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Scott Dworkin: Trump Sons Cash in, DOGE Strikes Out

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2026 //
5

Scott Dworkin runs a Democratic activist’s blog, raising money for candidates and exposing Trump scandals and grifts. I subscribe and encourage you to do the same.

He writes:

A NEW TRUMP BUSINESS: THE PENTAGON

A paper trail of federal money keeps showing up right behind the Trump name. Don Jr. joined drone maker Unusual Machines’ advisory board in November 2024—and within a year, one of the company’s largest orders ever was placed by the US Army.

Last August, Don Jr.’s firm, 1789 Capital, bought into a startup called Vulcan Elements; three months later it landed a $620 million loan, the biggest in the Pentagon’s lending office history. ProPublica found the loan was initiated by senior White House official Peter Navarro—a friend of Don Jr.’s—and pushed through in a matter of weeks, sending Vulcan’s value skyrocketing from $200 million toward $2 billion.

The sons swear their names have nothing to do with it, but the record says otherwise: roughly $3.7 billion in federal money went to at least ten companies tied to the brothers since the regime took power. That’s your April taxes, meant to defend the country, rerouted to whoever hired the right last name.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is now demanding the Pentagon’s inspector general investigate: “his sons are cashing in on defense contracts funded by hardworking taxpayers.”

They built this in the dark to work in secret, betting nobody would ever turn on the lights. The investigation just started, the receipts are already public, and every dollar gets traced. This fight is only beginning.

DOGE IS DEAD. THE DAMAGE ISN’T.

DOGE’s mandate expired July 4, the end date written into Trump’s own executive order. Elon Musk swore he’d cut $2 trillion. DOGE’s website claims $215 billion—a number they haven’t updated since January and that budget experts don’t buy. Even taking their figure at face value, that’s a dime in cuts for every dollar promised.

Molly Hardy was the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 2024 employee of the year. DOGE laid her off anyway. Then in March, the agency came crawling back, emailing to ask if she’d return. She turned them down—not bitter, just clear-eyed: “It didn’t feel good. It just felt really sad.”

She’s not alone, and that’s the part they didn’t see coming. All over the government, the wreckage is being reversed: HHS fired 10,000 workers and is now scrambling to hire 12,000. Agencies that bragged about the chainsaw are begging people to come back. Asked if shrinking the workforce was even still the goal, OPM chief Scott Kupor admitted: “I’m not hearing that.”

And when Congress asked what DOGE actually accomplished, budget director Russell Vought had nothing to show: “We have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report.”

The people who took a chainsaw to our government don’t get to slink off without a full accounting. We’ll see to that.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Musk, Elon, Trump

Why Ohio Got a Terrible Grade on the NPE Report

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2026 //
0

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, was the author of the recent report Public Schooling in America: Our 2026 Report Card on the States. The subtitle: THE BEST AND THE WORST STATEHOUSES FOR SUPPORTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THEIR STUDENTS.

She wrote recently to explain why Ohio received a low grade:

Ohio lost more points on privatization in the NPE Report Card than any other state — more than Florida, more than Arizona. Its charter and voucher policies are among the most expansive and least accountable in the nation. The only reason Ohio does not rank at the very bottom is that it continues to fund its public schools at a relatively adequate level. That margin is shrinking.

The charter sector tells a particularly troubling story. Half of all charter schools in Ohio are operated by for-profit companies — an unusually high share even by national standards. Yet nearly half of all charter schools that have ever opened with enrollment in the state have since closed, a closure rate of 49 percent. These are not isolated failures. They reflect a system designed with too few guardrails and too little accountability.

A significant portion of these for-profit schools are credit recovery operations and online schools — low-cost, maximum-profit models held to lower academic standards than traditional public schools. Nearly one in three charter students in Ohio — 30 percent — attends a virtual school or an institution where instruction is delivered primarily online.

What explains so much low-quality supply? Ohio’s authorizing structure is a central culprit. The state permits multiple authorizers, including nonprofits that collect millions in authorizing fees and have a financial incentive to approve and retain schools regardless of performance.

Ohio also has more voucher programs than any other state in the country — eight in total — further diverting public dollars away from the students and communities that depend on public schools.

If Ohio continues on its current trajectory, the consequences are predictable: further erosion of public school funding, further decline in the rankings, and fewer educational options as the neighborhood public school choice disappears. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Why Does Media Ignore Susan Collins’ Scandals?

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2026 //
23

We have read all about the scandals of Graham Platner. We know about the women he dated, the women he texted, and his tattoo. The media has written about all of them in detail.

What we don’t know is about the financial scandals of his opponent, Senator Susan Collins. Her husband is a lobbyist, and she has lovingly taken care of his business.

David Dayen, editor of The American Prospect, wrote about the media’s double standard here.

The Founding Fathers had a finely honed sense of the corroding power of corruption. They wrote prohibitions on self-enrichment and the pull of bribery directly into the Constitution on three separate occasions, banning foreign and domestic gifts, changes to presidential compensation during one’s period in office, and appointments for members of Congress that could be remunerative. They believed that someone treated well by a foreign potentate or stateside special interest would be naturally inclined to benefit them, if even unconsciously, and that a wall needed to be constructed to guard against this.

That the Supreme Court has directly or indirectly nullified these one by one is a tragedy. But the court of public opinion, at least as mediated by gatekeepers of information, has also separated what counts as corruption from what counts as a political scandal. Donald Trump personally earning $1.4 billion from a family cryptocurrency business that benefits from his administration’s lenient crypto policies (much of those crypto purchases coming directly from a foreign government) is less well known to the public than whatever wild thing he said on his personal social media site the night before.

By the same token, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a household name, and Darializa Avila Chevalier will soon be, because of what they say, or once said. Thomas Daffron is not a household name.

