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Project 2025 Lives! Despite Trump’s Denials.

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2024 //
11

During the campaign, Democrats continually drew attention to the radical proposals of Project 2025 as the agenda for a second Trump term. Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 and pretended to know nothing about it or anyone who wrote it. Now that he is President-elect, Project 2025 is indeed Trump’s agenda.

Someone on social media asked, “If Trump disavowed Project 2025 when campaigning, isn’t I clear that he has no “mandate” to act on it?

The LA Times reports:

Russell Vought, one of the chief architects of Project 2025 — a conservative blueprint for the next presidency — is no fan of the federal government that President-elect Donald Trump will soon lead.

He believes “woke” civil servants and “so-called expert authorities” wield illegitimate power to block conservative White House directives from deep within federal agencies, and wants Trump to “bend or break” that bureaucracy to his will, he wrote in the second chapter of the Project 2025 playbook.

Vought is a vocal proponent of a plan known as Schedule F, under which Trump would fire thousands of career civil servants with extensive experience in their fields and replace them with his own political loyalists, and of Christian nationalism, which would see American governance aligned with Christian teachings. Both are core tenets of Project 2025.

Throughout his campaign, Trump adamantly disavowed Project 2025, even though its policies overlapped with his and some of its authors worked in his first administration. He castigated anyone who suggested the blueprint, which polls showed was deeply unpopular among voters, represented his aims for the presidency.

But last week, the president-elect nominated Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the White House budget and its policy agenda across the federal government.

Trump called Vought, who held the same role during his first term, an “aggressive cost cutter and deregulator” who “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government.”

The nomination was one of several Trump has made since his election that have called into question his claims on the campaign trail that Project 2025 was not his playbook and held no sway over him or his plans for a second term. 

He selected Tom Homan, a Project 2025 contributor and former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative organization behind the blueprint, as his “border czar.” Trump named Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner also linked to Project 2025, as his deputy chief of staff for policy. Both also served in the first Trump administration.

He also named Brendan Carr to serve on the Federal Communications Commission. Carr wrote a chapter of Project 2025 on the FCC, which regulates U.S. internet access and TV and radio networks, and has echoed Trump’s claimsthat news broadcasters have engaged in political bias against Trump.

Trump named John Ratcliffe as his pick for CIA director and Pete Hoekstra as ambassador to Canada. Both are Project 2025 contributors. It has also been reported that the Trump transition team is filling lower-level government spots using a Project 2025 database of conservative candidates.

During the campaign Trump said that he knew “nothing about” Project 2025 and that he found some of its ideas “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” In response to news in July that Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, was leaving his post, Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — whom the president-elect has since named his chief of staff — issued a statement saying that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”

Asked about Trump’s selection of several people with Project 2025 connections to serve in his administration, Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt responded with a statement, saying Trump “never had anything to do with Project 2025.”

“This has always been a lie pushed by the Democrats and the legacy media, but clearly the American people did not buy it because they overwhelmingly voted for President Trump to implement the promises that he made on the campaign trail,” Leavitt wrote. “All of President Trump’s cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”

Leavitt too has ties to Project 2025, having appeared in a training video for it.

In addition to calling for much greater power in the hands of the president, Project 2025 calls for less federal intervention in certain areas — including through the elimination of the Department of Education. It calls for much stricter immigration enforcement and mass deportations — a policy priority of Trump’s as well — and rails against environmental protections, calling for the demolition of key environmental agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service.

It calls for tougher restrictions on abortion and for the federal government to collect data on women who seek an abortion, and backs a slew of measures that would strip rights from LGBTQ+ people.

For Trump’s critics, his selections make it clear that his disavowal of the conservative playbook was nothing more than a campaign ploy to pacify voters who viewed the plan as too far to the right. It’s an argument many were making before the election as well.

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Categories Accountability, Censorship, Cruelty, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Privatization, Republicans, Trump

North Carolina: Republican Supermajority Strips Newly Elected Democrats of Power

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2024 //
27

The Republican supermajority in the state’s General Assembly is shameless. They used their numbers to pass a bill that strips the newly elected Democratic Governor, State Attorney General, and State Superintendent of Schools of many of their powers.

Outgoing Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, but Republicans overturned his veto.

The Republican power grab was embedded in a bill that shortchanged the victims of Hurricane Helene.

When will voters in North Carolina wise up and start voting for Democratic legislators? The ones they have now are not working on behalf of their constituents.

