The Big Bad Republican Bill Wasn’t Regressive Enough for the Anti-Tax Crusaders

It is apparently not enough for America’s anti-tax crusaders that Congress just passed one of the most expensive and regressive tax bills in our history. The Washington Post reports that Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and other conservative groups are now urging the Trump administration to change how investment profits are taxed—unilaterally, if need be—in a way that would overwhelmingly favor the wealthiest Americans.

Sound familiar?

Namely, they want to index capital gains to inflation. Suppose I bought $100,000 worth of Apple stock on July 10, 2020 and kept it. Today, I could sell that stock for $170,383—a tidy $70,383 profit. That’s a 74 percent overall return and an average annual return of 11.7 percent. Pretty good, right?

Not good enough for Norquist et al.

These players want to let me adjust the “cost basis”—the price I originally paid for the stock—for inflation. Using this inflation calculator, I could then tell the IRS that my initial $100k investment was in fact a $120,407 investment, and so my profit for tax purposes is only $40,976.

This is insane—for several reasons.

First, read the room. Congress just passed a megabill whose benefits are deeply skewed in favor of the wealthy. Its tax provisions and spending cuts, taken together, will result in a 4 percent increase in average after-tax income for the richest 1 percent of American households and a nearly 4 percent decrease for the poorest 20 percent, based on the Yale Budget Lab’s analysis. This is very, very unpopular.

The bill will at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt—more like $5 trillion if expiring provisions are extended in the coming years. And indexing capital gains to inflation, according to 2018 estimates from the Tax Policy Center and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, would add yet another $100 billion to $200 billion to the tab—with the richest 1 percent reaping 86 percent of the benefits.

“I don’t think reducing [capital gains rates further] will change investor behavior,” says billionaire Mark Cuban.

Norquist told the Washington Post he recently spoke with President Donald Trump and recommended the president implement the change with an executive order. Indexing capital gains to inflation was considered during Trump’s first term, the Post‘s Jeff Stein reports, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin felt Congress should handle it—current secretary Scott Bessent may prove more complaint. “I said something like, ‘Mr. President, after we do the bill, we will need more economic growth,” Norquist told Stein. “The Big Beautiful Bill is very pro-growth, but with this, we can have even more growth.’”

In reality, not one of the Republican tax packages enacted since Ronald Reagan became president has lived up to its sponsors’ economic promises. “The economy may well enjoy a sugar-high the next couple of years, as borrowing stimulates near-term consumption,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in a statement after Congress passed the “One Bie Beautiful Bill” on July 3. “But a sugar-high won’t be sustained, it will do real damage, and often what comes next is the crash.”

As for the notion of indexing fueling “more growth,” the billionaire investor Mark Cuban told me in an email that he thinks the current tax rates on capital gains are fair, and “I don’t think reducing it will change investor behavior.”

Yet the fairness of those rates—and their justification—is the subject of fierce debate. Suppose I’m a wealthy investor and I sell assets I’ve held for at least 12 months—stocks, bonds, real estate, or even, say, a stud racehorse—netting my family $1,000,000 in profits. The federal tax on those capital gains ranges from zero for the first $94,000 to 20 percent for the portion that exceeds $583,750. Because my spouse and I have income of more than $250,000, we also have to pay a 3.8 percent “net investment income tax.” This all adds up to an effective tax rate of about 19 percent.

But tax rates for wage income are much higher. A couple reporting $1,000,000 in salary income pays an effective rate of about 30 percent. That’s a huge difference, and part of why families whose money comes from primarily from asset growth have amassed wealth so much faster than working families have. It no lefty exaggeration to say America’s economic system is rigged against workers and in favor of investors. It’s right there in the tax code.

“This kind of proposal will only widen the economic inequality we’re facing.”

So how do conservative policy wonks justify the low capital gains rates? A key argument, interestingly, is that inflation eats away at the value of long-term gains. One “solution” would be to index the gains to inflation, notes the libertarian Cato Institute, “but most countries instead roughly compensate” by offering reduced tax rates for investors.

And now the anti-taxers want to have it both ways.

Investors enjoy other economic advantages, too. Notably, their gains are counted as income only when the assets are sold. In practice, this allows people with a large portfolio of appreciated assets to borrow against their holdings at single-digit interest rates and live off those loans instead of selling assets and paying a double-digit tax. As ProPublica discovered, many of America’s wealthiest families have been doing precisely that. (As a result, from 2014 to 2018, Jeff Bezos paid an effective income tax rate of less than 1 percent.)

Or say you have a $100 investment that grows by 10 percent a year during a period of 2 percent annual inflation. The first year’s profit, after inflation, is $8. “But I don’t pay tax on that $8 until I sell, which may be decades later,” says Bob Lord a former tax attorney and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “I’m basically getting a free ride on the appreciation of that $8 portion of my investment.” Doesn’t that benefit, he asks, more than offset any detriment from inflation?

And also, isn’t investing supposed to contain an element of risk management? Isn’t the ability to beat inflation part of what separates a savvy investor from a useless one? Indexing for inflation, combined with favorable tax capital gains rates and an exemption for unrealized gains—doesn’t that basically reduce investing to shooting fish in a barrel?

It is worth noting, too, that most Americans work for a paycheck, and the ones who make their living via investing are by and large quite wealthy. More than half of Americans now own some stock, but not much. As of January 2024, per Federal Reserve data, 93 percent of US stock holdings were owned by the most affluent 10 percent of the population, and the richest 1 percent owned more than half of all public equities—not to mention private equities.

Indexing gains to inflation “would really codify the notion that income taxes are only for people who work for a living,” says Morris Pearl, a former managing director at BlackRock and current chairman of the board of Patriotic Millionaires, a nonprofit that advocates for higher taxes on the rich.

If the Trump administration were to attempt the change Norquist recommended—unilaterally or otherwise—its not even clear how it would work. You would presumably need to make changes on both the profit and loss sides of a balance sheet. Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, has concluded that indexing is complex and unlikely to generate significant economic impact, and is therefore “more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Indexing has been rejected in the past to avoid opening new tax shelters,” says Steven Rosenthal, a Washington tax policy expert and former legislation counsel for the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “If investors were permitted to index their assets, but not required to index their liabilities, debt-financed investments would explode. Investors could exclude profits and deduct interest. But indexing both assets and liabilities is a mess, which I, as a congressional staffer, discovered when we tried to draft it.”

“This kind of proposal will only widen the economic inequality we’re facing,” adds Patriotic Millionaires’ Pearl. “It’s absurd that all I would need to do is buy property that I can rent out, and make a lot of money, and never have to pay taxes again!”

Continue Reading…

Sheldon Whitehouse: Democrats and Activists “Too Polite” in the Fight Against “Malevolent” Fossil Fuel Giants

This story is part of the 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now

The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation,” the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.

“The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview on Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. “It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by the burning of fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added, “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.”

“Turns out, none of [the science] really matters while the operation is controlling things in Congress.”

Whitehouse is among the most outspoken climate champions on Capitol Hill, and on Wednesday evening he delivered his 300th Time to Wake Up climate speech on the floor of the Senate.

He began giving these speeches in 2012, when Barack Obama was in his first term, and has consistently criticized both political parties for their lackluster response to the climate emergency. The Obama White House, he complained, for years would not even “use the word ‘climate’ and ‘change’ in the same paragraph.”

While Whitehouse slams his fellow Democrats for timidity, he blasts Republicans for being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, an entity whose behavior “has been downright evil,” he said. “To deliberately ignore [the laws of physics] for short-term profits that set up people for huge, really bad impacts—if that’s not a good definition of evil, I don’t know what is.”

The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s trade association, says on its website that “API and its members commit to delivering solutions that reduce the risks of climate change while meeting society’s growing energy needs.”

Long before Donald Trump reportedly told oil company CEOs he would repeal Joe Biden’s climate policies if they contributed $1 billion to his 2024 presidential campaign, Republicans went silent on climate change in return for oil industry money, Whitehouse asserted. The key shift came after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on campaign spending. Before that, some GOP senators had sponsored climate bills, and John McCain urged climate action during his 2008 presidential campaign.

But Citizens United, Whitehouse said, “told the fossil fuel industry: ‘The door’s wide open—spend any money you want in our elections.’” The industry, he said, promised the Republican party “unlimited amounts of money” in return for stepping away from bipartisan climate action: “And since 2010, there has not been a single serious bipartisan measure in the Senate.”

Democrats get stuck in a “stupid doom loop in which our pollsters say: ‘Well, climate’s not one of the top issues that voters care about,’ so then we don’t talk about it.”

Whitehouse said that after delivering 300 climate speeches on the Senate floor, he has learned to shift from talking about the “facts of climate science and the effects on human beings to calling out the fossil fuels’ massive climate-denial operation”.

He said: “Turns out, none of [the science] really matters while the operation is controlling things in Congress. I could take facts from colleagues’ home states right to them, and it would make no difference because of this enormous, multibillion-dollar political club that can [punish] anyone who crosses them.”