Daffron is Susan Collins’s husband. He was also a registered lobbyist and eventually became chief operating officer of a K Street consulting firm named Jefferson Consulting, prior to and after marrying Collins. This firm received $76 million in government contracts for acquisition and improvement consulting during Daffron’s tenure from 2006 to 2016. Much of it came after he became COO, and especially after Collins wrote a contracting reform bill in 2007, parts of which boosted Jefferson Consulting.

Some of the connections appeared rather clear. To use one example, the Collins bill required a strategic plan for acquisition at the Federal Acquisition Institute, and Jefferson billed the Federal Acquisition Institute for its strategic plan. This pattern repeated; the bill put in rules mandating precisely the services Jefferson Consulting provided.

This is not a new revelation. It was released on the eve of Collins’s last re-election campaign six years ago. Collins’s response was that Daffron, the man she has been married to since 2012 and has known since the 1970s, never officially lobbied her. Collins won re-election and that was that, until her Democratic opponent for Senate this year, Graham Platner, brought it up as part of an anti-corruption agenda he released a week ago. He proposed the “Collins Rule”: Any senator whose spouse or the firm where they work receives government contracts should have to recuse themselves from voting or oversight work on that contract.

Collins was apoplectic. She tweeted that the claim was “outrageous and false,” and that she was defamed as a criminal. (Platner replied that he didn’t say it was criminal, but that it should be.) She sent her campaign manager to stand outside Platner’s press event and rebut the charges. The campaign manager said that money is delivered to contractors through the executive branch and not the Senate, eliding the fact that the bill Collins wrote benefited the firm her good friend and future spouse worked at.

For six years, this has been a nonstory, because we don’t have a political culture that imprints this kind of financial machination and leveraging of political power as a scandal. It’s either too complicated or just politics, and people move on.

Scandals are reserved for old internet comments and personal failings. Of these, Platner has plenty. When I talked to him last week, I mentioned that he’s become like a figure in Homer’s epics who is always preceded with an epithet: the “scandal-plagued” Graham Platner.

He’s talked about these scandals countless times, and I don’t need to rehash them here. But you can believe both that personal character is important in assessing elected officials and make room within that definition of character to cover how their actions in office affect their personal bank accounts.

“We’ve been working within a political system that for so long now, this form of self-dealing and self-enrichment has become intrinsic to the system itself,” Platner told me. “A lot of people who cover this stuff have created this framework in which that kind of thing is not even worthy of discussion … We write off actual scandal, legalized corruption, because we’ve been so immunized to it.”

This may seem solely like a media critique, and yes: It’s partially that. Headlines like “Platner Tests Democrats’ Tolerance for Scandal” are rarely matched by ones like “Collins Tests Republicans’ Tolerance for Self-Dealing.” But that takes everyone but the media off the hook.

Platner and Collins are locked in a virtually tied race, according to recent polling. Other statewide Maine races show the Democrat comfortably in front. Part of Collins’s still being in the game is due to her experience and durability, but part of it is the way in which this definition of political scandal is massaged and shaped.

In her career, Susan Collins hasn’t faced a drumbeat of questions about her consistent violations of the congressional stock trading disclosure laws that she co-authored. She hasn’t had to answer many queries about a net worth that has more than doubled since 2012, after her marriage to Daffron. She doesn’t respond to reporters about her family stock holdings in Amazon and UnitedHealth and Visa, and the votes she makes affecting those businesses.

She isn’t forced to explain why she switched her vote to allow a tax break for private equity managers to stand, and how now private equity managers are supporting her re-election with millions of dollars. She hasn’t said much about the 100 billionaires who are funding a super PAC on her behalf (run by a lobbyist whom Daffron recently consulted for) that has spent $9 million in attack ads just through the end of last month. There’s been little about how one of the billionaires is a private equity mogul who destroyed paper mills in Maine and put residents out of work.

We all know chapter and verse about Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, his texts to women other than his wife early in his marriage, and allegations of misconduct from former girlfriends (that one he vociferously denies). These are the kinds of revelations that are grist for gossip. We don’t have a mentality that puts financial scandal and personal scandal on the same plane. Old tweets are easy to cover, but they’re also easy to understand and to render judgments in ways not applied to things that take more consideration.

The people who decide what does and doesn’t matter in politics also don’t speak the language of no-bid contracts, pay-to-play deals, and family benefits from contractswith the same zeal reserved for putting an old tweet on a screen. Maybe that’s because corruption hits both ways and can blow back on one’s own party, and maybe that’s because personal peccadilloes are a shortcut and time-saver.

Either way, this dearth of consideration has saddled us with this myopic definition of scandal that contributes to a disaffection with politics. If graft is seen as normal, the ability for reform and even progress feels remote.

Please open the link to finish reading this examination of the media’s double standards.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, For-Profit, Maine, Scandals

Harry S Truman: The President Must Never Engage in Any Business Transaction

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2026 //
2

Truman didnt say anything about the President’s children!

Mary Trump wrote about how Eric and Donald Jr. are cashing in on their father’s Presidency.

Are there no laws against conflict of interest? Nepotism?

And to think that Republicans were outraged by Hunter Biden! Whatever he did (a seat on the Burisma board; name-dropping his father in business meetings?) is chump change compared to the money-grubbing Trump boys.

Where is the outrage?

Mary Trump writes:

Donald has always insisted that his children run their businesses independently. We have been told repeatedly that there is a bright line separating the presidency from the Trump family’s financial interests. We have also been told to ignore the remarkable coincidence that, every time Donald returns to power, his family somehow discovers lucrative new industries that depend almost entirely on decisions made by the federal government.

Those coincidences are becoming increasingly difficult to believe.

