DOGE Killed Dozens of Grants That Supported Women Workers

President Donald Trump has repeatedlypromised to support women, grow jobs, and revive American manufacturing in his second term. But a recent round of cuts by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to undermine all three of those supposed priorities.

On Tuesday, the Department of Labor (DOL) terminated more than two dozen grants to increase women’s representation in trades like construction, manufacturing, and information technology, and to fund programs to prevent and respond to gender-based violence and workplace harassment. The grants were administered by the Women’s Bureau, an office created by congressional mandate in 1920 to support women’s employment.

This article, the first to report on the grant cancellations, is based on communications with four current and former Labor Department employees familiar with the work of the Women’s Bureau, and five of the affected grantees, some of whom also provided copies of termination notices. Experts and advocates say the cancellations will undermine women’s safe participation in the workforce at a time when Trump has promised “a boom like no other” and “millions and millions of new jobs.” They also threaten to reverse the progress women have made in the trades: Research conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR)—a Washington, DC, think tank that researches women’s employment—has found, for example, that the number of women working in construction grew by nearly 30 percent from 2018 to 2023. (Spokespeople for DOL, the Women’s Bureau, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

“A lot of these programs have been designed to help women get into the pipeline of some of these male-dominated jobs, and make those jobs safer places for women to be,” said Kate Bahn, chief economist and senior vice president of research at IWPR. “Any administration [would] value programs that help overcome these barriers…This is clearly not doing that.”

DOGE sees it differently. In a Tuesday night post on X, the office bragged about cutting millions “in wasteful DEI grants” at DOL, including cuts to “gender equity awareness training.”

But DOGE’s cuts may not be legal: The two-year grants are mandated by a bipartisan act of Congress passed in 1991 that aimed to get more women into apprenticeships and nontraditional careers, and required the Labor Department to make support and training grants to that end.

The most significant Women’s Bureau cancellations affected the congressionally mandated, two-year Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants, which support recruiting and training women in industries where they constitute less than 25 percent of workers, including construction, manufacturing, and information technology. Grantees from the past two years received notices on Tuesday that their funding was immediately being terminated. Four of the termination notices reviewed by Mother Jones state that the programs do not support the department’s “priorities for its grant funding, including with regard to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” (Trump, of course, signed an executive order on his first day in office seeking to purge DEI programs across the federal government.)

Last year, the Women’s Bureau awarded $6 million in WANTO funding to nine organizations, the department’s largest-ever award; the year before that, it awarded $5 million to seven groups. The only grant not canceled on Tuesday, according to DOL sources, was one given to Chicago Women in Trades, which is suing the administration for its anti-DEI executive orders.

Nora Spencer, founder and CEO of Hope Renovations, a North Carolina nonprofit that supports and trains women to work in construction, was in a workforce development meeting on Tuesday when the Labor Department notified her that her organization was losing about $300,000 of a $700,000 grant, which it used to support job training for 76 participants, including recent high school graduates and people in their 50s and 60s, with tools and materials, instructors’ salaries, and internship stipends—and about half of which it was still counting on reimbursement for. The internship program will now have to be shuttered, Spencer said, and she may be compelled to make changes to the way the organization is staffed.

The termination notice justified the cancellation by quoting Spencer’s grant application, in which she wrote that Hope Renovations sought “to increase the number of women…in construction.”

“It was so blatantly sexist,” Spencer told me. “It stung to see that from my own government.”

The cancellation did not make economic sense to Spencer, either: The construction industry, she pointed out, is already expected to take a hit from Trump’s tariffs and mass deportations, given the role that immigrants play in the field, as my colleague Isabela Dias has written. Plus, research has shown that the industry will need to hire more than half a million new skilled workers per year to keep up with demand, especially in light of its aging workforce: More than 40 percent of the current construction workforce is projected to retire by 2031, according to the National Center for Construction Education and Research.

“To be losing a development program at a time that’s really critical to bringing on workers, it’s insulting to the industry,” Spencer said. “I’ve worked with builders who are like, ‘I don’t care what gender you are, I need to know if you can swing a hammer or if you can pull wire.'”

Vermont Works for Women, a nonprofit that supports women’s and young people’s career development, is also losing the nearly $400,000 WANTO grant it received last year. That grant helped fund training for about 55 women and nonbinary people per year for careers in construction and renewable energy, and to launch a new pre-apprenticeship program in the semiconductor and advanced manufacturing industries, according to its executive director Rhoni Basden. That program, which was going to kick off this fall, is now on indefinite pause. The news, she said, came as “an absolute shock.”

“It completely dismantles [the] only progress that has been made within these industries,” Basden said, adding that half of Vermont’s population consists of working-age women. “This is a prime program to help fill multiple gaps that our state is experiencing.”

Moore Community House, a nonprofit in Mississippi, lost more than $700,000 in funding for its Women in Construction program, which has already trained nearly 200 people and was counting on $250,000 in further reimbursement. Branden Forshee, the organization’s CEO, pointed out that Mississippi has some of the country’s highest poverty rates for women and children. “Workforce training programs like this one are so important in this area,” Forshee said, “and taking funding from that, again, it directly contradicts [Trump’s] goal” of creating jobs.

A Labor Department employee described the WANTO program as “definitely life-changing for a lot of women,” saying the funding “gives [women] a career path they might not have had before.” Another DOL employee said the DOGE cuts would mean that fewer women “are going to be exposed to these different career paths” or “have the opportunity to get careers in these industries that have family-sustaining wages.”

A separate set of Biden-era Women’s Bureau grants known as FARE—Fostering Access, Rights, and Equity—that focused on preventing and addressing gender-based violence and harassment in the workplace were simultaneously canceled, DOL sources said. Last year, that program awarded $1.4 million in grants to four community organizations, according to an archived version of its webpage.

The Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence used a FARE grant to create a toolkit to help employers identify signs of domestic violence, said the coalition’sCEO, Meghan Scanlon. The organization was also about to begin creating a more in-depth training program on the topic for employers, staff, and supervisors, which will no longer proceed, she said.

While it’s not unusual for new administrations to create new programs, it is unusual for officials to claw back funding that a previous administration already promised to pay out, Labor Department sources said. And the cancellations are especially ironic in light of Trump’s campaign-trail promise to “PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”

“He’s literally taking away the enforcement mechanisms for protections,” Bahn, of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said, calling the move “absurd.” (As I have reported, the Trump administration also reneged on that promise by gutting the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health and cancelling grants for programs supporting crime victims.)

A pair of smaller DOL grants—one focused on projects to get women and people of color into infrastructure jobs, and another to reduce gender and racial disparities in state paid leave programs—were also canceled, according to the same departmental sources.

Spencer, who runs the formerly Women’s Bureau–funded construction program in North Carolina, expects DOGE’s latest cuts to come back to haunt the Trump administration.

“We live in an industry that is very much filled with people who voted for Trump, and I think there’s a lot of feeling right now in [the] industry that they’re just overlooking people who voted them in,” Spencer said. “I think things like this are just going to exacerbate that.”

Update, May 7: This article has been updated to distinguish outstanding and total grant amounts provided to North Carolina nonprofit Hope Renovations.

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24-Hour Vigil to Save Medicaid Takes Over National Mall

At a 24-hour vigil to protect Medicaid on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) was to the point: to protect democracy, Medicaid has to be protected, too.

The vigil, which kicked off Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET, is hosted by the advocacy group Caring Across Generations and will be livestreamed until it ends Thursday; beyond Raskin, the event featured speakers including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) alongside disability advocates and Medicaid users, in response to a series of White House attacks and cuts on health services spearheaded by President Donald Trump, his advisor Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Sometimes,” Raskin said, “people say to me, ‘Well, is it more important to go and fight for democracy and judicial independence and the right to vote, or is it more important to go and fight for Medicaid and Social Security?’ That’s a false choice. It’s all the same.” The United States, Raskin said, needs to represent everyone—not just people like Trump and Musk.

Since February, Republicans in Congress, at Trump’s prompting, have been pushing a federal budget that would entail up to $88 billion in annual cuts to Medicaid’s $600 billion budget, which supports some 72 million users. While President Trump has repeatedly promised not to cut Medicaid directly, the budget proposals before Congress won’t be possible without drastic cuts to the social safety net.

“What they’re doing with the budget is to destroy community,” Pelosi said. “Community has a word—unity—in it, and that is what we have to be: completely unified in our fight for Medicaid, for Medicare, for Social Security, for SNAP.”

“We will be out here as long as it takes!” Maria Town of @aapd-disability.bsky.social highlights that Medicaid allowed her to have physical therapy and her mom to have respite care.

[image or embed]

— Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) (@autisticadvocacy.org) May 7, 2025 at 10:53 AM

For disabled people who rely on Medicaid, those cuts would almost certainly mean a reduction of services, including funding for home care workers—if it doesn’t lead to their being kicked off the service altogether. Raskin cited one Maryland constituent who had shared with him that Medicaid was what made it possible for him to live independently and work.

“This is a matter of life and death for millions of people across the country,” Raskin said. “So the question is, what kind of America are we going to be? Are we going to be in America for dictators and plutocrats and theocrats and autocrats, or are we going to be an America for all the people?”

The vigil, Raskin said, helped to demonstrate that Americans were “not going to allow” Donald Trump to sign a widely harmful budget into law.

“It is through American democracy that we’ve created Medicaid, that we’ve created Social Security, that we’ve created Medicare,” Raskin said. “We are not going to allow them to tear it down.”

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A Holocaust Tale for Today

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

Imagine a situation in which the threat of fascism is so pressing that you consider sending your children to another country. That’s what happened decades ago for the family of Julian Borger, the world affairs editor of the Guardian. Borger has long been a keen observer of wars, global crises, and international relations. His work is an essential read for anyone looking to make sense of our mad world. But with a new book, Borger has cast his gaze back to the 1930s and a piece of family history he stumbled across only recently.

After Hitler annexed Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938, Borger’s grandparents and his father, Robert, then 11 years old, as well as all the families of the Jewish community of Vienna, became targets of the vicious antisemitic campaign waged by the Nazis and their Austrian allies. Soon after the Germans’ arrival, as the Borgers were being forced to give up their radio shop and subjected to hate, humiliation, and violence, they managed to find a way to send their only son to the United Kingdom. And, as Jews were being sent to labor camps, they, too, escaped Vienna.

This is quite the moment to be writing about Nazi authoritarianism and the Holocaust.

That’s as much of the story as Julian knew. No details. His father never talked about what happened. But not long ago, through an odd coincidence, Julian discovered that his grandparents had taken out a three-line ad in the Manchester Guardian—the previous name of the newspaper where he works—looking for a Brit who would take in his son. He started poking about and discovered that other Viennese Jewish families had done the same and that scores of Viennese children had found refuge from the Nazis because British citizens responded to these pleas. The result of his subsequent investigation is a wonderful book that is both a personal memoir of hidden history and a gripping account of the fates of these Jewish children, including his dad: I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust. This is quite the moment to be writing about Nazi authoritarianism and the Holocaust. Julian was kind enough to talk with me about the book and what insights about today he’s gained from digging into the past.

How did you first uncover this unknown past about your father?

It was the archivist at the Guardian who found it. In late 2020, at the end of the first Trump term, I was talking to an American immigration lawyer. She was trying to stop the deportation of West Africans, in particular Cameroonians, to their home country, where, in the midst of civil war, they were likely to be killed or tortured. She made a remark about how we keep reliving the same traumas, generation on generation. And she mentioned how her dad had escaped from Vienna in the late 1930s, and she said it had something to do with the Manchester Guardian, the original name of the newspaper. It reminded me that in our family lore the Manchester Guardian had something to do with my dad coming out of Vienna.

This gave me the idea of asking our archivist. Because the Guardian was coming up to its 200th anniversary, I thought it might make for an interesting story. I mentioned to him there was something about my father. The next day, he wrote back and said, “Is this it?” Attached to the email was an advert I’d never seen before. I had thought that maybe there had been an article in the paper about Brits taking in Viennese children. I had no idea there had been an ad with such a personal plea.

Courtesy Julian Borger and the Guardian archives

The wording of it was straightforward but emotional: “I Seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11. Viennese of good family.”

When did it appear?

On August 3, 1938. This was five months after the Anschluss, and the lives of Jews in Vienna were becoming more precarious with every passing day. They had lost their jobs, their livelihoods. My father, like other Vienna Jews, was removed from his school and put into a separate Jewish school. I only learned much later some of the things that happened to my family in those months, because this was something we never talked about. This advert opened the door to the buried history of my family.

“Children could leave without having to pay the various exit taxes the Nazis demanded. Parents had to decide to send their children away, not knowing if they’d be able to join them.”

What happened with the advertisement your grandfather placed? Were there many responses?

My father was lucky that my grandfather did this early. These adverts began to appear late July 1938. A couple of Welsh school teachers in Caernarfon, Wales, who were looking for ways to help saw it. They could see what was happening in Central Europe. They wanted to make a difference and help in any way they could. They started corresponding with my grandparents. They even traveled down to the Home Office in London to make sure the paperwork was speeded up. At the time, you could get a child out of Austria if or she had a sponsor in a destination country willing to look after them and pay for their education. It was much harder for adults. So Jewish parents in Vienna had to make this decision. Do we all stay together, or do we at least try to save our children?

How long did the process take?

The advert was published in August, and in October, he was traveling to the UK. At this point, the Nazis were focused on getting Jews out. This was before the final solution. Children could leave without having to pay the various exit taxes the Nazis demanded. Parents had to decide to send their children away, not knowing if they’d be able to join them.

After you saw the ad, you realized there was an untold story here not just about your family. What did you do next?

After first experiencing the surprise of seeing my grandparents pleading for the life of my father, I realized he was not alone. In that block of adverts, there are five other kids. So I searched the archives and found 80 children advertised this way in the Manchester Guardian. It seemed obvious to me, as a journalist, that I had to find out what happened to all of them. That is the starting point of the book.

Of those 80, how many did you track down?

Mostly all of them. I was able to find out what happened to them. But when it came to locating those for whom there was someone who could talk about them, that was a smaller number. Within that group, there were seven who left very full accounts of what had happened to them, mostly in memoirs written for their families. There was one survivor of the children from these adverts still alive, in her 90s, and living in Connecticut. I came across her late in the project, after I had despaired of finding anyone still alive. I mainly talked to the children of these people. In each case, I would send them the advert. And in all but one case, they’d never seen or heard of the advertisement.

What happened to your father’s parents?

They both survived. His mother got out of Vienna with a visa for domestic work. There was a shortage of maids at that time in Britain. She was able to travel out of Vienna with my father. But her visa did not allow her to have a child with her in Britain. So she could not look after him or stay with him. Then, with the help of his foster parents, they were able at the last moment in 1939 to obtain a visa as an agricultural laborer for my grandfather. That part of the family all survived. Others did not.

But did they all unite at some point?

They never lived together again as a family. My father stayed with his foster parents in Wales until he went to university.

The book starts with a dark day in 1983 when you’re in your 20s, come home, and learn your father, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University, has just committed suicide. Is there a connection between that and the story you’re telling in this book?

His foster mother definitely thought so. When my father took his life, it was my job to ring round people, and the person I left until last was his foster mother. Her immediate reaction was to say he was Hitler’s last victim: “They got to him in the end.” This came as a complete shock to me. It was something we just didn’t talk about. We didn’t talk about the past. In the note he left, he didn’t mention any of this. But she was quite adamant about it.

Much later, when I was researching this book, I realized why she seemed so certain. That’s because she was the last person he went to see before taking his own life. Tragically, she was away that weekend. He hung around the house for a little bit and then disappeared. When I called her, she knew that he’d come looking for her and that she’d been away. She felt he was trying to revisit that part of him, the boy who turned up as an 11-year-old refugee on her doorstep, and wanted to reconnect with that part of his life. At the time that didn’t mean much to me or our family because it was a piece of his life we didn’t talk about. It took on greater significance nearly 40 years later when I found the advert and began investigating my father’s early years.

“We could now remember people who had died under the Nazis who had been completely blotted out of our family history. We grew up thinking that as a family we survived scot-free. But it turned out there had been people who had perished in our family.”

The British are famous for being reserved when it comes to their emotional lives. Did you ever have any inkling of how your father’s experiences as a young boy—living in Nazified Austria and escaping—affected him?

