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Texas: Governor Abbott Celebrates His Big Voucher Win and Lies About It

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2025 //
5

Governor Gregg Abbott signed his big voucher bill into law yesterday, repeating promises he has made that are most certainly false. He claimed that vouchers will put Texas on a path to being the number one school system in the nation. Several other states have large voucher programs–e.g., Florida, Arizona, and Ohio–and none of them is the number one rated school system in the nation.

If anything, vouchers and charter schools break up the common school system that states pledge in their constitutions to support. Public schools are one system, regulated by the state, subject to elected local school boards. Charter schools are another, lightly regulated by the state, some for-profit, some as corporate chains, managed by private boards. Voucher schools are a third system, almost entirely deregulated, not required to accept all students, as public schools are. Voucher schools are not required to have certified teachers, as public schools are. Voucher schools are exempt from state testing. Most voucher schools are religious schools, managed by their religious leader. Private and religious schools choose their students.

Vouchers have been a big issue since the early 1990s. The first voucher program was launched in Milwaukee in 1990. The second started in Cleveland in 1996, ostensibly to save poor kids from failing public schools. Neither Cleveland nor Milwaukee is a high-performing district.

What we have learned in the past 30-35 years about vouchers is this:

  1. Most students who use vouchers were already enrolled in nonpublic schools.
  2. The students who transfer from public to private schools are likely to fall behind their peers in public schools. Many return to public schools.
  3. The public does not want their taxes to be spent on religious schools or on the children of affluent families. In nearly two dozen state referenda, voters defeated vouchers every time.
  4. The academic performance of students who leave public schools to attend nonpublic schools is either the same or much worse than students in public schools.
  5. Vouchers drain funding from public schools, where the vast majority of students are enrolled. This, the majority of students will have larger classes and fewer electives to subsidize vouchers.
  6. Vouchers are expensive. Arizona is projecting a cost of $1 billion annually. Florida currently is paying $4 billion annually.

To learn more about the research, read Joshua Cowen’s book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers (Harvard Educatuon Press).

Governor Abbott surely knows these facts, but he determined that vouchers were his highest priority. Certainly they make him the champion of parents who send their children to private and religious school. All will be eligible for a subsidy from the state. And Abbott delivered for the billionaires who funded his voucher campaign.

Edward McKinley of the Houston Chronicle wrote:

Gov. Greg Abbott signed a $1 billion school voucher program into law Saturday, cementing the biggest legislative victory of his decade in office before a huge crowd including families, legislators and GOP donors.

Abbott framed the ceremony as the climax of a multiyear effort by himself and advocates around the state, and touted the state’s new program as the largest to ever launch in the nation. 

“Today is the culmination of a movement that has swept across our state and across our country,” he said, using the speech to call out parents in the crowd who had already pulled their students from “low-performing” public schools to put them into private ones. “It’s time we put our children on a pathway to have the number one-ranked education system in the United States of America.”

He put pen to paper at a wooden desk in front of the Governor’s Mansion, as a gaggle of children stood around him wearing their private school colors and logos. Someone shouted, “Thank you, governor!” before the crowd of nearly 1,400 people erupted in applause. Abbott pumped his fist in the air. 

The ceremony marked a major moment for the third-term Republican, who threw his full political weight and millions of campaign dollars into a push for private school vouchers, overcoming a legislative blockade that had lasted for decades. The bill he signed into law will give Texas students roughly $10,000 a year that they can put toward private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks and other expenses…

Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath and Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass mingled in the crowd. Yass contributed more than $12 million to Abbott’s campaign last cycle, as the governor sought to unseat anti-voucher Republicans in the 2024 primary election.

Abbott was joined on stage by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dustin Burrows and the House and Senate authors of the bill. Also in attendance were private school leaders, including Joel Enge, director of Kingdom Life Academy. 

After Abbott’s address, Enge told the crowd he founded his Christian school after working in public schools in a low-income area of Tyler and watching children fall behind. His speech had the feel of a sermon.

“Children who have been beaten down by the struggles in the academic system that did not fit the system will now be empowered as they begin to find the right school setting that’s going to support them and to allow them to grow in confidence in who God created them to be,” he yelled, to raucous cheers. “Amen!…”

Hours earlier, Democratic legislators, union leaders and public educators gathered in the parking lot of the AFL-CIO building across the street from the governor’s mansion, where they had a much different message. 

Echoing lines used throughout committee hearings and legislative debates for the past few years, they warned that vouchers would hurt already struggling neighborhood public schools by stripping away their funding. About two dozen people swayed under the direct sun, waving signs that said “public dollars belong in public schools” and “students over billionaires.” 

