Stephen Dyer is a public policy expert, a specialist in school finance, and a former legislator in Ohio. He warned 11 years that vouchers would drive the state budget over a fiscal cliff. The court decision a few days ago proves that he was right on target.
Let this be a warning to all the other states that are adopting vouchers (without the consent of the governed, in every case).
He writes:
Proponents have claimed for years that Ohio and U.S. Supreme Court cases from the program’s infancy allows for explosive growth. Judge Jaiza Page warns, “Not so fast.” Just like I did 11 years ago.
Dyer wrote the following 11years ago:
“Overall, the state is sending nearly $144 million to private schools this year. In 2010-2011, that number was $78.85 million — nearly half the amount. Makes you wonder whether the case upholding Ohio’s Vouchers in 2002 would have the same outcome today. Also makes me want to kind of find out.” — Stephen Dyer on 10th Period blog, Jan. 25, 2014
Now he writes:
I guess we found out Tuesday, didn’t we?
To be clear, I had no idea that anyone would actually file a lawsuit against Ohio’s unconstitutional Voucher system when I wrote that on Blogspot 11 years ago (though I really did want someone to do that). But given the Ohio and U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings on vouchers at the turn of the century, I did question whether the state’s explosive funding of vouchers actually was justified under those rulings.
Guess who else agreed with me? Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page. While I focused in 2014 on the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, Judge Page focused on the 1999 Ohio Supreme Court case Simmons-Harris v. Goff.
Goff reached a similar conclusion as Zelman — that given the program’s then-small educational footprint, both in terms of kids and money — it did not interfere with Ohio’s overall ability to educate its public school students, so the program (which at the time only included Cleveland) was ok.
However, when Goff was decided, the Cleveland Voucher Program cost $5.7 million. The just-passed state budget allocated $2.5 billion over the biennium to the current program.
And that’s where voucher proponents got waaaay out over their skis. I realized this 11 years ago. But now, it’s even more obvious. The programs examined by the U.S. and Ohio Supreme Courts at the turn of the century look very different from the current budget hog Judge Page examined.
And she made that factual difference really clear in her ruling:
“As to the thorough and efficient challenge, the court ultimately held, “[w]e fail to see how the School Voucher Program, at the current funding level, undermines the state’s obligation to public education.” (Emphasis added.) Id. From this language, the Court concludes that the Goff court foresaw a renewed challenge to a larger scholarship or voucher program like EdChoice as an unconstitutional state supported system of private schools. Goff warned that a system that does not create but supports nonpublic schools in a way that jeopardizes the thoroughness and efficiency of the State’s system of public schools violates Article VI Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution.”
Added to this is this incredible fact that was brought out in the court case:
Not a single penny of voucher money goes to a single parent or student. It goes directly to private, mostly religious schools.
Let me repeat that for those of you in the back:
Not a single penny of voucher money goes to a single parent or student. It goes directly to private, mostly religious schools.
That’s right. This whole money-following-the-kid/parental-choice narrative that voucher proponents are still spilling out is complete, utter Grade A Bullshit.
In 1999, the money did go to parents and kids. Page was quite concerned about this payment change because the Ohio Constitution bans state establishment of religious schools. And if state money flows directly to religious schools that rely heavily on taxpayer subsidies (she mentioned that some private schools have 75% or more of their kids on vouchers), that is establishment and unconstitutional.
“By bestowing participating private religious schools with complete control over prospective students’ participation, the “school choice” here is made by the private school, not “as the result of independent decisions of parents and students.””
It’s as if the original creators of the Voucher program carefully crafted the legislation to pass judicial muster. Then when they got a favorable ruling, the gloves came off.
Oh yeah. One more thing: Not a single penny of the nearly $9 billion we will have spent on vouchers since 1997 has ever been audited. So we have no idea how the money on this unconstitutional program has actually been spent.
But I digress.
Luckily for Ohio’s 1.5 million public school kids, Judge Page recognized the program’s current reality rather than voucher proponents’ fictional account.
Just as your friendly neighborhood blogger did 11 years ago.
In a long and comprehensive article, three New York Timesreporters document what happened when DOGE (or DOGS, as I prefer to say) arrived at the Social Security Administration to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Determined to prove that their services were needed, they misinterpreted data and spun outright lies about finding “millions” of dead people collecting Social Security checks.
The Times titled the article “The Bureaucrat and the Billionaire: Inside DOGE’s Chaotic Takeover of Social Security.” The bureaucrat in the title is Leland Dudek, who became the acting administrator of the giant Social Security Administration, even though he never previously oversaw more than a dozen employees. The billionaire, of course, is Elon Musk.
I wish I could give you a gift article but that option was not available to me as a subscriber.
The bottom line of the article is that the young wizards of DOGE came looking for “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and when they didn’t find it, they made it up. While rummaging through the huge agency, which sends out retirement checks to some 74 million senior citizens, they fired senior officers and thousands of other employees. These checks, by the way, are not government beneficence; people pay a percentage of their income into Social Security throughout their work life, which they collect monthly after they retire.
The DOGS sought access to the agency’s huge computer system, which contains sensitive personal data about those who receive those monthly checks. At first, the federal courts rejected their request but ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court decided that these 20-somethings were entitled to access the data. Privacy is dead. Yours and mine. Elon Musk has the data. What has he done with it, along with information about your taxes? No one knows or says. Musk referred to Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.”
Here are a few of the high points:
Elon Musk stood before a giant American flag at a Wisconsin political rally in March and rolled out an eye-popping allegation of rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration. Scammers, he said, were making 40 percent of all calls to the agency’s customer service line.
Social Security employees knew the billionaire’s claim had no basis in fact. After journalists followed up, staff members began drafting a response correcting the record.
That’s when Leland Dudek — plucked from a midlevel job only six weeks earlier to run Social Security because of his willingness to cooperate with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — got an angry call from the White House, according to several people familiar with the exchange.
“The number is 40 percent,” insisted Katie Miller, a top administration aide who was working closely with Mr. Musk, according to one of the people familiar with the April 1 call. President Trump believed Mr. Musk, she said. “Do not contradict the president.”
Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Mr. Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans, a New York Times investigation has found.
Their work has led to the departures of thousands of employees, thinning an already overstretched work force and setting off a wave of public anxiety over the state of an agency administering politically sacrosanct retirement benefits that Mr. Trump has vowed to protect.
