On Saturday June 21, Governor Greg Abbot of Texas announced that he had signed a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom in the state.
The goal of plastering the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom is promoted by Christian nationalists who want to see an official declaration that the U.S. is a Christian nation.
The Founding Fathers would be stunned to hear the assertion that the Constitution they wrote was influenced by the Ten Commandments. The First Amendment very clearly states the importance of freedom of religion, meaning that anyone could practice any religion or none at all. It also declares that government should not “establish” any religion, meaning that government should not sponsor or endorse or favor any religion.
CNN reported:
Texas’ law requires public schools to post in classrooms a 16-by-20-inch (41-by-51-centimeter) poster or framed copy of a specific English version of the commandments, even though translations and interpretations vary across denominations, faiths and languages and may differ in homes and houses of worship.
Supporters say the Ten Commandments are part of the foundation of the United States’ judicial and educational systems and should be displayed.
Its supporters said that the Ten Commandments were the foundation of the American legal system. The state of Louisiana intends to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed last year by parents of Louisiana school children from various religious backgrounds, who said the law violates First Amendment language guaranteeing religious liberty and forbidding government establishment of religion.
The ruling also backs an order issued last fall by U.S. District Judge John deGravelles, who declared the mandate unconstitutional and ordered state education officials not to enforce it and to notify all local school boards in the state of his decision.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the mandate into law last June.
Landry said in a statement Friday that he supports the attorney general’s plans to appeal.
“The Ten Commandments are the foundation of our laws — serving both an educational and historical purpose in our classrooms,” Landry said.
The Founding Fathers would laugh at Governor Abbot and Landry. And Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who shepherded a similar law in Arkansas. It’s especially funny that the leader of their party has broken almost every one of the Ten Commandments. Perhaps the place to start posting them is in the Oval Office.
In 2017, when Trump passed his first budget bill, his allies inserted into it an unprecedented tax on institutions of higher education that have large endowments. The tax was 1.4%. But that 1.4%, though it seemed small, was money that would not be available for low-income students at expensive colleges and universities. The next logical step–once the government starts taxing nonprofits– would have been to tax megachurches but that didn’t happen.
This year, the Trump administration has included in its “One Big Ugly Budget Bill” a dramatic increase in the tax on higher education endowments.
Instead of 1.4%, the highest rate would climb to 21%.
This onerous tax would limit colleges’ ability to cover the tuition of students who are fully qualified but lack the financial resources to pay. The inevitable result of this tax will be to restrict the number and size of scholarships.
I received this letter from President Paula A. Johnson of Wellesley College, my alma mater. Dr. Johnson grew up in Brooklyn, where she graduated from a large public high school (Samuel J. Tilden), then to Radcliffe and to Harvard Medical School. She was a cardiologist before she was chosen as Wellesley’s president almost a decade ago. She is dedicated to providing scholarships for students who need them.
She wrote to all alumnae:
It is hard to overstate the importance of this moment for higher education. We are being threatened in previously unimaginable ways that cut to the core of our values and endanger a large proportion of our students. At Wellesley, we are deeply concerned about changes that could affect academic freedom, our need-blind status, and our ability to build a diverse community, one made richer by our international students.
One of the most significant threats comes from the likelihood of a major increase to the tax on college endowments. Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a budget bill that would raise the tax from 1.4% to as much as 21%. Under this proposal, Wellesley would be taxed at 14%, which means our liability under the tax would increase from $3 million, where it is currently, to $30 million per year—an amount equal to fully funding financial aid for 325 students.
When you consider that more than two-thirds of the $82 million Wellesley spent last year to support financial aid came from our endowment, the disastrous impact of this tax becomes clear. This is a punitive tax on students and families who need financial aid.
The tax would also have a disproportionate impact on small colleges like Wellesley that, without other revenue streams such as graduate programs or large research budgets, rely on endowments to support their mission.
At Wellesley, 43% of our operating budget comes from the endowment, making it our largest source of revenue. A tax increase would have a severe impact on our academic program and our ability to meet students’ financial needs. In addition, the tax would override the intent of generations of alumnae who have given to the endowment to support financial aid and our academic mission.
