One of the shocking actions of Trump’s first year of his second term was his decision to shutter the widely respected Voice of America. Not only were almost all employees laid off, but the leadership of the government agency was put in the hands of MAGA zealot Kari Lake. Lake ran for governor and senator in Arizona, losing both races.
Voice of America employees have spent a full year on paid administrative leave while President Donald Trump’s administration has tried to shrink the international broadcaster to its “statutory minimum.” That extended absence is coming to an end.
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the wind-down of operations at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA’s parent, is unlawful and ordered the agency to bring more than 1,000 employees back to work.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that the near-total shutdown of USAGM, which oversees VOA and funds several international broadcasters such as Radio Free Asia, violated federal administrative law. He ordered the full-time employees to return to work by March 23 and told the agency to resume international broadcasting, which it has mostly abandoned during the past year — save for some airing in languages such as Farsi.
Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, criticized the government’s “flagrant and nearly year-long refusal” to uphold statutory requirements set by Congress and lambasted Kari Lake, the Trump official who oversaw the dismantling of the agency. Lamberth recently ruled that Lake has been running the agency illegally. “The defendants’ persistent omission and withholding of key information in this case has been a Hallmark production in bad faith,” he wrote of Lake and the government in a footnote.
One of the key features of the “Mississippi Miracle” is the retention of third-graders who do not score well enough to enter fourth grade. Third-graders with low reading scores are held back for an extra year.
Critics of the “Miracle” say that holding back the lowest scoring third-graders inflates the fourth grade scores.
But what about the effects of retention in the students who are held back?
Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reports on a new study that found negative, long-term effects of third-grade retention.
It’s an age-old debate with an emerging conventional wisdom: Third graders should not move on to the next grade if they are still struggling to read.
There’s both logic and evidence behind this policy. Studies have found that students have higher test scores after they’re held back. This practice may also have played a role in helping Mississippi make remarkable improvements in recent years.A chorus of policymakers and journalists have insisted with growing confidence that others should replicate the state’s model.
But a new study offers a warning about the downside risks of retention. Third graders who had to repeat a grade in Texas were far less likely to graduate from high school or earn a good living as young adults, nearly two decades later. The harmful effects were quite large and came despite initial improvements in test scores.
“Retaining low-achieving students in third grade further deepens educational and income inequalities,” writes Jiee Zhong, an economics professor at Miami University.
The findings are hardly the last word on this topic. But they complicate the evidence base for retention at a time when more states — like Arkansas, Indiana, and West Virginia — are adopting this policy.
The paper, set to be published in an economics journal, examines an early 2000s Texas policy to hold back struggling readers. Students had three chances to pass the state exam.
Zhong, the researcher, looked at those who just barely missed the passing score versus those who just reached it. These students were essentially identical — the only difference was a few questions right or wrong on the test. Yet those handful of questions changed the trajectory of many students’ lives by determining whether they would be held back. This also created a natural experiment that allowed Zhong to compare the two groups of students, thus isolating the effect of retention.
Failing the exam wasn’t a guarantee that students would repeat the grade — parents could seek exemptions — but it dramatically increased their chances. Relative to the overall student population, the retained students were more likely to be low-income, Black or Hispanic, and still learning English.
In the short term, the results were promising. By the time retained students finished fourth grade, their test scores were much higher. But there were warning signs. Students missed more school after they were held back. As the years went on, the test score gains, relative to non-retained students, started to fade. In middle school, the students who had been held back were more likely to exhibit violent behavior (although this remained rare).
By the end of high school, retained students were 9 percentage points less likely to graduate, compared to similar students who weren’t forced to repeat third grade. This is a very large effect. Even those students who graduated typically did so a year later, reflecting the extra year from being held back.
At the age of 26, the previously retained students, now young adults, earned less money than if they hadn’t been held back. Again, the effect was substantial: nearly $3,500, a decline of 19%.
To finish reading the article, please open the link.
Brendan Carr, selected as chairman of the Federal Communications Conmission, threatened to revoke the licenses of stations that were too negative in their coverage of the war in Iran.