Since Donald returned to the White House, his two oldest and arguably most useless sons have dramatically expanded their investments into industries that rely almost entirely on Pentagon spending and federal policy. These are not businesses they spent years building. They are not industries in which either Don Jr. or Eric has any meaningful experience. They simply happen to be some of the fastest growing sectors benefiting from the Trump regime’s priorities.

Coincidentally, of course.

Don Jr.’s venture capital firm acquired a stake in Vulcan Elements shortly before the company received a $620 million Pentagon loan. According to reporting by ProPublica, that loan was accelerated after intervention from the White House.

Eric, meanwhile, serves as Chief Strategy Advisor for a robotics company despite possessing no discernible qualifications for such a role. That same company later received a $24 million Pentagon contract.

Neither Don Jr. nor Eric serves in government.

Neither is required to comply with federal ethics rules.

Neither files public financial disclosures.

Yet both continue to profit from industries whose fortunes increasingly depend on decisions being made by the administration run by their father.

Late in 2025, the Pentagon established the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, appropriately abbreviated DAWG, to rapidly expand the military’s use of drones, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Initially funded at roughly $226 million for fiscal year 2026, the Pentagon is now requesting an astonishing $54.6 billion for fiscal year 2027.

That represents an increase of more than 24,000 percent.

It is also larger than the entire proposed budget for the United States Marine Corps.

Think about that for a moment.

The Pentagon is proposing to spend more money on autonomous warfare than on the Marine Corps itself.

And it just so happens that Donald’s two oldest sons have recently become enthusiastic investors in autonomous defense technologies.

This is what MSNBC reported:

This is a major business move and another in a series of examples of the president’s family’s dealings seeming to intersect with his administration. In this case, the Pentagon, as the war with Iran rages on. Just yesterday, drone maker PowerUS announced it will merge with a golf course holding company backed by Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., with plans to create a new publicly traded company. That new company calls the Trumps notable investors and says it aims to support American drone industry dominance. The company is expected to compete for lucrative military contracts, trying to fill a void created after the Trump administration banned new foreign made drones on national security grounds. An investment firm joined by Donald Trump Jr. shortly after his father’s reelection has also taken a significant stake in another defense contractor supplying AI powered military technology to the Pentagon. The Trumps maintain their father is not involved in their business dealings, and the White House says President Trump acts only in the best interests of the American people.

The phrase “notable investor” deserves closer examination.

It does not mean Don Jr. or Eric possess unique knowledge about robotics, drones, artificial intelligence, or national defense.

It certainly does not suggest either of them suddenly became experts in autonomous weapons systems. It means they are the sons of the President of the United States. That relationship is their greatest asset. It is the reason companies want them associated with their businesses. It is the reason investors pay attention. And it is almost certainly the reason government contracts suddenly become easier to obtain.

No private citizen should be allowed to leverage proximity to presidential power in this way.

Yet that appears to be exactly what is happening.

Members of Congress are beginning to ask difficult questions.

Following ProPublica’s investigation into Vulcan Elements, Democratic lawmakers demanded explanations after learning that the company’s $620 million Pentagon loan was reportedly handled very differently from virtually every other application under consideration.

According to the report, Don Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, purchased a stake in Vulcan during 2025. Only months later, the Pentagon approved the largest loan ever issued through its Office of Strategic Capital.

Internal documents reportedly revealed that Vulcan’s application moved through the approval process with unusual speed after direct involvement from senior White House adviser Peter Navarro.

One anonymous Pentagon official summarized the situation bluntly.

The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.

The Pentagon insists political considerations played no role in the decision. Don Jr. likewise denies participating in securing the loan. Those denials become increasingly difficult to accept when viewed alongside the broader pattern.

One contract might be coincidence.

One investment might be luck.

One White House intervention might be explainable.

But eventually coincidences stop looking like coincidences.

They begin looking like a business model.

The deeper problem is that none of this violates the disclosure rules that govern executive branch officials because Don Jr. and Eric are not executive branch officials.

That loophole allows enormous sums of money to flow toward businesses connected to the First Family while shielding the public from understanding the true extent of their financial interests.

Transparency disappears. Accountability disappears. And public trust disappears right alongside them.

Unfortunately, this pattern does not stop with rare earth minerals or autonomous weapons.

It extends into robotics as well. 

Apparently, Eric Trump has now become an expert on robotics too, a development that would be more amusing if it were not attached to Pentagon spending, military applications, and the rapidly expanding market for autonomous weapons systems.

This is what Eric Trump said in a FOX state TV Interview:

We have to win robotics in the United States of America. You had a great segment two days ago, Maria, about the robot in Beijing that was literally running marathons and beating the fastest marathoners by seven, eight minutes for a full marathon. These are in the very early days. We better be winning this race in the United States of America. We are the greatest economy in the world, and that is exactly what this company is doing. I am telling you, he is doing a phenomenal job. When you go up and interact with these robots and they fist bump you, they high five you, they follow your commands. You bring in the AI economy. It is going to change industry, it is going to change military application, it is going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited and I think it is a very beautiful thing, but we must win this race.

What race, exactly?

The marathon the robot is running?

In what universe does the world become a better place because we have fast-running robots that can fist bump people? Although, to be fair, I would be more than happy to have robots replace Eric and Donnie.

Eric is listed as Chief Strategy Advisor, which, after listening to him speak, makes perfect sense if the strategy is to say a lot of words without demonstrating any understanding of the subject matter. In April 2026, the Pentagon awarded Foundation Future Industries a $24 million contract to test its Phantom robotic systems for military applications. That contract immediately drew attention from lawmakers concerned about potential conflicts of interest.

This is what Senator Elizabeth Warren said:

Is the Pentagon just a cash machine for Trump’s kids now? This looks like corruption in plain sight.

Yes. It does.