That is why Wellesley has joined a coalition of more than two dozen small colleges and universities from 17 states across the country that together serve more than 50,000 students. The coalition’s core argument, which we are sharing with members of Congress, is that endowments are not a luxury for small colleges; they are essential to continuing our commitments to access, opportunity, and educational excellence for students.
If this totally unwarranted tax is passed, the number of meritorious students from low-income, even middle-income families would shrink dramatically.
This is wrong.
Raise taxes on corporations and billionaires.
Tax megachurches.
Raise the taxes and tariffs on super yachts.
Don’t tax the endowments of institutions of higher education.
Republicans’ tax-and-spending megabill would give the school-choice movement a major, long-sought victory—and deliver an unusually generous tax break to wealthy taxpayers.
The bill includes a new way for taxpayers—whether they are parents or not—to direct tax dollars to private-school scholarships instead of the Treasury. There is an extra twist: It could deliver virtually risk-free profits to some savvy investors.
The proposal has excited school-choice advocates, infuriated public school leaders and stunned tax experts.
“Overnight, this would give millions of students access to the school of their choice,” said Tommy Schultz, CEO of the American Federation for Children, an advocacy group pushing the provision. “This is a revolution within the tax code.”
The American Federation for Children is the far-right wing group created by Betsy DeVos to promote charter schools and vouchers.
The incentive is structured as a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit. Give to a charity known as a scholarship-granting organization and you would get the same amount subtracted from your federal tax bill.
It is equivalent to redirecting your taxes to a scholarship-granting organization (SGO), with the benefit capped at 10% of adjusted gross income or $5,000, whichever is greater. That is a far better deal than what is offered by normal charitable donations, which generally just reduce your taxable income and only if you itemize deductions….
For people with appreciated stock, the proposal could be even more attractive than a dollar-for-dollar credit, potentially creating net profits.
Consider someone who bought a stock for $100 that is now worth $1,100. Selling that stock would trigger capital-gains taxes of up to $238. But under the bill, he could donate the $1,100 stock to an SGO. The government would give $1,100 back and he wouldn’t pay capital-gains taxes.
He could then buy the same $1,100 stock on the open market. The result? He’s better off than when he started, spending nothing to erase a potential capital-gains tax liability.
“In terms of something that is deeply offensive to basic tax logic, it’s hard to beat this,” said Lawrence Zelenak, a law professor at Duke University who expects donors to line up every Jan. 1 to take advantage. “Unless you actively hate the charity, you would want to do it…”
A federal program would expand private-school tuition subsidies into states such as New York and California that have resisted school choice programs….
The House bill caps credits at $5 billion annually, which would climb by 5% in subsequent years if the program is heavily used. That bill would run from 2026 through 2029. The Senate version released Monday includes $4 billion annually, starting in 2027 but without an expiration date.
The credit would mark a significant injection of resources to private education as the Trump administration separately seeks to cut federal grants for public schools. Still, it would pale in comparison to funding for public schools, which receive several hundred billion dollars annually, mostly from state and local governments.
Democrats hope the breadth of the policy changes will prompt the Senate parliamentarian to determine that it’s out of bounds for the budgetary fast-track process Republicans are using.
Public school advocates say the program would benefit better-off families at religious private schools. “The federal government needs to fund the neighborhood school that serves children from every walk of life,” said Sasha Pudelski, a lobbyist with the school superintendents’ association.
Opponents also say the idea has been rejected by voters. In November, three states voted down school-choice ballot measures.
Note: not only were vouchers defeated in three states last November, voters have rejected vouchers in every state referendum since 1967.
The new tax credit could become a model for Congress to direct money to other causes through the tax code, said Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive group that criticizes the plan.
Civil rights laws prohibit certain forms of discrimination in schools that receive federal funding, but it isn’t likely this would apply to private schools that benefit from the proposed tax credit, said Kevin Welner, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. The House bill includes a provision barring discrimination against students with disabilities in school admissions; the Senate version doesn’t.
State voucher plans do not bar discrimination in voucher-receiving schools. They can and do discriminate at will. Some require that families are members of their faith. Some bar LGBT students and families. Some bar students with disabilities. Some bar students with low test scores.
Trump’s funding of school choice is the fever dream of Christian nationalists. With one blow, they eliminate the separation of church and state, they get funding for religious schools, and they gut civil rights laws that barred discrimination.