Ann Telnaes was an editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post. She drew a cartoon showing billionaires bowing down to Trump. One of them was Jeff Bezos, owner of the Post. Her editor wouldn’t publish her cartoon. She resigned.
TheWall Street Journalposted a story about a tax economist who bet his life savings ($342,000) that the DOGE cuts would have no impact on government spending. He won. His bet returned $470,000, but the Journal pointed out that he probably didn’t win much because he took his money out of the stock market and missed gains and his winnings would be taxed. So there.
But seriously, what did Musk and his DOGE team accomplish?
Musk began his stint as leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency soon after Trump was inaugurated. Trump gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted so long as he cut the federal budget.
Musk boldly proclaimed that he would slash $2 trillion in government spending. He soon cut projected savings to $1 trillion. He didn’t come close to meeting his goal.
Analyses since then have concluded that his young team of computer nerds saved nowhere near that amount and that many of their “savings” were either overstated or false.
DOGE did fire hundreds of thousands of civil servants, but the cost of firing them was high and did not produce savings. As a result of losing senior civil servants, many government agencies may be less efficient today because of losing their knowledge and experience. Unions went to court; workers were fired, rehired, fired, rehired.
Musk boasted about shutting down foreign aid (USAID), but the cost there will be in loss of human life. International authorities believe that 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, will die by 2030 because of the cut-off of U.S. food and medicine.
The study, by researchers from the United States, Spain, Brazil and Mozambique, estimates that 91 million deaths were prevented between 2001 and 2021 in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) due to programs supported by USAID, the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid worldwide. However, recent U.S. foreign aid cuts could reverse this progress and lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5.
The cost of USAID to each American: $0.17 per day. Despite the sure death of people who needed USAID to survive, Musk celebrated the death of USAID at the national conservative political conference, dancing around with a jewel-encrusted chainsaw in his hands.
David Farenholdt and three colleagues at the New York Times published a summary of the impact of DOGE in December 2025. The title was “How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?”
The overview:The group’s biggest claims were largely incorrect, a New York Times analysis found. And its many smaller cuts added up to few savings.
The story begins:
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government — slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants.
But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.
How is that possible?
One big reason, according to a New York Times analysis: Many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong. And while the group did make thousands of smaller cuts, jolting foreign aid recipients, American small businesses and local service providers, those amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.
At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Mr. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations,” and said their demise had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.
Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.
Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate — reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend…
To sort DOGE’s bogus cuts from its successes, The Times looked at federal records for the 40 largest items on the “Wall of Receipts.” In at least 28 cases, DOGE got it wrong.
Its errors included:
Double-counting. DOGE took credit for canceling the same Department of Energy grant twice, adding $500 million in duplicate savings.
Timeline errors. One contract that DOGE claimed credit for ending had actually been terminated by the Biden administration, weeks before DOGE began its work. Three more items on DOGE’s list had simply expired. These were pandemic-era contracts with pharmacies that provided free Covid-19 testing for the uninsured. They were originally allowed to spend up to a combined $12.2 billion, but they never came close to that level. Then, in May, the three contracts ended on schedule.DOGE still claimed credit for killing them, highlighting $6 billion in savings.
Misclassifications. Seven programs that DOGE claimed to have terminated are not dead, including four that were resurrected by court rulings.
Exaggerations. In 16 cases, DOGE greatly exaggerated its cuts. Many, including those two large Defense Department contracts, relied on an accounting trick that produced “savings” with little real-world effect. DOGE lowered the official “ceiling value” of contracts — reducing the theoretical limit on what the government could eventually pay — without changing its actual spending….
In total, the Trump administration terminated more contracts this year than the government did last year. But the actual dollars “de-obligated” — money the government had committed to spend but then pulled back — were at most a couple of billion dollars higher in 2025 than in recent years, according to contracting experts.
For decades, the government has funded outside analysts to study whether taxpayer-funded programs actually work, and how to improve them. It is the kind of work that would seem to serve DOGE’s mission of making government more efficient.