There’s the British stiff upper lip. He definitely wanted to see himself as British. But I also found this attitude was widespread among these refugees. At least half of them did not mention the past and the adverts to their families until quite late in life, when they came under heavy pressure to talk about it. I also found this among the survivors from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The vast majority did not want to burden the next generation. It was a conscious decision: The trauma stops with me, and the next generation shouldn’t know. I believe that was his approach, and that was why he rebuffed any attempt to talk about his past. I once tried to do a school project on the Anschluss, thinking he’d help me. But he was very standoffish and did not want to get involved.

You’re best known as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian covering crises and foreign affairs around the globe. What was it like to write a memoir?

It goes against the grain in news-oriented journalism to write in the first-person singular. It was counterintuitive for me and felt self-indulgent. But the driving force behind writing the book was chronicling the extraordinary stories of these seven survivors. And the price for doing that was to tell this very painful story of our family that we had tried to block out. That ended up a blessing, because I found out a lot that had been hidden from our family that we could be proud of. We could now remember people who had died under the Nazis who had been completely blotted out of our family history. We grew up thinking that as a family we survived scot-free. But it turned out there had been people who had perished in our family. They just were not mentioned; their pictures were not on our walls. I’m grateful the book pushed me in a direction so that they now will be remembered. I went to visit their graves in Vienna—for those who had graves. On each it says, “unvergessen.” Unforgotten. That was a promise not kept. This book was a way of redeeming that promise.

You say some of these stories of these children are remarkable. Give me one.

Can I give you three? One is a guy called George Mandler, who lived very close to my dad in Vienna and was just a bit older. He came to Britain. But many Jewish refugees there in 1940 thought Britain was going to fall. Most of the kids in this book ended up getting on boats and going to the US. He did that and later signed up with the US Army and became one of the Ritchie Boys, an organization of refugees—many Jewish from Central Europe—who were trained to be intelligence officers and sent back to the front lines to interrogate German prisoners and conduct counterintelligence operations. (They were trained at Camp Ritchie in Maryland.) Mandler helped to chase the remnants of the SS through the forest of post-war Germany. He and two other Ritchie Boys came across an SS hideout in the middle of the woods in Germany and discovered a trove of Nazi cash. They decided to divide the loot among themselves as a kind of restitution and never told anyone else—until he wrote about it in a memoir for his family.

There was one girl who ended up in the Shanghai ghetto, a forgotten episode of the Holocaust. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took control of the international settlement in Shanghai and didn’t know what to do with the Jews. After Japan and Germany became allies, the SS showed up and advised the Japanese to put all the Jews on an ocean liner and torpedo it. That was too much for the Japanese, and, as kind of a compromise, they rounded up the Jews, placed them in a ghetto, and significantly worsened conditions. But the majority of these Jews survived. This woman, Gertrude Langer, in a long interview about Shanghai, gave a fantastic description of what that was like and also described pre-war Shanghai, a town essentially run by two Iraqi Jewish families and like a little Vienna. This was a whole episode of Jewish history I knew little about.

The third one is a boy named Fred Schwarz, who didn’t get as far as Britain. He got stuck in Netherlands, in a Nazi transit camp called Westerbork, and then was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He and his brother survived all of it, and he described their harrowing experiences in intimate details in a book he published in Dutch called Trains on a Dead Track. It’s one of the most extraordinary accounts of survival I’ve ever read. It’s so intimately and precisely remembered, and he recounts these extraordinary scenes at the end of the war, when the camp inmates and their SS guards were both desperately trying to flee the Red Army and reach the American forces.

Working on this book, no doubt, caused you to think more about the Holocaust than we are generally accustomed to doing. But as a journalist, you’ve covered many horrors and genocidal actions. Did working on this book change how you see the Holocaust?

No matter how black or dark an idea we have of the Holocaust, it’s still impossibly tainted, because all our accounts of the Holocaust are from people who survived it. This book contains the tales of survivors, but I’m very aware these are the stories of a small minority who got away. The great unknown is all the stories of the people who did not survive. Maybe that is so overwhelming and too difficult for us to absorb. We learn our history of the Holocaust out of the mouths of people who survived.

The dead don’t speak.

Yes, the dead don’t speak.

There’s a tendency to make comparisons between what is happening now in the United States and what occurred in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. I believe we should learn from history but also be cautious in drawing parallels. After spending so much time researching what happened in Vienna, which was a liberal and cosmopolitan city where Jews had become well established in the highest reaches of society, do you see anything from that period relevant for Americans today?

Several things. One is that among these well-established Jewish families was a conviction that it couldn’t possibly happen here. The Nazis could come in, but it couldn’t last too long, because we are too civilized, and Vienna is too civilized. In that situation, it was the pessimists who survived and the optimists who were killed. Similarly, it was the wealthy Jews who were killed. They had more to lose by leaving, so they stayed.

“This is a reminder of how fragile are the things that we take for granted in terms of civilization and how quickly it can change—and how there are, without doubt, among us people who would enthusiastically take part in atrocities against their neighbors.”

The second thing I found notable was the overnight transformation of the Viennese people. The people who my family, my father, my grandparents saw as schoolmates, neighbors, and friends turned on them overnight when the Nazis arrived. When my grandfather was on his hands and knees with the other Jews being forced to clean the sidewalks, he was spat on and jeered by the people in his district. Many of them he knew. This is a reminder of how fragile are the things that we take for granted in terms of civilization and how quickly it can change—and how there are, without doubt, among us people who would enthusiastically take part in atrocities against their neighbors. There are potential psychopaths among us. What matters is how permissive the environment is. That’s a lesson we learned in Vienna, but also in Yugoslavia and in Rwanda—how fragile is this idea of civilized society.

One of the biggest surprises of the book for me was learning that my great aunt, who was a very diminutive and rather eccentric woman who dressed like it was still the 1930s and who was a terrible hypochondriac and neurotic—a figure of some derision within our family—was a hero of the French Resistance. She was a communist who went to Paris and then to the south of France and became part of a German-speaking network within the resistance that was used to infiltrate German camps, bases, and office. Her son, who was like a brother to my father, was sent to Austria to report on factories and if necessary, sabotage or foment unrest. But the Gestapo learned the identities of the members of his network and came for him. He ended up being taken back to Vienna and tortured to death by the Gestapo.

Our family didn’t know any of this history. My great aunt knew but she didn’t tell anyone. After the war, she went back to Vienna. Her husband and her son were dead, and she lived out the rest of her days a sad figure, existing rather than living. As incurious children, we would visit her and have no idea of her history and what she had been through. That’s a powerful lesson. You just don’t know about people.

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North Carolina GOP Judge Finally Concedes After Six-Month Effort to Steal Election Fails

Six months after the November election, Republican state supreme court candidate Jefferson Griffin finally conceded to Democratic Justice Allison Riggs on Wednesday after his unprecedented effort to throw out thousands of votes and overturn Riggs’ win was rejected by a federal court.

Two recounts affirmed Riggs’ 734-vote margin of victory after the election, but Griffin, an appeals court judge, refused to concede and challenged the eligibility of more than 65,000 voters. He presented no evidence of illegal voting, but two GOP-dominated courts in North Carolina—the state of appeals and state supreme court—green-lit his scheme to throw out enough votes to potentially reverse Riggs’ win.

On Monday, however, federal district court Judge Richard Myers, who was appointed by Donald Trump, overruled the state courts in North Carolina and ordered the state board of election to certify Riggs’ election. “You establish the rules before the game,” he wrote. “You don’t change them after the game is done.”

Riggs celebrated the ruling in a statement: “After millions of dollars spent, more than 68,000 voters at risk of losing their votes, thousands of volunteers mobilized, hundreds of legal documents filed, and immeasurable damage done to our democracy, I’m glad the will of the voters was finally heard, six months and two days after Election Day. It’s been my honor to lead this fight–even though it should never have happened.”

“This is a righteous victory for democracy and a clear defeat of political gamesmanship,” added DNC Chair Ken Martin. “For 200 days, Republicans in North Carolina sought to overturn the will of the people, hijack a state Supreme Court seat, and systematically undermine basic faith in our elections.”

Even though he was ultimately unsuccessful, Griffin’s six-month effort to overturn the election did tremendous damage to the democratic process.

Riggs’ victory maintains the 5–2 Republican majority on the state supreme court. But it gives Democrats a shot at retaking the court before the critical 2030 redistricting cycle, when the court could oversee new legislative maps. That’s one reason the race was so hotly contested. “We’ve knocked over the first domino that we need to for Democrats to take back the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2028,” Riggs told me after the election.

Even though Griffin was ultimately unsuccessful, his six-month effort to overturn the election did a tremendous amount of damage to the democratic process. He got much further than Trump didin 2020, convincing two state courts in North Carolina to throw out thousands of otherwise lawful votes after two recounts had affirmed Riggs’ victory and every other election from November had been certified. That will go a long way toward making election subversion the norm rather than the exception, especially in states, like North Carolina, where Republicans control the top courts and election boards.

Democratic State Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls called Griffin’s attempt to steal the election “a bloodless coup.” Voting rights activists referred to it as “a nonviolent version of January 6.” Just like Trump’s effort to overturn the election inspired election deniers to seize positions of power across the country, what played out in North Carolina could embolden other losing candidates to go to extreme lengths to contest future elections.

“His effort to change the rules after an election is unprecedented,” Riggs wrote in one legal brief. “And if Judge Griffin succeeds, the implications are staggering. Rather than suing before an election to challenge rules they do not believe are valid, candidates will have an incentive to say nothing and wait to see if they win. Then if they lose, they will drag out elections through litigation for months, seeking to throw out votes until they win. Never again will North Carolina voters walk out of the voting booths knowing that their votes will count, and the court system will be flooded with lawsuits after every election seeking to challenge votes all over the State.”

Sadly, that dangerous precedent may now have been set even though Griffin ultimately lost. Republicans are getting closer and closer to achieving their ultimate goal of toppling democracy altogether.

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Aviation Industry “Failing Dramatically” on Climate, Insiders Say

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

The aviation industry is “failing dramatically” in its efforts to tackle its role in the climate crisis, according to a newly formed group of aviation professionals.

They say they are torn between their passion for flying and their concern for the planet and are calling for a fundamental transition of the industry, including controlling flight numbers.

The group, Call Aviation to Action, says the industry is overly optimistic about emissions-cutting technology and trapped in a business model that demands ever-growing flight numbers. The lack of significant climate action from the industry risks it being destroyed, the group says, as heavy regulation from outside will become necessary as the climate crisis intensifies.

Karel Bockstael, a co-founder of the group, and a vice president of sustainability at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines until 2022, said: “We see the good that aviation can do but we also see that we must reinvent our industry to restore its positive contribution to the world.”

Due to their international nature, carbon dioxide emissions from aviation are excluded from the national plans that countries submit to the UN’s climate body. Instead, the UN’s aviation body, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), is tasked with tackling the planet-heating gases.

“As a commercial pilot, I’m trained to recognize risks and act, and the climate crisis is one we can’t ignore.”

Bockstael said: “My view is ICAO have been failing dramatically on that responsibility, because the only thing it came up with after eight years of discussion is the Corsia scheme, which is nothing more than carbon offsets for the growth of aviation above a certain threshold, exporting your problem to another industry.” The scheme has been criticized as “unambitious and problematic” and has yet to require any airline to use a carbon credit.

He said: “If we do not act, by 2050 aviation emissions will be about a quarter of all human-caused emissions—that will be really a very shameful position.

“We love the magic of flying but we foresee it being destroyed. That’s what we want to prevent. We hope our initiative will help a really big group of aviation professionals to speak up, because we think they’re the silent majority. We need to break the silence and encourage our industry leaders to become part of this transition.”

The Guardian has previously been contacted by numerous aviation professionals concerned about the climate crisis but who felt unable to speak publicly.

The group said it had already signed up dozens of professionals before its launch on Tuesday, including engineers and airport and airline executives.

A spokesperson for ICAO said: “ICAO is committed to developing technically robust aviation standards and guidance material that can be implemented worldwide to drive progress towards the net zero carbon emissions goals that governments have set. As a politically neutral standard-setting body, we do not comment on the positions or activities of specific external parties.”

Tom Reynolds, an airline pilot and member of Safe Landing, a global group of climate-concerned aviation workers, said: “As a commercial pilot, I’m trained to recognise risks and act, and the climate crisis is one we can’t ignore. But I believe we’re on the cusp of a new jet age. With bold leadership, investment and the right policies, we can build an aviation industry that celebrates and preserves the beauty of flying for generations to come.”

Flying causes more CO2 emissions than any other form of transport per mile and is dominated by rich passengers, with 1 percent of the world’s population responsible for 50 percent of aviation emissions. The industry’s climate plans are rated “critically insufficient” by Climate Action Tracker.

ICAO forecasts a doubling of passenger numbers by 2042, and the industry argues that more efficient aircraft, sustainable fuels and Corsia can control CO2 emissions. The ICAO has been accused of having been captured by the industry, the Guardian reported in February.

Independent experts say the feasible scale of measures to cut aviation emissions is extremely unlikely to compensate for such a doubling in traffic, with, for example, fuel-efficiency improvements now stalling. The CEO of Qatar Airways called the airline industry’s emissions goals a “PR exercise” in 2023.

Bockstael said: “The absolute impact of aviation is still on a pathway up despite all the longer-term aspirations of ICAO [of net zero by 2050].”

The Call Aviation to Action group said the industry should set targets for absolute emissions cuts in line with science-based CO2 budgets and stop “lobbying against climate policies.” The industry should also acknowledge that managing global demand for flights in a fair way is part of the solution, it said.

Bockstael said the cost of emissions-cutting technologies would increase the price of flying but that additional measures, such as flight or carbon taxes, could be needed to keep passenger numbers at sustainable levels. Such constraints on demand must be fair, he said, offering equitable access to flying in developing countries and addressing heavy frequent flyers in rich nations.

Finlay Asher, an aerospace engineer and member of Safe Landing, said: “As an engineer, what really excites me is that the Call Aviation to Action proposals would lead to a new golden age of innovation. Our industry is in need of an upgrade: new aircraft designs, new forms of zero-carbon power and new airport layouts to support these. The research, development and operation of this new air transport system will not only create more jobs but also make flying greener, cleaner, quieter and more accessible to society.”

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Nikole Hannah-Jones: Trump Is Erasing Black History

President Donald Trump’s second term has swung a wrecking ball at diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and programs throughout the country. Few writers seem better suited to explain this unique moment in America than Nikole Hannah-Jones.

A New York Times journalist and Howard University professor, Hannah-Jones has spent years studying and shaping compelling—and at times controversial—narratives about American history. In 2019, she created The 1619 Project, a series of stories and essays that placed the first slave ship that arrived in Virginia at the center of the US’ origin story. Today, the Trump administration is pushing against that kind of historical reframing while dismantling federal policies designed to address structural racism. Hannah-Jones says she’s been stunned by the speed of Trump’s first few months.

“We haven’t seen the federal government weaponized against civil rights in this way” since the turn of the century, Hannah-Jones says. “We’ve not lived in this America before. And we are experiencing something that, if you study history, it’s not unpredictable, yet it’s still shocking that we’re here.”

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks to Hannah-Jones about the rollback of DEI and civil rights programs across the country, the ongoing battle to reframe American history, and whether this will lead to another moment of rebirth for Black Americans.

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

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Trump Is Eager to Defund Harvard, Yet Publicly Subsidized Hate Groups Get a Pass

One particularly surreal aspect of Donald Trump threatening the tax-exempt status of Harvard, one of the nation’s oldest and foremost educational institutions—and excluding it from federal research funding for refusing to heed the administration’s oversight demands—is the fact that even some of the nation’s most hateful and antidemocratic entities qualify as tax-exempt charities. As I explain in my book, Jackpot:

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation is broadly defined as an organization with religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. There are charities dedicated to “fostering appreciation” for camellias and “promoting the medium of American mime.” (The latter, last I checked, had more than $6 million in assets.) In 2017, according to one investigative outlet, the National Christian Foundation—one of the largest faith-based donor- advised funds—distributed more than $19 million of its donors’ money to tax-exempt charities that were anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant.