The Pentagon has defended the contracting process and has not alleged wrongdoing by Eric or the company. Of course it has not. This is Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon. Expecting it to objectively assess whether Donald Trump’s son is benefiting from conflicts of interest is like asking Donald to fact-check his own net worth.

We need a slightly more objective entity to decide whether there is wrongdoing here.

In May 2026, Ranking Member Robert Garcia wrote a letter to the Department of Defense laying out the concerns with unusual clarity.

Eric and Donnie’s purchases, consultancies, and advisory roles create unprecedented intertwining of Donald’s personal financial interests with U.S. policy and national security. Each new venture opens new opportunities to direct DOD funds to the first family’s pockets, and the Trump administration appears to be taking advantage of those opportunities. Such actions raise concerns that DOD is rewarding companies with contracts for recruiting a Trump family member into their ownership group or directly onto their payroll. Such companies have amassed over $725 million in loans, grants, and awards since Donald took office.

No kidding.

The coincidences are mind-boggling.

The Pentagon maintains that its decisions are based on merit, which is a difficult claim to take seriously when Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense. His appointment alone is evidence that merit is not exactly the organizing principle of this administration.

Because neither Eric nor Donnie is subject to federal disclosure requirements, the public has very limited visibility into the scale of their financial exposure. That is precisely how this kind of corruption is allowed to happen. The President’s children can invest in, advise, or promote companies that stand to benefit from federal contracts, while the American people are left guessing how much money they are making and how directly their father’s administration may be helping them make it.

This is the Trump family business model in its purest form. Find an industry dependent on government action. Attach the Trump name to a company operating in that space. Let the machinery of government create the opening. Then insist there is nothing to see when the money begins flowing.

The problem is not merely that Eric and Donnie are unqualified. That has always been the least surprising part of the story. The problem is that their lack of qualifications does not matter. In fact, it may be part of the point. Companies do not need them for their expertise. They need them for their access.

This is the same pattern that has defined Donald’s entire life. He has never understood the difference between public power and private profit because nobody ever forced him to learn it. Fred Trump built the empire. Donald inherited it, hollowed it out, sold off pieces of it, and survived only because other people kept rescuing him. Now his sons are applying the same principle to national security.

The stakes, however, are much higher this time.

We are not talking about failed casinos, licensing deals, branded steaks, or golf course scams. We are talking about drones, rare earth minerals, autonomous warfare, artificial intelligence, robotics, and Pentagon contracts. We are talking about the future of American military policy and billions of dollars in public money being routed through a system in which the president’s family appears to have direct financial interests.

There needs to be an investigation.

Someday, when we finally get through this mess, Eric and Donnie need to be held accountable, stripped of their ill-gotten gains, and, if warranted by the evidence, prosecuted. The American people should not be treated as a revenue stream for the Trump family. The Pentagon should not function as another Trump family ATM. National security should not be turned into a business opportunity for two men whose only qualification is their last name.

Categories Accountability, Character, Corruption, Elections, For-Profit, Fraud

A Portrait of Corruption

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2026 //
0

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut gave a stunning speech about the normalcy of corruption in the Trump White House. Senator Murphy spoke about “500 Days of Corruption,” in which he detailed numerous deals that enriched the Trump sons, Don Jr. and Eric. Typically, they invested in a company and with days or weeks, that company received a government contract.

Set aside 30 minutes and watch this speech. It is startling, infuriating, outrageous.

Just yesterday (June 29), the media reported that President Trump made $2.2 billion in 2025. $2.2 billion!

The New York Times reported:

President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows.

All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.

Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.

Remember how the Republicans in Congress excoriated Hunter Biden because he was paid to serve as a board member for a company called Burisma in Ukraine? How many times did Trump and his allies speak with derision about “the Biden crime family”?

Penny-ante when compared to the shameless profiteering of the Trump family.

The President should have no problem paying his $5 million debt to E. Jean Carroll, which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn or even the $83 million judgment that Carroll won in state court but Trump is litigating to avoid paying.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Character, Corruption, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Sons of Trump and Lutnick Cash in on Federal Contracts

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2026 //
7

Paul Krugman wrote about a giant-sized scandal that involves corruption, conflict of interest, nepotism, any number of violations of the law and the Constitution. The story appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Will anything happen to the perpetrators? Not as long as Trump is President.

The attitude of Republicans: Move on, nothing to see here.

Krugman wrote:

It’s kind of hard to believe, but the original Borat movie was 20 years ago. It’s time for a second sequel. And I already have the title. It would be Corruption for Make Benefit Glorious Family of Trump. 

I hope that some of my listeners are young enough to not remember the original Borat movie. But it was a mockumentary, a satire, in which Sacha Baron Cohen pretended to be a journalist from Kazakhstan investigating and interviewing Americans about American mores. It was not about Kazakhstan, although he did insult the country along the way. 

The reason I think about it is that today’s New York Times has a piece that reports, investigative reporting, on an immense mining deal in Kazakhstan, which, what do you know, turns out to be a big profit center for the Trump sons and also the sons of Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary. 

Check out the investigative reporting for the details, but basically here’s another one, another big one.

It’s part of an immense series of corrupt deals, often with petrostates — which Kazakhstan is — that financially benefit Donald Trump and his family and some of his cronies and cabinet members as well and their families. It’s all on a truly epic scale. 

This is a message I have been trying to get across. I don’t think many people even now understand just how much of a departure what’s happening now is from past US history. I still see people saying we might be, could be heading for another Gilded Age. But we have a level of concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people that is something like three times what it was at the peak of the Gilded Age. We’re in a super duper Gilded Age. 

And I sometimes hear people say, well, could we be returning to old kinds of corruption? Might we have another Teapot Dome scandal? Well, my God. Teapot Dome was a scandal actually involving mineral rights and bribes during the Harding administration, although not bribes to the president’s family, which is, again, something entirely new. The scale of the bribes was about $500,000: adjusting for inflation, that’s something like $9 million today.