They are using their power to protect their power and perks. The public be damned! Vote them out!

Categories Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, North Carolina, Republicans

The New Republic: How Trump Will Profit Bigtime from His New Job

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2024 //
8

The New Republic writes about how easy it will be to bribe Trump. The emoluments clause in the Constitution has been rendered meaningless–the one that says the President can’t profit from his office. In his first term, nations and lobbyists paid him off by renting luxury suites at the Trump hotel near the White House. Now the possibilities are much greater.

In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court has given Trump absolute immunity for criminal acts he performs while acting as President. So we can expect to see the President selling watches, Bibles, sneakers, NFT trading cards, perfume, and whatever in nightly addresses from the Oval Office.

Imagine a Presidential press conference where Trump has commercial breaks to sell his merch!

Just one more norm to break!

The story begins:

I know what you’re thinking. How can I, a 98-pound weakling, DEREGULATE my industry or win fat GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS? But after last week’s election, there’s NEVER been a better time to BRIBE THE PRESIDENT! As a candidate, Donald Trump said that, if elected, he would put his second term UP FOR SALE! Contribute to my campaign, he told oil and gas industry representatives, and REGULATORY RELIEF IS YOURS! 

But wait, you say. Aren’t there emoluments clauses in the Constitution that FORBID this? Isn’t BRIBERY of public officials AGAINST THE LAW? Not really, thanks to EXCITING NEW OPPORTUNITIES opened up by Supreme Court rulings and the Trump team’s own thrilling CULTURE OF IMPUNITY! 

The Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act requires major-party nominees for president to submit, before the election, a Memo of Understanding to the General Services Administration articulating an ethics policy to avoid conflicts of interest. Trump signed the MOU last time. He hasn’t submitted one this time, even though the deadline was October 1. Until he does, Trump is barred from carrying out certain transition functions. Probably he’ll sign eventually, but once he does the GSA will impose a $5,000 limit on private contributions to his transition and a disclosure requirement, neither of which is really the Trump way. Presumably Trump will tap many of the same donors who gave to him last time, including AT&T, General Electric, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, and JPMorgan Chase. Meanwhile, no dollar limits inhibit contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee, which last time included $5 millionfrom the late Sheldon Adelson. Adelson’s finances are now in the hands of his widow, Miriam, whom Trump will likely tap again.

Am I saying any of these corporations or individuals extracted promises back in 2016 in exchange for their contributions? I am not. Back then they were deterred by fear of prosecution. But they have much less to fear now, because last June, in the latest of its rulings to render the federal bribery statute completely unenforceable, the Supreme Court ruled that a politician who gets paid off by the beneficiary of some past action is accepting a legal gratuity and not an illegal bribe. Less than one month after this decision (Snyder v. United States) came Trump v. United States, where the court ruled that a president couldn’t be prosecuted for any act performed as part of his official duties. The combined effect is that the highest court in the land is practically inviting you to bribe your president. You might risk offending it if you turn this fabulous offer down! The Supreme Court’s lassitude about bribery, however, bumps up against its lassitude about presidential immunity in an interesting way that I’ll discuss in a bit. 

As for the emoluments clauses (two of which apply to the president; a third is for members of Congress), the Supreme Court long ago made clear it had no intention of enforcing those. In 2020 the high court declined to hear an emoluments case (Blumenthal v. Trump) brought by members of Congress, thereby upholding a lower-court ruling that Congress lacked standing. In 2021 the court dispensed with two other emoluments cases (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) v. Donald J. Trump and the District of Columbia v. Trump), both filed way back in 2017, by delaying action until five days after Joe Biden was inaugurated president and then declaring the lawsuits moot. 

The high court resorted to this evasion because any ruling on the cases’ merits would have had to acknowledge that Trump, serially and flagrantly, violated the emoluments clauses both foreign (“no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust … shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State”) and domestic (“The President shall … not receive … any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them”). 