But DOGE canceled some of these contracts as well.…
A Chaotic Process
Many of the errors DOGE has left in its wall were rooted in the chaotic process of how it identified cuts — or told agencies to.
DOGE was staffed by outsiders from the business and tech worlds, without much experience in the arcana of government programs. The early approach to measure savings by subtracting spent money from ceiling values helped drive its choices, and its high error rate.
Dr. Sunny Patel, who was a top official at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said he and his colleagues were given a dollar target and an Excel formula for calculating savings. DOGE officials suggested contracts to cancel, and agency officials fought to protect ones they viewed as most critical by offering others instead.
“You had to hit the hard number, and there’s only so many things that you can cut,” he said. “So it was like, ‘Oh, I guess we’re going to offer this up,’ because this is the least bad thing to do.”
In other cases, government workers came to understand DOGE’s process and fed the group nearly finished contracts with high ceiling values, rather than contracts that would significantly reduce spending.
Many of DOGE’s initial broad cuts and layoffs were later put on hold or reversed by litigation — a fact DOGE never went back to the wall to update. That litigation also cost the government money.
The Port Discovery Children’s Museum in Baltimore had won a $200,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (I.M.L.S.) to fund a program in which museum staff members went into child care centers connected to public schools in Baltimore. There they would teach parents how playing with their children could foster child development and family relationships.
On April 28, the government sent the museum a form letter terminating the grant and half its funds. The program no longer met agency priorities, the letter said, “and no longer serves the interest of the United States.”
“We were serving low-income families in Title I schools,” said Sonja Cendak, the vice president for development and marketing for the museum. “I don’t know what to say.”
The DOGE wall shows that it canceled more than 1,000 I.M.L.S. grants to local museums, libraries and history centers. States and the American Library Association sued, and courts required the grants to be reinstated. The Baltimore museum later received most of its funds. And on Dec. 3, I.M.L.S. announced it was reinstating all grants. But those grants still appear as cuts on the DOGE website, collectively “saving” the government about $134 million.
But DOGE achieved one of its undisclosed aims: It gained access to confidential Social Security files, which were quickly hoovered up by the tech-savvy DOGE kids. According to the Washington Post, “Members of DOGE …had obtained one of the government’s most protected databases, risking the security of hundreds of millions of Americans’ private Social Security records.” The Justice Department admitted “that the Social Security Administration had discovered a secret agreement between a DOGE employee and an unidentified political advocacy group. The agreement called for sharing Social Security data with the aim of overturning election results in certain states.”
DOGE busted government unions, wrecked the civil service, and demoralized career employees in every department.
DOGE created confusion and chaos in the federal workplace; certainly it demoralized career workers, who didn’t know from day do day whether or not they were still employed. They were fired, recalled, fired, recalled.
Blumenthal asserted that DOGE was actually a huge money-waster:
U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) released a Minority staff report today unveiling that Elon Musk’s brainchild, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has generated at least $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government between January 20, 2025, and July 18, 2025. The report, “The $21.7 Billion Blunder: Analyzing the Waste Generated by DOGE,” follows a months-long investigation into Elon Musk and DOGE and is the most comprehensive effort to date to quantify taxpayer dollars squandered by DOGE despite its ostensible goal of eliminating government waste.
“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims. At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars,” said Blumenthal. “As my PSI investigation has shown, DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money. I urge Inspectors General to take up our investigation’s findings and initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s careless actions.”
PSI’s comprehensive review of publicly available resources and independent analysis has found that DOGE has generated $21.7 billion in waste so far this year, including:
$14.8 billion through its Deferred Resignation Program for paying approximately 200,000 employees not to work for up to eight months.
$6.1 billion for over 100,000 employees who have been involuntarily separated from federal service or who remain on prolonged periods of administrative leave pending separation, many of whom were paid to not do their jobs for weeks or months.
$263 million in lost interest and fee income at the Department of Energy due to dozens of loan freezes meant to finance key utility projects supporting energy affordability and grid resilience.
$155 million in time costs to require nearly a million employees to send weekly accomplishment emails to the Office of Personnel Management amounting to millions of hours of wasted time.
