso Robles, Ca on 4/19/25 NO KINGS protest day

— (@shellyrn24.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:56:07.692Z

San Jose, CA

— Keith Blom (@keiththerunner.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:51:58.960Z

Paso Robles, Ca! #NoKings #RESIST

— (@shellyrn24.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:57:41.448Z

Rochester, NY

— Amy Adrion (@amyadrion.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T16:01:36.979Z

Turnout was strong in Honolulu on April 19.

— (@sayitwithaloha.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T16:04:02.919Z

Macomb, IL. Population 15,000ish.

— Chris Sutton (@mapyoda.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T16:02:57.100Z

Belfast, Maine bsky.app/profile/sara…

— Sara in Maine (@sara207.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T16:11:47.294Z

PHILLY #NOKINGS

— Karen Getz (@getzie.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T16:11:17.207Z

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Powerful Scenes From This Weekend’s Anti-Trump Protests Reveal Resistance in Action

Protesters across the country once again poured into the streets this weekend for a day of mass action denouncing the Trump administration. It was the second large-scale outpouring this month, following the coordinated “Hands Off” protests. Saturday’s events took place under the banner of “50501”—a grassroots effort aimed at mobilizing “50 protests, 50 states, 1 day,” with over 700 gatherings held in both big cities and small towns nationwide.

The protesters’ targets were wide-ranging—the deportation regime, Elon Musk and DOGE, the rise of authoritarianism, tariffs, trans rights, and more—but one figure naturally dominated the protest signs: Trump. And a historical echo was not lost on some organizers, who pointed to Saturday marking the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolutionary War—the historic struggle to free a nation from monarchy. Protesters around Boston chanted “no kings.”

Here are some photo highlights from across the day’s events.

Protesters formed an “Impeach and Remove” human banner on Ocean Beach in San Francisco during Saturday’s protest. The formation also included an upside-down U.S. flag—a common signal of distress.Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/AP

Many thousands of people demonstrated in Pioneer Courthouse Square and throughout downtown Portland, Oregon.John Rudoff/Sipa/AP

Anti-Trump protesters assembled on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Many were demanding the return of Kilmar Abrego García, who was wrongfully deported by the Trump administration to a megaprison in El Salvador last month.Aashish Kiphayet/Sipa/AP

People in Baltimore City, Maryland, rallied in support of unions, Medicare, Social Security, and the return of recent deportees.Robyn Stevens Brody/Sipa/AP

Crowds of people protested in front of the State Capitol building in Carson City, Nevada.William Hale Irwin/ SIPA/AP

Anti-Trump protesters displayed signs in front of a Tesla Store in Kissimmee, Florida.Ronaldo Silva/NurPhoto/AP

People gathered in Orlando, Fla.Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

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Far-Right Activist Who Vowed “Retribution” Lands Role at the FCC

For the past six years, Gavin Wax has held court as the president of the New York Young Republican Club, a group he helped turn from a small, stodgy establishment outfit into “a vanguard of the Trump movement,” as he said last year. Under his leadership, the club has moved far to the right. It’s hosted events attended by white nationalists, budding foreign authoritarians, and of course, George Santos, whose congressional campaign it endorsed before he became a convicted felon.

Wax announced this month that he was stepping down as the club’s president, and on Friday he revealed that he would be taking a post in the Trump administration as chief of staff and advisor to Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington. The 31-year-old former day trader has long been a die-hard Trump loyalist.

“Once President Trump is back in office,” Wax said at the 2023 NYYRC annual dinner, according to Politico, “we won’t be playing nice anymore. It will be a time for retribution. All those responsible for destroying our once-great country will be held to account after baseless years of investigations and government lies and media lies against this man.”

Like Trump, Wax was once a staunch opponent of media censorship and “Big Tech,” and had called for an end to legal protections for social media companies. An online libertarian magazine Wax founded, Liberty Conservative, once devoted quite a bit of ink to trolling Trump’s new benefactor, Elon Musk. (“Elon Musk: The Corporate Arm Of The Deep-State,” was one such 2017 article.)

Much of that rhetoric seems to have vanished since Musk bought Twitter and most of the tech world has gotten on board in support of Trump. Now, Wax’s focus at the FCC, like Trump’s, appears to be mainstream media outlets. In an email, he told me, “The issues of censorship, content moderation, and platform accountability remain important—not just in the context of individual CEOs, but as broader questions of public policy and civil liberties. We’re also focused on ensuring that licensed broadcasters are truly serving the public interest, as required by law. That includes holding legacy media to account just as much as newer tech platforms, and ensuring that all players in the communications space operate on a level playing field.”

