The Supreme Court Ponders Giving Billionaires Even More Power Over Elections

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in a case that could unravel the final remaining limits on the ultra-rich writing unlimited checks to their preferred federal candidates, opening the door even wider to political corruption. The liberal justices were clearly opposed to further weakening campaign finance rules, a path long-favored by the court’s Republican wing and that the Democratic-appointed judges have been dragged down kicking and screaming. Today’s oral arguments were no exception. If the court’s majority is going to make it even easier for the Elon Musks of the world to buy elections and reap the rewards, the dissenters will at least call it out.

Every few years, the GOP majority pushes us closer and closer to a system of election by oligarchs.

The Federal Election Campaign Act limits how much money individuals can give to federal candidates in hopes of limiting quid pro quo corruption—deals like, for example, I give you a million dollars and you give me a subsidy. Likewise, FECA limits the amount that parties can spend in coordination with a candidate, an acknowledgement that unlimited coordinated spending would effectively greenlight large donations to the candidate from a single source. For this reason—despite the court’s steady erosion of campaign finance law—for now unlimited donations must go to vehicles like super PACs, which are technically barred from coordinating with candidates, while donations to parties and candidates remain subject to Congressionally-set limits.

In 2022, the Republican Party arms that work to elect Senate and House members, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, alongside then-Senate candidate JD Vance and another Ohio Republican candidate, challenged these coordinated spending limits as a violation of the party’s First Amendment free speech rights.

The case is a partisan brawl. The Republican litigants are opposed by Democratic committees seeking to keep the limits in place. Republicans have recently relied more heavily on the unlimited spending of super PACs; a decision in their favor would allow the party to bring that massive but uncoordinated super PAC spending in-house and let donors write large (but still limited) checks to the parties to spend in open coordination with GOP candidates.

Elon Musk, for example, used his own PAC in 2024 to funnel upwards of $300 million to Republican candidates, mostly Donald Trump. In return, he got to spend months dismantling the federal government, investigations against his companies were dropped, and new contracts wereawarded. If Republicans win the case, next time, Musk could donate some of that directly to the GOP to spend in direct consultation with Musk’s preferred candidates.

During oral arguments, attorney Noel Francisco, a former solicitor general during Trump’s first term, argued on behalf of the Republicans that eliminating the coordination limits would not increase the actuality or appearance of quid pro quo corruption, claiming no such corruption has ever occurred. Justice Sonia Sotomayor indignantly schooled him on the relevant history.

“You keep saying there’s no evidence of this kind of coordination resulting in a quid pro quo or the appearance thereof,” Sotomayor told Francisco. “But the whole campaign finance law is based on just such evidence… The dairy industry channeled millions of dollars to President Nixon through the Republican Party and its committees. The industry landed a $100 million subsidy from President Nixon in return. Was there a quid pro quo? There certainly was an appearance of quid pro quo. That’s what started the entire campaign finance reform legislation.”

“If there’s not direct evidence, it’s because our umbrella is working,” Sotomayor continued, referring to a famous dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in which she analogized striking down a law that works to block bad behavior to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

A few minutes later, Sotomayor noted the gobs of money that Trump and President Joe Biden both raised in 2024 through committees jointly run with the parties. When Francisco responded that this enormous fundraising didn’t lead to any—or even the appearance of—quid pro quo corruption, Sotomayor brought up an obvious rejoinder from that election: Musk.

The best argument the Republicans’ lawyer had was to pretend he didn’t understand the question.

“You mean to suggest the fact that one major donor to the current president, the most major donor to the current president, got a very lucrative job immediately upon election from the new administration does not give the appearance with pro quo?” she pressed.

Francisco feigned ignorance. “Your Honor, I’m not 100 percent sure about the example that you’re looking at, but if I am familiar, if I think I know what you’re talking about, I have a hard time thinking that his salary that he drew from the federal government was an effective quid pro quo bribery,” Francisco said with a chuckle. “Maybe not the salary, but certainly the lucrative contracts,” Sotomayor responded.

It was a striking moment. It appeared that the best argument that a talented lawyer had in the face of clear evidence of corruption was to pretend he didn’t understand the question. This refusal to see what is apparent will be likely resurface if the conservative justices decide to jettison yet more restrictions on billionaires influencing elections—even as it stares them in the face.

While the case was technically over the First Amendment and the definition of speech, there was very little talk about that. Instead, several GOP appointees voiced concerns that political parties have been weakened thanks to the rise of super PACs, and that allowing unlimited coordinated spending by parties would restore the parties’ power by encouraging donors to send their money there. Francisco embraced the argument. But it is obvious why this reasoning was maddening to the liberals.

First, that’s not a First Amendment determination, but a policy preference, and pushing one through is not what the court is supposed to do—though that isn’t likely to stop the GOP-appointed majority. Second, the only reason super PACs have so much money is that the Supreme Court lifted outside contribution limits, first in 2010’s Citizens United and, again, in a 2014 case called McCutcheon. Francisco’s argument that the court needs to unravel yet more of Congress’ rules because its meddling has already messed things up is not a strong one. It’s a bait and switch: Now that you gave us what we wanted, you actually have to give us more of what we want.

Indeed, Francisco acknowledged that if his GOP clients win and the limits are lifted, they will soon be back before the court asking for even more. And this time, the logic of any restrictions on campaign donations will be in Constitutional jeopardy.

Attorney Roman Martinez, whom the court appointed to defend the limits because the Trump administration declined to do so, called out that risk, and how this case would cascade into a total erosion of campaign finance law. “This wolf comes as a wolf,” he said, quoting a 1988 dissent by the late Antonin Scalia that is beloved by conservatives.

Francisco, Martinez said, “has basically told you that they’re going to keep litigating to knock down every single one of the restrictions, and that includes the limits on donors to candidates directly.” Martinez continued to lay out this dark future: “It’s going to leave the donor with the ability to give infinite money to the party… and then the party can make unlimited coordinated expenditures—which, by the way, aren’t just about speech. It’s paying the electric bill, it’s paying the florist bill, it’s paying the pizza bill. It’s any expense that the campaign wants.”

The Republican majority has a history of aiding the GOP, and this case may become just the next example. But several of the conservative justices were mostly mum on Tuesday, leaving the outcome a little unclear. It’s possible the court could, to avoid the appearance of another win for Republicans ahead of the midterms, dismiss the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing. But if the court continues as it has, both in its support for the GOP and its ultra-wealthy benefactors, then they will likely make it easier for the two to work together.

We started down this road with Citizens United, and every few years since, the court’s GOP majority has pushed us closer and closer to a system of election by oligarchs. The rich do not spend billions of dollars on elections out of the goodness of their hearts, but because presidents and representatives will return the favor. We’ve already seen it happen this year. We’re getting pretty close to where this road ends. Whether or not this case takes us another mile toward an oligarchic free-for-all, we’re already in the bad place.

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The Story Behind the “Misconduct” Allegations Against RFK Jr.

A version of 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._

The saga of Olivia Nuzzi consuming the polimedia-sphere has prompted me to think about my own journalistic failing regarding Robert F. Kennedy Jr. No, I didn’t become smitten by RFK Jr. while covering the anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theory–spewing oddball. Nor did I not report what I knew about him during the confirmation process that landed this deceitful promoter of disinformation and fake science in a position to oversee our public health system. But at a critical time, I did not succeed in drawing attention to an important story about Kennedy. And that haunts me.

Allow me, dear reader, to explain.

While I was chasing several stories about Kennedy after Donald Trump tapped him to head the Department of Health and Human Services (see here and here), a source who was once close to Kennedy told me that the scion had at least twice settled cases brought against him by women who claimed he had engaged in misconduct. In one of these instances, this source said, Gloria Allred, the famous attorney, supposedly represented the woman.

When covering famous people, it is not uncommon to encounter gossip and tips about bad personal behavior, and this was not a surprising lead. A babysitter who had once worked for Kennedy had accused him of sexual assault. Her allegation had appeared in a Vanity Fair article. In a subsequent text to her, Kennedy said, “I read your description of an episode in which I touched you in an unwanted manner. I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.” That was not a denial.

I contacted Allred by email and asked if she had handled such a case. I noted that we could talk off the record, if she preferred. Her reply was short: “Sorry. No comment.” I tried her again. Silence.

I pursued other avenues and reached out to Kennedy intimates who might have been in a position to know of any settlements. I found no one with first-hand knowledge, and one person who would likely have been aware of such an arrangement did not respond to my many calls, texts, and emails.

“I have no other comment unless I receive a subpoena, and even then I would have to consider what I would say,” Allred replied.

While doing this, I came across an article published in the Daily Mail a few months previously in which Allred said of Trump’s Cabinet appointees, “I think all nominees should be asked, ‘Have you entered into any confidential settlement with a person who accused you of sexually inappropriate behavior? And if so, will you agree to release the person with whom you settled from the non-disclosure clause from which he or she agreed?’” Coincidence? Or did she know something specific?

As Kennedy’s confirmation hearings were beginning, I pestered Allred again, emailing her that I had just read an “interesting article” and linking to the Daily Mail piece with her highly relevant comment. This did not change her stance. She replied, “I stand by my quote in the Daily Mail article. I believe that all cabinet nominees should be asked if they have entered into settlements with women (or men) who have made allegations against the nominee involving inappropriate sexual conduct. I have no other comment unless I receive a subpoena, and even then I would have to consider what I would say.” Did that mean she had something to say? Or was this merely legal boilerplate?

As I continued to investigate, I contacted members of the two Senate committees holding hearings on Kennedy’s appointment, as well as their staffers, and I asked if they were aware of any such cases or settlements. Had anything come up during their research and preparation for the hearings? No one had any concrete information.

After the first of the two hearings, which was conducted by the Senate Finance Committee, Democrats on the panel sent Kennedy a list of written questions. It included these queries:

Yes or no, have you ever reached a settlement agreement with an individual or organization that accused you of misconduct or inappropriate behavior?

Yes or no, have you ever agreed to or been subject to a non-disclosure agreement with any individual or organization?

The following day, during the hearing held by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) raised the issue of personal misconduct with Kennedy. She referred to the former babysitter’s allegation. Kennedy denied the accusation, contradicting his response to the babysitter. Murray then asked, “Are there any other instances where you have made sexual advances toward an individual without their consent?” Kennedy replied, “No.”

As to the queries about reaching a settlement following an allegation of misconduct or inappropriate behavior and being a party to a non-disclosure agreement, Kennedy answered in each case with one word: “Yes.”

Murray did not question him about any other allegations or settlements. I bugged Allred again and asked what she thought of this exchange. Her answer was terse: “That was not the question I suggested should be asked of a cabinet nominee.”

With the hearings now behind him, Kennedy replied to the long list of written questions the senators had submitted. As to the queries about reaching a settlement following an allegation of misconduct or inappropriate behavior and being a party to a non-disclosure agreement, he answered in each case with one word: “Yes.” He supplied no further explanation. The tip had been accurate.

I contacted Kennedy and asked, “Will you disclose what those agreements were? What was the misconduct? Who were the individuals or organizations that accused you? Did this involve women who accused you of personal misconduct? Will you release anyone who has an NDA with you related to any of those settlements from that NDA?” He did not respond. But Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller and MAGA advocate who was then serving as a spokesperson for Kennedy, shot back: “As a matter of policy, we don’t respond to Mother Jones.”

I thought Kennedy’s acknowledgment of these settlements—and his reluctance to explain further—was a story that warranted widespread notice. But no Democratic senator raised a fuss. Once again, I reached out to Allred. Crickets.

The senators did follow up with another written question they sent to Kennedy:

Please describe the nature of the financial settlements (including total amounts) and non-disclosure agreements reached and what these agreements involved. Please also indicate how many of these settlements and non-disclosure agreements you have signed.

RFK Jr. replied:

Twice, I have been targeted by frivolous, unfounded allegations, which I strenuously denied at the time and continue to deny. I entered into confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements to prohibit these individuals from continuing to make these allegations.

This was not a full answer. The Senate Democrats had asked for the total amounts of the settlements, and Kennedy did not provide that information. Nor did this response indicate what “misconduct or inappropriate behavior” had been alleged. He was not being forthcoming.

Once more, I returned to Allred and asked if one of these cases did indeed involve a client of hers, would that client care to challenge Kennedy’s characterization. Allred replied, “I have not stated that I have a client in this matter, but if I did have one the client would be informed about all of your requests and questions.”

What was most surprising was that Senate Democrats dropped the matter.

It was clear: If Allred represented such a client, that woman had no interest in saying anything. Hardly a surprising circumstance. One could easily imagine the assault that would befall a person who might violate an NDA and come forward with allegations about Kennedy. Possibly my original source had been wrong about the Allred connection. Allred never confirmed to me that she had such a client. But if I had to guess…

And that was it.

What was most surprising was that Senate Democrats dropped the matter. After Kennedy refused to provide details about these cases of alleged misconduct, there were no further efforts to press him for more information. No press conferences with senators complaining that he was stonewalling them. He was off the hook. Perhaps he had been unfairly accused. Perhaps he had done something horrible. Kennedy would keep the public—and the senators who had to vote on whether to allow him to take this position of great responsibility—in the dark.

I wrote about all this (here and here), but Kennedy’s acknowledgement of these settlements received little attention elsewhere in the media. It seemed that in the second Trump era, the possibility that RFK Jr. had engaged in misconduct or inappropriate conduct did not matter. After all, Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth had been credibly accused of sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and financial mismanagement, and he had won Senate confirmation to become secretary of defense. Such transgressions were apparently not disqualifiers in Trump 2.0. The Democrats appeared to have no appetite for demanding details about possible Kennedy misdeeds, and I did not unearth any further information on these episodes.

I failed to crack the case. Kennedy was confirmed and went on to implement calamitous policies at HHS, denigrating vaccines, pulling the plug on critical scientific and medical research, and increasing the nation’s (and the world’s) vulnerability to pandemics. If the specifics of his alleged misconduct had been revealed, might that have sunk his nomination and prevented the disaster he’s wreaking? We will never know.

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As Federal Funding Lags, a Critical Ocean Weather System Nears a Breaking Point

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

Years of underfunding and new delays in federal grantmaking threaten buoys and ocean monitoring assets run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that protect fishermen, cargo ships and endangered species across the country. With key grant deadlines now passed and new awards still pending, regional operators warn that some of those services could go dark at the peak of hurricane season.

In the Northeast Channel, where warm, salty Gulf Stream waters collide with frigid meltwater from the Arctic, sensors that hung from a buoy like ornaments on a tree were stationed at the entrance to the Gulf of Maine. The sensors fed scientists and forecasters rare data from one of the Atlantic’s strangest crossroads.

