The Trump administration began in its earliest days to try to erase what it calls DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), which, in practice, means eliminating federal grants that acknowledge the existence of race, ethnicity, or gender, except for straight white men. Straight white women are usually okay, but recognizing the history, struggles and achievements of others is unacceptable in the Age of Trump.
Trump’s concept of “Make America Great Again” apparently means erasing those who deviate from his white straight ideal of the best days of America (think John Wayne).
An Underground Railroad museum in upstate New York alleged in a lawsuit Friday that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated its federal grant on the basis of race, pointing to President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle diversity-focused initiatives.
The Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, New York, alleges that the National Endowment for the Humanities’cancelation of a $250,000 grant amounted to viewpoint and racial discrimination, violating the First and Fifth Amendments, respectively.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, calls for the funds to be reinstated.
The suit cited Trump’s January 2025 executive orderthat required federal agencies to eliminate any operations supporting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within 60 days. The 40-page brief outlined 1,400 grants that were terminated in early April 2025 “for their conflict with President Trump’s EOs and the new agency priorities adopted in their wake.”
Nina Loewenstein, a lawyer for the museum, told NBC News that there is “just no legitimate basis” for the grant’s cancellation, adding that it is “just explicitly erasing things associated with the Black race.”
Loewenstein and the team of lawyers volunteering on the case through Lawyers for Good Government, an organization that provides free legal services for civil and human rights cases, argued that the Underground Railroad Education Center is just one of thousands of organizations that have been unlawfully targeted by the Trump administration.
Peter Greene retired after 39 years of teaching, and now is the best-informed and most prolific writer about misguided and sometimes malicious efforts to “reform” public schools.
Peter has his own blog–Curmudgucation–and also writes a column about reform frauds for FORBES.
In this post, he tells the remarkable and unsavory story of vouchers in Nebraska. Nebraska is a solid red state, but its voters don’t want vouchers. Rural legislators–even Republicans–know it’s a waste of money and are sure to defund their public schools.
But the voucher-pushers keep looking for clever ways to bypass the voters, who have made it clear that they don’t want vouchers.
Peter Greene writes:
Nebraska’s voucher fans are bound and determined, like legislators in many states, to get around the voters so they can get vouchers installed.
In May of 2023, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools.
The concept has been floated in Nebraska before, notably turning up more than once in 2022’s session. In 2023, it finally progressed through the legislature. But NSEA political action director Brian Nikkelson told the Nebraska Examiner that the public did not support the vouchers, and if the bill was passed, there would be a petition drive to force the bill to go on the ballot for voters to decide.
And so there was. It was a heck of a battle, with the pro-voucher forces have attracting a mountain of money, some of it from outside the state. Paul Hammel at the Nebraska Examiner reported that big money contributors include C.L. Werner, an Omaha-based trucking company executive ($100,000), Tom Peed and his son Shawn of a Lincoln publishing company ($75,000 each), and former Nebraska governor U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts ($25,000). Governor Pillen himself has contributed $100,000 to the campaign to save vouchers from a vote.
At the same time, Hammel reported, the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by Betsy DeVos, has contributed $103,000 in in-kind services and $583,000 in cash to the campaign.
It didn’t matter. Support Our Schools needed 60,000 signatures to force a referendum. They ended up with about twice that number (that’s roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the state). So this November, the voters of Nebraska were supposed to have their say. So you’d expect that voucher fans, who keep telling us how much everyone loves vouchers, would just sit back, secure in the knowledge that their program would win the referendum handily.
Well, no.
Instead, legislators cooked up LB 1402. This bill proposed to repeal the Opportunity Scholarships that were created under LB 753, and then to replace them with a new version of Opportunity Scholarships. This version would have been an education savings account (ESA) style super-voucher that hands over taxpayer money to send a student to a private or parochial school. It was more sketchy than last year’s bill because it appropriates state funds (rather than tax-credited contributions) to pay for the vouchers.
But mostly what it did it render the petition drive moot, because it repealed the version of vouchers that the public was going to vote on. “Ha,” they apparently thought. “That’ll stop those damned voters.”
In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. That repeal passed in November 2024, with 45 out of 49 legislative districts voting to repeal, and Nebraska’s voucher law was toast. The voters had sent a clear and unequivocal message.
Surely the state’s leaders would say, “Well, the voters have spoken, so that’s that.”
Fat chance.
Voucherphiles were back with a new proposal in January 2025. “I’m not dissuaded by the fact that it was defeated at the ballot box,” said freshman State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of Omaha.
Pillen’s new idea is to sell vouchers for the “gap” year, the year between the time when Nebraska’s vouchers are required to end and the time when the federal vouchers are supposed to kick in. The proposal is being sent through the state’s Labor Department rather than the Department of Education because that would skirt the requirement for any sort of hearing or debate, probably because voucherphiles have a pretty good idea of how that would go.
