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Trump Fires Official for Reporting Bad News on Jobs

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2025 //
36

The latest report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was bad news for the administration. It showed a small increase in employment and it revised downwards earlier data.

Trump was furious. The official was fired immediately. The message to federal data agencies was clear: Report good news or look for a new job.

Question: Will we ever be able to trust data reported by the Federal Government again? Maybe in four years?

Charles Rugaber of the AP reported:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Friday removed the head of the agency that produces the monthly jobs figures after a report showed hiring slowed in July and was much weaker in May and June than previously reported.

Trump, in a post on his social media platform, alleged that the figures were manipulated for political reasons and said that Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, should be fired. He provided no evidence for the charge.

“I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump said on Truth Social. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.”

Trump later posted: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

After his initial post, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said on X that McEntarfer was no longer leading the bureau and that William Wiatrowski, the deputy commissioner, would serve as the acting director.

“I support the President’s decision to replace Biden’s Commissioner and ensure the American People can trust the important and influential data coming from BLS,” Chavez-DeRemer said.

Friday’s jobs report showed that just 73,000 jobs were added last month and that 258,000 fewer jobs were created in May and June than previously estimated. The report suggested that the economy has sharply weakened during Trump’s tenure, a pattern consistent with a slowdown in economic growth during the first half of the year and an increase in inflation during June that appeared to reflect the price pressures created by the president’s tariffs…

Trump has sought to attack institutions that rely on objective data for assessing the economy, including the Federal Reserve and, now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The actions are part of a broader mission to bring the totality of the executive branch — including independent agencies designed to objectively measure the nation’s wellbeing — under the White House’s control.

McEntarfer was nominated by Biden in 2023 and became the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in January 2024. Commissioners typically serve four-year terms but since they are political appointees can be fired. The commissioner is the only political appointee of the agency, which has hundreds of career civil servants.

The Senate confirmed McEntarfer to her post 86-8, with now Vice President JD Vance among the yea votes.

Trump focused much of his ire on the revisions the agency made to previous hiring data. Job gains in May were revised down to just 19,000 from 125,000, and for June they were cut to 14,000 from 147,000. In July, only 73,000 positions were added. The unemployment rate ticked up to a still-low 4.2% from 4.1%.

“No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” Trump wrote. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”

The monthly employment report is one of the most closely-watched pieces of government economic data and can cause sharp swings in financial markets. The disappointing figure sent U.S. market indexes about 1.5% lower Friday.
While the jobs numbers are often the subject of political spin, economists and Wall Street investors — with millions of dollars at stake — have always accepted U.S. government economic data as free from political manipulation.

The New York Times added this information about Ms. McEntarfer:

McEntarfer was appointed to her post by President Biden after a long career at the Census Bureau and other agencies, where she served under presidents of both parties, including Trump. She is widely respected in the statistical community, and outside economists have often said they trust the data coming out of the bureau, thanks to her leadership.

Categories Economy, Ethics, Trump

John Thompson: Trump’s “One Big Ugly Bill” Will Kill Millions of People And Won’t Save Money

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2025 //
4

Trump (or more likely, his puppetmaster Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Budget and Management [OMB]) pulled the wool over the eyes of the Republicans who control Congress.

Trump insisted that he would rein in the budget; he brought in Elon Musk and his Kiddie Corps, to shut down vital functions of the federal government and pare the federal workforce. But Trump’s newly enacted budget adds at least 3 trillions to the deficit.

But first a word about Russell Vought. He was the primary author and editor of Project 2025, which is a blueprint for Trump’s second term. He worked at the far-right Heritage Foundation before the election. Now as director of OMB, he holds the most consequential job in the federal government. OMB decides which programs are priorities and which are not, which need more funding and which do not.

To understand the Trump administration’s policies and goals, read Project 2025. During the campaign, Trump pretended to know nothing about Project 2025. He lied.

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the real human costs of this evil plan.

He writes:

Even though my primary focus is on public education, I have been concentrating on President Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which is estimated to increase the federal deficit by $3.3 trillion, or more. 

My biggest concerns, however, were budget cuts that will likely result in the world-wide loss of untold millions of lives. For instance, even before Trump dramatically increased the subsidies for fossil fuel production, and undercut non-fossil fuel production, it was estimated that by 2049 global warming would cost the global economy $38 trillion per year, and that over 2 billion years of healthy lives would be lost by 2050.

Moreover, Robert F. Kennedy’s attacks on medical science and vaccines could result in pandemics that cost millions of lives. In fact, Kennedy’s attacks on Gavi vaccines would undermine a public health process which would likely save an estimated 8 million lives across the world by 2030.     

And it is estimated that the USAID programs Trump cut “have saved over 90 million lives over the past two decades.” It is now estimated that by 2030 those cuts could cost the lives of 14 million people.