But in 2022, the buoy’s operator, the Northeast Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (NERACOOS), was forced to pull it from the water as stagnant federal funding made routine servicing impossible. Faced with hard choices, the group prioritized buoys closer to shore that are more critical for marine safety over the Northeast Channel buoy, which primarily supported research.

Unlike many NOAA programs, the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS)—“the eyes of our ocean,” a network of regional associations that collect and track ocean data—enjoys bipartisan support in Congress. But year after year, federal appropriations have fallen short of what the program needs to properly service and maintain its buoys, sensors, gliders, and other equipment.

After the program was authorized by Congress in 2009, an independent study found that the program would need about $715 million to deliver on lawmakers’ vision. Since that study, the most the program has received is $42.5 million—a level it has effectively been stuck at for years.

That number was always ambitious and would require slow, steady growth, according to Kristen Yarincik, executive director of the IOOS Association, a nonprofit that represents the 11 regional IOOS associations. But flat funding in recent years, combined with inflation and rising equipment costs, has made routine servicing and upgrades increasingly difficult.

“If one of our buoys goes offline, I hear about it from fishermen [first]. What that tells me is that even a short outage really affects people.”

This year, federal appropriations may offer some relief, matching the IOSS Association’s $56 million request—but only if the money actually moves on time. IOOS regions operate on five-year cooperative agreements with NOAA; the current agreements, covering 2021–2026, end on June 30 for most regions.

IOOS sources say the next round of funding may be delayed by new layers of federal review within the Department of Commerce and the Office of Management and Budget. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Congress has not passed a full-year appropriations package, leaving agencies to operate under the president’s budget proposal, which zeroes out IOOS.

“It’s so important that Congress finalize a full-year appropriations package for 2026 as soon as possible,” said Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), a member of the House Committee on Appropriations. “Both the House and the Senate have proposed a funding increase for IOOS Regional Observations, and it’s my sincere hope that both chambers will push the administration to adopt these spending levels.”

Regional associations say they need to submit proposals by the end of January. Because Notice of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) to federal contractors are legally required to stay open for about 60 days, they need to have been published by the end of November to avoid problems next summer, according to Yarincik. “After that, the timeline, and therefore continuity of data collection, becomes at risk,” she said.

As of early December, those NOFOs still have not been released. The question now is how long awards will be delayed, and how long a funding gap may persist come July.

Once proposals are submitted, NOAA must still review, negotiate, and approve awards—a process that has been slowing under new rules requiring the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, to personally sign off on grants over $100,000.

“They are a ways behind on this,” said Jake Kritzer, executive director of NERACOOS. According to Kritzer and Yarincik, NOFOs are typically published a year before the start date, making this round more than six months late. If a funding gap arises because of the delay, it would only exacerbate problems IOOS regional associations are already struggling with.

A funding gap next summer could hit just as hurricane season reaches its height.

In the Northeast, buoys lobstermen and cargo ships rely on are starting to show their age, Kritzer said. “Think of it like a car,” he said. “It may last 10 or 20 years, but over time the maintenance becomes more and more expensive.” And replacing an old buoy requires even more money up front.

While the Gulf of Maine has lost a number of buoys, those that remain aren’t being serviced frequently enough. Buoys that should be serviced five times a year may see only a single visit, according to Kritzer. As sensors float at different depths, salt and biofouling buildup can degrade data quality, and sometimes the instruments go dark for hours or even days.

“If one of our buoys goes offline, I hear about it from fishermen before our data guys or sensor technicians,” Kritzer said. “What that tells me is that even a short outage really affects people.”

Fishermen use subsurface temperature data to find the most cost-effective places to fish and rely even more on IOOS data to decide whether it’s safe to leave the dock at all.

“Maine lobstermen monitor the buoy readings and NERACOOS data products daily to understand sea conditions, make informed decisions about when it is safe to leave the dock, and be prepared for the conditions they will face at sea,” the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) said in a statement. “It directly impacts their ability to determine whether or not it is safe to go fishing.”

The association also noted that NERACOOS data helps protect lobster populations and other sea life, including endangered whales, from human impacts. Sensors that monitor algal blooms and zooplankton help ensure lobsters have enough prey to feed on. Water-quality monitoring tracks pollution that can harm marine life. And acoustic monitoring systems help keep ships away from migrating whales.

Cargo ships depend on that same real-time wave and wind data to plan safe transit in and out of port, avoid dangerous seas, and reduce costly delays. “Congress and NOAA should continue to fund and efficiently administer the IOOS and other navigation programs for the safe and efficient operations of our maritime industry,” said a representative from the American Association of Port Authorities.

IOOS data supplements the National Weather Service’s own observation networks, sharpening coastal forecasts for local communities. The National Weather Service can still draw on its radars, satellites and other federal, military and private data, but IOOS-backed tide gauges and wave buoys help monitor flood risk and storm surge—data that allows emergency management to make more informed decisions.

IOOS officials warn that if regional systems go dark, many coastal forecasts would become less precise and less locally tuned.

But the work that allows lobstermen to empty their traps, cargo ships to safely reach port, and coastal communities to get accurate flood warnings depends on steady funding.

Supplementary funding sources can help keep IOOS regions afloat if a funding gap is realized, but IOOS leaders warn even a one- to two-month lapse in federal support could delay maintenance and force key services to go dark.

If that happens, Yarincik said, “the availability of real-time data and accuracy of data products will be reduced, at a minimum, and this will impact navigational safety for commercial shipping, fishermen and recreational boaters; local flood monitoring for coastal communities; and weather forecasting, especially for hurricane intensity forecasts.”

IOOS helps supply the water-temperature data forecasters use to gauge how intense hurricanes may become. A funding gap next summer could hit just as hurricane season reaches its height, leaving lives and entire coastal communities vulnerable.

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SCOTUS’s GOP Justices Are About to Hand Trump Way More Power

Oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Monday over the president’s power to remove the commissioners of independent agencies left little doubt that its Republican-appointed justices are about to fundamentally reorder our system of government. They appear ready to eliminate most pockets of expertise and nonpartisanship that we rely on as stewards of important economic, political, scientific, and regulatory power.

They will do this, if this morning’s arguments are any indication, without grappling with the predictable and disastrous fallout, with the endpoint of their own logic, or the historical record to the contrary. Instead, the six Republican appointees appear ready to race headlong into a Trumpian future in which no agency or decision is beyond the reach of the precedent’s political cronies.

“You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed Monday, “and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent.”

FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Trump and Biden appointee whose case is now before the court, sued after Trump fired her in March for not aligning with his agenda, despite his being prohibited from removing commissioners except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Slaughter’s case hearkens to the earliest days of the republic, when Congress first created independent agencies with limits on the president’s ability to remove the commissioners who run them. In their modern incarnation, beginning in the late 19th century, Congress has placed these agencies under the direction of a bipartisan group of commissioners who serve set, staggered terms and can only be removed for cause. The goal is to create expertise and independence, so that some of the government’s work is insulated from the abusive pull of political decision-making.

In 1935, a unanimous Supreme Court upheld the for-cause removal protections for independent agency commissioners in a ruling known as Humphrey’s Executor. But since taking office in January, Trump has removed the Democratic commissioners from several of these agencies, in violation of the Humphrey’s Executor precedent and multiple laws, seeking to eliminate their independence. He’s fired Democratic commissioners of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit System Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the FTC’s Slaughter.

It wasn’t a mystery where this case was headed. For years, the Roberts Court has sought to weaken and undermine Humphrey’s Executor, to reshape the federal government as a quasi-monarchical institution in which the president controls everything in the executive branch. This goal is intellectualized through the unitary executive theory, an invention of Ronald Reagan’s administration—in which Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito both served—to arrogate more power to the White House when Democrats had an unshakeable hold on Congress.

This is the whole problem in a nutshell: The majority does not really think it is bound by its own logic.

This year, the GOP wing of the court has been so eager to overturn Humphrey’s Executor that it actually couldn’t wait for the chance to issue a decision to render the precedent a nullity in practice. Thus, since Trump began firing Democratic commissioners, in January, the Supreme Court has repeatedly stepped in to allow those firings to take effect while the litigation over them proceeds, even though the firings clearly violated both the law and Humphrey’s Executor.

Despite the obvious direction this court was moving, it was still unsettling to hear six justices completely unwilling to acknowledge and wrestle with the consequences of overturning a 90-year-old precedent that acts as a pillar of the separation of powers that endeavors to protect key government functions from the corrosive effects of partisan politics.

Take this exchange between Justice Elena Kagan, Solicitor General John Sauer, and Alito. Kagan began by pressing Sauer on the logical consequences of his argument that all the executive power rests with the president, such that he must be able to remove anyone engaged in executive branch functions. What about courts set up by Congress—separate from federal courts under the federal judiciary—such as the Tax Court and the Court of Federal Claims? What about civil servants and government employees?

Sauer demurred that laws protecting civil servants and other employees haven’t been challenged—yet.

“I know you haven’t challenged it,” Kagan responded. “It’s really, the question is, ‘Where does this lead? What does it take you to, given what your primary rationale is?”

Then Alito piped up to suggest that maybe the court could just blow up our system of government without thinking through these pesky details.

“Suppose we were to decide this case in your favor without reaching some of the agencies that have been mentioned, like the Tax Court and the Claims Court and the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces,” Alito asked Sauer. “What would you propose that we say so as to reserve decision on those agencies?” Sauer happily responded that the court could simply say that it was withholding judgement on them.

An exasperated Kagan jumped back in. “Our logic has consequences,” she said. “Once you use a particular kind of argument to justify one thing, you can’t turn your back on that kind of argument if it also justifies another thing in the exact same way. And so, putting a footnote in the opinion saying we don’t decide X, Y and Z, because it’s not before us, doesn’t do much good if the entire logic of the opinion drives you there.”

This is actually the whole problem in a nutshell. The majority does not really think it is bound by its own logic. Next month, the Court is going to decide whether Trump can remove a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, a removal that could spook the markets and have more immediate and disastrous economic consequences than his takeover of the FTC.

And so the court appears poised to allow the president to take over the agencies it wants to transform into political entities, and preserve the independence of the ones it wants to keep independent, and use words like “uniquely structured” and “distinct historical tradition” to pretend this isn’t a consequentialist, results-driven exercise in hackery. On the other hand, if the justices want to embrace the logic that civil service laws violate the president’s executive power, then it will continue in this vein until it has replaced all experts and meritorious hires with cronies and nepo babies.

Just as the Republican justices avoided this logical incongruity, they also avoided the consequences of reordering some of the government, from an arrangement in which experts, scientists, and bipartisan commissions control at least some sensitive and technical decision-making to one in which political favoritism and corruption rule. Jackson pushed that issue repeatedly at oral argument.

The entire oral argument was infused with contempt for Congress’ authority and democratic legitimacy.

“My understanding was that independent agencies exist because Congress has decided that some issues, some matters, some areas should be handled in this way by nonpartisan experts,” she said. “So having a president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything, is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States.”

Relatedly, Jackson continued, why should the president’s desire to control everything take precedence over Congress’ judgment that some functions should be run by independent agencies? “Given the history of the monarchy and the concerns that the Framers had about a president controlling everything,” she asked, why shouldn’t Congress’ judgment prevail?

Jackson returned repeatedly to the idea that Congress has the authority to create independent agencies, as well as to the idea that Congress oversees them. Justice Amy Coney Barrett portrayed independent agencies as “not answering to either the President or to Congress”; Justice Brett Kavanaugh called them “unaccountable” and worried that they cause “real-world problems for individual liberty,” though he didn’t name any. Sauer alleged a “power vacuum” in which independent agency commissioners exercise enormous control without answering to the president.

“I really don’t understand why the agencies aren’t answering to Congress,” Jackson said. “Congress established them and can eliminate them. Congress funds them and can stop. So to the extent that we’re concerned that there’s some sort of entity that is out of control and has no control, I guess I don’t understand that argument.”

Indeed, the entire oral argument was infused with contempt for Congress’ authority and democratic legitimacy. The Republican-appointees prefer to give the president unlimited power than to allow Congress to create the agencies it sees fit; and they see Congressional oversight not as part of its constitutional function but as a problem.

Finally, though the conservative justices have spent decades touting their originalist methodology—which seeks the answer to constitutional and statutory questions in historical analogues and the Constitution’s original public meaning—they almost completely ignored the actual history of independent agencies. Since the Roberts Court began to move rapidly toward the unitary executive theory, historians and legal scholars have gone back to the archives to see whether there’s actually historical evidence for eliminating independent agencies and giving the president unfettered removal power. It turns out there are lots of historical examples of independent agencies and restrictions on presidential removals going back to the Founding era—as multiple amicus briefs in this case laid out.

“Independent agencies have been around since the founding,” Sotomayor said. “The Sinking Fund, the War Commission—we’ve had independent agencies throughout our history. So this is not a modern contrivance.”

But the conservatives saw our status quo—in effect, in some form, for 250 years—as the real threat. Chief Justice Roberts, for example, worried that Congress might get power-hungry and decide to transform federal agencies like the Department of Education into independent agencies run by independent commissioners. That example is far-fetched at the moment: Congress created the department and now is sitting idly by as Trump unilaterally dismantles it. Nevertheless, this seemed a bigger worry for the conservative bloc than the actual, predictable consequences of letting Trump get his hands on every pocket of independence: further self-enrichment, retribution, chaos, and the other tragedies that stem from clowns running the circus.

This is what it looks like when Supreme Court justices are completely unburdened by history, the logical conclusions of their own reasoning, and the real-world consequences of their own actions. And we are all along for the ride.

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Alina Habba Will Stop Pretending to Be a Federal Prosecutor—for Now

Alina Habba has finally stepped down as New Jersey’s lead federal prosecutor after a three-month court challenge found her appointment without Senate confirmation illegal.

The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit concurred with a lower court ruling that Habba, formerly Trump’s personal attorney, was gifted the position of acting US attorney through a “novel”—and unlawful—“series of legal and personnel moves.”

Habba announced her resignation as acting US attorney for the District of New Jersey in a social media post Monday afternoon to “protect the stability and integrity of the office.” Habba, who helped defend Trump in his New York civil fraud case and defamation trials, has no experience as a prosecutor.

pic.twitter.com/wIhEvXXZoh

— Alina Habba (@AlinaHabba) December 8, 2025

“But do not mistake compliance for surrender,” Habba wrote, announcing that she would continue to serve the Department of Justice as Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “Senior Advisor” for US attorneys.