$110 million on food aid and medical supplies spoiling in warehouses, set to be destroyed at a further cost to taxpayers.
$66 million by underutilizing thousands of professional staff to perform entry-level duties for weeks on end, including over $138,000 for paying scientists to check guests in at national parks.
$41.8 million to relocate over 250 staff members at one agency closer to a physical office.
$38 million in sunk costs on unrecoverable investments in science and technology across four projects at the National Institutes of Health and the Internal Revenue Service.
$1.7 million in time costs to require employees to unnecessarily justify routine expenses at three agencies, including window washing at the Federal Aviation Administration.
PSI’s estimate of DOGE-generated waste does not include other direct and indirect forms of waste that may add millions or even billions of dollars to projected waste, such as substantial administrative and legal expenses, undermining public safety and natural disaster response, human costs and health threats, and other hidden economic costs.
Trump and his Department of Justice have a very bad practice of appointing federal prosecutors without bothering to have them confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as the Constitution requires.
Several of his choices have been disqualified by federal courts. If a vacancy exists, the judges appoint a replacement. But Trump and Bondi then fire the judges’s choice.
Remember Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s personal attorney? He named her the U.S. Attorney for Eastern Virginia. She got an indictment against New York State Attorney General Letitia James, but she was never confirmed by the Senate. After six months as interim U.S. Attorney, she was removed by federal judges, and the indictment she won was dismissed as illegal.
In New Jersey, Trump picked another personal attorney, Alina Habba, as U.S. Attorney, again bypassed the Senate, and a panel of judges removed her. When the judges named a qualified replacement, Trump and the Department of Justice fired him. Having been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, Trump has a very long list of personal attorneys.
Judge Matthew W. Brann ruled that the appointment of the three prosecutors was illegal. Brann, a conservative Republican appointed by Obama, said that this unconstitutional maneuver put in jeopardy all the convictions secured by this office since December, when the troika took charge.
He wrote:
Using italics that demonstrated the heightened tenor of his ruling, he wrote that the Trump administration had shown through its statements and actions that it cared far more about who was running the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office “than whether it is running at all.”
Judge Brann pointedly said that the president’s continued reliance on unlawful mechanisms to appoint top federal prosecutors meant that “scores of dangerous criminals could have their cases dismissed or convictions eventually reversed…”
During Mr. Trump’s second term, when judges have installed a U.S. attorney, the Justice Department has fired them. After it did so with an interim U.S. attorney in upstate New York recently, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, wrote on social media: “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution.”
Judge Brann, a federal judge who typically sits in Pennsylvania but was designated to handle the matter in New Jersey, referred to that statement and others like it as “combative (and legally incomplete).” He said that such assertions clearly indicated that “the Department of Justice would not permit anyone to hold any United States attorney’s office if that person was not handpicked by the president…”
Judge Brann joins a growing collection of district court judges in New Jersey and around the country whose rulings are increasingly colored by their frustration with what they have consistently characterized as the lawless behavior of the Trump administration.
In several such rulings, judges appear to be seeking strategies to address frequent violations of the law. At least three in New Jersey have proposed new processes or tactics that they clearly hope will curb the administration’s conduct.
At the same time, the administration has grown more and more belligerent toward the judiciary. Top officials ridiculed the Supreme Court after it ruled against Mr. Trump’s tariffs, and Justice Department lawyers began an appeals court brief last week by saying: “Courts cannot tell the president what to say. Courts cannot tell the president what not to say.”
Since last summer, the New Jersey prosecutor’s office has been a casualty of the chaos created by the Trump administration’s moves to retain control. Dozens of seasoned lawyers have left the office, and trial court judges have been forced to grapple with the possibility that decisions they make about criminal cases could be overturned.
The Trump administration is trying to destroy what it does not control: the electoral process, the legal system, the public’s belief in the fairness of democracy as a way of government.
Jennifer Rubin, ex-columnist for The Washington Post, now leads The Contrarian, a home for dissatisfied ex-Republicans and outraged democrats. She wrote the following.