There’s a rich literature on the many and varied ways Trump made mincemeat of the emoluments clauses during his first term, including tworeports by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, one on foreign emoluments and one on domestic, and an update to the foreign emoluments report by CREW. According to CREW, Trump’s businesses received $13.6 million in payments from foreign governments during his presidency, including $5.7 million from China (mostly stays at Trump hotels), nearly $4 million from the United Kingdom (tax bailouts for two money-losing Trump golf resorts in Scotland), $1.1 million from Qatar (purchase of four units in Trump World Tower in New York City plus hotel stays at the now-defunct Trump International in Washington), and $885,000 from Saudi Arabia (which since 2001 has owned the 45thfloor of Trump World Tower; the Saudis also logged many stays at the Trump International). This tally excludes a reported $10 million campaign contribution that Trump’s 2016 campaign accepted from Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi. Such a contribution, if it was given, would be illegal. A Justice Department investigation of the alleged contribution was shut down by Trump Attorney General William Barr.

On the domestic front, federal and state officials spent, over just an 11-month period, more than $163,000 on rooms at the Trump International, including eight people Trump appointed ambassador and three people Trump appointed to the federal bench. Meanwhile, the Secret Service paid $1.4 million to various Trump properties in the United States so that it might carry out its duties to protect the president and his family from physical harm, at rates as much as 4.5 times the federal per diem. In some instances the Secret Service paid more than Trump charged members of the Qatari royal family. The Secret Service isn’t trying to bribe Trump, of course, but because its stays were paid from the Treasury they violated the domestic emoluments clause, which is triggered by the expenditure of government money.

Since Trump’s first term, opportunities to fill Trump’s pockets have proliferated. Truth Social is a money-losing social-media platform whose stock price is up 180 percent since late September. As I’ve noted before, Trump’s fans are much more interested in buying shares in his social-media platform than in using it, not because they can make money off it but because Trump can. Trump owns a $3.5 billion stake in the company even though he’s never invested in it and can sell that stake any time he wishes. Trump insists he isn’t selling, but more than half of Trump’s net worth of $5.9 billion is tied up in Truth Social, and he’s still burdened by hundreds of millions in debt. The presidency may be the only thing standing between Trump and personal bankruptcy. That reality makes Trump even more susceptible to payoffs of various kinds. “How much Truth Social stock do you own?” could easily become a routine question Trump poses to anybody seeking a political appointment or some other favor. If that’s established to be part of his “official duties,” no prosecutor can touch him. Maybe Trump’s new bestie Elon Musk will buy Truth Social and merge it with Twitter/X. The two platforms aren’t so different, and maybe Trump would agree to stop criticizing EVs in return.

Trump also has a cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial (WLF). He doesn’t own it, and neither he nor any family member works for it or sits on its board of directors. As with Truth Social, Trump has not invested in the company. Yet Trump and his family are poised to receive as much as 75 percent of net revenues from the company. When you pay your bribe, don’t forget to make it in WLF tokens!

The Trump International Hotel opened in Washington’s Old Post Office less than two months before the 2016 election, and with Trump’s victory it established the District of Columbia as a latter-day equivalent of Pottersville in It’s A Wonderful Life. Trump paid too much for his lease on this federal building in 2012, lost a fortune on it—and then sold it at a profit in 2022 under mysterious circumstances that I puzzled over two years ago. Some of the mystery cleared up after Forbes reported that Trump lent the new owner $28 million to take it off his hands. By last summer, though, the new owners—of what was now a Waldorf Astoria hotel—had defaulted, and in August the property quietly sold for $100 million at a foreclosure auction. 

Since then, Trump has licensed his name to three developments in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, including a Trump Tower Dubai and an Intercontinental Hotel, sparing the governments of those countries the inconvenience of traveling to the United States to shovel petrodollars down Trump’s pants. The Saudis’ LIV Golf League has already hosted six tournaments at Trump properties and will doubtless now step up the pace.

At the risk of spoiling the party, I must point out one potential bullkill.  Josh Chafetz, professor of law at Georgetown and author of a forthcoming Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities article about the Supreme Court and political corruption, noted recently to Adam Liptak of The New York Times that the high court’s definitions of what constitute “official acts” lack consitency. In McDonnell v. United States, a 2016 bribery case involving a corrupt wingnut Virginia governor, Chief Justice John Roberts defined an official act narrowly as “a formal exercise of government power,” and on those grounds he vacated the bribery conviction. But in July’s Trump v. the United States, Roberts defined an official act broadly as anything occurring “within the outer perimeter of … official responsibility,” and on those grounds he shielded Trump from prosecution. The only logic these two definitions shared was the chief justice’s motive not to prosecute corrupt Republican politicians.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Categories Corruption, Deregulation, Elections, For-Profit, Fraud, Trump

Texas: Deporting Undocumented Immigrants Will Cripple the Economy

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2024 //
6

The Texas Monthly contacted 100 Republican office holders to get their view of Trump’s plans for deporting millions of immigrants. Only two responded. In Texas, one in 20 residents is an undocumented immigrant. Their absence will have a big economic impact, as will the visuals of rounding up and detaining large numbers of people.