In 2023, Mother Jones identified Wax as one of a number of MAGA influencers who’d been defending the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui with op-eds suggested by Guo’s supporters. Guo was convicted of racketeering and fraud last year. Wax had once been the marketing director for Gettr, a social media site allegedly controlled by Guo. But Wax told me that an important part of the FCC’s work now is “defending against foreign influence in our information ecosystem.”

Wax’s ascension to the FCC was met with cheers in MAGA world from everyone from Steve Bannon to Kari Lake.

Thank you Kari! https://t.co/JXWES8zUR6

— Gavin Mario Wax (@GavinWax) April 19, 2025

He seems a natural fit for the FCC under its Trump-aligned chairman Brendan Carr. Carr has touted his own MAGA credentials and has taken up Trump’s call for the agency to investigate NPR and PBS over their sponsorship practices, and ABC and NBC over DEI efforts. The FCC also recently reinstated a complaint against CBS over an interview with Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign that Trump has alleged was deceptively edited to influence the election. Trump is suing the network for $20 billion over the interview. Trump’s FCC also revived complaints against NBC for allowing Harris to appear on Saturday Night Live during the campaign.

Last month, several congressional Democrats launched a probe of what they called the FCC’s “sham” investigations designed “to target and intimidate news organizations” that were unpopular with Trump and Musk.

Even at this FCC, however, Wax is likely to be a controversial hire. His ties to the more extreme fringes of the far-right are unusual credentials for a government job, though less so in this administration. For instance, in 2018, Wax penned a column in the American Thinker headlined, “We are all Proud Boys now,” in which he decried “Antifa” and “leftist terrorist” attacks on conservatives like himself.

“Out-of-context quotes from Gavin McInnes are being used to paint him as a right-wing militant leader when he in all actuality he just runs a patriotic fraternal group who like America and beer,” he wrote, defending the founder of the far-right militia group whose members later helped orchestrate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

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Supreme Court Blocks Deportation Flights–For Now

In an early morning decision, the US Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from attempting to fly another batch of migrants out of the country without due process. The high court’s decision was notable not just for the time it was released—1 a.m. Saturday morning—but because it leapfrogged a lower court that was still considering activity in the case.

“The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court,” the order said, noting that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas had dissented, and that Alito was planning to write a response.

The emergency ruling was a clear indicator that the high court, or at least seven of the nine justices, have finally realized that the Trump administration will not act in good faith when it comes to its desire to send people off for indefinite detention in a foreign gulag. The Supreme Court has already told the administration that it can’t send migrants to other countries without giving them a chance to challenge their removal, but immigration officials have been trying to get around that order by moving detainees to jurisdictions they believe aren’t covered by the earlier decision.

On Friday night, lawyers in Texas filed an emergency motion on behalf of clients who’d been told by immigration officials that they had been identified as members of the Tren de Aragua gang and were going to be removed from the country within 24 hours under the Alien Enemies Act. In their filing, the lawyers said the Trump administration was already busing dozens of men to a Texas airport for flights scheduled, they suspected, to depart for El Salvador.

The Trump administration has been invoking a 200 year-old law to try to suggest it has the power to remove people from the US without due process. As Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias explained in Mother Jones last month:

On March 14, President Donald Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act—a 1798 law last used during World War II. The order declared that the United States is under invasion by Tren de Aragua. It is the first time in US history that the 18th-century statute, which gives the president extraordinary powers to detain and deport noncitizens, has been used absent a Congressional declaration of war. The administration then employed the wartime authority unlocked by the Alien Enemies Act to quickly load Venezuelans onto deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador…

The administration invoked the act last month when it sent In response to a class action lawsuit brought by the ACLU and Democracy Forward, federal judge James Boasberg almost immediately blocked the Trump White House from using the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport Venezuelans, and directed any planes already in the air to turn around. But in defiance of that order, the administration kept jets flying to El Salvador.

The high court’s new order does not address the merits of Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act. But it does indicate that some of the justices realize that these are not ordinary times, and that once people have been put on planes to El Salvador, the ability of the US courts to help them is much diminished.

The administration has produced scant evidence that many of the people it has already sent to El Salvador are in fact members of gangs, or even criminals. Many of the deportees seem to have been targeted simply because they had the wrong tattoos.

“This doesn’t just happen overnight,” immigration lawyer Joseph Giardina, who represents one of the men now in El Salvador, told my colleagues recently. “They don’t get a staged reception in El Salvador and a whole wing for them in a maximum-security prison…It was a planned operation, that was carried out quickly and in violation of the judge’s order. They knew what they were doing.”