Nebraska is one of those states where rural Republicans have opposed all attempts at vouchers, and they aren’t sounding any friendlier about this one. Zach Wendling at Nebraska Examiner talked to State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a Republican who opposed Linehan’s previous proposals; he said he is opposed to using any public money for private school choice. He’s still waiting to see how the federal tax credit program includes public schools (because, remember, there are no actual rules yet attached to the federal voucher program).
“The referendum simply eliminated that. Period, end of story,” he continued on the state policy. “There’s no other interpretation you can draw from that.”
The gap funding would cost about $5 million for around 2,500 students. Of course, with no rules in place, it’s possible that not all of Nebraska’s current voucher students would qualify for federal vouchers. Nor can we predict what slice of the federal money pie Nebraska would be entitled to. If it comes to that, we could expect voucherphiles to argue that more gap funding is needed to cover new gaps, or maybe to expand above and beyond the federal offerings.
Nebraska voucher fans are making a lot of “think of the children” noises, but families have plenty of time to look for new arrangements (i.e. finding the student a new school or going back to paying the full tuition with their own money).
This is the same story we’ve seen over and over again. Vouchers never win when voters have a chance to be heard. Every single taxpayer-funded voucher program in this country has been created without giving the taxpayers a say or ignoring the say they had already said. Taxpayer-funded vouchers are all the result of legislators backed by deep-pocketed voucher fans deciding they are going to inflict these on the taxpayers. Nebraska’s taxpayers just happen to have a few more tools to fight back with, but Nebraska’s voucherphiles just keep looking for a way to avoid that whole pesky democracy thing.
Brian Stelter of CNN is one of the very best reporters about the state of journalism. In his newsletter “Reliable Sources,” he reported Sunday morning that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will appeal a ruling by a federal judge that prevents him from excluding mainstream journalists from covering the Pentagon. Hegeth wants to limit or ignore freedom of the press. He wants the Defense Department to be covered only by rightwing journalists.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been taking steps to thwart news coverage of the Pentagon for more than a year. Now he has finally met some resistance.
Friday’s ruling by a federal judge striking down Pentagon press limits was cheered by the news organization that sued over the policy, The New York Times, and by a wide range of First Amendment advocates.
“This is a great day for freedom of the press in the United States,” the Pentagon Press Association, which represents scores of journalists who regularly cover the military, said. “It is also hopefully a learning opportunity for Pentagon leadership, which took extreme steps to limit press access to information in wartime.”
Some beat reporters who were pushed out of the Pentagon complex last fall are now discussing how to get their credentials reinstated.
But Hegseth’s press office says, “We disagree with the decision and are pursuing an immediate appeal,” signaling that he will continue to pick fights with the news media.
At recent press briefings about the war in Iran, Hegseth has mirrored President Trump’s hyperbolic language about the media and made plainly false claims about news coverage.
More alarmingly, from the perspective of Pentagon correspondents, he has also hindered the free flow of information about the US military, in part through the restrictive press pass rules that The Times challenged in court.
The rules had the effect of replacing major news outlets like The Times and CNN with a handpicked group of relatively small and explicitly right-wing outlets.
But the rules veered into unconstitutional territory, senior US District Judge Paul Friedman wrote in Friday’s ruling.
The policy is “viewpoint discrimination,” Friedman wrote, “not based on political viewpoint but rather based on editorial viewpoint — that is, whether the individual or organization is willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.”
Tightening control over coverage
Governments routinely try to encourage favorable coverage, but Hegseth has gone much further since leaving Fox News for the Defense Department, which he has rebranded as the Department of War.
One of his first moves was to boot some news outlets, including CNN, from long-established media workspaces inside the Pentagon complex.
It was billed as a temporary “media rotation program,” boosting pro-Trump media outlets that never had a presence at the Pentagon before. For one year, Breitbart was meant to replace NPR, One America News Network to replace NBC News, and so forth.
But any argument about media diversity was undermined by the department’s inaccessibility.
Hegseth’s spokespeople declined to hold regular press conferences, effectively closed the Pentagon press briefing room, and made key parts of the Pentagon complex off-limits to journalists without an official escort.
By May 2025, the Pentagon Press Association was calling the restrictions “a direct attack on the freedom of the press and America’s right to know what its military is doing.”
It was apparent to many beat reporters that Hegseth wanted to prop up propagandistic outlets while punishing traditional media outlets.
He promoted himself on Fox, for instance, and gave access to right-wing content creators, while bashing what he called the biased “hoax press.”