Since the Trump plan passed through Congress, I’ve been catching up on the interconnected ways that it undermines education.

As Chalkbeat reported, this bill:

Slashes spending on Medicaid, which provides health insurance to some 37 million children and is a critical revenue source for schools. It also limits eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which provides food assistance to over 13 million children and makes kids automatically eligible for free meals at school.

Its revised tax credit will hurt an additional two million children. 

Moreover, the cuts will hurt the funding of hospitals and other medical service providers.

And anti-immigration raids will increase chronic absenteeism rates, and “have significant effects on children’s physical and mental health, as well as on broader school climate.”

And that brings me back to the damage done to Oklahoma students. As the Oklahoma Voice reports:

The Trump administration is indefinitely withholding more than $70 million in federal education programs meant for Oklahoma students and educators, including money for teacher development, English learners, after-care programs and migrant children.

Every day I hear about the results caused by threats to the $15.68 million that were authorized, but not delivered for before- and after-school programs, and the “$6.43 million dedicated for the 13% of Oklahoma students learning English as their non-native language.” 

In the Oklahoma City Public Schools, for instance, “47% of students are learning English as their second language. The district expected $1.1 million in federal revenue from Title III, which supports English learners.”

Finally, I recently attended the OK Justice Circle’s Breaking Bread with the Hispanic Community where educators and service providers described the cruelty that Hispanic students were facing. For instance, as a panelist was leaving for the conference, a student told her that she is studying the Holocaust. The student was worried about the tragedies that immigrants like her were experiencing, and how awful they could become.

The educator further explained that a big majority of her students are Hispanic. Due in large part to the current deportation campaign, at times, absenteeism has surged to 30% to 40%. And many students come to school every day with their birth certificates in the backpack in case they have to face raids by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The panelists explained how deportations of family members have produced a surge in the wide, interconnected, and painful crises that undermine student learning.

One of the services that schools can provide is referring students and families to nonprofit and public institutions. In an especially revealing set of discussions, educators described their “do-s and don’t-s” when sharing immigration information with patrons. 

But those statements are based on trust in the law and procedures that ICE agents are required to follow.  Today, it was agreed, it is hard to trust the immigration process.

As I struggled to reach the best possible emotional balance when evaluating the brutality imposed on children, families, and people across the world, I received a message from the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. It’s Executive Director, Colleen McCarty, expressed the frustration that I continually hear:

Congress passed the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—a piece of legislation wrapped in soundbites and flag pins—that will strip thousands of Oklahomans of life-saving healthcare. It will supercharge Immigration and Customs Enforcement, giving new power and resources to deport millions of people, tear families apart, and criminalize human existence based on borders and skin color. 

But she is committed to “stand in one courtroom fighting for freedom,” even though she leaves “to find the government systematically dismantling it on the largest scale imaginable.” 

We also must continue to fight both legal and political battles in defense of our democracy.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Cruelty, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

Paul Krugman: Trump Understands Nothing About Tariffs

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2025 //
9

Trump has an almost mystical view about tariffs. He thinks that they are a payment that a country makes to the U.S. in return for selling their products here. He thinks that the U.S. will collect so many billions in tariff payments that the government can keep cutting taxes. He doesn’t understand that the cost of tariffs is paid first by American retailers, but ultimately by consumers. Tariffs mean higher prices for everything that is imported.

He apparently never learned in high school about the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, which led to retaliation and ultimately contributed to the Great Depression.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has some lessons for Trump. Given Trump’s belief in his own great intellect, it’s doubtful that he’s interested in learning anything new.

Krugman writes:

Many investors seem to have deluded themselves into believing that Trump was done disrupting world trade, and some economists, myself included, were hoping that we wouldn’t keep having to write about stupid, feckless trade policy. But here we go again.

By now we were supposed to have scores of trade deals signed. Instead… Trump began posting letters on Truth Social (diplomacy!) telling a variety of countries that they would face high tariffs on Aug. 1. The first two letters were to South Korea and Japan, both told that Trump would put a 25 percent tariff on all their exports. Some countries are facing even higher tariffs. Overall, the tariff rates announced so far look very close to the widely ridiculed Liberation Day tariffs announced on April 2.

Honestly, I’ve written so much about tariffs that it’s hard to find new things to say. But let me offer a few notes on where we seem to be now.

These tariffs are really, really high

One way to look at the newly announced tariffs is in the light of history. The infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 pushed the average tariff rate to about 20 percent. So far every country that has received a letter will be facing rates higher than that.

Another way to look at it to ask how much we would expect these tariffs to reduce trade. The key number is the elasticity of substitution in world trade — the percent fall in imports caused by a one percent rise in import prices. The median estimate from many studies is 3.8, which implies that in the long run 25 percent tariffs will reduce trans-Pacific trade by almost 60 percent. That’s a lot.

