The Republicans Kneecapped America’s Clean Energy Sector. Now Trump Aims to Squash It.

The deficit-boosting bill President Donald Trump signed into law last Friday included provisions that will undermine US clean energy development. Indeed, a team led by Princeton energy expert Jesse Jenkins estimates that it will reduce US solar and wind output by at least 300 gigawatts by 2035—enough to power some 225 million homes.

But some Republicans still thought the bill didn’t go far enough. After a failed last-minute bid to add further subsidy cuts and an industry-killing renewables tax to the bill, Republicans agreed to vote yes after Trump promised to take matters into his own hands.

He delivered on Monday with an executive order titled “Ending Market Distorting Subsidies for Unreliable Foreign Controlled Energy Sources.”

The order basically instructs the Treasury Department to deny a developer’s application for soon-to-disappear clean energy subsidies “unless a substantial portion” of their project is already built. It also directs the Department of the Interior to revise policies favoring renewables. “While many executive orders have limited effectiveness, this one might actually have some bite,” says Yale energy economist Kenneth Gillingham.

“The Trump administration is taking every opportunity it can find to assert its authority not to spend money on things with which it disagrees,” says Don Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. “The implications here are enormous.”

“Just in case last week’s legislative sledgehammer didn’t do enough damage.”

Because of the time it takes to permit and site US projects, Gillingham says, the order’s stringent interpretation of the statutory language will have “the effect of quashing the market sooner than would have happened otherwise.”

Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a national organization of business leaders advocating for smarter climate policies, isn’t too pleased with the order. “Just in case last week’s legislative sledgehammer didn’t do enough damage to our economy, our environment, and the pocketbooks of anybody who pays an electricity bill, the Trump administration is taking yet another swing,” he said.

Trump’s decree asserts that renewables threaten “the fiscal health of the Nation,” a claim Gillingham deems entirely false. “Renewables cost something, but they create jobs and generate clean energy.”

“Our workforce is growing, businesses are expanding, and communities are saving money with consistent, reliable energy,” explains Bill Johnson, the owner of Brilliant Harvest, a Florida solar company, but the legislation and subsequent order put that progress at risk, he says.

The order, Keefe told me, suggests that the administration “either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that solar, wind, and batteries are the cheapest, quickest, made-in-America energy we can deploy.”

And although Trump questions the reliability of renewables, Gillingham insists that “at the levels of renewable energy we have today, we have nothing to worry about.” He adds, “If anything, adding more renewable capacity could help us meet additional electricity demand.”

As for the notion that the renewable energy market is “dependent on supply chains controlled by foreign adversaries,” well, sure, China dominates the sector, but that’s the result of supportive policies, Gillingham says—and the policies Trump is targeting were enacted to help US firms compete: “We would have to support our clean energy industries if we wanted to increase our share of clean energy manufacturing.”

Solar company stocks took a hit after the order was released. Gillingham says “the combination of high tariffs and removing the tax credits is a one-two punch that will greatly suppress the market for renewable energy.”

Johnson, the renewable energy businessman, concurs: “These federal policies create uncertainty [which] threatens to stall projects already in the pipeline and make it harder to keep building here at home.”

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Spending $200 Billion on ICE Is a Terrible Idea

This column originally appeared on author Garrett Graff’s site Doomsday Scenario_, which you can subscribe to here._

There are many reasons Trump’s new giant domestic agenda, the so-called one big beautiful bill, will be a tragedy for our country—a mean-spirited, life-wrecking, community-destroying stain on our history—from the fact that it will gut our health care safety net, force the closure of rural hospitals, and cut food supports to fund tax breaks for the wealthiest. I mean: How cruel do you have to be to raise taxes on those making less than $15,000 a year? How do you look at those making less than $15,000 a year and say, “You have it too easy and the billionaires need more of your money?”

But as someone who has covered federal law enforcement for the last two decades and has spent recent years writing both about the state of democracy today and authoring history books about the fall of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, it’s hard not to look at the new legislation and fear, most of all, how we’re turbo-charging an increasingly lawless regime of immigration enforcement and adding superpowers to America’s newly masked secret police.

As the New Republic summarized, “The bill is effectively a blank check, funding pretty much every aspect of the administration’s ramp-up of enforcement, detention, and surveillance: hiring nearly 20,000 additional immigration agents across Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, constructing more border walls, building detention facilities for tens of thousands of additional people, and so on.”

It’s easy intellectually to realize that pouring $200 billion dollars into immigration deportation and expulsion efforts is a bad idea, but I haven’t seen a lot of reporting and analysis that breaks down the why. So I wanted to write about why specifically we should fear this increase in ICE funding—many of these reasons are related and intersect, but to me there are four unique and specific reasons that we should be deeply fearful about what pouring $200 billion of combustible rocket fuel on our immigration enforcement will do to our country.

1) The how: ICE can’t grow that fast.

No healthy law enforcement agency can grow quickly. And ICE is far from a healthy law enforcement agency. ICE’s annual budget is about $10 billion a year, and the new legislation is about to hand it about nearly untold billions more—including $30 billion for hiring staff and conducting deportations and $45 billion for detention operations, as well as about $46 billion for border security construction, which could include the border wall and more detention facilities.

“With this vote, Congress makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and I think the smartest immigration watcher on social media.

History shows us what a disaster this will be.

We’re creating something even more dangerous to the country: A masked monster of a law enforcement agency, one uniquely unsuited for its new power, authority, reach, and funding levels.

What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well documented: Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well.

I spent nearly five years reporting heavily on the decade-long epidemic of corruption that paralyzed the Border Patrol after its ill-conceived Bush-era post-9/11 hiring surge—including interviewing every single person who had served as commissioner of CBP, visiting detention facilities, and even doing ride-alongs on the southern border by truck, boat, and helicopter. The Border Patrol’s hiring surge doubled the size of the force in just a few years, from about 9,200 to 18,000, a move roughly equivalent to (but still less than!) what we’re about to see happen with ICE.

Back then, my Border Patrol reporting was titled “The Green Monster.” Today, we’re creating something even more dangerous to the country: A masked monster of a law enforcement agency, one uniquely unsuited for its new power, authority, reach, and funding levels.

As CBP’s then-commissioner, Gil Kerlikowske, told me back in 2014, “Law enforcement always regrets hiring quickly.” Anyone familiar with policing can rattle off the police hiring surges that inevitably led to spikes in corruption—including mistakes like the 1980 Miami police hiring surge and the infamous Washington Metropolitan Police class of 1989, when Mayor Marion Barry tried to increase the police force by nearly half in a single year. Both agencies saw widespread corruption problems that took years to fix.

All of this happened with the Border Patrol. CBP and the Border Patrol hired cartel members and even a serial killer—and put them out in the field with inadequate training and supervision. According to two people I interviewed who had been involved in the hiring process, the Border Patrol regularly sent new agents through the academy and even out into the field before completing full background checks. As I wrote, “By the middle of the hiring surge, some southwest sectors reported to the GAO that average agent field experience was down to 18 months—and falling. And whereas the agency aimed for an agent-to-supervisor ratio of 5 to 1, some stations reported ratios as high as 11 to 1. By the end of the Bush administration, more than half of the Border Patrol had been in the field for less than two years.”

As I totaled up in 2014, “there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and agents—ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012—meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours. “The Border Patrol was never big on the huge hiring,” one former training officer told me. “We weren’t prepared. That’s never worked out for anyone.”

Now we’re about to repeat all of those mistakes with ICE—and with CBP all over again.

2) The who: We should fear specifically who the next 10,000 ICE officers will be.

Hiring fast doesn’t work in law enforcement, but I think there’s a specific reason we should be wary of the next 10,000 people who want to be ICE officers in the United States: We’ve never seen anything in modern US history like the fast-rising social stigma and politicization of ICE as an agency and brand in terms of recruiting. Whole swaths of “normal” ICE applicants, the types of standard former local or state law enforcement officers who have made up the applicant pool, will surely think twice before applying to an agency that makes the NYPD or the Ferguson PD look like “Officer Friendly.” Instead, the types of people who will be attracted to a job in the wake of Kristi Noem’s special-forces cosplay, the eye-popping photo ops at El Salvador’s CECOT torture gulag and the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp are exactly the people who we shouldn’t imbue with federal law enforcement powers—you’re going to tell a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January. If you’re excited to dress up like you’re taking Fallujah for a raid of hard-working roofers in the Home Depot parking lot, working ICE or CBP shouldn’t be for you.

The recruiting pitch for ICE and CBP is even worse than that post-9/11 pitch: Are you watching the news and excited to rough up abuelas, hog-tie the guy cutting the lawn down the street, or manhandle a member of Congress? Apply today!

A major part of what the Border Patrol dealt with in its hiring surge was it played to post-9/11 terror fears. As I wrote in 2019, “CBP spent that first decade after 9/11 recruiting and equipping what it touted would be an elite counterterrorism force—the first line of defense against Islamic terrorists and drug cartels. But this only perpetuated a message and culture that has left the agency ill-suited to confront what it actually has to do in the second decade after 9/11: Provide humanitarian aid for women, children and families amid global instability that has strained border forces worldwide. CBP went out and recruited Rambo, when it turned out the agency needed Mother Teresa.”

Right now, the exact recruiting pitch for ICE and CBP is even worse than that post-9/11 pitch: Are you watching the news and excited to rough up abuelas, hog-tie the guy cutting the lawn down the street, or manhandle a member of Congress? Apply today!

I wrote last month about the dangerous culture we’re seeing play out in ICE—it clearly believes it will never face accountability again—and a lot of that has to do with how unhealthy and new ICE is as an agency. Other law enforcement agencies, like the FBI and DEA, are more cautious culturally because they have long-enough histories to know how mistakes happen and political climates shift. They’ve seen the pendulum swing. ICE hasn’t. It’s young, formed in the wake of 9/11, and its widespread and rapid embrace of masked enforcement is terrifying—other federal agencies also operate in plainclothes but then go out of their way to make clear their law enforcement bona fides during enforcement operations. Think of the FBI’s iconic blue raid jackets. That ICE has gone so quickly to masked operations in unmarked vehicles with no clear law enforcement identification makes clear how unhealthy and fundamentally undemocratic its core culture now is. It’s a resounding indictment of the current leadership at ICE and a warning sign of what’s to come.

3) The what: Funding ICE and CBP at this level marks a fundamental and dangerous shift in the balance of the rule of law and federal law enforcement.

According to the latest figures, DHS already has more federal law enforcement officers and agents than the Department of Justice. CBP was already the largest federal law enforcement agency. As of 2020, DHS had about 66,000 officers and agents—almost entirely ICE and CBP, with about 5,000 Secret Service agents and another 1,000 building guards and TSA investigators—while DOJ had about 40,000 officers, including the FBI, DEA, Marshals, ATF, and the Bureau of Prisons. Now, we’re going to funding ICE and CBP at a level where they will dwarf the Justice Department’s resources, tipping the balance in the government even more so from DOJ to DHS. That matters, in part, because DHS is much less grounded in the rule of law and Constitution than DOJ. Generally speaking, its agents and officers are trained less, face lower hiring standards, and come to the job with less and more narrow professional experience.

We’re already seeing “mistakes” made in who is arrested. We’re already seeing people disappear in a system that’s detaining too many people too quickly. We’re already seeing ICE officers harass and assault US citizens.

As just a few examples: FBI special agent requirements include a bachelor’s degree and two years of professional experience (or an advanced degree, often a J.D. or accounting degree for the bureau), be at least 23 years old, pass a Top Secret security clearance background check, and then special agent candidates undergo 20 weeks—five months—of training at the academy at Quantico. ICE officers do not have a basic educational requirement (they can use three years of work experience instead), pass only a Secret level security clearance background check, and go through just 13 weeks of training (plus a five-week Spanish course).Out in the field, ICE and CBP officers and Border Patrol agents face a different policing environment—there are a lot of areas where civil rights and civil liberties are different in border and immigration policing than they are for Justice Department law enforcement agencies who primarily deal with Article III courts, standards of evidence, and US citizens. We’re already seeing how corruption and fear-inducing applying that “border mentality” to the nation’s interior is—and we’re about to radically increase the number of times and frequency that ICE and CBP officers are in contact with US citizens. “You think we’re arresting people now?” Trump’s border czar Tom Homan bragged. “Wait till we get the funding to do what we got to do.”

We’re already seeing “mistakes” made in who is arrested. We’re already seeing people disappear in a system that’s detaining too many people too quickly. We’re already seeing ICE officers harass and assault US citizens. We’re already seeing tensions boil over in communities because of the heavy-handed ICE and CBP tactics. “It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play,” AOC wrote after the bill’s passage.

Lastly, DHS is not—and was never designed to be—the Justice Department. It’s notable and important that presidents have (or at least are SUPPOSED to have) a fundamentally different relationship with their attorneys general than they do their homeland security secretaries. Attorneys general—by tradition, culture, and design—are supposed to maintain an arms-length from the presidents they serve; their oath and duty is to the rule of law and the constitution. This is the tension we saw play out in Watergate, the Clinton administration, the first Trump administration, and even—notably—in the Biden administration, where Merrick Garland famously was less aggressive prosecuting past Trump transgressions than the Biden White House wished. DHS secretaries, though, are more traditional Cabinet secretaries—their role is to implement forcefully the president’s agenda.

4) The why: Trump’s vast spending increase will coincide with an increasingly lawless administration.

As one might say, the warning signs that Trump’s lawlessness will increase are flashing red. This is particularly worrisome in the context of immigration detention and enforcement because the courts are still battling over exactly what kind of due process the administration is required to provide before kidnapping you off the street and expelling you to a country where you may or may not have ever been in your life.

The signs aren’t good.

If the administration had any plan to balance civil rights and due process with its giant new hiring and construction spree, it would be also tripling or quadrupling or quintupling the new immigration judges.

We know that this giant increase in detention facilities and officers isn’t meant to actually work with the existing immigration system because compared to the rest of the bill, there’s only the most modest of modest increases to the number of immigration judges in the country—a rise from 700 to 800, an increase so out-of-scale to the problem that we could have used those extra 100 to work through the existing backlog from the Biden years. If the Trump administration had any plan to balance civil rights and due process with its giant new hiring and construction spree, it would be also tripling or quadrupling or quintupling the new immigration judges. The fact that it’s not makes clear that the Trump administration, DHS, and DOJ have no intention of normal due process.

Now combine the ICE and CBP expansion with the other startling and worrisome revelation of the Trump administration last week: It asserts, in “allowing” companies to ignore the TikTok ban, that it has the power to grant clemency for illegal actions. The always-smart Jack Goldsmith, a veteran of the Justice Department and careful student of executive power, called it “an astounding assertion of executive power—maybe the broadest I have ever seen any president or Justice Department make, ever, in any context—and that is saying something.”

The new arguments emerged in a Fourth of July news dump, where the administration finally released the letters it has issued companies like Apple and Google to tell them they’re okay to ignore the ban on TikTok in the US. As Goldsmith says, “The logic of the letter seems to be: The law touches on national security and foreign affairs; I, President Trump, do not like the law; therefore, I need not enforce it. That logic would enable the president to not enforce (and presumably not comply with) every one of the many, many hundreds of statutes that touch on foreign relations or national security—just because the president does not like the law.”

As the also always-brilliant Steve Vladeck wrote, “Attorney General Bondi’s TikTok-related letters rest on a view of presidential power that has no support in even the most capacious understandings of the ‘unitary executive’ theory.”

The idea that the attorney general can issue a letter basically saying “don’t worry, ignore that federal law because I say you can” is a level of lawlessness that cannot stand in a free society. And it’s an ill portent of what’s to come.

Put all of the above together, and I fear that Congress just passed legislation hastening our transformation toward a federal police state unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our history.

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As Nations Lag on Climate Action, Cities Across the World Step Up

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

Your city is probably fighting climate change in more ways than you realize. Perhaps your mayor is on a mission to plant more trees, or they’ve set efficiency standards for buildings, requiring better windows and insulation. Maybe they’ve even electrified your public transportation, reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.

Ten years after the Paris Agreement, nations are still nowhere near ambitious enough in their commitments to reduce emissions and avoid the worst consequences of climate change. More than that, they haven’t shown enough follow-through on the goals they did set. Instead, it’s been cities and other local governments that have taken the lead.

According to a new report by the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, along with C40—a global network of nearly 100 mayors prioritizing climate action, collectively representing nearly 600 million people—three-quarters of the cities in the latter group are slashing their per capita emissions faster than their national governments. As global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, per capita emissions across C40 cities fell 7.5 percent on average between 2015 and 2024.

“The untold story is that cities and local leaders really mobilized in a big way in Paris, but also in the decade since,” said Asif Nawaz Shah, co-author of the report and the head of impact and global partnerships at C40 and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy. “It’s where the action happens, and it’s also where people are suffering the impacts the most.”

Cities are adapting because they’re experiencing especially acute effects of climate change as their populations rapidly grow. They’re getting much hotter than surrounding rural areas due to the urban heat island effect, in which the built environment soaks up the sun’s energy during the day and slowly releases it at night. Because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, they’re suffering increasingly catastrophic flooding as rains overwhelm sewer systems designed for the climate of yesteryear. And coastal cities have to deal with sea level rise in addition to fiercer tropical storms.

“I find it very heartening, to be honest, that cities really are taking the lead.”

Mayors can more quickly deploy fixes than national governments can, climate experts say. Cities are less politically divided, for instance, and officials are more in tune with the immediate needs of their residents than a faraway federal government is. “I think that’s part of what makes it easier for mayors to make the case for climate action, because they’re not just addressing a concept that can seem a little abstract,” Shah said. “They’re addressing it through the lens of what people’s lived realities and experiences are.”

By making their cities more liveable, mayors also make them more sustainable, especially when it comes to walkability, bikeability, and vehicle transportation. The report notes that Melbourne, Australia, is on a quest to create “20-minute neighborhoods,” in which people can reach most of their daily needs—work, schools, grocery stores—within a 20-minute return walk from home. Over in Shenzhen, China, officials have electrified 16,000 buses, reducing annual CO2 emissions by over 200,000 tons.

And by literally greening their cities, mayors solve a bunch of their citizens’ problems at once. In Quezon City in the Philippines, the government turned unused land into 337 gardens and 10 model farms, while training more than 4,000 urban farmers. The report also notes that Freetown, Sierra Leone, planted more than 550,000 trees, creating more than 600 jobs. In addition to significantly reducing urban temperatures, these green spaces also mitigate flooding by soaking up rainwater. “It is becoming clear, I think, to a lot of municipalities that this type of action will be absolutely essential,” said Dan Jasper, senior policy advisor at the climate solutions group Project Drawdown, which wasn’t involved in the report. “It’s not just about being uncomfortable. This is about protecting people’s lives.”

Mayors are also improving access to clean energy and more efficient appliances. The report notes that Buenos Aires, Argentina, installed solar panels on more than 100 schools, while Qab Elias, Lebanon, went a step further by partnering with a private supplier to allow half of its homes to install solar.

It’s not as if all nations are leaving cities to their own devices, though. The Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships, for instance, is an initiative signed by more than 70 national governments to help cities, states, and regions with planning and financing climate action. “I find it very heartening, to be honest, that cities really are taking the lead,” Jasper said. “I think they’re going above and beyond in some respects, about planning for the future, as well as actually implementing some of the things that the federal governments have signed on to.”

Still, not nearly enough funding is flowing to cities and other local governments to do all the climate action they need. Unlike national governments, they can’t print their own money, so they’re strictly limited by their budgets. Conservative governments like President Donald Trump’s administration are also slashing funds for climate action. Last year, 611 cities disclosed 2,500 projects worth $179 billion, but urban climate finance has to rise to $4.5 trillion each year by 2030, the report says.

These are not donations but investments with returns: Spending money now to adapt to climate change means spending less on disaster recovery and health care in the future. “It’s not a call for handouts or for freebies,” Shah said. “It’s a call for genuine long-term investment that will yield results to protect citizens and livelihoods.

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Trump’s DOJ Just Denied Key Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracy Theories. MAGA Uproar Ensued.

Late Sunday night, Axios reported that the Department of Justice and FBI have concluded that billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide. A two-page memo issued by the DOJ and obtained by Axios also stated that Epstein wasn’t engaged in a blackmail operation and didn’t have a “client list” of people who are believed to have engaged in sex crimes against women and girls alongside him. The DOJ also released surveillance video from outside Epstein’s prison cell in New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, meant to help show that no one could have entered to murder him. Besides Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s procurer who is serving 20 years in prison for sex trafficking, the department determined that no one else will be charged in connection with his case.

“Next the DOJ will say ‘Actually, Jeffrey Epstein never even existed,'” complained Alex Jones.

“This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list,’” the memo reads. “There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

This was, of course, cause for considerable uproar, both in the MAGA world and across the aisle, where Epstein conspiracy theories are also deeply rooted. The Trump administration has continually claimed they would declassify shocking and never-before-seen Epstein files, conducting a weird little stunt in February where a group of conservative bloggers and influencers were given folders full of supposedly unreleased Epstein-related material; the move flopped when it became clear that they held no new information. Earlier that month, Attorney General Pam Bondi even claimed that she had Epstein’s client list “sitting on my desk right now to review,” adding that doing so had been a “directive by president Trump.”

Among the MAGA faithful, the news of the Justice Department’s decision brought a sense of betrayal and profound confusion, with some seeming to mistake it for a vindication of Epstein. Catturd, a prolific far-right Twitter poster and booster of the administration whose real name is Philip Buchanan, tweeted, “So all the girls who have testified about being raped on Epstein’s island were lying and Giselle Maxwell is in prison for being the madam for nobody? Please tell me this is fake news.”

“Assuming this leaked Epstein Files memo is true, then we all know this is a shameful coverup to protect the most heinous elites,” tweeted Rogan O’Handley, better known as “DC Draino,” another right-wing commentator and Trump stalwart. “We were told multiple times the files would be released and now it looks like backroom deals have been made to keep them hidden.”

“I don’t understand this,” echoed conservative political commenter Glenn Beck, sounding a plaintive note. “I’ve invited AG Bondi, Patel, and Bongino to discuss. Hope someone takes me up on the offer.”

“This is the type of lying that radicalizes people. Sigh,” tweeted “Autism Capital,” another large pro-Trump news aggregation account. (The account is followed by several members of the Trump administration, including Director of the National Institutes of Health Jay Bhattacharya and Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokesperson with a history of inflammatory and bigoted tweets.)