Michael Hardy wrote:

Shortly after he is sworn into office, on January 20, President-elect Donald Trump plans to launch a massive deportation operation targeting the estimated 11.5 million immigrants living illegally in the United States. Texas, with its 1,254-mile southern border and pro-Trump leaders, will play a central role in any such deportations. Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has vowed that the administration will build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” likely on “open land in Texas near the border.” State land commissioner Dawn Buckingham recently offered the administration 1,400 acres in Starr County about 35 miles west of McAllen to build “deportation facilities.” 

In their eagerness to help Trump conduct sweeping roundups of undocumented Texas workers and their families, state leaders who vociferously supported Trump’s candidacy have mostly avoided reckoning with the likely economic consequences of such roundups—including the impact on inflation, a major issue in the presidential campaign. 

Earlier this month, Governor Greg Abbott said he expected the president-elect to begin by deporting immigrants who have committed crimes in the United States, but he would not say who he thinks should be expelled next under the far-reaching plan. “President Trump has made perfectly clear that this is a process and you have to have a priority list,” he said. “You begin with . . . the criminals.” 

But Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants—around one in every twenty residents—and the vast majority are not criminals. In fact, undocumented immigrants in our state commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than legal residents, according to a National Institute of Justice analysis of Texas Department of Public Safety data. Many among these 1.6 million power the state’s construction, farming, and meatpacking industries and work as housekeepers, landscape gardeners, and restaurant workers. 

Deporting every immigrant who is in the U.S. illegally—or even half of them—would cripple the economy. And Texas would be hit harder than most states. A recent report by the left-leaning American Immigration Council estimated that a mass-deportation campaign would reduce the national GDP by 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent—a similar hit to the one the nation took during the Great Recession. The price of groceries would skyrocket. A gallon of milk, for instance, would cost twice as much without immigrant labor, according to a 2015 estimate from Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Extension Service. Mass deportations would also punch a hole in the state budget, because undocumented Texans pay an estimated $4.9 billion in sales and payroll taxes every year, including for retirement benefits they are ineligible to collect. 

Trump has argued that deporting undocumented immigrants would open up jobs for American citizens. But the percentage of citizens willing to work in industries such as landscaping and construction has declined, and economic studies suggest that immigration, both legal and illegal, is a net benefit to the economy. Reducing illegal immigration likely would, over time, result in higher wages for legal workers in industries such as construction, assuming the supply of labor were to fall faster than demand. But suddenly removing a significant percentage of undocumented workers (one recent estimate found that 23 percent of construction workers nationally don’t have legal documents) would likely cause hundreds of building projects to stall, crops to go unharvested, and cattle to stack up in feedlots.

Trump’s program would also impose social costs on communities across Texas. According to the Pew Research Center, around 70 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country live in mixed-status households with at least one family member who is here legally. Expelling these migrants would separate families and decimate communities across the state. “The social, family, and economic impact would be very deep,” said Rice University political scientist Tony Payan. “It doesn’t make sense from any perspective. It would be madness for the U.S. to do that.” 

Some Texas officials, including Senator Ted Cruz, have long supported mass deportation as a campaign platform while remaining vague about how such an operation would be executed and what the consequences might be for the Texas economy. In an attempt to get more specifics, Texas Monthly reached out to top Texas officials and every Republican state legislator to ask about the incoming president’s mass-deportation plan. We posed four questions:

  • Do you support President Trump’s plan to deport all immigrants in the country illegally?
  • How would you like the deportations to be carried out?
  • Are you concerned about the potential economic damage to the Texas construction, farming, and restaurant industries from deporting undocumented immigrants? If so, how would you remedy that damage?
  • Are you concerned about the family separations that will occur if all undocumented Texas are deported?

Two legislators responded. Ninety-eight did not.

A loud silence.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Economy, Elections, Immigration, Texas

Senator Grassley Shows the Door to FBI Director Wray

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2024 //
11

After Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in 2017, he choose respected FBI veteran Christopher Wray to replace Comey. The FBI Director is appointed for a ten-year term, to insulate the Director from partisan influence.