So how much has Trump enriched himself since returning to the White House about 500 days ago? The answer is certainly more than four billion dollars, almost certainly more than four and a half, maybe five billion dollars. Divide that by 500 and we basically have a Teapot Dome sized corruption scandal on an average day under Trump.

So it’s basically day after day of scandals as big or bigger than Teapot Dome. Our corrupt grandfathers, great-grandfathers were pikers compared with this, just as the Gilded Age robber barons were pikers compared with the modern-day tech bros. 

This is obviously not good. It’s actually quite horrifying. How did we so quickly descend into becoming a truly massively corrupt country on a level that we used to think of as being associated only with tinpot dictators in the third world? And yet here we are. 

This ought to be a political issue and it ought to be a legal issue as soon as the government is back in the hands of people who actually take the rule of law seriously. Again, without going into the details of the deal, it’s surely illegal. I mean, it’s illegal under the Emoluments Clause. Probably since there are definitely Kazakhs on the take as well, it’s illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This is just, it’s illegal up the wazoo.

Of course, it will not be prosecuted as long as Trump is in the White House. But forget any Democrat who isn’t promising to go after this massive corruption when they regain power. If they don’t, then none of this matters, but that should be a core part of anybody’s platform. 

I’m not a political expert — sometimes I think nobody is — but my God, again, this corruption is so blatant. And it does resonate with people. It’s really clear that corruption at the top and the sense that ordinary people are paying the price while people with power enrich themselves is an effective popular issue. That is actually the issue that brought Viktor Orban down in Hungary, which is one of the hopeful signs for what may happen to America going down the pike. 

So here we are, just to remind you that this scandal, it’s a huge thing. It’s page one in the New York Times, but in a way it’s actually kind of ordinary, since even this size of scandal is happening every few weeks these days.

Do not make the mistake of treating what’s going on as in any sense normal. This is hugely abnormal, and I believe that the American people will understand that it’s abnormal even if pundits get bored of talking about the corruption. So drive it home, maybe for make benefit American people instead of the Trump family.

Here is the article in The New York Times describing the lucrative deal in Kazakhstan that will increase the wealth of the sons of Trump and Lutnick. It is a gift article.

When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York, President Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington.

During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.

Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.

It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.

Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.

Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.

Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.

The Kazakh deal was ultimately signed on Nov. 6, six days after the investment involving the Trump sons and their partners, which was not publicly disclosed at the time.

The arrangement is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project, according to federal filings examined by The New York Times.

All 14 of these companies have either benefited directly from offers of financial assistance from the Trump administration, or have pending permit applications before the Commerce Department, which Mr. Lutnick oversees, The Times found. The total amount of federal funding that the Trump administration has provided or is considering providing to the companies exceeds $8.9 billion, according to public statements by the companies and federal government.

Categories Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Scott Dworkin: Don Jr. Cashes in on His Connections

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2026 //
1

Scott Dworkin writes a blog to promote voting, especially voting for Democrats.

He posted this recently, the ongoing saga of the Trump Kids Getting Rich:

TRUMP TARIFFED THEM. THEY PAID HIS SON.

Donald Trump Jr. (L) and Anant Ambani (R)

Last summer, the regime went to war with one of the richest families on earth. Trump hit India with 50% tariffs built to punish the Ambanis—the billionaire family whose company had made a fortune off cheap Russian oil.

Then Donald Trump Jr. flew to India in November 2025, toured the family’s private zoo, and danced with their heir that night. Four months later, according to a ProPublica investigation, the Ambanis poured at least $100 million into an obscure Texas oil startup that Trump Jr. had secretly acquired a stake in.

Soon after, the Ambanis received what they’d been lobbying for: tariffs slashed on Indian imports, a license to buy Venezuelan oil, and a sanctions waiver to buy Russian oil. Trump personally celebrated the deal on Truth Social.

Forbes estimated that Trump Jr.’s net worth rocketed from roughly $50 million to $300 million since his dad returned to office—based only on publicly disclosed investments.

When Democrats take back Congress, every one of these deals gets investigated.

Categories Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Trump Gives Contract for Coal-Fired Plant to MAGA Ally with Zero Experience

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2026 //
4

During the 2024 campaign, Trump met with leaders of the oil and gas industry and asked them to raise $1 billion for his campaign. He promised to be their champion.

I don’t know whether the industry delivered for Trump, but he has certainly delivered for them. He has opposed alternative sources of energy, treats climate change as a hoax, and canceled federal contracts for wind and solar projects that were well underway. He loves fossil fuels and plans to revive the coal industry. Trump is a champion of “clean coal,” whatever that is.

While Europe, China, and Japan forge ahead with the expansion of alternative sources of energy, the U.S. is investing in the energy sources of the past.

Redeeming his promise to the coal industry, Trump recently launched planning for a coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. The contract for the design and feasibility was awarded to a Trump crony with no experience in the field.

A man the Trump administration picked to be a key player at the fore of a U.S. coal renaissance is likely more familiar to QAnon circles than energy ones.

TerraSpark’s project carries big promises. The proposed 1.6 gigawatt facility — touted by the Trump administration last week — would be the first new coal-fired power plant built in the U.S since 2013. It vows to infuse up to 1,000 jobs into West Virginia, a state rich in coal-mining history that’s seen its industry wither over the past two decades.

But few if any Trump administration energy allies have heard of TerraSpark or Alex Phillips, who is running the company with two other people also lacking coal backgrounds. Even the Republican lawmaker whose district would host the massive coal plant and carbon capture project learned of it just two months before the Energy Department this month agreed to give it $18.5 million of taxpayer dollars to pay for a feasibility and design study.