Among the NCF’s leading recipients is Alliance Defending Freedom, a network of Christian lawyers that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group for its antigay activities. The Alliance collects tens of millions in tax-exempt donations each year. It has expressed support for foreign laws criminalizing sodomy, represented business owners in court who refuse to serve LGBTQ customers, opposed transgender troops, and even disputed that the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, in Laramie, Wyoming, was a hate crime.

I bring this all up because acting US Attorney Ed Martin, Trump’s ill-fated pick for permanent US Attorney for the Washington,DC, district, apparently had a cozy relationship with the white nationalist group VDare. According to a 2024 report from Media Matters, Martin has called himself a “big admirer” of the nonprofit group. (His nomination appears doomed, albeit for unrelated reasons.) Media Matters wrote:

Martin also repeatedly hosted VDare leader and white nationalist Peter Brimelow on his now-defunct radio program The Ed Martin Movement. During an episode that aired on November 29, 2018, Martin praised Brimelow as “a guy worth listening to” and told him, “I’m always glad to give you a voice, you’re always welcome here.”

VDare, which suspended its activities last July, was an active tax-exempt charity during Trump’s first term. In 2018, too, the Trump administration reinstated the tax-exempt status of white nationalist Richard Spencer‘s National Policy Institute, which had its status revoked automatically for failing to file mandatory 990 tax returns for three years running.

It is telling that a president who never questioned the tax-exempt status of white nationalist groups is now suggesting his IRS might take a hard look at Harvard’s.

Of course, even that simple suggestion would seem to violate federal law, which states explicitly (emphasis mine): “It shall be unlawful for any applicable person”—the president, vice president, any of their staffers, or any cabinet member—”to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.” (The law was passed post-Watergate to ensure that no administration could weaponize the IRS as President Richard Nixon sought to do.)

Even if Harvard has some issues to work out related to alleged antisemitism, US taxpayers continue to subsidize nonprofits that exist largely to stoke anti-immigrant and religious hatred. If we are compelled to support these kinds of groups in the name of “education,” we’d best be compelled to also support legitimate institutions of higher learning. As I wrote in the book:

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who slaughtered those Black parishioners in Charleston, wrote that he was motivated by “black on white” crime propaganda he discovered on the website of the nonprofit Council of Conservative Citizens, one of whose former board members, a self-described “race realist” named Jared Taylor, runs the like-minded New Century Foundation, another tax-exempt nonprofit. VDare Foundation, a vehemently anti-immigrant journalism nonprofit, has collected more than $5 million over the past decade. Its website features headlines such as “Milwaukee Shooting: Six Out of Eleven Mass Shootings in 86% White Wisconsin Are by Minorities or Immigrants” and “NYPD Releases Pic of Suspect in Tessa Majors Killing. Guess What? He’s Black.”

Taylor’s New Century Foundation also appears to be inactive these days, and an entirely unrelated nonprofit exists under the same name. When I reached Taylor by phone circa 2020, he told me he disagreed with Roof’s motive of starting a race war (“that’s immoral”), but said “his grievances were understandable.” Taylor also disputed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization of the Council of Conservative Citizens and New Century as white nationalists, saying, “I call myself a ‘race realist’ and a “white advocate.’ ”

Alas, our current, Orwellian, administration—with its nasty scapegoating of immigrants and clumsy attempts to erase the historical contributions of women, LGBTQ people, and nonwhites from the public commons under the guise of eliminating “DEI”—has proved itself a “white advocate” at the expense of just about everyone else.

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RFK Jr. May Have Inspired Acting US Attorney’s Harassment of Medical Journals

Ed Martin, the acting US Attorney for Washington, DC, had recently been peppering medical journals with “vaguely threatening” letters accusing them of acting as “partisans” in scientific debates.

Those missives are just one genre within a barrage of communiques Martin has sent to perceived Trump foes—congressional Democrats, special counsel Jack Smith, a former Mueller prosecutor, nonprofits and Georgetown law—since taking office in January, part of a clumsy effort to turn the nation’s largest prosecutorial office into an organ of his boss’s retribution.

But the letters Martin addressed to prominent publications, including the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and JAMA, and lesser-known journals such as CHEST, published by the American College of Chest Physicians, have been among the weirdest.

The US Attorney in DC has no evident authority over the tax status of medical journals published in other jurisdictions. Martin, who has no prosecutorial experience, let alone a scientific background, also seems to lack any understanding of, or interest in, how peer-reviewed journals work. His letters ask whether the publication in question accepts submissions from scientists with “competing viewpoints,” and inquire about how they “handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled their readers.”

The letters fail to acknowledge the strong First Amendment protections scientific journals enjoy against the government telling them what to print.

But the reason for Martin’s bizarre campaign against medical publications became clearer Monday night, when Trump, in a social media post attempting to resuscitate Martin’s declining hopes of Senate confirmation, said Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. believed Martin’s confirmation “is IMPERATIVE in terms of doing all that has to be done to SAVE LIVES and to, MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN.”

Martin also had a little-noticed meeting with Kennedy on March 18 at HHS.

Thank you @USAEdMartin for our great discussion today on ways we can work together to MAHA. https://t.co/SixDTx5Vu0

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 19, 2025

Martin began writing to the medical journals the following month. “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publication…are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” he wrote to CHEST, before asking about the inclusion of competing viewpoints. Martin also questioned the journals about the influence the National Institutes of Health exerts over “the development of submitted articles.”

These lines of questioning track views expressed by Kennedy. As the New York Times recently noted, Kennedy attacked NEJM on a podcast last year as an example of a journal that had taken part in “lying to the public” and “retracting the real science.” Kennedy, then a presidential candidate, said he planned to use federal criminal and civil statutes against the journals. “I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws,” he said. “I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science.”

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon declined to comment on whether Martin targeted the journals at Kennedy’s direction. But Nixon cited the March 18 meeting where the men agreed to work together.

Kennedy’s apparent role in Martin’s missives is an ominous development for science publishers. Martin’s odds of confirmation declined on Tuesday, when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Judiciary committee, announced his opposition. If not confirmed, Martin will have to leave office on May 20, after which Jeb Boasberg, the chief judge of the DC District Court, whom the Trump White House also has attacked, would be charged with picking an interim attorney to serve until the Senate confirms a presidential nominee.

But a Kennedy campaign against scientific journals and other institutions will likely carry on in some form. Though Martin’s nomination may be dead, MAHA will live at least a bit longer.

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Trump-Appointed Judge Blocks GOP Plot to Steal North Carolina Election

The unprecedented GOP attempt to overturn a Democratic victory in a North Carolina State Supreme Court race suffered a major setback Monday night at the hands of a stalwart conservative judge who was appointed by Donald Trump.

In a lengthy ruling,federal district court Judge Richard Myers rejected the effort by Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin to throw out thousands of votes. Myers ordered the state board of election to certify Democrat Allison Riggs’ 734-vote victory.

On April 11, six months after the election, the Republican-dominated state supreme court—still short-handed from the contested election**—**had green-lit Griffin’s attempt to invalidate enough ballots from overseas and military voters to potentially reverse Riggs’ victory. Democratic Justice Anita Earls called that decision “a bloodless coup.”

“It’s hard to envision a more ‘severe restriction’ than retroactive invalidation of one’s vote.”

On Monday,Myers overruled the state Supreme Court’s decision. “This case concerns whether the federal Constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals,” he wrote. “This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible. To this court, the answer to each of those questions is ‘no.’”

Myers found that the state court decisions agreeing with Griffin’s legal challenges would violate “the equal protection and substantive due process rights of overseas military and civilian voters.” He prominently cited Bush v. Gore, the landmark 2000 case in which the US Supreme Court found that a manual recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court violated voters’ rights to equal protection under the law because it only applied to three large, Democratic-leaning counties.

“Today, we won,” Riggs said in a statement. “I’m proud to continue upholding the Constitution and the rule of law as North Carolina’s Supreme Court Justice.”

After two recounts had affirmed Riggs’ victory, Griffin initially challenged 60,000 ballots cast by early and mail-in voters who had allegedly submitted incomplete voter registration forms, even though all of them showed ID when they voted. But Griffin didn’t identify a single instance of someone who had voted illegally, and his list including example after example of lawful voters who had been wrongly challenged—including Riggs’ own parents.

The North Carolina Supreme Court rejected that aspect of Griffin’s challenge, but itallowed him to selectively target the ballots of military and overseas voters from heavily Democratic counties who did not show ID when they voted from abroad because it was not required at the time, according to rules codified by the state election board before November. Griffin asked the court to throw out more than 5,000 ballots cast by voters in six Democratic-leaning counties, which he said would result in his victory.

Myers found that this scheme violated those voters’ equal protection and due process rights. “As a consequence, overseas military and civilian voters who cast a ballot in Guilford County are required to undertake additional efforts in order to have their votes counted,” he wrote. “Their neighbors in Randolph, Alamance, and Rockingham Counties need not. That disparate treatment between similarly situated voters, based solely on their casting of ballots in ‘different counties,’ amounts to ‘a constitutional violation’ of the Equal Protection Clause.” He also wrote that “retroactive invalidation of overseas military and civilian voters’ ballots violates their substantive due process rights.”

Griffin additionally challenged close to 300ballots cast by US citizens living abroad whose parents had established residency in North Carolina. The state Supreme Court ordered those ballots thrown out with no opportunity for the voters to prove their eligibility, even though the law granting voting rights to those so-called “never residents” was unanimously passed by the North Carolina legislature in 2011 and at least 30 people on the list had voted in North Carolina before. “The court finds that post-election ballot disqualification for individuals erroneously designated as Never Residents constitutes a substantial burden on the right to vote,” Myers wrote.

The 68-page opinion—authored by a conservative federal judge—represented an emphatic defeat for Griffin. “It’s hard to envision a more ‘severe restriction’ than retroactive invalidation of one’s vote,” Myers wrote.He called Griffin’s post-election challenge “an attempt to change the rules of the game after it had been played” and added that the“court cannot countenance that strategy.”

Myers gave Griffin a week to appeal the order before the state board certified the result. Election law expert Rick Hasen predicted that further appeals would be rejected, including by the US Supreme Court, given the strength of the due process and equal protection arguments.

Riggs’ victory would maintain the 5-2 Republican majority on the state Supreme Court. But it would give Democrats a shot at retaking the court before the critical 2030 redistricting cycle, when the court could oversee new legislative maps. That’s one reason the race was so hotly contested. “We’ve knocked over the first domino that we need to for Democrats to take back the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2028,” Riggs told me after the election.

But even if Griffin ultimately loses, which now appears likely, his monthslong effort to steal the election sets an extremely dangerous precedent. He got much further than Trump didin 2020, convincing two state courts in North Carolina to throw out thousands of otherwise lawful votes after two recounts had affirmed Riggs’ victory and every other election from November had been certified. That will go a long way toward making election subversion the norm rather than the exception, especially in states where Republicans control state courts.

It shouldn’t be considered a major victory for democracy when an election result is certified six months after the contest has concluded. But that’s where things stand in Trump’s America.

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Why is Everybody Hating on Richie Rich?

For kids like me, who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, comics were a big deal. Our media landscape otherwise consisted mainly of books and records, commercial radio, and, in my family’s case, a small black-and-white TV with a coat hanger antenna that got four staticky channels. So we periodically raided our piggy banks and headed to the Stop-N-Go for candy and comics. My favorite was Richie Rich.

Richie was wildly popular, a brave and generous little fellow with unfathomably wealthy parents. He’s 9 or 10 years old in the comics, with a signature outfit consisting of white booties, blue shorts, a black jacket, and a white shirt with a big red bowtie. (He’s a teenager, with outfits less Little Lord Fauntleroy, in the 1980s cartoon series—ditto the 1994 Macaulay Culkin movie.)

Swimming pools filled with cash, monogrammed ships and planes. All part of the Riches’ over-the-top aesthetic.NBCUniversal

Had someone compared you to Richie back in the day, you might have thanked them. After all, he used his vast wealth for good. But Richie’s reputation has fallen upon hard times. “We all knew Trump was richie rich scumbag,” one Bluesky user wrote in March. Another posted, in reference to the Virginia governor and Trump sycophant Glenn Youngkin: “‘Richie Rich’ Youngkin (R), thinks poor people should just fucking stay poor.” A third circulated a parody comic book cover, “Richie Reich,” featuring a dour Musk/Richie hybrid doing the Nazi salute. It got more than 1,100 likes.

“Richie is so misunderstood,” laments 30-year-old news producer Jonny Harvey, whose late grandfather, Leon, along with brothers Alfred and Robert, churned out hundreds of issues of Richie Rich on their family-friendly Harvey Comics imprint from 1960 through 1982—with an encore from 1986 to 1989, when the company was sold—in addition to titles like Little Audrey and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Richie would not appreciate being associated with Elon Musk.Gretchen Kent

“I think people believe he’s this spoiled rich kid,” says Harvey, who is working on a documentary about the late family business. “Because of the blond hair, because he was the son of a multimillionaire, people make that [Trump] comparison. And there couldn’t be anything further from that.”

Something clearly has shifted in our culture that we would so defame this icon of upper-crust benevolence. As a journalist who covers inequality and the author of a book, Jackpot, about the American wealth fantasy run amok, I decided it was time to revisit Richie to try to understand how economic changes since his heyday might account for the transformation. As it turns out, there are important lessons here for grownups, even if you’ve never heard of “the poor little rich boy.”

The Richie comics, in retrospect, are wildly incongruous. Richie’s family (much like Trump’s) is comically ostentatious. His mom is a jewel-laden socialite, his dad some sort of industrialist. They have swimming pools filled with cash, piles of gleaming gemstones, safes swollen to bursting, and driveways paved with gold bars—not to mention monogrammed ships and planes and swank mansions. The “help” includes butler Cadbury, robot maid Irona, and Bascomb, a chauffeur who shuttles Richie around in a stretch limo. Their dog, Dollar, has dollar signs for spots.

It’s all quite over the top, and that’s part of the appeal. Billionaire and former Dallas Mavericks majority owner Mark Cuban, raised in a middle-class Pittsburgh family, “loved, loved, loved Richie Rich,” he told me via email. “Watching the cartoon was like driving around wealthy neighborhoods, dreaming of one day being able to afford one of the palatial homes I never thought I would ever even walk inside.”

Yet Richie is no snob. His endless money is leavened by courage, loyalty, and sheer goodness. Despite his vast fortune, he steers clear of the trust-fund kids, opting instead to share his adventures with public school pals. Richie’s besties, Freckles and Pee-Wee Friendly, basically live in a shack. “It was so funny,” says Angelo DeCesare, who wrote and drew Richie for Harvey Comics from 1978 to 1980. “It looked like this beat-up old thing with boards. They really made them poor!” Gloria Glad, Richie’s sweetheart, is the proverbial middle-class girl next door.

“Reggie was a jerk. The idea was to be more like Richie..” says former Harvey Comics artist Angelo DeCesare. “Reggie was presented as the guy who always got his comeuppance.”NBCUniversal

Plots typically involved Richie using his limitless resources to bail out a friend, help solve somebody’s problem, or foil the bad guys forever scheming to steal his family’s wealth. In a paper, York University marketing professor Russell Belk summarized one 1966 story like this: “To keep his girlfriend Gloria’s father from being transferred out of town, Richie Rich buys a hot dog factory for $500,000 and has her father made general manager. The man Richie outbids for the plant is his father, who was buying it as a gift for Richie’s next birthday.”

The Harvey neighborhood crew includes a Black kid—quite the rarity in mainstream comics back then, though race is never referenced: Tiny’s distinguishing trait is his diminutive stature. “It was a way of showing that we’re all part of the same neighborhood, that we all have the same aspirations…that we all can have fun together,” Kathy Jackson, a professor of media at Virginia Wesleyan University, told Jonny Harvey in an interview for his film. “Certainly, in the 1960s, in the age of civil rights, that had important ramifications.”

Most of Harvey’s founders, artists, and writers were first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants, more than a little familiar with ethnic bigotry. Their mission was to sell comics by creating stories that appealed to kids, encouraged them to read, and imparted good values along the way.

Richie would be appalled by the thought that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” as Elon Musk told Joe Rogan in February. He would never, as Musk did on X, brag about a weekend spent “feeding USAID into a wood chipper.” Nor would he terrorize federal workers or seek Medicaid reductions to facilitate tax cuts for his family. He wouldn’t slash research funding, either—Richie loves scientists and inventors. He’d be inclined to build them new, cutting-edge labs—and gleaming hospitals for the sick, and cozy abodes for the unhoused.