In September, his press office circulated a new policy controlling the press credentials that grant physical access to the Pentagon complex.
The policy challenged the ability of reporters to freely gather information, for instance, through leaks from sources inside the military, by enabling the Pentagon to suspend or revoke credentials due to reporting.
Media lawyers said the revised rules criminalized routine reporting. So, rather than abide by the new policy, journalists from virtually every major American news outlet turned in their press passes en masse last October.
The Pentagon gave credentials to what it called “the next generation of the Pentagon press corps,” made up of staples of the MAGA media diet that are barely known to the rest of America.
Those media outlets were welcomed into the building’s workspaces, though the cubicles and offices are said to be largely empty nowadays. Before long, some of those outlets also began to complain about a lack of transparency from the Pentagon.
A handpicked ‘press corps’
When the US and Israel began strikes in Iran, and the Pentagon resumed somewhat regular press briefings, Hegseth called almost exclusively on MAGA-aligned outlets that were given front-row seats in the briefing room.
Representatives of bigger news outlets with decades of experience covering the US military — who were granted temporary access to the building — were seated in the back and generally ignored.
Furthermore, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon “barred press photographers” from some briefings after the photographers published photos of Hegseth “that his staff deemed ‘unflattering.’”
Those photographers were allowed back inside for the most recent briefing on March 19.
But Hegseth added a new anti-media talking point to his repertoire that day, claiming that the “dishonest and anti-Trump press will stop at nothing — we know this, at this point — to downplay progress, amplify every cost, and call into question every step.”
He diagnosed them with “TDS,” short for Trump Derangement Syndrome, a favorite insult of MAGA loyalists.
Hegseth also said Iran wants “to put out fake AI-generated images, which, by the way, sometimes our press happens to fall for, like the Abraham Lincoln on fire.”
His assertion that the American press has fallen for the fake imagery is itself fake. As CNN’s Daniel Dale reported, “There is no evidence that mainstream US media outlets promoted fake videos of the Lincoln on fire.” In fact, several US outlets, including The Times, debunked the videos.
When it filed suit against the Defense Department last December, The Times said the press pass restrictions were “an attempt to exert control over reporting the government dislikes.”
When Friedman ruled in agreement on Friday, The Times treated it as front-page news, and a spokesperson said the ruling “enforces the constitutionally protected rights for the free press in this country.”
“Americans deserve visibility into how their government is being run, and the actions the military is taking in their name and with their tax dollars,” The Times said.
Julian Barnes, the Times reporter named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, wrote on X, “This is a big win for the press, the public and the United States military, which fights better when observed by a robust press corps.”
Journalists at other news outlets are also monitoring the case closely. A CNN spokesperson said of the ruling, “This is an encouraging development and we are evaluating next steps and what this means for CNN.”
All the while, most original journalism about military matters has still been produced by the traditional outlets that lost access to the Pentagon complex last fall.
While Hegseth and his deputies have adopted a hostile approach toward the press corps, rank-and-file military officials have not.
When the ruling was handed down, beat reporters who had previously worked inside the Pentagon received messages from military personnel saying things like: “Does this mean we’ll see you Monday?”
Republicans are eager to put Trump’s name and face wherever possible, both to please him and to acknowledge him as the Sun God of their party.
Two plans are under discussion. One, which appears likely to go into distribution, is to mint a $1 coin, whose image of Trump was approved by him, a handsome profile.
The other is a 24 karat gold coin that would be minted to mark the 250th anniversary of the nation. It would be sold for thousands of dollars and would be super-sized, as much as 3″ across.
However, the gold coin is controversial. It is supposed to be approved by two commissions. The first one rejected the idea because putting the face of a living President on a coin seemed to them akin to a king, not appropriate for a democracy.
The second commission, stocked with Trump allies, is enthisisstic about the gold coin.
A federal arts commission on Thursday voted to approve a commemorative U.S. gold coin featuring Donald Trump, the administration’s latest effort to celebrate the president, even as Democrats and members of another federal committee say the idea is deeply inappropriate and potentially illegal.
The proposal calls for a 24-karat gold coin depicting Trump leaning on a desk with clenched fists, based on a photograph taken by his chief White House photographer and now displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Such gold coins from the U.S. Mint typically sell for several thousand dollars. A Mint official told the panel that Trump had personally approved the design.
Members of the Commission of Fine Arts — composed entirely of Trump appointees, including a 26-year-old executive assistant whose only listed credential for the post was managing Trump’s portrait project — spent several minutes discussing potential changes to the coin, including how big to make it, before officially endorsing it.
“I think the larger the better, and the largest of that circulation, I think, would be his preference,” said Chamberlain Harris, Trump’s executive assistant. Harris also said that the image captured Trump looking “very strong and very tough” and that it would be “fitting” to have him on a coin to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary.