It also permits the revival of school segregation, under the once-discredited banner of school choice. White Southerners who don’t like “race mixing” have dreamed of this day since May 17, 1954.
Political cartoonist Ann Telnaes recently won the Pulitzer Prize, specifically for a cartoon that depicted plutocrats prostrating themselves at the feet of Trump. One of them was Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, who was her boss. Her editor refused to post her cartoon, and she resigned.
Voice of America is known worldwide for its straightforward, unbiased presentation of world news. Trump placed MAGA enthusiast Keri Lake in charge. At his behest, she just laid off most of the VOA staff. Remember when America was great? We thought we had a message for the world and that the truth would set us free.
But Trump doesn’t want to “Make America great Again.” He wants to make America a land of bitter divisions, where the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer and sicker, unable to get health insurance, medical care, good schools, or any opportunity to rise into the middle class. For that, you need unions and good jobs.
The Trump administration sent layoff notices on Friday to more than 600 employees at Voice of America, a federally funded news organization that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedom.
The layoffs, known as reductions in force, will shrink the staff count at the news organization to less than 200, around one-seventh of its head count at the beginning of 2025. They put Voice of America journalists and support staff on paid leave until they are let go on Sept. 1.
The termination notices are the latest round of the Trump administration’s attack on federally funded news networks, including Voice of America.
In March, President Trump accused the news group of spreading “anti-American” and partisan “propaganda,” calling it “the voice of radical America.” He then signed an executive order that effectively called for dismantling of the news agency and put nearly all Voice of America reporters on paid leave, ceasing its news operations for the first time since its founding in 1942.
Kari Lake, a fierce Trump ally and a senior adviser at the news organization’s oversight agency, U.S. Agency for Global Media, notified Congress earlier this month that her agency intended to eliminate most positions at Voice of America. Her letter identified fewer than 20 employees who must remain at the media organization, according to laws passed by Congress to establish and fund it. Friday’s termination notices leave around 200 employees.
Ms. Lake’s decision “spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds U.S. ideals of democracy and freedom around the world,” Patsy Widakuswara, a former Voice of America White House bureau chief who was placed on leave and is leading a lawsuit against Ms. Lake and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said in a statement.
She encouraged Congress to intervene and to signal support for Voice of America, which was founded to combat Nazi propaganda and reported in countries that suppress independent reporting and free speech.
“Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and extremist groups are flooding the global information space with anti-America propaganda,” Ms. Widakuswara said. “Do not cede this ground by silencing America’s voice.”
An anti-Trump statue has popped up on the National Mall in Washington. (Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post)
Remember the poop statue? The curly-swirly pile of doo that sat atop a replica of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) desk? The work of protest art placed on the National Mall last October in mock tribute to the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election?
Well, the artists responsible for the political poo plop appear to have struck again. This time with a work called “Dictator Approved,” an 8-foot-tall sculpture showing a gold-painted hand with a distinctive thumbs-up quashing the sea foam green crown of the Statue of Liberty. It sits at the same location on the Mall near Third Street NW as the poop statue did last fall.
The artwork’s creators intended “Dictator Approved” as a rejoinder to the June 14 military parade and authoritarianism, according to a permit issued by the National Park Service. The parade, the creators wrote in the application, “Will feature imagery similar to autocratic, oppressive regime, i.e. N. Korea, Russia, and China, marching through DC.” The purpose of the statue, they continued, is to call attention to “the praising these types of oppressive leaders have given Donald Trump.”
Plaques on the four sides of the artwork’s base include quotes from world leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin (“President Trump is a very bright and talented man.”), Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (“The most respected, the most feared person is Donald Trump.”), former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (“We do have a great deal of shared values. I admire President Trump.”) and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (“Your Excellency.” A “special” relationship. “The extraordinary courage of President Trump.”).
“If these Democrat activists were living in a dictatorship, their eye-sore of a sculpture wouldn’t be sitting on the National Mall right now,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, wrote in an emailed statement. “In the United States of America you have the freedom to display your so-called ‘art,’ no matter how ugly it is.”
Mary Harris is listed as the applicant for the permit but no contact information for her was provided. The permit allows the statue to be in place from 7 a.m. June 16 until 5 p.m. June 22. The “Dictator Approved” statue is very similar in style and materials to the poop statue and several protest artworks placed in the District, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, last fall.