Mr. Musk has left Washington amid a blowup with Mr. Trump, and some of his top aides at DOGE have also departed, leaving federal workers and the public to assess what Mr. Musk’s tornadolike path through Washington yielded. At Social Security, Mr. Musk’s efforts amount to a case study in what happened when his team of government novices ran a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts.
Musk’s senior aide was Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest aides and the architect of the ICE crackdown on immigrants. When Musk left, she left with him. Don’t ask me to explain how that works, because I don’t know. Did she move to Texas to join his sister-wives? Did she take her three children? Or did she stay in DC? I don’t know.
When he started the investigation of the SSA, Musk believed that he would find “massive fraud,” especially the millions of dead people that he believed were collecting Social Security. He didn’t believe the career bureaucrats who said that he was wrong, nor did he accept a secret DOGE memo concluding that the “massive fraud” didn’t exist. Trump’s presss secretary said on FOX News that “tens of millions” of dead people were collecting Social Security checks. Trump lowered the number in his March 4 address to Congress. He said that Social Security records reported “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149….And money is being paid to many of them.”
The Times reporters found:
One audit from 2015 found only 13 people older than 112 still receiving benefits. Other audits found payments being sent to an estimated 24,000 people who generally died more recently — a sign of Social Security needing tighter controls and monitoring — but not the millions Mr. Musk claimed.
DOGE did not find the waste, fraud, and abuse they searched for but they pursued something of perhaps even greater value to them: the personal data of everyone who had a Social Security card, which is almost every citizen except young children.
DOGE demanded that the SSA hire a “21-year-old former intern at Palantir, a data analysis and technology firm, and grant him access to the personal data of every Social Security cardholder despite the executives’ concerns that he lacked sufficient training to handle such sensitive information.”
Despite their objections, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the SSA to give the young man whatever he wanted.
DOGE used its power to advance Trump’s political goals. When Trump quarreled with Maine Governor Janet Mills over transgender athletes, DOGE staffers canceled contracts with the state of Maine.
But under pressure from Mr. Musk’s team, nearly half of the Social Security Administration’s 140 senior executives, and thousands of employees overall, have taken buyouts or retired. As many as 12 percent of staff members, out of a bureaucracy that numbered around 57,000 people, are expected to depart their jobs as part of DOGE’s cost-cutting plan.
To try to make up for the staffing shortfall, the agency has encouraged specialized professionals like lawyers, human resources staff and technologists to take reassignments in customer service jobs — often at higher pay than what the people they’re replacing had made. Workers have said they felt pressured to volunteer for reassignments, or else risk being fired later.
No one knows at this juncture whether DOGE saved money by firing workers at the SSA. But the benefits to DOGE and Musk are enormous: they now have personal data on almost every American.
Heather Cox Richardson relates Trump’s flurry of tweets yesterday, which indicate a heightened state of anxiety. It seemed as though he devoted an inordinate amount of time to posting on his social media site. He did board a helicopter at one point in the day and answered a reporter’s question, using the F word. What people say in private is their own business, but this may be the first time that an American President used that expletive in public, on camera, speaking to the American people. This is a man who seethes with undisguised rage.
Mary Trump would say that this rage is a consequence of slights from his childhood. Maybe she’s right.
Or was it because his grandiose claims of obliterating Iran’s nuclear stockpile turned out not to be true? Trump lies all the time, but this was a big boast on the international stage that turned out to be premature. He looks foolish. He hates that.
At 6:02 last night, President Donald Trump announced on his social media account that Israel and Iran has agreed to “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE” that would lead to “an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR.” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that the announcement took some of Trump’s own senior advisors by surprise. Since then, Trump’s social media feed has been unusually active, posting claims that his approval rate is soaring, that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, that “for the first time ever [a] majority of Americans believe the United States is on the right track,” and that “Trump was right about everything.”
“THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!” Trump’s social media feed posted at 1:08 this morning. But within hours, Israel had struck Iran again. At 6:50, Trump’s social media feed posted: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” At 7:28 it posted: ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly “Plane Wave” to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
After Israel struck, Iran retaliated. This morning, Trump accused both countries of violating the ceasefire agreement—although, to be sure, there has been no published confirmation that any such agreement exists. Sounding angry, Trump told reporters: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing.”
At 11:17 the account posted: “Both Israel and Iran wanted to stop the War, equally! It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!” It also attacked Democrats, especially women of color, at length, saying they were stupid and “can’t stand the concept of our Country being successful again.”
The account also said: “Now that we have made PEACE abroad, we must finish the job here at home by passing “THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” and getting the Bill to my desk, ASAP. It will be a Historic Present for THE GREAT PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, as we begin the Celebration of our Country’s 250th Birthday. We are finally entering our Golden Age, which will bring unprecedented Safety, Security, and Prosperity for ALL of our Citizens.”
In fact, Trump’s victory lap seems designed to be the finale to a triumphant storyline that can convince his loyalists he has scored an enormous victory before reality sets in. According to a new CNN poll, Americans disapprove of the U.S. military strikes against Iran by a margin of 56% to 44%.
Further, Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that according to early assessments by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the damage caused by the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the strikes did not destroy the main parts of the Iran’s nuclear program and probably set it back by only a few months. The DIA is the intelligence arm of the Pentagon.
The White House called the DIA assessment “flat out wrong.”
Later today, the New York Times confirmed CNN’s reporting.
Republican senator Rand Paul of Kentucky suggested today that the Obama administration had the right approach when it negotiated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s nuclear program. Paul said: “I’m arguing that the intervention, the military intervention, may not have been successful, as people are saying, and also that there may not be a military answer to this, that ultimately the answer to the end of the nuclear program is going to involve diplomacy.”
A video on Trump’s social media feed posted at 7:15 tonight recalled Senator John McCain’s 2007 call to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” Trump’s version used McCain’s “bomb Iran” chorus but was longer and had visual imagery of planes dropping bombs. In Trump’s version, the soundtrack to the video used the melody of Barbara Ann to say things like: “went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, tell the ayatollah gonna put you in a box,” and “old Uncle Sam, getting pretty hot, gonna turn Iran into a parking lot.”
It is a truism that, like other authoritarians, Trump tries only to appeal to his supporters, but I confess this video, from the president of the United States, left me aghast. It seems to me long past time to question the 79-year-old president’s mental health.
Tonight, Trump’s social media feed posted: “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY. THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!”
Henry David Thoreau wrote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Thoreau understood that as humans we need to be nourished by contact with or immersion in the natural world. Environmentalists understand this. They fight the inexorable march of what we call progress, which clear-cuts forest and paves over what once were boundless plains. Today, most of us get into a car and drive for hours to connect to wilderness. And we find solace in those encounters.