Side note: If I were a government employee, this post would probably be flagged for DEI because I just used the word “trans.”

There were never going to be genuine trade deals

These tariffs are going to hurt South Korea and Japan, although they’ll hurt U.S. consumers even more. So why didn’t Korean and Japanese negotiators make big enough concessions to satisfy Trump?

Because there was nothing for them to concede. South Korea has had a free trade agreement with the United States since 2012, so most U.S. exports to Korea face zero tariffs. Japan, like other wealthy nations, has very low tariffs on most goods. Neither country, then, was in a position to offer big tariff reductions, because their tariffs were already minimal.

Here’s part of Trump’s letter to South Korea, alleging that the country’s “Tariff, and Non Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers” are responsible for the bilateral trade imbalance:

Notice that Trump offered no specifics — because there aren’t any. How were the South Koreans supposed to end unfair trade practices that exist only in Trump’s imagination?

Here’s an analogy that occurred to me: Imagine that you have a belligerent neighbor who threatens to take revenge unless you stop dumping trash on his lawn. You reply, truthfully, that you aren’t dumping trash on his lawn. His response is to accuse you of being intransigent and slash your car’s tires.

The only possible out here would be a series of fake deals, in which countries pretend to have offered significant concessions and Trump claims to have won big victories. Some people still think that will happen — the new tariffs aren’t supposed to take effect until Aug. 1. But the tone of those letters and Trump’s clear obsession with tariffs make me doubt that he’ll call the tariffs off, in part because of my last observation: Attempts to mollify Trump always end up emboldening him to demand more.

Why make a deal with a man who will surely break it?

As I already mentioned, South Korea and the United States have had a free trade agreement (KORUS) since 2012. This agreement wasn’t some vague memorandum of understanding. It was the result of years of tough negotiation, followed by intense political debate in both countries before our respective legislatures passed the enabling legislation.

Yet Trump is simply ignoring that hard-won agreement. His letter to the South Koreans doesn’t even mention KORUS, let alone explain why the United States is reneging on its solemn promises.

Japan doesn’t have a free trade agreement with the United States. But it does have Most Favored Nation status, which means that under international trade law it is entitled to face tariffs no higher than those America committed to under the last major global trade agreement, the Uruguay Round that concluded in 1994. Again, these tariff commitments weren’t embodied in some casual memorandum. They were the result of years of negotiation, whose results had to be approved by Congress.

And again Trump isn’t even trying to explain why he’s going back on a longstanding U.S. commitment.

The point is that Trump doesn’t feel bound by trade deals America has made in the past. Why should anyone expect him to honor any new deals he makes, or claims to make, now?

Obviously this behavior isn’t unique to tariffs. Many domestic institutions, from law firms to universities, have discovered that attempting to appease Trump buys you at best a few weeks’ respite before he comes back for more.

It’s possible that the governments receiving Trump’s tariff letters haven’t figured that out yet. But they will. And my bet is that the TACO people — Trump always chickens out — are wrong in this case. I’ll be happy to be proved wrong, but right now it looks as if deeply destructive tariffs are really coming.

Categories Accountability, Economics, Economy, Extremism, Stupid, Trump

Trump Throws Global Economy into Chaos with On-again, Off-again Tariffs

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2025 //
7

The New York Times said bluntly that Trump has plunged the global economy into chaos with his wild and wooly tariffs. He doesn’t know what they are, who pays for them, how they affect trade. He is listening only to Peter Navarro, the tariff evangelist. Trump is not the master of “the art of the deal” (a ghost-written book). He is the master of obfuscation and chaos.

The New York Times reported:

Six months into his new administration, President Trump’s assault on global trade has lost any semblance of organization or structure.

He has changed deadlines suddenly. He has blown up negotiations at the 11th hour, often raising unexpected issues. He has tied his tariffs to complaints that have nothing to do with trade, like Brazil’s treatment of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, or the flow of fentanyl from Canada.

Talks with the United States were like “going through a labyrinth” and arriving “back to Square 1,” said Airlangga Hartarto, the Indonesian minister for economic affairs, who met with U.S. officials in Washington on Wednesday.

The resulting uncertainty is preventing companies and countries from making plans as the rules of global commerce give way to a state of chaos.

“We’re still far away from making real deals,” said Carsten Brzeski, global head of macroeconomics at the bank ING in Germany. He called the uncertainty “poison” for the global economy.

Gone is the idea that the White House would strike 90 deals in 90 days after a period of rapid-fire negotiation, as Mr. Trump pledged in April. Instead, Washington has signed bare-bone agreements with big trading partners including China, while sending many other countries blunt and mostly standardized letters announcing hefty tariffsto start on Aug. 1.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economics, Economy, Extremism, Stupid, Trump

Trump Budget Guts Scientific Research

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2025 //
3

William J. Broad, science writer for The New York Times, reports on the Trump administration’s draconian cuts to scientific research. As the U.S. cuts back on investments in basic research, China is increasing its spending.