It remains uncertain who will head the New Jersey US attorney’s office following Habba’s resignation.

Despite the earlier federal ruling on her position, Habba remained in her post after Bondi deemed her “Special Attorney to the Attorney General,” a title the White House has used in other attempts to force through other prosecutorial appointments without Senate confirmation.

Bondi wrote on X that the Department of Justice would “seek further review” of the decision against Habba and that she was “confident” it would be reversed. Bondi complained that “politicized judges” were pausing trials to “countermand the President’s choice of attorneys.”

Habba was only the first of Trump’s US attorneys to be embroiled in a court battle over their appointment. Judges have stated that circumventing Senate confirmation by placing acting US attorneys—and obvious Trump devotees—in lead prosecutor positions was illegal.

Lindsey Halligan, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, met the same fate last month. Halligan’s criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were subsequently dismissed. In September and October, respectively, the US attorneys in Nevada and the Central District of California were also found to have been appointed illegally.

In a Monday statement posted on X about Halligan, Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the judges of conducting an “unconscionable campaign of bias and hostility.”

Habba’s resignation may indicate that the Trump administration is nevertheless beginning to see such appointments as a losing battle.

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Mother of Karoline Leavitt’s Nephew Released From ICE Custody on Bond

Bruna Ferreira, the mother of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew, has been released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after a US immigration judge on Monday ordered her release on a $1,500 bond.

Ferreira, who was born in Brazil and still faces possible deportation, was arrested on November 12 in Massachusetts on the way to pick up her 11-year-old son from school and was sent to South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.

The White House has since attempted to villainize Ferreira as an absentee mother and a “criminal illegal alien” despite the lack of public records showing any criminal convictions. Ferreira stated in an exclusive interview with the Washington Post on Sunday that these were “disgusting” lies; she told the Post that she had even chosen Leavitt to be her son’s godmother.

The Department of Homeland Security declined to respond to questions about whether Ferreira’s release signaled any changes in policy regarding bond releases for detained undocumented immigrants. (DHS, under the Trump administration, has typically opposed such releases.) Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin instead replied, “The facts remain [Ferreira] has a previous arrest for battery.”

Ferreira emigrated from Brazil with her parents when she was about 6 years old. She obtained temporary protection from deportation and work authorization through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program. But as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote in November, DACA recipients, who were long promised a safety net, are now being targeted by the Trump administration for deportation.

Those attacks include detention and more insidious methods. As Isabela reports, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services now excludes DACA recipients from coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace, and in July, the Department of Education launched an investigation into five universities over scholarships for students with DACA status.

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Congress Moves to Ban Trans Women From Military Academy Sports

On Sunday, US lawmakers released the annual defense policy bill authorizing a record $901 billion in national defense spending in 2026. The bill was somehow $8 billion more than President Trump requested, and bans transgender women from competing in sports at military universities.

The 3,086-page bill states that the Secretary of Defense will ensure military academies do not permit a person “whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.” The text codifies “sex” as “a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”

The bill has already been negotiated between Republicans and Democrats and is set to go to a House vote this week, likely leaving little room for significant changes.

But the new version does drop the ban on Defense Department funding on gender-affirming surgeries. Previous versions passed by both the House and the Senate incorporated the ban.

The House bill approved in September also prohibited gender transition services for family members through the Exceptional Family Member Program: “No gender transition procedures, including surgery or medication, may be provided to a minor dependent child through an EFMP.”

Last year’s National Defense Authorization Act restricted TRICARE, the health care program that provides civilian health benefits for US military personnel, their dependents, and retirees, from covering “certain medical procedures for children that could result in sterilization.”

The NDAA is must-pass legislation as it sets the defense budget and determines the policies it will apply to each year. NDAA laws from previous fiscal years thus have a knock-on effect, opening the door for lawmakers to flood the new bill with anti-trans provisions that would likely not pass on their own and force Democrats to block them while on limited time.

The House bill that was passed in September contains several anti-LGBT amendments in addition to the ban on “gender transition procedures” for servicemembers’ children. Many of Rep. Nancy Mace**‘s** (R-SC) proposed additions were adopted—including prohibiting coverage for “gender-related medical treatment,” defined to include puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries, as well as mental health care for transgender young people and requiring the use of single-sex facilities such as restrooms and locker rooms according to their “reproductive system.”

Every year’s NDAA will likely prompt discussions on what anti-transgender provisions could be forced through. As my colleagues Madison Pauly and Henry Carnell wroteinJanuary, President Donald Trump is restricting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth. This has led institutions like the NCAA and government departments such as the Department of Veterans Affairs to bow to his orders. The NDAA is just one piece of this coordinated effort.

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The Problem with Palantir’s New Neurodivergent Fellowship

On Sunday, Palantir announced that the company, which counts Peter Thiel as its chairman, and is doing work for the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will have a “Neurodivergent Fellowship.” The X post sharing this news noticeably did not have captions, making it inaccessible for some disabled people.

While cross-country skiing this morning, Dr. Karp decided to launch a new program: The Neurodivergent Fellowship.

If you find yourself relating to him in this video — unable to sit still, or thinking faster than you can speak — we encourage you to apply.

The final round of… pic.twitter.com/2Xdrc13uj5

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) December 7, 2025

Neurodivergent people face barriers when it comes to employment in all industries, due to biases about disability and failure to give adequate accommodations. Disabled people can also very much participate in technofascism and also lateral ableism of other disabled people—as I previously reported, Elon Musk is a very strong example of this—and this fellowship will do nothing to break down barriers that neurodivergent people face.

Virginia Tech professor Ashley Shew, author of Against Technoableism, noted to me that some disabled people being seen as better than other disabled people is not new. Hans Asperger, after all, chose which autistic people were worth saving and which children were sent to their death under the Nazi regime.

“Disabled people know keenly the dangers of surveillance technology, about what it means to be reduced to data and misread, and the societal impetus to scrutinize our lives and lived expertise,” Shew told me. “It’s a terrible shame that disability gets the most celebration and investment when it is coopted by corporate and industrial interests.”

“Being a disabled token for a morally questionable industry is by no means a step toward disability liberation or true inclusion of any sort, but rather leads us in the other direction,” Shew added.

University of North Carolina at Charlotte assistant professor Damien P. Williams, who researches how technologies are impacted by values, concurs with Shew that this fellowship is very harmful.

“A ‘neurodivergent fellowship’ at a corporation like Palantir isn’t meaningful inclusion or representation so much as it’s an exercise in having an often punitively surveilled population be complicit in making platforms of weaponized surveillance, to build and be the systems and tools of their own and others’ oppression,” Williams said.

Looking at how the job is described, Seton Hall University assistant professor Jess Rauchberg—who researches the cultural impacts of digital media technologies— finds that the fellowship dives into harmful tropes of neurodivergent people.

“Some of the language the job call uses about neurodivergent people as ‘able to see past performative ideologies’ reinforces really dangerous rhetoric that disabled people aren’t human,” Rauchberg told me. “It also presents neurodivergent people using the supercrip trope: that these are disabled people whose ‘savant’ status makes them not like other disabled people, especially intellectually and developmentally disabled people.”

Shew, in general, feels “pretty gross about most neurodiversity hiring programs.” Shew notes that these programs tend to misunderstand the neurodivergence umbrella and focus on autism.

“These programs are rarely about thinking bigger about how to include people with a range of disabilities and neurotypes in all places and still reify impairment models in how they describe the hired workers, which too easily results in situations where people hired in this model cannot meaningfully advance and are seen in specific and limiting ways,” Shew continued.

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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro Takes Flack for Ditching Regional Carbon Pact

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

Last month, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro withdrew from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI (pronounced “Reggie”), a cap-and-trade program that establishes a regional limit on carbon emissions from power plants located in the Northeast.

Here’s how RGGI works: Each year, credits allowing the power plants to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide, up to the cap, are auctioned off. The proceeds from these auctions go to RGGI member states, which can reinvest them into clean energy and consumer affordability programs. Crucially, the emissions cap gradually lowers over time, theoretically ensuring that total emissions continue on a downward trend.

Pennsylvania is a giant within the program, because it has higher power sector emissions than all of the other RGGI states—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the District of Columbia—combined, so Shapiro’s exit sent shockwaves through the system. The Democrat withdrew from the program as part of a compromise to convince Republicans in the legislature to pass the state’s budget, which has been delayed since June, forcing schools and public transportation to dip into rainy day funds or take on debt to support services.

“To add insult to injury here, we were about to have the answer from the [state Supreme Court]. And now we never will.”

As he signed the withdrawal bill, Shapiro said that state Republicans have used RGGI “as an excuse to stall substantive conversations about energy.” (Though Pennsylvania joined the regional pact in 2022, the move was immediately tied up in litigation, which was ongoing at the time of Shapiro’s withdrawal, meaning the state had yet to actually participate in the auctions.)

“Today, that excuse is gone,” Shapiro added. “It’s time to look forward—and I’m going to be aggressive about pushing for policies that create more jobs in the energy sector, bring more clean energy onto the grid, and reduce the cost of energy for Pennsylvanians.”

But some other Democrats and environmental advocates argue that the governor has essentially given away the store. “I would describe it as Faustian, except Faust got so much more out of his bargain with the devil,” Nikil Saval, a Democratic state senator, told Spotlight PA. Jackson Morris, senior state policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that Shapiro lost a chance to claim credit for a substantial environmental victory during a potential presidential run, which he is rumored to be considering.

Democrats “basically got rolled,” said Morris. “The political calculus of all this is baffling.”

Pennsylvania first moved to join RGGI in 2019 through an executive action by then-governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, but the program attracted pushback from Republicans immediately. A 2022 court order prevented the state from formally joining RGGI that year, and then the Commonwealth Court ruled Wolf’s executive action unconstitutional in 2023. That decision is currently being reconsidered by the state Supreme Court, where Democrats retained their majority in elections last month. But Shapiro’s move renders that process moot.

“To add insult to injury here,” said Morris, “we were about to have the answer from the court. And now we never will, because they gave up.”

“It’s not just that we fumbled the ball on the 1-yard line, but then [we] picked it up and ran it into the other end zone,” said Patrick McDonnell, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania environmental group PennFuture. (The governor’s office declined to speak with Grist on the record.)

RGGI has produced about $8.6 billion thus far for participating states. Virginia, fresh off the heels of Democratic governor-elect Abigail Spanberger’s victory, is poised to rejoin the program after being forced out by the current Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin. When Youngkin’s withdrawal was found to be unlawful in court, Spanberger campaigned on returning to the compact.

Some are more cautious in their criticism of Shapiro. “This decision [on RGGI] doesn’t feel final to me,” said Dallas Burtraw, a senior fellow at the research nonprofit Resources for the Future.

In early 2025, Shapiro unveiled his “Lightning Plan,” a jobs-and-energy proposal that included something called the Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction program. Known as PACER, it’s essentially a Pennsylvania-specific version of RGGI—a cap-and-trade program that gradually reduces emissions, creates tradable carbon credits that would (theoretically) be interchangeable with those of RGGI member states, and reinvests the profits toward lowering consumer electricity costs. “Pennsylvania is an elephant compared to the rest of RGGI,” said Burtraw, explaining the reasons that the state would want to create its own program and later link it to RGGI.

“It would have been amazing to see Pennsylvania join RGGI,” he said. “But I think that we might be setting down a pathway that’s turned out for the better.”

Others are less convinced. Joining RGGI was feasible, they say, only because it was implemented through executive action. The odds of anything like PACER making it through the state’s Republican-controlled senate are slim.

“Pennsylvanians need and deserve serious plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions, lower energy bills, and deliver revenue,” said state Senator Saval in a statement to Grist. “So far, senate Republicans have shown little interest in even meager efforts to do any of this. It’s hard to imagine the abrogation of RGGI would help them, as it were, to find religion on this front.”

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Stephen Miller’s Rhetoric “Reminds Me” of “Nazis,” Says Rep. Ilhan Omar

During a Sunday interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said that Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller’s late November comments about “migrants and their descendants” reminded her of how Nazis talked about Jewish people in Germany.

This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands. https://t.co/09HumIaZuL

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) November 28, 2025

Host Margaret Brennan brought up Miller’s Thanksgiving day post on X, when the top White House adviser and architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda bemoaned what he called the “great lie of mass migration.”

“You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies,” Miller commented over a Wall Street Journal editorial on avoiding collective punishment following reporting that the man alleged to have shot two National Guard troops is an Afghan national. “No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” he continued.

Omar, a refugee from Somalia, said of the comments: “When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremist rhetoric, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar: "When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-07T16:00:45.361Z

The representative’s statement comes as Trump and Miller’s immigration enforcement apparatus has descended on Minnesota’s Twin Cities and aimed its campaign specifically at immigrants from Somalia, leading some US citizens to carry their passports out of fear.

In a speech that spurred widespread outrage this week, Trump repeatedly referred to people from Somalia as “garbage.”

At the end of a cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump said Somalia “stinks” and that immigrants from the country “come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch.” “We don’t want them in our country,” he said multiple times.

“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. He then singled out Representative Omar: “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”

In a New York Times guest essay following Trump’s comments, Omar defended her community, writing, “The president knows he is failing, and so he is reverting to what he knows best: trying to divert attention by stoking bigotry.”

As for Miller, his anti-immigrant comments are anything but new.

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Mom of Karoline Leavitt’s Nephew Speaks Out From ICE Detention

In an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, Bruna Ferreira, the mother of Karoline Leavitt’s nephew, who has been in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since November 12, details her arrest, her long relationship with the Leavitts, and how the White House, in her own words, is spreading “disgusting” lies about her.

“I asked Karoline to be godmother over my only sister,” she said Thursday in a video interview from a remote detention center in Louisiana. “I made a mistake there, in trusting….Why they’re creating this narrative is beyond my wildest imagination.”

Since being picked up by ICE, the White House has painted Ferreira as a criminal and an absentee mom who hadn’t spoken to Leavitt in years. According to the Post, “Court records, family photos and Ferreira’s account tell a different story.”

Ferreira, born in Brazil, is facing possible removal after living in the United States for most of her life. She’s also a part of the cohort who received protection through the 2012 program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and is now being targeted for deportation. Her case has gained national attention because of her connection to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who remains a staunch supporter—and mouthpiece—for President Donald Trump and his administration’s ongoing mass-deportation campaign across the country.

Ferreira’s arrest has raised the question of if there was personal involvement from the Leavitt family in ICE’s actions, a claim that Michael Leavitt, Karoline’s brother, has denied. “I had no involvement in her being picked up by ice,” he wrote Wednesday to the Post. “I have no control over that and had no involvement in that whatsoever.”