Even Benny Johnson, a former Buzzfeed writer and plagiarist turned MAGA personality with close ties to the administration who frequently interviews various senior officials, responded with fury.

“To say there are thousands of ‘victims’ in a convicted sex trafficking ring and then to say there were no ‘customers’ when the operation happened right before our very eyes insults our intelligence,” he tweeted. “Trafficking women to no one? I don’t buy it.”

“There are other dark forces at play here,” he added, before quoting George Orwell: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Yet skepticism of the decision wasn’t just limited to the MAGA world. People on the left and throughout American society also seemed doubtful. For instance, the Rise Above Justice Movement, which advocates for survivors of sexual violence (and was previously known as Survivors 4 Harris), shared an Instagram post which read, “We all know Donald Trump is on the Epstein list… That’s why they’re concealing and redacting it. They admitted there was a list. Now they’re backtracking… We know why.” (Ellipses theirs.)

The department’s memo comes not long after a Trump ally-turned-frenemy Elon Musk claimed that Trump is “in the Epstein files,” adding, “That is the real reason they have not been made public.” (After souring on Trump, Musk recently announced the formation of a new political party, dubbing it the America Party.)

While Musk appears to have since deleted those tweets, it is of course a documented fact that many powerful people socialized with Epstein, including Trump himself. The future president told New York magazine in 2002 that Epstein was a “terrific guy,” adding, “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Trump and Melania were also photographed alongside Epstein and Maxwell at Mar a Lago in 2000.

Musk greeted the news of the memo with a new fusillade of conspiracy-stoking tweets. “What’s the time?,” he posted very late Sunday night. “Oh look, it’s no-one-has-been-arrested-o’clock again.” He also retweeted a post from another conservative activist named Sarah Fields, which read, “If the entire government is protecting pedophiles, it has officially become the government against the people. I hope you understand that.”

“Next the DOJ will say ‘Actually, Jeffrey Epstein never even existed,” agreed conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones, responding to Musk. “This is over the top sickening.”

The complaints from Trump allies are part of a developing pattern in which administration officials—many of whom, like FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, were part of right-wing media before assuming roles in government—make sweeping promises of disclosure that they likely can’t ever fulfill. (On Monday, notably neither Bongino nor Bondi had tweeted anything about the Epstein memo.)

If Epstein’s death has become the JFK assassination of this generation, this memo stands to be its version of the Warren Commission report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Skepticism about the JFK assassination and the commission itself took root almost immediately after it finished its work in 1964, with a considerable percentage of Americans believing that Oswald had accomplices or that the commission failed to answer lingering questions about the killing. Some saw the report as an attempt to simply put debate about the shooting to bed. The U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, for instance, later wrote that the commission’s “investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate. The conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive.”

We’re heading down the same long road again, with the Trump DOJ and FBI’s bizarre stunts and sweeping promises serving only to cement Epstein’s death further into the conspiracy firmament. In their memo, both agencies tried, faintly and quite ironically, to prevent the tide of recrimination they surely know is coming, writing: “One of our highest priorities is combatting [sic] child exploitation and bringing justice to victims. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.”

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It’s Brad Lander’s Victory, Too

On election night a couple weeks ago, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was in an unusually good mood for a man about to lose the mayoral primary. Once heralded as a potential frontrunner, he had consistently been polling in a distant third place to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani.

Lander has a record of progressive policy accomplishments and the self-assurance of a seasoned technocrat. But, wonkish and unassuming, he struggled to gain traction in the Democratic primary. There were bigger, showier personalities competing for attention, and Lander receded to the background of a crowded field. Though in 2021 the New York Times Editorial Board had weighed in on behalf of Kathryn Garcia—that year’s unassuming technocrat—it managed to dismiss all the candidates in this race. The editorial described Lander as an effective manager who “exudes competence if not inspiration.”

A few weeks ago, though, Lander was thrust into the national spotlight when he was detained by federal agents while escorting a migrant out of an immigration court in Lower Manhattan. In videos, Lander can be seen holding onto the man and demanding to see a judicial warrant. (He was released several hours later without being charged.) It was a forceful side of Lander, tuned to a burgeoning resistance under the second Trump administration, that voters had not seen before.

Ultimately, Lander’s star turn came too late to make his candidacy viable, but it amplified his never-Cuomo message. Lander had spent the last stretch of the race doing everything in his power to, at the very least, keep Cuomo out of office. He spent $750,000 on ads attacking the former governor and landed some punches during the second debate. On the eve of the election, Lander cross-endorsed with Mamdani and appeared with him on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—an important sign of support, as Mamdani has been repeatedly and baselessly accused of antisemitism.

In this way, Mamdani’s win is also partly Lander’s, and the comptroller has been on an extended victory lap. On election night, Lander was addressing supporters at his campaign’s watch party in Park Slope when news of Cuomo’s concession came in. Lander was nothing short of gleeful. “Andrew Cuomo is in the past. He is not the present or future of New York City,” he told the crowd. “Good fucking riddance.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You took a more traditional route to the mayoral race—first as a city council member, then as the comptroller. In this primary, we’ve seen some rules of electoral politics get completely rewritten. Has this changed your understanding of New York City politics?

It did not go as I had mapped it out. That said, I was aware of the following fact when I got in the race: I am the 45th comptroller of the city of New York. The vast majority [of comptrollers] wanted to be mayor, and only one made it that was [Abraham Beame], and no one writes songs about Abe’s mayoralty. Comptroller is a job that teaches people about the inner workings of government and how to make it work better. But it isn’t so easy to make competence sexy or compelling. I knew that going in and was excited to get out there and talk to New Yorkers. It’s taken a bunch of twists and turns. I’m proud of the campaign we ran and feel very optimistic about the future of the city.

As a competitor to Mamdani, what did it feel like—and did it challenge ideas that you had about electoral politics—to see his surge in momentum?

Zohran ran a brilliant campaign—with a relentless focus on affordability, a mastery of the communication tools of the moment, and an understanding that people are being crushed by the cost of living. But he also had a real hopefulness that the city could be something better for working people in challenging times. He did that in a really compelling way. And I don’t know that that’s breaking the rules of politics. People get excited by someone who speaks to the things they’re feeling and projects a very hopeful vision that government can make it better.

But when it comes to the typical experts—editorial column writers, political consultants, and pollsters—they might have missed part of the story as the campaign was unfolding. Even Mamdani’s supporters were surprised by the outcome in the first round of ranked choice voting, right?

I think he over-performed everyone’s expectations—certainly mine, and I think even his own. One thing that has certainly changed is that, traditionally, in a race of this scale, you raise money, build a coalition, and reach voters primarily through paid TV and digital [advertising]. You would be helped in that greatly if you had the New York Times Editorial Board or a few marquee endorsements. That’s the way I won the comptroller’s race four years ago.

The attentional landscape has changed dramatically. Zohran’s videos, door-knocking, and volunteers broke through in a way that was different from many prior citywide races. It’s always a challenge to get people’s attention. And there’s so much else going on, with Trump, with Eric Adams still in City Hall, and with the sense of dark inevitability that Cuomo was bringing. That was even harder.

Look, until a few weeks before the election, I had not succeeded in enabling New Yorkers to see the parts of me I wanted to show and the kinds of leadership I could provide. And I give Zohran credit that he found powerful ways to do that.

Your campaign took a strong swing at social video, too. There’s been a lot of postmortem analysis of Mamdani’s online success—is it the form of the message? Is it the messenger or the content itself? I’m curious about what your read might be.

For myself, what I will say is that I come across best when I’m acting, when I’m leading, when I’m showing up. And I don’t think it was a coincidence for me that it was the arrest and the debate and the cross endorsement that helped me show leadership. I am just less telegenic. I made this joke throughout the campaign, but it really is true: All my daughter’s TikToks do better than mine.

So it’s definitely medium and messenger. There are things I’m really good at, and that form of viral video content just turns out not to be one of them. We got better at it; we brought in a new digital team a little later in the race. I think our earned media was good throughout. But Zohran really captured the spaces of attention. And I don’t only mean the videos. He made it cool for young people to meet others and socialize and by volunteering and knocking on doors.

An issue that’s risen to the forefront of the mayoral race is Israel’s war in Gaza, which has deeply divided the Democratic Party at large. Last year, a group advocating for a ceasefire was denied a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention. And now New York City may elect a Muslim mayor who’s been outspokenly pro-Palestine. To you, is this a sign that Democrats should rethink how they’re talking about Israel and antisemitism?

I have long believed that we need a different dialogue that doesn’t divide Jews and Muslims. The cross endorsement that Zohran and I did showed that. We can have different points of view on foreign policy, but share a belief in the equal worth of humanity. And we can have a conversation about what the best ways to provide every single New Yorker with a home they can afford, a neighborhood they feel safe going to worship in, and a great school for their kids. Democrats have to get better at doing that.

And that is not easy. The days since October 7 have been excruciating. This conflict, this war, is horrible in the cost it’s taking over there and the divides it has imposed here. I hope that what we did in the closing days of the campaign—to reach out and try hard to listen and understand—can be a model for bringing our party and our city back together.

Meanwhile, you have Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, who are three non-Jews weaponizing antisemitism and Jewish anxiety for their own craven political purposes, and it’s just critical that we don’t fall for it.

One thing that’s on a lot of people’s minds right now is what comes next for you after your term as comptroller ends—whether that might be potentially joining a Mayor Mamdani’s administration or running for Congress. Do you want to stay local?

First, I’ll say I’m really flattered by all the interest. I’m moved, and honestly, still a little bewildered by the way in which the cross endorsement and the arrest generated so much goodwill and hopefulness. That all sits on top of the energy generated by Zohran and his campaign.

There’s a lot still to do in the comptroller’s office, and I am deeply committed to ensuring that we elect Zohran Mamdani mayor in November. There’s a lot of work to do there—continuing the campaign and building a bigger coalition. He has a very big mandate for change, and it will take a lot of hands to make it happen. And I’d be happy to help in any way I can.

And to end on a lighter note: A few weeks ago, you tweeted at the comedian Tim Robinson and asked him to a New York Liberty game. I have two questions. The first is, did you hear back? And the second is, do you see the resemblance?

[Laughs.] For better or worse, it’s hard to miss the resemblance. He did not get back to me, sadly. But the offer stands. I have a half season ticket package to the New York Liberty, and he’s welcome to join me anytime.

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Tragedy Strikes Texas, and Some Experts Blame Trump Cuts for Devastation

On July 4, tragedy struck Texas.

A flash flood cresting at more than 20 feet killed at least 70 people across six counties in central Texas, according to reports. Most of the damage was concentrated in Kerr County, a region about 125 miles west of Austin. There, the dead include 21 children and 11 who reportedly remain missing from Camp Mystic, a Christian children’s summer camp in the unincorporated community of Hunt. Videos and images show homes destroyed, trees downed, and muddy waters flooding streets.

On Sunday morning, Trump announced he had signed a major disaster declaration for Kerr County, which unlocks federal funding and resources to support the emergency response and longer-term recovery. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) has said that more than 800 people have been saved so far, but dozens reportedly remain missing.

People at Camp Mystic, a Christian camp for girls in Hunt, Texas, which was hard hit by the flash floods.Julio Cortez/AP

But according to a new report in the New York Times, there were serious inadequacies in both preparation for and the emergency response to the natural disaster. In part, apparently because of staffing shortages at the National Weather Service (NWS) prompted by Trump’s and Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government. Housed within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the Department of Commerce, the NWS provides forecasts, weather warnings, and climate data that are used to help local and state officials protect communities in the face of weather disasters. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) invaded NOAA earlier this year, and hundreds of forecasters were reportedly fired; another 1,000 reportedly took buyout offers.

According to the Times, the San Angelo office of the NWS was lacking a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster, and top meteorologist. The nearby San Antonio office also had vacancies for a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, roles that are designed to work with local officials to plan for floods. The Times reports that the warning coordination meteorologist left after taking the early retirement offer that the Trump administration has used across agencies to try to shed staff, citing a person with knowledge of that worker’s departure. The Times also reports that while some of the open roles may predate the current administration, the current vacancy rates at both the San Antonio and San Angelo NWS offices are roughly double what they were in January, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents NWS employees.

John Sokich, former director of congressional affairs for NWS, told the Times the reduced staffing made it harder for the NWS to successfully coordinate with local officials.

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said the vacancies should be investigated, adding, “I don’t think it’s helpful to have missing key personnel from the [NWS] not in place to help prevent these tragedies.”

Rep. @JoaquinCastrotx responds to reports that two key Texas National Weather Service offices were understaffed: “I do think that it should be investigated. And I don't think it's helpful to have missing key personnel from the National Weather Service not in place to help prevent… pic.twitter.com/6wyckCJmZG

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) July 6, 2025

Several factors, however, contributed to the scale of devastation in Texas, including some that may not have been able to have been anticipated, much less controlled.

Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said at a news conference on Friday that the NWS underestimated the amount of rain expected to fall in its forecasts, but several meteorologists told Wired in a report published on Saturday that the meteorologists could not have predicted the severity of this storm, and that their forecasts were accurate at the time they issued them. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly also told reporters, “We deal with floods on a regular basis…we had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here.” And as my colleague Henry Carnell points out on Bluesky, other factors that were at play included national reductions in FEMA funding and, in some cases, lags in communication by local agencies to the public advising evacuation.

A spokesperson for NWS said in a statement provided to Mother Jones on Sunday that the agency is “heartbroken by the tragic loss of life in Kerr County,” adding that the agency’s local offices in Austin and San Antonio had conducted forecast briefings for emergency management personnel on Thursday, and issued flash floods warnings both Thursday night and Friday morning.

People searched through debris along the Guadalupe River on Sunday in Hunt.Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle/AP

Still, the vacancies in the local Texas offices, coupled with the devastation of the floods, point to what experts have said is an urgent need for the Trump administration to bolster resources for emergency responses to natural disasters. Just this week, emergency officials from across the country told CNN that FEMA was ghosting them despite the arrival of hurricane season. Also this week, the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA), a nonpartisan group of emergency management directors, sent Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem a letter demanding she make congressionally-mandated emergency management grants available immediately, given that they should have been available in May. Spokespeople for DHS and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday afternoon.

Acting FEMA Director David Richardson reportedly told staff last month he was not aware that hurricane season had started, which the White House dismissed as a joke, and a May internal review of FEMA concluded that the agency was not ready for hurricane season despite the June 1 deadline. NOAA is also seeking to cut another 2,000 employees in its proposed budget for the next fiscal year.

Appearing alongside Noem, who insisted that the Trump administration would upgrade what she described as an “ancient” NWS notification system, Abbott pledged at a Saturday press conference that officials “will be relentless in going after and ensuring that we locate every single person who’s been a victim of this flooding event.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, right, signed a disaster declaration proclamation on Saturday as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, left, looked on.Rodolfo Gonzalez/AP

The tragedy is particularly chilling in light of a May open letter issued by five former NWS directors, who wrote that agency staff “will have an impossible task to continue its current level of services” in light of the Trump cuts, adding, “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

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EPA Workers Speak Up for Public Health. Then Trump Officials Sent Them Home.

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

The US Environmental Protection Agency placed 139 employees on administrative leave Thursday, an agency spokesperson confirmed, after they signed a “Stand Up for Science” petition using their official titles and EPA positions.

The affected employees received an email, shared with Inside Climate News, informing them that they are on leave through July 17, pending an investigation into whether they used work time or resources when signing the petition.

The email emphasizes that “this is not a disciplinary action.”

One employee, who asked not to be named, said they signed the petition “on a Sunday on my own device.”

“I’d be shocked if anyone used work resources,” the employee went on. “We’ve taken ethics training and are aware of the law.”

While the employees are on leave, they are prohibited from using government equipment, including cell phones, logging into government-issued computers, contacting any EPA employees for access to information, and performing any official EPA duties.

An EPA spokesperson wrote in an email that the agency “has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November.”

The agency “has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November.”

The EPA also alleged that the petition contains misleading information, but did not specify what is incorrect.

The petition, addressed to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and members of Congress, is a “declaration of dissent” with the administration’s policies, “including those that undermine the EPA’s mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

“Since the Agency’s founding in 1970, EPA has accomplished this mission by leveraging science, funding, and expert staff in service to the American people,” the petition reads. “Today, we stand together in dissent against the current administration’s focus on harmful deregulation, mischaracterization of previous EPA actions, and disregard for scientific expertise.”

More than 200 EPA employees, including retirees, signed the petition, some of them only by initials. The document criticizes the agency for “undermining the public trust” by issuing misleading statements in press releases, such as referring to EPA grants as “green slush funds” and praising “clean coal as beautiful.”

The petition also accuses the administration of “ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters,” most notably regarding asbestos, mercury, and greenhouse gases.

Health-based regulatory standards are being repealed or reconsidered, including drinking water limits for four PFAS “forever chemicals” that cause cancer.

“The decisions of the current administration frequently contradict the peer-reviewed research and recommendations of Agency experts. Such contradiction undermines the EPA’s reputation as a trusted scientific authority. Make no mistake: your actions endanger public health and erode scientific progress—not only in America—but around the world.”

Signatories also lambasted the EPA for reversing progress on environmental justice, including the cancellation of billions of grant dollars to underserved communities and the removal of EJScreen, a mapping analysis tool that allowed the public to see pollution sources, neighborhood demographics, and health data.

The petition also opposes the dismantling of the Office of Research and Development, whose work forms the scientific basis for federal rulemaking.

Nicole Cantello is president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Union Local 704, and leader of AFGE Council 238, a nationwide union that represents over 8,000 EPA employees.

She said the EPA’s allegations are baseless.

“These are trumped-up charges against EPA employees because they made a political statement the Trump administration did not like,” Cantello said. “Now the Trump administration is retaliating against them.”

Cantello said the union will fight for the employees on several legal grounds, including First Amendment protections and employment contractual rights. “We’ll be using all of them to defend our people,” she said.

Matthew Tejada, the former director of the EPA’s environmental justice program and currently senior vice president of environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, blasted the Trump administration for going after the EPA employees who signed the letter.

These civil servants, he said, were “totally within their rights” to speak out. “This is a public declaration by those employees that they continue to fight to do their jobs to help people across this country live healthier, safer, more prosperous lives,” Tejada said.

Tejada emphasized that the individuals involved were not working in coordination with advocacy groups, but acting independently in defense of the agency’s mission and the public interest.

He called the administration’s reaction “another indication that this administration is unique in modern times for having zero regard for the Constitution, for protecting and supporting the people of the United States.”

“We are in completely unprecedented waters here,” Tejada said.

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Elon Musk is Back in Politics With the New America Party

After leaving DC, with his business empire suffering, his relationship with President Donald Trump fractured, and his DOGE efforts deemed broadly unpopular, Elon Musk is not quietly retreating to his Texas compound of pronatalists’ dreams.

Instead, he announced on Saturday in a post on X that he will launch a new, third political party called the America Party. “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Musk wrote. “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.” The announcement came a day after Trump’s former top adviser and the world’s richest man teased the potential launch, polling his X followers on whether they wanted the new party; the results show that out of approximately 1.25 million respondents, 65 percent said yes.

Musk told followers in other posts that he plans to launch the party “next year,” which would be in time for the critical midterm elections, and floated the idea of focusing on “just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.”

“Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people,” he added.

In another post, Musk said the party would have legislative discussions with both the Democratic and Republican parties and caucus independently.

What sparked this? It seems that Trump signing his legislative agenda into law on Friday via the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill—which Musk had previously railed against, describing it as “utterly insane” and arguing it would undo some of the work of DOGE—pushed Musk over the edge. In response to someone on X asking how Musk went from loving Trump to trying to undermine him, Musk wrote: “Increasing the deficit from an already insane $2T under Biden to $2.5T. This will bankrupt the country.”

Musk follows a long line of people who have attempted to launch a third party and discovered it was an uphill battle, due to ballot requirements and the need to build powerful political allies in a staunchly two-party system.In fact, Musk himself previously flirted with the idea in 2022 before seemingly abandoning it. As my colleagues wrote in a special issue of this magazine published last year, third parties’ electoral efforts have never been successful in America—at least, if you define success in terms of winning elections. And as David Corn wrote:

Third-party and independent candidates always talk about the legitimate need to enlarge the political debate. But they also present the major parties, billionaires, and even foreign governments with opportunities for political mischief.

Speaking of mischief, Musk’s massive wealth offers a unique form of power to potentially create it. The tech mogul, after all, spent more than $290 million on last year’s election to put Trump back in the White House, according to FEC filings.He also infamously spent $25 million earlier this year to try to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election; Musk’s preferred candidate lost, and the race also became a referendum on his attempts to buy elections. Nonetheless, when someone on X outlined the laundry list of demands he would have to satisfy to successfully launch the America Party, Musk responded, “Not hard tbh.”

Trump does not appear to have weighed in yet, though earlier this week he floated the idea of having DOGE take a look at federal subsidies provided to Musk’s companies. “BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!” Trump wrote.

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday morning. But some Trump- and third-party loyalists have already indicated they do not approve. Trump fan Roger Stone wrote on X that he “would rather see [Musk] pursue his efforts at electoral reform within the Republican Party primaries rather than having a new party splitting the vote of sane people and letting the Marxist Democrats gain control again.” The Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, Steven Nekhaila, wrote in another post, “Elon, building a new party isn’t the shortcut you think, it’s a multi-decade slog.” But he offered an easy alternative, imploring him insteadto back the Libertarian Party, the country’s [third-largest][27] political party that has never managed to score more than 3 percent of the vote in a presidential election.

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—who Musk reportedly [sparred with][28] in the past—offered what appeared to be the Trump administration’s first comment on Musk’s new venture. “The principles of DOGE were very popular,” Bessent said. “I think, if you looked at the polling, Elon Musk was not.”

“The principles of DOGE were very popular. I think, if you looked at the polling, Elon was not.”

.[@SecScottBessent][29] responds to Elon Musk saying he’s launching a new political party. [pic.twitter.com/clsZXZOrjB][30]

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) [July 6, 2025][31]

If Musk’s recent activity on X is any indication, it looks like those who engage with him on the platform he owns will have a central role in shaping the party’s future. “When & where should we hold the inaugural American Party congress?” he [wrote][32] in one post early Sunday. “This will be super fun!”