“Everyone saw this coming except the President.” An “unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.” Were these the words from Democrats decrying Donald Trump for failing to plan to evacuate hundreds of thousands of civilians under a blizzard of retaliatory fire raining down on the Gulf States? No, those were Republicans excoriating former president Joe Biden for the botched 2021 exit from Afghanistan. Back then, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) thundered, “It’s a very dire situation when you see the United States Embassy being evacuated.”
Fast forward to last week. The Trump regime closed down three of our embassies (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Kuwait), abandoning U.S. citizens in those countries. Trump’s minions failed to consider advanced planning to evacuate Americans from the region, leaving them to fend for themselves in places where missiles are flying and buildings are ablaze.
Story after story has documented Americans scared, stranded, and left to find their own transportation out of countries made dangerous by his careless whims. Many have expressed their understandably fury that their government could be so derelict. The State Department has failed spectacularly in one of its essential missions — protecting Americans around the world.
The Trump regime’s level of recklessness and indifference to human life and international order should appall all Americans. Trump’s excuse for making no evacuation plans — “Well, because it happened all very quickly” — is ludicrous, considering the U.S. and Israel apparently spent months planning the military assault. His jaw-dropping admission that Iran’s bombardment of neighboring countries in retaliation was “probably the biggest surprise” reflects how little thought he put into a war with global ramifications.
Foreign policy professionals who have planned and executed mass evacuations of civilians in war zones over decades blasted Trump’s negligence. State Department veteran and Middle East expert Jeffrey Feltman recently argued, “It is a complete dereliction of duty for President Trump and his administration to have been planning this war for the past month, however long it’s been since they’ve been moving assets, without planning for an evacuation of American citizens.” He expounded on the cavalier and irresponsibly failure to protect Americans:
You know, Biden rightly got criticized for the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan. But we’re talking now about the potential of… American citizens being trapped in 14 different countries when they could have been planning all along for how they were going to deal with this. Right now, right now, the statements are, “Use commercial means to leave.” Well, there are no commercial means to leave. There’s been some hints they’re looking at this, but they could have put all this in place.
How could they not have expected a country with a stockpile of missiles would retaliate across the region, endangering tens of thousands of Americans? Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s pathetic excuses for neglecting elemental steps to protect Americans left Democrats, ordinary people, and foreign policy insiders flabbergasted.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) reported his office was inundated with “panicked calls from Americans stuck in the Middle East, outraged that our government has provided zero evacuation support.” Combat veteran Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) was outraged by the absence of any “evacuation plan for Americans in the region when he launched his reckless, needless and unconstitutional war of choice against Iran.” Others joined in denouncing the institutional malpractice.
This display of incompetence should not surprise us, given that the MAGA crew harbors such contempt for government. The massive cuts and loss of scores of foreign policy professionals (collectively representing centuries of experience) mean institutional knowledge is scarce. DOGE cuts conducted by know-nothing twenty year olds, partisan witch hunts, early retirements, and mass resignations have hollowed out the State Department, leaving it in the hands of a skeletal staff retained for their political loyalty — not expertise and experience. (Rubio also slashed staff at the National Security Council, which is supposed to oversee interagency planning.) In any other administration, the secretary of state/national security adviser would get canned or forced to resign in disgrace after such management malpractice.
As Columbia University Professor Elizabeth Saunders explained, Trump and Rubio’s “gutting of the State Department and blowtorching of US diplomatic capacity and credibility is an accelerant to this spiraling war and will seriously undercut US/allied efforts to pick up the pieces after.” If they bollixed up something as foreseeable as evacuations, imagine what chaos will ensure when the fighting stops.
For over a year, buffoonish Cabinet secretaries and their senior advisers have demonstrated the Trump regime is no “meritocracy.” As in all corrupt regimes that value sycophancy over competence, avoidable errors multiply over time. Americans trapped in a regional war zone (not to mention our armed service and regional allies) now pay the price for an unhinged and impulsive president enabled by careless, juvenile advisers who think war is a video game.