In their exclusive reporting, the Post’s Maria Sacchetti and Todd Wallack piece together more than 11 years, from Ferreira and Leavitt’s relationship to their separation to contentious co-parenting, all the way to Karoline coming to the White House.

According to Ferreira, Michael and his father, Bob Leavitt, have in recent weeks told her sister that Ferreira should “self deport”—a common refrain from the White House to scores of immigrants across the country. Yet, if she did that, under federal law, Ferreira would be barred from coming back to the United States for a decade.

Her lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, has advised against it: “It’s a trap.”

Read the full report here.

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Ben, Jerry Told to “Hand Over” Ben & Jerry’s by Corporate Big Wigs

Ben & Jerry’s boss thinks the company’s founders and board members ought to hand over pass the company to the next generation, amid a long-simmering fight for control of the ice cream brand.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are both in their seventies and have grown increasingly upset with their brand’s parent company, Unilever, claiming that executives there have repeatedly tried to stifle the brand’s activism. The frustration culminated in Greenfield deciding to quit Unilever in protest in September.

“Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important. And…Ben & Jerry’s has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power.”

And it has been fired up again:Peter ter Kulve, chief executive of Unilever’s ice-cream offshoot Magnum Ice Cream Company, recently told the Financial Times that it’s time for the pair to move on.

The ice cream brand’s co-founders’ “commitment to the brand, to the causes, has been immense,” ter Kulve told FT, “but at a certain moment you need to hand it over…we need to move on.” The comments, per the FT, also pertained to trustees of Ben & Jerry’s charitable arm, Jeff Furman and Liz Bankowski.

“Unlike Magnum,” Cohen said in response, “I don’t think there is an age limit on campaigning for social justice and peace. This is another attempt to silence the social mission that we are all too familiar with, as Unilever attempts to wash their hands of Ben & Jerry’s through this IPO.”

“But,” he continued, “Ben & Jerry’s social mission has always been inseparable from the brand itself, and it is legally protected.”

The back and forth comes as Magnum is demerging from its parent company, Unilever. Shares of the new ice cream offshoot start trading in Amsterdam on Monday. The Ben & Jerry’s brand, which the pair launched nearly five decades ago, sold to Unilever for $326 millionin 2000. Unilever announced the spin-off last year “as part of a plan to slim down the sprawling multinational through lay-offs and divestments,” according to FT.

According to Reuters, a recent audit of the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation by Magnum “found that it had deficiencies in financial controls and governance” and “deficiencies in other compliance policies such as conflicts of interest.” Ter Kulve told FT that he “can’t continue to fund” the foundation “unless we basically have complied with the conclusions of the audit, and we’re working on that.”

Counsel for the Ben & Jerry’s board dismissed what they called Unilever’s “phantom allegations,” alleging the claims are part of a campaign against Anuradha Mittal, who chairs the independent board, because she is trying to “protect the independence of Ben & Jerry’s under the merger agreement.”

With the demerger, Magnum is set to inherit a contentious legal battle between the Ben & Jerry’s board and Unilever. The board has accused Unilever of blocking its call for a ceasefire in Gaza, preventing it from supporting Palestinian refugees, and otherwise attempting to thwart the charitable arm of the company. In May, Cohen was arrested after disrupting a Senate hearing to protest the US government’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

In the note announcing his decision to quit, Greenfield said that the independence they fought for some 25 years ago was effectively “gone.” “Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important,” he wrote.

“And yet,” he continued, “Ben & Jerry’s has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power.”

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Get a Rake: Dispatch From Suburban America’s Forever War

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

The push to ban gas-powered leaf blowers has gained an unlikely figurehead: Cate Blanchett, the Australian actress. “Leaf blowers need to be eradicated from the face of the Earth,” she said in an interview in March. Her complaints have gone viral on TikTok and other social media platforms. “It’s a metaphor for what’s wrong with us as a species,” Blanchett said. “We blow shit from one side of our lawn to the other side, and then the wind is just going to blow it back!”

Her complaints about leaf blowers—equal parts entertaining and earnest—stretch back nearly 20 years, and now the mood has caught up with her. Today, more than 200 local governments in the U.S. have restricted gas-powered lawn equipment or provided incentives to switch to quieter, less-polluting electric tools. The first bans date back to the 1970s, but the trend picked up after the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, when newly homebound workers discovered just how inescapable the whine of their neighbor’s leaf blower can be.

“With every year that passes, more and more communities across the country are taking action to address the shocking amount of pollution and noise from gas lawn equipment,” said Kirsten Schatz, clean air advocate at the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, called CoPIRG.

Gas-powered leaf blowers aren’t just annoying; they’re bad for public health. Closing the windows can’t shut out their low-frequency roar, which can be louder than the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of 55 decibels up to 800 feet away. The unwanted sound can lead to high levels of stress, along with disturbing people’s sleep and potentially damaging hearing over time.

Leaf blowers’ two-stroke engines also churn out a noxious blend of exhaust: fine particulate matter, smog-forming gases, and cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde. By one estimate, running a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour emits as much smog-forming pollution as driving a car from Los Angeles to Denver.

One partial solution: Homeowners could accept a scattering of leaves, instead of demanding a perfectly manicured lawn.

And while lawn and garden equipment is only a small slice of global carbon emissions, leaf blowers and other gas-powered tools “pack a big punch for the amount that they create based on the size of their engines,” said Dan Mabe, the founder of the American Green Zone Alliance, a group that works with cities and landscapers to shift to electric equipment. In 2020, fossil-fueled lawn and garden equipment in the United States released more than 30 million tons of CO2, more than the emissions of the city of Los Angeles.

Cities and states across the country have taken different approaches to dealing with the problem. California’s law banning the sale of new gas-powered blowers took effect last January, while cities like Portland and Baltimore are phasing out their use. Some places, like Wilmette, Illinois, have enacted seasonal limits, either permanently or until a full ban takes effect. Others, like Colorado, attempt to sweeten the deal of buying electric lawn care equipment, offering a 30 percent discount.

But implementing the bans is proving more challenging than many expected. Many communities are frustrated that the new rules are not being properly enforced, said Jamie Banks, the founder and president of Quiet Communities, a nonprofit working to reduce noise pollution.

Westport, Connecticut, fought for years to get a seasonal restriction on gas-powered blowers, only to find that local officials were not enforcing it, Banks said. Noise complaints are not exactly at the top of police officers’ priority lists, and sometimes ordinances are written in a way that’s hard to carry out—police aren’t usually expected to go around town taking noise readings, for example. Some communities are taking a deliberate approach to the problem: Banks pointed to a group of towns in the greater Chicago area, including Wilmette, that are trying to create consistent policies across the region and working with the local police.

Then there’s the matter that swapping gas blowers for ones powered by electricity isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. While the costs are comparable for homeowners—you can get electric blowers at a big-box store like Home Depot for around $200 or less, cheaper than most gas ones—electric blowers are more expensive for commercial landscapers. They require multiple batteries for workers to get through the day. While a typical professional gas-powered blower runs for $550, a comparable electric one costs $700 and requires thousands of dollars worth of batteries. Landscapers also have to buy hundreds of dollars worth of charging equipment and find ways to charge safely on the go.

Plus, it can be difficult to meet the standards customers expect with electric leaf blowers, which are less powerful than gas ones. “If you have customers that are demanding that you get everything off the ground, and you better do it quickly, and you’d better not charge me too much money, it’s really tough,” Banks said.

Bans have already generated a political backlash in some Republican-led states. Texas and Georgia have passed laws prohibiting local governments from regulating gas-powered leaf blowers. The Western States Petroleum Association, an oil industry group, launched a Latino-focused messaging campaign in California that pushes back against laws to electrify vehicles and leaf blowers. But leaf blowers aren’t just a culture-war lightning rod; in some places, they’re leading to personal conflict. In Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago, several landscape workers allege they’ve been harassed by people reporting violations of the local ban.

The American Green Zone Alliance noted in a recent statement that “heavy-handed bans on gas-powered leaf blowers can unintentionally create stress and hardship for workers who often labor for low wages, with limited benefits or control over their working conditions.”

Although there remain a lot of details to work out, the organization is still pushing lawn care to go electric. “We are trying to convince our industry, ‘Look, we need to accelerate this,’” Mabe said.

The alliance is advocating for incentives that are sufficient to make the new equipment affordable for landscaping businesses operating on razor-thin margins. (In the end, lower fuel and maintenance costs for electric blowers can save companies money if the equipment is properly cared for, Mabe said.) Seasonal bans on gas-powered leaf blowers may be more feasible in some places than year-round ones, because they leave short windows for using the fossil-fueled devices in the spring and fall to take care of heavy cleanup jobs.

Another solution: Customers could loosen their expectations and accept a scattering of leaves, instead of demanding a perfectly manicured lawn. “Now, if that aesthetic was more relaxed, that could help change things,” Banks said. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to carry so many batteries.” Leaving some leaves on the ground is, at least ecologically speaking, a good thing—decaying leaves fertilize the soil and form a protective layer that provides shelter for snails, bees, and butterflies.

And of course, in many cases, a leaf blower isn’t needed at all: You can do as Blanchett advises and take matters into your own hands with a good-old fashioned rake.

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Federal Judge Orders Release of Jeffrey Epstein Grand Jury Records in Florida

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida has ordered the public release of grand jury transcripts from the first federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of underage girls, which took place during the mid-2000s.

That investigation ended without any charges. In 2007, however, federal prosecutors in Florida did indict Epstein, who managed to obtain a plea deal, copping to relatively minor charges of procuring a person under 18 for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He was given an 18-month sentence in the Palm Beach County Jail—with daytime work release—and served about 13 months.

Back in July, a different judge, at the request of the Trump administration, had declined to demand release of records from the earlier investigation. On Friday, however, US District Judge Rodney Smith, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2018, stated that the Epstein Files Transparency Act that President Donald Trump signed into law on November 19, “overrides” rules that prohibit the public disclosure of “unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials”—including grand jury transcripts.

This same law compelsthe Department of Justice, federal prosecutors, and the FBI to release, by mid-December, materials they collected during their investigations into Epstein going back at least as far as the mid-2000s Florida case. The DOJ has not yet announced a timeline for making the information publicly available.

Earlier this year, three federal judges denied DOJ requests to unseal the federal grand jury transcripts. US District Judge Richard Berman framed the effort as a “diversion” strategy to distract from the agency’s slow-rolling of its own Epstein files: “The information contained in the Epstein grand jury transcripts pales in comparison to the Epstein investigation information and materials in the hands of the Department of Justice,” he wrote.

DOJ officials are now attempting to unseal materials from three different Epstein investigations. The Trump administration has asked two New York judges for grand jury transcripts from Epstein’s 2019 sex-trafficking case and Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2021 trial.

The state courts are now weighing privacy concerns from survivors and witnesses. The Epstein Files Transparency Act lists exemptions that may allow the DOJ to redact records that could result in personal identification.

The New York judges are expected to issue their decisions next week.

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Trump Puts Screws on Indiana Senators to Greenlight a GOP-Friendly Voting Map

The Indiana House voted on Friday to redraw the state’s congressional map with the aim to produce a 9-0 Republican delegation.

Lawmakers approved the redistricting proposal 57-41, despite 12 Republicans joining the entire Democratic House caucus in opposition. The bill now goes to the state Senate, where the outcome is unclear.Republican leadership has insisted for months that they do not have the votes to pass it. But President Donald Trump, who has asked Republican-led states to redistrict, has been putting the heat on holdout legislators.

According to the Indiana Capital Chronicle, at least 14 of 40 Republican senators have publicly voiced disagreement with the new map. Indiana has 10 Democratic senators, which leaves the tally roughly equal—for now.

On Friday night, Trump weighed in with a vaguely mob boss-style social media post calling on his followers to pressure the stragglers: “I am hearing that these nine Senators, some of whom are up for Re-Election in 2026, and some in 2028, need encouragement to make the right decision: Blake Doriot, Brett Clark, Brian Buchanan, Dan Dernulc, Ed Charbonneau, Greg Goode, Jim Buck, Rick Niemeyer, and Ryan Mishler. Let your voice be heard loud and clear in support of these Senators doing the right thing.”

This comes after at least 11 Indiana Republicans were the targets of swatting or other threats following a November Trump Truth Social campaign against the state’s reluctantGOP.

Indiana is just one of several states wrapped up in Trump’s redistricting crusade. On Thursday, the Supreme Court permitted Texas to use its new map in the 2026 midtermelections, which could hand Republicans five new seats. Missouri and North Carolina have also passed new maps that could enable the party to gain a seat in each state.

Florida may be next up, as lawmakers held a hearing on Thursday to consider redistricting. Florida has a constitutional amendment that prohibits gerrymandering, but Gov. Ron DeSantis said earlier in the week that the new map should be drawn in the spring so that the inevitable court debate could factor in a possible Supreme Court ruling in a Louisiana redistricting case that would further weaken the Voting Rights Act.

Democrats are countering with their own map in California, and are beginning efforts in Virginia with the potential to flip two seats from red to blue.

Mid-decade drawings are relativelyrare. According to the Pew Research Center, previous to this election cycle, only two states have passed new maps since 1970 for partisan gains on their own—Texas in 2003 and Georgia in 2005. Most other redistricting took place because courts threw out maps for legal violations.

This recent swell of gerrymandering is just one way the Trump administration is attempting to influence—and rig—the 2026 election. It has, for example, weaponized the Justice Department to pursue dubious claims of voter fraud to suppress specific voting groups. Notes my Mother Jones colleague Ari Berman, who has written extensively on the topic: “The sheer volume of threats to democracy can feel so overwhelming that some people may choose not to vote for fear that their ballot will not matter. And that may be part of Trump’s plan.”

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“Demoralizing”: How Donald Trump Undermined Coal Country’s Comeback

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

For a moment, Jacob Hannah saw an unprecedented opportunity to make Appalachia great again.

In 2022, the Biden administration earmarked billions of dollars to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities. The objective was to lay down building blocks for the region to transition from extractive industries like coal and timber to a hub for solar and other advanced energy technologies, with a view to long-term economic, climate and social resilience.

But on his first day in office, Donald Trump scrapped Biden’s clean energy and environmental programs, which he lambasted as woke, anti-American, liberal hoaxes.