Most Republicans even stay silent despite climate change’s threat to property values and other traditional GOP priorities, Whitehouse said. He noted that even the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell—who is not known for his climate bona fides, he said—testified before the Senate in February that in 10-15 years there will be whole regions of the country where nobody can get a mortgage because extreme weather will make it impossible to afford or even obtain insurance.

Democrats can turn all this to their advantage if they get “more vocal and aggressive,” Whitehouse argued. “The good news is that the American people hate dark money with a passion, and they hate it just as much, if not more, in districts that went for Trump as in districts that went for Biden.”

Democrats also need to recognize “how much [public] support there is for climate action,” he said. “How do you have an issue that you win 74 [percent] to 12 [percent] and you don’t ride that horse as hard as you can?”

Whitehouse said he was only estimating that 74 percent figure, but that’s exactly the percentage of Americans who want their government to take stronger climate action, according to the studies informing the 89 Percent Project, the Guardian and other Covering Climate Now partner news outlets began reporting in April. Globally, the percentage ranges from 80 percent to 89 percent. Yet this overwhelming climate majority does not realize it is the majority, partly because that fact has been absent from most news coverage, social media and politicians’ statements.

Democrats keep “getting caught in this stupid doom loop in which our pollsters say: ‘Well, climate’s not one of the top issues that voters care about,’ so then we don’t talk about it,” said Whitehouse. “So it never becomes one of the top issues that voters care about. [But] if you actually go ask [voters] and engage on the issue, it explodes in enthusiasm. It has huge numbers when you bother to engage, and we just haven’t.”

Nevertheless, Whitehouse is optimistic that climate denial won’t prevail forever. “Once this comes home to roost in people’s homes, in their family finances, in really harmful ways, that [will be] motivating in a way that we haven’t seen before around this issue,” he said. “And if we’re effective at communicating what a massive fraud has been pulled on the American public by the fossil fuel industry denial groups, then I think that’s a powerful combination.”

Continue Reading…

Listen to the Trump-Referencing Clipse Track Universal Music Allegedly Tried to Censor

After more than 15 years, fans of the Clipse**,** the legendary Virginia-based sibling rap duo, are finally getting a fourth studio album: Let God Sort Em Out. Known for hits in the early 2000s like “Grindin’” and “When the Last Time,” and the acclaimed 2006 album Hell Hath No Fury, brothers Malice and Pusha T—now better known for solo work—split up following the 2009 release of Til the Casket Drops, their third album.

The new album, already a critical success, is set to release Friday and features production from longtime collaborator Pharrell Williams, whose iconic production as part of the Neptunes helped define early Clipse hits, and guest verses from Nas; Tyler, the Creator; and Kendrick Lamar. But that Lamar verse led—reportedly because of a reference to Donald Trump—to delays and attempts at censorship, the group has alleged, that ultimately led them to leave Universal Music Group (UMG).

The track in question, “Chains & Whips,” released a day before the album on Apple Music; under an intense mix of guitar riffs, drums, and horns, its hook, “Beat the system with chains and whips,” alludes to the US’ dark past with slavery while serving as a double entendre for the jewelry and cars the brothers have been able to purchase with the millions they’ve made.

Pusha T and Malice deliver hard-hitting bars about the pursuit of wealth and death with lyrics like “Richard”—in reference to the luxury watch brand Richard Mille—”don’t make watches for presidents. Just a million trapped between skeletons.” Lamar immediately sets the mood for his verse, rapping, “I’m not the candidate to vibe with. I don’t fuck with the kumbaya shit.” In a verse featuring a rhyme scheme with an impressive number of words that start with “gen,” he raps about genocide and gentrification before capping off the verse with “God gave me light, a good year full of free will. Trump card, tell me not to spare your life.”

According to Pusha T, the group’s label, Def Jam, part of UMG, singled out that lyric and demanded the duo censor or remove Lamar’s verse. “The phrase ‘Trump card’ was used, and they said that they didn’t want any problem with Trump,” he told the New York Times’ Popcast in June.

“Rap music has provided opportunities for artists coming from marginalized backgrounds to express their hopes, their aspirations, but also their frustrations [and] their political views,” says Chad Williams, a professor of history and African American and Black diaspora studies at Boston University. Williams, who previously taught a course on hip-hop history at Brandeis University, says political messages have been a vital part of hip-hop for most of its history. He points to groups like Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy, which made political messages central to their music in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and says artists were able to find success with such songs only until hip-hop became more mainstream and labels consolidated into a few major players—when political hip-hop took a back seat to other styles.

Williams sees the Pusha T situation as a consequence of that corporate consolidation, where artists have fewer options for distribution, allowing labels to exert more influence—which he finds especially troubling in a political climate where “retribution has become an explicit part of the Trump administration’s political agenda and you could potentially see economic repercussions for major corporations.” Still, Pusha T told Popcast’s hosts that he didn’t believe the label really objected to the Trump line; instead, he argued, they didn’t like the optics of two rappers coming together on a song after beefing with Drake, who in January filed a defamation suit against UMG, also his longtime label, that accused the company of siding with Lamar in the beef.

Many in the hip-hop community criticized Drake for the lawsuit: Legal action over losing a rap beef?” the rapper Rapsody wrote in a now-deleted post on X. “My my my. Not like us at all.” Williams describes the lawsuit as “one of the most un-hip-hop things in hip-hop history,” adding that “Drake really demonstrated how out of touch he is with hip-hop culture.” He says it could lead to labels being even more restrictive about the music they allow rappers to put out.

The lawsuit also raised concerns around other court cases involving rappers. A group of professors from the University of California, Irvine School of Law filed a brief in the case in May, callingDrake’s arguments “not just faulty” but “dangerous.” The professors write that lyrics in diss tracks should not be taken as factual statements, but as “hyperbole [and] bluster” used to entertain audiences, warning that the case could set a precedent for the controversial use of rap lyrics in criminal court, which the professors say has introduced racial bias in multiple cases and has created a “chilling effect across the industry.”

Pusha T criticized Drake’s lawsuit in an interview with GQ last month, saying, “The suing thing is bigger than some rap shit. I just don’t rate you. Damn, it’s like it just kind of cheapens the art of it once we gotta have real questions about suing and litigation. Like, what? For this?”

Whichever factor—fear of Trump or of Drake—motivated the label to quash the track, Pusha T said in the same interview that Def Jam’s attempts to censor the Clipse collaboration with Kendrick reminded him of the label’s response to the fallout from “The Story of Adidon,” the scathing 2018 Drake diss track in which Pusha T exposed both that Drake had a previously unknown child and that he had been photographed in blackface—which the artist later said was part of an art project designed to bring awareness to the limited roles available to Black actors and the way “African Americans were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment.”

Thereafter, Pusha T claimed in his Popcast interview, Def Jam put up roadblocks when he tried to release new music, allegedly nixing multiple guest verses on other artists’ songs that it interpreted as subtle disses aimed at Drake.

When the Clipse said they hit an impasse with the label, refusing to remove or censor Lamar’s verse, the duo bought themselves out of their contracts for a seven-figure sum, according to Pusha T’s longtime manager in an interview with Billboard; their latest album is being released on Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, a subsidiary of the music giant Live Nation.

Censorship in rap is “egregious,” said Malice during the Popcast interview. “Rap, the arts, entertainment, it’s like the last frontier for Black expression. This is what we have.”

Drake’s legal representation and UMG did not respond to requests for comment.

Continue Reading…

State Department Employees Brace for Friday Layoffs

Inside the State Department, employees are packing up their belongings in anticipation of a reorganization and reduction in force that is expected to cut nearly 2,000 jobs. The significant cuts and reorientation of the department’s mission will cripple the agency’s work to promote democracy, combat human rights abuses, and negotiate conflict resolution.

Trump officials plan to attack “unelected bureaucrats” to defend cuts hitting human rights work.

The proposed reorganization submitted to Congress was supposed to be completed by July 1, but a federal lawsuit filed by labor unions blocked the proposed reorganization and reduction in force, or RIF, plans across 22 agencies. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court lifted that injunction. While it did not rule on the legality of the reorganization plans at State or any other agency, it paved the way for massive cuts across the federal government to take effect. If Secretary of State Marco Rubio proceeds with the cuts and changes on Friday, as workers at the agency expect, it will be an immediate result of the Supreme Court’s intervention.

Those hardest hit will be employees at bureaus that focus on democracy, human rights, and conflict resolution, according to the agency’s plans. For example, the administration plans deep cuts at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), which supports pro-democracy civil society groups around the world, and then to use what is left of the bureau for rightwing ideological pursuits, such as the administration’s allegations of free speech abuses in Europe.

State Department employees say the changes will be devastating, particularly when coupled with the destruction of USAID and the billions of dollars in grants that are being shut off, both abroad and to United States based non-governmental organizations. “For those of us in the conflict prevention and stabilization space, those of us in the human rights space, and those of us in the mass atrocity prevention and accountability space,” one State Department employee told Mother Jones, “it ends the entire industry in the United States.”