In another post responding to someone outlining a potential “America Party platform”—which [listed][33] “free speech,” “pro natalist,” and “reduce debt,” among other priorities—Musk simply [wrote][34], “Yeah!”

[27]: http://IG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!! [28]: https://www.axios.com/2025/04/23/musk-bessent-trump-white-house-irs [29]: https://twitter.com/SecScottBessent?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw [30]: https://t.co/clsZXZOrjB [31]: https://twitter.com/CNNSOTU/status/1941883854156906954?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw [32]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1941789385185182136 [33]: https://x.com/tyler%5F%5Fpalmer/status/1941615907266232707 [34]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1941616039827017825

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We Asked Trump’s Former Prisons Chief How $45 Billion Will Reshape Immigrant Detention

The massive piece of legislation to which President Donald Trump has just attached his legacy allocates $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement over the next four years—including $45 billion to expand the detention of immigrants to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations. It will make ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history, with more money than the federal prison system, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration combined.

What will that mean, practically speaking? I turned to former officials who have run large prison systems, as well as attorneys who specialize in immigrant detention, to understand the logistical concerns with expanding a detention system so quickly.

Hugh Hurwitz was acting director of the Bureau of Prisons during part of Trump’s first term, managing 122 facilities and some 170,000 incarcerated people nationwide.

Martin Horn was secretary of corrections for Pennsylvania in the late 1990s and commissioner of New York City’s corrections department in the 2000s.

Eunice Hyunhye Cho is an attorney who challenges unconstitutional conditions in immigrant detention centers with the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute, wrote a book about the private prison companies that incarcerate immigrants.

In separate interviews—excerpts of which have been edited for length and clarity—they dove into how this $45 billion spend could, as Eisen put it, “drastically change the landscape of immigration enforcement and detention in this country.”

On the size of the allocation

Cho: “It’s enormous. Currently, ICE spends around $3.4 to $3.9 billion a year on immigration detention.”

Hurwitz: “Forty-five billion dollars is an astronomical amount of money—the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has an $8 billion annual budget. The money for ICE is available through September 2029, so Congress doesn’t expect Homeland Security to spend it in one year.”

Cho: “Even if you average it out over the years—and that may not be right, they may spend it very quickly—$45 billion is at least three or four times the amount they currently spend on immigration detention.”

Eisen: “It will drastically change the landscape. A vast infrastructure of detention will be built, and actually has already started, even before this bill was signed.”

On the number of potential detainees

Hurwitz: “ICE wants to increase their capacity from about 41,000 people a day to 100,000—that’s pretty significant. To put it in comparison, BOP’s population today is about 155,000. And ICE doesn’t have 122 prisons like BOP has.”

Cho: “This is an extraordinary number of people. ICE is rounding up people through home raids, workplace raids, court check-ins, courthouse arrests, arrests near schools, places of worship. The other thing is that ICE is refusing to release people from detention who have traditionally been released, people who may be eligible for bond and parole, people who are very medically vulnerable, and even people who have won their cases.”

On where the money might end up

Hurwitz: “Remember, ICE doesn’t own prisons. So my guess is the immediate effort will be in contracting with private prison companies or states and localities that have capacity to hold these people.”

Cho: “They have also discussed new ways of detention, including temporary tent detention sites, so some of the money may go to logistics corporations and toward sites like Alligator Alcatraz, an example of how they may contract with a state. And there’s Guantanamo—ICE is supposed to be reimbursing the Department of Defense for use of those facilities—as well as flights. They may choose to build their own facilities, but it takes time to do that, so to extend the number of detention beds quickly, they’ll probably go with preexisting facilities or temporary facilities.”

On staffing challenges

Horn: “How do you recruit enough staff to supervise that number of individuals? How quickly can you onboard them and train them? Staffing is absolutely critical—custodial staff, but also medical staff. And if you look at these very rural locations, typically there are not a large number of trained medical professionals, so you’re going to have to get people to relocate. Are there places for them to live? How long is the commute going to be?”

Hurwitz: “All correctional facilities nowadays are having difficulty hiring staff. The private prisons and states and localities, they’re all looking for the same candidates, right? Most places have increased the salaries and created other incentives to recruit people, but it’s still difficult to find good candidates.”

On medical concerns

Hurwitz: “In the BOP, we have sentenced inmates who have been in the system a while. Because we had them for a long time, we knew what their medical conditions were, so we could send them to the appropriate places. ICE has a challenge, because these people aren’t going to be there that long, so they don’t know their medical history, they just don’t have the depth of information that you have with sentenced inmates. And that makes everything more risky.”

Cho: “Immigration detention facilities were terrible places to be even before the Trump administration. We have documented conditions of abuse, medical neglect, preventable deaths, sexual assault, use of force, force-feeding on hunger strikers. There have been suicides. You have people who are placed in brutal conditions of confinement, who had mental health treatment outside, but once they come in they’re either cut off from their medication or placed in solitary confinement, which can further exacerbate mental health distress. We’ve been tracking cases where people who are life dependent on insulin are not receiving it.”

On Alligator Alcatraz

Horn: “The pictures that I saw of the Florida facility show a large open space separated by chain link fence with bunk beds. We don’t know how many showers, how many toilets, how many wash basins they’re providing.”

Hurwitz: “That was built by the state of Florida. I’ve never been in an ICE detention facility, so I don’t really know what an ICE detention facility looks like. That’s not how we would run a Bureau of Prisons facility.”

Cho: “I haven’t seen it. I don’t think many people have. There are some very clear issues—tent facilities in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the swamp. Heat concerns, whether or not it’s actually safe during hurricane season, inclement weather. They were already reporting flooding on the first day.”

Eisen: “They are talking about alligators and pythons guarding the perimeter of the facility. The cruelty and inhumanity here is pretty unprecedented.”

On local, state, and federal prisons taking immigrants

Eisen: “It is very common to find detention bed space in county jails and state prisons, and less common in the federal system, though it did happen in Trump 1.0. Conditions depend on the facility; some have air conditioning and enough space, and in some the infrastructure is much worse. These are immigrants who have not been convicted of a crime for the most part, or have not been accused of committing a crime. Correctional officers are trained for a certain population, whereas ICE detention officers are trained for a different population.”

Cho: “Jails or prisons may not have been set up to ensure that people can call immigration attorneys, or that people who speak different languages can access medical care. We were talking to folks in Alaska, and there were stories of people who had missed their immigration proceedings or their bond hearings because the facility just wasn’t set up to make sure they would be there.”

Hurwitz: “Obviously, [holding immigrant detainees] is not what BOP is designed to do, but BOP and ICE did sign an intergovernmental agreement, and BOP housed a small number of detainees for ICE at five, six facilities—maybe it’s more now. I think BOP generally tried to separate them—they were kept in separate housing units or separate wings away from the general population. When I was director, [operating to house immigrant detainees] certainly wasn’t our preferred method, because it was different than how we do things. And when you’re running a prison, you don’t like to do things differently.”

On private prison companies taking immigrants

Cho: “Private prison companies have been chomping at the bit for this reconciliation package to pass. They very early on recognized what an economic boon this would be.”

Eisen: “Ninety percent of people in immigrant detention facilities are in private facilities, and we have seen companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group already profit from the president’s immigration agenda. There’s the potential reactivation of a detention center in Leavenworth, Kansas; we’ve seen the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas reopen; the reopening of Delaney Hall, owned by GEO Group in Newark. What’s also really important to note is that these companies own transportation subsidiaries to transport people across the country, and those will be expanded as well.”

Hurwitz: “When BOP worked with private prisons, we were putting criminal aliens in those private facilities and didn’t require them to run programming—they were going to be deported after their release, so there was no reason for BOP to invest in programming—but yet, all of the contractors ran programming. And why did they do that? An idle population is more apt to get into fights. So they put in the programs on their own.”

On oversight

Eisen: “This new money comes at a time when the administration is rolling back attempts to oversee what’s happening. You’ve seen members of Congress attempting to visit detention facilities, and ICE issued guidance in June asking for 72 hours’ notice for a visit, even though federal law authorizes members of Congress to visit any detention facility at any time unannounced.”

Cho: “The Trump administration basically defunded the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties as well as the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which were both responsible for investigating abuses in immigration detention facilities. [Facing blowback, the administration backpedaled, but advocates doubt its commitment to those missions.] And ICE has weakened standards for facilities that are going to be combined ICE detention plus criminal detention. Things as basic as not allowing legal groups to provide legal orientation, not specifying the number of telephones that must be provided, not specifying in their medical care guidelines that prescription medication must be provided to detainees. Standards have become so weak as to render them practically meaningless.”

Eisen: “In 2024, right before Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General issued a report after inspecting ICE detention facilities. They observed mold, rust, peeling paint in showers, bathrooms with clogged or inoperable toilets, broken sinks, water leaks, people not seeing doctors as often as they were supposed to. I bring all this up because those were the conditions when there was more significant oversight. So one can only imagine what’s going to happen with less oversight.”

On what won’t get funding—and what will

Cho: “It’s important to note what the $45 billion is being taken away from. There’s $11 billion being cut from Pell Grants, $20 billion being cut from Medicaid for the provision of nursing home staff. I am reading proposals for increased detention centers in places that were formerly nursing homes—that is one of the starkest manifestations of what this is going to look like, what this budget bill is doing in terms of the fabric of our communities.”

Hurwitz: “I believe the ‘big, beautiful bill’ had another $5 billion for BOP, so from a BOP perspective, the amount of money is pretty good.”

On the speed of the expansion

Hurwitz: “They’re on a pretty aggressive track, from what you hear from the president, but I have no reason to think that it can or can’t be done. I don’t have enough information.”

Horn: “Anything having to do with detention that you do in a hurry is generally not a good idea. That’s been my experience.”

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Musician Uses Moths’ Flight Data to Compose a Piece About Their Decline

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

They are vital pollinators who come out at night, but now moths have emerged into the bright light of day as co-creators of a new piece of music—composed using the insects’ own flight data.

Ellie Wilson composed Moth x Human in a protected habitat on Parsonage Down in Salisbury, Wiltshire. She assigned each of the 80 resident moth species a different sound, which was triggered when it landed on her monitor.

Around the automated melody created by the moths, she composed music for live violin, cello, trombone, piano, and synths. Wilson will be interviewed and the piece performed twice, at London’s Southbank Centre this weekend as part of the New Music Biennial.

“I wanted to compose a piece of music that was, in part, created by the insects themselves,” said Wilson. “The moths randomly created these little tiny melodies—little fragments and motifs which I used to compose the rest of the piece, including tapping on the body of the cello to imitate the sound of a moth getting trapped in a lamp.”

Moth populations are experiencing steep declines across the globe due to habitat loss, pesticides, and the climate crisis. This has a knock-on effect on the ecosystem because moths are an important food source for bats, owls and birds—but also because moths are critical to pollination, albeit in ways that are still not fully understand.

“Music is an accessible way for people to understand the disaster unfolding.”

“Many of us don’t see moth numbers declining because they come out at night but they’re just as vital to our ecosystem as bees and butterflies,” said Wilson.

Wilson created the work with the support of Oxford Contemporary Music and with biodiversity scientists at the UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology. The piece highlights the impact of the decline of the UK moth populations by ending with data from a different area: a farmland monoculture with only 19 moth species.

“I wanted the difference in moth populations to be audible,” said Wilson. “There’s so much sound at the beginning of the piece. At the end, there’s very little.”

Wilson said the scientists she teamed up with were enthusiastic about their work being turned into music. “They’ve been trying to get the message across about catastrophic moth decline but they can’t get traction using figures and data,” she said. “Music is an accessible way for people to understand the disaster unfolding.”

Wilson is not the only UK musician using nature to draw attention to the climate breakdown: Cosmo Sheldrake is appealing against the refusal of his legal attempt for the Ecuador forest to be recognised as a co-creator of a song he wrote.

“The nature of the ecological crisis is fast, so striking, so completely urgent and total—and natural sounds have so much charisma and power—that music based on nature can reveal and communicate things about the natural world far more effectively and powerfully than science can,” Sheldrake said.

“So much can be revealed from listening to ecosystems,” he added. “Removing a single tree devastates the soundscape even though the forest might not look any different.”

Radio Lento recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, streaming “captured quiet” from 105 locations in 26 UK counties. And the UK-based design and architecture firm Heatherwick Studio is transforming an uninhabited island in Seoul, South Korea, into a public park, featuring musical performances based on soundwaves created by the mountainous terrain.

But Finland has taken things one step further, becoming the first country in the world to create an official soundscape.

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Trump Claims the Power to Nullify the Law

Remember when Congress banned TikTok? A bipartisan majority passed a law last year to ban the massively popular social media platform due to the national security implications of its control by the Chinese government. President Joe Biden signed it into law, and in January the Supreme Court upheld the law. And yet, TikTok is still with us. So what happened?

How does a law… not become a law? According to the Trump administration, the president has the authority to nullify laws he doesn’t like. The fate of the TikTok ban hasn’t made national headlines in months among the deluge of other notable anti-democratic Trump administration actions. But in letters obtained this week by the New York Times, the Trump administration is claiming broad powers to simply wipe from the books laws it does not like. The TikTok ban has become Exhibit A.

The TikTok law operated not as an outright ban but by making it illegal to host the app in app stores and cloud and internet services, with punishing fines for companies that disobeyed. But in seeking to overturn the law by fiat, the Trump administration tells companies like Apple and Google that they are off the hook.

Not only was it a promise that the Trump administration would not enforce the law, but that no future administration could. This move is unprecedented.

“Article II of the United States Constitution vests in the President the responsibility over national security and the conduct of foreign policy,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in an April letter to tech companies including Apple, Google, and Amazon. The TikTok law, she continued, does not “infringe upon such core Presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.” In other words, if the president invokes his authority in the realms of national security and foreign affairs, he can nullify a law.

Bondi’s letters informed the tech companies that continuing to host TikTok, despite the plain language of the law, was not illegal. Not only was it a promise that the Trump administration would not enforce the law, but that no future administration could. This move is unprecedented. “Recent past presidents have been aggressive in exercising law enforcement discretion,” Harvard Law School’s Jack Goldsmith told the Times, “but they haven’t suspended the operation of a law entirely or immunized its violation prospectively.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has attempted to thwart or ignore the law. In the past week, his Education Department refused to disburse $7 million in funding for afterschool care programs, English language instruction, and other programs. The money was appropriated by Congress and signed by the president, and its disbursement is required by law. But the Office of Management and Budget, under director Russel Vought, has claimed the power to impound funds. In the case of the missing education money, OMB is investigating whether the funds were being used to further a “radical leftwing agenda.” This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has illegally refused to spend money, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Still, claiming that the president has inherent powers to nullify represents an unprecedented power grab by the Trump administration. If the law can be turned on and off by the president, Congress’ authority is worthless. Today, it’s the TikTok ban and spending requirements. What’s next?

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Trump Is Now Free to Send Immigrants to “Third Countries”

On the 249 anniversary of the country’s declaration of independence from tyranny, the Trump administration was in court asking a judge to let it send eight men to South Sudan, a war-torn country where they face a significant possibility of torture or death. The government wished to subject these men, and then untold thousands more, to such a fate without the guarantee of due process promised in the Constitution. And on America’s birthday, they got their wish.

A federal judge in Massachusetts declined to halt the deportations. He lay the blame at the feet of seven Supreme Court justices who had allowed the removals to move forward the previous day. The Trump administration had a plane to fly them from a US military base in Djibouti scheduled for 7pm ET on July 4. Presumably, they are now in South Sudan.

The July 4 courtroom drama is the denouement of a months-long battle over the Trump administration’s plan to remove non-citizens to so-called third countries, nations that the immigrants have no ties to. The Massachusetts judge, Brian Murphy, had required the government to provide non-citizens the chance to object to the third country on grounds that they may face torture there before removing them. This kind of due process was in accordance with federal law, international law, and the Constitution. But in late June, the Republican appointed Supreme Court justices allowed the administration’s third-country removals proceed without this due process.

This led to a final showdown on Independence Day over whether some of the key liberties won through the creation of the United States will still endure. In a last-ditch effort to halt their client’s removal to South Sudan, where people are subjected to horrific violence, lawyers for the eight men argued that the removal is an unconstitutional punishment with additional cruelty intended to deter future migration. Further, the eight men had been convicted of felonies and served their sentences. Trump has no additional right to inflict further punishment by removing them to a country where torture likely awaits.

In a video hearing in federal court in Washington, DC on Friday, Judge Randolph Moss was disturbed by the wide latitude the Trump administration claimed to punish individuals through deportation to whatever country it wishes. If an orthodox Jew on route to deportation to Israel angered a DHS agent, Moss asked, could the government instead remove him to a country where he couldn’t practice his religion?

Judge Moss: Say there was an order to send observant Orthodox Jews back to Israel. They're on the plane, and (ICE) says, one of them said something that made me really mad. I want to send them somewhere in the world where they can't find a minyan and practice. Can't challenge?

— Joshua J. Friedman (@joshuajfriedman.com) 2025-07-04T17:12:19.784Z

Ultimately, Moss transferred the case to Massachusetts where the litigation over third-country removals had been playing out. There, Judge Murphy declined to halt the flight to South Sudan due to the Supreme Court’s previous orders in the case.

In 1776, drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson zeroed in on an abusive and malleable justice system. He accused the king of depriving colonists of trial by jury and for “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.” As my colleagues David Corn and Tim Murphy noted, commemorating the holiday, Trump’s immigration agenda reflects modern shades of these notorious offenses: condemning hundreds—and soon likely many thousands—of immigrants to torture in other countries without the fair processes guaranteed by the Constitution and beyond the protection of the American judicial system.

The United States has rarely lived up to the full promise of its founding documents. This July 4, the Trump administration acted more like the monarchy the colonists overthrew than the revolutionaries demanding freedom.

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This Week’s Podcast: A Decade of Reveal

The first pilot episode of Reveal exposed how the Department of Veterans Affairs was overprescribing opioids to veterans and contributing to an overdose crisis. Journalist Aaron Glantz explained how he received—surprisingly quickly—a decade’s worth of opioid prescription data from the federal government.

“Sometimes, you have to sue to get the records,” he said. “I have to think that there were some people over there in DC who were as concerned as we were about this.”

After that first show was made, host Al Letson didn’t know what to expect. “We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” he said.

Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Congress held hearings during a government lockdown, and there’s been a sea change in the way veterans are prescribed painkillers. And today, the show is on more than 500 stations.

This week on Reveal, we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired.

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Trump’s All-Out Assault on Science Constitutes a “Mind-Boggling Own-Goal”

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

A generation of scientific talent is at the brink of being lost to overseas competitors by the Trump administration’s dismantling of the National Science Foundation (NSF), with unprecedented political interference at the agency jeopardizing the future of US industries and economic growth, according to a Guardian investigation.

The gold standard peer-reviewed process used by the NSF to support cutting-edge, high-impact science is being undermined by the chaotic cuts to staff, programs and grants, as well as meddling by the so-called department of government efficiency (DOGE), according to multiple current and former NSF employees who spoke with the Guardian.

The scientists warn that Trump’s assault on diversity in science is already eroding the quality of fundamental research funded at the NSF, the premier federal investor in basic science and engineering, which threatens to derail advances in tackling existential threats to food, water and biodiversity in the US.

“The NSF’s gold standard review process has 100 percent been compromised.”

“Before Trump, the review process was based on merit and impact. Now, it’s like rolling the dice because a DOGE person has the final say,” said one current program officer. “There has never in the history of NSF been anything like this. It’s disgusting what we’re being instructed to do.”

Another program officer said: “The exact details of the extra step is opaque but I can say with high confidence that people from DOGE or its proxies are scrutinizing applications with absolutely devastating consequences. The move amounts to the US willingly conceding global supremacy to competitors like China in biological, social and physical sciences. It is a mind-boggling own-goal.”

The NSF, founded in 1950, is the only federal agency that funds fundamental research across all fields of science and engineering, and which over the years has contributed to major breakthroughs in organ transplants, gene technology, AI, smartphones and the internet, extreme weather and other hazard warning systems, American sign language, cybersecurity and even the language app Duolingo.

In normal times, much of the NSF budget ($9 billion in 2024/25) is allocated to research institutions after projects undergo a rigorous three-step review process—beginning with the program officer, an expert in the field, who ensures the proposed study fits in with the agency’s priorities. The program officer convenes an expert panel to evaluate the proposal on two statutory criteria—intellectual merit and broader impacts on the nation and people—which under the NSF’s legal mandate includes broadening participation of individuals, institutions, and geographic regions in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

Applications from across the country that are greenlighted by the program officer are almost always funded, though may be subject to tweaks after revision by the division director before the grants directorate allocates the budget.

That was before Trump. Now, DOGE personnel can veto any study without explanation, the Guardian has confirmed.

“We are under pressure to only fund proposals that fit the new narrow priorities, even if they did not review as well as others,” said one current program officer. “The NSF’s gold standard review process has 100 percent been compromised.”

Research aimed at addressing the unequal impact of the climate crisis and other environmental hazards is particularly vulnerable, according to several sources. New proposals are also being screened for any direct reference or indirect connection to diversity, equity or inclusion (DEI).

“NSF is being asked to make science racist again—which contradicts evidence that shows that diversity of ideas is good for science and good for innovation. We are missing things when only white males do science,” said one program officer.

In addition to DOGE interfering in new proposals, at least 1,653 active NSF research grants authorized on their merits have so far been abruptly cancelled—abandoned midway through the project, according to Grant Watch, a nonprofit tracker of federal science and health research grants canceled under Trump.

“It has been soul-sucking to see projects that went through the review process being changed or terminated over and over again.”

Multiple NSF scientists who oversee a diverse range of NSF programs described the grant cancellations as “unprecedented,” “arbitrary,” and a “colossal waste of taxpayer money.”

Almost 60 percent of the projects abandoned are in states which voted for Joe Biden in 2024, Guardian analysis found. More than one in nine cancelled grants—12 percent of the total—were at Harvard University, which Trump has particularly targeted since coming to power in January.

In addition, studies deemed to be violating Trump’s executive orders on DEI and environmental justice—regardless of their scientific merit, potential impact or urgency—are being abruptly terminated at particularly high rates.

It’s not uncommon for the NSF and other federal research agencies to shift focus to reflect a new administration’s priorities. Amid mounting evidence on the crucial role of diversity in innovation and science, Biden priorities included increased effort to tackle inequalities across the STEM workforce—and a commitment to target underserved communities most affected by the climate crisis and environmental harms.