“We knew we were living in a historic moment, not just because of the amount of funding, but because the whole region mobilized to meet the moment,” said Hannah, 33. “It was a once-in-a-generation cash injection designed to prioritize extraction-based communities as part of the energy transition, which for the first time in almost a century made Appalachia very competitive. So to have it all taken away is deeply damaging and demoralizing.”

Hannah, a fifth-generation Appalachian with a bushy beard and signature wide-brimmed hat, has been crisscrossing the country on a mission to raise philanthropic capital to limit the economic damage caused by the Trump administration taking a chainsaw to Biden-era grants.

Hannah runs Coalfield Development, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Huntington, focused on rebuilding Southwest Virginia’s economy and social fabric through workforce training, job creation, and revitalizing abandoned buildings and mines in some of the most forgotten corners of coal country.

People shop at the Wild Ramp, a nonprofit local farmers’ market.Michael Swensen/The Guardian

Coalfield Development has trained more than 4,000 people—including many formerly incarcerated and/or in addiction recovery—over the past 15 years in everything from solar installation to drywalling and first aid. Yet, historically, federal grants for community regeneration efforts in Appalachia have been mostly top-down, project-based and short-lived.

The 2022 cash injection came through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s landmark climate and infrastructure legislation, and was designed to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities over the long haul.

“These are not frivolous things: these are basic services.”

It was the largest investment in Appalachia since the 1960s’ “war on poverty” under Lyndon Johnson.

In response, Coalfield Development spearheaded a coalition of universities, unions, nonprofits, businesses, and local governments to create collective infrastructure and capacity, enabling coal-affected rural communities across the US access to more than $900 million of the historic IRA investment.

Rural communities in Appalachia were on the verge of breaking ground on projects when the grants were paused or terminated by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by the billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. The wholesale cull included the $3 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Program created in the IRA to tackle the climate crisis and environmental harms at a local level.

A few grants have since been reinstated, but are subject to long delays—in part because so many staff at federal agencies were forced out by DOGE. Many remain the subject of litigation. Every single grant Coalfield Development was helping coordinate has been affected in some way.

Kalob Smith removes mud from the tracks of an excavator. Michael Swensen/The Guardian

The cuts have deepened existing mistrust in government, known colloquially as Appalachian fatalism, yet many of those interviewed by the Guardian blame Washington politics generally rather than Trump.

“This party has taken away that funding from Appalachia illegally: That’s the stone-cold fact. But by the time those facts reach communities on the ground, it’s just so muddy. I think some are asking questions about why training is being shut down and why they didn’t get their SNAP [food assistance] benefits, but where they’ll find the answers is the big issue,” said Hannah.

Huntington, the second largest city in West Virginia with 45,000 residents, was perhaps a perfect place to build a coalition for the massive IRA investment across coal country. Located on the Ohio river, it was once a major transportation hub for the region’s coalfields, but suffered major economic and social decline as the surrounding mines shut down—and then became an epicenter of the opioid epidemic.

It sits at the heart of the Bible belt, which once voted loyally with Democrats but like many blue-collar regions is now part of the loyal MAGA base who believed Trump when he pledged to resuscitate coal country and put America first.

Trump has won big in West Virginia in the past three general elections, securing every county in 2024 with an average of 70 percent of the vote—the highest percentage any party has won in the state’s history. His vote share was even larger in rural counties including Clay and Wayne, which Huntington straddles.

The Guardian’s visit coincided with the Democrats drubbing the Republicans in several state elections—including the governor’s race in Virginia.

It was also five weeks into the government shutdown, just days after the Trump administration announced that millions of Americans would not receive food stamps and Tesla shareholders approved a trillion-dollar pay package for Musk.

The damage caused by Trump’s dismantling of Biden-era programs was visible all around Coalfield Development’s redbrick office, which is located in a former manufacturing hub between the rail tracks and the river.

Next door, a multimillion-dollar redevelopment of a sprawling industrial site known as the Black Diamond warehouse has stalled—at first due to grant suspensions and more recently due to the federal shutdown slowing down payments. Coalfield Development is still waiting for close to $3 million in overdue reimbursements.

An empty lot in Huntington, West Virginia. Michael Swensen/The Guardian

The warehouse, which once manufactured military planes, jeeps, and coal trains, is being repurposed as a hub for sustainable industries and training. But all six EPA grants for Reuse Corridor, a new social enterprise to salvage and repurpose mattresses, electronics, and other materials frequently dumped in the Ohio River, were cut, effectively killing the business and with it countless job opportunities.

Meanwhile, Solar Holler, a solar developer and installation company with 105 employees across Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Virginia, signed up for a new office in the warehouse as the business had been growing 20 percent to 30 percent annually.

But tax incentives for residential solar, which accounted for 70 percent of the company’s business, will be axed at the end of this year thanks to Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget. Commercial tax breaks will end in late 2027.

Solar Holler uses panels made in Georgia, yet Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions have caused supply chain delays and pushed up raw material prices across the board, as well as almost doubling the cost of solar energy on the market. The company’s forecast for 2026 is down from 30 percent to “roughly flat.”

“The massive increase in costs ends up being passed down to customers,” said Dan Conant, founder and CEO of Solar Holler. “The IRA rollbacks are obviously disappointing but that said, no matter how hard you make it on the ground for people, solar is the cheapest form of power on the planet so it’s going to happen one way or the other.”

Appalachian Voices is a nonprofit working with local communities—and in Washington, DC—on securing a just energy transition. In 2023, AV, which is part of the broader coalition with Coalfield Development, was awarded a half-million-dollar EPA grant to help five former coal communities in Virginia increasingly being hit by severe floods thanks to the climate crisis and the environmental legacy of mining.

The grant was among those summarily terminated by DOGE. It remains the subject of class-action litigation brought by 350 groups, tribes, and local governments that claim the wholesale termination of the $3 billion environmental justice and climate program is unconstitutional.

“I don’t think people know who or what to trust, because both [political] parties have failed us in big ways.”

In Lee county, where 85 percent of voters opted for Trump and almost half rely on food stamps, AV had earmarked $40,000 for an asbestos survey in Pennington Gap. This was among a stack of grants secured by the community to demolish a derelict supermarket—a concrete, asbestos-ridden eyesore that frequently floods and cuts off neighborhoods from the main town—to create a green space that would mitigate future flooding.

For small communities such as Pennington Gap, securing funding for revitalization projects is like a game of Jenga, and removing just one or two pieces can make the whole stack collapse, according to Emma Kelly, AV’s New Economy program manager. “People in Appalachia are used to being let down by the government, but this time we had the money. It was still taken away, and people feel betrayed.”

A Department of Energy grant that the community hoped to use to install rooftop solar on public buildings that would save $400 or so in monthly energy bills—a reliable income source that could be reinvested in sustainability projects such as communal fruit trees and electric bikes—was also cut.

“Regardless of who’s in power, there’s a lot of finger-pointing, while life gets worse for the common people and the oligarch class keep winning,” said Orville Overton, 34, a local business owner and member of the residents’ council. “I don’t think people know who or what to trust, because both [political] parties have failed us in big ways.”

Hannah, the Coalfield Development CEO, walks towards the Black Diamond warehouse.Michael Swensen/The Guardian

About 60 miles east, Dante, a sparsely populated former integrated mining community that was once the second largest in Russell county, suffers frequent power outages—including a four-day blackout during a major flood in July, and nine days after Hurricane Helene in August 2024.

Dante’s share of the terminated EPA grant was tagged for a feasibility study on the old railway depot, once the hub of mining operations and the whole town. This is the first step needed to convert the depot into a resilience hub with solar panels and battery storage, a place for residents to charge their phones and keep medication refrigerated during the next blackout.

The post office has been closed since July, due to flood damage. The only place still open for business in Dante is the volunteer-run mining museum.

Dante is also currently without a fire station, after nearly $400,000 appropriated by Congress to replace the one demolished due to subsidence was rescinded by the Trump administration.

“These are not frivolous things; these are basic services. And when you work hard for two or three years to secure federal funds, you expect it to be delivered,” said Lou Ann Wallace, Dante’s representative on the Republican-controlled Russell County Board of Supervisors.

“I don’t think the president knew. I’m one of his biggest supporters, but we’re dealing with the ills of industry here, and we’ve got to be able to clean this up so our people in these hollers can have a quality of life.”

Trump won 83 percent of the vote in Russell county in 2024 while Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor, secured 81 percent last month.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said: “President Trump cares about our miners more than any other president in modern history—which is why he has implemented his energy dominance agenda to protect their jobs and revive the mining industry…we can maintain the safety of miners while simultaneously rolling back Joe Biden’s Green New Scam regulations that were killing their jobs.”

Across Appalachia, people who believe in Trump will be hit hard by his wholesale cuts to Medicaid, Veterans Affairs, food aid, and education, among other public services. Simultaneously, the region is scrambling to save projects that would improve resilience and bring jobs.

It’s a race against the clock, according to Hannah, to find enough money to keep afloat and help people keep faith.

“The funding was committed by Congress, so we know the law’s on our side, and that we will eventually win back some of these grants,” Hannah said. “One objective was probably to remove confidence in the system, so we need to outlast what is a game of cashflow and the battle of morale.”

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The Gaza Flotilla Story You Didn’t Hear

Earlier this fall, hundreds of activists from all over the world crowded onto several dozen boats and set sail for Gaza. Their goal: Break through Israel’s blockade of the territory and end one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. They thought that by sharing their journey through social media, they could capture the world’s attention.

At first, it was easy to dismiss the Global Sumud Flotilla—until it wasn’t. Before reaching Gaza, the flotilla was attacked by drones, and activists were arrested by the Israeli navy.

“We were at gunpoint; like, you could see the laser on our chest,” says flotilla participant Louna Sbou.

They were then sent to a high-security prison in the middle of the Negev desert.

“You have no control, you have no information, and you have no rights,” says Carsie Blanton, another participant. “They could do whatever they want to you.”

This week on Reveal, we go aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla for a firsthand look at what activists faced on their journey and whether their efforts made any difference.

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Science Journal Retracts Widely Cited Study That Claimed Roundup Is Safe

A landmark study on the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the controversial herbicide Roundup, has been formally retracted by its publisher, raising new concerns about the chemical’s potential dangers.

Federal regulators have relied heavily on the study, published in 2000 by the science journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, in their assessment that the herbicide is safe and does not cause cancer. Indeed, the paper, which concluded that “Roundup herbicide does not pose a health risk to humans,” was among the most cited studies in government reports.

But the journal’s co-editor-in-chief, Martin van den Berg, said he no longer trusted the study, and that it appears to have been secretly ghostwritten by employees of Monsanto, the company that introduced Roundup in 1974. Officially, the paper’s authors, including a doctor from New York Medical College, were listed as independent scientists.

Van den Berg, a professor of toxicology in the Netherlands, concluded that the paper relied entirely on Monsanto’s internal studies and ignored other evidence suggesting that Roundup might be harmful.

“The MAHA world is losing their minds right now. They keep getting thrown under the bus.”

In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer determined that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Since then, Roundup’s manufacturer, Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to people who claim it gave them cancer.

In 2020, the US Environmental Protection Agency released an updated safety assessment on glyphosate that again determined that it was safe and did not cause cancer. This EPA report is often cited in news reports that contend glyphosate is “fine” and important for modern food production.

But those reports failed to mention that the 2020 EPA health assessment was overturned in 2022 by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The “EPA’s errors in assessing human-health risk are serious,” the judges wrote, and “most studies EPA examined indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma”—a type of cancer.

The court told the EPA it needed to redo its human health assessment, meaning the agency now has no official stance on glyphosate’s risk to people. It is expected to release an updated safety report next year.

During the first Trump administration, Monsanto executives were told they “need not fear any additional regulation from this administration,” according to an internal Monsanto email cited in a Roundup lawsuit in 2019. Monsanto had hired a consultant, according to court documents, who reported back that “a domestic policy adviser at the White House had said, for instance: ‘We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.’”

The retraction comes at an awkward time for the Trump administration, which just this week moved to support Bayer, whose potential cancer-related legal costs are now approaching $18 billion. On Tuesday, the US solicitor general asked the Supreme Court to consider a case that could help shield the manufacturer from further lawsuits. Bayer’s stock soared by 14 percent on the news.

Two states—North Dakota and Georgia—have passed laws this year that help shield Bayer from some cancer lawsuits arising from Roundup use. There is a push to enact similar laws in other states and on the federal level.

In July, New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker introduced the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act to push back against these new laws, and ensure that “these chemical companies can be held accountable in federal court for the harm caused by their toxic products.”

Zen Honeycutt, a key voice in the Make America Healthy Again coalition, has endorsed the legislation. Honeycutt is executive director of Moms Across America, which on Wednesday posted to its 144,000 followers on Instagram about the “good” news of the study’s retraction and the “bad” news that the Trump administration had moved to help Bayer in its lawsuits.

“We are calling on all Americans to remind President Trump of his promise to get toxic pesticides out of our food supply and to protect our children from harmful chemicals,” the post read.

Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which sued the EPA for its 2020 approval of the herbicide, said the glyphosate debate has become a key sticking point between President Trump and his MAHA base. “The MAHA world is losing their minds right now. They keep getting thrown under the bus by this administration,” Donley said. “He’s alienating a crucial voting bloc.”

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EU Fines Musk $140 Million for Violations of Online Safety Rules. Vance Calls It “Censorship.”

The European Commission announced Friday that it was fining Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, for the equivalent of $140 million, saying his company X had breached Europe’s Digital Services Act. The act, which took effect around the same time Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, is a kind of digital rulebook meant to crack down on illegal or potentially harmful content.

Vice President JD Vance, before the fine was even finalized, slammed the commission, claiming that it was targeting US companies.

“Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship,” Vance wrote on X Thursday. “The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.”

“Much appreciated,” Musk responded.

A key aspect of the alleged violation is how Musk handles account verification on his social media site. Musk’s X “allows users to subscribe to a tier of the platform that grants them a badge that had previously signified the person had been vetted and approved by X’s moderators,” the Washington Post reports. The European Commission said this system makes it “difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with.”

“This deception,” the body continued, “exposes users to scams, including impersonation frauds, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors.” The commission also said X didn’t provide a transparent advertising repository, as the Digital Services Act requires, and “fell short of an obligation to let researchers access and analyze its public data,” per The Post.

It doesn’t look like Musk will face similar issues in the US.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr claimed on X that, “Europe is fining a successful U.S. tech company for being a successful U.S. tech company.” Musk reposted. “The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on @X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote, adding, “The days of censoring Americans online are over.” Musk endorsed the post with a one word reply: “Absolutely.”

Once again, Europe is fining a successful U.S. tech company for being a successful U.S. tech company.