Because Richie Rich is not an asshole.

He is, alas, entirely fictional. “There was no such person like that in the world, who had that kind of money and would use it in the way Richie did,” DeCesare told me. To longtime Harvey Comics editor Sid Jacobson, “Richie was his idealized fantasy of what he really wished the wealthy would be; they would be kind,” says son Seth Jacobson, 67, who remembers hanging out with his late father’s team at their offices in Manhattan’s old Gulf and Western Building. “My dad was a diehard Democrat,” he recalls. “He wanted taxes to be higher for the rich and the upper middle class. He wanted universal health coverage.”

Some Richie characters were more in sync with the Mar-a-Lago crowd, like Reginald Van Dough, Richie’s greedy, scheming cousin, and Mayda Munny, a snooty social climber who is desperate to woo Richie away from Gloria but inevitably fails because Gloria loves Richie despite his money, not because of it. “Those comics were very moral. That’s what I liked about them,” says DeCesare. “Reggie was a jerk. The idea was to be more like Richie. Be generous, kind, have empathy for your fellow human beings. Reggie was presented as the guy who always got his comeuppance.”

Ideally, children are encouraged to share and tell the truth—and to care about others. As we grow up, some people continue to embrace those values. Others clearly don’t. As for Richie’s parents, the question of what it might take to amass and protect such riches or who may have been exploited in the process is never explored. Did Mr. Rich, like even the “good billionaire” Warren Buffett, have vast holdings in polluting industries or take advantage of obscure (if scandalously legal) tax avoidance strategies? We’ll never know. Richie exists in a realm free of adult politics, unscathed by what one wealthy Silicon Valley denizen described to me as the “blasé weirdness” experienced by the heirs to vast fortunes—think Succession. (“My wife and I are doing our best for that not to happen,” Cuban told me. “I hope my kids are more like Richie.”)

The values Richie embodied, and our notion of noblesse oblige—the duty of society’s richest to behave with honor, generosity, and responsibility toward those with less—have waned in tandem with a staggering rise in wealth inequality. In 1960, if your salary exceeded $60,000, every additional dollar was taxed at a rate ranging from 71 percent to 91 percent. This helped keep our financial differences in check. But the tax cuts signed by President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s chopped the top bracket from 70 percent to 28 percent. Two years after he left office, Congress enabled a type of trust—by accident, the lawyer credited with inventing it told me—that America’s dynasties now use routinely to transfer vast fortunes, often billions of dollars, to offspring without paying a dime of inheritance tax.

Since Richie’s heyday, we’ve also witnessed the rise of the zero-sum mindset embodied by Trump and his minions. Namely, the idea that every transaction has a winner and a loser—and you do not want to lose. This ethos is now standard operating procedure for a subset of the superrich, compelling ultrawealthy parents to bribe and cheat their children’s way into elite colleges, as revealed in the 2019 scandal dubbed Operation Varsity Blues. It also helps explain why more than 84 percent of that year’s incoming college freshmen—whose collective top priority in 1969 was “developing a meaningful philosophy of life”—selected as their new No. 1 goal: “being very well off financially.”

A uniting myth of America for scrappers and strivers and immigrants is that of a land of opportunity, despite the bigotry that has pervaded our laws and culture. (Leon Harvey would have excelled in advertising, grandson Jonny told me, “but Jewish sons of Jewish immigrants mostly could not get the advertising jobs.”) The distribution of wealth in Richie’s day was by no means egalitarian, but it was markedly more so than today. The notion of a child of superrich parents attending public schools and mixing with poor and middle-income kids was less laughable in 1965, when the pay ratio of CEOs to typical workers at the nation’s 350 largest companies was 21 to 1. By 2019, the ratio had soared to 320 to 1.

A real child of billionaires today probably wouldn’t be running around with poor kids like Freckles and Pee-Wee.NBCUniversal/Sally Edelstein archive

Such vast resource differences contribute to what social scientists call “income segregation,” and I like to call “wealth flight.” “The things that people can afford tend to dictate the spaces that they inhabit,” explains Cornell sociologist Kendra Bischoff, who studies the phenomenon in collaboration with Stanford’s Sean Reardon. Rising inequality increases “the spatial separation of people of different incomes,” she told me. When parents opt into private schools, elite sports leagues, and other exclusive activities for their children, “those are the kinds of structural conditions that lead kids to be a lot less likely to hang out with each other,” and that lack of exposure very plausibly “limits their understanding of the world and decreases empathy for people who are different than them.”

There’s that word again—the one that, in the Trumpian mindset, belies weakness. Indeed, there’s good evidence that people of higher socioeconomic status tend to be less empathetic than their lower-status counterparts. “We find that people who are relatively well-off are less likely to orient to others in social environments,” says Paul Piff, a psychologist who studies wealth and behavior at the University of California, Irvine. What’s more, he says, “upper-class individuals show—both explicitly, they talk about it, and physiologically—reduced signs of compassion, less sympathy. They’re less moved by the needs of others.”

Who’s to know if hoarding money makes some people callous or whether less-empathetic people are simply more prone to pursuing materialistic aims? Cuban restated a theory I’ve heard numerous times, that great wealth merely amplifies a person’s character: If you’re a Reginald sans dough, you’ll end up a Reginald Van Dough. But “if you were nice and caring” before you hit the jackpot, you’ll remain a good person—and have more resources to do good. “Where I think people deviate from that is during the grind to make money—to get to having more than you ever dreamed of,” Cuban says. “That grind is filled with uncertainty for all those not born wealthy. That’s where you focus on your company, often to the exclusion of others. Families. Relationships.”

The ramifications of America’s wealth divide have grown clearer as the Trump regime lays waste to agencies and programs that the families of Richie’s friends might have relied upon and seeks to privatize federal services and enact more tax breaks for the wealthiest 0.01 percent—a group who began this year with an average of $938 million in estimated household assets, and whose share of the nation’s overall wealth has more than quadrupled since 1976, even as the middle class’s share has dwindled.

Richie Rich was a good egg, if a Fabergé one. But today, as America’s wealthiest have fallen in line behind the most egregiously materialistic human being ever to occupy the Oval Office, Richie seems like an anachronism. Remember that Gulf and Western Building where Harvey Comics once had its offices? In the mid-1990s it was acquired by a consortium that included a certain New York City real estate developer. Now it’s the Trump International Hotel and Tower.

The irony, as they say, is rich.

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Bird Populations Are Declining Across North America

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

Bird populations across North America are falling most quickly in areas where they are most abundant, according to new research, prompting fears of ecological collapse in previously protected areas.

Analysis of nearly 500 bird species across North America has found that three-quarters are declining across their ranges, with two-thirds of the total shrinking significantly.

The study, published in the journal Science, indicates that former strongholds for bird species are no longer safe, particularly in grasslands, drylands, and the Arctic.

Some of the study results suggest that we are “seeing fundamental changes to the environments around us.”

In one of the most ambitious uses of citizen science data so far, scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology used observations from eBird, a popular application used by birdwatchers to record sightings, to model changes between 2007 and 2021. The granularity of the data allowed researchers to track the rate of change in 10-square-mile segments across North America, showing dramatic declines in areas where less than two decades ago bird species had thrived.

“We’ve known for several years that a lot of bird species in North America have been declining. With this study, we were aiming to understand in much finer spatial resolution where birds were declining and where they might be increasing. Rather than having a range-wide trend to see if a species is going up or down, we want to know where it is going up and down,” said Alison Johnston, director of the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling at the University of St Andrews, UK, who led the study.

“The main ecological finding is that the locations where these species were thriving in the past, where the environments were really well suited to birds, are now the places where they are suffering the most,” she said.

The researchers said further studies were needed to explain the reasons behind the changes, many of which were dramatic, with populations falling by more than 10 percent a year in some areas. Global heating and habitat change were put forward as the main theories behind the shifts, but Johnston said they ultimately did not know.

“The way I interpret this result is that it’s indicative of major changes in our world,” she said. “The fact that where birds used to have strongholds, where there used to be a lot of resources, where the environments were really suitable, are now the places where they are declining most, that suggests to me that we are just seeing fundamental changes to the environments around us. The birds are like the canary in the coal mine,” she said.

The research adds to a recent series of studies that have documented severe declines of birds in nature reserves and protected areas.

Despite the worrying overall picture, the researchers found pockets of stability in bird populations in their analysis, such as the Appalachians and western mountains. In addition, 97 percent of all bird species had some pockets where their populations were increasing.

The team at Cornell University has previously developed methods for reliably converting citizen science observations in apps such as eBird into data that can be used to monitor population changes in a single species. The study authors only included results that had passed strict reliability checks.

Amanda Rodewald from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a professor and co-author on the study, said the methods would allow conservationists to target their efforts.

“It is this kind of small-scale information across broad geographies that has been lacking and it’s exactly what we need to make smart conservation decisions,” she said. “These data products give us a new lens to detect and diagnose population declines and to respond to them in a way that’s strategic, precise and flexible. That’s a gamechanger for conservation.”

Ian Burfield, a global science coordinator with BirdLife, who was not involved in the study, welcomed the research and said it highlighted areas for further investigation.

“North American birds are one of very few taxonomic groups and regions where such data exist to facilitate this approach. This emphasises the vital need for more field data collection, both through formal monitoring schemes and citizen science efforts, in many other parts of the world, especially in the biodiversity-rich tropics,” he said.

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“Designed to Scare People”: Lawyers Warn of Self-Deportation Notices Posted in Immigration Courts

On April 28, lawyer Paul O’Dwyer opened his email inbox to find some good news. A New York City immigration judge had approved the asylum applicationfor one of his clients. But the immigration court email also contained an attachment O’Dwyer hadn’t seen before: a Justice Department notice encouraging immigrants to self-deport.

O’Dwyer was confused. If an immigration judge had just granted his client protection from deportation, why would they send out such a flyer? “It was bizarre,” he said, “and I was surprised to see it simply because it came with an order approving the asylum application. On that front, it just didn’t make sense.”

Titled “Message to Illegal Aliens: A Warning to Self-Deport,” the message is also available in Spanish and lists the supposed benefits of self-deportation and the consequences of being removed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The first category includes the ability to “leave on your own terms” and keep any money earned in the United States, as well as the possibility of a flight subsidized by the US government. The alternative, the notice warns, could result in “immediate deportation,” daily fines of close to $1,000, and potential jail time.

Immigration lawyers say the Justice Department’s self-deportation notice is misleading.

“It’s troubling to see that the immigration court is injecting itself into the actual removal process and taking a position on that,” O’Dwyer said.

The warning appears to be part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to boost its deportation numbers by making immigrants voluntarily leave, while aiming to discourage future migration to the United States. “Leave now,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. “If you don’t, we will find you and we will deport you. You will never return.”

The notice assures immigrantsthat it’s “safe” to self-deport using the CBP Home mobile application, which the Trump administration launched in March. “People in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way,” President Donald Trump said in an official White House video publicizing the app, “or they can get deported the hard way—and that’s not pleasant.” The administration is also offering a $1,000 stipend and travel assistance to incentivize immigrants to use the CBP Home self-deportation feature.

Alarmed by what he described as the notice’s “inflammatory language,” O’Dwyer shared a copy with a group of fellow immigration attorneys. He wasn’t alone in noticing this troubling new trend. Immigration lawyers across the United States—including in Chicago, Cleveland, and San Antonio—have observed this notice to self-deport posted on the walls of immigration courts where they practice or are receiving it as part of communications related to their cases. One attorney in Colorado reported getting it with the denial of an appeal from one of her clients issued by the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews the decisions of immigration judges.

Many lawyers have called the warning misleading and essentially a trap, particularly for immigrants without legal representation. One lawyer in New York said it “reads more like a scare tactic than informed legal guidance.” Kansas City-based Yanky Perelmuter saw the notice inside the courtroom, laid out on a table with other informational pamphlets about how immigrants can report a change of address or find counsel. “You’re offering legal advice,” he said. “They’re saying there’s a benefit to self-deport, but without explaining what are the disadvantages of self-deporting.” It “looks like the judge is endorsing this,” Perelmuter added.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department’s branch running the US immigration courts, was asked about the notice to self-deport and declined to comment.

Denver-based attorney Lisa Guerra recently received the notice alongside information about hearings in the cases of two asylum seekers she’s representing. She also saw it posted on the Denver immigration court’s bulletin board. For one, Guerra explained, the blanket notice makes no distinction between immigrants with final orders of deportation and those who may be eligible for some form of relief such as asylum or cancellation of removal. It also doesn’t mention the right to appeal an immigration judge’s deportation order.

“It’s mostly focused on just getting them to leave and not anything on finishing their process here in the United States. I guess that goes with the theme, right? They don’t really think they’re entitled to due process.”

As a result, unrepresented immigrants with legitimate claims to stay in the United States might be induced to abandon their cases fearing immediate deportation or the threat of financial penalties. “It’s mostly focused on just getting them to leave and not anything on finishing their process here in the United States,” Guerra said. “I guess that goes with the theme, right? They don’t really think they’re entitled to due process.”

Guerra and other lawyers who have seen or received the self-deportation notice have also pointed out that it gives a false impression about the lack of consequences of departing in a “dignified way.” Traditionally, an immigrantlooking to leave the United States of their own accord in order to avoid a final order of deportation—and potentially be exempt from bans on re-entering the country—might petition an immigration judge for a grant of voluntary departure, for which they have to meet certain eligibility requirements and, in some cases, waive any existing applications for relief and pay a bond. (Even a grant of voluntary departure might not protect someone from being barred from returning to the United States for several years after leaving.)

Taking the government’s offer as presented on the Justice Department’s notice, several lawyers fear, could backfire. If an immigrant leaves the United States while in removal proceedings and fails to show up in court, that could trigger a deportation order in absentia from an immigration judge, which in turn carries harsher long-term consequences such as bars on eligibility forseveral forms of immigration benefits.

“I don’t think individuals [representing themselves] would know enough to say, ‘I need to let the court know that I would like to leave on my own accord so that there’s a record of that in my immigration court record,'” Guerra said.

The concept of self-deportation is hardly a new one, Dina Francesca Haynes, executive director of the Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights, pointed out, and successful lawsuits have been brought to challenge the practice of Department of Homeland Security agents allegedly coercing immigrants into signing their own removals. But now, she said, “this is a whole app and flyer with a QR code and seemingly posted in courts all over the country.”

Haynes is skeptical that immigrants will turn to the government’s CBP Home app in light of the atmosphere of distrust created by the administration’s immigration enforcement policies. “A lot of this is designed to scare people,” she said, “and it’s unfortunately very effective.”

O’Dwyer shares that sentiment. “I don’t know necessarily that a lot of people are then going to go home and pack their bags and leave the country when they get this,” O’Dwyer said of the notice. “But it certainly is going to discourage people from attending any future immigration appointments.”

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No, Elon Musk, Government Should Not Be Run Like a Business.

For years, I’ve heard the familiar refrain: “America should be run like a business.”

First, it came from the young republicans at my small, conservative, undergraduate institution, advocating for Mitt Romney in 2012. More recently, it has become a justification for Elon Musk’s indiscriminate cuts to government spending alongside his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In a recent interview on Fox News, Musk claimed that a commercial company would have filed for bankruptcy by now if they were to operate the way that the federal government operates.

So I reached out to Mike Mechanic, a senior editor at Mother Jones, to ask if the government should be run more like a business. His answer was simple: That’s bonkers.

Not only does the government provide services and resources that do not easily map to the business world’s profit/loss framework, the government is, designed to be a corrective force to the excesses of business.

“The government does all sorts of things that you can’t put a number on the outcome,” says Mechanic.

Watch part of my conversation with Mike Mechanic here:

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Trump’s Onslaught Hits Staffers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Staff at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Department of Energy division that guides public and private research and development involving renewable energy and energy efficiency, were blindsided with a round of layoffs on Monday morning.

Three lab sources told Mother Jones the cuts affect several NREL departments, including communications, wind, water, and community energy. Remote and in-person staffers are both affected, as are non-probationary employees—those who have worked at NREL for more than two years.