James McCrery II, who served as Trump’s first architect on his planned ballroom before wrangling with the president over its size, encouraged Treasury officials to make the coin “as large as possible, all the way to three inches in diameter” as he led the vote to approve it.
But new coin designs are supposed to receive approval from two panels — and that second panel, the bipartisan Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, refused last month to consider the proposed gold coin. In interviews, members opposed putting a sitting president on currency, saying it would break with democratic norms and reek of subservience to royalty.
“It’s wrong. It goes against American culture and the traditions that drive what we put on our coinage,” said Michael Moran, a Republican coin collector who then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) recommended for appointment. “I didn’t sign up for this.”
Several members of the coin committee said the Trump administration could seek to mint the coin without their panel’s approval but would probably face legal challenges.
The coin committee is composed of numismatists, or experts in coin collecting, as well as a historian and an artist who specializes in medallic arts. Its most famous former member — retired basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a longtime coin collector — said he was disheartened because he believed well-designed coins could inform and inspire. He cited as examples a 1998 silver dollar that honored Crispus Attucks, who was enslaved, escaped and was killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770, and a 2017 gold coin that depicted Lady Liberty as an African American woman.
“I’m not enthusiastic about memorializing Mr. Trump on a coin because he has done so much damage to our country,” said Abdul-Jabbar, who served on the committee a decade ago. “It takes a huge consensus to get agreement on something like this, and I’m not inclined to be supportive of the president’s request.”
The White House did not respond to questions about the commemorative coin and whether it was appropriate to commission it. The Treasury Department, which oversees the Mint, said the commemorative coin was appropriate for this year’s anniversary.
“As we approach our 250th birthday, we are thrilled to prepare coins that represent the enduring spirit of our country and democracy, and there is no profile more emblematic for the front of such coins than that of our serving President, Donald J. Trump,” U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach said in a statement.
Only one past president — Calvin Coolidge — was featured on a U.S. coin in his lifetime. Coolidge’s portrait appeared on a commemorative coin to mark the nation’s sesquicentennial in 1926, a year when he was president, with an image of George Washington overlaid. Coolidge’s inclusion sparked controversy, and most of the coins were later melted.
The Trump-themed gold coin marks the administration’s latest effort to shape U.S. currency. Officials last year proposed a separate $1 coin design featuring the president’s likeness, intended to honor the sesquicentennial and enter circulation, but the coin committee balked at taking up the proposal. Mint officials argue that because the committee declined to consider the coin, the administration is not bound by its review — a claim that current committee members dispute.
Meanwhile, the arts commission in January approved the Trump-themed $1 coin. The Treasury Department has not yet specified whether or when that coin will enter circulation.
A photograph of President Donald Trump, featured at the National Portrait Gallery, inspired the image used for the planned gold coin. (Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post) Democrats have bristled at efforts to recognize Trump on currency and attempted to stop it. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada), one of several Democrats who introduced legislation last year intended to block any living or sitting president from being featured on U.S. currency, told The Washington Post that the Trump-themed gold coin was “embarrassing” and against the nation’s values.
“Monarchs and dictators put their faces on coins, not leaders of a democracy,” added Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon). Lawmakers and congressional staff have also cited past laws they say should constrain the administration, such as a 2005 law that restricted some $1 coins to honoring deceased presidents.
Donald Scarinci, a Democrat whom Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) recommended to the coin committee, said that gold coins presented a “loophole” because the Treasury Department has the independent power, without congressional authority, to mint them.
“They can definitely make the coin without our review. But it would be an illegal coin,” Scarinci said. “It’s not about Donald Trump. It’s about whoever the president is. It’s not something done in a democracy.”
Trump has also sought to remake White House grounds, proposing a visitor screening center also under consideration Thursday and demolishing the White House’s East Wing to build his long-desired ballroom. His projects extend into Washington, with plans to construct a 250-foot triumphal arch along with other projects that would leave a physical imprint on the city.
The wrangling over the coin comes amid a bigger fight over how Trump and his allies are seeking to memorialize the 79-year-old president, with nearly three years remaining in his term. Trump’s deputies have put his name on buildings, such as the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace, drawing complaints from lawmakers and lawyers who say that only Congress can rename the facilities, and GOP lawmakers have proposed renaming Dulles International Airport after him.
Those efforts are generally unpopular, surveys have found. About two-thirds of Americans said they opposed efforts to rename Dulles Airport and the Kennedy Center after Trump, with about 15 percent in favor, according to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted last month. Majorities of Americans also said they opposed demolishing the East Wing to build the ballroom and erecting the triumphal arch, according to the poll.