Senator Chuck Grassley is the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on the Budget.

In this letter, directed to Director Wray, Grassley says he is finished and it’s time to pack his bag. He explains why. The heart of the matter is that he failed to investigate Republican claims that Biden was corrupt, but approved a search of Trump’s home for classified documents.

Next up is the odious Kash Patel, nominated by Trump to be FBI Director. Patel is a MAGA ideologue who has said that if appointed, on day one, he would close the FBI Headquarters and re-open it as a “museum of the deep state.”

Let’s see what Senator Grassley says about the unqualified Patel.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Justice, Republicans, Trump

An Infectious Diseases Doctor Assesses Trump’s Public Health Team

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2024 //
7

In Houston, Lisa Gray of the Houston Chronicle interviewed Dr. Peter Hotez, a respected practitioner, about the Trump agenda for public health. This is part two of a two-part post.

Gray writes:

Recently, after outlining five terrifying infectious diseases and potential pandemics looming on the world horizon, vaccine researcher Peter Hotez said that he doesn’t believe that the incoming Trump administration is taking those threats seriously enough.

That alarmed me. I’ve been interviewing Hotez since early 2020, right after COVID infections showed up in the United States. As he’s the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, he follows emerging disease threats closely. And with his team at Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, he develops low-cost vaccines for low-income nations. During the pandemic, he became one of the most recognized medical experts on COVID — and a local hero here in Houston. 

Videographer Sharon Steinmann and I spoke with Hotez in his office at Baylor. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why are you worried that the incoming Trump administration may not be ready for public-health threats on Day 1? Is that based on the people Donald Trump has named to health positions?

A: I’m concerned that the Trump administration is picking individuals based on their ideologies rather than either their subject-matter expertise or their ability to get things done in government.

Q: You’ve been acquainted for years with RFK Jr. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who Trump has nominated to be secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. How did you meet him?

A: I used to call him “Bobby.” I got to know him because in 2017 he indicated that he was going to head a vaccine commission for the new incoming Trump administration.

I was in my office, here where we’re speaking now, and my assistant said, “Hey, Dr. Hotez, I have Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins on the phone. Can you talk to them?”

Q: Whoa! Those are two big names in your field.

A: [Grins.] I said, “Yeah, I guess I’ll take the call.”

They said, “Peter, we’ve got a job for you. If anyone can explain to Kennedy why vaccines don’t cause autism, it’s you.”

They asked because I was a scientist and a pediatrician, and most importantly, I’d written a book, “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism,” explaining how I can be sure that my daughter’s autism is not linked to vaccines. 

Tim Shriver, a terrific guy who heads the Special Olympics, brokered a meeting for us with RFK Jr. And for months after that, I had a number of long, long phone conversations with Bobby. Sometimes that would be while my wife Ann and I were out for a long walk through Montrose, and she’d listen in.

Q: How did that go? 

A: Our conversations weren’t very productive. It was an exercise in frustration, probably for both of us. He was pretty dug in. Either he didn’t understand the science or he didn’t have a lot of interest in it.

For instance, I would point out to Bobby that autism is a neurodevelopmental condition that starts early in pregnancy. We know this from multiple neurodevelopmental studies. So autism is well in motion before kids ever even see their first vaccine.

In addition to that, the Broad Institute, at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had also identified at least a hundred autism genes. Many of them are a type of gene called the neuronal cytoskeleton gene, which is involved in neuronal connections. (My wife Ann and I actually did a whole-genome sequencing on Rachel. We found that Rachel’s autism gene is different from the ones published by the Broad Institute, but it’s similar — it’s a neuronal cytoskeleton gene.)

Sergiu Pasca and his associates at Stanford University Medical School have also looked at what they call brain organoids. They can put neurons together in a petri dish and basically assemble them as mini-brains. This has been done now with neurons that have autism genes, and so the aberrant neuronal patterns really tell the complete story now.

It was frustrating to me that Bobby didn’t pay attention to the science and instead spouted dogma.

A: I got to know her during the COVID pandemic. She was a Fox News talking head, and I was going on Fox News pretty regularly in the evenings until I wouldn’t go along with the hydroxychloroquinine nonsense.

At the time, we talking heads on the various news channels would talk to each other. That was helpful because we were learning from each other. We all brought different expertise to the table.