Most presidents take pride in the number of acres of wilderness that they have saved for future generations and the number of national monuments they designated to preserve unique natural formations. Not Trump. Trump has been openly hostile to environmental protection and to any measures that reduce the risks of climate change.
Yesterday the administration announced that it was opening up 58 million acres for commercial development.
The Trump administration said on Monday that it would open up 58 million acres of back country in national forests to road construction and development, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans to repeal the 2001 “roadless rule” that had preserved the wild nature of nearly a third of the land in national forests in the United States. Ms. Rollins said the regulation was outdated.
“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common-sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive roadless rule,” Ms. Rollins said in a statement. She said the repeal “opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation’s forests.”
Environmental groups said the plan could destroy some of America’s untouched landscapes and promised to challenge it in court.
The unspoiled land in question includes Tongass National Forest in Alaska, North America’s largest temperate rainforest; Reddish Knob in the Shenandoah Mountains, one of the highest points in Virginia; and millions of acres of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho.
“Most Americans value these pristine backcountry areas for their sense of wildness, for the clean water they provide, for the fishing and hunting and wildlife habitat,” said Chris Wood, the chief executive of Trout Unlimited, an environmental group.
Businesses are eager to chop down the timber. There’s profit in those untouched forests, maybe even tracts for homes. The word “pristine” in not in their vocabulary.
The American Bar Association has filed a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration’s policy of intimidating lawyers and law firms. The article was written by Mimi Rocah, former District Attorney, former prosecutor, and currently law professor. It was posted at Cafe, a blog for legal issues.
She wrote:
Last week, the American Bar Association (“ABA”) filed what can fairly be described as a bombshell lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C. The suit asks the court to declare unconstitutional and stop the Trump administration’s “ongoing unlawful policy of intimidation against lawyers and law firms.” The ABA, a non-partisan non-profit organization founded in 1878, is the nation’s largest voluntary association of legal professionals. It is represented in this case by powerhouse law firm Sussman Godfrey (one of the firms targeted by an executive orderearlier this year). This isn’t just any lawsuit. The complaint names the Office of the President and—in light of the Trump administration’s proclivity to dodge the “who’s responsible” question—every high level government department, along with every cabinet official (the caption goes on for eight pages). The normally staid organization has found its voice on this issue over the past few months, issuing several statements and launching a rule of law initiative, and it does not mince words in this lawsuit, stating, “Today,…the American legal profession faces a challenge that is different from all that has come before. It is unprecedented and uniquely dangerous to the rule of law.”
The complaint explains the administration’s strategy to essentially weaken the legal profession that it sees as a threat to its agenda: “Since taking office earlier this year, President Trump has used the vast powers of the Executive Branch to coerce lawyers and law firms to abandon clients, causes, and policy positions the President does not like.” It has done so “through a series of materially identical executive orders designed to severely damage particular law firms and intimidate other firms and lawyers…; a series of similar ‘deals’ or ‘settlements’ between the Administration and certain law firms in order to avoid such Orders or have them rescinded; other related executive orders, letters, and memoranda. . . and public statements by the President and his Administration publicizing the objectives of the Law Firm Intimidation Policy.” The “attacks on law firms…are thus not isolated events, but one component of a broader, deliberate policy designed to intimidate and coerce law firms and lawyers to refrain from challenging the President or his Administration in court, or from even speaking publicly in support of policies or causes that the President does not like.” Finally, the ABA explains that despite four different district court judges finding the orders blatantly unconstitutional and illegal, the administration’s strategy is ongoing. It cites reporting as recent as June 1st indicating Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s interest in keeping threats of more “executive orders on the table because they think it dissuades the best lawyers from representing critics of the administration.”
Why is the “Law Firm Intimidation Policy” (as dubbed in the lawsuit) so insidious? In a nutshell, it “is uniquely destructive because of the critical role that its targets—lawyers—fulfill in our constitutional system. Without skilled lawyers to bring and argue cases—and to do so by advancing the interests of their clients without fear of reprisal from the government—the judiciary cannot function as a meaningful check on executive overreach.” Even worse, the ABA documents the administration’s strategy having the desired impact. “Even as federal judges have ruled over and over that the Law Firm Orders are plainly unconstitutional, law firms that once proudly contributed thousands of hours of pro bono work to a host of causes—including causes championed by the ABA—have withdrawn from such work because it is disfavored by the Administration, particularly work that would require law firms to litigate against the federal government.” Many law firms are laying low, and “organizations (including the ABA) that have historically relied heavily on top law firms to bring pro bono cases—particularly against the federal government to challenge unlawful executive action—face serious and sometimes existential crises, as those same law firms are declining to represent these organizations.” The complaint cites examples of such instances from particular law firms and, chillingly, does so anonymously in ways reminiscent of a prosecutor’s charging documents against mob families out of real fear of retaliation. As the complaint states, “This threat has a deliberately powerful chilling effect. Already, many firms are declining to take on cases that challenge the administration’s policies. That’s not a side effect of the crackdown. It was the purpose all along.”
The federal judiciary, especially at the district court level, has been the sand in the gears to this administration’s unlawful orders and unconstitutional agenda, which has cast aside due process and the First Amendment in ways never seen before. In May alone, the White House lost 96 percent of its cases before federal district courts, with appointees of both Democrat and Republican presidents curbing the excesses of the Trump regime. As one expert explained, that the “rulings are coming from a stunningly broad array of jurists and many aren’t even being challenged on appeal” is an indication of both the continued need for these legal challenges and also the flimsy legal ground on which the administration stands. But courts cannot adjudicate cases that aren’t brought—and that requires lawyers willing to challenge a retributive and vengeful administration. Our legal system, and the rights of so many individuals and perhaps even our democracy, depend on it. If lawyers are afraid of what will happen to them if they stand up and oppose the government, then the whole system collapses. As the ABA emphasizes in its lawsuit, the judiciary needs to be strong and independent referees, but it needs lawyers willing to play the field.
We will see how this important lawsuit plays out. The case is assigned to Judge Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali who has already drawn the ire of Trump loyalists for daring to rule against the executive order cutting funding for foreign assistance programs administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Inevitably, this will likely end up before the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roberts has talked a good game about judicial independence. Hopefully he and the other justices recognize that such an ideal cannot exist without lawyers able to act free from coercive intimidation by the full force of the presidency.