Trump officials last year also scrapped designs for commemorative quarters that were approved in 2024 by the arts commission and coin committee, months before Trump took office, and would have honored Black Americans and notable women. Coin committee members said they were unhappy about the administration’s decision to instead issue quarters honoring the Mayflower Compact, Revolutionary War and the Gettysburg Address, calling the process flawed and the new designs lacking.
“The designs, the themes that they came up with for the quarters — that could have been done by a fifth-grade class on American history,” Moran said.
Coin committee members said they will continue to balk at considering currency with Trump’s face on it.
“I think all of us feel the weight of responsibility here,” Scarinci said. He noted that Trump fired holdovers on the arts commission and that the administration could do the same with the coin committee, whose members are appointed by the Treasury Department.
“They may fire us all,” Scarinci added. “They may replace us all to make this coin … but there’s a very high caliber of people on this committee, they know numismatics, and they know history, and they know this is wrong.”
Arts commissioners in January, at the first meeting of the reconstituted board, showed little compunction of their counterparts on the coin committee as they weighed the $1 coin and discussed Trump’s own preferences.
Two of the proposed designs “both remind me a little bit of that portrait that was done of the president, which he did not like,” said Roger Kimball, a critic that Trump named to the panel. But he praised another version that had “a statesmanlike quality, to the coif of the hair.” The commission ultimately recommended that version.
Officials last year proposed a separate $1 coin design featuring the president’s likeness. The arts commission recommended this version in January. (U.S. Treasury)
Former KGB agent Vladimir Putin was hand-picked by Boris Yeltsin as his successor. Yeltsin was a drunk, and he miscalculated badly in picking Putin. Instead of building democratic norms and institutions, Putin embarked on a long-term plan to restore the USSR. After serving as president of Russia from 2000-2008, he was succeeded by a puppet (Dimitri Medvedev), then resumed the presidency in 2012. The national legislature extended his term to 2036. Anyone who seriously threatens him ends up in prison or dead.
In a startling development, one of Putin’s most strident sycophants abruptly turned against him. Ilya Remeslo, a lawyer, was known as a reliable lapdog for Putin. He regularly testified in trials against Alexei Navalny.
For years, Ilya Remeslo was a reliable pro-Kremlin operator, going after critics of the regime and smearing independent journalists, bloggers and opposition politicians.
Then the 42-year-old lawyer abruptly turned on the country’s most powerful man. Late on Tuesday, Remeslo posted a manifesto to his 90,000 Telegram followers titled: “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin.”
In it, he accused the “illegitimate” Russian president of waging a “failing war” in Ukraine that had caused millions of casualties and wrecked the economy, and argued that Putin’s more than two decades in power illustrated how “absolute power corrupts”, calling on him to step aside….
Doubling down on his earlier remarks, he told the Guardian on Wednesday from his flat in St Petersburg: “Vladimir Putin should resign and be put on trial as a war criminal. His personalised, corrupt system is doomed to collapse, as we’re seeing now with the war in Ukraine and elsewhere.
“The army isn’t advancing in Ukraine, and the war is going nowhere. There are massive losses. We are fighting over tiny territories that will ultimately give Russia nothing.”
He went on to criticise Putin’s authoritarian rule, the state of the economy and Moscow’s recent push to shut down internet access. “This man [Putin] has destroyed everything he could lay his hands on. The country is literally falling apart,” Remeslo said.
Please open the link and finish reading this fascinating article.
I was delighted to see that the very popular Heather Cox Richardson invited Josh Cowen to talk about the ominous spread of vouchers. HCR made clear that public schools are an essential element in building a society that is educated to sustain democracy.
The voucher movenent, on the other side, has turned into a means of building a society that sustains the white Christian nationalism of its funders.
It’s a valuable discussion, and I hope you will watch and listen.
The Century Foundation published an analysis of Trump’s federal voucher program, which explains why it is a hoax and a fraud. The authors are Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra.
The promise it makes is that families and students will choose schools that are just right for them, but the reality is that schools choose the students they want.
The promise is that school choice will benefit black and brown children, as well as children with disabilities, but children abandon all civil rights protections when they enroll in private schools.
The promise is that schools of choice will produce better academic outcomes but typically they produce worse outcomes (see Josh Cowen, The Privateers).
The promise is that school choice represents accountability but it usually means no accountability at all, because nonpublic schools don’t take national or state tests.
Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra write:
Modern school voucher programs are often framed as a response to declining academic achievement and a way to expand “parent choice” by enabling private educators to operate within the public system. But in practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools, not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTCS), passed as part of the Republican Party’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA), scales this model for camouflaged privatization to the national level. Though branded as a tax incentive, it functions as a nationwide voucher system that diverts public dollars to private schools while allowing those schools to play by different rules than public providers—evading civil rights protections, academic oversight, and any requirement to provide meaningful evidence to the public of their students’ outcomes.