Meanwhile, no one at the White House has the temerity to contradict Trump’s “gut” impulses. Without aides to restrain Trump’s whims (e.g., Mr. President we need to get the Americans out first), he blunders forward.
To compound the problem, MAGA’s cult of personality that necessitates Republicans abdicate their legislative responsibilities, Congress would have voted for a war powers resolution, or at the very least, initiated aggressive oversight. Alas, the Republicans (who have time to quiz the Clintons behind closed doors about the pedophile scandal) show no interest in determining how this travesty unfolded and what is being done to remedy it. Instead, Hill staffers are left to field angry calls from constituents begging for help.
Congress must rouse itself to focus on a foreign policy disaster that makes the Iraq War look like a masterstroke. Rubio and other top officials under oath and in public should answer for their lapses, account for every dime spent, and give Congress some basic information. (What is the plan to extract Americans? When does the war end? Are we now targeting civilians?) The last thing Congress should do is agree to any request, as the Trump team is reportedly contemplating, to shovel more money into the coffers of this gang of bumblers.
Unfortunately, we know how this will play out. Trump and his arrogant yes-men will never admit error, let alone apologize; Republicans on the Hill will not stir themselves to do their jobs. It will be up to the voters to throw out every elected Republican and force removal of the architects of this catastrophe. Until that happens, Americans here and abroad will needlessly suffer and die
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is holding the line on spending, except for vouchers, which h will get a big boost. About 85% of the students using vouchers never attended public schools, so Governor Sanders is handing out money to pay for students already enrolled in private and religious schools.
Poor people in Arkansas don’t get much help in the budget, but affluent families get tax cuts and vouchers to pay for private schools, religious schools, and home schools.
Arkansas lawmakers are set to convene April 8 to hash out next year’s state budget. In a Wednesday letter to lawmakers, Sanders said she’s proposing a 3% increase, a pretty standard figure on par with recent years.
But what’s going to be funded in this mostly flat spending plan, and what’s not? At first blush, it looks like well-to-do Arkansans are the big winners, cashing in on private school vouchers and more income tax cuts.
Sanders’ proposed 2026-27 budget, presented to lawmakers by Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration Director Jim HudsonWednesday morning, includes up to $379 million for the Arkansas LEARNS vouchers that parents who opt out of traditional public schools can tap to pay private school or homeschool expenses. That’s a big increase over the $187 million budgeted for vouchers last time.
The 2025-26 school year was the first in which all students in Arkansas were eligible for these vouchers, and the price tag keeps creeping higher. Ballooning costs are pretty much a given, based on what’s happened in other states that pioneered this tricky transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to their wealthy overlords by paying fancy kids’ tony tuitions for them. Just ask Arizona and Florida.
Lawmakers have made a number of adjustments and budget increases for LEARNS after voucher costs quickly exceeded the budgeted amount. In January, a legislative committee signed off on giving another $32 million in one-time reserve funds to Arkansas’s newly universal school voucher program, bringing its total cost in the current 2025-26 school year to $309.4 million, which covers more than 44,000 students. That $309 million is the base amount proposed for 2026-27, but Sanders’ budget proposes an extra $70 million for it, just in case.
Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families warned in January that vouchers are doing all the things opponents warned they would: creating new spending obligations for taxpayers to cover private school tuitions and other costs that were never on the public dime before; chipping away at public schools’ financial resilience; and generally busting budgets.
These set-aside amounts that were incorporated into the state’s school voucher fund this year, and which are being teed up to be added next year to the tune of $70 million, look a lot like a trap. Last go-round, lawmakers approved about $187 million for vouchers, but then added another $122 million to the school voucher cause in piecemeal fashion over the course of the fiscal year, to ultimately spend $309 million. Now lawmakers are looking at $309 million as the floor for voucher spending for 2026-27, and will almost certainly throw in that set-aside $70 million, too (if not more). How many hundreds of millions more are we going to add in these payouts for the well-to-do each year, in slapdash fashion? Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Stephen Dyer, former state legislator, follows the money. As usual, in Ohio, public money is flowing to private organizations that are neither accountable nor effective. In this post, he assays the trail of public funds collected by the Center for Christian Virtue. The Ohio Constitution could not be clearer: no money for religious schools. The Ohio legislature treats the state constitution like an outdated relic.