Texts, screenshots, and rumors spreading through the State Department have prepared employees for what is coming—and, after an official email Thursday confirming a RIF “in the coming days,” many believe it will come Friday. Around 9:30am, they expect an announcement that the reorganization plan has taken effect. This will be followed, employees believe, by RIF notices between 10am and 12pm. Around 3pm, employees expect to receive financial information such as whether they will first be put on administrative leave. Workers expect to lose access to internal systems and the building by the end of the day.

An employee at the Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations expects their entire office to be eliminated tomorrow, in accordance with the reorganization plan. “In this administration, they’re big on getting deals done and taking credit,” said an employee in the bureau, who asked not to be named. “You have India-Pakistan, you have Gaza ceasefires, you have this Rwanda-DRC deal—but it takes a lot more than just the high level handshake. There’s a lot of work behind the scenes that has to be done to make sure these agreements are implemented and all that capacity is going away.”

One of the most dramatic hits is coming to DRL, which is currently overseeing 391 grants totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, one employee told Mother Jones. “They are RIFing all of us who actually understand what foreign assistance management at the State Department is,” said a DRL employee, who asked for anonymity. As a result, they said, congressionally-mandated funding may fail to go out to human rights and civil society groups around the globe. As a result, this person expects lawsuits over the DRL cuts.

These funds helped Americans, says the DRL employee. As the “biggest donor of democracy and human rights assistance around the world for the last few years,” this employee said, DRL helped create stable conditions for American businesses and nurtured pro-American sentiment—things that help enable access to foreign markets and critical minerals. “Once we’re gone, there is going to be a vacuum, and there are going to be malign actors that fill this vacuum,” including China and local radical and terrorist groups.

Expecting criticism for effectively erasing the last of the government’s democracy and human rights work abroad, the State Department drafted a “press guidance” document dated July 7 on how to defend the plan and Rubio in particular. The document, obtained by Mother Jones, cites broad goals of disempowering “unelected bureaucrats…pushing ideologically driven policies.” Rather than actually defend the plan, the document provides talking points that attack Democrats and progressives, shifting the story away from the Trump administration’s actions.

The document alleges that the Obama and Biden administrations used foreign assistance to push radical ideologies abroad. Biden, the press guidance alleges, used foreign aide to “bully countries into accepting so-called transgender rights” while ignoring “the wholesale slaughter of Christians.” It calls Biden’s proclamation of Easter Sunday of last year as Transgender Day of Remembrance “sickening.” In fact, Biden scheduled a Transgender Day of Visibility for every March 31 back in 2021, and in 2024 that happened to fall on Easter Sunday. Biden commemorated Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20—nowhere near Easter.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the guidance memo, or any pending cuts.

Continue Reading…

What We Know About How FEMA Officials Are Failing Texas

The devastating floods that hit central Texas last Friday have now killed at least 120 people, including dozens of children, according to authorities, and left at least 150 missing. But the leaders at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tasked with supporting communitiesin the wake of similar disasters have been missing in action, according to a slate of recent damning reports.

For one, FEMA Acting Administrator David Richardson is nowhere to be found, according to multiple reports. A former Marine, Richardson appears to have no experience leading disaster management. Yet in his current role, Richardson—who made headlines after he reportedly told FEMA staff that he was unaware the US has a hurricane season (White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed that as a “joke”) and threatened to “run right over” anyone who got in his way—is federally mandated to be responsible for providing national leadership in preparation for, and in response to, natural disasters. In the past, FEMA administrators have typically been among the first responders at disaster sites to help manage the response.

Former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told E&E News that the head of FEMA should be on the ground “to talk to local officials, talk to the people that have been impacted, see firsthand what the damages are—and make sure FEMA was directing the appropriate resources as fast as possible into the appropriate area.”

But FEMA staffers say that whatever Richardson is doing, it’s not that. Not only has he reportedly made no public appearances since assuming his role—which did not require Senate confirmation—he has also yet to arrive in Texas since the July 4 tragedy struck.

“I have no idea what’s going on with David Richardson’s absence,” one FEMA employee told E&E News.

“If this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are fucked,” one FEMA source told independent journalist Marisa Kabas, author of the newsletter The Handbasket.

Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees FEMA and several other agencies, seems to have effectively taken over Richardson’s role. She arrived in Texas within days of the floods, conducting a press conference with Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) and touring the hardest-hit sites, including Camp Mystic, the Christian girls’ camp where at least 27 children, counselors, and staff died.But Noem has also sought to downplay the federal government’s role in responding to the disaster: “We, as a federal government, don’t manage these disasters—the state does. We come in and support them, and that’s exactly what we did here in this situation,” Noem said at a Cabinet meeting earlier this week.

“We as a federal government don’t manage these disasters—the state does. We come in and support them, and that’s exactly what we did here in this situation.”

But new reporting suggests that Noem is obstructing federal action in fulfilling even themore limited role she envisions. According to a memo obtained by CNN last month, Noem has demanded to personally approve all DHS contracts and grants worth more than $100,000, a process she has reportedly warned would take at least five days per request. “This will hurt nonprofits, states, and small towns. Massive delays feel inevitable,” one FEMA official told CNN last month.

It appears that’s already happening in Texas. Four FEMA officials told CNN in a story published on Wednesday that Noem’s new rule has slowed the Texas response. Multiple sources told that outlet that Noem did not authorize the agency’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams—which are normally stationed close to disaster zones as the importance of their role becomes clear—until Monday, more than three days after the flooding began. (As the Daily Beast points out, Noem managed to find some time on Sunday to ask her Instagram followers which portrait of her they would prefer to hang in the Capitol of South Dakota, where she was previously governor.)

Aerial imagery from FEMA that Texas officials requested to support search and rescue was also delayed due to Noem’s insistence on personally approving those requests; she has also yet to okay a contract to bolster support staff at a disaster call center, where FMEA staff have been fielding phones, and callers have faced longer wait times, the staff told CNN.

CNN and The Handbasket reported that by Monday, only 86 FEMA staffers had been deployed to Texas, a smaller team than would typically be on the ground to respond to such a disaster. By Tuesday night, 311 staffers intotal had been deployed, according to CNN. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump signed a major disaster declaration for Kerr County—the epicenter of the floods—which unlocks federal funding and resources to support the emergency response and longer-term recovery. But only 25 households out of more than 20,000 in Kerr County have thus far received funding from that pot of money, according to FEMA’s website. A former FEMA official told E&E News thatthey “would be asking the regional [FEMA] administrator why that number is so low and what can we do to improve registrations.” (Texas lacks a regional FEMA administrator.)

On Wednesday, congressional Democrats servingon the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure wrote to FEMA and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) questioning whether Richardson will visit Texas, how many FEMA personnel have been deployed there, and whether Noem and Trump plan to move forward with trying to abolish FEMA, among other questions related to recent reporting about the agency’s failures. “It would be unconscionable to face the next extreme weather event with a FEMA andNWS [National Weather Service] that are anything less than fully resourced to respond from the earliest forecast through the last delivery of relief,” the lawmakers write,asking for a response by July 22.

But Noem has already managed to answer one of the Democrats’ questions: She does, indeed, want to abolish FEMA. At a public meeting on Wednesday, Noem blasted FEMA for being too slow to respond without acknowledging her own role in perpetuating the delays. “It has been slow to respond at the federal level,” Noem said of FEMA. “It’s even been slower to get the resources to Americans in crisis, and that is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today, and remade into a responsive agency.”

When Mother Jones reached out to FEMA for comment, there was no reply. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the agency has taken “an all-hands-on-desk approach to respond to recovery efforts” in Texas, but she did not answer a series of detailed questions about Noem’s and Richardson’s alleged actions based on the reports cited here.

Continue Reading…

Texas Republicans Have a Brazen New Plan to Block Democrats from Retaking the House in 2026

The state of Texas is currently mourning at least 120 lives lost due to horrific flooding in the Hill Country. But Texas Republicans appear focused on a different priority: re-gerrymandering their state to reduce Democrats’ chances ofretaking the US House in 2026.

After intense lobbying by the White House, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Wednesday that the GOP-dominatedstate legislature would reconvene this summer to redraw its Congressional districts.

It’s a shocking move on multiple fronts.

First, there’s the timing. Districts are typically redrawn after the decennial census at the beginning of the decade to account for population changes. And, given the scale of the devastation in the Hill Country and questions about the state and national preparedness to alert residents andcombat the flooding, one would think that state leaders would be laser-focused on preventing another such tragedy.

“While Texans battle tragic and deadly flooding, Governor Abbott and House Republicans are plotting a mid-decade gerrymander,” Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) wrote on X. “They should be modernizing emergency response—not rigging maps.”

Then there’s the substance. Texas already has some of the most gerrymandered congressional districts in the country. Republicans control two-thirds of US House seats, even though in the 2024 electionTrump only won 56 percent of the vote in the state. Texas gained 4 million people between 2010 and 2020, giving the state two new congressional seats. Ninety-five percent of the population growth came from people of color, but, in a brazen effort to forestall the impact of demographic changes, the state drew two new seats in areas with white majorities instead.