However, no individual or group has publicly claimed responsibility for those pieces. An unidentified caller and emailer told a Washington Post reporter last year that he was part of the group that worked on the sculptures and provided information about them that only someone who had installed the projects would know, such as when the statues would appear.
His identity remains a mystery. On Wednesday he replied to a Washington Post email asking if he was involved with the new statue. “I have heard about it but not me,” he wrote. He did not respond to additional questions or a request to meet in an Arlington parking garage.
Some of the tourists and locals who stopped by the statue between downpours Wednesday afternoon expressed surprise that it was allowed to be placed where it was. And they expressed reservations about weighing in on it publicly.
“I’m amazed that whoever dreamed this up could put this here,” said Kuresa, an 80-year-old from Australia who declined to give his last name because he said as an international visitor he didn’t feel comfortable expressing his views. “It reminds me of ‘Animal Farm.’”
Plaques on the sculpture’s base include quotes from Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. (Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post)
District resident and retired federal employee Yvette Hatfield stopped by with her dog Max, wearing an adorable raincoat and rain hat, to get a selfie of both of them in front of the statue. Asked why she wanted a photo, Hatfield laughed. “Because of my political views and that’s all I’m going to say.”
“I actually love it,” said another District resident. He declined to give his name because he said his parents and grandparents often told him “Fools’ names, like their faces, are always seen in public places.” He wished the reporter good luck with the story.
Francesca Carlo, 20, and Abigail Martin, 21, visiting from Cleveland, happened on the statue just before it started to pour.
“At first I was confused,” Martin said, “but then I figured it out. I think it’s beautiful.”
Carlo agreed. She thought the quotes on the plaques could send a message.
“If all these authoritarian politicians approve of our president then maybe people will see a pattern recognition and see where democracy is headed,” she said.
We don’t yet know the rewards and risks of artificial intelligence or its uses in the schools. Yet Trump’s “Big Ugly Budget Bill” creates a special status for AI in the schools and beyond, fending off regulation by states. Lobbyists at work.
There are many damaging aspects of the U.S. House budget bill just passed, but one that has received inadequate attention is a provision imposing a 10-year ban on states or localities from limiting or regulating the use of the artificial intelligence in the classroom and beyond.
This provision is a naked giveaway to the tech billionaires who want unfettered control and even higher profits for their products. According to some reports, the Senate has now tweaked the language of the House bill, but still proposes punishing any state that attempts to control the use of AI by cutting its funding.
The unregulated use of AI in the classroom is a profound threat to student privacy, as these programs collect and commercialize students’ personal data. It is also a threat to the personal connection, feedback and engagement central to a quality education. AI is one of the few technologies whose inventors have warned that it poses a serious risk to humanity itself, including Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, often called the godfather of AI.
In a joint letter, more than 200 state legislators expressed their “strong opposition” to any ban on regulating AI, joining a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general who expressed similar concerns.
Please write to your U.S. Senators today, to demand that they eliminate any language from the budget bill that would prevent or dissuade states and localities from passing laws on AI to protect the safety, education and the well-being of our children. And please share this email with others who care. Thank you!
Tom Ultican, retired teacher of high school physics and advanced mathematics in California, has been keeping close watch on the billionaire-funded efforts to promote privatization and demean teachers. In this post, he reviews an opinion piece that advocates the resuscitation of failed policies of the past.
As I wrote in my 2013 book Reign of Error, merit pay has been tried again and again, and it has never worked. There and in my last book, Slaying Goliath (pp. 244-245), I cited powerful evidence that paying teachers based on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores was a disaster: The Gates Foundation awarded $575 million to three school districts and four charter chains to evaluate teachers by test scores and peer evaluators, in hopes of getting the best teachers to transfer into the neediest schools. Gates hired top firms Rand and AIR to evaluate the program over six years. They concluded that it wasted resources that might have been better spent on reducing class sizes or raising teachers’ salaries. The program did not raise test scores, did not affect graduation rates or dropout rates, andddid not change the quality of teachers. Yet Hanushek and Macke advocate for the revival of this failed practice.
Ultican writes
It was “déjà vu all over again” when Eric Hanushek and his wife Macke Raymond shared their views in the Washington Post. They cited Michelle Rhee and Mike Miles as exemplary education leaders, merit pay as good education policy and turned to A Nation at Risk for support. Governor Abbott took over Houston’s schools and installed Miles as superintendent but here Hanushek and Raymond were referencing his long ago stint in Dallas.