Dr. Nesheiwat had a lot of humility. She wanted to know my opinion on COVID vaccines, how they worked and what were the different technologies. She was inquisitive and delightful to talk with. So I’m excited about her role as surgeon general. That’s at least one silver lining.

Q: Are there other silver linings?

A: Yeah. The other person that I got to know during the pandemic was Mehmet Oz, Dr. Oz, because he had a show with wide reach. I would go on his show and talk about COVID vaccines.

I liked being on his show. He was respectful and thoughtful. He asked good questions and gave me an opportunity to talk to daytime audiences — people I wouldn’t ordinarily reach. I was grateful for that opportunity.

I think that both Dr. Nesheiwat and Dr. Oz are effective communicators. I think President-elect Trump wants to bring on good communicators.

Dr. Oz is heading a very bureaucratic organization, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. I don’t think that’s a perfect fit for him — he’d have been better off as something like surgeon general — but we’ll see.

Lisa Gray is the op-ed editor and a member of the Houston Chronicle editorial board. During the pandemic, she was the Chronicle’s lead COVID reporter.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Health, Science, Trump

The Five Threats to Public Health on Day 1 of Trump Administration

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2024 //
1

Lisa Gray, an editor at the Houston Chronicle, interviewed Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and specialist in infectious diseases, about the major public health challenges facing the incoming Trump administration. Dr. Hotez shares the story of his effort to persuade Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of the importance of vaccines. This post is the first of two.

Gray wrote:

During the COVID pandemic, Americans came to rely on bow-tied vaccine scientist Peter Hotez for calm, scientific assessments of the virus and the vaccines being developed to fight it. With his team at Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Hotez develops low-cost vaccines for low-income nations. He’s also the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine — and is arguably Houston’s most beloved doctor.

He still monitors the public-health landscape closely. To find out what public-health threats await the Donald Trump administration, Houston Chronicle videographer Sharon Steinmann and I interviewed him at his office at Baylor.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What are the public health challenges that the Trump administration will face on Day 1? Are you monitoring any major health threats?

A: We’ve got some big-ticket concerns regarding infectious disease and pandemic threats. The new administration is not going to have the luxury of time to organize and think about it. They’re going to be confronted with this from the very beginning.

One of the big threats I’m following is H5N1, an avian influenza. The virus is widespread now in migratory birds that fly from the north to the south.

It’s spilling over into domestic birds and poultry. We’re now seeing a big increase in infections of domestic birds and poultry in California and elsewhere in the western part of the United States, as well as across the northern part of the country. 

An H5N1 strain has also crossed over from birds into cattle. It’s gotten into our herds, including in Texas, as well as in the Great Plains and other parts of the United States.

I’m concerned that, eventually, this virus could spill over to people as well. We’re starting to see human cases. In the last few weeks, we’ve had six human cases. I think eventually H5N1 could become a major human public-health threat.

It’s not there yet. We’re not seeing human-to-human transmission yet. But monitoring it and being prepared for it has got to be a big priority for the new incoming administration. 

Q: Oof. Is that all that’s on the horizon?

A: Guess what? That’s just the beginning.

The other thing that’s happening is, we still have COVID with us. Our COVID-19 numbers are low again, but I expect them to rise. You can protect yourself from that, of course, by keeping your immunizations up to date. If you got a dose of the vaccine in September, like I did, you’ll be due again around January.

But here’s the thing: COVID-19 isn’t the only COVID threat. There are other coronaviruses.

Remember that the name for the virus that causes COVID is the SARS-2 coronavirus. There was a SARS-1, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that came out of southern China in 2002. We had Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, also caused by a coronavirus, in 2012. And of course, we had SARS-2 cause COVID, the largest pandemic of them all, starting in 2019.

We should expect SARS-3 to come in the next few years.

Q: Why are we seeing these new coronaviruses in people?

A: Because these viruses are widespread in bats. Across China and East Asia, they’re jumping regularly to people. In some cases that’s through intermediate animal hosts. In some cases it’s directly from bats to people.

By some estimates, these new SARS coronaviruses are jumping from bats to people on the order of 66,000 times a year. Every now and then, one catches fire and ignites a pandemic.

So that needs to occupy the attention of the Trump administration. What kind of surveillance are we doing for SARS-3, which is brewing as we speak among bats in Asia?

Q: That’s a lot to take care of.