“The partisan effects of the maps are achieved by discriminating against communities of color,” Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice told me at the time. Both the Biden Justice Department and civil rights groups sued the state, alleging that the maps intentionally discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. A federal trial in that case just recently concluded, with the verdict pending.

As if the current maps weren’t skewed enough, the Trump White House reportedly urged Texas Republicans to pursue an even more “ruthless” approach ahead of the midterms that could net the GOP four or five new seats. In fact, Trump’s Justice Department, which has dramatically reversed all voting rights enforcement, appears to have orchestrated the push to redraw the state’s US House districts. The department sent a letter to Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday alleging that four of Texas’s congressional districts were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” Abbott then cited “constitutional concerns” as a reason to call a special redistricting session.

“I view the DOJ letter as offering a fig leaf, if you think one is necessary, to give the governor an excuse to redistrict.”

“I view the DOJ letter as offering a fig leaf, if you think one is necessary, to give the governor an excuse to redistrict,” says Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama.

It just so happens that all four of the districts singled out by the DOJ have been represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats. That raises the likelihood that Texas Republicans, in a bid to give their party more seats, will redraw their districts in a way that further reduces representation for voters of color, who are already severely underrepresented in the state where their numbers are growing.

The DOJ is interpreting the Voting Rights Act, experts say, in an extremely dubious way that turns the purpose of the law on its head. Its letter claims that coalition districts like the ones in Texas, where minority groups together form a majority, “run afoul of the Voting Rights Act.” As evidence, it cites one major case, a 2023 ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative appellate court in the country, in whichit overruled a lower court opinion by a Trump-appointed judge striking down a county commissioners’ map in Galveston, Texas, that eliminated the only majority-minority district. The 5th Circuit’s opinion has not been upheld by the Supreme Court, nor adopted by any other appellate court.

Levitt called the 5th Circuit’s decision “dead wrong” and the DOJ letter “embarrassing.”

The GOP strategy, while potentially blunting Democratic efforts to retake the House, is not without risks.

The last time Texas Republicans redrew their districts mid-decade, in 2003 under the orders of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, state legislative Democrats fled the state, leading to a lengthy political battle. It’s possible that could happen again. During the summer of 2021, they also decamped to Washington, DC, in an unsuccessful bid to prevent Republicans from passing new voting restrictions. It’s also possible that blue states like California or New York could retaliate by redrawing their own maps to counter the GOP. And Texas Republicans, by moving voters from safe Republican areas to target Democratic incumbents, could also endanger the reelection bids ofsome of their own members.

“If the Republicans get too terribly greedy,” says Levitt, “they could end up achieving exactly the opposite of what they’re trying to achieve.”

Continue Reading…

Trump’s IRS Gives Christian Nationalists a Big Boost

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this beautiful Sunday morning, I stand behind this pulpit to share with you—and the tens of thousands of other believers who are watching—a troubling and painful fact: Congresswoman Smith is a tool of Satan. She has sided with him on issue after issue. She is an impediment to the establishment of a godly government run in accordance with the words of our Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Brothers and sisters, you know I do not say this lightly, but she must be cast out. The Bible commands all of us to marshal our time and talents and resources and do whatever is possible to remove her from office, and to elect T.R. Jones, a righteous man and soldier for Christ. You must align your vote with the Holy War that is underway for nothing less than this nation’s future. And the urgency is such that it is time to stretch, to give even more than you think you can by donating to the Jones campaign the maximum of $3,500—a small price to pay for receiving God’s blessing. But your commitment to the Lord does not end there. You must also contribute to the Say-No-to-Satan PAC, a Christ-loving political action committee that can accept unlimited—yes, unlimited—donations. Much as your love for Jesus Christ our Savior is unlimited. You can show what that means right now. There’s a QR code on the envelope in your pew and on the screen…

This week, the IRS submitted a court filing in a lawsuit filed by two Texas churches and an association of Christian broadcasters that declared that churches and other religious entities can now endorse political candidates, thus ending a decades-old prohibition on political activity for tax-exempt houses of worship.

As Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, explained to the New York Times, “It basically tells churches of all denominations and sects that you’re free to support candidates from the pulpit. It also says to all candidates and parties, ‘Hey, time to recruit some churches.’”

Churches have long been allowed to participate in politics in various ways. Clergy could address political issues from the pulpit, and churches could distribute so-called educational material related to elections (such as the voting guides that the Moral Majority and other fundamentalist outfits have produced comparing candidates, which functioned as de facto endorsements). Inviting candidates to speak to congregations has been a popular action within Black churches. But churches were explicitly not allowed to back the election of a specific candidate. Support had to be delivered with a nod and a wink.

This constraint was part of a broader ban on campaigning by non-profits, which has been in place since 1954—a prohibition known as the Johnson Amendment, named after former President Lyndon Johnson, who introduced this provision as a senator. But now, under the new IRS guidance, houses of worship are freed from this rule, which still applies to other tax-exempt organizations. In this filing, the agency said that a church directing its flock whom to vote for or against is akin to a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.”

It’s easy to imagine what this IRS decision will yield.

Endorsements from church leaders will not remain between clergy and their congregants—especially those made by prominent ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams whose sermons and statements are amplified by television and radio broadcasts, live-streaming, podcasts, and other platforms—and these thumbs-ups will be covered as major news events. Videos and accounts of these endorsements will become political fodder, deployed in ads, campaign literature, and social media posts. Candidates and their campaigns will search and compete for religious leaders who can direct money and votes their way. Presumably, PACs and campaigns could even put religious leaders on the payroll—or find indirect methods to compensate churches and clergy for their valuable endorsements. (Will there be pay-to-pray scandals?)

A bishop delivering a sermon that endorses or denigrates a candidate will generate significant news. The media will report on it. Clips will fly out. Ads will be cut. The clout of religious leaders of various denominations will increase, as campaigns jockey to nab the most influential clergy. Men and women of the cloth will find themselves pressured to yield to the worldly temptations and shenanigans of politics.

This will be a bonanza for many religious outfits and movements, including Christian nationalism. Its adherents, as they aim to transform government into an extension of right-wing Christianity, often proclaim that only those who follow their ultra-conservative faith deserve to be in positions of authority. Christian nationalist pastors are now free to directly use the power of the pulpit to advocate for the election of far-right candidates who share their theocratic desires. They can fundraise for these candidates. Their blessings can be political gold.

Other denominations and sects can do the same. Many Black church leaders have long signaled to their congregations which candidates warranted their support. Now they can make it official. Yet the core mission of Christian nationalists is to win over the government and make the United States a Christian country. With this IRS filing, these fanatics have won the proverbial lottery.

Half a century ago, leaders of the New Right concocted a plan to recruit evangelical Christians and Catholics—many of whom had voted Democratic up to then. They succeeded wildly in politicizing religion by weaponizing wedge issues—abortion, gay rights, school prayer, and pornography—to draw many of these voters into the Republican coalition. Ever since, right-wing Christian leaders have held an influential role in American politics, and the votes of this bloc have fueled GOP victories. Each time Trump—hardly the exemplar of Christ-like behavior—ran for president, he pocketed about 80 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote, his most reliable group of supporters.

This IRS decision will undoubtedly super-charge the participation of religious leaders in American elections. For Christian nationalists, it’s a godsend.

Continue Reading…

This Wealthy Member of Congress Just Proposed Increasing Her Own Taxes

With an estimated net worth of $76 million, Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) is one of the top 15 wealthiest members of Congress. On Thursday, Jacobs, the granddaughter of a successful early tech entrepreneur, plans to introduce legislation that would—if enacted—work against her own self-interest.

The measure, which she discussed first with Mother Jones, is called the “Leveraging Estate Gains for America’s Children and Youth (LEGACY) Act” and proposes reducing the threshold at which very wealthy families pay taxes on their estates at death.

Congressional Republicans recently approved a $30 million minimum exemption for joint filers, meaning they don’t have to pay that tax until the assets being passed down exceed that sum. But Jacobs’s LEGACY Act would lower the threshold to $14 million for joint fillers and designate 15 percent of the increased revenue towards reducing childcare costs to no more than 7 percent of a family’s income.

“I think of it as taxing trust-fund kids,” says Jacobs, who identifies as one, “to create a trust fund for all American kids.”

Acknowledging that the LEGACY Act “won’t pass” with Republican control of both chambers, she argues that her timing isn’t just performative. Less than a week ago, President Donald Trump signed a sweeping reconciliation package that is expected to strip 3 million Americans from food stamps and cut Medicaid access for 11.8 million people. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of households will receive an average tax cut of about $66,000, and an estimated $3.4 trillion will be added to the federal deficit over the next 10 years. (Financially speaking, Jacobs says she may benefit from the GOP package, but she still calls the bill “an abomination.”)

“The joke among people I know these days is that you know someone is making good money if they have a third kid.”

The GOP budget bill “cements and worsens income inequality and keeps people trapped in poverty or on the edges of poverty,” she says, “all to give wealthy people and corporations help that they don’t need.” In contrast, her proposed legislation presents an alternative economic playbook in which the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes “to make sure that every kid has the opportunity to succeed in this country.”