Trump’s priorities are AI, quantum information science, nuclear, biotech, and translational research. “It’s normal that a new administration will emphasize some areas, de-emphasize others, and we would gradually transition to new priorities. During the George W. Bush administration there were shenanigans around climate change, but it was nothing like this kind of meddling in the scientific review process. You never just throw proposals in the garbage can,” said one current NSF staffer.

“Our mandate is to advance science and innovation. And we just can’t do that if we’re not thinking about diversifying the STEM workforce. We don’t have enough people or diversity of thought without broadening participation—which is part of the NSF mission mandate,” said a former program officer from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science who recently accepted a buyout.

“It has been soul-sucking to see projects that went through the review process being changed or terminated over and over again,” they added.

The Federal Reserve estimates that government-supported research from the NSF and other agencies has had a return on investment of 150 percent to 300 percent over the past 75 years, meaning US taxpayers have gotten back between $1.50 and $3 for every dollar invested.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” includes a 56 percent cut to the current $9 billion NSF budget, as well as a 73 percent reduction in staff and fellowships, with graduate students among the hardest hit.

Last week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced that it will be moving into the NSF headquarters in Virginia over the course of the next two years. The shock announcement—which did not include any plans on relocating more than 1,800 NSF employees—has triggered speculation that the administration eventually plans to defund the agency entirely.

For now, program officers are also being instructed to return research proposals to scientists and institutions “without review”—regardless of merit and despite having been submitted in response to specific NSF solicitations to address gaps in scientific and engineering knowledge around some of the most pressing concerns in the US. This includes projects that have in fact undergone review, and others which can no longer be processed due to staff and program cuts, according to multiple NSF sources.

In one case, a 256-page proposal by scientists at four public universities to use ancient DNA records to better forecast biodiversity loss as the planet warms was apparently archived without consideration.

“That’s a whole generation of young scientists who see no pathway into the field.”

In an email seen by the Guardian, the NSF told Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist and principal investigator (lead scientist) based at the University of Maine, that all proposals submitted to the Biology Integration Institute program were returned without review. A second email said their specific proposal had been “administratively screened” and the area of proposed study was “inappropriate for NSF funding.”

An estimated 40 percent of animals and 34 percent of plants across the US are currently at risk. The proposed study would have used an emerging technology to extract ancient DNA from lake sediments, ice cores, and cave deposits to better understand which species fared better or worse when the planet naturally warmed thousands of years ago—in order to help model and protect biodiversity in the face of human-made climate change.

Gill told the Guardian the team took great care to avoid any reference to DEI or climate change. The grant would have created much-needed research capacity in the US, which is lagging behind Europe in this field.

“Ancient DNA records allow you to reconstruct entire ecosystems at a very high level. This is a very new and emerging science, and grants like this help catalyze the research and reinvest in US infrastructure and workforce in ways that have huge returns on investments for their local economies. It’s an absolute slap in the face that the proposal was returned without review,” Gill said.

In another example, two academic institutions chosen to receive prestigious $15m grants for translational research—a Trump priority—after a 30-month cross-agency review process led by the engineering directorate and involving hundreds of people will not be honored.

The proposals selected for the award through merit review will be returned without review for being “inappropriate for NSF funding,” the Guardian understands.

“This is complex, very high-impact translation science to achieve sustainability across cities and regions and industries…we’re being instructed to put the principal investigators off, but nothing’s going to get funded because there’s DEI in this program,” said an NSF employee with knowledge of the situation.

Meanwhile scores of other proposals approved on merit by program officers are disappearing into a “black box”—languishing for weeks or months without a decision or explanation, which was leading some to “self-censor,” according to NSF staff.

“It’s either NSF staff self-censoring to make sure they don’t get into trouble, or it is censorship by somebody inserted in the scientific review process from DOGE. Either way it’s a political step, and therefore problematic,” said Anne Marie Schmoltner, a program officer in the chemistry division who retired in February after 30 years in the agency.

In addition to distributing funds to seasoned researchers, the NSF supports students and up-and-coming scientists and engineers through fellowships, research opportunities and grants.

This next generation of talent is being hit particularly hard under Trump, who is attempting to impose sweeping restrictions on visas and travel bans on scores of countries. The proposed 2026 budget includes funding for only 21,400 under- and postgraduate students nationwide—a 75 percent reduction from this year.

Like many scientists across the country, Gill, the paleoecologist, is not accepting new graduate students this fall due to funding uncertainty. “That’s a whole generation of young scientists who see no pathway into the field for them. I cannot stress enough how deeply upsetting and demoralizing these cuts are to a community of people who only ever wanted to solve problems and be of use.”

Yet the NSF student pipeline provides experts for the oil and gas, mining, chemical, big tech and other industries which support Trump, in addition to academic and government-funded agencies.

If we can’t manage our natural resources in a sustainable way, “we will be shooting ourselves in the foot.”

“Industry is working on optimizing what they’re doing right now, whereas NSF is looking 10, 20 years down the road. The US wants a global, robust economy and for that you need innovation, and for innovation you need the fundamental research funded by the NSF,” said Schmoltner.

The NSF declined to comment, referring instead to the agency website last updated in April which states: ‘The principles of merit, competition, equal opportunity and excellence are the bedrock of the NSF mission. NSF continues to review all projects using Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria.’

The sweeping cuts to the NSF come on top of Trump’s dismantling of other key scientific research departments within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Agriculture (USDA) and US Geological Service (USGS).

The USGS is the research arm of the Department of Interior. Its scientists help solve real-life problems about hazards, natural resources, water, energy, ecosystems, and the impacts of climate and land-use change for tribal governments, the Bureau of Land Management, fish and wildlife services, and the National Parks Service, among other interior agencies.

Trump’s big, beautiful bill cuts the USGS budget by 39 percent. This includes slashing the entire budget for the agency’s ecosystems mission area (EMA), which leads federal research on species & ecosystems and houses the climate adaptation science centers.

EMA scientists figure out how to better protect at-risk species such as bees and wolverines, minimize harmful overgrazing on BLM lands, and prevent invasive carp from reaching the Great Lakes—all vitally important to protect food security in the US as the climate changes.

The EMA has already lost 25 to 30 percent of employees through DOGE-approved layoffs and buyouts, and is now facing termination. “We’ve already lost a lot of institutional memory and new, up-and-coming leaders. [Under Trump’s budget], all science in support of managing our public lands and natural resources [will] be cut,” said one USGS program officer.

“Our economy is driven by natural resources including timber, minerals, and food systems, and if we don’t manage these in a sustainable way, we will be shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Like at the NSF, the USGC’s gold standard peer-review system for research approval and oversight is now at the mercy of DOGE—in this case Tyler Hasson, the former oil executive given sweeping authority by the Interior secretary. According to USGS staff, Hasson’s office accepts or rejects proposals based on two paragraphs of information program officers are permitted to submit, without any dialogue or feedback. “The gold standard scientific review is being interfered with. This is now a political process,” said one USGS scientist.

A spokesperson for the Interior department said: “The claim that science is being ‘politicized’ is categorically false. We reject the narrative that responsible budget reform constitutes an ‘assault on science’. On the contrary, we are empowering American innovation by cutting red tape, reducing bureaucracy and ensuring that the next generation of scientists and engineers can focus on real-world solutions—not endless paperwork or politically motivated research agendas.”

The USGS, office of management and budget and White House did not respond to requests from comment.

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A July 4th Reflection

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._

As the nation celebrates its 249th birthday, it’s hard not to wonder about the future of the American experiment. Two-and-a-half centuries ago, a collection of disparate colonies overcame regional differences to forge a nation. Sure, on slavery, the most divisive issue of the time, they punted. And the mighty rhetoric of freedom and liberty was deployed to the advantage of wealthy male landowners. Nevertheless, despite their differences, they banded together beneath a banner of ideals for a common cause.

These days, the people in charge do not seem keen on bolstering our communality. President Trump and his MAGA cult are propelled more by animus and retribution—let’s crush the libs!—than by a desire to strengthen the bonds among the diverse citizens of this large nation. In a highly symbolic act that did not receive sufficient attention, Trump declined to attend the funeral of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, who had been assassinated by a Trump supporter who opposed abortion rights and gay rights. The day of that memorialceremony, Trump golfed with Republican leaders and posted on social media, “WHY ARE THE DEMOCRATS ALWAYS ROOTING AGAINST AMERICA???” Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance spends much of his time snarkily trolling progressives and Democrats on social media.

This pair evinces absolutely no interest in bridging gaps, healing wounds—much less in serving as role models of comity and decency. At every opportunity, they choose bombast and insult over discourse and debate. They seek to divide and conquer, and they define their politics by identifying and pummeling enemies. In one conversation I had with Barack Obama when he was president, he remarked, “I am the president of all Americans, including those who did not vote for me. I have to consider what’s best for them, even the ones who don’t like me.” That’s not how Trump and Vance see it.

Trump has no recognition of the public interest, only his own self-interest. Which is how we ended up with the atrocious legislation passed by congressional Republicans this week. As we have heard repeatedly, it gives to the wealthy (handing them huge tax breaks) and robs from the poor (stripping millions of Americans of their health care coverage and slashing food assistance for children). Even Republicans who initially opposed these draconian provisions—including those who represent huge numbers of Medicaid recipients, as well as other constituents who will be severely harmed by this legislation—allowed themselves to be bullied by Trump and his MAGA henchmen into voting for it. The measure is estimated to expand the deficit by $3.3 trillion or so over 10 years (and maybe more). It will pour $100 billion into ICE and border enforcement, bolstering the burgeoning police state that the Trump administration is creating to deport law-abiding and hard-working residents. (For comparison’s sake, the annual FBI budget is $11.4 billion.)

The message to many Americans is this: We will pick your pocket to deport people who work the jobs you’d rather not.

Besides breathtaking cruelty, this bill features an absurd internal logic. Trump claimed that undocumented immigrants must be rounded up for the sake of American prosperity. Yet to pay for this operation, he and his Republican minions will decrease after-tax income for some Americans within the lower 20 percent and snatch health insurance from millions—and cause fiscal instability. Moreover, expelling millions of migrants will likely trigger a labor shortage that will spur a rise in prices. The message to many Americans is this: We will pick your pocket to deport people who work the jobs you’d rather not.

In a much-noticed social media post, Vance declared that the impact of the cuts in Medicaid and nutrition assistance of the bill were “immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.” As if persecuting immigrants will offset the human suffering this bill yields. Try telling that to a parent whose child goes hungry or an adult child whose parent loses his or her care for dementia. Or a low-income family that will have to get by with several hundred dollars less a year.

The gleeful malice of the past few months has been nauseating. Trump, Elon Musk, and their crew relished demolishing USAID, not pausing for a nanosecond to consider the dire consequences. A new study concludes that from 2001 to 2021 USAID programs prevented 92 million deaths in 133 nations. This included 25 million deaths caused by HIV/AIDS, 11 million from diarrhea diseases, 8 million from malaria, and 5 million from tuberculosis. The study forecasts that the annihilation of USAID will lead to 14 million deaths in the next five years. Yet Trump, Musk, and others have cheered the demise of this agency. How can plutocrats be so mean? The USAID budget last year was a mere 0.3 percent of the total federal budget.

Down the line, Trump and his MAGA band have expressed little concern or empathy for those clobbered by their vengeful policies. They are smashing the scientific research infrastructure of the nation and assaulting universities. They are demonizing public servants. They are eviscerating laws that protect our water and air—the common resources we share—and sacrificing our children’s future by unplugging programs that address climate change. All while recklessly vilifying their fellow Americans who disagree with these moves as enemies of the nation. Hatred is the currency of their realm—and crypto is the currency of their corruption.

This is a far cry from the originators of the union who were forced to overcome differences to achieve independence and place America, with all its ills, on the path to becoming one of the most dynamic forces in human history.

So on July 4, 2025, we can celebrate the imperfect start of our national enterprise, despite the dark turn it has taken. As we do so—and as we contend with the discouraging and disturbing developments of the moment—we ought to keep in mind a fundamental fact: There are more of us than them. More Americans reject the cruelty of Trump’s mass deportation crusade than accept it. More Americans oppose the profoundly unfair billionaires-enriching-Medicaid-slashing-deficit-busting tax-and-spending mega-bill than embrace it. More Americans disdain the Trump presidency than hail it.

The question at hand, all these years after Thomas Jefferson provided the original pitch deck for American democracy, is whether the majority can triumph. Can it overcome institutional barriers, disinformation, and distraction and find a path toward responsible governance that addresses the shared interests and values of the citizenry? We all may have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it demands great work—eternal vigilance, you might say—to protect that right so we all can put it to good use.

Enjoy your burgers, hot dogs, tofu sausages, and ice cream.

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The Bill Moyers That Obituaries Missed

“And they get away with the corruption,” read the email subject line. I knew it was from Bill Moyers, because launching right into the point was the M.O. when he sent me news clips and ideas, sometimes several times a day, in the waning months of the first Trump administration. They would ding in at 5 a.m. or earlier—that, too, was the M.O. of a man who, then in his mid-80s, showed no sign of slowing from a pace that his longtime producer, Judy Doctoroff, described to me as that of an “overwhelmingly energetic idea machine.”

Moyers died last week, at 91. You can watch the tribute from his former colleagues at PBS, or read about his accomplishments in the big papers’ obits. It’s an incredible arc—born to a dirt farmer in Oklahoma, ordained a Baptist minister at 25, LBJ’s right-hand man and present on Air Force One after the Kennedy assassination, key architect of the Great Society and the Peace Corps, and then, for decades, legendary correspondent and host on PBS and CBS, where his interviews and documentaries changed how Americans thought about masculinity, spirituality, economic inequality, pollution, and more. (You can spend days browsing his work (including an interview with Clara Jeffery, MoJo‘s editor in chief, and yours truly, as well as a fantastic two-part conversation with my colleagues David Corn and Kevin Drum, at his website. And be sure to read David’s appreciation of Moyers for a lovely story of what came from that interview!)

This story, however, begins where Moyers’ New York Times obituary ends, after his official retirement in 2015. That’s when I got to know him, though he didn’t seem particularly retired to me. He was reading everything, talking to everyone, charming the socks off people with that soft drawl while also steelily driving them toward where he needed them to go. He talked about journalism as a calling, whose goal was “getting as close as possible to the verifiable truth.”

He also thought hard and strategically about what the truth might accomplish. Once I heard him described as “that curious and very rare blend of idealist-operator,” and that sounded exactly right. He would quote George Bernard Shaw (“It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics”) or the inscription on a 17th-century church: “In the year 1653 when all things Sacred were throughout ye nation, either demolisht or profaned, Sir Robert Shirly, Baronet, Founded this church; Whose singular praise it is, to have done the best things in ye worst times, and hoped them in the most callamitous.” His first executive producer, Jerry Toobin, noted that “In all the years I have worked with him, I have never heard him say anything dumb.”

Moyers had come to the conclusion that his early call to the ministry was “a wrong number,” but he never lost a preacher’s ability to enchant. Moyers had, as Doctoroff puts it, “an expansive view of public affairs, those things that make us human and feel connected with each other,” which led him to make documentaries on poetry, on myth, on addiction (this one featuring his son opening up about his own struggles.) His special on the song “Amazing Grace“ is a love letter to America.

At the Center for Investigative Reporting (now MoJo’s parent organization), filmmaker Steve Talbot worked with Moyers on a 1999 documentary about the politicization of the courts—another topic on which he was ahead of his time—and remembers how surprisingly easy it was to get him in front of Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer. “I soon discovered the reason it was possible to book the interviews was that both Kennedy and Breyer were big admirers of Moyers’ intelligence and journalistic integrity. They wanted to meet and engage with him.”

“Who will show us how corruption is not just episodic but systemic? That capitalism has democracy by the throat because democracy no longer has any balls?”

Former Mother Jones publisher Steve Katz recalls that after his first meeting with Moyers, “as starstruck as I was, I left thinking that what we see of Bill on TV is exactly the same man I met with just now. That, to me, was such an expression of Bill’s authenticity. It also was clear to me that as heartfelt and good a man as he was, he had a clear grasp on the question of power—how to get it, and how to use it.”

In “retirement,” Moyers was running his own media enterprise, producing videos, articles, and documentaries nonstop. He was also the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which made grants to transparency watchdogs, nonprofit journalism, and environmental organizations.

By this time, Moyers had become profoundly disillusioned with the major newsrooms where he had spent much of his career. He’d always been one of the very few voices on national television unapologetically saying the big truths about American society—about injustice, racism, and the capture of politics by moneyed interests. He’d clashed with his network bosses (at one point, he said the changes demanded by CBS executives to his exposé about baby formula had “turned Jaws into ‘Gums’”). Now, as he watched traditional media struggle to grasp the Trump era, the stakes seemed existential.

Thus the “and they get away with the corruption” email he sent me. It was about a New York Times story exposing, two years after the fact, that the 2017 Trump tax bill had been even more of a giveaway to the wealthy than we knew. “Not a single corporation with a news division—the major networks, cable, newspaper chain, etc.—covered it,” Moyers wrote. “A free and independent press? Bah, humbug…. Who will show us how corruption is not just episodic but systemic? That capitalism has democracy by the throat because democracy no longer has any balls?”

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Moyers was acutely aware, sooner than most, that big money was eating away at American democracy. “Ninety-six percent of the people believe it’s important that we reduce the influence of money [in politics],” he said in a 2014 interview. “Yet 91 percent think it’s not likely that its influence will be lessened. Think about that: People know what’s right to do yet don’t think it can or will be done. When the public loses faith in democracy’s ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game’s almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class.” He went on to say that “there are people fighting back [and] if it weren’t for them, I would despair. It’s the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there’s still hope.”

Watching mainstream media first make Donald Trump a celebrity and then normalize his authoritarianism, Moyers had come to believe that real accountability was going to have to come from the outside—from journalists who were not part of corporate media, and who were focusing on themes that were getting lost in the day-to-day headlines. One of these themes was corruption. He cited an annual survey by Chapman University that for nine years running has found “corrupt politicians” topping the list of Americans’ fears—ahead of “people I love becoming seriously ill,” terrorism, and nuclear weapons.

Corruption was a topic Mother Jones had been focused on since its founding. During the 2016 campaign, our reporters were among the very few digging into the massive conflicts of interest created by Trump’s business interests all over the world. Moyers told me that as part of the Schumann Foundation’s very last round of grant funding, it would support our work on this beat.

To him, it was all about connecting the dots. Again earlier than most, he realized that people were getting lost in a sea of doom-scrolly headlines, and propagandists were weaponizing this information overload. He sent me a column by the New York Times’ Charles Blow, which warned that “Investigations and exposés by the press may dazzle and awe [but] keeping track of all the corruption and grift is exhausting, and maybe that’s the point.”

“Telling people he and his gang are corrupt is no longer news,” he would say. “If you can show them what America is going to look like because of it, they might be moved.”

Bill trusted Mother Jones to do the work of exposing how “corruption is not just episodic, but systemic.” He also trusted us to show that this was not an abstract concept—that it cost all of us, in terms of money, opportunity, and quality of life.

In 2003, just months after US troops marched into Iraq on the strength of government lies, when hope for the power of truth ran pretty low, Moyers gave a speech laying out the history of movements for change in America, and how they have always been intertwined with the power of journalism. He quoted the muckraker Lincoln Steffens, who set out to “slay the dragon of exalting ‘the commercial spirit’ over the goals of patriotism and national prosperity.”

“I am not a scientist,” Steffens had said. “I am a journalist. I did not gather the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis…My purpose was…to see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride.”

Moyers believed that “shameful facts, spread out in all their shame,” could still “set fire to American pride”—especially when those facts laid bare how government was being turned into an ATM for the wealthy and connected. One of the last emails he wrote me noted that, “It will probably not surprise you that after four decades covering [big money’s] sabotage of democracy, from that first documentary on political action committees back in the 1970s, I often think of what the historian Plutarch said in his eulogy for the fallen Roman republic: ‘The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, however, this process of corruption spread to the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subject to the rule of emperors.’”

“Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere,” Moyers closed. “When he rode into town, it was ripe for plucking.”

Rereading this, in the 23rd week of the second Trump administration, is depressing—but also strangely calming. Moyers knew Trump was not an aberration, but the logical extension of a problem that went back decades. Corruption, he wrote me, is “a condition beyond individual scandals—more a totality of governance, a philosophy that says democracy exists for us to take what we can while we can—to hell with the law, rules, norms and the country. It’s the crime family manifesto of the mafia, affixed to the civic life and public affairs of the nation.”

There are few people who’ve embodied the best of journalism—its ability to cut through BS, its capacity to uplift those who’ve been wronged, its curiosity and burning appetite to tell the stories people need to know—like Bill Moyers. We’ve never needed him more. But the worst way to honor him would be to mope about what we’ve lost. The best—and only—way to pay tribute to him is to go out and do the work.

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“Self-Inflicted Tragedy”: Washington’s Abrupt Turnaround on Climate Policy

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

The US House of Representatives voted 218 to 214 on Thursday to pass President Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, greenlighting deep cuts to America’s social safety net and the decimation of the country’s only federal climate strategy. Democrats uniformly opposed the bill, while all but two House Republicans supported it.

“This bill will leave America a far crueler and weaker place,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, in a statement. It “races the United States and the world toward climate catastrophe, ending support for renewable energy that is absolutely vital to avert worst-case climate scenarios.”

The “One Big Beautiful Bill” has now been approved by both chambers of Congress; all it needs now is Trump’s signature before it can become law. Trump is expected to sign it during an evening ceremony on July 4, Independence Day, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

One of Republicans’ biggest victories in the bill is the extension of deep tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term, which are estimated to cost the country more than $4 trillion over 10 years. The legislation also directs roughly $325 billion to the military and to border security, while cutting more than $1 trillion in funding for Medicaid, the joint state and federal program that covers medical costs for lower-income and disabled Americans.

To pay for the tax breaks, the bill sunsets clean energy tax credits that were put in place by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), making wind and solar projects ineligible unless they start construction before July 2026 or are placed in service by 2027. It also imposes an expedited phaseout of consumer tax credits for new and used electric vehicles—by September 30 this year instead of by 2032. Green groups described the legislation as “historically ruinous” and “a self-inflicted tragedy for our country.”