While Phillips has no energy industry experience, he has hovered around Washington politics during the Trump era. The owner of a rural Virginia internet business served on telecommunications advisory boards. He was past president of a wireless internet company trade association that also had a political action committee. And he operated his own PAC, the Great American Patriot Project, that backed candidates who “adhere to the United States Constitution and America First principles.”

He made more of a name for himself within the MAGA movement through his American Priority Conference, known as AMPfest. It drew QAnon promoters and personalities like Roger Stone — President Donald Trump is a longtime friend and former client — former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and other MAGA influencers with a history of touting conspiracy theories, particularly the lie that widespread voter fraud cost Trump the 2020 election.

AMPfest and Phillips’ American Priority organization have since closed shop, with the last AMPfest held in October 2021 at Trump National Doral in Miami. Before then, however, he became integral enough to MAGA world to secure a speaking spot alongside far-right provocateurs like Alex Jones, Scott Pressler and Jack Posobiec at a rally on the eve of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 “Save America” event.

While Phillips did not end up speaking at that event — according to Mother Jones, which did not report why — he embraced election denier theories from the scene. He also encouraged then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 election, saying he “needs to step up.”

“I think that there’s been overwhelming evidence provided in so many different formats, ways, that any congressman or senator that doesn’t think that there was some kind of irregularity that needs to be looked at in these seven states is just not paying attention or is corrupt,” he told Citizen Media News outside of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Phillips referred questions to a public relations firm, which made another TerraSpark partner, Bill Tolpegin, available for comment. Tolpegin said in a statement that Phillips had no contact with the White House or Energy Department about the grant. Tolpegin said that the company “had no special, unique or otherwise different levels of access, communication with or attention from administration officials.”

But Phillips’ latest career act is nonetheless illustrative of Washington politics during Trump’s White House sequel, where allies have often won contracts or jobs.

“This is not normal,” Mike McKenna, an energy lobbyist who worked in the first Trump White House, said of DOE approving federal grants for a company with no track record in the industry.

McKenna said he is aware of two companies “with decades of experience in generating electricity” that have struggled to navigate DOE processes.

“These companies are no doubt going to ask if companies and people with no experience can do this, why can’t we?” he said. “I don’t want to be that guy, but this is obviously political. And the more political it is, the less likely it is to happen,” he said of building new coal plants.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement that Trump’s coal grants are part of his commitments to buoy the nation’s coal industry, such as directives to run coal plants beyond scheduled retirement dates that DOE has credited for preventing electricity blackouts.

“The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” she wrote in response to questions about Phillips and TerraSpark.

Rogers referred POLITICO to DOE for questions about the grant process. DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich said the department selected TerraSpark through a “competitive merit review process” that included evaluation of “technical merit, programmatic relevance, and the applicant’s ability to successfully execute the proposed work.” He did not address questions about Phillips.

“The economics of the project will speak for itself, and are highly competitive,” Tolpegin said.

Coal and carbon capture

What TerraSpark envisions is complex and expensive. A power plant the size it foresees would likely cost more than $1 billion — and that’s before accounting for technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions as proposed.

In addition to Phillips and Tolpegin, who calls himself a “serial entrepreneur,” the company has a third partner, Cory Cipra, a Kansas City-based technology consultant whom Tolpegin said has “a deep background working with utilities.” The company applied for the DOE grant in December and said it will not receive the funding until it comes up with the remaining $21.5 million needed to fund its study.

In an interview with POLITICO, Tolpegin said he founded the company with Phillips to bring online more energy generation “in a way that’s as clean as possible” that could eventually be “carbon negative.”

He called the company’s lack of experience in coal a “good thing.” Prior carbon capture attempts have been limited by “conventional” carbon capture technologies, he said.

“We’re not building your grandparents’ coal plant,” Tolpegin said. “We’re going to be building something new that I hope can flip the script on coal.”

The project was not on DOE’s radar a year ago, said Steve Winberg, who ran DOE’s fossil energy office in Trump’s first term and was undersecretary of infrastructure at DOE until May 2025. He said he knew some of the people involved in TerraSpark — he would not say who — but not Phillips.

The pool of potential grant winners was much larger earlier this winter. DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, which handles power generation and coal research, briefed the agency front office in early March on at least seven viable selections for the federal money, according to three people familiar with the process, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal government deliberations.

DOE ultimately picked two proposals for new coal plants, including a project in Alaska — which was awarded an $89 million grant — and the TerraSpark plan to build in West Virginia. Another two projects for existing plants also received awards. 

“Some of these companies are probably three connected guys who threw an application together,” said one DOE official granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with reporters. They said the TerraSpark proposal deserves scrutiny. “And the DOE review that occurred would likely not surface that and/or was specifically disinterested in figuring that out.”

TerraSpark does not have much of an online presence, registering its website in July 2025, according to a domain registry. Its website did not name any company officials until a press release for the DOE grant appeared late June 4.…

Kevin Hagerty, a commissioner of Grant County, where the project is slated to be located, said there had been rumors of a project but that he didn’t learn of specifics until DOE announced the grant. Nonetheless, he said people in the Trump-backing county were excited about the support for the state’s shrinking coal industry.

The project is in early stages. While TerraSpark said the project will be located in Mount Storm, it has not yet selected a location, and does not own land in the county.

The partners are also still exploring what specific end users, such as a data center, will be attached to the project.

On June 4, the day DOE announced its grant, TerraSpark’s website said the coal plant would be accompanied by a 1-gigawatt AI data center. By the next day, the website instead said the plan would be paired with a “multi-industry campus.”

Tolpegin said some details on the website were updated to correct “stale” information and that the “first phase” of the project would be building the coal plant in the next few years, with tenants to be determined later. The company has also said it eventually plans to connect the plant to the grid.