Dyer writes on his blog Tenth Period:
The Center for Christian Virtue is making quite a play in Ohio’s education policy landscape. They are using a multimillion dollar Capital Square office to run the lobbying effort to continue the state’s unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies. They also are running a so-called $3.2 million Scholarship Granting Organization, which is really just a fancy way of funneling millions more of our tax dollars into unaccountable private schools.
And, potentially most harmful of all, they’re running an operation they call “school planting” where they use the unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy to kick-start “schools” inside of churches across Ohio.
They are now claiming to have done this with 15 “schools” so far, publicly naming four new ones that opened this school year and another 4 next school year. Here’s how they brag about it in their news release about this initiative:
“Through our innovative school-in-a-church model, God is expanding access to Christian education for families in every corner of the state. By leveraging existing church facilities, we help keep costs low, making it possible for more families to afford a high-quality, Christ-centered education.”
Let’s set aside the fact that having schools pop up in churches is an ancient practice and not in any way “innovative” (having American taxpayers subsidize these things is “innovative”, though).
Anyway, here’s the thing: a total of 25 kids in only 1 of these schools — Westside Preparatory, which is the shining example displayed on CCV’s education website — has ever been tested for proficiency in reading and math, with only 9 ever being deemed “proficient” in both1.
This performance reflects these kids’ scores on tests the schools gets to pick from scores of options allowed by the state.
Public schools, in contrast, do not get to pick their kids’ tests.
All taxpayers had to do for 9 private school kids to test proficient on tests the school picked was to unconstitutionally subsidize these schools by about $2 million.2
[Open the link to see the scores.]
But at least the schools’ scores are 51 percentage points worse last year than the previous year in Math. Not an awesome trend, by the way.
Quite a return, wouldn’t you say? I mean, considering that none of these kids ever attended a public school. I am deducing this because in the schools’ first year of existence, only kindergarteners and first graders are included in their enrollment counts.
And that’s it. That’s all we know about the quality of these 15 “schools.” Hence my quotation marks around the word “school”. Because what these “schools” really seem to be are money makers for CCV so it can finance the elimination of public education.
This is why I call them the new White Hat. For those who aren’t familiar with White Hat, it was the company run by David Brennan that made millions running Charter Schools in Ohio and simply flipped a small percentage of those profits into Republican campaign war chests with the goal of de-funding public schools and the teachers unions that backed Democrats.
CCV is running the same White Hat playbook — set up a bunch of bullshit shell corporations, siphon millions of public dollars from Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students, use a small percentage of that money to lobby Ohio legislators and governors (who are notoriously cheap to buy) who allow CCV to continue stealing that money from kids, then watch public school kids suffer from it all.
All in the name of Jesus — they call this a ministry even!
Because robbing money from poor kids in Columbus, Athens, Steubenville and Findlay is exactly what Christ would have done. What CCV is doing to Ohio’s public school kids is blasphemy. Pure and simple.
But get this: Because CCV’s operation involves advocating for the state to shovel money to private schools, we have no idea how much of that largesse CCV is accumulating. We do know that CCV staff is making bank — again, just as Jesus intended.
An audit of Arizona voucher funds for home-schools demonstrated that 20% of the purchases by parents were unallowable, spent on consumer items that had nothing to do with education, unless you consider condoms “educational.”
Of some 384,000 transactions from December 2024 to September 2025, about 84,000 were spent on non-educational purposes.
One way to stop this misuse of public funds is to bar those who misspend public funds from participating.
Audit data shows over 20% of vendor purchases made with Empowerment Scholarship Account dollars could be barred under the program’s guidelines.
The program, run through the Arizona Department of Education allows expenses for homeschooled students under $2,000 to be automatically approved by the department and later audited. But that audit could come months later, a process that Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne has blamed on understaffing.