A National Voucher Program Disguised as a Tax Credit
The FTCS nationalizes a model that at least twenty states and counting –including Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania – have already adopted, one which functions by siphoning public dollars through scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). Under this law, individual taxpayers can donate up to $1,700 annually to SGOs in exchange for a 100 percent federal tax credit, effectively turning private donations into reimbursed public expenditures.
SGOs then will distribute “scholarships” to K–12 students to use toward private school tuition, books, curriculum materials, tutoring or other educational classes, and educational therapies provided by licensed providers. While the program is optional for states, at least twenty-seven have already signaled their intent to participate.
[To see which states have expressed their intent to participate, open the link.]
Despite its branding, this design drains public revenue that would otherwise support public schools—which still educate roughly 90 percent of American students—and redirects it to private, religious, and largely unregulated providers.
The program model also ignores what parents time and again have told us they want for their children. When given a direct choice at the ballot box, voters have repeatedly rejected school vouchers and related private-school subsidy measures. In the 2024 election, proposals to authorize or expand voucher-style programs in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska were defeated, and historical ballot measure data show that voters have rejected every statewide private voucher or education tax credit initiative placed before them since 1970. This opposition is reflected in polling that shows nearly 70 percent of voters say they would rather increase federal funding for public schools than expand government-funded vouchers, including majorities across party lines.
[Open the link to see which states have held referenda on vouchers.]
Broad Eligibility, Few Quality Controls, and Limited Public Benefit
Even measured against its stated goal of affordability, the FTCS program misses the mark. But if the goal is to make education more affordable for families under real financial strain, this program is also ineffective. Private K–12 tuition averages nearly $13,000 per year nationwide, placing private schooling out of reach for many families even with a modest subsidy. Yet the tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible. In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education, while in a city like New York—where median income is about $81,000—families earning nearly $244,000 would qualify. At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At the same time, the program imposes no meaningful accountability requirements on participating schools. There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes. In contrast to nearly every other federal program serving children, from Title I to Head Start, this is public spending without public oversight. Federal programs historically are monitored for fiscal, quality, and sometimes for safety compliance by the agency with charge over the program. In this case, U.S Department of Education (ED) expertise plays no role in oversight of new national policy for education.1
What State Leaders Can and Cannot Control
FTCS offers a tempting hook for well-intentioned state policymakers as well: Some governors and state legislatures may view the tax credit as a way to unlock new resources for priorities like tutoring or after-school programs. In practice, however, it offers no new, flexible funding for states and gives them little control over how public dollars are used. The law defines “scholarship-granting organizations” so broadly that states cannot meaningfully restrict eligibility, set standards, or influence whether funds flow primarily to high-cost private schools rather than unmet public needs.
Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S. Treasury without authority to shape program design or accountability. Far from being additional education funding that states need, opting in requires that states absorb the fiscal, administrative, and equity consequences of a federal program they are unable to direct or correct. It is not “free money” for states. The opt-in decision is therefore the only meaningful leverage states have—and governors should use their right to refuse to play along in order to protect their public education systems.
Why Oversight and Accountability Matters
Public funding should never function on a good-faith system. It’s very simple: in good policymaking, whenever taxpayer dollars are allocated, oversight measures are put in place to make sure those dollars are spent in the way intended. We already know from numerous examples in the school choice policy space itself that no accountability means that those who need the help the least receive the most benefit.
Eighteen states have a universal private school choice program. Unfortunately, states that have expanded vouchers or education savings accounts with minimal oversight have already seen waste, fraud, and abuse. Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, for instance, has minimal controls, audit practices that automatically approve reimbursements, and has been linked to purchases of non-educational items like diamond rings, televisions, and even lingerie with taxpayer funds, prompting investigations by the state attorney general. Rather than lowering costs for families, the program has generated ballooning expenses for the state and contributed to a growing budget crisis—with no measurable benefit to students at all.
Similarly, the federal Charter Schools Program has repeatedly been shown to lack meaningful accountability, with investigations and audits documenting hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on schools that never opened or closed prematurely, and charter networks facing conservatorship over financial mismanagement and self-dealing. These outcomes are the predictable result of public dollars flowing to private operators without meaningful oversight.
Decades of research on voucher programs show mixed or negative academic outcomes, particularly in math and reading, and no evidence that vouchers close opportunity gaps. In Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, studies found declines in student achievement following expansions in voucher programs. Students in Louisiana’s voucher program experienced drops in both math and reading in their first two years, while voucher students in Indiana and Ohio performed worse than comparable peers who remained in public schools.