Uphill battle for new coal

Energy companies and utilities have been reluctant to build new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. for myriad reasons. Environmental regulations raised the cost of burning coal. A gusher of natural gas made that fuel more economically competitive. Plummeting solar and wind costs pushed more capital-intensive coal facilities out of the mix.

Yet tech companies have proven willing to explore costly energy projects like geothermal and nuclear to feed energy-hungry data centers. Trump, meanwhile, has pledged to revive “clean, beautiful coal.” Some coal backers are quietly optimistic that those trends will benefit them.

“You think about the speed to which you need to get a data center going, people assume it’s going to be natural gas, but then you’ve got that turbine problem — long lead time on those,” Winberg said. “A lot of people assume it’s going to be nuclear, but you’ve got a long, long lead time on the nuclear. So coal is starting to fit into the mix again.”

But analysts in the energy sector have been skeptical of the TerraSpark project’s viability.

Seth Feaster, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank that supports a shift to cleaner resources, said that while many large energy infrastructure projects are built by experienced energy utilities, DOE in its June grant announcement turned to companies that don’t appear to have deep pockets or relevant experience.

“Who’s financing them, who’s going to invest in them?” he said. The government grants will “help a little bit, but you’ve got to convince the markets of the credibility of your project.”

“I find that pretty thin at the moment here,” he said.

Ryan Sweezey, director of North American power and renewables at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, said that if the developers plan to have a data center or other industrial customers that directly tie in to the plant, coal boilers likely won’t be able to ramp up and down quickly enough without batteries.

Sweezey said the executives’ lack of experience in energy or coal plant development was a “major red flag.”

Hooking up AI data centers directly to power sources — an increasingly popular model for the electricity-devouring sector — is “very complicated” and requires “serious expertise,” said Sweezey.

Adding a carbon capture and storage system to the mix further complicates that picture, and would catapult the overall cost, which could be over $10 billion, he predicted. Tolpegin said the entire cost of the energy campus and coal plant could be “in the billions.”

TerraSpark has partnered with Mantel, a carbon capture startup founded by MIT alumni in 2022, and Sargent & Lundy, an energy engineering firm. The Chicago-based firm has built more than 100 projects related to carbon capture in the last five years, according to its website, and completed work on the Petra Nova project in Texas, the only U.S. power plant currently operating carbon capture at commercial scale.

In a statement, a Mantel spokesperson said TerraSpark is one of many customers and that it is “committed to delivering efficient, scalable carbon capture solutions wherever they can have the greatest impact.”

The energy technology service provider Babcock & Wilcox is also part of the project, along with carbon capture consultants Advanced Resources International.

In a statement, Babcock’s communications director, Sharyn Brooks, said the company has decades of experience with boiler technologies, which positions the company “to support advanced coal generation projects with proven, high-efficiency technologies.”

“Our role is focused on providing engineering and technical support,” Brooks said.

Representatives of Sargent & Lundy and Advanced Resources International did not respond to requests for comment.

Terraspark’s ambitious plans also call for building a new campus for West Virginia University to focus on extracting rare earth minerals from coal waste, and could eventually acquire coal ash from other locations to process for rare earths.

That would be a massive undertaking for any developer, said Rudra Kapila, a director of carbon management and hydrogen at think tank Third Way, who evaluated carbon capture grant proposals for DOE during the Biden administration.

“I mean, who is this Johnny?” she said.

Ben Lefebvre contributed to this report.

Categories Corruption, Environment, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Scott Maxwell: Voucher Schools in Florida Should Be Accountable

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2026 //
9

Scott Maxwell is a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. In this column, he argues that voucher schools in Florida should not be allowed to dodge accountability. And, he explains, they are completely unaccountable. The state Constitution requires that the state provide high-quality education, which voucher schools do not. He neglects to notice that the state Constitution states that no public money should go to religious schools. Not a penny, but most vouchers go to religious schools.

What is more, the voters of Florida rejected an effort to strip that language from the state Vonstitution in 2012.

Scott Maxwell wrote:

Teachers and parents have filed a landmark lawsuit challenging the legality of Florida’s billion-dollar school voucher system

The argument at the heart of their suit is that Florida’s constitution requires tax dollars be spent on “high-quality” education. Yet Florida’s voucher system is a black-hole of accountability, sometimes paying for kids to go to “schools” that are total disasters — where teachers lack degrees, inflate grades and use curriculum that is rubbish.

I’m not convinced the teachers and parents will win this lawsuit. In fact, I doubt they will. Similar challenges have been unsuccessful. And Gov. Ron DeSantis has done a pretty thorough job of stacking the courts with political allies, especially at the appellate level.

But I know for a fact the teachers and parents have a point. In fact, It’s inarguable. This newspaper has spent nearly a decade documenting voucher schools that failed children.

Often, the parents themselves were shocked and outraged to learn that schools were failing their kids and that there was little to no accountability.

The Sentinel’s multi-year “Schools Without Rules” investigation into voucher (or “scholarship”) schools found some schools employed teachers that lacked any teaching credentials or college degrees.

Some were such financial disasters, they shut down in the middle of the year, stranding families. (One in Orlando was evicted from a commercial complex where a neighboring tenant was “Drug Tests R Us.”)

Some refused to serve children with disabilities, whether it was autism or reliance on a wheelchair. Even more refused to teach children who are gay or had gay parents. These were schools eager for the public money but unwilling to serve all the public. None of this was discreet. Some had written policies saying that they wouldn’t serve children with Down’s syndrome or who uttered the sentence: “I am gay.”

Some schools taught junk science and bogus history, suggesting that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together and downplaying slavery and segregation.

And at some schools, parents were so appalled at what they found that they reported to the state things like “Cleaning lady substituting for teacher” and “I don’t see any evidence of academics.”