The IRA’s tax credits and additional incentives for green energy from the bipartisan infrastructure act, also passed under former president Joe Biden, were projected to reduce the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent by 2030. Combined with additional action from states, cities, and private companies, they could have put the US on track to meet the country’s emissions reduction target under the UN’s Paris Agreement.

Once Trump signs the megabill, however, the US will have no federal plan to address the climate crisis. “Every lawmaker who voted for this cynical measure chose tax cuts for the wealthiest over Americans’ health, pocketbooks, public lands, and waters—and a safe climate. They should be ashamed,” said Manish Bapna, president of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement.

Agriculture experts have also objected to Trump’s policy bill, which removes the requirement that unobligated climate-targeted funds from the IRA be funneled toward climate-specific projects—in part so they can be directed toward programs under the current farm bill, an omnibus bill for food and agriculture that the federal government renews every five to six years. The Trump megabill will increase subsidies to commodity farms by about $50 billion.

The final version of the bill doesn’t include a proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands; this was dropped following outcry from the public and some conservation-minded GOP lawmakers. It also lacks stringent limits on the use of Chinese components in renewable energy projects that were proposed in an earlier version of the bill. Some Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate voted for the legislation in exchange for carveouts in their states, like reduced work requirements for food stamps and less severe health care cuts.

In Thursday’s House vote, only two Republicans broke with their party to vote nay: Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes measures that would increase the federal deficit, and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who had hesitated to support cuts to Medicaid.

All Democrats voted against the bill. Immediately preceding the House vote, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York railed against the policy in a record-breaking 8 hour and 45-minute House floor speech invoking scripture: “Our job is to stand up for the poor, the sick, and the afflicted,” he said.

Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have promised to hold Republicans accountable. More than three dozen of its members have said they’ll hold “Accountability Summer” events lambasting Republican lawmakers who supported the bill. “As Democrats, we must make sure they never live that down,” the group’s chair, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Tex.), said in a statement.

Similarly, Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat for Hawaiʻi, told the New York Times that his party should use the spending cuts as a cudgel against Republicans ahead of next year’s midterm elections: “Our job is to point out, when kids get less to eat, when rural hospitals shutter, when the price of electricity goes up, that this is because of what your Republican elected official did,” he said.

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Republicans Just Passed “the Worst Bill in Modern American History”

Just in time for the nation’s birthday, House Republicans have passed the most regressive legislation in recent memory, a bill that’s expected to cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and boot some 12 million Americans off their health insurance, even as it explodes the federal deficit—all to extend and expand tax cuts that favor the rich.

The vote was 218-214.

Republicans unilaterally shoved through their “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” awkwardly named with President Donald Trump’s phrase, just in time to meet his demand that they deliver it for his signature by Independence Day.

Their fealty to Trump helped House Speaker Mike Johnson overcome resistance among some GOP members, even though the measure flagrantly violates Trump’s many vows not to reduce Medicaid spending. Trump has addressed that contradiction by falsely claiming the bill doesn’t cut Medicaid or other benefits.

No Democrat in either chamber voted for the bill, and the party is expected to make the cuts to Medicaid and other safety net programs, including food stamps, the center of their efforts to retake control of the House and Senate in next year’s midterm elections.

Here are some of the aspects that have led critics to declare this “the worst bill in modern American history.”

It’s incredibly regressive: The bill cuts taxes for rich people while reducing benefits for the poor. Broadly, it extends the 2017 tax cuts Congress passed during Trump’s first term while partly offsetting the cost with deep cuts to health care spending, food assistance, and other programs. Although it includes some tax cuts that would benefit lower-income Americans, the gains, in aggregate, flow to the rich, with the top 1 percent of families getting a break (according to an estimate from an earlier version of the bill) of $79,000 a year while families in bottom fifth would get $160. But that’s before you consider the lost benefits.

When you factor in spending cuts to the aid programs, those wealthiest households end up with an average 4 percent increase in after-tax income, while the bottom 20 percent of earners are docked by nearly that same percentage, according to a Yale Budget Lab analysis. In a recent survey of 4,500 Americans by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker and post-doc Patrick Sullivan, Republican respondents, when informed of these numbers, opposed the bill by a ratio of 3-t0-1, and overall support for it plummeted to just 11 percent.

It blows up the deficit: The bill will increase the deficit by $4.1 trillion, including interest over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget , by extending the 2017 tax cuts and adding new ones aimed at fulfilling Trump promises. These include an extension of a home mortgage interest deduction and a “no tax on tips” provision, albeit with a $25,000 cap on the amount of tips workers can claim—which experts say means it will not help lower-income service workers.

It slashes Medicaid: The bill includes both direct and indirect cuts to Medicaid spending. It limits so-called Medicaid provider taxes that states use to collect more matching funds from the program. (Those states are taking advantage of a loophole in the law, but by cutting it off, the bill leaves them with less Medicaid funding, likely causing many to reduce services.) The legislation also imposes a requirement that Medicaid recipients provide proof of employment to get benefits. This imposes a complicated bureaucratic burden on beneficiaries that CBO says will cut $280 billion in Medicaid spending over six years—in many cases because even many people who work (most recipients do) won’t be able to navigate the red tape the bill imposes.

It ends health coverage for millions: Nearly 12 million Americans will lose coverage as a result of the bill, according to CBO, mainly due to the burdensome new requirements places on Medcaid recipients, and steps that make it harder to sign up, like limited enrollment periods and new paperwork requirements.

It‘s an impediment for women’s health care: Of the 24 million women currently enrolled in Medicaid, 56 percent are of reproductive age and the majority are women of color. The bill excludes Planned Parenthood and some other providers from Medicaid, reducing access to birth control and other reproductive care. The cuts could also force more than 140 rural hospitals to shut down obstetrics services or drastically curtail them.

It slashes food stamps: The bill will cut federal spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps poor people buy food, by an estimated $287 billion over a decade. It also includes a bizarre provision that rewards states with the highest error rates in awarding food stamps. That’s the result of legislative wrangling in the Senate where, in a bid to win over Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, GOP leaders—barred by procedural rules from simply exempting Alaska—instead exempted the 10 states with the highest error rates. (Alaska is the highest.) This actually gives states on the cusp of making the list an incentive to get worse.

As with Medicaid, most of the cuts to SNAP and other aid programs will be done backhandedly, via onerous bureaucratic burdens. As the New York Times reported: “By including dozens of changes to dates, deadlines, document requirements and rules, Republicans have turned paperwork into one of the bill’s crucial policy-making tools, yielding hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to help offset their signature tax cuts.”

Among the new requirements, “able-bodied” elders, ages 55 to 64, will have to submit documents verifying their citizenship. And rather than letting states use information already on hand to verify the citizenship of Obamacare subsidy applicants, the legislation requires people to track down and submit those documents. Republicans, who for years have railed against federal bureaucracy, claim these paperwork tasks would weed out only people who don’t qualify for benefits, but CBO and many experts say such hurdles will cause millions of people who qualify for Medicaid, food stamps, and health subsidies to lose them.

It undermines clean energy development**:** The bill slashes spending on clean energy approved under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, likely leading to job losses and a capitulation to China’s domination of the sector. It removes tax incentives for wind, solar, and other renewable energy projects, though it delays some of the cuts until after the midterms. It also ends subsidies of up to $7,500 for electronic vehicles purchased this year.

It greatly expands ICE detentions and enforcement: As masked ICE agents stir up neighborhoods around the country, the bill throws cash at the agency—more than $100 billion in new funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement through 2029. As my colleague Inae Oh reports, that would “fund the single largest increase in immigration enforcement in US history. It would ramp up mass deportations to an unprecedented scale; create hastily built, sordid detention centers across the country; and all but ensure that millions of people who haven’t been accused of crimes are disappeared.”

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“An Absolute Moral Failure”: Disability Advocates React to GOP Medicaid Cuts

On Thursday, House Republicans voted to enact a spending bill that will strip close to one trillion dollars from federal Medicaid funding across a decade—an attack expected to cause tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year, disproportionately among the one in three disabled people on Medicaid in the US.

The cuts will, among other reductions in treatment, limit Medicaid’s home and community based-services, endanger rural hospitals, and kick millions of users off Medicaid altogether, especially those unable to secure exemptions to the bill’s new work requirements.

“It’s a devastating day for disabled people to witness members of Congress, people who are elected to serve the people, be willing to strip healthcare away from 17 million Americans,” said Maria Town, CEO and president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, “and endanger disabled people’s ability to live, work and thrive in our communities.”

Republicans in Congress have played down or denied the impact of the cuts—which Town calls an out-and-out lie: “Many disabled people [whose insurance is] covered via Medicaid expansion…are going to lose access to their health care.”

Nicole Jorwic, chief program officer at the nonprofit Caring Across Generations, is shocked that the bill’s open funding of tax cuts for the ultra-rich through gutting Medicaid still allowed it to pass. “That narrative was a clear one—taking care away from people to pay for tax cuts was an even stronger message than in 2017, when we did win” a fight against the rollback of the Affordable Care Act, she said.

Little Lobbyists CEO Elena Hung, who has been fighting alongside other families in Washington, DC, to try and prevent the cuts, described the vote as a “punch in the gut.”

“It’s just an absolute moral failure,” Hung said. “At the end of the day, this Congress lacks the courage to do the right thing.”

For people like Hung, their kids’ future hangs in the balance. “Medicaid is the only way that children like mine are able to live at home and be in their communities and not be forced into a medical facility or institution,” Hung said. “It is literally lifesaving for children like mine.”

Cuts to Medicaid are not the only devastating attack on the social safety net in the budget bill that just passed the House: It also includes $230 billion in cuts to SNAP over the next decade.

“There are many disabled people who receive SNAP,” Town said. “In fact, I believe four out of all five households that receive SNAP benefits have a family member with a disability in them.”

For the disability advocates I spoke with, Thursday was a difficult day without a clear plan for tomorrow.

“While there is sure to be devastation and unfortunately, lives lost, and we need to be able to mourn for that,” Jorwic said, “what the disability community has always shown is that we can come together and imagine something that other people can’t see as possible.”

“We have to have hope to continue to fight,” Hung said. “When I think about families like mine, families with kids with complex medical needs and disabilities, there isn’t a choice to give up.”

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The Supreme Court Turns Its Sights on Trans Athletes

The US Supreme Court announced Thursday that it will hear a pair of cases in the fall involving state laws in that ban transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s school sports.

The cases originate in Idaho, which passed the country’s first trans youth sports ban in 2020, and West Virginia, which followed in 2021. In both states, transgender students represented by the ACLU filed lawsuits and succeeded in blocking the laws. Now, the states—both of which are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal group behind many of the Supreme Court’s anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion decisions—are asking the justices to reverse the lower courts and declare the bans constitutional.

The high court’s decision to review the cases comes just two weeks after its landmark6-3 ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, in which it upheld a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors, and a week since its ruling in [Mahmoud v. Taylor][3], when the same conservative supermajority sided with parents seeking to opt their children out of LGBT-inclusive lessons. In the days since then, the justices have [ordered lower courts to reopen cases][4] that had been won by transgender plaintiffs—including rulings that had prevented state-sponsored health insurance plans from excluding gender-affirming care and required a state to let trans residents change the sex marker on their birth certificates.

“I just want to have a chance to participate in school sports like any other girl,” the 11-year-old plaintiff in the West Virginia case wrote in a declaration to the court .

Now the Supreme Court will take up the constitutionality of transgender sports bans. The Idaho case, [Little v. Hecox][5], was originally filed by Lindsay Hecox, a trans woman and first-year student at Boise State who wanted to run on the women’s cross-country team. Joining her was an anonymous cisgender girl worried about the part of the law that created a “sex dispute verification process” requiring girls and women in school sports to undergo medical exams if someone challenged their femaleness.

Meanwhile, in [West Virginia v. B.P.J][6], 11-year-old plaintiff Becky Pepper-Jackson wanted to try out for the girls’ cross-country team. “I just want to have a chance to participate in school sports like any other girl,” she wrote in a [declaration][7] in the case. “It is frustrating and hurtful that some people want to take that chance away from me and treat me differently from everyone else just because I am transgender.”

Laws restricting trans athletes’ participation in sports have proliferated across the country over the past five years, along with laws targeting their medical care, their school bathroom use, and [LGBTQ themes in school curricula][8]. Today, lawmakers in [27 states][9] have forbidden trans girls and women from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, typically arguing that trans athletes have biological differences that make sports less fair and less safe for cisgender participants.

Yet an effort to pass [a nationwide trans sports ban][10] failed in Congress this year, after Democrats argued that it would require invasive and potentially abusive sex testing of girls and women in sports and pointed out how few trans athletes there really are. Among the 510,000 total NCAA athletes last year, NCAA President Charlie Baker [testified][11] that he knew of fewer than 10 who were transgender.

Opponents of trans athletes notched another major victory this week when the University of Pennsylvania, [under pressure][12] from the Trump administration [announced][13] that it would ban trans women from women’s sports teams, revoke the records of swimmer Lia Thomas, who became the first openly trans athlete to win a NCAA Division I title in 2022, and apologize to women swimmers “disadvantaged” by Thomas’ participation on the Penn women’s swim team.

In March, the Supreme Court[ announced][14] it will also review laws banning [anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy][15] on kids.

[3]: http://LGBTQ-inclusive books [4]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/30/politics/transgender-health-care-birth-certificates-supreme-court?utm%5Fcampaign=KHN%3A%20Daily%20Health%20Policy%20Report&utm%5Fmedium=email&%5Fhsenc=p2ANqtz-%5FLo%5F0UTxSPr2IU-neTcGPdhWz3fJo1sDKhmt9vz8EyQpkAdjHGAivKmoAM8xvXagVQ9eAztNgX1nDz6yQ0MT--xnpyfg&%5Fhsmi=369344942&utm%5Fcontent=369344942&utm%5Fsource=hs%5Femail [5]: https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/little-v-hecox/ [6]: https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/west-virginia-v-b-p-j-2-2/ [7]: https://www.aclu.org/cases/bpj-v-west-virginia-state-board-education?document=Declaration-of-BPJ#legal-documents [8]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/mahmoud-v-taylor-scotus-lgbtq-kids-lose-at-supreme-court-parental-rights-win/ [9]: https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/youth/sports%5Fparticipation%5Fbans [10]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/28 [11]: https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/5046662-ncaa-president-transgender-athletes-college-sports/ [12]: https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/07/penn-complies-education-department-demands-title-ix-resolution-trump [13]: https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/%5F/id/45634254/penn-ban-trans-athletes-ending-lia-thomas-civil-rights-case [14]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/supreme-court-to-decide-whether-states-can-ban-anti-lgbtq-conversion-therapy-on-kids/ [15]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/05/conversion-therapy-lgbtq-anti-trans-gay-gender-affirming-care/

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The Choice Some Pregnant Immigrants Face: Deportation or Parenthood

Shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, and Texas completely outlawed abortion in communities along the Rio Grande Valley, the effect was swift. In this region, which is home to 1.4 million residents, most of them Latinx or immigrants, the area’s only abortion clinic in McAllen was forced to shut down.

“When we lost that, people lost care. That was the immediate first blow and it did send shock waves,” says Cathy Torres, organizing manager for the Frontera Fund, an abortion fund serving border communities in Texas from Brownsville to El Paso. The organization provides financial support toward abortions, flights, and hotels for people forced to leave the state for medical care. After the Dobbs decision, they also began funding other reproductive health services such as birth control and STI testing.

The Frontera Fund is a three-person team, and in addition to her management responsibilities, Torres also answers most of the calls to the organization. She responds to the myriad of questions in voicemails and text messages in English and Spanish. Some reach out to the fund with concerns about being criminally prosecuted should they get an abortion out of state. Others need help paying for travel or their appointments in neighboring states such as New Mexico, Colorado, or Kansas.

The McAllen clinic closure was especially devastating for undocumented immigrants, Torres says. Should they want to travel to another state, anyone living within 100 miles of the US-Mexico border must pass Customs and Border Protection checkpoints before leaving the area. Borderagents can question drivers and their passengers, search vehicles, and detain people. Trained K-9 dogs often circle cars and the checkpoints are flooded with cameras and surveillance. For immigrants without documentation who need in-person abortion care, “folks are either facing the potential risk of deportation or they’re being forced into parenthood,” Torres says.

The fear among immigrants who call Frontera Fund’s support line is palpable, Torres says. “People who are undocumented are scared to go anywhere, to do anything, to go to the doctor,” she says. “While that has always been the case, you can imagine how heightened it is now.”

Immigrants have long faced obstacles in accessing reproductive health care. The list of challenges even before the Dobbs decision has included language barriers and, for many, the stigma of abortion within their own communities. Travel options are limited for those without valid IDs needing to go out of state for care.

In recent months, these barriers have only grown as the Trump administration targets immigrant communities with ICE raids, courthouse arrests, detention in overcrowded facilities, and deportation. I reached out to abortion funds, clinics, and advocacy groups across the country and they all said the same thing: they have noted a growing fear among immigrants to leave their homes even for a nearby medical appointment. For many, medication abortion delivered by mail and administered at home may be an option; but for immigrants who need in-person medical care, they must weigh the risk of traveling without status.

“We have navigated domestic terrorism for decades.”

Some providers are also strategizing on how to respond if ICE shows up at their doors—the latest challenge they must navigate amid a growing web of abortion restrictions in the last three years. Due to the ever**–**present anti-abortion violence and harassment, many clinicsalready have security measures that could protect staff and patients if ICE were to visit, says Amy Hagstrom Miller, one of the most prominent independent abortion providers in the country and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates clinics in four states. “We have navigated domestic terrorism for decades,” she says.

Since the Dobbs ruling, about two dozen states have adopted abortion restrictions, and 13 have banned the procedure altogether. Many of those states, such as Florida and Texas, also have large immigrant populations. At least 1.9 million undocumented women live in a state with abortion restrictions, according to a 2024 report by the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on advancing policies for low-income communities. “State abortion bans and restrictions disproportionately harm communities who already face significant barriers to accessing health care,” the report states, “including Black, Indigenous, Latina/x, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities.”

Suma Setty, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Law and Social Policy and one of the report’s authors, has watched the growing government hostility against immigrant communities since President Donald Trump returned to office. Setty worries that recent enforcement actions will further restrict immigrants’ access to reproductive health care. “The fact that we’re seeing arrests in courthouses for people who are complying with the law makes it very difficult for people to even just go out.”

At a national legal helpline operated by If/When/How, a reproductive rights organization, call takers have noted that immigrant callers express a greater sense of fear and confusion, says Limayli Huguet, one of the organization’s Spanish-speaking attorneys. The helpline operates 24 hours a day, and Huguet is among the staff of six attorneys responding to calls, voicemails, and online messages from people seeking reproductive health care. She has noticed that the helpline receives more calls when reports about immigration enforcement, like ICE raids, appear in the news.

Huguet has also heard immigrant callers say that they are scared of leaving their homes. A woman recently called, and explained she was pregnant and concerned about traveling to a nearby hospital for prenatal care. Huguet tries to help callers assess the possible legal consequences for those seeking care in a post-Roe world. “A lot of our work is just making sure that people feel empowered to make the decision that they want to make,” she says.

In Florida, a recent series of laws targeting immigrants have tightened their access to care, says Stephanie Loraine Piñeiro, executive director of the Florida Access Network, an abortion fund serving the entire state. In 2023, for instance, the state passed a law that requires hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status.

Since February, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration has encouraged local law enforcement agencies to collaborate with federal immigration authorities through so-called 287(g) agreements that grant police certain immigration powers. As I reported back in April, of all these agreements nationwide, about half were established with law enforcement agencies in Florida. The increased enforcement has forced many undocumented immigrants in the state to limit their movements, Piñeiro says. “Going to a grocery store is a risk, let alone being forced to drive multiple states away [for abortion access],” she says.

Florida’s six-week abortion ban does include some exceptions; pregnant victims of incest or rape who file a police report can access the procedure for up to 15 weeks of gestation. But under the current climate of cooperation with ICE, Piñeiro says she finds it difficult to believe many victims would seek out police.

“One of the big questions is, if ICE showed up to your clinic, what are you going to do?”

Some providers are also preparing for any potential interactions with ICE. The discussions are already happening in Illinois, says Diana Parker-Kafka, executive director of the abortion fund, Midwest Access Coalition. The fund helps many patients from Texas, and more than half of their team who answer calls speak Spanish or another language. “One of the big questions is, if ICE showed up to your clinic, what are you going to do? What is your security instructed to do? What do the laws in the state say that you can do?” she says. “There are a lot of conversations that are going to be new to funds, to clinics, to leaders. The law is literally changing before our eyes.”

At Whole Woman’s Health clinics, located in Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Virginia, presentations about immigration have been shown to staff, says Hagstrom Miller. Short of a warrant identifying the clinic by name and address, ICE doesn’t have a legal right to enter the premises, she says. Hagstrom Miller wants patients and staff to see her clinics as “a safe place.” She notes, “They can trust Whole Woman’s Health to really stand up for them.”

Reproductive health care isn’t the only medical service affected by anti-immigrant policies. Lupe Rodriguez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, points to the Trump administration’s decision to freeze Title X funding to family planning clinics across the country. These were places where immigrants obtained other medical services such as wellness exams and blood pressure screenings.

Trump alsoeliminated a Biden-era policy that protected certain public spaces like hospitals from ICE, further discouraging immigrants from seeking care, Rodriguez says. Many immigrants, especially those without documentation, must constantly weigh “the threat of being detained, questioned, separated from their families if people go out into the community to seek care or to seek services.”

Setty, from the Center for Law and Social Policy, has heard of recent situations where people have skipped medical treatments for chronic conditions. “Abortion access was already challenging in many states where there are high immigrant populations,” she says, “but if you’re adding the attacks on immigrants on top of all of that, it’s just narrowing this tightrope even more for folks who are trying to access any sort of care.”

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Trump’s FCC Scraps Ban on Prison Phone Price Gouging, a Gift to Some of His Top Donors

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

The Federal Communications Commission will no longer enforce a rule capping the price of prison phone calls, according to an announcement made Monday by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.

The move suspends a 2024 FCC decision that capped the price of in-state phone calls at 6 cents minute for prisons and large jails and 7 cents per minute for medium-sized jails. Before the decision, a 15-minute phone call could cost as much as $11.35 at large jails in some states. Under the 2024 rules, those same phone calls would cost 90 cents.