I am no longer a reader of the Washington Post. When Bezos decided his newspaper would not endorse a candidate for president, I cancelled my subscription. However, a friend felt I needed to see this article and sent me a copy.
Billionaires like Bezos are destroying America and all of its venerable institutions. Hanushek and Raymond are Stanford based billionaire tools.
While working on her PhD in Political Science at the University of Rochester, Macky fell in love with her much older professor, Eric Hanushek, and eventually married him.
Today, Raymond is the director of CREEDO. Her 2015 Hoover Institute Fellow’s profile says in part, “In partnership with the Walton Family Foundation and Pearson Learning Systems, Raymond is leading a national study of the effectiveness of public charter schools.” Are the billionaires guarding the hen house?
Rhee and Miles
The Hanushek and Raymond opinion piece states:
“In 2009, under the leadership of then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Washington implemented the IMPACT program — a revamped teacher evaluation system that is linked directly to classroom effectiveness and that provides large increases in base salaries for the most effective teachers and dismissal for the least effective. This program has shown that focusing on student learning is rewarded with improved student performance, and that student-focused incentives work.”
This is a totally bunkum statement and is followed by another world of bunkum claim:
“Under the leadership of then-Superintendent Mike Miles, Dallas in 2015 switched to a salary system based on a sophisticated evaluation of teacher effectiveness. It then used this system to provide performance-based bonuses to teachers who would agree to go to the lowest-performing schools in the district. Two things happened: First, the best teachers responded to the incentives and were willing to move to the poorest-performing schools. Second, within two years, these schools jumped up to the district average.”
The linked evidence in the Dallas claim is to an Education Next article written by Hanushek and friends. In it, he claimed, “In the four years after Dallas adopted new performance-based teacher evaluation and compensation systems, student performance on standardized tests improved by 16 percent of a standard deviation in math and 6 percent in reading, while scores for a comparison group of similar Texas schools remained flat.”
Sixteen percent of a standard deviation of growth in math after 4 years sounds weak and 6% of a standard deviation growth in reading does not seem much more than noise in the data.
Hanushek gained notoriety with his 1981 paper, claiming “there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.” This played well with billionaires from the Walton family but had no relationship with reality. The history of crazy pants unsupported statements like this have long caused me to seek verification for whatever he says.
Hanushek and Raymond claim that both Dallas and Washington DC saw comparatively superior testing outcomes than other urban areas in the US. The evidence they provide is a link to the NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (tuda). I graphed 4th and 8th grade math tuda data between 2009 and 2024 for the Large City composite, Dallas, DC, Baltimore and San Diego. Nothing substantive popped out in my graphs.
I decided to subtract the 4th grade scores from the 8th grade scores to get a sense of how the students were progressing. The results graphed below stunned me with their clarity. Baltimore, which traditionally has low scores, San Diego, which traditionally scores well and the Large City composite had fairly consistent increases of about 40 points. Dallas and DC both fell below a 30 points increase.
Billionaires Take Over
Michelle Rhee came out of Teach for America (TFA) where she taught for three years in a Baltimore elementary school. She returned to New York, TFA and Wendy Kopp to help found the New Teachers Project which is now known as TNTP. New York Chancellor of Public Schools, Joel Klein, who worked for multi-billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recommended the 37-year-old Rhee to be Washington DC’s new superintendent.
During Rhee’s three year reign of terror, she replaced half of DC’s teachers and a third of its principals. She was consumed with raising test scores and scorned those who did not share her devotion to standardized testing. Her relentless pressure to raise test scores brought some early gains and produced a major cheating scandal.
DC principal, Adell Cothorne, lost her job for insisting upon increased test security when she learned that teachers were violating testing protocols. I had lunch with Adell at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago. She struck me as a proud Black woman with poise, immense courage and profound character.
After Rhee left DC schools, she started StudentsFirst and led a national crusade to abolish teacher tenure and promote school choice. Billionaires and their friends provided her organization with millions of dollars. (Reign of Error, Pages 145-155)
Before 2012, Dallas school board elections were very low key affairs. Two of the three incumbent school board trustees up for reelection ran unopposed in 2011.