A current staffer described the firings as “rather haphazard and unorganized.” According to agency sources, even lab managers were not told of the cuts until Monday. The staffer said one colleague they’d spoken with had been fired after first being locked out of a work-issued laptop without explanation.

All three NREL sources said 114 staffers were cut, per their conversations with department leaders and an all-hands meeting where employees were told that the layoffs were due to funding being paused or cancelled. Internal documentation reviewed by Mother Jones confirms this number. (NREL has not responded to a request for comment.)

The cuts come less than a month after NREL staff received an email from their leadership team offering unpaid leave options, and just days after the White House released a budget calling for large cuts to renewable energy.

The lab has more than 3,000 employees, but the sources I spoke with said even modest layoffs will create bottlenecks. NREL “specifically hires to make sure that there is a person assigned to a specific amount of work and complete it,” said one source, and unlike NIH and NSF research, the lab’s work is driven in part by industry partnerships. “You have to hit a certain number of billable hours.”

The employee explains that while their schedules have changed—because so much staff time is now spent “attempting to prove our worth to the administration—the lab’s clients have not. “If I am suddenly the only person on my team, I can’t handle that work,” the employee told me.

“Until January, I loved my job,” they continued. Since Donald Trump took office, proving their worth has felt “like a fool’s errand.”

A NREL researcher told me that any feeling of “security and optimism is gone,” and pointed to a breach of trust between employees and managers. “They have kept us in the dark and insisted things were better than they are,” the researcher says. “It’s a huge loss in terms of talent and brainpower.”

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The Trump Administration Canceled a Program That Reduced SIDS. Enter the Anti-Vaxxers.

After years of progress in reducing the number of babies that succumb to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), the National Institutes of Health has terminated its participation in the Safe to Sleep program, STAT News reported last week. The program encouraged parents to practice a suite of evidence-based safety practices when putting their infants to sleep, including placing them on their backs instead of their stomachs. It has been credited with a 50 percent reduction in SIDS deaths since its inception in 1994. Despite the progress, there is still more to do: In 2022, the last year for which there was data, about 3,700 babies died suddenly and unexpectedly, according to the CDC.

The federal government has not offered any explanation as to why the program was canceled. In an email to Mother Jones, an NIH spokesperson wrote that information from the Safe to Sleep campaign linked to the website, adding that materials “remain available to the public, and we encourage individuals to visit to access these resources. ” The spokesperson then noted, “No final decision has been made regarding the future” of the program.

In light of the NIH’s initial announcement of terminating its program involvement, it’s worth noting that Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. used to chair, has long promoted false claims about an association between vaccines and SIDS.

It wasn’t just the group that promoted this misinformation—it was RFK Jr. himself. In 2023, for example, he posted to his 5.5 million followers on X about a statistical analysis study that claimed to find a correlation between number of vaccines given and infant mortality, saying the “new peer-reviewed study found a positive statistical correlation between infant mortality rates and the number of vaccine doses received by babies—confirming findings made by the same researchers a decade ago.” (Both the recent and the older study had severalmethodological flaws, as surgeon and pseudoscience debunker David Gorski wrote in Science-Based Medicine.)

Last year on X, Kennedy claimed that the CDC had suppressed the link between SIDS and a vaccine that prevented diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. (The vaccine that the letter referred to isn’t used anymore, and multiple studies since then have shown no connection between vaccines and SIDS.) Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services oversees the National Institutes of Health, the agency that made the decision to cancel the Safe to Sleep program.

Once news of NIH’s cancellation broke, it didn’t take long for anti-vaccine activists to seize the opportunity to promote SIDS misinformation on social media. On April 30, the same day STAT’s story was published, Children’s Health Defense posted to its 287,000 followers on X, “There is an undeniable link between vaccines and sudden infant death syndrome.” It followed up with a similar post the next day. On May 3, anti-vaccine activist Steve Kirsch suggested to his 599,000 followers that the recent death of a pair of Idaho twins was caused by vaccines. “We’ve seen SIDS cases before,” he wrote. “With twins and no other causes such as CO poisoning, the most likely cause is a vaccine-mediated death.” (The deaths are currently being investigated as a homicide, local news outlets report.) On May 4, an X account called A Midwestern Doctor posted to 248,000 followers “Our government has known for a century that vaccines cause SIDS, but like COVID vaccine injuries, they kept covering it up.”

The agency had made the decision during the first uptick in infant deaths in the three decades that the program has existed; between 2020 and 2022, the last year for which data is available, a recent study found, rates increased by 12 percent. Experts can’t explain the sudden reversal of the decades-long decline; experts list Covid, maternal opioid use, and safe-sleep misinformation on social media as theories, the New York Times reported in January. In the wake of NIH’s decision, nonprofits are scrambling to keep the program going, NPR reported this week.

The cancellation of Safe to Sleep comes at a time when leaders at the highest levels of the Trump administration are calling on Americans to have more babies. The agency’s recent decision has sparked outrage on social media, especially from people for whom SIDS is personal. As one X user put it in a post linking to STAT’s story, “My twin brother died of SIDS in his crib when we were a couple weeks old. Not many Americans at all support [the decision to terminate the program]—I know that much—but in the off chance any do, I’d highly recommend they stay far the hell away from me.”

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Trump Promised No New Business Deals With Foreign Governments. He Lied.

This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here.

On January 10, 2025, President Trump released an “ethics agreement” detailing how he would handle his personal business interests while in the White House. It is remarkably weak and does not require Trump to divest any of his holdings. Unlike a similar agreement for his first term, it does not prohibit the Trump Organization from striking new deals abroad while Trump is president. Instead, it simply prohibits the Trump Organization from striking deals directly with foreign governments.

Trump’s second-term ethics agreement is such a permissive document that it is challenging to find a way to violate it. But three months into his presidency, Trump has found a way.

Last Thursday, the Trump Organization struck a deal to build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar. To develop the project, the Trump Organization is partnering with Dar Global, a Saudi Arabian company, and Qatari Diar, a company owned by the Qatari government. Qatari Diar was established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005. Its stated purpose is to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.”

Eric Trump, who runs the Trump Organization, said that the deal was only with the Saudi company and not Qatari Diar. “We have zero relationship with them,” he insisted in a statement.

That appears to be false.

Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, sought to eliminate even the appearance of financial conflicts.

“We are incredibly proud to expand the Trump brand into Qatar through this exceptional collaboration with Qatari Diar and Dar Global,” Eric Trump said in a press release. “Trump International Golf Club Simaisma and our luxury villa community will reflect our highest standards of quality, prestige, and timeless elegance.”

At the announcement of the deal, the president’s son appeared alongside Abdullah bin Hamad bin Abdullah Al Attiya, a Qatari government official and the Qatari Diar Chairman. As the deal was signed, he posed in front of a backdrop featuring the logos of the Trump Organization, Dar Global, and Qatari Diar.

Separately, the Trump Organization announced it was also partnering with Dar Global to build a new Trump International Hotel & Tower in Dubai. While Dar Global is not formally owned by the Saudi government, it “has close ties to the Saudi government.” The tower, slated to be completed in 2031, will feature the highest rooftop infinity pool in the world.

A rendering of Trump International Hotel & Tower, Dubai.Dar Global

It will also be home to a private club called “The Trump,” which “brings together wellness, business, and the timeless atmosphere of a classic private club.”

Last week, another company owned by the Trump family, the crypto firm World Liberty Financial, announced it would be involved in a transaction involving a foreign government. Zach Witkoff, the co-founder of WLF, announced that MGX, a venture firm owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, would make a $2 billion investment in the crypto exchange Binance, using WLF’s embryonic stable coin, USD1. Stable coins are crypto assets pegged to traditional currency in an effort to avoid the volatility of other tokens.

There is no reason for MGX to finance the transaction with the little-used USD1, rather than cash or a more established stable coin, other than the desire by MGX and Binance to ingratiate themselves with the Trump family. MGX is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who met with President Trump at the White House in March. Binance has been subject to oversight by the federal government after admitting in 2023 to violating money laundering laws.

The flurry of deals comes just days before Trump is scheduled to travel to the region. In a trip scheduled for May 13-16, Trump will visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

The exact financial arrangements, including the direct financial benefit to President Trump, remain opaque. But discussions of trade, military assistance, and other issues are now inextricably entwined with Trump’s private real estate investments. Trump is openly leveraging his position as president to enhance his personal finances.

This is not normal.

Previous Republican and Democratic presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, sought to eliminate even the appearance of conflicts. Biden and Obama divested of all assets except for cash and diversified mutual funds. Bush placed his assets into a qualified blind trust, which means investment decisions were made without his knowledge or input. They did not enter into new business ventures while in the White House—much less a new venture directly with foreign governments.

Trump has imposed high tariffs on nearly every country, including 145 percent on China, as part of a strategy to force businesses to invest domestically. “Remember, there are no tariffs if you build your product here,” Trump said Sunday on Meet The Press. “It’s very easy. It’s very simple.” Trump also insisted that American consumers should be willing to pay more for some items, or forgo purchases completely, to support this effort. “I’m just saying [American children] don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three,” Trump said. “They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”

But Trump’s own company, the Trump Organization, is not investing in projects in the United States. Since his inauguration, the Trump Organization has announced new developments in the UAE, Qatar, India and Vietnam. But none in the United States.

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Trump’s Slot Machine Spits Out Two New Orders

Much has been written about the cruel, and often unconstitutional, onslaught of executive orders that has come to define President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. But somewhat lost in the discourse is the brazen stupidity, a stunning randomness with which Trump appears to feed his slot machine of presidential instructions.

“I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders,” Trump announced on social media.

In came the dutiful derision: As manyexplained, Alcatraz, the federal island prison once notorious for its former brutality and elaborate escape attempts, closed in 1963 because it was too costly to manage and has since operated as a tourist attraction. It would therefore take an enormous sum of money to renovate the site to meet current federal standards for prisons after the president simply, by his own admission, pondered it into executive order.

“Just an idea I’ve had,” Trump said on Sunday, responding to a reporter’s question about where the proposal came from. He then muttered a complaint about “radical” immigration judges, before describing Alcatraz as “sad” but a “symbol of law and order.

Minutes later, Trump issued another haphazard executive order on Truth Social. “I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands,” Trump wrote, prompting a slavish Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to respond on X, “We’re on it.”

Of course, the announcement was scant on critical details. Would tariffs apply to US film productions in foreign locations? Even for a single scene filmed abroad? Did a specific movie spark this outrage? With questions and suggestions of illegality once again abounding, the announcement sent media stocks sliding, which in Trump’s second term has become something of our nightmare capitalist barometer of how things are going.

Compared to the blitz of actions that have upended—and in many cases ruined—lives since Trump returned to power, Sunday night’s dueling orders are low stakes. But they neatly capture governance by way of shitposting, the outcome of federal policy left to feral instincts.

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Trump Admits He’s Iffy On The Whole Due Process Thing

It has long been evident from his actions that President Donald Trump does not respect the constitutional principle of due process. And now, he has admitted it himself.

In an interview with Meet the Press host Kristen Welker of NBC News that aired on Sunday morning, Trump made clear that he does not concern himself with the pesky details of the Constitution—despite the fact that the Oath of Office he has now taken twice requires him to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.”

When Welker pressed Trump on the administration’s refusal to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from the El Salvador prison they deported him to—despite the Supreme Court’s order that the administration “facilitate” his release from custody and officials’ admission that Abrego Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error”—the president said that the decision is one for El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, to make. (In the Oval Office last month, Bukele said he would not send Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant originally from El Salvador, back to the United States. The U.S. government has alleged, without presenting verifiable evidence, that he is a member of the MS-13 gang.)

Pressing Trump further, Welker said: “Your secretary of state says everyone who’s here, citizens and non citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree?”

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I’m not a lawyer.” (His administration’s actions—which include seeking to deport international student protesters who criticized Israel’s war in Gaza and sending a group of Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador seemingly based on their tattoos—suggest he and his lawyers do not believe in due process.)

When Welker reminded him of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to trial by grand jury and due process, Trump suggested it would be too cumbersome to actually honor in practice. “It might say that,” he replied, referring to the Fifth Amendment, “but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.”

WELKER: Your secretary of state says everyone who's here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree?

TRUMP: I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know.

WELKER: Don't you need to uphold the Constitution?

TRUMP: I don't know pic.twitter.com/xRwDh8sm0X

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 4, 2025

Trump continued to double down, saying the United States is home to “some of the worst, most dangerous people on Earth, and I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it.”

“But even given those numbers that you’re talking about,” Welker continued, “don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States?”

Again, Trump’s answer did not inspire confidence that the president can be trusted to uphold the guiding principles of the country. “I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.” He added that his lawyers “have a different interpretation” of the Supreme Court’s ruling from those who believe it requires the administration to try to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States.

In the wide-ranging interview, Trump also attacked Welker for some of her questions (“Why don’t you ask it a different way?” he chided, when she asked about his response to criticisms that he’s taking the country down an authoritarian path); refused to rule out using military force to take Greenland; refused to rule out that his tariffs might cause a recession; and claimed he has been trolling in previously speculating on running for an unconstitutional third term (“This is not something I’m looking to do,” he said).

But his comments regarding due process and the Constitution may be the most telling about how Trump sees his role in upholding—or breaking—the rule of law. As a protester calling for Abrego Garcia’s return told my colleague Isabela Dias on Thursday: “If we break due process in this country, we’re all doomed. Everyone can be put in jail.”

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Leading Catholics Condemn Trump Meme Depicting Himself as Pope

The White House has dropped a new trolling tactic—and many Catholics are not laughing.

Less than two weeks after the death of Pope Francis, on Friday, the White House reposted on X a seemingly AI-generated meme that Trump shared on Truth Social of himself as the pope. In the eyes of many Catholics, Trump, who was raised Presbyterian and more recently said he’s a non-denominational Christian, has committed a grave act of blasphemy by posting the image.

“There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr. President,” the New York State Catholic Conference, a policy and lobbying organization, posted on X. “We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.” Dennis Poust, executive director of the Conference, told the New York Times the post was “disrespectful,” adding, “It’s never appropriate to ridicule or mock the papacy.”

When reporters asked about the image, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, replied, “I hope he didn’t have anything to do with that,” referring to the creation of the image. (It was not immediately clear who made the image.) Dolan added, “It wasn’t good.”

Responding to general questions before Mass at his titular church this morning in Rome, Cardinal Dolan spoke about President Trump‘s post on social media dressed as a pope. @thegnewsroom pic.twitter.com/sF1zshVTP3

— Mary Shovlain (@maryshovlain) May 4, 2025

Michael Steele, former Republican National Committee chairman and a devout Catholic, wrote on X that the post “affirms how unserious and incapable he is. At 78 he remains a 10yo child, emotionally scarred and broken while desperate to prove he could be somebody. His problem: he can’t grow up to prove it.”

Anthony Scaramucci, former White House Communications Director during Trump’s first term, who is also Catholic, wrote over the White House’s X post: “You are trolling and trying to trigger all of us. Especially us Catholics. But the arrogance and general stupidity and the disgrace that you represent will blow back on all of you.” Scaramucci followed up Saturday night with another post: “The dope of dopes not a pope.”

Major Catholic organizations including the US Conference for Catholic Bishops, Catholic Charities, and Catholic Relief Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday morning. The Vatican also did not immediately respond.

The post came a few days after Trump told reporters at the White House, “I’d like to be pope. That would be my No. 1 choice.” But he appeared to acknowledge he was joking, subsequently saying, “No, I don’t know, I have no preference,” adding, “I must say we have a cardinal that happens to be out of a place called New York who’s very good, so we’ll see what happens,” referring to Dolan.

Trump: "I'd like to be Pope. That would be my number one choice." pic.twitter.com/VHB5VPdoV9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 29, 2025

As I previously wrote, a quick look at Trump’s biography shows he does not belong amongst the most revered figures of Catholicism, despite Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) claims otherwise: The man supports the death penalty; has (at least) five kids by three different women; and has been found liable for sexual assault, which he also famously bragged about on tape. The Bible explicitly prohibits all of these actions.

Others in Trump’s orbit, though, appeared to further Trump’s idea, or at least dismiss it as a joke. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), wrote on X: “This would truly be a dark horse candidate, but I would ask the papal conclave and Catholic faithful to keep an open mind about this possibility!” Juanita Broaddrick, who accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault and supported Trump despite his own history, shared a 40-second long AI-generated video purporting to show Trump as pope. “Trump’s latest Epic troll is making the left insane,” she wrote.