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How Police Guns End Up in the Hands of Criminals

When the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department in California wanted to purchase new firearms, it sold its used ones to help cover the cost. The old guns went to a distributor, which then turned around and sold them to the public. One of those guns—a Glock pistol—found its way to Indianapolis.

That Glock was involved in the killing of Maria Leslie’s grandson, and the fact that it once belonged to law enforcement makes her loss sting even more.

https://play.prx.org/e?ge=prx%5F149%5F7fe27ff3-d333-473d-b22b-e6dc6cc561d8&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast

“My grandson was in his own apartment complex. He lived there,” Leslie said. “He should not have been murdered there, especially with a gun that traces back all the way to the California police department’s coffers.”

This week on Reveal, in a collaboration with The Trace and CBS News, reporter Alain Stephens examines a common practice for police departments—trading in their old weapons rather than destroying them—and how it’s led to tens of thousands of old cop guns ending up in the hands of criminals.

This is an update of an episode first aired in July 2024. Since then, more than a dozen law enforcement agencies have stopped reselling their used firearms or are reviewing their policies.

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In “Cancer Alley,” Black Communities Get All the pollution, But Few of the Jobs

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

Residents of the mostly Black communities sandwiched between chemical plants along the lower Mississippi River have long said they get most of the pollution but few of the jobs produced by the region’s vast petrochemical industry.

A new study led by Tulane University backs up that view, revealing stark racial disparities across the US’s petrochemical workforce. Inequity was especially pronounced in Louisiana, where people of color were underrepresented in both high- and low-paying jobs at chemical plants and refineries.

“It was really surprising how consistently people of color didn’t get their fair share of jobs in the petrochemical industry,” said Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist with the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. “No matter how you slice or dice the data by states, metro areas or parishes, the data’s consistent.”

Toxic air pollution in Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor, an area often referred to as “Cancer Alley,” has risen in recent years. The burdens of pollution have been borne mostly by the state’s Black and poor communities, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

The Tulane study’s findings match what Cancer Alley residents have suspected for decades, said Joy Banner, co-founder of the Descendants Project, a nonprofit that advocates for Black communities in the parishes between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. “You hear it a lot—that Black people are not getting the jobs,” she said. “But to have the numbers so well documented, and to see just how glaring they are—that was surprising.”

People of color were underrepresented in all of the highest-paying jobs among the 30 states with a large petrochemical industry presence, but Louisiana and Texas had “the most extreme disparities,” according to the study, which was published in the journal Ecological Economics.

While several states had poor representation on the upper pay scale, people of color were typically overrepresented in the lower earnings tiers.

In Texas, nearly 60 percent of the working-age population is nonwhite, but people of color hold 39 percent of higher-paying positions and 57 percent of lower-paying jobs in the chemical industry.

Louisiana was the only state in which people of color are underrepresented in both pay categories. People who aren’t white make up 41 percent of the working-age population but occupy just 21 percent of higher-paying jobs and about 33 percent of lower-paid jobs.

The study relied on data from the US Census Bureau, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Louisiana Economic Development.

The chemical industry disputed the study’s findings. “We recognize the importance of examining equity in employment, however, this study offers an incomplete and misleading portrayal of our industry and its contributions,” David Cresson, president and CEO of the Louisiana Chemical Association, said in a statement.

Cresson pointed to several industry-supported workforce development programs, scholarships and science camps aimed at “closing the training gap in Louisiana.”

But the study indicates education and training levels aren’t at the root of underrepresentation among states or metro areas. Louisiana’s education gap was modest, with college attainment at 30 percent for white residents and 20 percent for people of color. In places like Lake Charles and St. John the Baptist Parish, where petrochemical jobs are common, the gap was minimal—five percentage points or less.

The industry’s investments in education are “just public relations spin,” Banner said.

“The amount of money they’re investing in schools and various programs pales in comparison to how much they’re profiting in our communities,” she said. “We sacrifice so much and get so little in return.”

Louisiana is also getting little from generous tax breaks aimed at boosting employment, the study found.

The state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program has granted 80 percent to 100 percent property tax exemptions to companies that promise to create new jobs. For each job created in Cameron Parish, where large natural gas ports have been built in recent years, companies were exempted from almost $590,000 in local taxes. In St. John, each job equated to about $1 million in uncollected tax revenue.

“This tradeoff of pollution in exchange for jobs was never an equal trade,” said Gianna St. Julien, one of the study’s authors. “But this deal is even worse when the overwhelming majority of these companies’ property taxes are not being poured back into these struggling communities.”

This coverage was made possible through a partnership between Grist and Verite News, a nonprofit news organization producing in-depth journalism in underserved communities in the New Orleans area.

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“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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