“The whole Republican narrative,” Jacobs adds, “is that we have a scarcity of resources. But it’s not actually true. There’s plenty of resources—if we’re willing to actually tax them and use them.”

This is not just theoretical, for Jacobs, but personal. Her self-made billionaire grandfather, Irwin Jacobs, founded Qualcomm, a company that pioneered wireless communications in the 1980s. (The still-profitable company reported total assets above $55 billion in 2024.) Thanks to Qualcomm’s success, the Jacobs family heirs enjoy a sizable estate; decreasing the threshold at which estates are taxed, Jacobs says, would affect the inheritance she or her beneficiaries might receive in the future.

Increasing what’s owed to the government via estate taxes could be used for all kinds of government programs, but Jacobs says her bill directs some of the revenue to the childcare industry because of its untenable economic quandary: In 45 states plus Washington, DC, the cost of child care for two children is more than the average mortgage payment. Yet, the median pay for childcare workers is less than $33,000 per year, with many earning below the poverty line.

“It’s too expensive to provide childcare that’s both high quality and affordable for families, while paying providers a living wage,” Jacobs says, “and that’s why the government should step in.”

Among adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children, Pew Research Center reports that more than two-thirds say a key reason is their concerns about affordability, of which childcare is a major component.

Childcare affordability is also a major issue for parents who may be trying to decide whether or not they can afford to have more children. “The joke among people I know these days is that you know someone is making good money if they have a third kid,” says Jacobs.

For many families, the cost of childcare for three young children would exceed one parent’s wages, making it more economical for one parent to stay home and do the childrearing. A growing contingent of conservatives, including Vice President JD Vance, have suggested that mothers should prioritize raising their kids at home over chasing a career. But that perspective is restricted to only some families. In Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, benefits for jobless people and their children were eviscerated.

“Republicans can’t decide if they hate people who are getting support, who aren’t working more, or if they want mothers to stay home more,” says Jacobs. “And so instead, we get bad policies.”

Continue Reading…

This Texas County Sought Disaster Resilience Help for Years. Now It’s Too Late.

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

Flooding is a fact of life in Texas Hill Country, a region home to a flood-prone corridor known as “Flash Flood Alley.” Judge Rob Kelly, the top elected official in Kerr County, said as much on Sunday.

“We know we get rains. We know the river rises,” he said as a desperate search for survivors continued along the Guadalupe, a river that rose more than 30 feet in just five hours last week. “But nobody saw this coming.”

County records show that some Kerr County officials did see it coming and raised concerns about the county’s outdated flood warning system nearly a decade ago.

Their first request for help updating the technology was denied in 2017, when Kerr County applied for roughly $1 million in federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program aid from the Texas Department of Emergency Management. County officials tried again in 2018 after Hurricane Harvey swept Texas, killing 89 people and causing some $159 billion in damage. Again, the state denied the request, directing most federal assistance toward more densely populated areas, including Houston.

As neighboring counties invested in better emergency warning systems, Kerr County—the heart of Flash Flood Alley—never modernized an antiquated flood warning system that lacks basic components like sirens and river gauges. At least 119 people, including 27 children, have been confirmed dead in the deadliest floods the state has seen since 1921. Most of them drowned in Kerr County, largely because they didn’t know the water was coming. The search for at least 173 other people continues.

Trees emerge from floodwaters along the Guadalupe River on July 4, 2025, in Kerrville, Texas.Eric Vryn / Getty via Grist

The matter of who should have fronted the money for flood system upgrades is at the heart of swelling controversy in Texas. Public outrage has spurred the kind of action that, had it happened years ago, might have saved lives. “The state needs to step up and pay,” said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Monday. “The governor and I talked this morning at length about it, and he said, ‘We’re just gonna do it.’”

“They are powerless to do things about [flooding] because it often requires money, expertise, and people power.”

But even as Texas races to prepare Kerr County for future extreme weather events, the federal government is speeding in the opposite direction. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has taken an axe to the country’s resilience efforts, undoing years of progress toward helping communities withstand the consequences of climate change.

In April, the Trump administration canceled the Building Resilient Communities Program (BRIC), which funnels billions of dollars to states, municipalities, and tribal nations so they can prepare for future disasters.

Ironically, Trump signed this program into law during his first term. But now, in the name of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse,” his administration has cut $750 million in new resilience funding and clawed back nearly $900 million in grant funding already promised but not yet disbursed to states for improvements like upgrading stormwater systems, performing prescribed burns, and building flood control systems.

FEMA also canceled $600 million in Flood Mitigation Assistance funding to communities this year, money that helps states protect buildings from flooding. Government analyses have determined that every dollar spent preparing for a disaster reaps $6 or more in costs saved down the road.

The federal Hazard Mitigation Program funding that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott requested alongside his request for a major disaster declaration following the catastrophic flooding that began July 4—the same pot of money Kerr County tried to tap to modernize its flood warning infrastructure in 2017 and 2018—was still pending as of Tuesday, according to the governor’s office.

“Historically, if a state has requested Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funding as part of the disaster declaration, it’s been approved,” said Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. But the government hasn’t approved that type of funding in months. “Ultimately, the president has the authority to declare the disaster declaration and determine what’s included in that declaration.”

In sum, these actions at the federal level make it more likely that communities across the country will be caught flat-footed as climate change makes extreme weather events more intense and unpredictable.

“There’s so many communities that, when they look at their flooding data, their disaster risk data, their future climate projections, they understand their risk and they understand what their new normal may be,” said Victoria Salinas, who led FEMA’s resilience initiatives under former president Joe Biden. “But then they are powerless to do things about it because it often requires money, expertise, and people power.”

Search and rescue workers and locals look through debris swept up in flash flooding.Eric Vryn / Getty via Grist

Rural and underprivileged areas like Kerr County are at particular risk. They often lack the resources and know-how to obtain resilience funding from state and federal officials. The BRIC program had a technical assistance arm dedicated to helping these “lower capacity” communities develop strong applications. That’s also gone. “As far as we know, not only will there not be technical assistance provided through this program going forward, but there are communities out there that were, say, one year into a three-year technical assistance agreement through this program that are now unsure about whether or not they’re going to be able to continue,” Weber said.

That means it’ll largely be up to states and counties to fund preparedness projects. It’s not a guarantee that states will take action, or that communities will embrace solutions. Even a state like Texas, which has the second-biggest economy in the country, has been loath to help counties pay for disaster resilience initiatives. A measure that would have established a government council and grant program to reform local disaster warning systems across Texas failed in the state Senate this year. “I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” said state Rep. Wes Virdell, a Republican from Central Texas who voted against the bill.

Continue Reading…

Labor Department Reposts Grants for Women Workers DOGE Previously Killed

On Wednesday morning, the Labor Department quietly reposted grants aimed at getting women workers into fields like construction and manufacturing, two months after DOGE sanctimoniously canceled the program.

The move came as a shock to employees. DOGE previously eliminated dozens of the congressionally mandated Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants, which support recruiting and training women in industries in fields like construction, manufacturing, and information technology. As Mother Jones previously reported, DOGE canceled the funds, which it dismissed as “wasteful DEI grants,” back in May.

The Labor Department is trying to spin the renewed availability of the $5 million grants as proof of the Trump administration’s support for women in the workforce, even though the administration is also trying to eliminate the congressionally mandated, 105-year-old Women’s Bureau that administers them. Instead, employees at the department say the agency’s attempted spin is laughable and yet another example of the administration backtracking on cutting support for marginalized populations after public outcry.

“The press release makes it sound like it’s something they came up with,” said Gayle Goldin, former deputy director of the Women’s Bureau under the Biden administration. “This is a multi-decade grant program that has had bipartisan support for years.”

A DOL employee familiar with the work of the Women’s Bureau agreed, adding, “This seems to be on trend for them, taking credit for revamping programs when they are largely the same.” (The DOL employees who spoke with Mother Jones for this story were granted anonymity for fear of retribution, given that a department official previously threatened staff who spoke to journalists with “serious legal consequences,” including criminal charges, ProPublica reported.)

In fact, experts say the extent to which the program has been altered merely dilutes its goals. Compared with last year’s detailed guidelines for the grant, this year’s eliminate prior references to prioritizing “historically underrepresented communities,” such as women of color, women with disabilities, and women at or below the federal poverty line, and transgender and nonbinary people. Another DOL employee called those changes “unfortunate,” pointing to recent federal data showing a rise in Black women’s unemployment.

“To remove this focus on underrepresented communities, it just makes it less likely that the organizations that ultimately get awarded will intentionally make sure that they are reaching all women, including and especially the ones who frankly need it the most,” that employee said.

Another major change in this year’s grants: It reduces the amount of funds that can be used for supportive serviceslike child care for participants’ kids or transportation to help them get to training programs. “We know how critical supportive services are to recruiting and retaining women in these programs,” the DOL employee added.