This week’s FCC announcement states that the suspension of the 2024 rules will apply until April 1, 2027. But it also says that the FCC will use that time to consider making permanent changes to the rule. Carr claims that the 2024 rules, which started going into effect on January 1 on a staggered basis, are “leading to negative, unintended consequences.”

The current system incentivizes prison operators to award contracts to companies that charge exorbitant fees.

The 2024 FCC decision followed the passage of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022, which gave the FCC authority to regulate the price of in-state phone calls from prisons and jails. The legislation was named after Martha Wright-Reed, who spent two decades fighting for lower prices for prison phone calls as she struggled to afford spending over $100 per month to call her incarcerated grandson. At times, Wright-Reed had to skip medication payments and even cut back on groceries in order to afford the calls. In 2000, Wright-Reed sued CoreCivic, a private prison operator, arguing that the company’s exclusive contracts resulted in excessively high prices.

Monday’s statement was blasted by FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who argued that not enforcing the 2024 rules violates the Martha Wright-Reed Act, as the law directed the FCC to “implement the statutory provisions not earlier than 18 months and not later than 24 months after the date of its enactment.” Gomez said that the FCC is making the “indefensible decision to ignore both the law and the will of Congress.”

Incarcerated people have said that the high cost forces them to choose between spending money on phone calls or purchasing personal hygiene items, or even shoes. One mother told CBS News in 2020 that she and her husband spent “$14,268 over the past two years” so that their incarcerated son could make phone calls. On top of the exorbitant per-minute rates, incarcerated people are charged additional fees, including as much as $4 to connect the call, which could be charged multiple times if the call drops.

In 2024, the FCC estimated that capping the price of phone and video calls “would save incarcerated people and their families, friends and legal teams about $386 million.” The Prison Policy Initiative estimated that the industry costs families of incarcerated people “nearly $1 billion a year.”

Studies have shown that visitation and phone calls from family decrease the chances that an incarcerated person will commit another crime.

So why is the FCC suddenly suspending the lowered price caps for prison phone calls? Follow the money.

The high cost of prison phone calls is a cash windfall for the private prison industry, which spent vast sums to help elect Trump president.

The companies that provide prison telephone services offer kickbacks, known as “commissions,” to prison operators to secure lucrative contracts. This means up to 50 percent of the money incarcerated people spend on telephone calls is routed back to the company or government that operates the prison. This system incentivizes prison operators to award contracts to companies that charge exorbitant fees, creating a larger pool of money for kickbacks.

For private prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic, kickbacks from telephone service providers are a lucrative revenue stream. How much money do these companies make from commissions? The industry no longer discloses those figures. But in 2012, according to SEC filings, the GEO Group made over $600,000 in site commissions from phone services. That figure is likely much higher today.

The FCC rule on phone rates would have ended this practice, banning kickbacks for prison operators. But, like the caps on phone charges, the kickback ban is now on hold.

During the 2024 campaign, GEO Group, through its PAC, was the first company to make the maximum contribution to Trump’s campaign. The same day, two top GEO Group executives, CEO Brian Evans and board chairman George Zoley, each donated $11,600 to the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee. Later, a GEO Group subsidiary, GEO Acquisition II, donated $1 million to Make America Great Again PAC, a pro-Trump super PAC. GEO Group used the subsidiary to evade a federal law that prohibits government contractors from making political donations. After Trump won, GEO Group and CoreCivic each donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee.

Both Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, and Attorney General Pam Bondi have previously been on the payroll of GEO Group. According to his federal financial disclosures, Homan received consulting fees from GEO Group in 2023 and 2024. Homan was not required to disclose the exact amount he was paid by the GEO Group, except that it was more than $5,000. Bondi worked as a lobbyist for GEO Group in 2019.

In the order delaying the rule, the FCC explicitly cited the “financial burdens” imposed on prison operators through inhibiting their ability to collect commissions. The FCC claims that, without the ability to receive commissions or charge high prices, many facilities would stop allowing incarcerated people to make phone calls. This conclusion is largely based on claims made to the FCC by the corporations profiting from the existing system.

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What $100 Billion in New ICE Funding Looks Like

President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic agenda, which seeks to inject plutocratic ideology and disdain for the poor into nearly every corner of American life, is on the verge of passage. Its success comes despite overwhelming unpopularity and official estimates that it will add $4.1 trillion to the national debt while slashing $930 billion from Medicaid over a decade.

Yet, even for all the descriptors that have been attached to Trump’s budget bill—big, mega, supercharged—the scope of one of its most crushing ambitions appears to have been lost on the American public: more than $100 billion in new ICE funding through 2029.

What does that even look like? The figure would fund the single largest increase in immigration enforcement in US history; it will ramp up mass deportations to an unprecedented scale; create hastily built, sordid detention centers across the country; and all but ensure that millions of people who haven’t even been accused of crimes are disappeared.

Here are some ways to process the scale of $100 billion in ICE funding:

343times what Elon Musk spent to swing the 2024 elections

140times the cost to make NYC buses free

1451 times private prison company CoreCivic’s net 2024 income

568 times the cost to pay all US students’ public school lunch debt

1923 times the amount saved by the bill’s defunding of Planned Parenthood

62.5 times what the US paid in reparations to over 82,000 interned Japanese-Americans

2,000 Bezos-Sánchez weddings

388 of the HIV-vaccine program that the Trump administration eliminated, effectively ending chances for a shot to prevent infections

8 times what the US spent to develop and purchase Covid vaccines in 2020 alone

185 years of operating Guantánamo Bay

2.1 times what it would cost to hire enough teachers and nurses to end both national shortages

7.6 Rupert Murdochs

385 Rick Scotts, the richest US senator

170 times the amount Trump’s bill cuts from the National Parks

2.63 times what USAID spent in 2023

12 times the 2023 Federal Bureau of Prisons budget

2 times Harvard’s endowment, the largest of any university in the world

7times the 2021 federal childcare funding

4.4 times what the US has spent on Israel’s military since the October 7 attacks

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Has MAGA Killed Satire?

In June, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced plans to build an immigrant detention center on an unused airstrip in the Everglades. “There’s not much waiting for them except alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said in a video on social media, suggesting that the detention center’s location in the middle of a swamp was a key selling point for the Trump administration. “Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.” He dubbed the facility “Alligator Alcatraz,” and soon started selling alligator-themed merch on his reelection campaign site.

A week or so later, Florida residents turned out in droves to protest the facility as a threat to the environment and human rights. One held up a sign that asked, “Is this a Carl Hiaasen novel?” A photo of the sign made its way to the Instagram account of the famous Florida author, who responded, “Thanks for the shout-out, but even I’m not warped enough to dream up Alligator Alcatraz.”

The exchange said a lot about the Era of Trump. It also said a lot about how difficult Hiaasen’s job as Florida’s premiere political satirist has become. After all, even the most brilliant novelist would be challenged to imagine storylines more preposterous than those generated by President Donald Trump in his second administration. The Fox News host with a booze problem running the Pentagon; the former heroin addict Kennedy scion with a brain worm overseeing the CDC; an ex-professional wrestling promoter turned Education Secretary; or the 19-year-old DOGE staffer formerly known online as “Big Balls” charged with improving the Social Security Administration? The entire federal government, it seems, has become a Hiaasen novel—though much less funny.

For those not familiar with his oeuvre, Hiaasen is a former longtime Miami Herald columnist who has written more than a dozen novels set in his home state of Florida, plus a handful of young adult and nonfiction works. One novel—Strip Tease—became a 1996 movie featuring Demi Moore, and last year, Apple TV turned Bad Monkey into a TV show starring Vince Vaughn.

Hiaasen’s novels defy easy categorization—they’re often lumped in with “crime fiction.” Generally speaking, they take the weirdness of Florida and its corruption, mix in a heavy dose of environmental consciousness, and turn it all into something resembling a comic thriller.

Over his long career, Hiaasen has created several memorable characters, most notably, his legendary anti-hero “Skink,” who first appeared in Double Whammy in 1987. Seven books later, Skink is now so iconic in Florida that Hiaasen’s friend, the late Jimmy Buffett, even put him in a song.

Née Clinton Tyree, Skink is a former Florida governor who had waged a quixotic battle against overdevelopment and fought to protect the environment. At one point, he tried to impose heavy fines or jail time on any boater who killed a manatee, which the boater would be required to personally bury in a public event.

Fed up with the corruption, Skink eventually disappears to live as a hermit in the Everglades, surviving on roadkill and fresh fish. He periodically resurfaces in Hiaasen’s books to save endangered panthers or to assist his other protagonists in various monkey-wrenching activities. After Hiaasen responded to the “Alligator Alcatraz” Instagram post, one of his fans replied, “Where is Skink when you need him?”

Hiaasen’s latest book, Fever Beach, came out in May. As a huge fan, I bought it without even reading the reviews, so I was a little shocked when I realized who had inspired it. “Holy shit this is about Matt Gaetz!” I told my husband after reading a few pages.

If there were ever a political figure who might be both deserving of and difficult to parody, it’s the former Republican representative from Florida. Gaetz had leveraged his father’s money and political ties to launch himself out of the Panhandle into national prominence, becoming one of the youngest members ever elected to the House in 2016. In November, he resigned after Trump nominated him to be US Attorney General. But then a House ethics report found credible evidence that he’d paid a 17-year-old for sex and abused illegal drugs while in office, which even among the Trump-loving GOP lawmakers, was a bridge too far. Trump dumped him.

Gaetz has since been reduced to hawking ivermectin on OANN, but he was clearly the model for Fever Beach’s Clure Boyette. A nepo-baby Florida congressman with a drug habit, Boyette has a fondness for underage escorts, and teeth that “looked like dentures for a Clydesdale.” His solidly red constituents are growing weary of him, so he hatches an outlandish reelection scheme that involves an assist from the Strokerz for Liberty, a white supremacist group founded as a competitor to the Proud Boys.

“The Strokers, we ain’t like the Proud Boys. You can jerk off all you want at home,” Stroker founder Dale Figgo promises a new recruit, referencing a real-life Proud Boys membership rule restricting self-gratification. (Hiaasen had to put a note in the book indicating that he did not, in fact, make this up.)

This “truth is stranger than fiction” detail left me wondering whether MAGA world might have bested Hiaasen. After I finished Fever Beach, I was curious about how he managed still to find satire in the age of Trump, so I called him up. He gracefully fielded all my questions, including the first burning one: “Have you heard from Matt Gaetz?” He had not. “I don’t know that Matt’s much of a reader,” he suggested.

“At some point these headlines drop and your heart sinks, not just for the country, for the state of Florida, but for the craft of satire. How do you get ahead of it?”

He confirmed that current events had made his job much more challenging. He pointed to Moms for Liberty, the book-banning group founded in Florida. “How do you improve on the facts that the Moms for Liberty were involved in a big sex scandal in Sarasota—threesomes!— involving the head of the Republican Party in the state of Florida?” he said in amazement. “At some point these headlines drop and your heart sinks, not just for the country, for the state of Florida, but for the craft of satire. How do you get ahead of it?”

He gave it a shot. In Fever Beach, the moms become “Wives Against Filth.” Much of the inspiration for Fever Beach, however, came from the January 6th assault on the US Capitol. Hiaasen said he couldn’t shake the idea that several people who broke into the Capitol decided when they got inside to “just take a shit.”

“I mean, that’s the most creative thing they could come up with?” he marveled. “I’m going to make a political statement by taking a shit in the Capitol?”

The episode left him curious about who those people were, and what their lives were like. That’s how he got into the character of Dale Figgo, who had been at the Capitol but, Hiaasen says, “shit on the wrong statue.” His defilement of the statue of a Confederate war veteran and rabid secessionist gets Dale kicked out of the Proud Boys and prompts him to start his own group.

While most of Hiaasen’s work has centered on Florida, it was probably inevitable that he would have to tackle the Trump administration, if only because so many people in the administration now hail from Florida. “We have a bottomless pool of mediocre public figures that we can keep supplying the Trump administration with,” Hiaasen says. On book tour, he says, he has tried to apologize for former Florida attorney general and now US Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “I wish they were just characters in a novel,” he says, “but they’re actually real.”

Rubio, the Cuban-American former Florida senator who once espoused a George W. Bush-inflected “compassionate conservatism,” really gets under the writer’s skin. “To see the transformation of Marco Rubio,” he marvels. “I mean, his testicles are in a jar on Donald Trump’s desk. To see him now leaning on Ukraine when the whole Cuban immigrant experience was precipitated by Fidel Castro’s alliance with Moscow. Just how much of a wimp do you have to be to work for Donald Trump?”

In 2018, Hiaasen’s brother was murdered in a mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, along with four of his colleagues. A former Baltimore Sun reporter, Rob Hiaasen was working as an editor at the Gazette at the time of his death. Hiaasen was devastated. He told me that after the shooting, he took a few months off from his Herald column, which he’d never done before, as he wrestled with the grief.

“He was a much different kind of writer than I was,” Hiaasen said of his brother. “He was, gentle, funny. He didn’t have the sharp edges that I had. He was really so good at what he did.” Eventually, he went back to work, concluding that Rob “would have been really pissed off if I had stopped writing,” he told me. “He would have wanted me to not only keep writing but keep writing the kind of stuff I did.”

Squeeze Me, Hiaasen’s first book after the shooting, came out in 2020 during the pandemic. It marked the first time President Trump, his tanning bed, and the Mar-a-Lago crowd came in for the Hiaasen treatment. (Skink returns with a cameo.) While I might have been projecting, I thought it wasn’t quite as funny as his previous books and wondered if his brother’s death might have been responsible. But Hiaasen—who hopes I’m wrong about the quality of the humor—says it was not just grief, but the state of the country that has made his work harder.

He fully recognizes that the same politics he lampoons often harms real people. He has to ration his news diet “because it can weigh you down to the point where you can’t squeeze out a sentence that is even mildly funny.” Much of his writing, he says, is “obviously me trying to cope in my own way. I’ve been lucky that so many people seem to get it, and judging from their reactions, it gives them some relief in times like these.”

Hiaasen came out of journalism school in the middle of the Watergate scandals. “The Vietnam war was still dragging on. We thought democracy was over,” he told me. That experience gives him some perspective on the current state of affairs. “I think you always want to cling to some hope that there are some good people out there who are going to rise up and stop this.”

Democrats, he said, will probably not save democracy from Trump. He recently told a friend, “This country can’t afford to sit around and wait for the Democrats to get their shit together. It’s going to be sensible, moderate, brave Republicans who stand up, just as they did during Watergate, and say, enough is enough.” In the meantime, he’ll keep working, and it’s hard to imagine that Alligator Alcatraz won’t appear in a future Carl Hiaasen novel.

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How Zohran Mamdani Tied Climate Policy to Voters’ Pocketbook Issues

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

As she canvassed for Zohran Mamdani in New York City on Tuesday last week, Batul Hassan should have been elated. Her mayoral candidate—a 33-year-old state assemblymember—was surging in the polls and would within hours soundly defeat Andrew Cuomo on first preference votes in the Democratic primary election.

But Hassan’s spirits were hampered by record-breaking temperatures. In Crown Heights, where she was the Mamdani campaign’s field captain, the heat index soared into the triple digits. “I couldn’t think about anything but the heat,” she said. “It was so dangerous.”

Early that morning, Hassan had visited a public school polling site, where elderly workers sweltered without air conditioning. The city Board of Elections sent over paper fans, but they were no match for the heat.

If Mamdani is elected mayor, that school could be retrofitted with air conditioning and green space to bring down temperatures as part of his green schools plan, or could even be transformed into a resilience hub for communities to shelter amid extreme weather events

“We need to expand mass transit to fight the climate crisis,” and also “because we want to improve people’s lives right now.”

“Seeing total infrastructural failure on Election Day emphasized the stakes of what’s happening with the climate crisis and the importance of the election,” said Hassan, who took time off from her day job at the leftist thinktank Climate and Community Institute to canvass.

Mamdani’s green schools plan is just one of his schemes to slash carbon emissions and boost environmental justice. His plans for New York City would make residents “dramatically more safe” from extreme weather, said Hassan.

But the democratic socialist, who was endorsed by the national youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement and student-led climate group TREEAge, did not place the climate crisis at the center of his campaign, instead choosing to focus relentlessly on cost-of-living issues. The model could help build popular support for climate policies, supporters say.

“Climate and quality of life are not two separate concerns,” Mamdani told The Nation in April. “They are, in fact, one and the same.”

Over the past two decades, Democrats increasingly focused on the climate. But often, their proposed schemes have been technocratic, Hassan said. Carbon taxes, for instance, can be impenetrably complex, making them difficult candidates for popular support. They can also be economically regressive, with “working class people experiencing them as an additional cost,” Hassan said.

More recently, Joe Biden coupled climate plans with green industrial policy and plans to boost employment. But even those projects can take years to effect tangible change, critics say. As president, for instance, Biden achieved historic climate investments in the Inflation Reduction Act. But its green incentives disproportionately benefited the wealthy, and its job creation remains invisible to most people around the country. One poll found only a quarter of Americans felt the IRA benefited them.

“Now with Trump, we see the pitfalls of the IRA, where there is real difficulty in consolidating enough political support to defend those climate policy achievements,” said Hassan.

Mamdani “learned from some of the mistakes” of the Biden administration, said Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which supported Mamdani’s campaign. His housing plan, for instance, aims to lower planet-heating pollution by boosting density, but his signature promise is a rent freeze.

That pledge could ensure residents are not priced out of New York City and forced to move to more carbon-intensive suburbs, and prevent landlords from passing the costs of energy efficiency upgrades or air conditioning installation to renters, preventing displacement, said Hassan.

Similarly, Mamdani’s headline transit goal was to make buses faster and free, which could boost ridership and discourage the use of carbon-intensive cars. “Public transit is one of the greatest gifts we have to take on the climate crisis,” Mamdani said at a February mayoral forum.

Biden’s IRA placed little focus on boosting public transit, said Gordillo. This was a missed opportunity to cut emissions and also lower Americans’ fuel costs, he said.

“We need to expand mass transit to fight the climate crisis, which hasn’t been a priority for the Democratic establishment,” said Gordillo, who is an electrician by day. “But we also need to expand it because we want to improve people’s lives right now.”

As a New York assemblymember, Mamdani has backed explicitly green policies. He was a key advocate for a boosting publicly owned renewable energy production. The effort aimed to help New York “live up to the dream of our state as being a climate leader,” he said in 2022.

He also fought fossil-fuel buildout. He coupled that climate focus with efforts to keep energy bills low, consistently opposing local utilities’ attempts to impose rate hikes, said Kim Fraczek, director of the climate nonprofit Sane Energy Project.

“His growing political influence is a clear win for communities demanding a just transition: renewable power, democratic control and relief from crushing energy costs,” said Fraczek.

Progressive cities like New York are often climate leaders. But if they price out working people, only the wealthy get to see the benefits of their green policies, Mamdani’s backers say.

By crafting popular climate policies, the Democratic nominee is also building a base of New Yorkers who will work to defend those plans in the face of threats from the Trump administration, they say.

“New Yorkers want an affordable city, clean and green schools, fast and free buses, and a rent freeze,” said Daniel Goulden, a co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America ecosocialist working Group. “But most importantly, New Yorkers want a future—one where they can live and thrive in New York.”

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Wisconsin Supreme Court Just Killed the “Zombie” Abortion Law

When Wisconsin voters flipped the ideological balance of the state’s supreme court in 2023, abortion was very much on their minds. Specifically, abortion opponents were arguing that with the demise of Roe v Wade the year before, the state’s 1849 near-total abortion ban—invalidated by Roe but never overturned by lawmakers, so still technically on the books—should go into effect. The Wisconsin Supreme Court would be the ultimate decider—and thanks to the retirement of a conservative justice, the court was evenly split along partisan lines, 3 to 3.

The race for the open seat between Democratic-aligned circuit judge Janet Protasiewicz and conservative former Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly was hard-fought and, with over $45 million spent, the most expensive judicial race in US history to that point. The final vote left no doubts about voters’ mindset on abortion: Protasiewicz won by more than 11 percentage points.

On Wednesday, the now liberal-leaning court did what voters had wanted and struck down the state’s 176-year-old “zombie” abortion law, which made it a felony for anyone other than the mother or a doctor in a medical emergency to destroy “an unborn child.” In a 4-to-3 decision, Justice Rebecca Dallettsaid the old law was no longer valid because the Wisconsin legislature had effectively repealed it by enacting a myriad of abortion restrictions since Roe was handed down in 1973.

We conclude that comprehensive legislation enacted over the last 50 years regulating in detail the “who, what, where, when, and how” of abortion so thoroughly covers the entire subject of abortion that it was meant as a substitute for the 19th century near-total ban on abortion. Accordingly, we hold that the legislature impliedly repealed [the 1849 law] as to abortion, and that [the zombie law] therefore does not ban abortion in the State of Wisconsin.

Rejecting the claim that the zombie law should be revived, Dallett wrote, “A statute may be repealed either expressly, by enacting a subsequent statute that repeals the earlier one, or by implication.” She cited a number of regulations that Wisconsin lawmakers had passed during the Roe era, including a law criminalizing only those abortions performed after viability; laws requiring ultrasounds, a 24-hour waiting period, and parental consent; bans on government funding, and a 2015 law restricting abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, signed by the-then governor, Republican Scott Walker.

The court’s decision on Wednesday effectively upholds the 20-week ban, and Walker posted on X, “Had I not signed that law, there would be no real legal protections for the unborn in Wisconsin after this decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”

The lawsuit against the Wisconsin zombie law was brought by Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat. Defending the 1849 law was Joel Urmanski, Sheboygan County’s district attorney, who argued that the Roe-era restrictions were consistent with the older ban. Without the change in the court, the ruling could easily have gone the other way; last year, the Arizona Supreme Court declared that state’s 1864 abortion law to be enforceable—a ruling later repealed by state lawmakers.

In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Jill Karofsky cited stories of women who died from unsafe, illegal abortions, including her own great-grandmother in 1929. “Like so many others,” Karofsky wrote, “she died because society did not recognize her as someone with the ‘dignity and authority to make these choices.'”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court was the focus of another intense partisan battle this April, when Elon Musk spent more than $25 million trying to defeat progressive candidate Susan Crawford for a seat being vacated by liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley. Instead, Crawford beat Musk’s pick, Brad Schimel, to preserve the liberal majority on the high court through at least 2028.