Stay Informed,
Mimi
CAFE Contributor Mimi Rocah is the former District Attorney for Westchester County, and previously served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and Division Chief for the Southern District of New York. She is currently an adjunct professor at Fordham School of Law.
Glenn Kessler is the fact-checker for The Washington Post.
He wrote:
“There are all these humanitarian programs, where we sent money to people for medicine, for food, okay? What I thought, before I got into government, what most Americans think is, okay, so we sent $100,000 to this group to buy food, for like poor kids in Africa, okay? And what actually happens is it’s not $100,000 that goes to the poor kids in Africa. The NGO, the nongovernmental organization, that gets that money, contracts that out to somebody else, … there are like three or four middlemen. What Marco Rubio told me … his best estimate, after having his team look at it, is that 88 cents of every dollar is actually being collected by middlemen. So every dollar we were spending on humanitarian assistance, 12 cents was making it to the people who actually needed it. That’s crazy. There’s a lot of waste.”
— Vice President JD Vance, remarks during interview with Theo Von, June 7
We thought it would be helpful to display Vance’s full quote, because a social media post that received about 4 million views incorrectly attributed the 12-cents statistic to the U.S. DOGE Service. Instead, Vance said this number was the “best estimate” of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Indeed, Rubio has used this statistic on Capitol Hill, decrying what he called the “foreign aid industrial complex.”
When asked for the source of this number, Vance’s spokesman did not respond to repeated queries and the State Department provided a nonresponsive statement that the “United States is no longer going to blindly dole out money with no return for the American people.”
Despite the stonewalling, we figured out where this 12-cents figure comes from. It’s a misunderstanding of a number in a U.S. Agency for International Development report issued before the Trump administration took office. That report recorded the percentage of funds that go directly to local entities, bypassing nongovernmental and international organizations. It’s not a new or undiscovered issue, as Vance framed it. In 2023, Samantha Power, USAID administrator in the Biden administration, had decried the “industrial aid complex” and set a goal of directing 25 percent of aid to local entities by 2025, more than doubling the level when she announced the goal.
As is often the case, the Trump administration is reinventing the wheel while misinterpreting the data.
The Facts
We’re not sure how much Vance knows about business, but it’s simpleminded to believe $100,000 in humanitarian assistance would end up in Africa intact. People who deliver the aid must get paid, for instance, even if they work for nonprofit organizations. These organizations need accountants, lawyers and managers, too. The aid — say, food — may need to be delivered on ships. That also adds to the expenses. Moreover, some contractors who deliver aid are profit-making enterprises, so that’s an extra cut off the top.
A similar thing happens in the opposite direction. A doll might get made for $5 in an African country, but then another $2 is needed for export and shipping costs, and $3 for storage, logistics and profit for the importer. The America retailer then doubles the price — to $20 — to cover store operations, staff, rent and profit. You can’t expect, as Vance apparently does, a cost-free transfer across oceans.
In the case of foreign aid, Congress has set rules that further increase expenses. For instance, food aid must be purchased in the United States and by law must be shipped on U.S. carriers, according to the Congressional Research Service. For years, foreign-policy experts have argued for more aid to be handled at the local level, thereby saving on overhead. (Washington, D.C., for example, is more expensive than most cities in developing countries in Africa, South America, the Caribbean and Asia.) The Share Trust, which pushes for more local funding, estimated last year that local intermediaries in the Middle East could deliver programming that is 32 percent more cost efficient than international organizations.
Steve Gloyd, a global health expert at the University of Washington, had decried what he calls “phantom aid,” in which he said 30 to 60 percent of the total budget of some global health aid projects never even leave the headquarters of the nongovernmental organization hired to manage the program. International NGOs also can inflate the salaries of local staff, draining health ministries of expertise and raising in-country costs.
Not every country, however, has organizations in place that can take on the job. So, for-profit contractors such as Chemonics ($1.6 billion in 2024) and DAI Global ($500 million) win contracts from USAID to, among other tasks, reduce Ukrainian corruption, create a Famine Early Warning System Network and support democracy in El Salvador, according to Pub K Group, which surveys government contracts. More than 20 years ago, President George W. Bush set up Millennium Challenge Corp. as a way to get individual countries more invested in using the funds wisely — and building sustainable programs to take on the task after the American contract has ended. (DOGE attempted to shutter MCC, but it appears to have gotten a reprieve.)
This brings us to the 12-cent statistic. We scoured for estimates of how much aid money is lost to fees and expenses. There’s no overall number, and the amount varies from program to program, with some highly efficient. But it’s not an 88 percent loss overall. Instead, Vance and Rubio are referring to a report issued under Power assessing progress on her goal of delivering 25 percent of funds to local aid organizations.
In the 2024 fiscal year, “USAID provided $2.1 billion directly to local nongovernmental, private sector and government partners, or 12.1 percent of USAID’s acquisitions and assistance (A & A) and government-to-government (G2G) funding,” the report said. Additional aid given to regional partners brought the percentage to 12.6. The Trump administration deleted the report, which noted that USAID for 15 years has sought to direct more aid to local entities, but it can still be found on the Wayback Machine internet archive.
Publish What You Fund, a group advocating for greater transparency in aid funding, disputed USAID’s methodology, saying the figure is just 5.1 percent, though no major donor country does well. (The Netherlands tops the list at 6.9 percent.)
But, again, this is not what Vance said — “Every dollar we were spending on humanitarian assistance, 12 cents was making it to the people who actually needed it.”
The misunderstanding may have started, as these things do, with a tweet by billionaire Elon Musk. On Feb. 1, as Musk led DOGE’s dismantling of USAID, he elevated a quote from a PBS interview with Walter Kerr, co-executive director of Unlock Aid, a D.C.-based nonprofit that aims to improve American aid effectiveness. “The level of corruption and waste is unreal!” Musk posted.
Kerr was quoted as saying: “It’s actually less than 10 percent of our foreign assistance dollars flowing through USAID is actually reaching those communities.” Kerr told The Fact Checker he had been interviewed in August, and he was referring to a previous report issued by USAID on the percentage of funds going to local aid organizations. His organization issued a statement saying the quote had been taken out of context — a graphic in the PBS segment made clear what he meant — but the genie was out of the bottle.
When Rubio testified before the Senate on May 20, asserting that “at USAID, 12 cents of every dollar was reaching the recipient,” some Democratic lawmakers called him out.