I invite anyone who reads this to try to explain why this administration is reducing spending on scientific research.

Broad writes:

President Trump’s budget plan guts federal science funding for the next fiscal year, according to an overview published by an external group. Particularly at risk is the category of basic research — the blue-sky variety meant to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and sow practical spinoffs and breakthroughs in such everyday fields as health care and artificial intelligence.

The group says it would fall by more than one-third.

The new analysis, made public Wednesday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a general scientific society based in Washington, D.C., added up cuts to the budgets of hundreds of federal agencies and programs that do scientific research or provide grants to universities and research bodies. It then compared the funding appropriated for the current fiscal year with the administration’s proposals for fiscal year 2026.

For basic science research, the association reported that the overall budget would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent. For science funding overall — which includes money for basic, applied and developmental work, as well as for facilities for research and development — the analysis found that the federal budget would fall to $154 billion from $198 billion, a drop of 22 percent.

The new analysis shows that the Trump administration’s budget plan, if adopted, “would essentially end America’s longstanding role as the world leader in science and innovation,” said Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.

His group, Mr. Smith added, is working with Congress to develop “a funding plan for strategic investment that would help to sustain continued American scientific leadership rather than destroying it.”

Mary Woolley, president of Research America, a nonprofit group that promotes science, said the new analysis showed that the budget plan “is threatening not only science but the American public. If approved by Congress, it will make the public less safe, poorer and sicker.”

Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, did not reply to a request for comment on the new analysis.

In early May, the White House unveiled a budget blueprint that listed proposed cuts to a handful of science agencies. For instance, it sought a reduction in the budget of the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much basic research, to $3.9 billion from $8.8 billion, a drop of 55.8 percent.

Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the science association, said in an interview that the comprehensive analysis drew on several hundred proposed budgets from federal science agencies and programs, as well as figures supplied by the White House Office of Management and Budget. In May, the budget office made public the rough sketch of the administration’s overall proposal for next year but included only a small number of science agencies and figures.

The Gutting of America’s Medical Research: Here Is Every Canceled or Delayed N.I.H. Grant. Some cuts have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye.

Ms. Zimmermann added that the association’s new compilations would be updated as new budget data from federal agencies and programs became available. However, she said, the group’s estimates of cuts to federal basic research are “not going to be undone by a minor number change.”

The science group has long recorded the ups and downs of the federal government’s annual spending on science. Taking inflation into account, Ms. Zimmermann said the administration’s proposed cut of $44 billion would, if approved, make the $154 billion figure the smallest amount that the federal government has spent on science in this century…

In May, science appeared to be high on the list for significant funding cuts, while large increases were proposed for the Pentagon and Homeland Security. Until the science association updated its reports on the proposed presidential budget for fiscal year 2026, however, the public had no clear indication of the overall size of the federal cuts.

The proposed drop in federal funding for science research, if approved by Congress, could let China match or take the lead in global science investments, Ms. Zimmermann said.

In April, the science group published figuresshowing that China had greatly increased support for its scientific enterprise in the past two decades. As of 2023 — the most recent year available for comparisons — China’s investment was close to equaling that of the United States.

Experts say it could take years of data gathering to know if China is pulling into the lead.

Categories Budget Cuts, Economy, Extremism, Funding, Health, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

David Dayen: What Else Is Included in the Big Ugly Budget Bill?

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2025 //
5

Since this is a mostly education blog, I have covered the budget debate by focusing on what the GOP is doing to maim public schools and enrich private (especially religious schools). In the past, Republicans were strong supporters of public schools. But the billionaires came along and brought their checkbooks with them.

The rest of the Ugly bill is devastating to people who struggle to get by. Deep cuts to Medicaid, which will force the closure of many rural hospitals. Cuts to anything that protects the environment or helps phase out our reliance on fossil fuels. Well, at least Senator Schumer managed to change the name of the bill, new name not yet determined.

One Republican vote could have sunk the bill. But Senator Murkowski got a mess of pottage.

David Dayen writes in The American Prospect:

Welcome to “Trump’s Beautiful Disaster,” a pop-up newsletter about the Republican tax and spending bill, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in a generation. Sign up for the newsletter to get it in your in-box.

By the thinnest of margins, the U.S. Senate completed work on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Tuesday morning, after Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) decided that she could live with a bill that takes food and medicine from vulnerable people to fund tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy, as long as it didn’t take quite as much food away from Alaskans.

The new text, now 887 pages, was released at 11:20 a.m. ET. The finishing touches of it, which included handwritten additions to the text, played out live on C-SPAN, with scenes of the parliamentarian and a host of staff members from both parties huddled together.