The program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Taken together, these examples underscore why oversight and accountability are not optional when public dollars are at stake. The FTCS program includes no meaningful accountability, evaluation, or research requirements to justify an estimated $26 billion cost to taxpayers. Without data on student learning, fiscal integrity, or long-term outcomes, the public has no way to assess whether this investment is helping students or simply reshuffling them across systems while diverting resources away from the public schools that serve most children and toward unknown corporate interests.2 In effect, the program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Who Profits When Public Dollars Become Private Subsidies?
Another consequence of turning public education dollars into private subsidies is that it creates a lucrative marketplace for the companies that manage these voucher systems. A handful of firms have seized on state voucher expansions to secure multimillion-dollar contracts, turning what was pitched as a cost-saving policy into a business opportunity for tech and finance intermediaries. These companies often have limited experience running education programs, and in some states have faced scrutiny over operational problems, questionable spending controls, and high administrative costs.
This track record raises questions about whether families truly benefit from FTCS’s model. It would seem the opposite: it diverts taxpayer dollars into private profit streams instead of lowering education costs for struggling families. Instead of more wasteful government contracts, these dollars should be used to improve neighborhood schools by hiring high-quality educators, increasing after school programs, expanding pre-K, and hiring mental health professionals.
A Tax Policy Not Designed to Support Education
Congress gave sole interpretive authority for this program to the U.S. Treasury Department, deliberately excluding the U.S. Department of Education and its education-specific expertise. As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact. While advocates have urged the Treasury Department to include stronger transparency, safeguards, and state authority, it is unlikely those measures will be adopted to address the program’s core design flaws.
This use of the tax code stands in sharp contrast to prior policies that successfully supported children and families. The 2021 expanded Federal Child Tax Credit helped to lift more than 2 million childrenout of poverty and reduced the country’s child poverty level to a historic low of 5.2 percent. This program will likely do the opposite. Research shows that private school voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families. Consistent with many other provisions in the law, Congressional Republicans have chosen to prioritize a tax break that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, over nearly every other form of charitable giving, such as donations to food pantries, hospitals, or community services.
By incentivizing families to exit public schools, the voucher tax credit also undermines the financial stability of those schools, particularly in rural and high-need communities. Because education funding is largely enrollment-based, even modest shifts can lead to school closures, consolidations, and reduced services. This leaves behind those families who don’t have the time or resources to navigate private systems, and asks taxpayers to reimburse private donations on top of existing public education costs.
Civil Rights Protections Are Excluded
Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In 2024, ED received 22,687 civil rights complaints, including about 8,400 related to disability discrimination, reflecting just how often students and families rely on these protections.
These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse. This is what public accountability looks like in practice, and its success depends on ED’s legal authority and the staff capacity to respond when families ask for help.
By contrast, the OBBA does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections, even though they benefit from publicly subsidized dollars. This means that if a student experiences harassment or discrimination based on race, national origin, sex, religion, or disability, families may have little or no ability to hold private schools accountable or seek remedies comparable to those guaranteed in public schools.
Evidence from state voucher programs shows why this gap matters. An investigation in North Carolina found that voucher funds flowed to private schools that were significantly whiter than the communities they serve, reinforcing racial segregation rather than expanding opportunity. In the absence of enforceable civil rights guardrails, public funding supports exclusionary practices that would be unlawful in public schools.
The Cost to Public Schools and Communities
Ultimately, this voucher/tax credit perpetuates a broader pattern of states, in addition to the federal government, stepping back from their responsibility to fully fund and strengthen public schools. Rather than address the systemic problems that perpetuate low-performing schools, it treats educational inequity as a series of individual problems to be solved by sending public dollars to private education. No matter how the administration spins it, these programs fail to prioritize students from lower-income families while simultaneously subsidizing private education for higher-income families. It invites taxpayers to feel as though they are helping children access opportunity, while leaving the underlying inequities in public education unresolved and, in many cases, deepened.
[Open the link to see data on source of insurance.]
This tax credit is projected to cost $26 billion, which is a high price tag that instead could be doing real good in public schools. If Congress instead invested this through Title I, that money would amount to roughly $1,238 per student in schools serving low-income communities. Research shows that investments of this size improve reading and math outcomes. In other words, we know how to use public dollars to help students succeed. This policy chooses not to.
Imagine putting that $26 billion, the lowest estimated cost of the tax credit over ten years, toward Title I, the federal program that benefits most public schools. That would more than double Title I’s current funding at $18.4 billion. Title I’s flexibility allows schools to meet their specific needs to improve student achievement: more teachers, aides, professional development, wraparound services, and more.