“It would certainly shock Americans to hear that only 12 percent of our foreign aid reaches recipients, needy recipients on the ground, the people who need the help,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (Connecticut). “That is not actually an accurate number. That is the amount of aid that goes directly to local groups on the ground. But as you know, most of our aid runs through bigger international organizations like Save the Children. Those entities are getting somewhere around 80, 85 percent of the aid we give them directly to recipients on the ground.” Rubio did not respond.
Then Sen. Brian Schatz (Hawaii) followed up. “It is just not true that only 12 percent of the aid reaches recipients. … That is excluding the World Food Program, that is excluding Catholic Relief Services,” he said. “I will just say if there’s an enterprise to reduce overhead, count me in, but it is not 88 percent overhead. That’s not what’s happening.”
This time, Rubio answered. “That number, just to clarify, was actually Samantha Power’s number,” he said, without admitting error. “And she regretted that one of the things she was unable to do at USAID is improve upon that number.” Rubio may have trouble improving on that number as well.
The foreign-aid cuts under President Donald Trump have significantly tilted the percentage of foreign-aid awards toward U.S.-based institutions, according to an analysis by the Center for Global Development, a think tank.
“Given how scandalous members of the administration appeared to find the fact that only about ten percent of USAID awards went to prime awardees based in recipient countries, it is surely disappointing their ‘reform’ efforts have further decreased that percentage,” the analysis said.
The Pinocchio Test
There’s a good case that too many foreign-aid dollars get spent inside the Beltway, and that more funds should be directed to organizations on the ground in recipient countries. After years of debate, the Biden administration set a goal for improvement.
But Vance and Rubio are undermining the case for reform when they twist statistics and make outlandish claims in interviews and in congressional testimony. Rubio, in his testimony, appeared to acknowledge that he was citing a number generated by the Biden administration — but he failed to admit error. And apparently he failed to tell the vice president that “his best estimate” was false.
Yesterday at the meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), a forum of democracies with advanced economies, President Donald Trump told reporters: “The UK is very well protected. You know why? Because I like them, that’s why. That’s the ultimate protection.”
Commenters often note that Trump talks like a mob boss, but rarely has his organized-crime style of governance been clearer than in yesterday’s statement.
Also yesterday, Ana Swanson and Lauren Hirsch of the New York Times reported that Trump has taken unprecedented control over U.S. Steel. Japan’s Nippon Steel has been trying to take over U.S. Steel since 2023, but the Biden administration blocked the deal for security reasons. In order to move it forward, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demanded an agreement that gives to the president and his successors, or a person the president designates, a single share of preferred stock, known as class G, or “gold.” The deal gives the president permanent veto power over nearly a dozen actions the company might want to take, as well as power over its board of directors.
Swanson and Hirsch note that the U.S. government historically takes a stake in companies only when they are in financial trouble or when they play a significant role in the economy. “We have a golden share, which I control, or the president controls,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday. “Now I’m a little concerned whoever the president might be, but that gives you total control.”
This kind of deal echoes those of the authoritarians Trump appears to admire. His ongoing support for Russian president Vladimir Putin was on display at the G7, when he echoed Russian talking points that blamed European countries and the United States for Putin’s war against Ukraine, rather than acknowledging that it was Russia that attacked Ukraine after giving assurances that it would respect Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the Soviet nuclear weapons stored there.
Also yesterday, Rene Marsh and Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that officials from the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump have been telling staff in the Midwest—which the authors note has a legacy of industrial pollution—to “stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies.” At the same time, the Department of Justice has cut its environmental division significantly, leaving “no one to do the work.”
Trump vowed that if he were reelected he would slash the oil and gas regulations he claims are “burdensome.” Now, one EPA enforcement staffer told Marsh and Nilsen, “The companies are scoffing at the cops. EPA enforcement doesn’t have the leverage they once had.”
Also yesterday, outdoor journalist Wes Siler reported in Wes Siler’s Newsletter that while language inserted in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill requires the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of publicly owned land, an amendment authorizes the sale of 258 million acres more over the next five years. The amendment comes from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and was written by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Steve Daines (R-MT).
It includes Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands in 11 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. As Siler notes, while the measure does not currently include national monument lands, the Department of Justice under Trump is arguing that the president can revoke national monument protections. If it did so, that would make another 13.5 million acres available for purchase.
Siler notes the process for selling those lands calls for an enormous rush on sales, “all without hearings, debate, or public input opportunities.”
Today, Eliot Brown of the Wall Street Journal reported that Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is now one of the many wealthy foreign real estate developers “pouring money” into the Trump Organization. Brown noted that the Trump family is aggressively developing its businesses while Trump is in the White House, reaching past real estate into cryptocurrency and other sectors.
The growing power of international oligarchs to use the resources of the government for their own benefit recalls a speech Robert Mueller, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave in New York City in 2011. In it, he explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. No longer regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated, with multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.
These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”
These criminal enterprises, he noted, were working to corner the market on oil, gas, and precious metals. And to do so, Mueller explained, they “may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”
The FBI’s increasing focus on organized crime and national security is what prompted its interest in the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016.
The willingness of Republicans to enable Trump’s behavior is especially striking today, since June 17 is the anniversary of the 1972 Watergate break-in. On that day, operatives associated with President Richard M. Nixon’s team tried to tap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex. Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard, noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.
The story played out over the next two years with Nixon insisting he was not involved in the affair, but in early August 1974 a tape recorded just days after the break-in revealed Nixon and an aide plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Republican senators who had not wanted to convict their president of the charges of impeachment being considered in the House knew the game was over. A delegation of them went to the White House to tell Nixon they would vote to convict him.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.
Chris Geidner of LawDork notes that despite the lawmakers in our own era who are unwilling to stop Trump, “the pushback…is very real.” Geidner notes not just the No Kings Day protests of the weekend, but also a lawsuit by the American Bar Association (ABA) suing Trump for his attacks on law firms and lawyers, calling Trump’s actions “unprecedented and uniquely dangerous to the rule of law.”
Geidner also notes that lower court judges are upholding the Constitution, and he points especially to U.S. District Judge William Young, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan. In a hearing yesterday, Young insisted on holding the government accountable “for both Trump’s actions and the follow-up actions from those Trump has empowered to act.”
Young called cuts to funding for National Institutes of Health research grants “illegal” and “void” and ordered the NIH to restore the funds immediately. “I am hesitant to draw this conclusion—but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it—that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.”
“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Young said during the hearing. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.” He added: “You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The Constitution will not permit that.… Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
I have always thought there was something fishy about Trump’s win last November. When Elon Musk broke up with Trump, he said boldly that Trump would have not won the election without his help, and the Democrats would now control the House. What kind of help did he refer to? I wondered if this was an unintended admission. Of course, he can’t say more because it’s illegal to interfere to change the outcome of an election.