The program was initially designed primarily for students with disabilities but was expanded to be available for all students in 2022. Many homeschooled students are eligible to receive about $7,000 per year through the program, though money allocated to special needs students can be much higher.
Records released by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office show Arizonans have spent millions of dollars on expenses that appear to fall afoul of the program’s guidelines. A risk-based audit performed by the Department of Education found that 20% of purchases were “unallowed.” A risk-based audit is a financial audit that examines where problems are most likely to happen. In this case, the audit examined a random sample of purchases made through the ESA program.
When the department’s risk-based audit detects “unallowed” purchases, it then performs a full audit of the account to review the account holder’s other purchases. Of the accounts that received a full audit, 46% of the purchases made by those account holders were “unallowable.”
Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat seeking reelection this fall, in a January letter to the Department of Education asked for tighter guardrails on expense approval.
“ADE must do more on the front end to prevent unallowable purchases, and it must do so immediately,” Mayes said in her letter.
Horne declined to comment to The Arizona Republic, saying his office would soon send a letter in response to Mayes.
But Mayes criticized the policy of automatically approving some purchases and auditing them later. That’s given people a “road map for how to game the system,” Mayes said.
What were the ‘unallowable’ ESA purchases discovered in the audit?
One of the heftier purchases was $7,500 in video gaming equipment.
Parents also paid themselves for homeschooling, which is prohibited under the program. One parent paid themselves $5,700, while others kept the payments to below $2,000.
Other expenses forbidden by the ESA handbook included coffee machines, $2,000 in Visa gift cards, a $1,700 diamond necklace and dog training. There were also trips to Mexico, a Kohl’s gift card, scuba diving equipment, swimming pools, condoms and lubrication.
The last national #NoKings was in October 18, 2025. That was a Saturday. Two days later, on October 20, 2025, Donald Trump began the demolition of the East Wing of the White House. He didn’t tell anyone–not in public, anyway–nor did he follow the law and seek the approval of two boards of review.
Before anyone had a chance to react, the East Wing was a heap of rubble.
Trump declared that he the finished plans to replace it with a grand ballroom that could seat 1,000 people. He showed drawings of a room dripping in gold. A room that belonged in Las Vegas alongside the glittering, gaudy attractions, not alongside the President’s house, which has a simple elegance.
When civic groups and historic preservationists complained that he broke the law, they pointed out that he neglected to get the approval of the Conmission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, which is required by law.
Trump immediately solved the problem of an independent review by replacing every member of both commissions with loyal flunkies.
No surprise, the Commission on Fine Arts unanimously approved Trump’s ballroom unanimously. The chairman of the Commission said the ballroom was desperately needed and credited its “beautiful” structure to Trump.
Meanwhile an independent group called the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to block the ballroom. Their lawsuit was dismissed, but the judge suggested they could sue for other reasons, and they have. That suit is pending.
Having won the approval of the Commision on Fine Arts, the ballroom issue went to the National Capital Planning Commission, stacked with Trump devotees.
At the public hearing, 30 people testified; 29 were opposed.
The Society of Architectural Historians entered a scathing statement into the record, critical of every aspect of the design.
The NCPC decided to delay its decision until April 2.
There is no doubt whatever that the NCPC will enthusiastically endorse Trump’s grand ballroom. Trump is committed to the idea. At one of his first public briefings about the attack on Iran, Trump spoke tersely about the conflict, then segued to musing about the golden drapes in his new ballroom. That’s when he became animated.
Throughout the process, Trump again proved that he is above the law. He believes that the White House is his personal property, and he can change it however he wants. It’s the architectural version of DOGE. Trump sees no reason to seek approval from Congress or any other body for whatever he wants to do.
He doesn’t need Congress to approve the elimination of foreign aid or the gutting of the Department of Education. When he realized he needed the approval of two little-known agencies to get what he wanted, he replaced everyone on both panels that wasn’t a loyalist.
He knows how to rig the outcome. In his vanity and narcissism, he never loses. That’s why he continues to insist that the 2020 election was rigged despite the total absence of any evidence. He never loses.
Diane Ravitch's blog 