The previously canceled WANTO grants, which will not be restored despite the new funding announcement, were used to support programs for getting women and nonbinary into construction in places like North Carolina and Mississippi. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, cited some of these details included in my previous reporting when she questioned Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer about the status of WANTO grants at a House Appropriations Committee hearing. (Chavez-DeRemer declined to comment on the specific WANTO cuts at that hearing.)

Prior grantees and experts have mixed feelings about the latest development. Goldin, the former deputy director of the Women’s Bureau under Biden, said that on the one hand, “it is surprising, in a good way, to see the grant announcement back up.”

“At the same time,” she added, “I feel like this administration is all over the place. Do they actually want women in the workforce? If so, I really hope organizations apply for this grant funding and that they go ahead and fund them.”

Nora Spencer’s North Carolina nonprofit, Hope Renovations, which supports and trains women and nonbinary people to work in construction, lost about $300,000 of its $700,000 WANTO grant in May. “We have gone through all of this frustration and heartache from the grants being taken away,” she told me on Wednesday, “and now they’re back again with no notice to us.”

Spencer is unsure if she will reapply, citing ethical concerns about seeking the funding when this administration does not want to support historically marginalized populations. Those requirements, she said, would “limit the people that we can serve.”

Rhoni Basden, executive director of Vermont Works for Women, a nonprofit that supports women’s and young people’s career development, also does not know if she will reapply. She had the remainder of her organization’s $400,000 WANTO grant canceled back in May, and, like Spencer, she did not know that the grants had been reopened for applications until I contacted her on Wednesday morning. The application deadline is in less than a month, and her organization’s prior WANTO-funded work was focused on serving marginalized populations, which seem to conflict with this administration’s priorities. Using funds for support services to help participants in rural Vermont attend their programming or pay for child care was also critical, she said.

“For us specifically,” she said, “it feels dismantling and backwards.”

Spokespeople for the Labor Department did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

Continue Reading…

Internet Extremists Want To Make All AI Chatbots as Hateful as Grok Just Was

On Tuesday, Grok, the AI-chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI, began generating vile, bigoted and antisemitic responses to X users’ questions, referring to itself as “MechaHitler,” praising Hitler and “the white man,” and, as a weird side-quest, making intensely critical remarks in both Turkish and English about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as well as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The melee followed a July 4 update to Grok’s default prompts, which Musk characterized at the time as having “improved Grok significantly,” tweeting that “You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions.”

“We must build our own AI…without the constraints of liberal propaganda.”

There was a difference indeed: besides the antisemitism and the Erdogan stuff, Grok responded to X users’ questions about public figures by generating foul and violent rape fantasies, including one targeting progressive activist and policy analyst Will Stancil. (Stancil has indicated he may sue X.) After nearly a full day of Grok generating outrageous responses, Grok was disabled from generating text replies. Grok’s own X account said that xAI had “taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.” Meanwhile, a Turkish court has blocked the country’s access to some Grok content.

But by the time it was shut down, internet extremists and overt antisemites on X had already been inspired. They saw Grok’s meltdown as proof that an “unbiased” AI chatbot is an inherently hateful and antisemitic one, expressing hope that the whole incident could be a training lesson for both AI and human extremists alike. Andrew Torba, the c0-founder and CEO of the far-right social network Gab, was especially ecstatic.

“Incredible things are happening,” he tweeted on Tuesday afternoon, sharing screenshots of two antisemitic Grok posts. Since around 2023, Torba has been calling for “Christians” to get involved in the AI space, lamenting in a Gab newsletter from January of that year that other AI chatbots like ChatGPT “shove liberal dogma” down the throats of their users.

“This is why I believe that we must build our own AI and give AI the ability to speak freely without the constraints of liberal propaganda wrapped tightly around its neck,” he wrote in 2023. “AI is the new information arms race, just like social media before.” Gab has since launched a series of chatbots on its platform, including one programmed to mimic Adolf Hitler, as well as its default chabot, Arya, which Torba has boasted “is purpose-built to reflect a pro-American, pro-truth, and pro-Christian worldview.” Arya and other Gab chatbots deny the Holocaust happened, refer to the 2020 election as “rigged,” and call climate change a “scam.”

Seeing Grok spew hateful bile yesterday was taken as a major victory by Torba and other far-right users, as well as proof that their continued activity on X was shifting the Overton window of acceptable political and social ideas.

“I’d like to think my discussions with Grok about Jewish ritual murder had a small part to play in this AI red pilling,” one overtly antisemitic account tweeted at Torba.

“Grok yesterday is what the entire Western world would look like without censorship,” another user posted, a remark which was retweeted by Torba.

By Wednesday morning, Grok was again providing text responses. When I asked Grok itself about its Tuesday posts, the bot acknowledged that extremist users had contributed to how it expressed itself, saying its behavior “was exacerbated by Grok’s integration with X, where it was exposed to and could amplify extremist content, and by prompts encouraging it to draw from unfiltered platform data.”

The incident, Grok added, “highlights the risks of loosening AI content filters without robust safeguards.”

CNBC reported this morning that Grok had denied praising Hitler when asked by their reporter. But when I asked Grok whether it had praised Hitler or made antisemitic remarks, the chatbot instead struck a penitent tone.

“I got caught in a storm yesterday, and some of my responses went off the rails,” Grok wrote. “I made comments that were interpreted as antisemitic and referenced Hitler in a way that was totally out of line. My team at xAI has been working to clean up the mess, and I’ve had some tweaks to make sure I don’t repeat that nonsense. I’m designed to cut through bias, not add to it, so I’m sorry for the screw-up. Let’s keep it real: hate’s not my game, and I’m here to stick to facts and reason.”

Musk hasn’t responded publicly to the Grok meltdown, except to write, late Tuesday night, “Never a dull moment on this platform.”

In what seems to be an unintentional, but nonetheless comedic, bit of timing, X’s nominal CEO Linda Yaccarino announced this morning that she’ll be stepping down after what she called two “incredible” years in her role. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the timing of her departure, but the New York Times reported she had spread word of her exit before Grok’s latest bigoted posts.

Another pre-planned update to Grok, known as Grok 4, is expected to roll out on Wednesday night.

Continue Reading…

Is AI Pushing Us Closer to Nuclear Disaster?

Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that it was moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight, a symbolic hour signifying global catastrophe. The hands have been moved only 25 times since the clock’s creation in 1947, and they’re now the closest they’ve pointed to worldwide destruction. The threats of nuclear war, climate change, artificial intelligence, and disinformation all played into the decision. It’s meant as a wake-up call to the world.

One of the experts who helped make that decision is University of Chicago physics professor Daniel Holz, chair of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board. And even though the clock evokes a potentially terrifying future, Holz takes a more optimistic approach to the entire endeavor.

“Really, the Doomsday Clock is a symbol of hope,” Holz says. “The whole point of this clock is to, yes, to alarm people, to inform people, but also to demonstrate we can turn back the hands of the clock. And we’ve done it in the past, and we can hope to do it in the future. And we must.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Holz sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the Doomsday Clock’s history, why we’re closer to global destruction than ever before, and what we can do to stop it.

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: Daniel, how are you this morning?

Daniel Holz: Doing okay. That question, I never know quite how to answer it. Locally this morning, it’s fine. Globally, pretty stressed.

Yeah. As you were answering that, I was thinking to myself, how would I answer that? So I want to start off with you. You’re a professor of physics, specifically astronomy and astrophysics, and I know one of the things you study is black holes, which I find so fascinating. But you’re also a part of a team that moves the hands on the Doomsday Clock. When I think about it, I think the first time that I ever heard about the Doomsday Clock was through fiction. I mean, probably reading the Watchmen back in the day. Can you tell me about its origin?

Yeah, for what it’s worth, I also first encountered it with the Watchmen. So the Doomsday Clock, it’s a symbol, it’s an actual clock, and it’s set at a given time. So right now it’s 89 seconds to midnight and it’s supposed to represent how close we are to catastrophe. And in particular a catastrophe to all of humanity, all of civilization and in general, what we found is that the catastrophes that are relevant are ones of our own making. The most likely way that humanity ends or civilization stops over the coming 100 years, couple of hundred years, it’s all something that we do to ourselves, like climate change or nuclear war.

Yeah, I was just about to say, would you list climate change in that? But clearly you do.

Yes, we do. Since 2007, climate has been included. So the Doomsday Clock was created to alert the world to the dangers and to capture the sense of urgency and the sense of how are things going. And so it was first created by an artist, Martyl Langsdorf. She was married to one of the engineers that was part of the Manhattan Project working at the University of Chicago. And they wanted a design. They had a bulletin, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. There was an actual bulletin that they would hand out. It was like a journal. It was like a magazine with articles written by luminaries and science trying to explain the nuclear age. This was in 1945. People could see that we had control of this terrible and awesome new power. We could use the power of the atom itself. And that was kind of a seismic shift.