As my colleague Ari Berman wrote, the stakes went way beyond abortion:

“It’s a seismic event both inside and outside Wisconsin. On a state level, the court could soon decide the fate of an 1849 abortion ban, a law restricting collective bargaining for public sector unions, and Wisconsin’s gerrymandered congressional maps—the latter of which could help determine which party controls the US House in 2027.

Crawford takes office in August. Bradley voted with the majority to strike down the zombie abortion law.

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This Term, the Supreme Court Gave Favors to Its MAGA Allies on Two Tracks

Last week, the Supreme Court ended a term unlike any other. The Roberts Court, with its 6-3 majority of Republican appointees, continued to issue partisan opinions that pleased the wealthy interests that fund the conservative legal movement while abetting the new Trump administration on its lawless rampage against immigrants, federal agencies, Congress, the courts, and natural born citizens. With the decisions now laid out, a clear pattern emerges: The court is increasingly solicitous of the political coalition that created its rightwing majority—as well as the court’s own power over the rest of the government.

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.”

Once President Donald Trump took office on January 20, the justices’ work split along two parallel tracks. The first, called the merits docket, encompasses the normal business of the court—which for this court is doing the work of the billionaires and industry titans whose largess helped the conservative majority win its seats. The second track, the emergency docket, is wherethe court acts as the final mediator of Donald Trump’s unlawful power grabs—power clashes that the Republican-appointed justices have repeatedly called in Trump’s favor. This docket is also derisively called the shadow docket, because the justices not onlymake these decisions quickly, butwith little or no explanation. Thus, this is the executive power track.

These parallel tracks reflect the two sides of the Republican Party’s coalition: The traditional constituents of big business and conservative Christians on one side, and Trump’s newer MAGA movement on the other. On the merits docket, the Roberts Court continues at breakneck speed to dismantle the administrative agencies and laws that regulate industry while abetting the project of Christian nationalism. On the shadow docket, the GOP appointees oblige Trump’s power grabs.

The two tracks are not entirely separate, but mutually reinforcing. Both share a disdain for Congress’ role in our system of government whileprioritizing the prerogatives of the president, wealthy interests, and rightwing Christian interest groups. And so these parallel tracks have, in recent months, converged.

They also mutually reinforce the awkward political marriage that created this Supreme Court, between the powerful business interests and the religious extremists who,in joining up with Trump’s MAGA movement, forged an alliance that rewarded and kept both camps happy, facilitating their continued cooperation. Again and again, on both tracks, it is democracy that loses out to opportunism as the court seeks to hand party favors to all but the people who need their protection.

Michael Podhorzer, the former political guru for the AFL-CIO, has described how the Roberts Court often supplants “democratic legal principles” with what he terms rule-by-fiat, an “outcome-driven jurisprudence that disingenuously changes the law to accomplish outcomes that favor specific interests.” As Podhorzer tells it, “once cases reach the Rule-by-Fiat system, outcomes follow power relations rather than legal principles.” The best way to understand the court’s actions this year is through this Rule-by-Fiat framework.

Consider the justices’ track record in the last weeks of its term. According to Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, between May 1 and June 23, lower courts ruled against Trump 94 percent of the time. In that same window, the Supreme Court ruled for the administration 94 percent of the time.

The shadow docket allows the justices to orderchange simply because they say so.

Traditionally, the Supreme Court begins each term in the first week of October and wraps up by the end of June, when multiple justices wing off to Europe on plum teaching junkets, cruise on billionaires’ yachts, or fly private jets to Alaska fishing expeditions—the spoils of their all-powerful position in government. Cases on this merits docket, many of which are handed out in the Supreme Court’s final weeks of term,have marinated in the lower courts, where district courts have fleshed out the facts and appellate courts have rendered their analysis—though those lower courts are increasingly shaped by the same special interests that indulge the justices in their fancy vacations and other perks. The justices read rounds of briefs, receive input from interested parties, hear oral arguments, and then make a final decision. These cases are generally the biggest of the term, and the focus of press reports.

But this year, the court’s regular business was overshadowed by its shadow docket. Throughout the year, the justices consider emergency applications—requests for the highest court to intervene before a case has worked its way up through lower courts and is ready for a full merits decision by the justices. In the past 10 years, this emergency or shadow docket has grown in both size and importance. Increasingly, the Republican-appointed majority is using these emergency appeals to render important legal decisions and intervene on behalf of partisan allies. They do this in the proverbial shadows, skipping over the normal deliberative process and often sharing no justification for their actions. Rather than release considered opinions, the shadow docket allows the justices to orderchange simply because they say so.

Since President Donald Trump’s swearing in five months ago, the shadow docket has exploded with the most vital cases on the very basic questions of liberty and the rule of law: Can the president deport people without due process? Can he disregard Congress’ spending authority? Can he gut federal agencies by executive order? Can district court judges halt Trump’s policies on a nationwide basis? Repeatedly, the court has used this shadow docket to carve rights out of the Constitution with a few days deliberation, no oral argument, and, in some cases, not a word of explanation.

It is through the shadow docket that the justices have greenlit many of Trump’s power grabs. When the administration flew 238 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center just hours after invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. ordered the administration to halt AEA deportations for 14 days. But the Supreme Court intervened on Trump’s behalf, ordering that potential deportees could only contest the government’s plans by lodging habeas corpus petitions in the court district where they were confined. No justice signed their name to the April opinion, but it was clear from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, which was joined by the other two Democratic appointees and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which five Republican-appointed justices were behind it. Sotomayor called out the majority for using the shadow docket to decide new and novel legal questions. “There is every reason to question the majority’s hurried conclusion that habeas relief supplies the exclusive means to challenge removal under the Alien Enemies Act,” she wrote. “At the very least, the question is a thorny one, and this emergency application was not the place to resolve it.”

In her own dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was more blunt: “With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”

Days later, the court tempered a district court judge’s order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly sent to CECOT. The Trump administration would use the Republican majority’s milder language to refuse to bring him home for months. Then, in a June shadow docket ruling that applied not to one man but to many, the court allowed Trump to cancel humanitarian parole for hundreds of thousands of immigrants,ending their legal right to stay in the country and injecting chaos and danger into the lives of half a million people without a word of explanation.

In June, the Supreme Court issued its most worrying immigration decision from the shadow docket yet when the GOP appointees greenlit an administration policy of sending non-citizens to dangerous, war-torn countries without an opportunity to challenge their deportation—a likely violation of US and international law, not to mention constitutional guarantees of due process. In a dissent joined by her Democratic colleagues, Sotomayor warned that the majority’s unsigned, unexplained order “expos[es] thousands to the risk of torture or death.”

As the president tried to manifest a strongman-style government, the Supreme Court rushed to his aid.

The Republican-appointed majority has also had Trump’s back in other lawless pursuits. In May, they reinstated Trump’s ban on transgender service members in the military. In early June, they sided with DOGE when it authorized Elon Musk’s minions to access millions of Americans’ Social Security data, possibly in breach of the 1974 Privacy Act. “Once again, this Court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them,” Jackson wrote in a dissent joined by Sotomayor. The emergency, according to the GOP majority, was not whether DOGE staffers can legally access the personal data of millions of Americans or what might happen to it, but that the Trump administration might have to wait out the litigation to get its hands on it. The same day, the GOP appointees sided with the administration in a case over access to DOGE records, setting backthe public’s ability to learn what the Trump administration is so urgently doing.

In the opening months of Trump’s second term, as the president tried to manifest a strongman-style government, the Supreme Court rushed to his aid, enabling him under the guise of the unitary executive theory,an expansive doctrine of executive power. Perhaps the justices’ embrace of the theoryis heartfelt, perhaps it is utilitarian, likely it is both. But one decision particularly showcases how the conservative majority used the shadow docket to both empower the president at the expense of Congress and enact the agenda of their industry backers against workers. How convenient that it all came in one case.

Shortly after taking office, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which protects civil servants. Under federal law backed up by Supreme Court precedent, neither could be removed without cause. But Trump dismissed them anyway, betting that the Republican justices would take his side. He was right. In a brief, unsigned, shadow docket opinion, the Republican appointees effectively toppled a 90-year precedent that allowed Congress to createcommissionswith independent leadership. The opinion expanded the president’s powers over agencies that were supposed to be immune from partisan gamesmanship. It was a gift not only to Trump, but to the businesses that wish to neuter federal regulators that oversee unionization and labor disputes, and that regulate financial markets and big business—the agencies that sprung from the New Deal to reign in the excesses that led to the Great Depression. For the justices, this case presented a chance to help Trump and their big business backers: win-win. For civil servants, American workers, American consumers, and Congress’ power to enact its agenda, it was a big loss.

“Our emergency docket, while fit for some things, should not be used to overrule or revise existing law,” Justice Elena Kagan chided in dissent. “The majority’s order granting the President’s request for a stay is nothing short of extraordinary.” But the extraordinary is now ordinary.

Finally, the biggest case of the term also came from the shadow docket. On January 20, Trump signed an executive order purporting to carve the children of undocumented people and visa holders out of the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. It was so blatantly illegal that Trump has lost in every court to consider the issue, all of which issued injunctions to halt the policy nationwide. So the administration turned to the Supreme Court for reprieve, asking their allies in robes tostop allnationwide or universal injunctions on the grounds that they are an inappropriate use of judicial power. Last week, the six GOP appointees agreed.

After again and again bailing Trump out when district courts halted his policies, the majority issued a get-out-of-jail free card: It will now be difficult for courts to protect everyone from Trump’s lawless actions. Those lower courts, ruling almost uniformly against Trump’s lawless actions, are now hamstrung. If you don’t have a lawyer, the ability to join a class action, or live in a state challenging a Trump policy, your rights will give way to Trump’s whims. “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Sotomayor warned. “The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.”

The justices delivered wins for the traditional Republican coalition of big business and extremist Christian groups.

“By striking down nationwide injunctions, the Court furthered its determination to free up this President to exercise virtually unlimited power,” writes civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill. “More than a unitary executive, this conservative Court imagines an unfettered executive.”

And so on the last day of the term, the shadow docket created a new legal realm. It’s possible that through class actions and state litigation courts can limit the decision’s harms. But we no longer live in a country where rights are universally protected.

With all the momentous law made—and broken—on the shadow docket, the court’s merits decisionsreceived less attention. But in its course of regular rulings, the justices could be counted on to deliver wins for the traditional Republican coalition of big business and extremist Christian groups. Since 2020, the court’s six-justice GOP-majority has taken every opportunity to advance an agenda that aligns with the Republican coalition, and it is not slowing down. This term, winners included the fossil fuel industry, corporations seeking to dodge regulation, religious parents, anti-abortion advocates, and patriarchy. The losers include the environment, civil rights, people on Medicaid, women, transgender minors, other LGBT children, public education, people with disabilities, and Planned Parenthood.

In one case, the court’s GOP appointees and Kagan allowed a vaping company to sue the Food and Drug Administration in the Fifth Circuit, known for its rightwing attacks on agency regulation, rather than the DC Circuit or the circuit where the plaintiff is based, as stipulated by Congress. The result is that the Supreme Court discarded Congress’ will and created a loophole in federal law whereby tobacco industry litigants can pick their favorite judges when challenging certain FDA actions. Check off a big win for the tobacco industry.

The fossil fuel industry scored big as well, when the justices granted them standing to sue over California’s car emission standards, reasoning that oil companies’ profits will be harmed by the downstream effects. It’s hard not to see the decision as a favor to the fossil fuel industry and its grandees, including the Koch brothers, who helped pay for the Federalist Society and related entities that have nurtured and elevated members of the Supreme Court. In June, days before the majority slammed the courthouse doors to individuals seeking to vindicate their rights in a case over Medicaid, they opened those same doors to the fossil fuel interests that helped fund the justices’ rise.

Justice Jackson didn’t let this unsavory favoritism go unmentioned. “This case gives fodder to the unfortunate perception that moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens,” Jackson wrote in a dissent. She didn’t go so far as to outrightclaim that her colleagues were intentionally privileging “plaintiffs whose claims are backed by the Chamber of Commerce” over “those who seek to vindicate their rights to fair housing, desegregated schools, or privacy”—but she came close, writing that the decision “will do little to dissuade” anyone of the notion.

The GOP-appointed justices made a hash of federal regulators’ enforcement powers by allowing parties to challenge certain regulations in district court while they are being enforced—despite a federal law, the Hobbes Act, to the contrary. The case was a technical dispute over enforcement of a telecommunications law, but the bottom line is to bring chaos to the enforcement of federal regulations, to encourage regulated entities to flout the rules, and to open agencies to endless litigation—ushering in uncertainty and volatility. Who wins? Industries, corporations, and individuals who don’t want to follow the rules. The case follows recent decisions that make it easier for industries to defeat regulations Americans depend upon for a safe and healthy life. Once again, Congress’ will and lawwere nuisances to be disposed of.

“The Court will do whatever it wants, whenever it wants.”

While the court’s corporate backers had an excellent term, the far-right Christians in the GOP firmament made out just as well in their effort to subject the entire country to their patriarchal religious views. In a devastating case for transgender children, the court upheld a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors, opening the door to dozens of other state health care bans that similarly threaten the lives of transgender children. The decision cuts transgender kids out of the equal treatment protections of the 14th Amendment and disregards the wishes of parents seeking medical care for their children.

A week later, the Republican majority handed down a decision that threatens to upend public school classrooms by allowing religious parents to opt their kids out of lessons that violate their religious views. The case arose out of a Maryland county that allowed parents to opt their kids out of reading books with LBGT subjects, but that reversed course when the op-out proved impossible to manage. Now, the 6-3 majority has imposed opt-outs on every public school in the country: if a parent says a lesson violates their religious beliefs, the school has to pull the kid out of the classroom.

This is, of course, unworkable. Instead of constantly yanking a segment of their students out of classrooms, schools will remove the LGBT topics from the bookshelves, along with anything else the most vocal religious parents object to. As religious objections get bolder, teachers will likely self-censor. LGBT children, or those from LGBT families, will see representations of their lives banished. The court has ushered in a world where parents can no longer make decisions about their trans child’s medical care, but religious parents can dictate what every kid in the school learns. It’s parental rights, for the right parents.

“The damage to America’s public education system will be profound,” Sotomayor wrote in dissent. “In effect, then, the majority’s new rule will hand a subset of parents a veto power over countless curricular and administrative decisions. Yet that authority has long been left to democratically elected state and local decisionmakers, not individual parents and courts.” When it comes to transgender kids, the court lets state legislatures target a vulnerable minority. But when it comes to school curricula, the democratic process isn’t good enough. Rather than use its power to protect a minority’s rights against a hostile majority, the court throws them to the wolves, then invokes its protective powers to impose religious views on everyone else. It certainly seems like some litigants get favorable treatment while others do not.

The court also targeted poor people on Medicaid, particularly women, by allowing states to halt Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood and any other disfavored providers. This is not only a blow to women’s healthcare, most certainly with deadly consequences, but the GOP majority also used the case to weaken a Reconstruction Era law that allows people to sue to vindicate their rights. For the scorekeepers: fossil fuels can sue over indirect financial losses, but the courthouse door is shut to individuals like Medicaid recipients seeking to protect their rights.

“I think the most telling single opinion from the entire term is Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence in the birthright citizenship ruling—which, in my view, can be fairly read to stand for the proposition that the Court will do whatever it wants, whenever it wants,” Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck wrote on Tuesday. “And I think that principle is fairly reflected in most of the Court’s big decisions from the term—including almost all of the headline-generating rulings respecting emergency applications.”

This Supreme Court term delivered momentous cases that will pervert our system of checks and balances while furthering the GOP projects of dismantling public education, workers’ rights, and medical care. It’s decisions will submit hundreds of thousands of immigrants to unspeakable harm. A president with fascistic ambitious is significantly more powerful than he was when he took office five months ago. The court didn’t have to do any of this. It wanted to.

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Jeffrey Goldberg on Signalgate, Pete Hegseth, and the Risk of WWIII

In March, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, glanced at his phone and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He’d been inadvertently included in a secret chat on Signal among the Trump administration’s national security team about imminent military strikes in Yemen. The Signal chat leaks—which inevitably became known as “Signalgate”—called into question President Donald Trump’s national security team and how it handled top secret information.

Many of those same officials oversaw recent military operations against Iran and its nuclear facilities. Few journalists have seen how the administration operates from the inside out better than Goldberg. He says those Signal chats revealed something about how he believes Trump’s officials view their jobs, especially Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

“I almost felt like, at a very basic level, he was showing off for the vice president, who was also in the chat,” Goldberg says. “The thought I had was, ‘Dude, you don’t have to cosplay being secretary of defense. You are secretary of defense.’” He adds that while it was happening, he didn’t “contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Goldberg sits down with host Al Letson to reflect on the Signal chat leaks, fears of World War III, and what truly worries him about the future of US democracy.

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: So after the US bombed Iran, I’ve seen all over the place that people feel like this could be the beginning of World War III. What are your thoughts?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yeah, I see that and I read it. I just, no one’s explained to me how this leads to World War III yet. That is not to say that things can’t spin out of control in the Middle East. The Middle East, the only constant in the Middle East is sudden and dramatic change, so something can go off the rails even as we’re speaking.

There’s a larger point, and sorry to give you this lengthy answer, but I actually think that we’re in World War III and we’ve been in World War III since the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. And by that I mean, when you have a situation in which Russia, aided by North Korean troops and Iranian drones and supported diplomatically by China, is invading a neighboring country that is supported by Western Europe and until today at least, the United States, that seems like a low-grade world war. Right? It’s controlled, it’s conventional, it’s mostly done through proxies, at least from the western side it’s done through proxies. But we’re having all of these eruptions all the time now, and the world is not at peace because the major powers are battling it out through proxies and in other ways.

I think what has been a little bit surprising for me with this new front or change in the Middle East when it comes to Iran and Israel, is seeing that some people on the right are really against American intervention with Iran. And I’m thinking specifically about Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. I saw her saying that she thought that this was going to become a nuclear war. And then you’ve got Tucker Carlson who really grilled Ted Cruz and brought his thoughts to the forefront. I don’t know, I just did not expect to see that happen.

I’m going to go deep here for a second and I’m going to argue against the idea that Americans don’t like wars. I think Americans are fine with wars as long as they’re short wars that we win.

Agree.

So I think, look, one of the differences and I just wrote a piece about this. I covered Barack Obama and as foreign policy, national security policy in depth so I know something about that and I know something about Donald Trump. Barack Obama was interesting because he would study the second and third and fourth order consequences of actions America could take, and that would frequently paralyze him into not taking any action. Remember, the Syrian red line controversy is a good example. Donald Trump, I don’t think understands intellectually the idea that there’s consequences to actions, right? And so they’re wildly different. And so when you have somebody like that, like Donald Trump, who doesn’t really ask analytically, what could happen down the road if I do X or Y or Z? You’re really rolling the dice.

I think maybe more than any journalist, you have seen up close the incompetence of the Trump Administration. And obviously-

Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.

I don’t know. I mean, you were added to a top secret group chat about a bombing. I think I would stand by my statement just because of that.

Okay, maybe yes, in the sense that it was coming in on my phone. Yes, it was very close.

Yes, I would say that-

I was getting a firsthand glimpse. I’m not going to argue the point.

How much confidence do you have in this team? And I’m talking about Secretary of Defense Hegseth, I’m talking about Trump, I’m talking about all the people that are around these decisions. How confident are you in their ability to execute a plan and to protect American lives?

I have confidence in, let me put it this way, the General in charge of Central Command, General Kurilla, who oversaw this operation, highly competent. There’s a lot of competent people still in government. I have no confidence in Pete Hegseth’s management or analytic or moral capabilities. Marco Rubio is a mystery to me because I knew Marco Rubio a bit and I was an admirer of his brain and many of his policy ideas and now he’s completely done one of these invasion of the body snatchers things where he’s just whatever Trump says is the thing.

Trump himself tweets or Truth Socials or whatever the verb is for posting on Truth Social, a kind of goading text about Russia and its nuclear capabilities. And I worry about Trump’s understanding of the way the national security systems of autocracies work. And I worry that, I mean, it would be the greatest irony of them all, it would be sort of a, that’s a hell of a way to destroy the planet if the planet were eventually destroyed because Donald Trump put something on Truth Social that was misinterpreted by a nuclear armed enemy of the United States who felt as if they had to respond by escalating.

I don’t think Donald Trump wants a nuclear war. Donald Trump has actually been very interesting on the subject of nuclear war and warfare in general. And as you know, he’s not very much into generally speaking into foreign adventures, or at least he’s said as much. I worry that he doesn’t have the self-restraint, maturity, analytic ability, and today the advisors to keep us out of an escalatory cycle with a major power. Iran is a minor power, but I’m talking about China and Russia, North Korea to some extent because they already have nuclear weapons. So that’s what I worry about. You want somebody in that office who’s not impetuous and who is not reactionary. I don’t mean reactionary in the political sense, I mean reactionary in the characterological sense, is easily poked, somebody who’s chill. I mean, if you remember, he was goading the leader of North Korea, this was eight years ago. Little rocket man, and my button is bigger than your button. It’s like, you don’t have to spend years in grad school studying nuclear weapons doctrine to know that ridiculing and threatening people with nuclear weapons is not a great idea.

And so if the question is how worried I am that this is the man in charge of our nuclear weapons, and remember, even though we are a democracy, the President of the United States is an absolute nuclear monarch. The President of the United States can use a nuclear weapon when he wants to. So I don’t feel great about the match of the responsibility that the president has and this particular person in the role.

The foreign power that I think about, the conflict that could be coming, I worry a lot about China and Taiwan and how President Trump would respond to any aggression from China towards Taiwan. And I mean, because I don’t know if you can say that this administration has a definable foreign policy, because you can’t really tell what they’re going to do from one day to the next. I wonder, all bets are off the table if China moves in on Taiwan.

Yeah, that’s interesting. By the way, there’s an argument to be made that a president who is unpredictable is useful, in terms of managing adversaries.

Sure.

It’s known in foreign policy is the crazy Nixon approach. Kissinger would tell the Russian, “Look, I understand what you’re talking about, but my boss, he’s a little bit nuts. We don’t know what he is going to do.” The problem with that is for the crazy Nixon approach to work, the president can’t actually be crazy.

It seems to me that this administration, specifically this president, if you whisper sweet nothing’s in his ear and find a way to get money into his coffers, aggression seems to go away.