Snopes reviewed the case and came down on the side of more evidence is needed. Maybe there were districts where no one voted for Harris, because they were orthodox Jewish districts and everyone followed their rabbi’s endorsement. Maybe not, because there were districts that were not Hasidic where she got zero votes.
Please open the link to read additional stories tied to this one. Also, look up the meaning of the term “Dark Enlightenment.” It refers to the reactionary ideology of Curtis Yarvin, whose admirers include billionaire Peter Thiel and his protege JD Vance.
The Dark Enlightenment Coup
The missing votes uncovered in Smart Elections’ legal case in Rockland County, New York, are just the tip of the iceberg—an iceberg that extends across the swing states and into Texas.
On Monday, an investigator’s story finally hit the news cycle: Pro V&V, one of only two federally accredited testing labs, approved sweeping last-minute updates to ES&S voting machines in the months leading up to the 2024 election—without independent testing, public disclosure, or full certification review.
These changes were labeled “de minimis”—a term meant for trivial tweaks. But they touched ballot scanners, altered reporting software, and modified audit files—yet were all rubber-stamped with no oversight.
That revelation is a shock to the public. But for those who’ve been digging into the bizarre election data since November, this isn’t the headline—it’s the final piece to the puzzle. While Pro V&V was quietly updating equipment in plain sight, a parallel operation was unfolding behind the curtain—between tech giants and Donald Trump.
And it started with a long forgotten sale.
A Power Cord Becomes a Backdoor
In March 2021, Leonard Leo—the judicial kingmaker behind the modern conservative legal machine—sold a quiet Chicago company by the name of Tripp Lite for $1.65 billion. The buyer: Eaton Corporation, a global power infrastructure conglomerate that just happened to have a partnership with Peter Thiel’s Palantir.
To most, Tripp Lite was just a hardware brand—battery backups, surge protectors, power strips. But in America’s elections, Tripp Lite devices were something else entirely.
They are physically connected to ES&S central tabulators and Electionware servers, and Dominion tabulators and central servers across the country. And they aren’t dumb devices. They are smart UPS units—programmable, updatable, and capable of communicating directly with the election system via USB, serial port, or Ethernet.
ES&S systems, including central tabulators and Electionware servers, rely on Tripp Lite UPS devices. ES&S’s Electionware suite runs on Windows OS, which automatically trusts connected UPS hardware.
If Eaton pushed an update to those UPS units, it could have gained root-level access to the host tabulation environment—without ever modifying certified election software.
In Dominion’s Democracy Suite 5.17, the drivers for these UPS units are listed as “optional”—meaning they can be updated remotely without triggering certification requirements or oversight. Optional means unregulated. Unregulated means invisible. And invisible means perfect for infiltration.
A New Purpose for the Partnership
After the Tripp Lite acquisition, Eaton stayed under the radar. But in May 2024, it resurfaced with an announcement that escaped most headlines: Eaton was deepening its partnership with Palantir Technologies.
Let’s be clear, Palantir wasn’t brought in for customer service. It was brought in to do what it does best: manage, shape, and secure vast streams of data—quietly. According to Eaton’s own release, Palantir’s role would include:
AI-driven oversight of connected infrastructure
Automated analysis of large datasets
And—most critically—“secure erasure of digital footprints”
The Digital Janitor: also known as forensic sanitization, it was now being embedded into Eaton-managed hardware connected directly to voting systems. Palantir didn’t change the votes. It helped ensure you’d never prove it if someone else did.
BallotProof: The Front-End for Scrubbing Democracy
Enter the ballot scrubbing platform BallotProof. Co-created by Ethan Shaotran, a longtime employee of Elon Musk and current DOGE employee, BallotProof was pitched as a transparency solution—an app to “verify” scanned ballot images and support election integrity.
With Palantir’s AI controlling the backend, and BallotProof cleaning the front, only one thing was missing: the signal to go live.
September 2024: Eaton and Musk Make It Official
Then came the final public breadcrumb: In September 2024, Eaton formally partnered with Elon Musk.
The stated purpose? A vague, forward-looking collaboration focused on “grid resilience” and “next-generation communications.”
But buried in the partnership documents was this line:
“Exploring integration with Starlink’s emerging low-orbit DTC infrastructure for secure operational continuity.”
The Activation: Starlink Goes Direct-to-Cell
That signal came on October 30, 2024—just days before the election, Musk activated 265 brand new low Earth orbit (LEO) V2 Mini satellites, each equipped with Direct-to-Cell (DTC) technology capable of processing, routing, and manipulating real-time data, including voting data, through his satellite network.
DTC doesn’t require routers, towers, or a traditional SIM. It connects directly from satellite to any compatible device—including embedded modems in “air-gapped” voting systems, smart UPS units, or unsecured auxiliary hardware.
From that moment on:
Commands could be sent from orbit
Patch delivery became invisible to domestic monitors
Compromised devices could be triggered remotely
This groundbreaking project that should have taken two-plus years to build, was completed in just under ten months. Elon Musk boasts endlessly about everything he’s launching, building, buying—or even just thinking about—whether it’s real or not. But he pulls off one of the largest and fastest technological feats in modern day history… and says nothing? One might think that was kind of… “weird.”
Lasers From Space
According to New York Times reporting, on October 5—just before Starlink’s DTC activation—Musk texted a confidant:
“I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight. Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” Then, an hour later:
“This isn’t something on the chessboard, so they’ll be quite surprised. ‘Lasers’ from space.”
It read like a riddle. In hindsight, it was a blueprint.
Let’s review what was in place:
This wasn’t a theory. It was a full-scale operation. A systemic digital occupation—clean, credentialed, and remote-controlled.
The Outcome
Data that makes no statistical sense. A clean sweep in all seven swing states.
The fall of the Blue Wall. Eighty-eight counties flipped red—not one flipped blue.
Every victory landed just under the threshold that would trigger an automatic recount. Donald Trump outperformed expectations in down-ballot races with margins never before seen—while Kamala Harris simultaneously underperformed in those exact same areas.
If one were to accept these results at face value—Donald Trump, a 34-count convicted felon, supposedly outperformed Ronald Reagan. According to the co-founder of the Election Truth Alliance:
“These anomalies didn’t happen nationwide. They didn’t even happen across all voting methods—this just doesn’t reflect human voting behavior.”
They were concentrated.