Writing for In These Times, George Joseph explained the political change, “But since the beginning of 2012, hundreds of thousands of Super PAC dollars from Dallas’ richest neighborhoods began flowing into nearly all of the district’s school board elections.”
Once the new 2012 board was seated, it fired Superintendent Michael Hinojosa and replaced him with Mike Miles, a graduate of billionaire Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy.
“Miles’s reforms included a new principal evaluation process which led to large turnover. He also instituted a merit pay system for teachers and hired Charles Glover a 29-year-old administrator of the Dallas TFA branch to be Chief Talent Officer in DISD. After just under three years, he had managed to alienate the black and Hispanic communities as well as many experienced teachers and principals.”
Like Michelle Rhee, he also believed in standardized test based accountability and merit pay.
Concluding Information
Reporting for NPR’s 35 anniversary of A Nation at Risk, Ana Kamenetz discovered, “They started out already alarmed by what they believed was a decline in education, and looked for facts to fit that narrative.”
A decade before Ana’s report, Florida education professor, James Guthrie, noted, “They cooked the books to get what they wanted.”
In 1990, Sandia engineers set out to add weight to A Nation at Risk. They disaggregated the data by race and sex and were surprise to find that every group advanced during the 1963 to 1980 period. The growing numbers of SAT test takers was driven by poor, minority and female students, causing the test averages to drop.
A Nation at Risk was a fraudulent paper and America’s students were actually healthy and doing well, which means public schools were healthy and doing well.
Merit pay is a Taylorist scheme that appeals to many American business leaders, but has a long history of employee dissatisfaction and output quality issues. Researchers at Vanderbilt University studied merit pay for teachers and found no significant gains in testing data and in New York researchers documented negative results.
Unfortunately, billionaires own the media and publish opinion pieces by hired frauds like Hanushek and Raymond.
Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest will be funded in large part by draconian cuts to Medicare, which provides insurance to poor people. The massive cuts to Medicaid will lead to closure of many rural hospitals, which rely on Medicaid payments. The Senate knows this, and so-called “moderates” are working on adding a fund for rural hospitals. The bill, which Trump insists must pass by July 4, will add trillions to the nation’s debt.
So for all the cuts and firings imposed by Elon Musk and his DOGS, the federal deficit will grow under Trump.
As we at the Prospect have reported, while the Senate’s version of the Republican budget reconciliation bill was widely expected to be more moderate than the House one, when it comes to health care it is more extreme. This came as a surprise to many Republicans, some of whom now want changes. And they all are highlighting the same area of concern. It would be “potentially really bad for rural hospitals,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told The Wall Street Journal. It’s “going to hurt our rural hospitals and hurt them in a big way,” said Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV). Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) expressed “concerns about the effect on rural hospitals in her state.”
This is all certainly true. Senate cuts to the provider tax, a way for states to get more federal funding for their Medicaid programs, along with the House cuts that have been analyzed as leading to at least 11 million fewer people on the Medicaid rolls, will deeply harm the 700-plus rural hospitals already at risk of closure.
But that’s too narrow a frame. The entire health care provider network would come under heavy strain, and possibly collapse.
That’s because each node of the system is interdependent. If the 190 rural hospitals estimated in a recent Center for American Progress report as collateral damage of the Republican cuts close, all of their patients must find treatment at the remaining health care providers. Many of these new-arrival patients are likely to be uninsured (many thrown off Medicaid or Obamacare by Republicans), crushing hospital finances and potentially adding more closures on top.
This means overcrowded hospitals and overburdened staff, in addition to the serious hardships for patients traveling long distances for care. “The Republican Senate budget accelerates the rural hospital collapse that is under way, like jet fuel on a fire,” said Alex Lawson of Social Security Works, who works directly on health care issues in Washington. “Hospitals that don’t close will be the ones people drive four hours to access. The quality of everybody’s health care in this country will plummet.”
If the entire hospital doesn’t close, unprofitable business lines are often shuttered first. “I’ve talked to a lot of hospitals worried about having to close maternity wards,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, who ran the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in the Biden administration. In California alone, 56 hospitals have ended maternity care since 2012, and the crisis of maternity deserts is acute.