At the very end, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer knocked out the name “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” with a parliamentary maneuver, on the grounds that it was ridiculous (which is hard to argue). It’s unclear what this bill is even called now, but that hardly matters. The final bill passed 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie.

Murkowski was able to secure a waiver from cost-sharing provisions that would for the first time force states to pay for part of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In order to get that past the Senate parliamentarian, ten states with the highest payment error rates had to be eligible for the five-year waiver, including big states like New York and Florida, and several blue states as well. 

The expanded SNAP waivers mean that in the short-term only certain states with average or even below-average payment error rates will have to pay into their SNAP program; already, the language provided that states with the lowest error rates wouldn’t have to pay. “The Republicans have rewarded states that have the highest error rates in the country… just to help Alaska, which has the highest error rate,” thundered Sen. Amy Klobuchar (R-MN), offering an amendment to “strike this fiscal insanity” from the bill. The amendment failed along party lines.

The new provision weakens the government savings for the bill at a time when the House Freedom Caucus is calling the Senate version a betrayal of a promise to link spending cuts to tax cuts. But those House hardliners will ultimately have to decide whether to defy Donald Trump and reject the hard-fought Senate package, which only managed 50 votes, or to cave to their president.

In addition, Murkowski got a tax break for Alaskan fishing villages and whaling captains inserted into the bill. Medicaid provisions that would have boosted the federal share of the program for Alaska didn’t get through the parliamentarian; even a handwritten attempt to help out Alaska on Medicaid was thrown out at the last minute. But Murkowski still made off with a decent haul, which was obviously enough for her to vote yes.

All Republicans except for Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Susan Collins (R-ME) voted for the bill. Tillis and Collins are in the two most threatened seats among Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections; Tillis decided to retire rather than face voters while passing this bill. Paul, a libertarian, rejected the price tag and the increase in the nation’s debt limit that is folded into the bill.

Other deficit hawks in the Senate caved without even getting a vote to deepen the Medicaid cuts. That could be the trajectory in the House with Freedom Caucus holdouts. But the House also has problems with their handful of moderates concerned about the spending slashes in the bill.

The bill was clinched with a “wraparound” amendment that made several changes, including the elimination of a proposed tax on solar and wind energy production that would have made it impossible to build new renewable energy projects. The new changes now also grandfather in tax credits to solar and wind projects that start construction less than a year after enactment of the bill. Even those projects would have to be placed in service by 2027. The “foreign entities of concern” provision was also tweaked to make it easier for projects that use a modicum of components from China to qualify for tax credits.

The bill still phases out solar and wind tax credits rather quickly, and will damage energy production that is needed to keep up with soaring demand. But it’s dialed down from apocalyptic to, well, nearly apocalyptic. And this is going to be another source of anger to the Freedom Caucus, which wanted a much quicker phase-out of the energy tax credits.

The wraparound amendment also doubled the size of the rural hospital fund to $50 billion. The Senate leadership’s initial offer on this fund was $15 billion. Overnight the Senate rejected an amendment from Collins that would have raised the rural hospital fund to $50 billion. Even at that size—which will be parceled out for $10 billion a year for five years—it hardly makes up for nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts, which are permanent. The hospital system is expected to buckle as a result of this legislation, if it passes.

Some taxes, including a tax on third-party “litigation finance,” were removed in the final bill. But an expanded tax break for real estate investment trusts, which was in the House version, snuck into the Senate bill at the last minute.

The state AI regulation ban was left out of the final text after a 99-1 rejection of it in an amendment overnight.

The action now shifts to the House, where in addition to Freedom Caucus members concerned about cost, several moderates, including Reps. David Valadao (R-CA) and Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), have balked at the deep spending cuts to Medicaid and other programs.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Education Industry, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Injustice, Privatization, Religion, Trump

Republicans Race to Pass the World’s Worst Legislation to Please Trump

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2025 //
1

Andrew Egger of The Bulwark describes the chaotic atmosphere in which Trump’s precious Big Bad Beastly Budget Bill is being rushed to completion. Most Senators have no idea what’s in the bill. They know only that Trump wants it done by July 4. Why? Because he does. The Bulwark is the home of many Republican Never Trumpers.

Egger writes:

A 9 a.m. newsletter is, apparently, a poor fit for the ungodly timetables of today’s Congress. As of this writing, we don’t know whether Senate Republicans will manage to squeeze through their Frankenstein’s monster of a big beautiful bill. What we do know is that this has been one of the most ridiculous and embarrassing spectacles of “legislating” we’ve ever had the displeasure of witnessing.