Several X users demanded answers from Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic who met with the pope just a day before his death. “As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen,” he wrote on X Saturday. A few days prior, Vance also joked about Secretary of State Marco Rubio taking on “pope” as his fifth title.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told some reporters that Trump “has been a staunch champion for Catholics and religious liberty.” The papal conclave to decide the next pope will begin on May 7. Given the requirements—which include being a baptized Catholic and an ordained bishop—you can be sure that Trump will not win this election.

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Missing Lynx: How the Rise of Border Walls Has Divided Wildlife Populations

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

The lynxes of the Białowieża forest once freely prowled through 548 square miles of ancient woodland. Then, in 2022, the habitat was abruptly sliced in two. Poland built a 115-mile wall across its border with Belarus to stop refugees and migrants entering the EU. About 15 lynxes were left stranded on the Polish side of the forest, forced into a genetic bottleneck.

The 18-foot-high barrier, which is topped with wire and cameras, also dissects the forest’s population of bison, wolves, and elk. Researchers monitored 10 sites along the border, walking along sections and counting signs of humans and wildlife.

“I could not have foreseen the diversity of impacts that we ended up finding,” says the lead author of the report, Katarzyna Nowak, from thePolish Academy of Sciences’ Mammal Research Institute.

There are now an estimated 74 border walls globally, up from six in 1989, with more in the pipeline.

Humans have been building walls for thousands of years, but the speed and scale with which they are now being constructed has ballooned over recent decades.

With refugee crises in Europe and Asia, and the rise of governments cracking down on immigration, the planet is increasingly crisscrossed with steel barriers, chain-link fencing and razor wire—with significant consequences for wildlife.

There are now an estimated 74 border walls globally, up from just six in 1989, with more in the pipeline. “The hardening of international borders through fortification and militarisation is on the rise,” researchers say in the report on the impacts of the Polish-Belarusian border wall.

In a separate paper published in February, another researcher argues for “ecological peace corridors” to protect wildlife movement amid growing human conflict.

At the same time that borders are strengthened, the need for humans and other animals to migrate is being supercharged by climate breakdown. “It is a worrying future in multiple respects,” says Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at BirdLife International. “This is a worldwide phenomenon that is going to become of increasing importance.”

His research found that border walls obstruct the ranges of more than 700 species of mammals, including leopards, tigers, cheetah, and the critically endangered Saiga antelope. The study identified 20,000 miles of borders fortified with fences and walls, which can cause habitats to fragment and create injuries from entanglement, genetic bottlenecks and blocked migration routes.

The US-Mexico border call crosses the Madrean Sky Islands, home to the greatest diversity of mammals, reptiles, and ants in the United States.

The US-Mexico border wall—which was found to have the most impact of those studied—bisects the ranges of 120 mammals alone. Pygmy owls, which stay close to the ground for safety, do not fly high enough to cross the wall, and populations of pumas and coatis—a raccoon-like animal found across Latin Americahave fallen. Bighorn sheep risk becoming “zombie species” as the populations become too genetically fragmented and unable to move sufficiently to adapt to climate change.

The study of the Polish-Belarusian border showed animals were keeping their distance from the wall because they were scared of it. Despite the fact that it passed through a rich forest habitat, Nowak says: “We had very few signs of animals along the border.”

Thirty-six cameras were up for more than a year and images of lynxes were only found on them twice. Humans were more frequently seen on cameras than wildlife, especially at border sites.

Sound recordings revealed human sounds—such as vehicles, music, dogs, and gunshots—penetrated up to nearly 275 yards into the forest, which is aUnesco world heritage site.

Rubbish lined the border, drawing dogs, cats and other scavengers to the area. “This again creates an unnatural interface, not just between people and wild animals, but also domestic animals,” says Nowak.

Plant surveys suggested invasive species might be able to survive in the “sun-streaked strip in the middle of the forest,” says Nowak, who is worried that the forest could start to split into two.

A bird sits perched on amid razor wire over the US-Mexico border fence. Such barriers break up habitats, stop migration and injure animals.David Swanson/AFP via Getty Images

Borderland regions such as Białowieża Forest can also be among the continent’s most biodiverse places. The border fence between Slovenia and Croatia has sliced up the Dinaric mountain range, home to some of the most important brown bear and wolf populations in Europe.

The region’s lynx population is threatened with high levels of inbreeding, with researchers warning that the fence “may just be the last push for the population to spiral down the extinction vortex.” The 3,000-mile border between China and Mongolia, which is almost entirely fenced, has blocked the migrations of Asiatic wild ass.

Even if these fences are removed in the future, migratory routes are not easily re-routed. Red deer on the border between the Czech Republic and the former West Germany still do not cross what was the “Iron Curtain” —even though the electric fence that divided the countries was taken down 25 years ago, a study found. The life expectancy of a deer is 15 years, so no deer alive at the time of the study would have ever encountered the barrier.

A 2025 review of the impacts of border walls had four key recommendations to make them less damaging: Leave gaps in the fencing; cut down on light and noise; avoid the concertina razor-wire tops, which many animals die on; and increase cooperation between countries on the borders.

To ease the pressure on wildlife, scientists are pushing for small gaps in fencing to allow species through. The US-Mexico border wall covers more than 700 miles of the almost 2,000-mile long frontier, and crosses the Madrean Sky Islands—patches of woodland that are home to the greatest diversity of mammals, reptiles, and ants in the United States.

A study looked at the 13 small passages for wildlife along 80 miles of continuous border—roughly one every 6 miles—each about the size of an A4 sheet of paper. Researchers collected and analyzed more than 12,000 videos of animals encountering them.

Deer, bears, wolves, and pronghorn sheep were all blocked by the wall, but cameras showed coyotes, wild pig-like peccaries, American badgers, and even some smaller mountain lions were squeezing through.

“We were surprised by how busy the A4 holes ended up being,” says Eamon Harrity, wildlife programme manager at Sky Islands Alliance in Arizona and lead author of the study of the wall along the US-Mexico border.

“We want more of them,” says Harrity. “They need to be, at a minimum, every half a kilometer.”

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Scientists Deem Trump’s Latest Funding Freeze a “Slow-Moving Apocalypse”

The hits to science, and scientists, keep coming under the Trump administration.

This week, the National Science Foundation (NSF), a government agency that funds research across the country, told staffers that “until further notice,” it will stop payments on grants it has already awarded for studies—and stop awarding new ones.

That’s according to a scoop from the science journal Nature, which got its hands on an internal NSF email. The freeze will be “a slow-moving apocalypse,” an NSF-funded scientist told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “In effect, every NSF grant right now is canceled.”

In the past, the agency has funded hundreds of thousands of researchers every year, including technical professionals and students. The NSF did not give a reason for the freeze in its internal email, and it declined Nature‘s request for comment.

The halt to funding is just the latest example of turmoil at the NSF. In February, my colleague Jackie Flynn Mogensen reported that the agency was laying off 10 percent of its employees. In April, it terminated more than 1,000 awards, many supporting work the administration claims is related todiversity, equity, and inclusion, or misinformation and disinformation, as my colleague Henry Carnell reported.

On Friday, the NSF said it was terminating hundreds of additional grants that were “not aligned with agency priorities.” The same day, the White House requested to halve the agency’s $9 billion budget.

Sudip Parikh, who leads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the largest scientific societies in the world, told NPR that he doubted Congress would approve the White House’s request, but that the budget process could take months. Cutting so much of NSF’s funding, he added, would be “a crisis, just a catastrophe for US science.”

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The Immigrant Families Trump Separated Years Ago Are Getting Another Raw Deal

The immigrant families separated at the US-Mexico border during Trump’s first administration have gotten some bad news: Essentially, Trump’s second administration is taking away their lawyers and giving them new ones.

The new ones work for the government.

Put another way, the Trump administration, which has the power to deny immigrants’ applications to stay in the United States, will also be helping them fill out those applications. And if that sounds like a conflict of interest, that’s because it is.

Let’s backtrack a bit: In 2018, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against the first Trump administration for illegally separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border, with no tracking process or records that would allow them to be reunited. The case dragged on after Trump lost his bid for reelection, and the Biden administration reached a settlement with the ACLU in 2023. The settlement gave separated families a path to obtain asylum in the United States, and it guaranteed them legal assistance as they worked through the complicated immigration system.

Until recently, such legal assistance was offered through Acacia, a nonprofit that specializes in immigrant legal defense. But in April, Trump’s Justice Department told Acacia it would not renew its contract, which ended this week, according to a report by the California Newsroom collaboration. The Justice Department told the court overseeing the ACLU lawsuit that its Executive Office for Immigration Review would provide the legal services instead. This will “maximize efficiency,” the department’s lawyers claimed.

But efficiency for whom? Experts interviewed by the California Newsroom worried that the change in representation would make it easier for Trump to deport the families and separate them all over again. “The government hasn’t shown them that they have their interests in mind,” said Sara Van Hofwegen, who manages legal programs at Acacia.

“It is about as extreme a conflict of interest as you can imagine for the party that is adjudicating matters to provide legal advice,” added David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University.

According to Super, immigrants separated from their families under the first Trump administration—and who no doubt are aware of its current effort to deport as many migrants as possible—would likely be afraid to divulge sensitive information to their new government attorneys. There’s also a risk the government might “trick people into sharing information that might seem to weaken their case,” he added, or that it will take information out of context—falsely claiming, for example, that an immigrant is part of a dangerous gang simply because he has tattoos.

In short, if the Justice Department takes over legal representation for the families, Super said, “it opens “the door wide for them [to get] more information they can distort.”

The ACLU is pushing back against the new arrangement, but it’s unclear whether US District Court Judge Dana Sabraw will sympathize. At a hearing this week, Sabraw said the ACLU had not proved that any harm had already taken place. Its lawyers, he said, could seek relief on a case-by-case basis if they were able to show that the families were missing important legal deadlines because they were not getting appropriate legal assistance.

The next hearing in the caseis set for May 15.

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After Trump Kills the National Climate Assessment, Scientists Vow to Create Their Own

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

Two major US scientific societies have announced they will join forces to produce peer-reviewed research on the climate crisis’s impact days after Donald Trump’s administration dismissed contributors to a key Congress-mandated report on climate crisis preparedness.

On Friday, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) said that they will work together to produce more than 29 peer-reviewed journals that will cover all aspects of climate change, including observations, projections, impacts, risks, and solutions.

The collaboration comes just days after Trump’s administration dismissed all contributors to the sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA), the US government’s flagship study on climate change. The dismissal of nearly 400 contributors had left the future of the study in question; it had been scheduled for publication in 2028.

“We at AMS see it as vital to support and help expand this collaborative scientific effort .”

The NCA had been overseen by the NASA-supported Global Change Research Program—a key US climate body which the Trump administration also dismissed last month. The reports, which have been published since 2000, coordinated input from 14 federal agencies and hundreds of external scientists.

In its announcement on Friday, the two societies said: “This effort aims to sustain the momentum of the sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA), the authors and staff of which were dismissed earlier this week by the Trump administration, almost a year into the process.”

According to the AMS and AGU, the collection will not replace the NCA but instead create a mechanism for important work on climate change’s impact to continue. “It’s incumbent on us to ensure our communities, our neighbors, our children are all protected and prepared for the mounting risks of climate change,” AGU resident Brandon Jones said.

“This collaboration provides a critical pathway for a wide range of researchers to come together and provide the science needed to support the global enterprise pursuing solutions to climate change,” he added.

Similarly, the AMS president, David Stensrud, said: “Our economy, our health, our society are all climate-dependent. While we cannot replace the NCA, we at AMS see it as vital to support and help expand this collaborative scientific effort for the benefit of the US public and the world at large.”

Speaking to the Associated Press, Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University climate professor and chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy said the latest collaboration between AMS and AGU is “is a testament to how important it is that the latest science be summarized and available.”

Hayhoe, who was a lead author of reports in 2009, 2018, and an author of the one in 2023, added: “People are not aware of how climate change is impacting the decisions that they are making today, whether it’s the size of the storm sewer pipes they’re installing, whether it is the expansion of the flood zone where people are building, whether it is the increases in extreme heat.”

In addition to widespread dismissals across federal agencies, federal websites have been purged of information pertaining to climate change and extreme weather events since Trump took office in January.

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“Going to Fallujah Was the Most Horrific Experience of Our Lives”

It’s been just over 20 years since the Battle of Fallujah, a bloody campaign in a destructive Iraq War that we now know was based on a lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

But back then, in the wake of 9/11, the battlefield was filled with young men and women who bought the like, and believed in serving and defending the country against terrorism. At first, for Marines trained to fight, their deployment during the “hearts and minds” portion of the US campaign was simply “boring.”

But then they received marching orders for a fight that would prove long and intense. “Going to Fallujah was the most horrific experience of our lives,” recalls Mike Ergo, a team leader for the US Marines Alpha Company, 1st Battalion. Yet paradoxically, “it was also, for myself, the most alive I’ve ever felt.”

This week on Reveal, we’ve partnered with the nonprofit newsroom The War Horse to join Ergo’s unit as they reunite and try to make sense of what they did and what was done to them. Together, they remember Bradley Faircloth, the 20-year-old lance corporal from their unit who lost his life, and unpack the mental and emotional battles that continue for them today.

In this intimate portrayal, we learn about Faircloth’s upbringing and character, and hear from his comrades about what it was like to be barely adults, yet tasked with clearing insurgents from a city, building to building, in the bloodiest battle of the Iraq War. A situation where you could be shot at from virtually any angle, and it was hard to know who, exactly, was trying to kill you.

The episode also takes us back home, exploring the travails the Marines faced upon returning to the United States, the knowledge they were recruited on false premises, and the complex feelings they still carry today, 20 years later.

This episode originally aired in January 2025.

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Republicans Seek to Kill California Auto Pollution Rules Using a “Blatantly Illegal” Tactic

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

On a warm July morning in 1943, in the middle of World War II, a thick cloud of acrid smoke blanketed downtown Los Angeles, turning its clear blue skies into an inscrutable brown haze that left Angelenos with burning eyes, noses, and throats. The aerial assault was so intense it sparked rumors of chemical warfare as city officials scrambled to identify the source of one of the city’s first bouts with smog.

Within a decade, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology had isolated the irritant in smog as ozone and identified the primary culprit: hydrocarbon emissions from oil refineries and automobiles, which interacted with compounds in the atmosphere and sunlight to form the health-harming gas.

The unique conditions that shaped Los Angeles—a steady influx of people attracted to a sunny city built for cars and ringed by pollutant-trapping mountains—made it the nation’s smog capital. They also prompted state officials to pass the nation’s first tailpipe emissions and air pollution standards in the 1960s.

Congress, in turn, recognized that California “demonstrated compelling and extraordinary circumstances sufficiently different from the Nation as a whole to justify standards on automobile emissions which may, from time to time, need to be more stringent than national standards.”

In other words, Congress gave California the authority under the Clean Air Act to ask the Environmental Protection Agency for a waiver from rules that bar states from passing stricter air and climate pollution rules than the federal government.

But President Donald Trump moved to revoke California’s special status by executive order on his first day in office, as he tried to do in his first term. On Wednesday and Thursday, the Republican-dominated House, with some Democrats, voted to pass three resolutions to revoke the waivers that underlie California’s nation-leading climate and air pollution rules through means that, critics say, abuse the law.

“Trump Republicans are hellbent on making California smoggy again,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

Over several days on the House floor, Republicans, who once championed states’ rights, repeated Trump’s talking points about President Biden’s “radical agenda,” California’s “EV mandate” and decision-making by “unelected bureaucrats” to justify preventing California from enacting the nation’s toughest vehicle-emissions standards.

Democrats countered that Republicans’ resolutions assume illegitimate authority to assail California’s ability to pursue ambitious climate policies and protect its residents from air that is perpetually among the worst in the nation.

Maxine Dexter, an Oregon Democrat, said she opposed the resolutions “that strip away a state’s right to protect its residents from dangerous air pollution.”

More than 156 million people in this country live in counties with dangerous levels of ozone and particulate matter, Dexter said. “And yet, instead of empowering states to raise the bar on clean air, Republicans are telling them to stand down.”