Targeted.
Specific to swing states and Texas—and specific to Election Day voting.
And the supposed explanation? “Her policies were unpopular.”
Let’s think this through logically. We’re supposed to believe that in all the battleground states, Democratic voters were so disillusioned by Vice President Harris’s platform that they voted blue down ballot—but flipped to Trump at the top of the ticket?
Not in early voting.
Not by mail.
With exception to Nevada, only on Election Day.
And only after a certain threshold of ballots had been cast—where VP Harris’s numbers begin to diverge from her own party, and Trump’s suddenly begin to surge. As President Biden would say, “C’mon, man.”
In the world of election data analysis, there’s a term for that: vote-flipping algorithm.
Billionaires and Tech Giants Pulled Off the Crime of the Century
Why? There wasn’t just one reason—there were many.
Elon Musk himself hinted at the stakes: he faced the real possibility of a prison sentence if Trump lost. He launched his bid for Twitter—at $20 billion over market value—just 49 days after Putin invaded Ukraine. That alone should have raised every red flag. But when the ROI is $15 trillion in mineral rights tied to Ukraine losing the war and geopolitical deals Trump could green light, it wasn’t a loss—it was leverage.
It’s no secret Musk was in communication with Putin for over two years. He even granted Starlink access to Russian forces. That’s not just profiteering. That’s treason.
Then there’s Peter Thiel and the so-called “broligarchs”—tech billionaires who worship at the altar of shower-avoidant blogger Curtis Yarvin. They casually joke about “humane genocide for non-producers” and have long viewed democracy as a nuisance—an obstacle to their vision of hypercapitalism and themselves as the permanent ruling elite.
Well, what is the elimination of Medicaid if not “humane genocide”—and does anyone really wonder why his 40-year-old protégé and political rookie, JD Vance, is Vice President? With this technology in place, if the third-term legislation were to pass, it would hand Vance a minimum of twelve years at the helm of Thiel’s regime.
And of course, Donald Trump himself: He spent a year telling his followers he didn’t need their votes—at one point stating,
“…in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
Trump was facing eighty-eight felony indictments—he was desperate to avoid conviction and locked in a decades-long alliance with Vladimir Putin. An alliance that’s now impossible to ignore—look no further than his policy trail.
He froze aid to Ukraine and has threatened to place sanctions on them, while planning to lift sanctions off Russia. He openly campaigned for anti-EU candidates, and sided with Russia in multiple key United Nations votes related to the Ukraine conflict.
Let’s be clear:
Donald Trump pledges allegiance to a red, white, and blue flag— It’s just not the American one.
What Happens Now?
We don’t need permission to enforce the Constitution. We need courage. While state attorneys general begin their investigations, it only takes one U.S. senator to initiate the disqualification proceedings against the unelected and unfit occupant of the Oval Office. State Attorneys General and Investigators:
Conduct independent audits of UPS firmware on Dominion and ES&S machines
Subpoena communications between Eaton, Palantir, Starlink employees, and Pro V&V
Audit Starlink satellite logs for the week of the election
Freeze uncertified infrastructure updates
Recount physical ballots—by hand Now they’re rolling out the same technological toolkit abroad—forcing countries into Starlink contracts in exchange for tariff relief. The U.S. election wasn’t their endgame. It was their litmus test.
Want the truth they’re not telling you? For fearless reporting and expert-backed research, read The Common Coalition Report. And if you believe in funding real, independent work—support our all volunteer team here.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, probes the divide in the state Republican Party, which is currently in the hands of MAGA extremists.
He writes:
Oklahoma seems to be a case study in MAGA-ism and, now, it may be foreshadowing the chaos that President Donald Trump is creating with his fights with allies.
As the Oklahoma Observer’s Arnold Hamilton explained, the massive Republican majority in the Oklahoma legislature had been “bullied by Gov. Kevin Stitt all session long, until they became “chihuahuas [who] abruptly morphed into pit bulls.” Hamilton then asked, “Was this a one-off, final-hours temper tantrum by legislators fed up with the governor? Or a sign they are embracing their constitutional authority as a co-equal branch of government?”
On the other hand, the Oklahoma Voice’s Janelle Steckleinwrote that the “Stitt Show” shouldn’t distract from the fact that most of his agenda became law, and the people were the big losers.
I suspect that this is another case of Democrats and adult Republicans minimizing the damage that would be done by the passage of the DOGE/Ok agenda. And that is necessary before real progress can be made. I also suspect that the answers as to who won the 2025 session will mostly depend on the courts.
Oklahoma ranks in the bottom five of the nation in child-welfare, and 48th in education. Also, Oklahoma’s poverty rate increased from 38th to 45th in the nation since Stitt took office, and we are 45th in bridge infrastructure. We are in the nation’s top five in men killing women; in the worst women’s health care access; in teen pregnancy; and in the world’s incarceration rates; as one Oklahoman commits suicide every 19 hours.
As the Oklahoma Policy Institute explains, “Oklahoma’s housing crisis is worsening. Moreover, the Trump administration’s “deep cuts to housing programs” are “leaving states to fill the gap in funding.” State lawmakers “punted” on nearly all of their “multiple opportunities to reduce evictions, update the Landlord-Tenant Act, and increase Oklahoma’s supply of housing stock.” And, Stitt “vetoed the only bill to combat the housing crisis the legislature managed to pass, a measure that would have extended the eviction timeline and given families a better shot at staying housed.”
After the legislature gave the governor unprecedented power to control state agencies and Stitt appointed Commissioner Allie Friesen as the head of the ODMHSAA, the legislature had to pass a nearly $30 million emergency bill to keep the agency open until July, and it fired Friesen.
Stitt responded by making personal attacks on fellow Republicans. Senate Pro-Tem Lonnie Paxton the “called Friesen’s appointment by Stitt part of a “pattern” of failure.” Moreover:
“The executive branch continues to produce multimillion-dollar disasters that are routinely dumped in the Legislature’s lap to clean up,” Paxton wrote. “The legislature entrusted this governor with more control of this agency, and he has wrecked it in record time.”
Oklahoma’s extreme mental health crisis isn’t the only extreme challenge, as the Trump administration is ramping up major cuts to health-care funding. As the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy (O.I.C.A.) reports, 59% of the state’s medical facilities are at risk for closing. And the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 174,000 Oklahomans are likely to lose benefits from SoonerCare, Oklahoma’s version of Medicaid. The Urban Institute estimates that “Oklahoma would have to raise taxes or cut other parts of its budget by $2 billion over ten years to maintain SoonerCare” due to federal Medicaid cuts.