Yes, and, I mean, the Iranians didn’t try, to be fair. So, we don’t know. Right, I mean, the joke in the first term or at least the joke that I heard was that either the Trump presidency ends with Trump bombing Iran or building a casino in Tehran. You don’t know, right? You don’t know which way anything’s going to go.

On the Taiwan issue, I would ask you what you think because I have no idea of knowing whether when push comes to shove, Donald Trump would go and defend Taiwan or not. He’s a very transactional person. He wants to do business with China on the one hand, he sees China as an adversary, as another. Does he care who runs Taiwan? No. He cares who’s in control of the smooth flow of semiconductors out of Taiwan into American manufacturing facilities. Right? So I don’t know what he would do. On the one hand, he’s transactional quasi isolationist so he doesn’t seem to be the sort of person who’s going to commit US bodies, meaning soldiers, to a fight to defend Taiwan. On the other hand, he’s very reactive, like we were talking. And so maybe he would be like, “China doesn’t get to do that. Only I get to do that sort of thing, so I’m going to go defend Taiwan.” I don’t know. Do you have any insight into it?

I have zero insight into it. I think the thing that I think about a lot is that there’s two paths, right? There’s a path that he says, “I don’t really care, as long as we get the superconductors, who cares?” There’s the other path where maybe China has a little bluster in their step and says something like challenging the United States, then anything could happen at that point. So, who knows?

Yeah, that’s what I mean about someone who is emotions based in these situations.

Right.

No, I mean, if you’re Taiwan, if you’re Poland, if you’re the Baltic States, you have to be asking, especially with the Europeans because he obviously has a softer spot for Putin than he has for Xi. If you’re the Europeans, you have to say, “I don’t know if this guy’s going to actually come in and save us if we need saving.”

But on the particular issue of Hegseth and Signalgate, obviously what I saw coming over my phone was to some degree a group of people, mainly Hegseth, cosplaying at running the country and running the national security apparatus of the country. This is why they were sort of putting things on Signal like, “The bombers leave at whatever.” And you know what the thought I had when I was seeing it? The thought I had was, dude, you don’t have to cosplay being Secretary of Defense. You are Secretary of Defense.

You are. Right, exactly. You are.

We’re good, we’re good. We’re good. I got it, you’re cool. You got all the bombers, that’s great. You don’t have to show… I mean, I almost felt like at a very basic level, he was showing off for the Vice President, who was also in the chat, and I was like, oh, this is not… You just want people in government, the people who have life-and-death responsibilities to be calm, cool, a lot of cool is necessary, mature, analytic. They don’t take things personally, they’re not getting tattoos to show how cool they are. You want smooth professionals who aren’t looking for glory, they just want to do their job because they believe that they have a responsibility to their country.

Where were you and what did you think when you realized exactly what was happening?

Well, I didn’t realize what was happening until it was happening. What happened was I got a connection request from Mike Waltz who, despite what Mike Waltz later said, I do know, I have met, my phone number would be in his phone. That’s not an impossible thing. And so I sort, oh, wow, Mike Waltz wants to chat, I haven’t talked to that guy in a long time. Maybe he wants to open up a channel, that’s great. So I accepted it and then the next day or two days after that, I was added to the, I think PC Houthi Small Group, it was called. And I thought, oh, this is somebody’s punking me. This is obviously some kind of scam. And then it continued in that vein until the actual messages about the bombing started coming in and I thought, well, if this is real, then we’re about to see some bombing in Yemen. And sure enough, it was real.

And this is a couple of months ago already, and when I do think about it, it still seems absurd because I was in the middle of this. And it’s not that common, as you know, for a reporter to be part of the story in the way that I became part of that story for a week. So in the middle of that swirl, I didn’t really contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was. What are the chances of that happening, right? And that goes back to your original question, which is, are these guys good at their jobs? In this case, they weren’t very good at their jobs.

No. Why did you decide to take yourself out of the chat?

You are making an assumption that I was making decisions alone. All I can say is that I had a great number of very, very skilled lawyers assisting me through this process because none of them had ever seen anything like this before. And so the prudent course of action was to remove myself from the chat, and obviously we thought that that would trigger… When you leave a Signal chat, the rest of the people on the chat are told that you’ve left the Signal chat. So we were expecting all kinds of high jinks to ensue. They didn’t because it seemed like nobody noticed that I had left the chat.

What I would say is, apart from various legal exposures and all the rest, I didn’t want to be in that chat. I have to be honest with you. I want to know as much as I can about the decision-making process and the arguments and the strategy of the United States National Security Complex. I do not as a civilian want to know when the bombers are taking off, from what base they’re taking off, what ships are firing, what missiles at what targets. I don’t want to know. I am not qualified to have that information, I don’t think it’s the place of a journalist to have that. I’m happy to find out later, but I don’t want specific tactical information to be coming to me. And not just because of all the exposure that that would open up, open you up to all kinds of Espionage Act issues. I don’t need to know what kind of gun the soldiers are using.

Well, it’s also a heavy responsibility, right? I mean-

That’s what I mean. It’s not my… that’s not what I-

Yeah, I don’t want to know that.

I don’t want to know that, and I have no problem with this. I’ve gotten into this argument subsequently. It’s like, what is your role as a journalist in these kind of circumstances? And for some people, for a lot of people, by staying in the chat at all and writing about it, I was a traitor and I was violating something. I don’t know what I was violating. To them I say, “Look, my job is to figure out what powerful people are doing on our behalf.” And so if they wanted to invite me to the chat, I’m in the chat and I’m going to tell the readers of The Atlantic what’s going on. There are some people who’ve said, “You should stay in the chat forever and then report out immediately what they’re attacking.” And it’s like, look, I’m an American journalist, right? I’m a patriotic American, I’m not doing anything. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do anything that endangers the lives of another American.

So, what went into your decision to publish the chat?

Well, there are two phases. One, I wasn’t going to. A lot of the stuff, as you know, seemed to me to be obviously classified, secret information. What kind of missiles, when they’re going to leave, when they’re going to land, who they’re targeting, etc, etc, etc. What I did with all that information is along with colleagues, we measured the question of publishing, what benefit would become from publishing that specific information and what harm could ensue? So I willingly held back information that I thought was operational because it’s not my interest to provide operational details to stated sworn adversaries of America. And remember, the Houthis slogan is, “Death to America, death to the Jews, or whatever.” I’m like all the categories, right? I mean, death to left-handed Yankees fans. I’d be like, oh my God, they really know me. And so, I have no interest in sharing that kind of information.

They come out and call me all kinds of names and say that I’m lying and that there was nothing in the chat that was secret. And so they actually kind of weirdly forced my hand. So we spent the day after the first story appeared, vetting again the information that I had that I had not published, and making sure that no American would be harmed by the publication of that information. And then we went to all the different agencies and said, “Look, this is what I’m going to put in The Atlantic tomorrow. If you can make a compelling case why I shouldn’t publish this, make it now.” The CIA came back and asked that we not publish one specific thing about a specific person and I said yes, because my interest is not harming that specific person. Other than that, they were like, “Nope, we’re not raising objections.” So then I published it.

They could have had this become a two-day story by simply saying, and look, this is what an ideal administration or even a normal administration might’ve done. They might have said, “Oh, wow, that was a doozy. We really shouldn’t have been communicating on Signal. From now on we’re not going to communicate on Signal anymore and we’re going to investigate how this happened and investigate how this journalist was brought in.” And for whatever reason, their impulse was to attack me and say that I’m lying and call me a scumbag and call me… I mean, Mike Waltz literally called me a loser. And the funniest part of that is that I didn’t ask you to send me all this stuff.

Right, you, you added me.

I was literally, I mean, was literally sitting in a supermarket when I got off. I was shopping and I’m getting all this stuff, and it’s like, well, you could call me a loser but at least I know how to text.

Right, right. I think in normal times though, it wouldn’t just be, we’re not going to use Signal again. It would be, we’re not going to use Signal again and someone’s going to be held accountable. We’re going to fire somebody. And really, that didn’t happen here. This administration just kind of doubled down and said, “Jeff is stupid,” and that’s where it ends, Jeff was stupid.

No, but here’s a serious thing and anyone who is active duty military or works in the intelligence community who’s listening to this or any veteran is going to understand what I’m saying immediately. You can get in serious trouble if you’re a soldier for revealing the fact that you’re in a truck moving from X base to Y base, right? You can get into trouble for… The government over classifies, let’s stipulate that, they classify everything. But let’s also stipulate that there’s some stuff that’s worth classifying, making secret. There are so many soldiers who’ve been punished, including jail time, for revealing things that are so much less serious than the stuff that was revealed in the Signal chat. And what I heard from non-political rank and file soldiers, veterans, etc, was, “I would’ve gone to jail for that. These guys don’t even lose a day’s pay, but I would’ve gone to jail.” And that hypocrisy, let’s talk about what leadership is, right? That on the part of Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz, etc, that is not modeling good leadership for the people who report to you.

Yeah. Are you scared for this country, where we are right now?

In my mind, we’re either experiencing a midlife crisis, a nervous breakdown, or a terminal illness. I know we’re going through something. We’re going through something. Social media, reality TV before it and the coming AI, it created a situation in which one of these things could happen. I don’t even know if democracy can survive in an age of social media, that’s a large question for another day. But I literally don’t know if we’re going through a thing where it’s like, all we need to do is buy a sports car and we’re going to be fine, or we just need a little bit of rest and relaxation and maybe some drugs and we’ll be fine, or if the American experiment is under such pressure that maybe it doesn’t make it.

I would note, colleague of mine, Yoni Appelbaum has noted this in writing in the past, that there’s never been this sort of experiment before in human history. A large, very large, multi-ethnic democracy has never flourished before over the long term. And I do think that introducing social media and conspiracism and the fakery of AI and all the rest has really affected our ability to keep it together. But I just don’t know. Obviously, I’m hoping for the best. I do think that America’s a great country. I think that we’re an indispensable nation. I think we are a force for good more than we’re a force for bad in the world, especially when you look around the world and see what actually is out there. I’ve got kids, I want them to live in a flourishing country, but I don’t know where we’re at.

I do know this. I do know that passivity in the face of outrage is not going to get us anywhere. And I do know that there are some people who believe that as long as we shovel enough cheap calories at Americans and multifarious forms of entertainment, we’ll keep them quiet and quiescent. And I think that people need to really contemplate what we have and what our system is and think about ways to make it better and not just let it get destroyed by people who don’t care about our democratic experiment. Sorry, I didn’t mean to start giving you a big speech there, but I really feel this. I feel like there’s a lot of passivity right now about things.

I agree with you. I think passivity, and I think that in a lot of ways, so many things, social media, the media we consume, all of it brings us further away from our humanity. And I think that-

Look at the way people talk to each other in this country.

Exactly, the way we talk to each other. Also, the fact that we’ve just lost touch with having empathy for people who aren’t in our immediate circle, and-

Well, this goes to my exact point. It’s like, you know what? You know what I call MAGA supporters? Americans. I want them to call us Americans too. I want people to look at journalists as patriots and not as traitors. I want people to operate within the boundaries of decent behavior and self-restraint, because we’re going to be living here together no matter what, so it might as well work.

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The Murky Relationship Between the Hindu American Foundation and an Indian Embassy

In early June, a gurdwara in Fremont, California shared a potential bombshell document on X. Obtained through public records requests, the legal note implied that the Hindu American Foundation (HAF)—an advocacy group for the Hindu diaspora in the United States—maintains a “fiduciary” relationship with the Indian embassy in Washington, D.C.

It could have massive consequences: If HAF, one of the wealthiest and most controversial nonprofits to organize on behalf of American Hindus, is financed by the embassy, it could trigger a violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

It is not illegal to operate as a “foreign agent” in the United States. But organizations must register. And with the filing comes a series of significant requirements. If HAF were to register as a foreign agent, it would be compelled to publicly disclose detailed information about any alleged dealings with the Indian government.

Ben Freeman, the Director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, described the registration act as somewhat “murky” when it comes to dictating what think tanks or nonprofits can and cannot do. Still, establishing a “fiduciary relationship is really key for FARA.”

On its surface, HAF looks like a typical advocacy group. Created in 2003, it purports to provide school boards, law enforcement, college campuses, and journalists with “a better understanding and inclusion of Hindu Americans.” On an ideological level, many have said HAF is to India what the Anti-Defamation League is to Israel.The foundation—increasingly influential as the South Asian population increases in the US— operates aggressively to help shape a particular consensus on the most divisive political issues in the diaspora. HAF has publicly condemned caste abolitionists in California, Sikhs rallying for self-determination, and reporters who frame India’s military and human rights abuses in Kashmir as an occupation.

Any organization is free to support the policy of a foreign government, but the Department of Justice lays out several criteria that the government would use to establish a relationship between the “agent” and “foreign principal.” As outlined in a 2020 memo from the DOJ, “the purpose of FARA is not to restrict speech, but rather to identify it as the speech of a foreign principal (when fairly attributed), and thus to enable American audiences to consider the source in evaluating the message.” Finances can play a key part. “Frankly, the DOJ hasn’t done a good job of making it clear when think tanks should and shouldn’t register under FARA,” Freeman explained, “but there are a couple red lines that have been drawn.”

One of these criteria is somewhat objective: if the agent is receiving compensation for their activities. The other criteria are more subjective. If HAF were to be investigated by the DOJ, it would have to be established that the Indian government or embassy yields “some level of power by the principal over the agent.” The government would then consider if the foundation had an “ongoing relationship” with the foreign principal, whether their activities are “coordinated with the foreign principal,” whether their relationship is “documented in a written agreement,” or whether their actions are “a one-off or part of a pattern.”

The recent allegation of FARA violation began amid a flurry of paperwork. The Fremont Gurdwara Sahib requested email correspondences between the Indian Embassy in Washington and HAF, under India’s Right to Information Act (RTI). The embassy refused to release this information. But, it did so in an odd way. According to the documents provided to Mother Jones, the embassy replied to the gurdwara’s information request with a denial, and wrote that the disclosure of such emails would “irreparably breach” the trust between HAF and the embassy’s mission. They added that “some of the information” sought by the requesters contained “fiduciary” information that the embassy is entitled to withhold under Indian law.

Prabhjot Singh, a spokesperson for the temple, said they felt compelled to make the document request in response to HAF’s close coordination with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and American politicians. HAF has previously liaised directly with Modi, former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley, and former Hawaiian Congresswoman and (one-time Democrat) Tulsi Gabbard when Modi visited the United States in 2014. HAF played a similar role during two more trips in 2019 and 2024. HAF also organized a briefing in 2019 between Capitol Hill staffers and the Indian Embassy to discuss Modi’s first term, for which they provided materials to participants that touch on religious violence in India, while making no mention of the significant role Hindu paramilitaries played in organized attacks on minorities. (Modi was previously banned from entering the US for his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom.)

The Department of Justice encourages citizens to report violations with the federal government if they suspect that a person or organization is acting as an authorized foreign agent. The gurdwara filed a complaint with the DOJ through their legal counsel Lex Politica, an Austin–based law firm that has previously represented Elon Musk. As reported by the Times, the founder of the firm, Chris Gober, hopes to develop Lex Politica as the outside counsel to major Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson.

In conjunction with the “fiduciary” connection, a term Singh is convinced implies a formal loyalty, the gurdwara’s legal counsel says HAF’s response shows an unambiguous violation of FARA. The complaint says that the foundation has “consistently and unequivocally advocated for the interests of [Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party] on both domestic and foreign policy matters,” drawing on social media posts, interviews, newsletters, and other communications that indicate a close relationship between HAF and Indian politicians that span the last decade.

“Given its ‘fiduciary’ relationship with the Indian Embassy, [HAF] appears to be acting in alignment and in coordination with a foreign government,” said Singh. “It strikes at the heart of American sovereignty, civil rights, national security, all of those things are influenced by this.”

The legal complaint is similarly forceful. “A review of publicly-available information reveals that HAF appears to be acting as an agent of the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. and the Bharatiya Janata Party (‘BJP’), the ruling government of India,” Lex Politica wrote in their letter addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “This consistent and repeated activity directly on behalf of its foreign principals demands that HAF register and report according to FARA’s requirements.”

The embassy has yet to elaborate on the details of said fiduciary connection. Neither HAF nor the Indian Embassy responded to comment on the exact nature of their relationship, financial or otherwise, but the foundation did tell The Guardian that they deny the claims and are open to meeting with the DOJ, Gabbard, and FBI Director Kash Patel to discuss the “dangerous accusations” against them.

HAF also responded to the allegations in a public statement, calling the complaint just the “latest dual loyalty smear” and said the foundation “categorically rejects the ludicrous allegation that HAF coordinates its activities with the Government of India.” Making no clear connection to the Fremont gurdwara, the statement also mentions Khalistan. The Khalistan movement aims to establish a sovereign Sikh state; for a significant number of American Sikhs, the movement represents a nonviolent freedom struggle; HAF says the movement is fundamentally anti-Hindu.

The Fremont gurdwara has been active in local Khalistan organizing for years, and in response, HAF has publicly disparaged their political stance in the press. Their statement on the FARA allegations goes on to suggest that HAF is being targeted for “their strong advocacy” against the Khalistan movement.

HAF is already infamous in some circles. It has reportedly orchestrated smear campaigns against scholars and organizations who ideologically oppose the rightwing elements in Indian politics, namely Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Researchers have placed HAF within a larger network of other right-wing Hindu organizations, which have explicit connections to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a massive Hindu paramilitary organization in India. According to Jewish Currents, HAF has wielded the accusation of “hinduphobia” against anyone outwardly critical of hindutva, especially on college campuses.

And this is not the first time HAF has faced similar accusations of violating FARA. A 2024 report in Al Jazeera found that HAF appeared to be “treading a fine line” between acting as a nonprofit and a foreign agent, even if the organization denies that it operates on the direct behalf of the Indian government.

Whether a connection between the activities of HAF and the will of the BJP can be plausibly established, enforcement is an entirely separate issue. “I think it’s unlikely that Trump’s DOJ under Pam Bondi would do anything about it,” Freeman said.

Since 2023, the self-professed “largest democracy in the world” has made international headlines for its very undemocratic repression of its critics from afar. Canadian intelligence connected the Modi government to the murder of Khalistan activist and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar and the Justice Department announced its charges against an Indian intelligence employee who attempted to murder a Sikh lawyer and American citizen in 2023. These events prompted Sen. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) to introduce the Transnational Repression Reporting Act, currently working its way through the House.

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Why So Many Low-Income Households Can’t Afford This Free Home Improvement Program

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

The federal Weatherization Assistance Program is the oldest and largest energy efficiency initiative in American history. Born from the 1973 oil crisis, it helps low- and moderate-income households make a litany of upgrades to their homes, such as installing insulation, sealing windows, and wrapping water pipes. The program, known as WAP, is often free and saves residents an average of $372 annually on their utility bills.

But a report released today by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that many homes need basic—but expensive—repairs before they can participate, something many residents can’t afford. Those households are placed on a deferral list until those improvements are made. Although some buildings are too damaged to fix up and some people manage to get off the list,the research showed that, in 2023, another 7,000 homes could have been repaired but weren’t due to lack of money. That’s a fifth of the 35,000 homes that the Department of Energy estimates WAP reaches each year.

“People are in really bad situations…There is a very big demand for this no-cost program.”

“We were the first to really figure out what the deferral rates are and why,” said Reuven Sussman, an expert in energy efficiency behavior change at ACEE and an author of the report. “I don’t think this problem is broadly known.”

The Department of Energy, which administers the $326 million WAP budget, works with local companies to weatherize qualifying homes.ACEEE surveyed providers in 28 states about their deferrals. The top reason cited was the poor condition of the roof—an issue that undermines improvements such as attic insulation. Floor damage and outdated electric panels were the other leading justifications for deferring homes. The average cost of bringing a home up to WAP standards, the report found, was nearly $14,000.

“If you’re eligible for WAP you likely don’t have enough money to pay for it,” Will Bryan, director of research for the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance. “There are households that are falling through the cracks.”

People facing deferrals have a few options, but they are limited and inconsistent. Depending on where these residents live, some public, private, or philanthropic funds are available for critical home repairs. Some states—like Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Vermont—have more specific programs targeting WAP deferrals. Starting in 2022, the federal government also provided money for the Weatherization Readiness Fund (WRF), though it only backed it with about $15 million.

“The government has experimented with some pre-weathization funding, but that hasn’t happened at the kind of scale that it needs to,” said Bryan. And, he added, President Donald Trump’s administration and Congress are trying to pull what little money has become available in recent years. The “big, beautiful” budget bill that the House passed zeros out the budget for both WAP and WRF, as well as related assistance or incentive programs. The details of the Senate version are not yet clear, but the impacts of the rollback could be drastic.

“Elderly people, disabled people, small children—their energy burden is so much higher than other folks because they are on fixed incomes,” said Bryan Burris, vice president of energy conservation programs at projectHOMES, a WAP provider in Richmond, Virginia. The recent influx of state and federal funding has helped his organization cut its deferral rate from around 50 percent to about 20, but that progress is in peril. “People are in really bad situations,” said Burris. “There is a very big demand for this no-cost program.”

ACEEE estimates that it would cost about $94 million per year to make the 7,000 preventable deferrals ready for weatherization. If all those homes were able to receive WAP services, it would save 49,236 megawatt-hours of energy annually and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 153,000 metric tons over the lifetime of the measures. WAP projects also often pay for themselves many times over in lower utility bills.

Evaluating the effectiveness of weatherization readiness programs is more complex. Although they may save homeowners some money on a monthly basis, the greatest gains of major repairs are often indirect boosts in health and quality of life. For example, fixing a roof could help a senior citizen age in place, rather than go to an assisted living facility. Removing toxic substances, like asbestos, from homes could prevent illnesses in children.

“You can potentially save money in the long term by reducing the hazards that people are exposed to,” said Bryan, pointing to a substantial body of research supporting the idea. A 2021 study in the southeastern United States, for example, found that after weatherization, “respondents reported fewer bad days of physical and mental health. Households were better able to pay their energy bills and afford prescriptions.”

While that line of inquiry was beyond the scope of the latest ACEEE report, Sussman said the logic makes sense. Avoiding even a minor trip to the hospital or doctor could save programs like Medicaid or Medicare thousands of dollars.

“People live with holes in the roof and asbestos and can’t get assistance,” said Bryan. “It leads to health issues.”

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