The situation is worse, Brooks-LaSure said, in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, suggesting that the program is a lifeline for hospitals, supplying a steady stream of paid claims for insured patients. Indeed, Medicaid is often the biggest line item in the accounts receivable budgets for nursing homes, rural hospitals, and maternity wards, as Families USA’s Anthony Wright pointed out to The Bulwark. A letter to the Republican leadership citing data from the Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina notes that 213 rural hospitals serve a disproportionately high share of Medicaid patients.
While hospitals sometimes complain about low Medicaid reimbursement rates, the government has in the past compensated for that with “state-directed payment” arrangements that boost levels to what commercial insurance pays. That is being attacked in the Senate Finance Committee version of the bill, cutting those reimbursement top-ups to Medicare levels.
Hospitals are legally required to take care of patients in an emergency, regardless of their ability to pay. And more emergencies occur when more people are uninsured and put off care until they absolutely need it, which are made worse still if patients have to travel for hours to get care. Uncompensated care builds up in states with larger proportions of their populations who are uninsured, severely damaging hospital budgets.
Taking nearly $1 trillion out of the health system will magnify that problem across the country. And Medicaid cuts that create more uninsured patients, along with the creation of potentially millions of uninsured through Affordable Care Act changes, are terrible for hospitals. According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, uncompensated care would increase by $204 billion over the next decade if the House version of the bill passed; remember, the Senate bill is even worse. Much of that burden would be thrown onto already shaky hospitals.
To those who argue that the cuts are really to state Medicaid programs and not hospitals, the ways states will deal with those cuts is not likely to be through simply providing more money that they don’t have. They will either change enrollment rules, so fewer people stay on the program, or cut reimbursement payments to hospitals and other providers. Both of these options would directly harm hospital finances.
“These cuts will strain emergency departments as they become the family doctor to millions of newly uninsured people,” said Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, in a statement, adding that “the proposal will force hospitals to reconsider services or potentially close, particularly in rural areas.”
Please open the link to see the full scope of the threat this Big Ugly Bill poses to rural Americans, most of whom voted for Trump.
Benjamin R. Cremer is pastor at the United Methodist Church in Boise, Idaho. I read his essays regularly. He is truly a Christian. He preaches love, not hate. He knows and tries to exemplify the Beatitudes.
On June 19, 1865—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed—enslaved Black Americans in Galveston, Texas were finally informed of their freedom. This day, now known as Juneteenth, marks not just the delayed enforcement of a national promise, but the resilient hope and courage of a people who endured unspeakable injustice while still holding onto the belief that liberation would come.
As Christians, we must understand that Juneteenth is not just a historical footnote—it is a call to theological clarity and moral responsibility. Scripture consistently reveals a God who hears the cries of the oppressed (Exodus 3:7), who calls for justice to “roll on like a river” (Amos 5:24), and who sets the captives free (Luke 4:18). The story of God is a story of liberation—not just personal salvation, but also the dismantling of systems that crush the image of God in others.
Juneteenth challenges us to confront a difficult truth: that much of American Christianity was complicit in slavery, and that the legacy of that sin continues in our institutions, our policies, and yes—even in some of our pulpits. But the gospel does not shy away from hard truths. It invites us to repentance. To truth-telling. And to the costly work of reconciliation and repair.
In our time when people are heard saying “Illegal is illegal,” Juneteenth invites us to remember that slavery was once legal. Harboring a fugitive enslaved person was illegal. Black freedom illegal. “Illegal is illegal” has always been used to defend injustice. Legality ≠ morality. Justice calls us higher.This is not about shame. It’s about grace. Grace that tells the truth. Grace that restores what has been broken. Grace that refuses to be silent in the face of injustice.
Observing Juneteenth as Christians means celebrating the faith and dignity of Black Americans who have carried the gospel with courage even when the church failed to. It means honoring the day freedom was announced, and lamenting that it was so long withheld.
May we not be a people who forget. May we be a people who remember rightly, act justly, and walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8).
If you are looking for a tangible way to get involved in communal justice work, I want to let you know about Be Love day, put on by the King Center. Be Love is a growing movement of courageous acts to achieve justice, which is based on these words from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” Be Love seeks to strategically define and unleash the true power of love to unite humanity, cultivate true peace, and create the Beloved Community. The movement is holding “Be Love Day” on July 9th. Click the link above to learn more.
Diane Ravitch's blog 