“Today, big money won and the students of Texas lost,” said state Rep. James Talarico, an Austin Democrat. “Remember this day next time a school closes in your neighborhood. Remember this day next time a beloved teacher quits because they can’t support their family on their salary.”

Several speakers pointed out that while Republicans fast-tracked the voucher bill, they have yet to agree on a package to increase funding to public schools and raise teacher pay.

State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, an Austin Democrat, said she hoped this defeat could sow the seeds of future victories. Abbott and most legislators are up for reelection next year.

“He may have won this battle, but the war is not over,” she said. “There will be a vote on vouchers and he can’t stop it, and it will be in November 2026.”

What’s in the bill

The new law stands to remake education in Texas, granting parents access to more than $10,000 in state funds to pay for private school tuition and expenses, or $2,000 for homeschoolers. The first year of operation will begin in 2027, and in the run-up, the state will choose nonprofits to run the program, develop the application process and pick which families will have access.

All students will be eligible, although families making more than 500% of the federal poverty line, about $160,750 in income for a family of four, cannot take up more than 20% of the funds. The funds will be tied roughly to the amount of money the students would have received in public schools, meaning students with disabilities will receive extra.

School vouchers have become a signature of Abbott’s three terms in office. 

After the COVID-19 pandemic, other Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Arizona, Iowa and Indiana created or expanded their own voucher programs. But school choice advocates repeatedly fell short in Texas thanks to an alliance between Democrats and rural Republicans. Bills passed the Senate but failed to gain traction in the House. 

Then, in May 2022, Abbott announced in a speech at San Antonio’s Southside that he’d be throwing his full weight behind the policy. Even as public schools struggled to keep teachers in the classroom and balance their budgets, the governor told lawmakers he wouldn’t approve extra funds until a voucher bill made it to his desk. When it didn’t happen, even in special sessions, he took to the campaign trail, spending millions to unseat about a dozen key GOP lawmakers who stood in his way.

This session, he enlisted President Donald Trump’s help at the last minute to rally Republican House members, some of whom said they felt forced to back the policy.

Critics warn the state’s voucher program lacks safeguards to ensure it reaches the children it was designed to help and say they expect many of the slots to go to students already in private schools, which can pick and choose who they educate. The majority of private schools in Texas are religiously affiliated, and the average tuition costs upwards of $10,900, according to Private School Review.

Though $1 billion is set aside for the program in the first biennium, the nonpartisan Legislative Budget Board projects it could grow exponentially in the next decade amid huge demand from students currently in private or home schools.

It remains to be seen how many private schools will accept the vouchers, but many advocated their passage, including Catholic, Jewish and Muslim schools.

Although Abbott has said repeatedly that the program won’t pull funds from public schools, because schools are funded based on attendance, the LBB analysis showed that the program would reduce state payments to public schools by more than $1 billion by 2030. 

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

John Thompson: Oklahoma Has Its Own DOGE, Just as Destructive as Elon’s

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2025 //
17

After Trump introduced Elon Musk and his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” several Republican-controlled states created their own DOGE operations. Like the one Musk launched, these were non-governmental, unelected, unaccountable cost-cutters, set loose to apply a chainsaw to state government.

John Thompson reports on what happened in Oklahoma.

CBS’s Sixty Minutes recently reported on the danger of H5N1 bird flu spinning out of control. It cited Dr. Kamran Khan who explained why “We are really at risk of this virus evolving into one that has pandemic potential.” Another expert agreed that “this flu could make Covid look like a walk in the park.”

This frightening reporting comes as the DOGE–OK seeks to cut nearly $150 million for programs that provide immunization services, pathogens surveillance, and emerging infectious diseases prevention, and provide Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Prevention of Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

And this is only one reason for looking into the DOGE–OK process.

Anyone paying attention to Elon Musk’s leadership of the Trump administration’s DOGE campaign to cut federal programs has reason the fear the DOGE campaigns launched in 26 states. After all, as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) explains, when Governor Kevin Stitt opened Oklahoma’s DOGE-OK, he called for a reduction in our personal income and corporate tax rates, thus making the state’s tax code even more regressive.

The EPI further explained that Stitt selected Marc Nuttle, “who was the ‘chief strategist’ behind Oklahoma’s 2001 so-called right-to-work referendum—a policy designed to disempower workers and lower wages (and contrary to proponents’ claims, it did not bolster job growth in the state).” The executive order empowered Nuttle to lead efforts of a newly formed agency to study the state budget.