A: That’s not all we have to worry about. A third big-ticket item is the fact that we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of virus infections transmitted by mosquitoes or other biting arthropods. We all know about the West Nile virus. Last year was a pretty bad year for infections in the United States, including Texas. But that’s just the beginning.

With these mosquito-transmitted viruses, which we call arboviruses, we know what to expect in the U.S. because we usually see it first in Brazil. In the Western Hemisphere, Brazil is the arbovirus epicenter.  And right now, dengue, Oropouche, Zika and even yellow fever are all expanding in Brazil. They’re even extending beyond the Amazon rainforest, where we typically see them, because of climate change and possibly because of deforestation. 

And unfortunately, what starts in Brazil doesn’t stay in Brazil. It will eventually make its way to the Gulf Coast of the United States, including Texas.  So for next summer, I’m worried about dengue. I’m worried about Chikungunya, and even the possibility of yellow fever. I wrote about the possibility of a yellow fever outbreak in the New England Journal of Medicine; it would be catastrophic. The virus affects pregnant women and could be transmitted to the fetus, causing horrible birth defects. And besides yellow fever, Oropouche virus [pronounced “o-ro-push”] is going to be yet another big-ticket item. It’s spreading fast in Brazil. 

Q: So we’ve got four big-ticket concerns.

A: Wait, wait: We’re not done yet. Anti-vaccine activism accelerated during COVID; we’ve spoken about it many times. Now it’s spilling over to childhood immunizations. We’re seeing unprecedented levels of vaccine hesitancy and of parents refusing to have their kids vaccinated. So guess what?

From 2023 to 2024, we had a nearly sixfold increase in pertussis, or whooping cough, cases. We went from four measles outbreaks in 2023 to 16 in 2024. We’ve even seen polio in the wastewater of New York state.

I’m expecting a big rise in illnesses that are preventable with childhood vaccines.

Q: And the Trump administration has to be ready for all five of these major threats?

A: All of that is going to come crashing down on them. It’s going to be important that they take all those threats seriously.

It’s not just public health that could be affected. We’ve learned that pandemics have all sorts of other aspects. There’s an economic impact. There’s the impact on our security. And if we have a serious epidemic here in the U.S., it could block our travel from the U.S. to other countries.

I don’t have the sense that these big-ticket infectious disease threats are being taken with the seriousness that they need to be.

Q: Is that based on the people Donald Trump has named to health positions?

A: I’m concerned that the Trump administration is picking individuals based on their ideologies rather than either their subject-matter expertise or their ability to get things done in government.

Lisa Gray is the op-ed editor and a member of the Houston Chronicle editorial board. During the pandemic, she was the Chronicle’s lead COVID reporter.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science

Voters Defeated the Dark Money Behind Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2024 //
3

David Armiak of the Center for Media and Democracy reviewed the recent defeat of vouchers in three states: Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska. He points out that vouchers have never won a state referendum. Voters have always said “No” to sending public money to private and religious schools.

Who pays for the state campaigns on behalf of vouchers?

Billionaires.

The two most reliable funders of voucher proposals are billionaires Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch.

The billionaires keep pushing vouchers even though we now know that they are subsidies for families whose children are already enrolled in private schools. And we now know that vouchers don’t help public school students who use them. And we now know that vouchers are a huge drain on state budgets and always cost more than predicted.

DeVos and Koch like to fund failure. Their goal is not to improve education but to destroy public schools.

Armiak writes:

The dark money group Advance Colorado Action (ACA, formerly Unite for Colorado) qualified the ballot measure, but most of the identifiable money spent pushing its passage came from a related advocacy group, Colorado Dawn.

Unite for Colorado was founded in 2019 by Dustin Zvonek, the former vice president for strategy and innovation and state director for Charles Koch’s astroturf operation Americans for Prosperity. As of 2022, Unite for Colorado provided Colorado Dawn with almost half of its revenue ($2.7 million out of $5.9 million).

Both groups have been hit with multiple campaign finance complaints in recent years, including one last month against Colorado Dawn for sending misleading text messages and spending money to influence a ballot measure without registering as an issue committee.

Colorado Dawn reported spending nearly $1.9 million as of October 23 to back Amendment 80, The Colorado Sun reported.

In Kentucky, voters in every county rejected Amendment 2 by a margin of almost two to one (65%).

If it had passed, the state constitution would have been amended to allow public funding to go to private schools.