IDEA is supposed to fund 40 percent of each student’s special education each year, but the federal government has never met that promise. Current funding at $14.2 billion amounts to less than 12 percent of the promise. However, adding $26 billion to IDEA would almost triple current funding and completely close the gap.
We know that the unprecedented funding from the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief packages will make a major return on investment: every $1,000 invested per student will be worth $1,238 in future earnings. That funding also required states to at least maintain their education budgets at prior funding so that the federal investment would not replace their responsibility and effort, but work together. The FTCS model completely disregards these precedents, and their values.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Is a Heist Taken Straight from the Right’s Privatization Playbook
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship program follows a familiar privatization strategy. It routes public dollars to private actors while stripping away the oversight, transparency, and civil rights protections that normally accompany public investment. Framed as generosity and choice, it instead creates a system in which taxpayers assume the cost while private schools and intermediaries operate largely beyond public accountability.
The program recreates many risks at a national scale. The schools and organizations receiving these publicly subsidized funds are not required to demonstrate academic results, comply with federal civil rights law, or provide transparency about how dollars are spent. Families are left without protections, taxpayers without accountability, and policymakers without evidence that the investment is improving student outcomes.
When public dollars are transformed into lightly regulated private subsidies, they invite exploitation. The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship is not an isolated policy choice: it follows a pattern of policies that weaken, and normalize weakening, public education while insulating private actors from responsibility. History shows where this path leads: higher costs, weaker safeguards, and fewer assurances that public investments serve the public good.
Notes
The Trump administration has taken multiple actions to reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education, including firing staff and reassigning education programs and staff to other agencies through interagency agreements (IAAs) without congressional authorization. Such actions raise legal and governance concerns and further erode the education-specific expertise, oversight, and accountability that Congress has historically vested in ED.
Under the OBBA, the federal tax credit for contributions to SGOs applies to individual taxpayers. The law does not provide separate federal tax credit rules for corporate contributions; whether and how corporations might participate or benefit may depend on future Treasury and IRS regulations and state tax policies. Many states currently allow corporate contributions to SGOs.
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.
In a startling attack on freedom of the press, Brendan Carr–chairman of the Federal Communications Commission–threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters whose coverage of the war on Iran is negative. With Trump ally, the billionaire Ellison family, buying control of CBS and CNN, Carr’s threat is ominous. One of the first steps of fascist leaders is to gain control of or silence the media.
The job of the media in a democracy is to inform the public, not to serve as a propaganda arm of the government.
President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman is threatening to revoke the licenses of news broadcasters over their coverage of the Iran war.
Brendan Carr, the head of the agency, warned broadcast news organizations on Saturday to “correct course,” following the president’s rants over news coverage of his war with Iran, including stories about U.S. aircraft tankers sustaining damage in a strike.
“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr said in a post on X, without naming any media outlets. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”
The FCC did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
Carr referenced a Truth Social post from Trump Saturday morning denying reports that five U.S. Air Force refueling planes were struck at a military base in Saudi Arabia. Trump directed his screed at the The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, The New York Times and “other Lowlife ‘Papers’ and Media,” claiming they “actually want us to lose the War.”
In his own social media post later in the day, Carr pointed to Trump’s 2024 election win as an example of the lack of trust in the media from the American people.
“When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong,” the FCC chairman said. [Editor’s note:Trump did not win a landslide victory in 2024. Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, while Harris won 48.3%.]
Carr’s threat was met with immediate blowback from free speech advocates and political figures.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment advocacy group, called Carr’s statement an “authoritarian warning,” adding, “Again and again, Carr’s tenure as FCC chairman has been marked by his shameless willingness to bully and threaten our free press. But even by Carr’s standards, today’s hypocrisy is shocking — and dangerous….”
Carr, an author of Project 2025 whom Trump hand-picked to run the FCC, has sought to use his powerful position to bend media outlets — and late-night talk show hosts — to the Trump administration’s will. Under his watch, the FCC has opened investigations into multiple news outlets and threatened to strip the licenses of broadcasting companies deemed to have covered the administration and the president unfavorably.
But his latest missive took the administration’s assault on what the president routinely calls the “fake news” a step further. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said in an X post, “This is a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed. This is worse than the comedian stuff, and by a lot. The stakes here are much higher. He’s not talking about late night shows, he’s talking about how a war is covered.”
Trump and members of his administration have repeatedly bemoaned the media coverage of the war. Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused the press of being too focused on American troops’ deaths than the military’s successes.
“But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news,” Hegseth said. “I get it; the press only wants to make the president look bad. But try for once to report the reality.”
“Some in this crew, in the press, just can’t stop,” he said.
Late on Friday night, Trump railed against coverage of the war, saying on Truth Social: “The Fake News Media hates to report how well the United States Military has done against Iran.”
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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 