There have been three driving forces behind this bill. The first has been the “pass something or everyone’s taxes go up” pressure created by the soon-to-expire 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The second has been President Donald Trump, who took a shine to the simplicity of slamming together a bunch of things he wanted done into a single package and who has imposed an artificial deadline of July 4.¹ And the third is the Senate’s utterly dysfunctional procedures surrounding the filibuster, which make it basically impossible for majorities to pass new laws unless they get significant minority buy-in or glue them together into a “budget reconciliation” package that doesn’t need 60 votes.

What we’re left with is a bill that’s bigger than big and anything but beautiful. Although maybe it overstates it to even say we have a bill. As the Senate barrels to a vote (we think) they’re still crafting the actual text of the legislation. There will be no hearings, no comprehensive analysis, and certainly not enough time to read the thing. Whether it will pass now depends on whether Senate leaders can find a sweetener good enough to woo one of the four remaining Republican holdouts. Would any other institution operate in this way?

Yes, it’s common, in our sclerotic era of idiotic megabills, for such packages’ opponents to complain about “the process.” But the BBB has taken that situation to new heights.

It’s Trump’s bill, but even he doesn’t seem to be staying up to speed on what’s in it. He keeps posting that the bill will deliver “NO TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY FOR OUR SENIORS,” a provision that hasn’t been in the legislation for weeks.²

Massive policy amendments keep getting papier-mâchéd onto the package or peeled off by the Senate parliamentarian. One particularly egregious example is a new tax on wind and solar projects that threatens to bankrupt the entire fledgling renewables sector, which suddenly appeared in the bill during this week’s marathon cram session. Not only were a number of senators taken aback by the provision, many didn’t even know how it made it into the bill.

“I don’t know where it came from,” Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told NBC News yesterday evening.

“It wasn’t part of any consideration,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), one of the holdouts whose consent the bill will likely need to pass. “It’s like, surprise! It’s Saturday night.”

Surprise! We’re just gonna cripple an industry and not tell you who did it!

Whether that provision will remain in the bill remains to be seen, as several amendments have been proposed to blunt it. My personal favorite is from Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah), who would leave the new tax in place but give the treasury secretary broad discretion to suspend it. Just what we need, more policy levers for the White House to pull to inflict or relieve pain on private companies at its discretion! What could go wrong?

Other tentpoles of the bill have remained more or less the same. It still contains a staggering increase in federal immigration enforcement, with only a pittance of new funding for immigration courts—a congressional blessing of the White House’s agenda of arresting every migrant we can now, and figuring out how to get around the courts to deport them later. It still blows a massive new hole in federal deficits: $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years, according to a weekend Congressional Budget Office report. And it will still slash Medicaid funding by nearly $1 trillion, knocking nearly 12 million people off their insurance despite Trump’s own continual promises not to cut the program. (But hey, no tax on tips!)

This last provision has been one of the most interesting to watch play out among Republicans online. As many have noted, the bill’s changes to Medicaid will hit many of Trump’s own supporters, who tend to be poorer and more rural, the hardest. But there’s been no grassroots groundswell against the package. Instead, many Trump supporters seem to be operating on the assumption—this is becoming a theme—that it’s other people whom the cuts will hit. Point out online that Trump’s own base stands to hurt from the provision and you’ll be swamped by a wave of MAGA derision: We see through these media lies! We know they’re only taking Medicaid away from fraudsters and illegals!

If this monstrosity of a bill ever becomes law, it will be interesting to see the unstoppable force of this delusion meet the immovable object of people actually losing their coverage en masse. For the sake of the country, we hope we never get to see it. That would be a mess far bigger than the process of putting this bill together.

Categories Disruption, Economy, Trump

The Philosopher Crackpot Who Hates Democracy and Influences Powerful Tech Bros

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2025 //
6

If you haven’t heard of Curtis Yarvin, you should learn about him now. Yarvin does not believe in democracy. He believes in a society commanded by a king or autocrat. He was a prodigy as a child and now considers himself to be a political genius. Powerful men in the tech industry and politics pay him court and admire him, men like the billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and Vice-President JD Vance.

Curtis Yarvin, advisor to Peter Thiel, Donald Trump

This article in The New Yorker by Ava Kolman paints a biographical portrait of Yarvin, summarizes his major ideas and describes his international standing as a philosopher of far-right leaders of the tech industry.

Kolman writes about Yarvin’s extensive range of contacts among the Trump administration and his influence on them, as well as his contact with royalists in other countries..

Kolman begins:

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called rage—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

Does anything on his wish-list sound familiar to you?

It should. Trump has loaded up his administration with people who imbibe Yarvin.

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (doge), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

Yatvin’s ideas are quirky, inhumane, and extreme, to say the least:

On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco’s underclasses into biodiesel to power the city’s buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

Yarvin’s call for an American strongman is often treated as an eccentric provocation. In fact, he considers it the only answer to a world in which most people are unfit for democracy….