If you think any of that represents “high quality” education, you might also believe the mini tacos at 7-Eleven are five-star dining.

Many private schools that accept vouchers do stellar jobs and fill niche needs that public schools have historically struggled to meet. But too many taxpayer-funded schools are total trainwrecks. And the reason is that Florida has very few standards for voucher schools.

That is, in fact, the crux of the lawsuit, which lists about 20 different things that public schools are required to do by state law, but which all voucher schools are not.

Like providing certain levels of school safety staffing and having threat-management plans in place. Offering vetted curriculum and providing transportation. Hiring qualified teachers. And publicly posting test scores from state assessments that show whether students are actually learning anything. Public schools must do all of that.

The argument from choice-without-standards supporters is that parents should be able to choose any education they want for their kids without exception.

There are two problems with that argument.
One is that no other government-funded voucher program works that way — and for good reason. We don’t let recipients of food vouchers use them on Twinkies and Mountain Dew. This is public money meant to provide nutritional sustenance. So there are guidelines. The same way there is for Medicaid and Medicare. You don’t get to spent public money that’s meant to fulfill a public purpose on anything you like just because you invoke cries of “freedom” or “choice.”

The other problem is that using this money to provide “high quality” education isn’t optional. It’s part of the Florida Constitution — a point the lawsuit addresses when it says: “… choice does not change the Constitution. When public funds are used to educate a child, that child is entitled to the same level of educational opportunities, the same quality standards, and the same basic protections.”

You can certainly make the argument that some public schools have failed some students. Do you know how we know that? Because these schools were required by law to disclose their test scores, standards, hiring practices and curriculum.
In fact, newspapers in Florida were often the ones that exposed problems at public schools.

And most anytime we did, public officials would spring to action and agree reform was needed.
Yet most every time we’ve exposed problems in taxpayer-funded voucher schools, state lawmakers leaders looked the other way.
The most pathetic part of all this is that it’s easily fixable.

Florida could still offer “choice,” but also demand that any schools that receive public money meet basic standards. Hire qualified teachers. Post the results of nationally-normed standardized test scores and graduation rates. And ban discrimination.

“To me, this is just common sense,” said Stephanie Vanos, an Orange County School Board member who also happens to be an Orlando mom and joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff in that capacity. “I’m not saying they need the thousands of pages of rules that apply to us, but we need a common-sense set of rules that should apply to everybody.”

She is, of course, right. Schools that do good jobs shouldn’t be afraid of accountability and transparency. Most aren’t.

In fact, ask yourself these basic questions:
Why shouldn’t parents and students be guaranteed qualified teachers?

Why shouldn’t taxpayers be able to see what kind of test scores are being produced at all the schools they’re funding?

And why shouldn’t taxpayers be assured that the money they’re spending is actually providing “quality” education, as the Constitution requires?
Better yet, ask those who defend the status quo.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Industry, Elections, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Racism, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

How Tech Companies Hooked Kids in School on Social Media

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2026 //
2

The New York Times broke a story about how tech companies have quietly pushed kids to be dependent on social media. The link takes you to a gift article, which you can open and read for free.

The article was written by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, an investigative reporter who covers technology.

The Times opened the article with this overview: Internal documents show how tech giants grabbed children’s attention throughout the day, a strategy that schools say has undermined education.

The article begins:

Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms.

Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school.

TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.

Again and again, the world’s leading social media companies have targeted students, even as complaints have mounted that they are hurting teenagers’ mental health and academic performance, according to a New York Times review of internal documents that lay bare for the first time these tactics to hook young users.

The documents emerged from lawsuits filed by more than 1,400 school districts against Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube amid a rising backlash against social media, with parent movements and best-selling books blaming the platforms for loneliness, bullying, eating disorders and sexual exploitation.

The outcry, long focused on social media’s harm to mental health, has now shifted to its upending of the classroom. Many school districts are banning smartphones, and some are re-evaluating their reliance on devices like Chromebooks, the inexpensive laptops made by YouTube’s parent company, Google.

The companies’ push to keep children glued to their screens has overshadowed concerns from parents, teachers and even their own trust and safety teams about interfering with school, according to the documents and interviews with dozens of parents, teachers and former tech company employees.

TikTok’s leaders decided not to disable notifications during school hours, rejecting a change that its safety teams had pushed for years. A Snapchat strategy document referred to classroom phone use as “under the desk” time. Google managers knew YouTube was recommending videos to students during the school day that had nothing to do with their lessons.

The school districts contend that the apps’ addictive designs made teachers’ jobs more difficult. “It is so constantly tempting to these kids to be on a platform that promises endless, infinite, varied entertainment rather than actually focusing on what they should be at school to do,” said Previn Warren, one of the lead lawyers for the schools.

The companies argue that the Covid pandemic and other factors have harmed adolescents’ mental health, and that parents, schools and cellphone makers bear responsibility for children’s phone habits. They also say that they have made their platforms safer with parental-control features and account restrictions for minors.

All four companies recently settled with Breathitt County Schools, a small district in rural Kentucky that served as a test case for the litigation nationwide. The district, which has about 1,500 students, had sought $3 million in damages and about $60 million that it had planned to put toward a long-term education and mental health plan. The companies agreed to pay Breathitt $27 million: $9 million from Meta, $8 million each from Snap and TikTok and $2 million from Google, according to documents released on Friday and first reported by Bloomberg.

While it’s hard to say how the ongoing litigation might ultimately affect classrooms, it poses a substantial financial risk to the companies, possibly costing billions of dollars, said Alexandra Lahav, a civil litigation professor at Cornell Law School. She noted that the companies were also facing a barrage of claims from families and state attorneys general.

Message to Big Tech: Leave our kids alone!

Categories Ethics, Evil, For-Profit, Students, Technology
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