The transportation sector—which includes passenger and commercial vehicles and their fuels—accounts for half of California’s greenhouse gas emissions and 80 percent of its harmful smog-causing pollutants.

On Monday, members of the House Rules Committee set the stage for how Republicans planned to subvert California’s ambitious climate policies. The committee, which controls which bills go to the floor and the terms of debate, considered three joint resolutions to use the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to provide “congressional disapproval” of the waivers—which the Republican majority called rules.

The decision by the Biden administration to grant a waiver to California “is part of an orchestrated campaign against fossil fuels by EPA bureaucrats who act without regard for the inflation it would impose on Americans,” said rules chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC). The waiver has been “exploited time and again by environmental activists” to set standards for the rest of the country, Foxx said.

“It gives California unilateral authority to cram its ‘comply or die’ zero-emission truck rule down the throats of every American,” Foxx said. “It would decimate the trucking industry, lead prices of basic commodities Americans rely on to skyrocket and burden hard-working families and truckers everywhere across the nation.”

Regulatory requirements in California, now the fourth-largest economy in the world, can impact markets nationwide. But states are free to adopt or reject California standards as they see fit under certain conditions, in keeping with Clean Air Act amendments passed under Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Several other states have chosen to adopt California’s light- and heavy-duty vehicle regulations.

President George H.W. Bush signs the Clean Air Act in the East Room of the White House in 1990.George Bush Presidential Library and Museum

If Republicans cared about high prices for consumers, they would address the “economic and constitutional crisis facing American families,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat. “One hundred days of economic pain, as Trump’s on again, off again temper tantrum of tariffs tank the dollar, drive up prices, destroy the markets, and threaten a recession.”

In a letter to House leadership on Friday, automakers asked Congress to repeal the waiver supporting California’s Advanced Clean Cars II program, which requires all new passenger cars, trucks and SUVs sold in the state to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035.

In the letter, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the traditional auto industry’s main trade group, urged the House “to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency rule permitting California and affiliated states to ban the sale of new gas vehicles.” A ban on the sale of new gas vehicles “will increase automobile prices and reduce vehicle choices for consumers across the country,” the alliance wrote.

“These CRAs are a pretty naked quid pro quo,” said Rep. Mary Scanlon, a Pennsylvania Democrat on the Rules Committee. “Republicans are giving a massive regulatory handout to their donors in the auto industry.”

The automobile industry spent more than $85 million on lobbying last year, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that tracks money in politics.

The CRA requires federal agencies to submit rules to Congress for review before they take effect. Resolutions of disapproval allow legislators to use the CRA to overturn recently issued regulations. If both the House and Senate vote against a rule, it cannot be reissued in “substantially the same form.”

Yet waivers do not fit the definition of a rule and so are not subject to the CRA, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog, determined in 2023 and again in March. The Senate parliamentarian arrived at the same conclusion earlier this month.

The Senate parliamentarian upheld decades of precedent and confirmed that California’s waivers are not subject to the Congressional Review Act, said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, in a statement. He called attempts to use the CRA “a clearly bogus attempt to undercut California’s climate leadership.”

What’s more, experts say, there is no legal basis for rescinding a Clean Air Act waiver once it’s been issued.

“California emission standards are a matter of life and death .”

When Congress passed the Air Quality Act of 1967, and amended it as the Clean Air Act in 1970, it prohibited states from adopting their own air pollutant emissions standards for new vehicles and their engines. But since California had already passed its own vehicle pollution standards before the 1967 act was passed, Congress allowed the state to seek waivers from the EPA.

Over nearly 60 years, California has received more than 100 waivers.

The California waiver was originally viewed as essential to getting the federal law passed, with the stipulation that federal law would take precedence with exceptions for California under specific circumstances that were submitted to the EPA for review, said Ted Lamm, associate director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Every prior administration has followed the law and issued the waiver under circumstances where it is required and has not contemplated the act of rescinding it,” Lamm said. Revoking a waiver, he said, “doesn’t functionally exist as a legal concept.”

The waiver was created to address California’s unique circumstances of not only pioneering and leading the country in the creation of air-quality and air-emissions control policy, but also of having very specific air-pollution challenges relating to vehicles, geography and industry, Lamm said. “It’s a bedrock part of the Clean Air Act.”

Dave Clegern, a spokesperson for California’s Air Resources Board, which develops and oversees the state’s clean-vehicle rules, said there’s no precedent to use the CRA to revoke California’s waivers.

“By using the Congressional Review Act, the Trump EPA is doing what no EPA under Democratic or Republican administrations in 50 years has ever done, and what the US Government Accountability Office has confirmed does not comply with the law,” Clegern said.

Nonetheless, Congressional Republicans—aided by a handful of Democrats on Wednesday and 35 on Thursday—voted to use that law to cancel three waivers for clean vehicle programs issued under the Biden administration that allowed California to enact stringent car and truck emission standards. Two Democrats from conservative-leaning California districts and nearly three dozen from Ohio to Texas voted to block the waiver underlying the state’s plan to ban gas-powered vehicles by 2035.

“The president has unlocked America’s energy potential, or at least taken a giant step to do so, reopening 625 million acres for drilling, withdrawing from the disastrous Paris Climate Agreement, improving new LNG projects,” said Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican who serves on the Rules Committee, Tuesday on the House floor. “And here before us today, we have what we call CRAs, of the Congressional Review Act, and the purpose of these is to undo burdensome Biden regulations.”

“If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow it…But Congress shouldn’t intervene.”

Roy told the Rules Committee that he and his Republican colleagues are using the CRAs to clean up “the disastrous mess of the four years of the Biden administration.”

The CRA gives Congress the power to “look at the ridiculous regulations put in at the last part of the administration,” Roy said, which he called “radical leftist policies.”

Yet Democrats on the Rules Committee pointed out that the three agency actions the Republican resolutions are targeting are not rules. “They’re not covered by the Congressional Review Act,” said Scanlon, the Pennsylvania Democrat.

“While Congress has the unambiguous right to pass legislation to modify or cancel an agency action, what Congress can’t do is use the Congressional Review Act to nullify these three agency actions,” Scanlon said.

Several Democrats argued on the House Floor that attacks on the waivers are not only illegal but would thwart California’s ability to protect its citizens by implementing rules designed to improve air quality and public health.

Mark DeSaulnier, a California Democrat, called the Republicans’ attempt to use the CRA to kill California’s waivers “blatantly illegal.”

Zoe Lofgren, chair of the California Democratic Congressional delegation, called them “completely illegitimate,” citing the GAO and the Senate parliamentarian’s decisions.

Air pollution is responsible for killing millions of people worldwide a year, researchers reported in the journal BMJ in 2023. Fossil fuels are a primary source of these pollutants, they said, pointing to an urgent need for a rapid and just transition to cleaner energy.

A coalition of health, business, labor, faith, environmental, and consumer protection groups have urged representatives and senators to oppose the misuse of the CRA to target “ineligible policies” in multiple open letters to Congress.

“This vote is an unprecedented and reckless attack on states’ legal authority to address the vehicle pollution causing asthma, lung disease, and heart conditions,” said Kathy Harris, director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement.

“If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow it,” Harris said. “But Congress shouldn’t intervene and try to block state leaders from protecting their residents from dangerous pollution.”

Over several days of debate on the House floor, several Democrats urged their colleagues to consider the health and well being of their fellow Americans.

“Air pollution is directly linked with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and other diseases, and parental and childhood exposure to pollution is linked to long-term health risks adversely impacting babies and young children,” said Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley. “Just one of California’s standards that would be blocked, Advanced Clean Cars II, is estimated to reduce health-care costs by $13 billion over the next 25 years.”

Doris Matsui, a Democrat representing Sacramento, said California has the same “compelling and extraordinary circumstances” today that justified stronger emission standards under the Clean Air Act in 1970. “According to the American Lung Association’s 2025 state of the air report, five of the top ten most polluted cities in America are in California, and that includes my district.”

And California experiences some of the most severe impacts from climate change-fueled wildfires, atmospheric rivers and droughts, Matusi said.

“In Sacramento, we have faced deadly flooding from more intense winter storms as well as longer and more extreme droughts while the foothills above Sacramento are still scarred from the many wildfires we’ve seen in recent years,” she said. “California emission standards are a matter of life and death for my constituents.”

It’s difficult to imagine in today’s polarized political climate, but environmental protection used to be a bipartisan issue. The modern Clean Air Act was passed under President Richard Nixon, a California Republican, and then considerably strengthened in 1990 with penalties for polluters who failed to comply under another Republican, President George H.W. Bush.

At a signing ceremony in November 1990, Bush called the amendments “a long-awaited and long-needed chapter in our environmental history” that would usher in a new era for clean air.

Bush praised the bipartisan efforts of Congress in collaboration with industry and environmental leaders to pass what he hailed as “the most significant air pollution legislation in our nation’s history.”

“In passing the Clean Air Act on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, Congress explicitly granted California the ability to set more stringent vehicle emissions standards to protect public health from California’s unique air quality challenges,” said California’s Padilla.

Over time, as air-quality, emissions and climate challenges became more complex, Republican administrations have shifted and tried to deny the waiver, said UC Berkeley’s Lamm, starting with Bush’s son, George W., in 2008.

“But what’s happening now is a totally different, unprecedented thing that really has no basis in the law,” Lamm said. “To try to actually rescind a waiver that’s been issued, the law does not contemplate that. It’s not how the statute works.”

The administration’s attempts to undercut a system of governance designed by elected representatives of the people is “extralegal,” Lamm said, and “simply contrary to the simple principles of government.”

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JD Vance Poses With TV Host Who Called for Violence Against LGBTQ People

Steve Deace, the host of an eponymousshow on the rightwing platform Blaze Media, has built a brand around his brash and provocative personality. Deace has entertained his 52,000 YouTube viewers and 274,000 X followers by calling for violence against drag queens and LGBTQ people and ranting that the Democratic party is controlled by Satan. Those comments fit right in with those of thesome of theguests his show hosts, who regularly dabble in antisemitism and argue that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

But just this week, Deace’s track record of extremist rhetoric and guests did not stop Vice President JD Vance from posing for a photo with him. The circumstances of the picture were unclear; Deace posted it on X with the comment, “Had to make a quick stop by the West Wing this morning.”

Deace‘s track record of extremist rhetoric did not stop the vice president.

The extremism watchdog group_Right Wing Watch_ has helpfully rounded up some of Deace’s most colorful and violent statements from his last decade-plus of broadcasting. In February, he announced his intention to “punch Pride Month right in the balls. Hard.” In 2023, he called for the execution of drag queens, saying “pedo-groomers should be executed, by the way. After a fair trial, of course.” In 2022, he called the Democratic Party “a demonic construct, a satanically-influenced entity, and a death cult” and asserted that Democrats were “voting for dudes teabagging their hairy sacks on children at public libraries and public schools.” In 2020, he said, “I want to see antifa members hanging from gallows in Trump ties. That’s what I would like to see.”

Deace’s regular guests include the TheoBros, members of a network of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their tributary of Reformed Protestant Christianity is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law. Joel Webbon, a Texas TheoBro pastor who believes the 19th amendment should be repealed and regularly posts about his conviction that Judaism is evil, has appeared on Deace’s show several times. In a March episode, Webbon explained that his antisemitic statements were justified because the Bible called for “hating the enemies of God.” He added, “I do not hate Jews, I wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity.” In an August 2024 episode, Webbon told Deace that he was an abortion “abolitionist,” which is to say that abortion should be penalized as murder.

Another regular guest is Doug Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho, pastor and the patriarch of the TheoBro movement. In the past, Wilson has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence” and called male dominance over women “an erotic necessity.” On a Deace episode last July, Wilson mourned the loss of unapologetically Christian nations, including the United States. In January, Wilson told Deace he believed that senators questioning US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were putting him in the “longhouse,” a reference to a rightwing internet meme about how modern social norms emasculate men. “The only thing worse than the patriarchy will be the matriarchy, I can promise you that!” quipped Deace. Wilson giggled appreciatively. (Hegseth, too, has strong ties to the TheoBros world.)

The photo with Deace isn’t the first time Vance has dipped a toe into the world of the TheoBros. As I wrote last year:

Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher of TheoBro online magazine American Reformer. (The publication’s cofounder, Nate Fischer, later clarified to Mother Jones that Buskirk’s listing in the filing had been a clerical error, and that he was actually a board member of American Reformer.) In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.

Cohn also surfaced this photo of Vance posing with a bunch of TheoBros in 2023.

Vance isn’t the only politician hobnobbing with Deace. Last month, Deace devoted an entire episode of his show to an interview with TheoBro and Republican Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers, who has said he believes America should be a Christian nation and wants to end no-fault divorce.

Deevers told Deace that he hoped more Christians would soon be in public office, explaining that politicians “can actually be strong convictional Christians,” Deevers went on, who“lead according to the scriptures, and not be in violation of God’s word, and actually stand before him on Judgment Day and [have] him still say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.'”

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A Massive Power Grab Could Help North Carolina Republicans Steal an Election

Two weeks after the November 2024 election, the Republican-controlled legislature in North Carolina convened a lame-duck session for the ostensible purpose of passing a hurricane relief bill. But, with no public notice, they snuck provisions into the bill stripping power from the state’s incoming Democratic governor and attorney general and drastically changing how elections were administered.

Most notably, the bill prevented North Carolina’s incoming Democratic governor, Josh Stein, from appointing a majority of members on the state election board and 100 county election boards and transferred that authority to the state auditor, who, for the first time in more than a decade, was a Republican. Democrats and voting rights experts warned at the time that the bill could allow Republicans to overturn Democratic victories by refusing to certify election results and tilting the rules to favor the GOP.

“We are very concerned that some of the appointees to the newly appointed board of elections have a history of anti-voter positions on election law and redistricting issues.”

That chilling hypothetical is now much closer to becoming a reality, after a ruling on Wednesday by the GOP-controlled state court of appeals cleared the way for Republicans appointed by the auditor to take over the state election board effective May 1—at the very moment the board finds itself at the center of an unprecedented legal dispute over the Republican attempt to steal a state supreme court race.

Under Democratic control, the state board has objected to the efforts by Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin to throw out tens of thousands of votes and overturn the election of Democratic Justice Allison Riggs, who leads by 734 votes after two recounts, in the last uncertified contest from November.

Griffin is currently challenging more than 5,000 ballots cast by overseas and military voters in six Democratic-leaning counties that voted for Kamala Harris in November, specifically contesting voters who did not provide photo ID from overseas, even though that was not required at the time. Riggs and election law experts say this is a clear equal protection violation, since Griffin is only contesting ballots cast in heavily Democratic areas. If the courts discard those ballots, Griffin has said he will win the election. But the state board has told the courts his challenge applies to only 1,600 ballots in Greensboro’s Guilford County because the other challenges were filed too late, which would make it much tougher for Griffin to overturn the result.

However, if the board, under Republican control, reversed its position and sided with Griffin, it could potentially disqualify enough Democratic votes to swing the election. The board could also fail to properly reach out to voters whose ballots Griffin is challenging in a way that leads to more voter disenfranchisement.

“I fear that this decision is the latest step in the partisan effort to steal a seat on the Supreme Court,” Gov. Stein said in a statement after the appeals court issued its one-sentence, unsigned order on Wednesday. “No emergency exists that can justify the Court of Appeals’ decision to interject itself at this point. The only plausible explanation is to permit the Republican State Auditor to appoint a new State Board of Elections that will try to overturn the results of the Supreme Court race.”

Stein has appealed the decision to the state supreme court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority.

The Trump-backed auditor, Dave Boliek, has no experience running elections and under the law North Carolina would be the only state in the country where the auditor oversees election administration. On Thursday, within hours of the law taking effect, he appointed three board members to give Republicans a majority: Francis De Luca, former president of the right-wing Civitas Institute, which is funded by conservative billionaire Art Pope; former GOP state senator Bob Rucho, author of a notorious pro-Republican gerrymander; and current GOP board member Stacy Eggers. De Luca’s group filed a lawsuit against the state board challenging the results of the 2016 gubernatorial election, where Republican Pat McCrory narrowly lost to Democrat Roy Cooper, attempting to throw out thousands of votes cast during the same-day registration process.