Moreover, the EPI explains:

DOGE-OK is itself duplicative since the Office of the State Auditor and Inspector is constitutionally mandated to “examine the state and all county treasurers’ books, accounts, and cash on hand, stipulating that [the office] shall perform other duties as may be prescribed by law.” Similar to DOGE-OK, the auditor reviews staffing levels, assesses state spending, and issues public reports to promote transparency.

The DOGE-OK report now explains:

Once DOGE-OK ideas are received, they are analyzed and vetted with the appropriate group. If validated, ideas are added to the DOGE-OK website. 

But, when I studied the report, I found no sign of hard evidence to back its claims. For instance, they didn’t explain their methodology, and offered no cost/benefit analyses. DOGE didn’t explain what “groups” it considered to be “appropriate,” and what data was used to analyze and vet, and validate their ideas.  

Since the first DOGE headlines focused on $157 million in supposedly “wasteful health grants” by the federal government, I focused on Medicaid and Department of Health cuts.

These proposed cuts are especially disturbing because, as Shiloh Kantz, the executive director of the nonpartisan Oklahoma Policy Institute, explained, “Oklahoma already ranks among the worst in health outcomes.”

First, DOGE-OK claimed that $60 million per year would be saved if the state, not the federal government, performed eligibility checks on children. And, they cited two drugs that received accelerated approval without working, costing $42 million. But, they did not mention the number and the benefits of the other drugs, like the Covid vaccine, that received accelerated approval.

Also, DOGE-OK inexplicably said that easing the prescription drug cost cap would improve prices. And they recommended repeal of staffing requirements for Long-Term Care facilities in order to save $76 million annually, without mentioning harm to elderly patients due to under-staffing.

DOGE-OK also said that three Oklahoma State Department of Health programs should be cut by almost $150 million because their funding exceeded the amount necessary.  As already mentioned, in the wake of Covid pandemic, and as measles and bird flu spread, these programs provide immunization services, pathogens surveillance, and emerging infectious diseases prevention, etc. So, how did DOGE reach the conclusion that the full funding of those programs is no longer necessary?  

Then, DOGE-OK said that 7 programs should have cuts because of “duplication,” with partners doing the same or similar work. They said $2.2 million would be saved by getting rid of the team efforts necessary to improve health.

And Sex Education should be cut by $236,000 because of its low Return on Investment.

Again, I saw no evidence behind their recommendations for $157,606,300 in overall health care reductions. Neither did they address financial costs of implementing their ideas. And, there is no evidence that DOGE seriously considered the costs in terms of the lives that would be damaged or lost.

Given the history of the Trump/Musk DOGE, none of the DOGE–OK should be a surprise. When Gov. Stitt selected Nuttle, a true-believer in Milton Friedman, to run the project, Stitt said, “With his help, we’ll leave state government leaner than we found it.”

Is that the proper way to launch a supposedly balanced and evidence-driven investigation of such complex and crucial policy approaches?

Stitt’s news release previewed Nuttle’s methodology: “use his knowledge of the inner workings of government to comb through agency budgets, legislative appropriations, and contracts.”

So, to paraphrase the DOGE-OK report’s description of its methodology, its proposals would be “analyzed and vetted” by what they see as the “appropriate group.”

In other words, Oklahomans were never promised an open, balanced, evidence-based DOGE process for making our state better. But the same is also true for Musk’s federal DOGE chainsaw.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Oklahoma

Catherine Rampell: Why Does Trump’s Regime Have Your Data and How Will They Use It?

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2025 //
3

Catherine Rampell is an opinion writer for The Washington Post who writes often about economics. She focuses here on the expansion of data collection by the Trump administration, even as it ceases to collect anonymous data about health trends. What worries me is the invasion of privacy by the DOGE team, who scooped up personally identifiable data from the IRS and Social Security about everyone, including you and me. Why did they want it? What will they do to it?

She writes:

It’s rarely comforting to appear on a government “list,” even (or perhaps especially) when compiled in the name of public safety.

It was alarming in the 1940s, when the U.S. government collected the names of Japanese Americans for internment. Likewise in the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee catalogued communists. And it’s just as troubling now, as the Trump administration assembles registries of Jewish academics and Americans with developmental disabilities.

Yes, these are real things that happened this past week, the latest examples of the White House’s abuse of confidential data.

Last week, faculty and staff at Barnard College received unsolicited texts asking them whether they were Jewish. Employees were stunned by the messages, which many initially dismissed as spam.