Yarvin’s influence on Trump’s inner circle is noticeable:

Last month, an anonymous doge adviser told the Washington Post that it was “an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.” Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. “Did I hear someone say ‘beachfront?’ ” he wrote on Substack. “The new Gaza—developed, of course, by Jared Kushner—is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump, who doesn’t like to read, is unlikely to have read Yarvin’s philosophical treatises about the proper functioning of a modern society–without benefit of a popular vote–but certainly Trump’s view of the unlimited, imperial powers of the Presidency are similar to those of Yarvin.

Read the article if you can access it. Make yourself aware of the man who wields an outsize influence on Trump right now.

To learn more about Yarvin’s influence among rightwing billionaires, read:

https://theconversation.com/an-antidemocratic-philosophy-called-neoreaction-is-creeping-into-gop-politics-182581

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Gender, History, Politics, Racism, Trump, Tyranny

Heather Cox Richardson: Under Our Mafia Boss, Everything Is For Sale

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2025 //
2

Heather Cox Richardson describes the legal corruption that is now out in the open.

Yesterday at the meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), a forum of democracies with advanced economies, President Donald Trump told reporters: “The UK is very well protected. You know why? Because I like them, that’s why. That’s the ultimate protection.”

Commenters often note that Trump talks like a mob boss, but rarely has his organized-crime style of governance been clearer than in yesterday’s statement.

Also yesterday, Ana Swanson and Lauren Hirsch of the New York Times reported that Trump has taken unprecedented control over U.S. Steel. Japan’s Nippon Steel has been trying to take over U.S. Steel since 2023, but the Biden administration blocked the deal for security reasons. In order to move it forward, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demanded an agreement that gives to the president and his successors, or a person the president designates, a single share of preferred stock, known as class G, or “gold.” The deal gives the president permanent veto power over nearly a dozen actions the company might want to take, as well as power over its board of directors.

Swanson and Hirsch note that the U.S. government historically takes a stake in companies only when they are in financial trouble or when they play a significant role in the economy. “We have a golden share, which I control, or the president controls,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday. “Now I’m a little concerned whoever the president might be, but that gives you total control.”

This kind of deal echoes those of the authoritarians Trump appears to admire. His ongoing support for Russian president Vladimir Putin was on display at the G7, when he echoed Russian talking points that blamed European countries and the United States for Putin’s war against Ukraine, rather than acknowledging that it was Russia that attacked Ukraine after giving assurances that it would respect Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the Soviet nuclear weapons stored there.

Also yesterday, Rene Marsh and Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that officials from the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump have been telling staff in the Midwest—which the authors note has a legacy of industrial pollution—to “stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies.” At the same time, the Department of Justice has cut its environmental division significantly, leaving “no one to do the work.”

Trump vowed that if he were reelected he would slash the oil and gas regulations he claims are “burdensome.” Now, one EPA enforcement staffer told Marsh and Nilsen, “The companies are scoffing at the cops. EPA enforcement doesn’t have the leverage they once had.”

Also yesterday, outdoor journalist Wes Siler reported in Wes Siler’s Newsletter that while language inserted in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill requires the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of publicly owned land, an amendment authorizes the sale of 258 million acres more over the next five years. The amendment comes from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and was written by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Steve Daines (R-MT).

It includes Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands in 11 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. As Siler notes, while the measure does not currently include national monument lands, the Department of Justice under Trump is arguing that the president can revoke national monument protections. If it did so, that would make another 13.5 million acres available for purchase.

Siler notes the process for selling those lands calls for an enormous rush on sales, “all without hearings, debate, or public input opportunities.”

Today, Eliot Brown of the Wall Street Journal reported that Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is now one of the many wealthy foreign real estate developers “pouring money” into the Trump Organization. Brown noted that the Trump family is aggressively developing its businesses while Trump is in the White House, reaching past real estate into cryptocurrency and other sectors.

The growing power of international oligarchs to use the resources of the government for their own benefit recalls a speech Robert Mueller, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave in New York City in 2011. In it, he explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. No longer regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated, with multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.

These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”

These criminal enterprises, he noted, were working to corner the market on oil, gas, and precious metals. And to do so, Mueller explained, they “may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

The FBI’s increasing focus on organized crime and national security is what prompted its interest in the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016.

The willingness of Republicans to enable Trump’s behavior is especially striking today, since June 17 is the anniversary of the 1972 Watergate break-in. On that day, operatives associated with President Richard M. Nixon’s team tried to tap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex. Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard, noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.

The story played out over the next two years with Nixon insisting he was not involved in the affair, but in early August 1974 a tape recorded just days after the break-in revealed Nixon and an aide plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Republican senators who had not wanted to convict their president of the charges of impeachment being considered in the House knew the game was over. A delegation of them went to the White House to tell Nixon they would vote to convict him.