This comes at a time when the legislature will likely have $300 million less to appropriate next year. And it will happen as state agencies say they’ll need $921 million more in funding.
But Stitt, who brags about previously cutting taxes by a billion dollars, then cut income taxes by about $350 million a year, on his “path to zero,” meaning he would eliminate this progressive tax.
And that gets us to what I consider the other most destructive, anti-democracy victory achieved by Stitt and his fellow Republicans, SB 1027. Over the last nine years, voters in our populist state have used the initiative petition to pass state questions on criminal justice reform, medical marijuana legalization and Medicaid expansion. Also, a vote to raise the minimum wage is scheduled. And an effort to end legislative gerrymandering may be coming. Apparently, the biggest reason why the Republicans set out to remove our constitutional right is to prevent SQ 836, a petition for open primaries.”
So, the Republicans have passed SB 1027 which “caps the number of petition signatures that can be gathered in each county and imposes several procedural changes.” By capping the number of votes that can be counted in Oklahoma and Tulsa Counties, they “would effectively end initiative petitions in Oklahoma.”
Rep. Jay Steagall, R-Yukon defended his vote by suggesting “direct democracy as exemplified by initiative petitions invites mob rule.” And, Republican House Speaker Kyle Hilbert defended their refusal to take a stand for democracy, saying, “The founding fathers did have concerns about the tyranny of democracy.”
And that gets back to the question as to whether the integrity of Oklahoma’s judicial system will be maintained.
Until the early 1960s, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court was completely corrupt. In a bipartisan response, our state created an exemplary, honest judicial system. However, Gov. Stitt has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, tried to turn back the clock to the decades when Oklahoma was one of the most corrupt places in America by repealing the Justice Nominating Commission.
This year, however, he achieved a major goal by creating a Business Court, which could be a tool for enhancing corporate powers. Stitt sees it a tool for building a “more business-friendly state.”
And that brings us to the Oklahoma American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) review of the 2025 session. It listed more than 50 attempts to reverse legal reforms; 15 attempts to attack immigrant rights; 25+ attempts to reverse LGBTQ+ rights; 10+ bills attacking free speech; and 20+ bills attacking voting rights.
Most of these bills were so extreme that they were defeated. For instance, this week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of Oklahoma’s HB 4156, known as the “impermissible occupation” bill, which “criminalizes certain behaviors of undocumented immigrants, allowing state law enforcement to detain and prosecute them.”
But, there remains work to be done to prevent implementing the Education Department’s (OSDE) demand that immigration data regarding schools be turned over to the state. Also, the ban, aimed at trans-gender persons, on “obscene” performance in public property and certain public places must be challenged, as well as the banning DEI in Higher Education.
So, I conclude that Gov. Stitt has been humiliating himself, but he succeeded in passing the laws that inflict the worst harm on Oklahomans. The civil war between Republican extremists gives more hope that more of the silliest bills can be stopped, giving more power to adults Republicans and Democrats. However, it will take years to build the foundations that are necessary before we can create meaningful pathways to a state with a 21st century political and social systems that serve the people.
ProPublica published a searing critique of the medical research that has been cancelled by the Trump administration. The fact that this research has been canceled is not at question; at least some of the cancellations have been reversed (for now) by federal courts.
What’s truly puzzling is why the Trump administration wants to eliminate so much vital research. The U.S. has led the world in biomedical research that has saved countless lives. Why does Trump wants to abandon this vital and beneficent role. Other nations are wooing our top scientists. Why are we terminating their projects?
Some grants were canceled because they dealt explicitly with health and health disparities of nonwhites and LGBT people. A Reagan-appointed federal judge reversed those terminations and said that their purpose was clearly discriminatory.
But what about the search for causes and cures of diseases that affect many populations?
Scientists compete vigorously for a slice of the more than $30 billion that the agency doles out annually; they can spend years assembling grant applications that stretch thousands of pages in hopes of convincing peer reviewers of the promise of their projects. Only 1 in 5 gets chosen.
The NIH has rarely revoked funding once it has been awarded. Out of the tens of thousands of grants overseen by the institution since 2012, it terminated fewer than five for violations of the agency’s terms and conditions.
Then Donald Trump was reelected.
Since his January inauguration, his administration has terminated more than 1,450 grants, withholding more than $750 million in funds; officials have said they are curbing wasteful spending and “unscientific” research. The Department of Government Efficiency gave the agency direction on what to cut and why, ProPublica has previously found, bypassing the NIH’s established review process.
“The decision to terminate certain grants is part of a deliberate effort to ensure taxpayer dollars prioritize high-impact, urgent science,” said Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services. He did not respond to questions about the terminated grants or how patients may be impacted, but he said, “Many discontinued projects were duplicative or misaligned with NIH’s core mission. NIH remains focused on supporting rigorous biomedical research that delivers real results — not radical ideology.”
Targeted projects, however, were seeking cures for future pandemics, examining the causes of dementia and trying to prevent HIV transmission.
The mass cancellation of grants in response to political policy shifts has no precedent, former and current NIH officials told ProPublica. It threatens the stability of the institution and the scientific enterprise of the nation at large. Hundreds of current and former NIH staffers published a declaration this week — cosigned by thousands of scientists across the world, including more than 20 Nobel laureates — decrying the politicization of science at the agency and urging its director to reinstate the canceled grants. Many researchers have appealed the terminations, and several lawsuits are underway challenging the cuts.
It has been difficult for scientists and journalists to convey the enormity of what has happened these past few months and what it portends for the years and decades to come. News organizations have chronicled cuts to individual projects and sought to quantify the effects of lost spending on broad fields of study. To gain a deeper understanding of the toll, ProPublica reached out to more than 500 researchers, scientists and investigators whose grants were terminated.
More than 150 responded to share their experiences, which reveal consequences that experts say run counter to scientific logic and even common sense.
They spoke of the tremendous waste generated by an effort intended to save money — years of government-funded research that may never be published, blood samples in danger of spoiling before they can be analyzed.
Work to address disparities in health, once considered so critical to medical advancement that it was mandated by Congress, is now being cut if the administration determines it has any connection to “diversity,” “equity” or “gender ideology.” Caught in this culling were projects to curb stillbirths, child suicides and infant brain damage.
Researchers catalogued many fears — about the questions they won’t get to answer, the cures they will fail to find and the colleagues they will lose to more supportive countries. But most of all, they said they worried about the people who, because of these cuts, will die.