Europe is taxing Americans to subsidize a continent held back by Europe’s own suffocating regulations. pic.twitter.com/EzeOWZRC2t

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) December 5, 2025

While Musk and his supporters herald X as a bastion for free speech, his tenure in the past few years has been more complicated.

In December 2022, Musk suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists—from outlets like CNN, The New York Times, and WaPo—after Musk claimed reporters were endangering his safety by sharing information on where his private jets were using publicly available data. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk posted at the time.

According to self-reported data, from the date of Musk’s takeover to April 13, 2023, the social media site fully or partially complied with 98.8 percent of takedown requests submitted by governments. Turkey was responsible for half of all the takedown requests, followed by Germany at 26 percent and and India at 5 percent, as reported by Al Jazeera.

During the 12-month period before Musk took over the site, Twitter fully complied with 50 percent of these kinds of requests, and partially complied with 42 percent.

Since the EU commission announced the fine, Musk has been using his X page to amplify critiques of the commission’s decision. “Total war on free speech,” one post Musk reposted read. “It’s real simple,” Peter Imanuelsen, a well-known far-right voice in Sweden, began in another, “The EU fined X €120 million because this is where the mainstream media narrative gets exposed.” Musk quoted the post with the 100 emoji.

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Border Czar’s Former Clients Cash in on Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

Jin Kang, the CEO of a telecom and IT company, was talking to stock analysts this past spring, when he was asked about the company’s prospects for winning government contracts.

Kang said his firm, WidePoint, had technology that could help the Department of Homeland Security track down cellphones given to immigrants who had been released on bail, pending deportation hearings. All the company needed was a foot in the door.

“So we’ve been trying to get access to Tom Homan and the folks over at DHS at the secretary level,” Kang said. “I think we’ve gotten some…traction, but it’s too early to tell, but we are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they could get us in the door to talk about the potential savings that we could provide.”

Kang’s statement stands out because Homan, prior to joining the second Trump administration as its “border czar,” ran a consulting firm that helped companies pursue government contracts. It does not appear that WidePoint was a Homan client, but other current contractors were. Homan has vowed, as federal ethics guidance advises, to stay out of federal procurement decisions.

“We are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they could get us in the door.”

Kang’s claim is even more striking in light of news reports that Homan was recorded last year accepting $50,000 in a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen paying for help winning government contracts in a second Trump administration. Homan has said he did nothing illegal and has stated that he “didn’t take $50,000 from anybody.” Trump’s Justice Department ultimately dropped the matter after investigators, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.” The White House has called the FBI probe “a blatantly political investigation” by the Biden administration.

Kang’s WidePoint, which won a DHS cellphone contract in the last months of President Donald Trump’s first term and is angling to win another worth up to $3 billion, is just one of several companies that have reportedly tried to enlist Homan’s help in drumming up federal contracts.

In June, Homan met with companies seeking contracts to build new immigration detention facilities, Bloomberg reported. Many of those contracts are being awarded by the US military, and Homan, according to the report, “was then expected to discuss the matter with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.”

In addition, a review by Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight shows that a number of Homan’s former clients from his time in the private sector have been awarded lucrative border and immigration-related contracts during the second Trump administration. Those projects include constructing private prisons, sprawling migrant detention camps, and a section of border wall. It is not clear whether Homan has played any role in helping his former clients land these deals—the White House says he has no involvement in the “actual awarding” of contracts.

Regardless, the pattern highlights what critics call the legalized corruption of Washington. While Homan denies taking a bag of cash to rig a contract, he openly ran a business in which he traded on his years of government work and high-level contacts to help clients who paid him prosper in the procurement process. Now that he is back in government, even the impression that he can influence federal contract awards creates the appearance of corruption, ethics experts argue.

Among would-be contractors, “the perception is that Homan can put in a good word—whether compensated or not compensated in cash, with or without a bag man—and in some sense, the damage is done,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies government ethics. Homan’s perceived influence, even after the alleged bag incident, sends “the message…that this is not disqualifying and people who want some portion of the trough that is DHS at this point can look to Homan, among others, for assistance,” Clark said.

Homan referred questions to White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, who dismissed concerns.

“As the Border Czar, Tom Homan occasionally meets with a variety of people to learn about new developments and capabilities to serve the needs of the American people – in doing so he continues to adhere to the federal ethics and [conflict] of interests rules,” Jackson said. “Tom has no involvement in the actual awarding of a government contract. Tom is a career law enforcement officer and lifelong public servant, with the utmost integrity, who is doing a phenomenal job on behalf of President Trump and the country.”

A White House official also said Homan “has not had any conversations, nor been involved in any conversations,” with WidePoint or any of the other companies discussed in this article “regarding contracts or business interests.” The official said Homan, a White House employee, has “no role in deciding or awarding contracts for DHS.”

Homan was well-situated to capitalize on his insights and government connections. He spent three decades working for the US Border Patrol and in 2013 was appointed to a high-ranking position with ICE by President Barack Obama—a post in which Homan pioneered the idea of using family separations as a tool to discourage illegal immigration.

Homan stayed on into the first Trump administration, but left his role as acting ICE director in June 2018—soon after the public outcry over family separations reached a fever pitch.

Homan’s consulting company boasted that it has “a proven track record of opening doors.”

Apparently, he already had been planning a leap to the private sector. In May 2018—just days after he announced that he would leave the administration—the state of Virginia approved paperwork incorporating a new business he founded, called Homeland Strategic Consulting. He spent the rest of Trump’s first term and the Biden years transforming himself from a lifetime government official into an advocate with insider perspectives and connections to the powerful for the many business interests trying to score government deals.

As of last December, the website of Homan’s consulting company boasted that the firm has “a proven track record of opening doors and bringing successful relationships to our clients, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts to private companies.”

In 2021, Homan’s firm registered to lobby in Texas for Fisher Sand & Gravel, a North Dakota-based construction company that was seeking work building portions of border wall. Texas records show Fisher paid Homeland Strategic Consulting up to $186,000.

Fisher is a controversial company. In 2019, it built short sections of border wall in Texas and New Mexico. The work was financed by “We Build the Wall,” an effort involving Steve Bannon in which organizers crowdsourced private donations to fence off the country from Mexico. In 2020, We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage, Bannon, and two other men were charged with defrauding donors by misappropriating money they raised. While the other three defendants were convicted and jailed, Bannon escaped federal prosecution when Trump pardoned him hours before leaving office in 2021. Bannon pleaded guilty in February to defrauding donors in a similar case brought by Manhattan’s district attorney.

The sections of wall Fisher did complete have been lambasted as poorly built. In 2022, Fisher reached an undisclosed agreement with the Justice Department to settle a lawsuit over the project. Fisher has also repeatedly been sued by environmental groups.

But Fisher, whose CEO Tommy Fisher has supported many GOP lawmakers, has tapped Trump world support to continue landing contracts. Last year, with Homan’s help, the company scored a $225 million contract from Texas to build a new section of border wall there. And in June 2025, this erstwhile Homan client won a $309 million contract from Customs and Border Protection to build a 27-mile section of wall in Arizona’s Santa Cruz County. The company did not respond to inquiries.

Fisher isn’t the only former Homan client continuing to seek federal contracts that intersect with Homan’s White House portfolio.

USA Up Star, a company that specializes in quickly constructing temporary buildings in response to emergencies, is a former client of Homan’s that donated $100,000 to the Trump-Vance inauguration committee in January and $15,000 in June 2024 to a pro-Trump super-PAC called Right for America. A Federal Election Committee database does not show any other corporate contributions from that company, though its owner and president, Klay South, previously donated to PACs supporting Ron DeSantis.

In the months before the 2024 election, according to Bloomberg, “USA Up Star executives had regular calls and meetings with Homan to explore an expansion into immigration detention.” The construction company, Bloomberg reported, was pitching “a sprawling tent camp in El Paso, Texas, where people would be held in pens and surveilled from overhead by guards in wooden structures.”

This September, the US Navy awarded a massive border security and immigration enforcement contract to dozens of companies, including USA Up Star. The deal could ultimately be worth up to $20 billion for each contractor over several years, according to a government press release. The contract includes work providing “safe and secure confinement for aliens in the administrative custody of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” per contracting records, as well as less controversial work, such as providing support in response to natural disasters.

In response to written questions, South declined to comment. He also wrote: “Get Fucked.”

Another past Homan client is SE&M Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based consulting firm that, like Homan’s former consultancy, helps other companies win government contracts. SE&M’s CEO is Charles Sowell, who also serves as chairman of the board of the Border911 Foundation, a border security-focused nonprofit founded and led by Homan. According to Sowell’s bio, he served in the Navy for 27 years, managed a Texas-based federal facility for unaccompanied migrant children in 2021, and attended the Border Patrol Industry Academy. USA Up Star is also an SE&M client, per reporting from ProPublica. SE&M’s website has touted “access to senior leaders in government.”

In August, according to Bloomberg, two SE&M clients met with Mark Hall, a top adviser to Homan who works in the administration. Hall is a former longtime Border Patrol agent who also served as a Border911 Foundation board member. (Another former board member is Rodney Scott, the head of Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for the Border Patrol.) SE&M Solutions and Border911 did not respond to requests for comment.

And then there’s GEO Group, a private prison behemoth that runs a sprawling network of immigrant detention centers. ICE’s largest contractor, GEO Group also offers related services such as transporting detainees and tracking immigrants who are not detained. Homan reported on his financial disclosure form that he had worked as a consultant for GEO’s health care arm during the prior year.

GEO Group donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inauguration. That’s in addition to 2024 contributions from GEO’s political action committee, senior executives, and a GEO subsidiary totaling more than $1 million to Trump-aligned political entities, according to a Project On Government Oversight review of Federal Election Commission records.

GEO has seen its fortunes rise this year as the current administration has set new records for the number of people held in immigration detention, recently hitting 66,000. The population of detainees is up nearly 70 percent since Trump’s inauguration—the vast majority have no criminal convictions. Since Inauguration Day, ICE has awarded GEO new detention contracts collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

“This represents the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our Company’s history,” George Zoley, GEO Group’s executive chairman, said in a November statement.

GEO did not respond to a request for comment. But it has been vocal about benefiting from the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “As a long-standing support services provider for ICE with a 40-year-long track record, we believe we are uniquely positioned to assist the agency to meet its objectives,” Zoley said over the summer.

This story was reported with the Project On Government Oversight.

Samantha Michaels contributed reporting.

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Alabama Wants to Lower the Bar for Executing Disabled People—If SCOTUS Lets It

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Hamm v. Smith, a death penalty case that will decide whether intellectual disability can be ruled out on the basis of IQ tests alone.

Long before he was convicted of murder in 1997, Joseph Clifton Smith was placed in schooling for an intellectual disability. Smith had five documented IQ test scores by the time he was tried, all around the bottom five percent of the population—four of which, his legal team has argued, fall in the range of mild intellectual disability.

The state of Alabama disagrees: anyone scoring 70 or above on one test, its attorney general contends, is intelligent enough to execute. In 2022, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument—setting the stage for a Supreme Court turnaround on IQ and capital punishment.

“If you tilt your head just right and squint…without considering anything else, then you get the result [Alabama] thinks you should get.”

The Supreme Court has previously stated that IQ tests alone fail to holistically determine intellectual disability, in 2002’s Atkins v. Virginia—which also established that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the Eighth Amendment—reaffirmed in 2014 in Hall v. Florida, and most recently in 2017’s Moore v. Texas. But Atkins and Hall were close decisions, and the Court’s conservative majority has since grown.

“It’s important to have a holistic assessment of the person,” said Shira Wakschlag, general counsel and senior executive officer for legal advocacy at The Arc, such as educational records and other documentation from childhood. IQ scores are a factor in determining intellectual disability, Wakschlag said, but they vary, and the tests don’t always offer consistent results.

An amicus brief from the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and Alabama Psychological Association in support of Smith’s case similarly argued that “because the diagnostic inquiry is necessarily holistic and requires the exercise of clinical judgment, no single datum—such as IQ test scores—is dispositive of intellectual functioning.”

An October filing by Alabama’s Department of Corrections commissioner, John Q. Hamm, pushes for a very narrow definition of intellectual disability defined by an IQ below 70, and argues that “the ‘holistic’ rhetoric’ is ‘just window dressing’ for a novel and indefensible change in constitutional law.’”

“If you tilt your head just right and squint, and apply this particular statistical principle in isolation, without considering anything else, then you get the result that [Alabama] thinks you should get,” said University of New Mexico School of Law adjunct professor Ann Delpha, whose work focuses on intellectual disabilities and the justice system. “That’s not what intellectual disability is about.”

“The court has said repeatedly…at different times, that intellectual disability is determined through clinical judgment, through a comprehensive analysis,” Wakschlag said. “It is not a number.”

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case is perhaps unexpected, given the clear precedent in its rulings that IQ tests are not enough to establish intellectual disability, and may signal a likely break with precedent.

A decision that effectively overturns the Court’s past rulings on intellectual disability and the death penalty would encourage states to define down intellectual disability, and any safeguards that come with it, in their criminal justice systems—in line with a wider push, echoed by conservative proposals like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to strip disability protections from schools, workplaces, and other sites of public life.

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Even Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Is Helping Catch Immigrants

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

The Louisiana Department Of Wildlife And Fisheries (LDWF), typically responsible in part for overseeing wildlife reserves and enforcing local hunting rules, has assisted United States immigration authorities with bringing at least six people into federal custody this year, according to documents WIRED obtained via a public record request.

According to the documents, LDWF signed a memorandum of agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in May, which gives the wildlife agency the authority to detain people suspected of immigration violations and to transfer them into ICE custody. Since then, at least six men entered ICE custody after coming into contact with or being detained by LDWF officers. None of the men were issued criminal charges at the time they came into contact with LDWF officers, the documents show. Two of the men were known by ICE to have been in the country legally at the time the agency took them into custody.

The documents also indicate that at least one “joint patrol” took place in a Louisiana wildlife management area in which LDWF agents were accompanied by officers with Customs and Border Protection and the US Coast Guard. The memorandum of agreement between ICE and LDWF makes no mention of CBP or the possibility of working with the agency as part of the agreement. However, the documents indicate that a relationship with CBP may have been facilitated through LDWF’s partnership with ICE.

LDWF partnered with ICE under the agency’s 287(g) program, named after the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that enables officers and employees at the state or local level to perform some of the functions of US immigration officers, such as investigating, apprehending, detaining, or transporting people suspected of violating immigration law.