On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

Chris Geidner of LawDork notes that despite the lawmakers in our own era who are unwilling to stop Trump, “the pushback…is very real.” Geidner notes not just the No Kings Day protests of the weekend, but also a lawsuit by the American Bar Association (ABA) suing Trump for his attacks on law firms and lawyers, calling Trump’s actions “unprecedented and uniquely dangerous to the rule of law.”

Geidner also notes that lower court judges are upholding the Constitution, and he points especially to U.S. District Judge William Young, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan. In a hearing yesterday, Young insisted on holding the government accountable “for both Trump’s actions and the follow-up actions from those Trump has empowered to act.”

Young called cuts to funding for National Institutes of Health research grants “illegal” and “void” and ordered the NIH to restore the funds immediately. “I am hesitant to draw this conclusion—but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it—that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.”

“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Young said during the hearing. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.” He added: “You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The Constitution will not permit that.… Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Character, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Economy, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Trump

Trump Reverses Decision to Stop ICE Raids in Farming, Hotels, and Restaurants

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2025 //
17

There was joy in certain industries last Friday when Trump announced that ICE would stop raiding workplaces. He exempted farms, restaurants, meatpacking plants, and hotels, acknowledging that they needed their employees, and that these immigrants were hardworking and contributed to the economy.

His Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollins apparently persuaded him.

But by Monday, he reversed course after Stephen miller got to him. TACO. Trump Always Chickens Out.

The Washington Post reported:

Industry and business groups that depend on immigrant workers are scrambling to respond to President Donald Trump’s heightened deportation efforts, after winning a partial reprieve on raids last week that was reversed days later.

The administration on Monday walked back a pause on immigration raids at farms, meatpacking plants, hotels and restaurants, sending renewed shock waves through the broader business community, parts of which are still pushing the White House for relief from workplace raids.

The pause had come after heavy lobbying efforts from farms, hotels and restaurants, as well as the meatpacking, construction, manufacturing, retail, elder care and dairy industries, among others, said Jennie Murray, president of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization that represents Fortune 500 companies on Capitol Hill. Industries have lobbied lawmakers in Congress and White House officials.

“To see such a quick overturn, I think, was disheartening for many. A lot of these business and trade associations that need workforce solutions have been very supportive of the administration,” Murray said. “That’ll be something they continue to be disappointed about for a while.”

The American Farm Bureau Federation, the country’s powerful lobbying group for farmers, expressed “concern” that the policy had been reserved.

“President Trump recently emphasized agriculture faces unique circumstances that warrant a different approach to enforcement practices,” Zippy Duvall, the federation’s president, said in a statement Tuesday.
The policy reversal appeared to take effect immediately. On Tuesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided Delta Downs, a horse racing track in Vinton, Louisiana, rounding up nearly 100 equine caretakers, some of whom fled the scene as drones swarmed overhead, according to Eric J. Hamelback, chief executive of the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association.

Hamelback said he had been under the impression that horse racing had been included in the administration’s agricultural carve-out. The group estimates that nearly 75 percent of its workforce is foreign-born, mostly from Latin America.


“The only change that we have to make is to get even more aggressive with both the administration and Congress,” Hamelback said, noting that his organization had been lobbying Washington lawmakers and the administration in recent weeks and months — including a meeting with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) in March.

The pause on workplace raids in agriculture and hospitality went out hours after Trump said in a post Thursday on his social media platform, Truth Social, that he was sympathetic to concerns that executives raised about his deportation plan. Trump wrote last week that “changes are coming” to help “protect our Farmers” from losing workers. However, a White House official told The Washington Post at the time that no actual policy changes were proposed by the White House.

The United Farm Workers union said in a statement that the pause didn’t make a real difference, because immigration sweeps continued to ripple through farmworker communities Friday. UFW President Teresa Romero said that as long as immigration enforcement continues where farmworkers live, “some farmworkers will be detained and deported.”

On Monday, a coalition of dozens of industry groups celebrated last week’s pause in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
“We … appreciate Trump’s pledge that ‘changes are coming’ and commitment to issuing policies soon to help stabilize and meet critical workforce needs,” the letter stated. It was signed by construction, retail and health-care industry leaders, including the National Retail Federation and Associated Builders and Contractors, the two groups confirmed to The Post.

The White House’s policy reversal appeared to reflect opposing factions within the administration that have pulled the president in two directions on the issue. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s aggressive immigration policy, privately opposed carving out exceptions for certain industries that rely heavily on workers without legal status, The Post reported Monday.

Conversely, Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, stressed to Trump the concerns that farming industry leaders have raised about threats to their workforce. More than 40 percent of agriculture laborers are undocumented, according to 2022 estimates by the Agriculture Department.

Categories Economy, Immigration, Trump
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