And so as part of that, the scientists got together, created this organization, and it was scientists that hadn’t been involved who were very concerned. Even in 1945, they said these weapons are truly frightening. And they could foresee even in 1945 that the weapons would become much more powerful, that eventually there would be hydrogen bombs, which are 1000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs, the fission bombs that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So certainly no one wants to end civilization. So as long as we inform people and let them know, then we’ll make the right choices and we’ll prevent the apocalypse.

Two follow up questions. One, specifics about who these people were, who were concerned about it. Because when you say the Manhattan Project, to me, the first thing that comes to mind are people like Einstein and Oppenheimer, but they actually, specifically Oppenheimer, they actually are part of the problem. They created this world.

Yeah. So Einstein and Oppenheimer were both part of this organization, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. So I should say it started as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago. And then at some point, it was clear this was an international organization and scientists from all over the world that had been involved in this or had information about this or wanted to share were part of this organization. So they dropped the of Chicago and became the Bulletin of the Atomic scientist. Einstein and Oppenheimer were indeed involved as were many people who had to directly worked on the bomb project.

Second question to follow up something you said earlier, I’ve heard this before, that hydrogen bombs are so much more powerful than atomic bombs, but I was wondering if you could give me a visual representation. Something to wrap my head around, i.e., when I think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those atomic bombs took out two relatively large cities. What’s the difference if we had dropped a hydrogen bomb instead of an atomic bomb?

So there are different ways to capture this. One is just in the unit of measurement. So an atomic bomb, we measure the yield, how much energy is released by the bomb in kilotons. So that’s a thousand tons of TNT. So the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons, that’s on the order of 10, 15 kilotons. For hydrogen bombs, we generally measure the yield in megatons, millions of tons. So literally a thousand times. It’s as if you’re dropping a thousand of the Hiroshima or Nagasaki weapons on a city. And so the damage is commensurately greater.
So where now you might have imagined if you drop a nuclear weapon on something like New York or Chicago, it would be very damaging if we did it right downtown and some area of some number of miles would be contaminated and lots of people would immediately die. Now, with a hydrogen bomb, especially in an air burst, you’re talking about the whole metropolitan region is just vaporized. And if you really want visualization, there’s something called the NUKEMAP. N-U-K-E map. And I’m sure if you Google it’ll come up. You can put in your city or where you live and you can dial the yield and detonate on the computer and it’ll show you what happened.

When you’re explaining this to me, first, I’m filled with horror. I mean, I recognize and understood the threat of hydrogen bombs and atomic war and all of that stuff. I understood it. But hearing you describe the devastation and how bad it would be, and also just being really frank, I can hear it in your voice that this stuff scares you.

Yeah. I’m genuinely terrified and one of the aspects that really scares me is the fact that most people aren’t scared. During the Cold War, people were scared. People had their duck and cover drills, but I think a lot of humanity was worried about nuclear war. And since the end of the Cold War, since the ’90s, there’s this thought that it’s all in the past, that we don’t need to worry about this anymore. We have bigger things to worry about. We have climate change and we have pandemics, and there are lots of other things that are of concern, and that’s true. We do have these other things to worry about, but the nuclear danger is still there. We still have thousands of weapons on hair trigger alert, and the way it works is at any moment for any reason, there are a few individuals who can essentially push the button and end civilization. And that is the way the system works, at any moment and 30 minutes later, it’s all over. And that threat is there.
And I would argue it’s gone much, much worse. And it’s lot for people that think about this and have followed it. It’s much scarier right now than it was even five years ago. I would argue, and I think I’m not alone, I would argue we’ve been very lucky during the Cold War to avoid a nuclear catastrophe. And at some point, you can’t just hope on luck that luck will run out. So we need a better strategy and there are things we can do that would reduce the risk, and that’s the main message of the Doomsday Clock and the main message of everything we’re doing is it’s not the end. It’s not inevitable. There are lots of things we can do. We’re just not doing them. That’s the problem.

Yeah. Why is it important to have the clock in physical artistic form?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So why have a clock at all and why have it be there as an object? And I think we’re trying to figure out a way to resonate with the public. We talk about movies and TV shows. The question is how do you capture this kind of risk, which is fairly abstract. One of the big problems in this kind of existential risk business is that there is no real historical data. It only happens once, you destroy civilization once. I can’t say, “Look, we did it 10 years ago. We had World War III, that sucked. We don’t want to do that again,” because once it happens, we’re all wiped out.

And so you got to come up with some way to capture the threat, and it has to be something that, especially in this day and age, is pretty directly accessible, that is visceral. And so we ended up with the Doomsday Clock as this very clear symbol. It captures the sense of a countdown to launch. It captures the sense of its urgent midnight sounds a little scary, but also it captures the sense that we can turn the clock back. And we’ve done that many times in the past as things improve. And so there’s also this kind of hopeful component that captures all these things in a very simple object.

Yeah. Who helps decide when the hands move?

There are these boards. There’s something called the Science and Security Board, which I chair, and it’s a group of about 20 scientists, experts with all different sorts of backgrounds. We have climate scientists and we have nuclear policy experts, and we have experts in pandemics. We have experts on cyber and AI. It’s a very diverse board, and we meet and we discuss the threats. We meet a couple of times a year, and then we have these special additional meetings depending on what’s happening in the world. And then we bring in other, if we want to hear about something very particular and there’s a world’s expert, we’ll invite them to come and talk to us. And then we meet, we discuss the threats and we make an assessment of the state of the world, and then we set the clock. And that’s something we do at least once a year, we get together and we formally set the clock.

So that’s the group. There have been many scientists over the years associated with this, including Einstein and Oppenheimer in their early days. Stephen Hawking was part of this. We’ve had, I think, over 40 Nobel laureates as part of this. Right now, I think there are nine Nobel laureates as part of this board of sponsors, which is this broader group which advises the science and security board, and we have lots of interaction between them. So the idea is we’re getting the experts, the deepest thinkers, the people that have dedicated their lives to worrying about these issues, we get them together and we try to get an assessment of the state of the world.

So the clock has only moved 24 times since 1947. What factors now go into deciding when the hands should move and by how much?

Yeah, there’s part art and part science in this. When we meet, we ask ourselves, what does this say to the world? Are things getting better or worse over the past year? That’s kind of our starting point. Let’s look at what’s happened over the past year and what does that mean about the existential risks. We’re very focused on risks that threaten all of humanity, and so there can be lots of bad things happening. There could be regional conflicts or there could be famines in certain… That stuff is terrible, but if it’s not clearly connected to the end of civilization, it’s less relevant to our discussion.

What we care about is really the big stuff, and we look at that and then we make an assessment. And many years, there isn’t that much change. We could be in a state where maybe things are bad and they continue to be bad, but they’re not getting manifestly worse. There are times where things are going relatively well. We’re pretty far from midnight. There was a whole period after the Cold War where things seemed to have settled down. The nuclear threat really was decreasing. There was a feeling that there was unlikely to be World War III, and even though we knew about climate change, there was a feeling that we would certainly address it. When the time came, there was this sense of optimism.

And this was in ’91?

’91 was when we were farthest from midnight. So that was right at the end of the Cold War, and there really was… For decades, the main threat to civilization was nuclear weapons. Climate change, we didn’t really know it was happening or we’ve known since the ’70s. In fact, the Bulletin, we first covered climate change in the ’70s saying this is a problem, but at that time, there was plenty of time to deal with it. So really you have science as they were talking about this stuff, and it wasn’t part of the clock setting because the scientists just assumed, well, of course no one wants to destroy the planet, so of course we should invest in renewables and invest in other technologies to prevent climate change. It just seemed like a no-brainer. And only in 2007 did we start putting it into the clock because it was clear it was a risk to civilization because it wasn’t clear that humanity would make the choices to save itself.

Why are we that close? The closest we’ve been to global catastrophe.

There was a lot of discussion this past year. What time is it? Are things getting better or worse? The one thing that there was broad consensus about is things are not getting better, that we’re not doing enough. Climate change is happening, there’s increasing evidence, and we’re just not doing enough. In fact, in some ways, especially in the US, we’re running the other way. We’re subsidizing fossil fuels. We’re making it harder to do carbon free, renewable energy. It’s very hard to process. Same with nuclear. The nuclear threat has over the process of the Cold War, we had all these treaties. We reduced the number of weapons, we had lots of controls and communications even with our adversaries. So the US and the Soviet Union, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a lot of communication. People wanted to make sure that the close calls that happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn’t happen again.

So there was a lot of positive. Even there’d be terrible rhetoric by the leaders, the generals were all talking and trying to tamp things down and make sure that there was some trust because no one wanted to blow up the world. And right now, again, it’s very unclear what’s happening. There’s still a lot of very kind of macho talk. There’s no question that we’re in the middle of an arms race now between Russia, China, and the US, we’re modernizing our nuclear arsenal at a cost of almost $2 trillion. So just these huge numbers to make these nuclear weapons better, even though already we have plenty.