A record-breaking $14 million was spent by groups in favor and against the amendment, Kentucky Public Radio reported. The Protect Freedom PAC pulled in $5 million from school privatization billionaire Jeff Yassand spent $4 million on ads supporting the measure.

Other groups spending in favor of the amendment included Kentucky Students First ($2.5 million); Empower Kentucky Parents ($1.25 million); Empower Kentucky Parents PAC ($800,000); and the state chapter of Koch’s Americans for Prosperity ($328,000).

Empower Kentucky Parents received $1 million from American Federation for Children, a group organized and funded by the billionaire DeVos family. Betsy DeVos served as secretary of education during Trump’s first term in office and now supports his plans to eliminate the department.

In Nebraska, 57% of voters supported a ballot measure (Referendum 435) to repeal a new state law that would have provided parents with $10 million in public funds per year in the form of vouchers for their children to attend private K–12 schools.

The Nebraska Examiner reported that Keep Kids First spent just $111,000 as of November 4 to prevent the repeal of the referendum in the Cornhusker state. The American Federation for Children is also the largest known donor so far to Keep Kids First, giving $561,500 in 2023–24.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Koch Brothers, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Watch as Republicans Grovel Before Elon and Vivek

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2024 //
24

This is a sickening article that appeared in The Irish Times about a meeting on Capitol Hill between Congressional leaders and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Why is it sickening? It shows our elected Congressional leaders preening and groveling in the presence of the world’s richest man and a man who is only very rich.

Our Leaders? Who elected Elon and Vivek?

Why an article from The Irish Times? My good friend and executive director of the Network for Public Education Carol Burris is spending the holidays there and sent it to me.

As you read the article, you can feel the obsequiousness that these elected officials are expressing as they wait for the phony Department of Government Efficiency to tell them what to cut.

“Elon and Vivek talked about having a naughty list and a nice list for members of Congress and senators and how we vote,” reported Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who offered a beaming smile that suggested she knew which list she’d be making. “And how we’re spending American people’s money. I think that would be fantastic.”

One wonders what Ted Kennedy or Henry Clay or Lyndon Johnson, during their Senate years, would have made of two billionaires with zero political experience or authority, breezing into the Capitol and explaining to them they had a chance to make the nice list.

Speaker Johnson promised that Thursday’s meetings will be the first of many visits by Musk and Ramaswamy. “We believe it’s a historic moment for the country and these two gentlemen are going to help us navigate through this exciting day. Elon and Vivek don’t need much of an introduction here in Congress for certain and I think most of the public know what they are capable of and have achieved.

“They are innovators and forward thinkers and that’s what we need right now. We are laying the new ground rules for the new Congress in the new year, and we are going to see a lot of change here in Washington of the way things are run. That is what this whole Doge effort is about.”

Should they cut Social Security? Medicare? Veterans’ Healthcare? Grants for higher education? Title 1? Headstart?

Everything is on their chopping block.

How many civil servants will they seek to terminate?

Musk cut 80% of the staff at Twitter. Will he aim to lay off a huge percentage of the people who keep government running?

Musk tweeted a few days ago that government “should be rule by democracy, not rule by bureaucracy.”

How is it democratic to allow two unelected oligarchs to decide which programs should be eliminated? Why do Elon and Vivek–who will never need Medicare or Social Security–get to decide whether the rest of us can keep the programs that we rely on? If they get their way, there will be more people dying of health conditions that could been treated, more seniors eating cat food for dinner.

The politicians eagerly await their marching orders.

Sickening.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Musk, Elon, Politics, Trump

Trump: He Will Pardon J6 Rioters, Try to End Birthright Citizenship on Day 1

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2024 //
20

Trump was interviewed by “Meet the Press” today.

He talked about his Day 1 goals.

He said he would pardon the January 6 insurrectionists, but the reporting did not clarify whether that would include those who brutalized police officers. If so, Republicans should stop calling themselves the party of law and order.

He said he would try to end “birthright citizenship,” the grant of citizenship to persons born in the U.S. He says he would achieve this goal by executive action but birthright citizenship is written into the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Trump said that no other country in the world has birthright citizenship but NBC said that 30 other nations do.

As usual, Trump ranted about immigrant criminals but NBC pointed out that immigrants are half as likely to commit crimes as native-born citizens.

He also said he would work with Democrats to protect “Dreamers.” These are children who were brought to this country as young children.

Categories Citizenship, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Immigration, Trump
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