As of December 3, exactly 1,205 agencies have partnered with ICE through the 287(g) program. (An additional eight agencies are currently pending approval from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.) Some 1,053 of these agreements were signed this year, meaning enrollment has increased by 693 percent compared to the end of 2024. The LDWF is one of just three state wildlife agencies—the others being the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources—that have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE, according to public ICE records. All three agreements were signed this year.

The marked expansion of the 287(g) program this year has generated relatively little attention. However, the documents from the LDWF indicate that the state and local agencies enrolled are actively detaining people not guilty of any crimes, and facilitating their arrests and possible deportation.

CBP did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. The LDWF answered questions about one particular incident, but did not respond to WIRED’s complete request for comment. ICE spokesperson Angelina Vicknair—when given the men’s full names, the dates and locations they were detained, all known circumstances of their detainment, and all other identifying information included in the documents—said that the agency did not have enough information to determine if the men were in custody, released, or deported. She also said that the number of men WIRED asked about, seven, constituted “too large a query,” adding, “We’ll need you to narrow it down.”

Per a LDWF “After Action Report” obtained by WIRED, three men were taken into a federal custody after the agency conducted a joint patrol on August 11 with five US Coast Guard officers and an unknown number of CBP agents in Lake Borgne, which is in Louisiana’s sprawling Biloxi Marsh Complex. According to the report, the officers were looking for people allegedly violating state statues for seed oyster harvesting.

The report claims that no one on the patrol witnessed any crimes or civil violations. Despite this, it says that “the federal partners were able to identify and detain 3 subjects for immigration issues,” adding that “all arrestees were transported by Federal agencies to detention centers.” It’s unclear why these individuals were singled out, but all three appear to have Hispanic last names.

The report claims that two of the arrested individuals legally entered the United States but overstayed the amount of time they were allowed to remain in the country. The third person, it claims, entered the country illegally and had an unspecified “criminal history.” Given the report’s sparse information about the men, it’s unclear if any of them have been deported or remain in federal custody.

Some time after the August 11 patrol, the report claims, a CBP lieutenant asked LDWF about organizing “future patrol opportunities and joint patrols” with the agency.

“After this operation, CBP has reason to believe that future patrols will be beneficial and productive,” the report reads. “They also expressed how much they learned traversing some of the more specific waterbodies with the local knowledge of our agents, they were able to learn new routes across the area that will allow them to extend the effectiveness of their independent patrols.”

In an August 22 email obtained by WIRED, LDWF regional captain Tim Fox says that CBP wanted to organize future patrols “on a less formal basis.” It’s unclear whether a less formal patrol would still produce a paper trail.

According to a later LDWF incident report, the agency arrested three additional people in October, all of whom were taken into ICE custody. The men were issued civil citations for going to a wildlife management area and using their firearms without the proper permits, the report says, but none were issued any criminal charges.

The report claims that on October 23, two LDWF officers patrolling the Maurepas Swamp Wildlife Management Area heard several gunshots in an area where “people often illegally target shoot.” The suspects, three men in their twenties, all cooperated with LDWF at the scene. When asked to show their weapons, they showed the officers a pistol, an AR-15, several magazines, and a few dozen rounds of ammunition. The officers confirmed that none of the firearms were stolen. One of the men also showed the officers where they had been shooting.

The men showed identification—a Louisiana ID card, a Honduran ID card, and a Honduran passport, respectively—when asked, but did not have the appropriate permits for being in a Wildlife Management Area and firing a weapon. The two men who fired weapons were issued three civil citations, while the one who didn’t was issued two. At some point during LDWF’s interactions with the men, the agency called immigration authorities.

“Due to the unknown immigration status and them possessing firearms, we made contact with Homeland Security Investigations,” the report reads. A HSI agent reportedly told LDWF that one of the men had a final removal order, one had “pending” immigration proceedings, and one man had legal parole to be in the US. When LDWF contacted the local ICE field office, ICE sent two agents to the scene.

Upon arrival, the report claims, “The ICE Officers made several phone calls and they decided to take custody of all three subjects.” All three men were placed in handcuffs and escorted to the ICE officers’ vehicles.

It’s unclear if any of these men were deported, but based on information in the report, none of them appear to currently be in ICE custody, according to the agency’s detainee locator.

In response to WIRED’s public record request, LDWF also included an incident report filed on October 6. The report describes a man who allegedly littered “roofing shingles, nails and other assorted building materials” near Cypress Lake for which he was issued one civil citation for “gross littering.” It notes that the man didn’t speak English, but “was cooperative during this investigation” with the help of a translator.

The incident report says that the man had “unverified citizenship,” but it does not specify whether he was taken into ICE custody. When asked about the incident and why it was included in the response to WIRED’s public record request, a LWFD spokesperson clarified that the agency reported the man to ICE after he was issued the littering citation.

The spokesperson said that as a result of the man’s “unverified citizenship,” the LDWF “forwarded the citation and report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

“LDWF has no further information regarding Mr. Garcia’s current status or location,” the spokesperson said.

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Zillow Nixes Feature That Helped Home Buyers Assess Climate Risks

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

Zillow, the US’s largest real estate listing site, has removed a feature that allowed people to view a property’s exposure to the climate crisis, following complaints from the industry and some homeowners that it was hurting sales.

In September last year, the online real estate marketplace introduced a tool showing the individual risk of wildfire, flood, extreme heat, wind, and poor air quality for 1 million properties it lists, explaining that “climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions” for many Americans.

“The risk doesn’t go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability.”

But Zillow has now deleted this climate index after complaints from real estate agents and some homeowners that the rankings appeared arbitrary, could not be challenged, and harmed house sales. The complaints included those from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which oversees a database of property data that Zillow relies upon.

Zillow said it remains committed to help Americans make informed decisions about properties, with listings now containing outbound links to the website of First Street, the nonprofit climate risk quantifier that had provided the on-site tool to Zillow.

Matthew Eby, founder and chief executive of First Street, said that removing the climate risk information means that many buyers will be “flying blind” in an era when worsening impacts of extreme weather are warping the real estate market in the United States.

“The risk doesn’t go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability,” Eby said. “Families discover after a flood that they should have purchased flood insurance, or discover after the sale that wildfire insurance is unaffordable or unavailable in their area.

“Access to accurate risk information before a purchase isn’t just helpful; it’s essential to protecting consumers and preventing lifelong financial consequences.”

Eby claimed that the push to delist the First Street ratings from Zillow is linked to a challenging real estate environment, with a lack of affordable housing and repeated climate-driven disasters that are causing insurers to raise premiums or even flee states such as California. “All of that adds pressure to close sales however possible,” he said. “Climate risk data didn’t suddenly become inconvenient. It became harder to ignore in a stressed market.”

“Brokerage firms know they cannot stop the transmission of climate risk information because climate impacts are already being felt far and wide.”

As the US, along with the rest of the world, has heated up due to the burning of fossil fuels, worsening extreme weather events have taken their toll directly upon people’s homes, as well as other infrastructure.

Last year, disasters probably amplified by the climate crisis caused $182 billion in damages, one of the highest on record, according to a government database since taken offline by the Trump administration.

As a consequence of these mounting risks, the home insurance required for buyers to obtain a mortgage is becoming scarcer and more expensive across much of the US. These changes are running headlong into an opposing trend whereby more Americans are moving to places such as Florida and the Southwest, which are increasingly beset by threats such as ruinous hurricanes and punishing heatwaves.

But assigning climate risks to individual properties has been controversial within the real estate industry, as well as some experts who have questioned whether such judgments can be made at such a granular level.

Warnings of such perils deterred some buyers, especially if the home was particularly costly anyway. Last year, a sprawling Florida mansion was put on sale for $295 million, making it the most expensive property in the country and in a place also ranked as one of the most at-risk in the US for flooding. After several cuts to the asking price, the house has been taken off the market.

Jesse Keenan, an author and expert in climate risk management at Tulane University, said many scientists and economists have argued that “proprietary risk models that provide highly uncertain assessments can have the perverse effect of undermining the public’s confidence in climate science.

“There has been a growing bipartisan recognition that the government should play a more active role in supporting and standardizing risk assessment for properties,” Keenan said. “At the same time, the science is limited in its capacity to assess property-by-property assessments.

“I do not believe that this is a sign that the brokerage industry is trying to hide climate risks,” he added. “Brokerage firms know they cannot stop the transmission of climate risk information because climate impacts are already being felt far and wide in the sector.”

Eby defended First Street’s methods and accuracy, pointing out that the models used were built on peer-reviewed science and validated against real-world outcomes.

“So when claims are made that our models are inaccurate, we ask for evidence,” he said. “To date, all the empirical validation shows our science is working as designed and providing better risk insight than the tools the industry has relied on historically.”

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For Many Contractors, Losing ACA Subsidies Means Losing Health Care

Comedian Megan Sass has been struggling to get their health insurer to cover intravenous immunoglobulin for more than a year. The treatment, which addresses a genetic antibody deficiency, requires antibodies from blood donors. Without insurance, it’s unaffordable. And with the looming expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies, Sass’ insurance will soon cost $1,300 a month.

“I am not at a place where I’m been able to joke about this,” they said.

ACA marketplace subsidies, first implemented in 2014, expanded greatly during the Biden administration, allowing millions more people to afford private health insurance. But enhanced premium tax credits are set to expire at the end of 2025. As ACA architect Jeanne M. Lambrew told me in October:

When the Biden administration came in during the pandemic, they tweaked the premium tax credits to improve them, which doubled enrollment. It increased the racial diversity of enrollment. It increased [the number of] low-income people enrolled. It removed a cliff, so when people’s income increased, they didn’t like fall off and have nothing. All that led to great gains and all that is at risk.

For contractors and freelancers in particular, the expiration of these enhanced subsidies could decide whether or not they can afford health insurance. According to KFF, around half of adults who purchase ACA marketplace plans are self-employed, small business owners, or their employees. Disabled people who work are 50 percent more likely to be self-employed than non-disabled people, meaning that people with existing health issues are at disproportionate risk of losing private health insurance for affordability reasons.

The ACA offers disabled people “options that many other people take for granted,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Center for American Progress’ Disability Justice Initiative, especially given the ties between insurance and employment.

The situation is especially frustrating for chronically ill and disabled contractors who watched Democratic leadership in Congress abandon a shutdown meant to protect those subsidies; President Donald Trump, during Thanksgiving week, then backtracked on a supposed plan to extend the tax credits when faced with the displeasure of congressional Republicans.

New Hampshire therapist Amanda McGuire is infuriated that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) voted to end the government shutdown without a deal to extend ACA tax credits: after all, McGuire created a video that Shaheen’s team posted on social media during the shutdown advocating for the importance of the ACA. McGuire feels betrayed.

McGuire doesn’t qualify for ACA subsidies, though she expects to have to buy a marketplace plan next year as her disabilities, including multiple sclerosis, increasingly compel her to reduce her working hours. McGuire’s therapy practice focuses on patients with chronic illnesses and disabilities, and she’s even more afraid of what the future holds for them.

“A lot of them can’t even look at the options in the marketplace right now, because they know they’re going to be priced out of policies,” McGuire told me. “As someone with chronic illness, you can’t just go without insurance.”

Kathryn Sullivan Graf, a contractor who works as a writer and editor in Arizona, has multiple sclerosis; she expects to pay around $300 more a month and to have to seek new specialists. She was relieved when her neurologist assured her that he’d remain her neurologist no matter what happened—”but that’s just one of my providers,” Sullivan Graf said.

Sass doesn’t believe that politicians on either side of the aisle are doing enough. Members of Congress, Sass noted, get comprehensive health insurance through the government—so they can’t personally experience the stakes.

“Obviously, the main culprits are Republicans,” Sass said. “But the system,” they said, was either “broken, or it was intentionally designed badly.”

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USDA To Blue States: Hand Over Personal Data Or Lose SNAP Funding

The United States Department of Agriculture is threatening to withhold federal funding for food stamps for more than 20 Democratic-led states that have refused to hand over sensitive personal data about millions of participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The agriculture department is seeking personal information like Social Security numbers, birth dates, and home addresses—information it claims will aid officials in rooting out fraud. Democratic leaders have warned the data could be used for other policies not related to keeping people fed, like immigration enforcement.

During a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, USDA Secretary Brooke L. Rollins said that leaders have until next week to send in data or the department will “begin to stop moving federal funds into those states,” adding that her office wants the data to “protect the American taxpayer.” If the administration follows through on this deadline, according to The New York Times, more than 20 million beneficiaries could be affected.

“NO DATA, NO MONEY,” Rollins wrote on X, “it’s that simple.”

According to the agency, since the administration asked states for SNAP recipients’ data in May, 28 largely Republican-controlled states have already complied.

The move comes after SNAP recipients across the country have just recently emerged from the confusion and frustration surrounding whether they would get money for food during the longest government shutdown in US history. It’s unclear how the secretary’s current request will impact—or avert—the ongoing SNAP-related legal battles between states and the Trump administration.

Just last week, Democratic attorneys general from 21 states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration over language within the GOP’s tax and spending package, which the group says unlawfully blocks certain groups of legal immigrants from accessing SNAP benefits.

Following the secretary’s Tuesday announcement, Democratic governors across the country accused the Trump administration of, once again, playing politics with peoples’ hunger.

“We no longer take the Trump Administration’s words at face value — we’ll see what they actually do in reality,” Marissa Saldivar, a spokesperson for California Governor Gavin Newsom, said in a statement. “Cutting programs that feed American children is morally repugnant.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul posted on X, “Genuine question: Why is the Trump Administration so hellbent on people going hungry?”

Claire Lancaster, a spokesperson for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, said the state’s leader “wishes President Trump would be a president for all Americans rather than taking out his political vendettas on the people who need these benefits the most.”

“The Trump Administration is once again playing politics with the ability of working parents with children, seniors and people with disabilities to get food,” Maura Healey, the governor of Massachusetts, said in a statement, calling the move, “truly appalling and cruel.”

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ICE Targets New Orleans In Latest Operation, Aims for 5,000 Arrests In The Region

The Department of Homeland Security officially launched what they’re calling “Operation Catahoula Crunch” in New Orleans on Wednesday, expanding President Donald Trump and his administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown in Louisiana. Federal immigration officers, in coordination with local law enforcement, are aiming to arrest 5,000 people in southeast Louisiana and into Mississippi.

The wider operation is called “Swamp Sweep.”

New Orleans Mayor-elect Helena Moreno, a Democrat who was born in Mexico, has been critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s impending presence in the city. “You have parents who are scared to send their children to school,” Moreno told the local CNN affiliate WWL. “At my church,” she said, “there is a one o’clock service, Spanish-speaking service every Sunday, that keeps getting smaller and smaller. People are really, really scared.”