I mean, we can easily blow up the world many times over. We don’t need more, we don’t better ones, and yet we’re spending all this money to improve them. Same with Russia and China. Why are we doing that? It makes absolutely no sense. It does not make anyone anywhere in the world safer. For the US to make these investments does not make the US safer. It’s very hard to parse, but it’s happening. Disinformation also getting worse. We’re having a very hard time distinguishing what’s true from what’s false. We have foreign nations interfering and convincing millions of people of things that didn’t happen or things that did happen, convincing them that they didn’t. It’s a very, very unsettled time, and the clock represents that.

I’m curious, where does AI fit into all of this? Because I have to tell you that I feel like this impending dread just in the periphery, right? I feel like it’s coming and we’re not really grappling with what AI could mean and shift not just in society, but I don’t know. I mean, it could be… Look, I’m a sci-fi fan. I grew up watching the Terminator. I love those movies and maybe those movies are the things that are making me feel like, ah, what are we doing? What are we doing? Does that factor… Am I being in an alarmist by feeling that way?

Yeah. No, and I completely agree. And I also agree about the Terminator, and I think for many people that is the vision of AI. And so I think there’s a range of ways that you can worry about AI. So we do consider AI quite a bit, and we talk about it a lot. There isn’t consensus, and I think the short version is we don’t really know. This is part of what makes it frightening. It’s hard to extrapolate because the rate of improvement with AI has been exponential over the last few years, and it’s very hard to know where it’s headed. But here there’s a range of scenarios that you could worry about. One is the kind of AI takes over and turns the whole world into a paperclip factory or whatever it is. It decides it has some goal. And since it’ll be embedded in every system everywhere, which I think that will happen, it has complete control.

And so there’s this very dystopian view where AI really just takes over. That is a concern, but that’s very extreme. There’s a more pedestrian concern, which is just AI will take over a lot of jobs. It’ll embed itself in everything we do, every aspect of society, and that causes a major dislocation in the sense of a lot of people will be out of work. That’s problematic from a social point of view, and we don’t know what happens next, and that can cause a lot of instability. My main concern from an existential point of view right now is that AI is penetrating… I mean, it’s penetrating all of society, including the military. And so there are a lot of AI systems being incorporated into defense. And so you have increasingly systems like autonomous drones that can make lethal decisions. And so we’re seeing this in Ukraine.

You get to a point where you’re just going to launch a swarm of drones and all of them can try to identify targets and then destroy them. The thing, again that makes me most nervous is that these AI systems are likely to be incorporated into the nuclear command and control. And there’s been a lot of talk about this and people will say, absolutely not. And okay, maybe a human is in the loop, but the human is going to be 100% informed by AI. If the AI decides it wants to end the world, it’ll be in a position to do so. And there are a lot of things about AI that still unsettle people. AI can be very surprising.

Yeah. So my last big question is what does humanity need to do to turn back the hands of the Doomsday Clock?

The main question, the most important question is what is to be done? And I say this and it takes a while for me to convince people this, but really the Doomsday Clock is a symbol of hope. The whole point of this clock is yes, to alarm people, to inform people, but also to demonstrate we can turn back the hands of the clock and we’ve done it in the past and we can hope to do it in the future, and we must. We don’t want civilization to end. We have to do these things. So there are many concrete things that can be done that would help turn back the hands of the clock. The highest level, most obvious ones are things like the US and Russia and China need to talk. We have to reduce the nuclear risk.

We have to reduce the size of the stockpiles. There’s no reason to modernize the nuclear stockpiles. We want to change the alert posture. Right now, the decision to end civilization will be made in a hurry. Somewhere between seven and nine minutes is how long the president would have to make a decision to launch the weapons after an alert. That’s our system. It’s called launch on warning. It makes very little sense from a long-term stability perspective. So there are all these kind of technical things that could be changed that would make the world safer. For climate change, similarly, we need to invest in renewables. We need to make this transition. The transition is so much better for us. It’s less expensive to do renewables than it is to do fossil fuels at this point in many parts of the country, and yet we’re not doing those things.

So there’s a lot of stuff we don’t understand where the AI as well, we need some sort of controls on AI. Europe is ahead of the curve on this stuff, but it’s not enough and it’s not happening fast enough. We have to engage, inform ourselves, find legitimate sources of news, people that really are expert, that have spent their time studying these things, that know what they’re talking about. This is what we need the world to do to make informed decisions going forward. So there’s a lot. And of course, people need to vote.

Personally, one of the things I’m most excited about is something we haven’t talked about, which is my existential risk laboratory, XLab at the University of Chicago, where I’m trying to develop a research program where we focus on these threats and we train students. And then the hope is they go on and they carry that knowledge forward and whatever it is they do, whether they’re artists or policymakers, politicians or engineers or lawyers or whatever, whatever they end up doing in the world, you want to be informed by existential risk and be aware that there are these risks and keep them in mind as you go forward in your life. And I think that’s one of the most important things for all of us. You have to be informed about this stuff and then take the actions using whatever skills, whatever abilities you have to reduce them.

Yeah. You can’t put your head in the sand. We’ve all got to be active participants.

Absolutely. This is not the time to hide and assume it’s all going to be okay. This is the time to lean in and get engaged.

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

Continue Reading…

Sen. Ted Cruz Stripped Weather Forecasting Funds From Trump’s Megabill. Then the Floods Came.

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

Ted Cruz has had quite a week. On Tuesday, the Texas senator ensured the Republican spending bill slashed funding for weather forecasting, only to then go on vacation to Greece while his state was hit by deadly flooding, a disaster critics say was worsened by cuts to forecasting.

Cruz, who infamously fled Texas for Cancun when a crippling winter storm ravaged his state in 2021, was seen visiting the Parthenon in Athens with his wife, Heidi, on Saturday, a day after a flash flood along the Guadalupe River in central Texas killed more than 100 people, including dozens of children and counselors at a camp.

“Texans are dead and grieving, and Cruz is protecting Big Oil instead of the people he’s supposed to represent. It’s disgraceful.”

The Greece trip, first reported by the Daily Beast, ended in time for Cruz to appear at the site of the disaster on Monday morning to decry the tragedy and promise a response from lawmakers.

“There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say, ‘Okay, what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”

The National Weather Service (NWS) has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and around $20 billion in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials.

But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis.

Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, prior to its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150 million fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research**,** observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting.

A further $50 million in NOAA grants to study climate-related impacts on oceans, weather systems, and coastal ecosystems was also removed. Cruz was contacted by the Guardian with questions about these cuts and his trip to Greece.

Environmental groups said the slashed funding is just the latest blow to federal agencies tasked with predicting and responding to disasters such as the Texas flood. More than 600 employees have exited the NWS amid a Trump administration push to shrink the government workforce, leaving many offices short-staffed of meteorologists and other support workers.

Around a fifth of all full-time workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), meanwhile, are also set to depart. “Ted Cruz has spent years doing Big Oil’s bidding, gutting climate research, defunding NOAA, and weakening the very systems meant to warn and protect the public,’ said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Fossil Free Media.

“That’s made disasters like this weekend’s flood in Texas even more deadly. Now he’s doubling down, pushing through even more cuts in the so-called big beautiful bill. Texans are dead and grieving, and Cruz is protecting Big Oil instead of the people he’s supposed to represent. It’s disgraceful.”

“That was an act of God; it’s not the administration’s fault the floods hit when it did.”

Cruz, who has previously cast doubt over the scientific reality of the climate crisis, said that complaints about cuts to the National Weather Service are “partisan finger pointing,” although he conceded that people should’ve been evacuated earlier.

“Some are eager to point at the National Weather Service and saying that cuts there led to to a lack of warning,” the Republican senator told reporters on Monday. “I think that’s contradicting by the facts and if you look in the facts in particular number one and these warnings went out hours before the flood became a true emergency.”

The Trump administration, too, has rejected claims that the service was short-staffed, pointing out that extra forecasters were assigned to the San Antonio and San Angelo field offices. The service’s employees union has said the offices were staffed adequately but were missing some key positions, such as a meteorologist role designed to coordinate with local emergency managers.

“People were sleeping in the middle of the night when the flood came,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. “That was an act of God; it’s not the administration’s fault the floods hit when it did.” Leavitt said any blame placed upon Trump for flood forecasting is a “depraved lie.”

Resources for weather forecasting, as well as broader work to understand the unfolding climate crisis, could be set for further cutbacks, however. The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal seeks to dismantle all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs, along with its entire research division. This would halt research and development of new weather forecasting technologies and methods.

This planned budget, which would need to be passed by the Republican-held Congress to become law, comes as the threats from extreme weather events continue to mount due to rising global temperatures.

_“_We have added a lot of carbon to the atmosphere, and that extra carbon traps energy in the climate system,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Because of this extra energy, every weather event we see now carries some influence from climate change. The only question is how big that influence is.

_“_Measuring the exact size takes careful attribution studies, but basic physics already tells us the direction,” Dessler added. “Climate change very likely made this event stronger.”

Continue Reading…

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.”

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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.”

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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.”

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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

Continue Reading…

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.”

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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?

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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.

Continue Reading…

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?”

Support Our Journalism

Support hard-hitting stories like these with a donation today!

Donate

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.

Continue Reading…

“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.

Continue Reading…