“We are very concerned that some of the appointees to the newly appointed board of elections have a history of anti-voter positions on election law and redistricting issues,” says Ann Webb, policy director for Common Cause North Carolina.

“They’re setting up a board that looks like it’s going to do very partisan, nefarious actions,” adds Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of N.C. For the People Action, a pro-democracy group. “They’re moving very quickly because they see a pathway to steal the North Carolina Supreme Court seat.”

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Trump’s Rookie Moves Have Created Loads of Uncertainty—Even for Big Oil

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

Last week, the US Department of the Interior announced that it would speed up the approval process for certain fossil fuel projects, proclaiming that environmental analyses that previously would have taken years must now be taken down to, at maximum, a month. While the new procedures are seemingly a gift to the industry, this may actually be terrible news for pipeline developers, drillers, and miners.

“If I were a developer of any of these projects, I would look at this order and smack my forehead,” says Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, the United States’ biggest environmental nonprofit law organization. “I don’t want my project to be authorized pursuant to these laughable procedures. It won’t hold up in court.”

“Virtually anything they do under these new legal procedures will be ripe for a legal challenge.”

The new procedures use President Donald Trump’s “national energy emergency,” proclaimed in an executive order in the first week of his presidency, to shorten timelines for federal reviews, including environmental reviews and reviews attached to cultural landmarks. Reviews that take into account a project’s impact on the environment are particularly truncated under this new policy. Processes that would normally take a year, the Department of the Interior says, must now be completed within just two weeks, while those reviews that might last longer than a year must now be done in under a month.

Experts say, however, that the new timelines are so short that they almost certainly run afoul of the bedrock laws involved: the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. Mass, ongoing layoffs inside the federal government—including at Interior, where the Washington Post reported that a quarter of the agency’s staff may eventually be cut—means that there may soon be far too few staff to handle reviews that would be near impossible to fulfill even in normal circumstances.

This leaves any projects that try to break ground under the new timelines open to very easy legal challenges—something that Sankar says is “low-hanging fruit” for people who are impacted by a project and who want to take a developer to court.

“The people who wrote NEPA and the Endangered Species Act meant for the public to be involved, meant for real expertise to be applied, and meant for these to be meaningful ways to protect the environment and biodiversity,” Sankar says. “To shorten these periods to where you can barely get a letter from point A to point B in that time means that they’re not trying to comply at all. The good news is that it’s all so manifestly illegal that virtually anything they do under these new legal procedures will be ripe for a legal challenge.”

These fast-forwarded processes are tied to a part of NEPA that states that agencies can bypass environmental reviews in case of an emergency. Ryan Hathaway, who worked on NEPA-related issues within Interior for more than a decade, says that this emergency justification has been used in the past for concrete events that pose an immediate threat to health and public safety, like wildfires or floods, with specific actions that needed to be taken—rather than a vague and open-ended energy “emergency.”

“There cannot be ‘US energy dominance’ and $50-per-barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory.”

“Lawyers are going to have a field day with this,” says Hathaway, who now works as a director at Lawyers for Good Government, a legal nonprofit dedicated to progressive advocacy.

It’s clear these new rules are exclusively a gift to extractive industries like drilling and mining. Solar and wind projects—which the administration has repeatedly attacked, withdrawing leases for offshore wind and ordering a construction halt on projects already underway—are notably absent from the list of projects allowed to undergo accelerated timelines. But ironically, these orders are only contributing to an increasingly uncertain environment for fossil fuel producers under the new Trump administration.

Even before the chaos caused by Liberation Day, Big Oil faced a potential reckoning with the president it helped elect. While the shale oil boom of the early 2010s rewarded executives for increased production, that strategy led to too much supply, leading prices per barrel to drop during the first Trump administration. After prices bottomed out during the pandemic, investors became more careful about unrestrained production.

“It’s not government regulation that’s limiting the production growth rate in the United States. It’s Wall Street,” says Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.

The industry was given a boost in the early 2020s with the worldwide energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but investors kept a cautious eye on prices. Despite President Joe Biden’s climate focus, the US oil and gas industry became the world’s biggest crude oil producer in 2023, and reached a record high of producing 13.4 million barrels per day late last year. The challenge under the Trump administration would become balancing profitability with the president’s goal of unleashing “energy dominance.” Trump, after all, has stated that he wants oil to drop to $50 a barrel—a price far too low to be profitable for the industry.

Each quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas publishes a regional report on the state of the oil and gas industry in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, which includes anonymous survey responses from executives. The vitriol towards the White House in these comments from the first survey of this year, published in late March, shocked analysts.

“The key word to describe 2025 so far is ‘uncertainty’ and as a public company, our investors hate uncertainty,” one anonymous executive said. “This uncertainty is being caused by the conflicting messages coming from the new administration. There cannot be ‘US energy dominance’ and $50 per barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory.”

“’Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry,” another wrote.

Trump has continued to hand out questionable gifts to industry. On Thursday, Interior announced that it had changed some policies around offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that could, according to the agency, increase production in the Gulf by up to 100,000 barrels a day. Meanwhile, Interior is also reportedly assembling a list of fossil fuel deposits on public lands that it plans to open up for production.

Like the accelerated timelines for environmental permitting, these gifts come with significant strings attached. While the Gulf order will help companies currently producing to up their productivity, they’re unlikely to lure new customers to the region: Offshore drilling is expensive, and four-fifths of the more than 2,000 active leases in the Gulf are sitting unused.

And while opening up public lands to drilling may sound like an industry wish-list item, companies faced with an uncertain American regulatory environment—from the looming threat of tariffs to accelerated permitting timelines that could get projects held up in court to promises made under a Republican administration that may be withdrawn the next time a Democrat is president—may not want to invest years and capital in starting up a project in a risky area.

“For more than a century, energy companies have looked at projects in part based on the host country’s political risk, but the United States wasn’t on that list,” Seigle says. “These days we see huge swings in political support for oil and gas, and the trend of reversing the prior administration’s approach. So energy companies and their investors are now thinking about the political risk of energy projects right here at home.”

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“An Anti-Trans Fever Dream”: HHS Publishes Attack on Gender-Affirming Youth Care

Three months ago, Donald Trump’s administration issued an executive order attempting to stamp out standard-of-care medical treatments for transgender children. Doctors who provided such treatments would be prosecuted, it promised; hospitals would lose all federal funding.

Buried in that order was a clause directing the top federal health agency to publish, within 90 days, a review of scientific evidence and “best practices” for treating gender dysphoria in children. That report is finally here: On Thursday morning, the Department of Health and Human Services published a lengthy document that rails against the evidence base for gender-affirming care for youth and the professional associations that have developed standards for treating them. Instead, it advocates for children with gender dysphoria to be treated only with “exploratory psychotherapy”—a phrase sometimes used as a euphemism for anti-trans conversion therapy, as a previous Mother Jones investigation found.

“It’s a post-hoc justification for a political agenda they wanted to pursue anyway.”

While the review does not make formal recommendations on gender-affirming medical treatments, an HHS press release asserts that the document “makes clear” that “science and evidence do not support their use, and the risks cannot be ignored.”

Experts in transgender healthcare promptly slammed the report, whose authors have not been disclosed, as a political, not scientific, document. “It’s a post-hoc justification for a political agenda they wanted to pursue anyway,” says Kellan Baker, executive director of the Whitman-Walker Institute for Health Research and Policy. “You don’t do good science in 90 days with a ‘research question’ that’s determined by political fiat.”

“The document is marked with the signature of politics, which is antithetical to the way that science is normally conducted,” Daniel Aaron, a physician and associate professor of law at University of Utah, wrote in an email.

Existing standards for trans youth health care, issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), recommend that kids with gender dysphoria receive psychotherapy, but a small minority of trans youth, with the consent of their parents, are also given gender-affirming medical treatments that can include puberty blockers for children who have entered puberty and hormone therapy for teens. Surgery is rare and typically reserved for the oldest adolescents.

Yet the HHS report, in the first paragraph of its introduction, misrepresents the number of youth receiving this care, claiming that “many” of the growing number of transgender teens are being treated with hormones and surgeries.

Trans youth were, of course, an outsized focus of Trump’s campaign—and since reassumingoffice, he’s issued policy after policy aimed at undermining transgender people’s participation in public life. While legal challenges have temporarily stymied some of Trump’s attacks on trans healthcare, other policies have taken effect. The Department of Veterans Affairs is phasing out hormone therapy for trans veterans. Millions in research funding for trans health care has reportedly been canceled. In April, the Justice Department set up a snitch line for anyone to report providers of gender-affirming medical care. Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed her underlings to open criminal investigations against physicians for “female genital mutilation” of trans youth.

Baker predicts that the new HHS report will be used to bolster current and future anti-trans litigation, and to argue that drastic policy changes are merited. “It will be relied upon, it will be cited, every time the government seeks to investigate, prosecute, defund healthcare providers and healthcare institutions that are caring for transgender young people,” Baker says. “It will probably be used in efforts to criminalize parents as well.”

Aaron concurs. “The report will likely be used to restrict transgender health care and to sow confusion among the public.”

Beyond its overtly political nature, experts say the document does not meet scientific standards. The authors of the report, described by the White House as “a team of eight distinguished scholars,” are unnamed—“to help maintain the integrity of this process,” HHS’ press release claims.

“That’s unusual and not typical of the medical literature,” says Alex Dworak, a family medicine physician in Omaha, Nebraska who treats transgender patients. The executive summary, Dworak says, contains inaccuracies, misleading language, and misrepresentations of the kind of care he provides to transgender patients. For one, Dworak points out, the summary claims that “no independent association between gender dysphoria and suicidality has been found”—which Dworak calls “flatly incorrect,” citing a systematic review that found the opposite.

The report also includes a lengthy explainer on Christine Jorgensen, questionable stories about trans health care “whistleblowers,” and a section arguing that the very idea of “gender identity” is undefinable. “It reads like an anti-trans fever dream,” Baker says.

“There’s nothing unusual about the types of studies that we do in trans health—or the level of evidence that underpins [it].”

Baker describes one of the review’s main critiques—a lack of “high-quality” evidence for the treatments given to transgender youth—as a “classic example of using jargon to try to distract and mislead.” Evidence is described as “low” or “high” in quality based on factors like study size and type, as most commonly assessed by a medical research standard known as GRADE. In fact, studies have shown that a very low percentage of treatments across all fields of medicine are backed by what the report calls high-quality evidence. Designing randomized controlled trials—an example of such evidence—is both practically and ethically impossible when studying pediatric and transgender healthcare, experts like Baker maintain. “The evidence for the standard of care for trans people is as strong as the evidence across myriad other areas of medicine,” Baker says. “There’s nothing unusual about the types of studies that we do in trans health or the level of evidence that underpins the standards of care.”

Gordon Guyatt, a professor of medicine and expert in research methods at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, was one of the key developers of the GRADE approach. Guyatt wrote in an email that the report accurately classifies the evidence around gender-affirming care for youth as low or very low in certainty, but that its discussion of ethical issues was “unbalanced.”

The report “suggests that adolescents should be denied the gender affirming therapies under consideration and that people shouldn’t be allowed to do research to address the possible outcomes,” Guyatt wrote. “This seems unbalanced to me and raises the issue of how this report came about, how the team that put together the report was chosen, and the influence that players in the current administration had on the report.”

Dworak emphasizes that the report represents neither established law nor clinical standards—and won’t affect the treatment he provides to his patients. “I want my patients and everyone who’s reading this to know: You are not alone,” he says. “There are people out there who do care for you and think you are important and valuable and want you to survive and thrive.”

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Thousands Call on the Trump Administration to Return Kilmar Abrego Garcia

On Thursday afternoon, Lorraine Beausejour Crowe, 82, and her daughter Donna Crowe, 60, joined thousands of protesters in the streets of downtown Washington, DC, to rally against the Trump administration’s assault on immigrant workers and communities. The duoheld one sign that read “ICE Is Trump’s Gestapo” and another displaying a photo of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posing in front of men behind bars at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. Above the image was a quote from the Nuremberg Trials: “All Germans are to blame for the crimes of Germany, on a level with the leadership of the country—because it was they who chose and did not stop their government when it committed a crime against humanity.”

“What Kristi and her ilk, including Trump, have done is send people to a concentration camp in El Salvador.” Donna, a Virginia resident, said, “There’s no difference.”

The Crowes were two of the tens of thousands who gathered across the country for the International Worker’s Day protest on May Day.In the nation’s capital, organizers brought together members of the Maryland-based group CASA, as well as the National Education Association, and the Service Employees International Union workers, among others. As they marched from Franklin Park to the White House, protesters chanted for immigrant rights and demanded that the Trump administration bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the Maryland man unlawfully removed to El Salvador last month—back to the United States. As one protester’s sign read,“We refuse to live in a country where our neighbors can be disappeared in the dead of night.”

Thousands rally against the Trump administration and demand the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.Isabela Dias

A couple of weeks after the administration deported Abrego Garcia—who had been granted protection from deportation to El Salvador from an immigration judge—it admitted that his removal had beendue to an “administrative error.” Nonetheless, Trump officials have continued to insist on the unproven allegations that he’s a member of the MS-13 gang and have disregarded a unanimous orderfrom the US Supreme Court to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.

For many of the protesters, Abrego Garcia’s case was emblematic of what they consider to be a broader attack on the rule of law, due process, and democratic principles. Ross Wells, a 72-year-old Takoma Park resident described theadministration’s actions as constituting a government “close to afascist regime.”

Wells, who has worked with local communities in El Salvador, recalled the recent Oval Office meeting between Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and President Trump. He said he saw their agenda as being “to roll back democracy and have an authoritarian state.” He was also emphatic that the administration’s claims of powerlessness in being able to reclaim Abrego Garcia from Bukele’s notorious prison were completely false.” If Trump wanted to use his leverage, he said, he could. But the fact is, Wells said, “He doesn’t want to.”

Wells continued, “If we break due process in this country, we’re all doomed. Everyone can be put in jail. President Trump said as much to President Bukele, ‘You need to build five more of these mega-prisons so we can deport the homegrowns.’ We assume without due process, without trial.”

Thousands rally against the Trump administration and demand the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.Isabela Dias

Others with whom I spoke also emphasized the potential risks for US citizens. “Today Kilmar, Tomorrow you,” another sign said. A 28-year-old, who works in intelligence and asked to be identified as Emma, carried a sign with the words ‘Trump wants to deport US citizens to El Salvador, you’re not safe.”She has been concerned “that many people are ignoring what’s happening right now with the deportations and thinking ‘I’m safe, I don’t have to worry about this as a white American, as a US citizen, somebody who’s lived here my entire life.'” But, she noted, “It’s happening whether they like it or not. There have been US citizens that have been deported.”

At Lafayette Square, protesters gathered to hear immigrant rights advocates and members of Congress speak on a stage with the White House as a background. Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who has been advocating for his return since his removal on March 15, addressed the crowd and demanded justice for her husband. “My husband was illegally detained,” she said, her voice breaking**.** “Abducted, and disappeared, thrown away to die in one of the most dangerous prisons in El Salvador, with no due process—because of an ‘error.'” As the crowd chanted “Bring him home,” she called on the Trump administration to “stop playing political games with my husband’s life.”

Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, demands justice for her husband.Isabela Dias

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House immigration subcommittee, vowed to hold a shadow hearing next week on Abrego Garcia’s case. “We’re here because we say, ‘not on our watch,'” she said, “to Trump’s kidnapping and deporting of immigrants, to going after immigrant workers.” She listed others who had faced deportation such as children who are US citizens and “in the middle of cancer treatments,” legal permanent residents**,** and people with legal visa status whose only issue may have been that they disagreed “with what they say, in a country that is supposed to have free speech for everybody.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) then spoke, describing the Trump administration as “stupid enough” to believe Abrego Garcia had an MS-13 tattoo on his hands based on a photoshopped image. “When you have a father who has a US citizen as a wife with young children being taken to a jail cell for the worst criminals on earth,” she said, “to be treated as if he has committed a crime, when there’s no crime to speak of, that is not the America that we all know, that is not the American we love, and that is not the America the world looks up to.”

“Kilmar, if you can hear me,” Vasquez Sura said, “I love you and keep your faith in God. Know that the children and I are still fighting for you to come back home.”

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