Moreno’s office has released guidelines instructing residents on how to interact with ICE. “Always comply with lawful orders from Law Enforcement,” the website reads, adding that local law enforcement “will not ask about your immigration status.” “Most of all,” the guidance continues, “keep each other safe.”

The governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, is more eager to comply with the administration’s deportation efforts.

“Thank you President @realDonaldTrump and @Sec_Noem for putting AMERICANS first,” Governor Landry said, tagging President Trump and the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in a post on X. “We welcome the Swamp Sweep in Louisiana.”

Thank you President @realDonaldTrump and @Sec_Noem for putting AMERICANS first.

We welcome the Swamp Sweep in Louisiana. pic.twitter.com/mlyjFAFsOx

— Governor Jeff Landry (@LAGovJeffLandry) December 1, 2025

Landry, a Trump-ally, has also been working with the president to send National Guard troops into the state in coming weeks. A presence that the governor says will continue through Mardi Gras, which is scheduled for February of 2026.

Trump and Landry claim that the efforts are to address crime across New Orleans and the state, though the city “has logged significant drops in crime and is on pace to have its lowest number of homicides in nearly 50 years,” according to reporting from NBC News based on crime data from the police department.

DHS’s campaign in New Orleans is the administration’s latest stop in a cross-country immigration crackdown. Officers, under Trump’s guidance, have been picking up people from New York City to Portland to Tucson to Minneapolis.

Newly elected Councilmember at-Large Matthew Willard (D-La.) told CNN that there has been “mass chaos and confusion” ahead of ICE’s operation in New Orleans on Wednesday.

“We’re really just fearful of the unknown, and looking at the coverage that we’ve seen in other cities by CNN,” he said, adding, “we certainly don’t want that here in the city of New Orleans.”

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Why Did Trump Pardon the Former Honduran President? Follow the Tech Bros.

Last year, a US district court sentenced Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. Orlando was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in bribes and importing 500 tons of cocaine into the United States, where he was extradited after completing his second presidential term in 2022.

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice considered the Hernández conviction a victory. “As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement last year. “The Justice Department will hold accountable all those who engage in violent drug trafficking, regardless of how powerful they are or what position they hold.”

“I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”

That is, until this week, when President Donald Trump abruptly pardoned Hernández in the midst of a tumultuous Honduran election. “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The pardon came during the same week that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was facing scrutiny for his role in lethal strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats, and Trump accused Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro of “narco terrorism.” So why would an administration hell bent on punishing drug traffickers pardon a kingpin like Hernandez?

Some have argued that this could simply be a way to make trouble for the left- wing successor to Hernández, the current Honduran president Xiomara Castro, who has been a strong critic of Trump’s mass deportations. In a recent thread on X, right-wing extremism researcher Jennifer Cohn unearthed an article from January that Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone—the convicted and now pardoned felon and political strategist—wrote with conservative commentator Shane Trejo. They suggested that Trump pardon Hernández as a way of trolling Castro:

Castro’s statements in recent weeks in defiance of President Trump’s proposal of mass deportations have raised her profile and caused enmity to build against her from the ‘America First’ right. Castro’s provocations of President Trump, a desperate attempt to rally Hondurans to her side in an election year, may backfire and prove to be her undoing as Trump has quite a bit of leverage at his disposal to upend her fledgling regime.

But they went further in elaborating the benefits of this strategy. In helping to unseat Castro, Stone and Trejo wrote, Trump could both “crush socialism and save a freedom city in Honduras.” The “freedom city” in question, they explained, was Próspera, a special economic zone founded in Honduras by a cadre of American tech titans including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen—both friends and fans of Trump family.

While Hernández strongly supported Próspera, his successor, Castro, spoke out against the project, which she saw as merely a shelter for foreign actors to undermine Honduran sovereignty and to skirt labor and environmental regulations they may face elsewhere. Last year, the Honduran Supreme Court declared special economic zones like Próspera unconstitutional, a move that Stone and Trejo described as “a starkly political maneuver.”

Próspera is an example of the tech-right concept of the network state, a phrase coined by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan. I wrote about it earlier this year:

In a 2021 essay on his website, Srinivasan laid out his vision for people seeking to build a new utopia or, as he put it, “a fresh start.” Sure, there were conventional ways to do this—forming a new country through revolution or war. But that would be, well, really hard, not to mention unpredictable. A cruise ship or somewhere in space were appealing options, but both presented ­logistical challenges. Far simpler and more practical was “tech Zionism,” creating an online nation, complete with its own culture, economy, tax structure, and, of course, startup-friendly laws.

Eventually, Srinivasan mused, such a community could acquire actual physical property where people would gather and live under the laws dreamed up by the founders—a “reverse diaspora,” he called it—but that land didn’t even need to be contiguous. “A community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online,” he said, “and only then comes together in person to build dwellings and structures.” Acknowledging that the idea might sound a little goofy—like live-action Minecraft—he emphasized that it was also a serious proposition. “Once we remember that Facebook has 3B users, Twitter has 300M, and many individual influencers”—himself included—“have more than 1M followers,” he wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we can build a 1-10M person social network with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the world.”

A network state would, like a kind of Pac-Man, gobble up little pieces of actual land, eventually amassing so much economic power that other nations would be forced to recognize it. Once that happens, laws in more conventional nations could become almost irrelevant. Why on earth would, say, a pharmaceutical company with a new drug choose to spend billions of dollars and decades on mandated testing when it could go to a deregulated network state and take it to market in record time? As Srinivasan argued in a Zoom talk at last year’s conference, “Just like it was easier to start bitcoin and then to reform the Fed,” he said, “it is literally easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA.”

Trump has expressed some interest in this idea; on the campaign trail, he proposed building “freedom cities” on federal land.

Still, it’s not entirely clear why the American president would care so much about saving a special economic zone in Latin America. That is, until one takes a look at Próspera’s Trump-aligned investors. That list includes Paypal’s Thiel, a Trump campaign donor who also is said to have played a key role in the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. Another prominent Próspera investor is venture capitalist Andreessen, who made significant campaign contributions to Trump and has also served as an adviser. Both Andreessen and Thiel have investment companies that benefit from government tech and defense contracts awarded under Trump.

At any rate, Stone appears to be taking a victory lap for having engineered the pardon. “Thank you, President Trump, for doing justice and granting the presidential pardon in the case of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was framed by Biden for an alleged drug trafficking that never existed,” he posted last week. “For a long time, I have advocated for a pardon in this case.”

Indeed, as he put it in his January article:

Castro’s regime could be upended and Honduras liberated without firing a single shot or deploying a single troop in what would be a massive strategic victory for US interests in the region. May the Próspera experiment prevail, the common good be saved, and global leftism be damned by the benevolent hand of President Trump!

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Team Trump Strips “Renewable Energy” From the Name of an Iconic National Lab

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

The Trump administration has renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, now calling it the National Laboratory of the Rockies, marking an identity shift for the Colorado institution that has been a global leader in wind, solar, and other renewable energy research.

“The new name reflects the Trump administration’s broader vision for the lab’s applied energy research, which historically emphasized alternative and renewable sources of generation, and honors the natural splendor of the lab’s surroundings in Golden, Colorado,” said Jud Virden, laboratory director, in a statement.

He did not specify what this “broader vision” would mean for the lab’s programs or its staff of about 4,000.

The renaming is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to deemphasize or cut the parts of the federal government that support renewable energy, while also expanding federal support for fossil fuels.

Asked for details, the Department of Energy said in an email that the renaming “reflects the Department’s renewed focus on ‘energy addition,’ rather than the prioritization of specific energy resources.”

If the name change heralds a shift in the lab’s direction, it would be “like losing several major land grant research universities all at once.”

A lab spokesman had no additional information about whether there will be changes to programs or headcount at the lab.

Bill Ritter, a Democrat who was governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011, said it’s reasonable to worry that the name change signals that the federal government is abandoning the lab’s status as a world leader in renewable energy research. “It’s an iconic research facility,” he said.

Underscoring this point, he recalled a trip to Israel while he was governor. “The head of their renewable energy laboratory said, ‘I have nothing to tell you, because you come from the place that has the best renewable energy laboratory in the world,’” Ritter said.

After leaving office, Ritter founded the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, which specializes in energy policy research, and is now a consultant on energy business and policy.

Based on this experience, he thinks that anything the Trump administration does to divert from the lab’s mission is harmful to the United States’ ability to remain a major player in the energy economy of the near future.

“We’ll no longer be competitive in renewables research with China or India or other countries that are still heading toward the renewable energy transition at a very fast pace,” he said.

People with close ties to the lab were not surprised by the name change, given the administration’s broader goals.

“In the early days of DOGE people there were whispering about a name change to avoid the ire of MAGAs,” said Matt Henry, a Montana-based social scientist who worked at the lab from February 2024 to August 2025, in a post on Bluesky. “It pissed me off—prioritizing the preservation of the institution at the expense of its [stated] mission? So disappointing.”

He was referring to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which sought to cut federal spending in the early months of the Trump administration. The term MAGA refers to President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and movement.

Dustin Mulvaney, a San Jose State University environmental studies professor, said if the name change is a sign of a significant change in the lab’s work, it would be “like losing several major land grant research universities all at once.”

Mulvaney has done projects in partnership with people at the lab. An important part of the institution’s work, he said, is that its research is free and accessible to the public, helping businesses and universities that may not be able to afford the work of private research firms.

The lab’s mission has included consulting to help communities benefit from new energy technologies, and ensure smooth transitions away from fossil fuels.

This work meant that the lab was out of step with an administration that has said it disagrees with the idea of a transition away from fossil fuels and has sought to impede funding and development of renewable energy.

The lab was established in 1974 as the Solar Energy Research Institute, part of a law signed by President Gerald Ford to facilitate alternatives to importing oil from the Middle East, according to a history on the lab’s website. The US was suffering through high gasoline prices amid tensions with oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia.

“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” said Audrey Robertson, assistant secretary of energy, in a statement. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand.”

In 1977, the federal government selected Golden, Colorado, as the location for the lab. In 1991, the Solar Energy Research Institute became the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of a change by the administration of President George H. W. Bush that also elevated the institution to become part of the country’s national lab system.

But the lab’s history has also included budget cuts and periods when its work fell out of favor with presidential administrations, including layoffs and funding cuts under President Ronald Reagan. Trump proposed substantial cuts during his first term, but Congress retained much of the funding.

The Trump administration’s budget proposal, issued in May, calls for cuts across non-defense discretionary spending, including on energy research, but the budget process is still underway.

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One on One With Trump’s Black MAGA Pastor

Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell is one of the most prominent Black conservatives in President Donald Trump’s orbit. It all started last summer when the president visited Sewell’s 180 Church while campaigning in Detroit. A month later, Sewell spoke at the Republican National Convention. And in January, he prayed for the new president during his inauguration inside the US Capitol. As Sewell’s voice echoed around the domed rotunda, the prayer sounded familiar to many. That’s because Sewell adapted Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

As Trump dismantles DEI policies around the country and pushes efforts to erase Black history from schools and museums, Sewell remains one of the president’s most prominent Black defenders and argues that the Trump presidency is actually improving Black Americans’ lives.

“I believe that racism is when you close the door of opportunity to people because of their skin color, intentionally or unintentionally,” Sewell says. “And I believe President Trump is a anti-racist because he opened the door of opportunity to somebody like me, in a context where nobody would vote for him.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Sewell sits down with host Al Letson to talk about his upbringing as a drug dealer in Detroit, his conversion to Christianity, and his inauguration prayer. Letson challenges Sewell’s ideas about racism, his support of Charlie Kirk, and his defense of the Trump administration’s rollback of DEI policies.

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Pete Hegseth Finds His Fall Guy

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remains under intense scrutiny following reports that he gave a spoken order to kill survivors of a boat strike, an allegation that has since labeled Hegseth the “Secretary of War Crimes.” But it appears that amid the fallout, Hegseth has found a potential fall guy: Admiral Frank Bradley, the Special Operations commander who oversaw the September 2 strikes.

Here is Hegseth on Monday referring to the September 2 strikes as “the combat decisions [Bradley] has made,” a line many viewed as attempting to directly place blame on a subordinate.

Let’s make one thing crystal clear:

Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.

America is fortunate to have such men protecting…

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) December 1, 2025

Then again, on Tuesday: “All these strikes, they’re making judgment calls, ensuring they defend the American people,” Hegseth told reporters, saying nothing of his own role in the strikes, which have more generally been likened to extrajudicial killings.

Hegseth: "As President Trump always has our back, we always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations. All these strikes, they're making judgement calls ensuring they defend the American people. They've done the right things. We'll keep doing that."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-02T17:27:58.563Z

A similar framing came from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said on Monday that Bradley “worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed.”

The apparent, coordinated effort to distance Hegseth from the September 2 boat strikes stems from an exclusive report from the Washington Post last week alleging that Hegseth ordered a follow-up strike on two people who had survived the initial bombing of their boat on September 2. The attack kicked off what has since exploded into an extended campaign of lethal hits on suspected drug boats from Venezuela, despite mounting evidence that casts doubt on the assertion that those killed were even trafficking drugs into the United States. According to tracking work from the New York Times, at least 80 people have been killed in 21 strikes.

Hegseth has since blasted the allegations as “fake news.” He also respondedwith his version of an apparent joke: a fake image of a Franklin the Turtle children’s book titled Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists, with the titular character shown in military gear, firing at targets in the sea from a helicopter.

Kids Can Press, which has published many of the Franklin the Turtle books, condemned Hegseth’s post on Monday night, saying it contradicted its values of “kindness, empathy, and inclusivity.”

Lawmakers, including at least one top Republican, have indicated targeting shipwrecked survivors may constitute a war crime. (The Department of Defense’s own “Law of War Manual” prohibits “no quarter” declarations, which includes “conduct[ing] hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors.”) Republican-led committees in the House and Senate have since announced investigations into the report.

“If [the order] occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and a former chair of the Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s Face the Nation.

“Pete Hegseth is a war criminal and should be fired immediately,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) posted on X.

The timing of Hegseth’s latest scandal hits at a larger irony, as it follows a November social media video featuring six Democratic lawmakers that sought to remind military officers that they “must refuse illegal orders” and “stand up for our laws and our Constitution.” The video enraged both Hegseth and President Donald Trump, who promptly accused the Democrats, many of whom are former military or intelligence, of “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”

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