Turns out the messages came from the Trump administration. Barnard, which is affiliated with Columbia University, had agreed to share faculty members’ private contact info to aid in President Donald Trump’s pseudo-crusade against antisemitism.

Ah, yes, a far-right president asking Jews to register as Jewish, in the name of protecting the Jews, after he has repeatedly accused Jews of being “disloyal.” What could go wrong?

The same day, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya announced a “disease registry” of people with autism, to be compiled from confidential private and government health records, apparently without its subjects’ awareness or consent. This is part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vendetta against vaccines, which he has said cause autism despite abundant research concluding otherwise.

This, too, is disturbing given authoritarian governments’ history of compiling lists of citizens branded mentally or physically deficient. If that historical analogue seems excessive, note that Bhattacharya’s announcement came just a week after Kennedy delivered inflammatory remarks lamenting that kids with autism will never lead productive lives. They “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job,” he said, adding they’ll never play baseball or go on a date, either.

This all happened during Autism Acceptance Month, established to counter exactly these kinds of stigmatizing stereotypes. Kennedy’s comments and the subsequent “registry” set off a wave of fear in the autism advocacy community and earned condemnation from scientists.

Obviously, advocates want more research and support for those with autism. They have been asking for more help at least since 1965 (when what is now called the Autism Society of America was founded in my grandparents’ living room). But few in this community trust political appointees hostile to scientific research — or a president who has publicly mocked people with disabilities — to use an autism “registry” responsibly.

(An unnamed HHS official later walked back Bhattacharya’s comments, saying the department was not creating a “registry,” per se, just a “real-world data platform” that “will link existing datasets to support research into causes of autism and insights into improved treatment strategies.” Okay.)

These are hardly the administration’s only abuses of federal data. It has been deleting reams of statistical records, including demographic data on transgender Americans. It has also been exploiting other private administrative records for political purposes.

For example, the Internal Revenue Service — in an effort to persuade people to pay their taxes — spent decades assuring people that their records are confidential, regardless of immigration status. The agency is in fact legally prohibited from sharing tax records, even with other government agencies, except under very limited circumstances specified by Congress. Lawmakers set these limits in response to Richard M. Nixon’s abuse of private tax data to target personal enemies.

Trump torched these precedents and promises. After a series of top IRS officials resigned, the agency has now agreed to turn over confidential records to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement locate and deport some 7 million undocumented immigrants.

The move, which also has troubling historical echoes, is being challenged in court. But, in the meantime, tax collections will likely fall. Undocumented immigrant workers had been paying an estimated $66 billion in federal taxes annually, but they now have even more reason to stay off the books.

This and other DOGE infiltrations of confidential records are likely to discourage public cooperation on other sensitive government data collection efforts. Think research on mental health issues or public safety assessments on domestic violence.

But that might be a feature, not a bug, for this administration. Chilling federal survey participation and degrading data quality were arguably deliberate objectives in Trump’s first term, when he tried to cram a question about citizenship into the 2020 Census. The question was expected to depress response rates and help Republicans game the congressional redistricting process.

Courts ultimately blocked Trump’s plans. That’s what it will take to stop ongoing White House abuses, too: not scrapping critical government records, but championing the rule of law.

Ultimately, the government must be able to collect and integrate high-quality data — to administer social programs efficiently, help the economy function and understand the reality we live in so voters can hold public officials accountable. None of this is possible if Americans fear ending up on some vindictive commissar’s “list.”

Categories Data, Ethics, Trump

Daniel Dale of CNN: Trump’s 100 Lies in 100 Days

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2025 //
10

Daniel Dale is CNN’s fact-checker. To mark Trump’s first 100 days in office, Dale collected 100 Trump lies.

Here are a couple of examples:

73. Falsely claimed the US ranks dead last, 40th out of 40 countries, in international education rankings. The White House couldn’t identify any education rankings where the US ranked 40th out of 40 countries; FactCheck.org and PolitiFact have noted that even among the wealthy, developed countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the US ranks well above average in reading and science and below average but still far from last in math.

74. Falsely claimed that while Democratic governors closed schools during the Covid-19 pandemic, some governors “kept them open 100% of the time,” adding, “South Carolina did. Tennessee did.” The Republican governor of South Carolina ordered school closures in 2020, while the Republican governor of Tennessee recommended school closures that year (and the state’s school districts complied).

I would love to see Daniel Dale of CNN or Glen Kessler of The Washington Post fact-check Trump’s historical references.

A few days ago, I heard Trump say that the greatest period of American growth was 1890-1913. That era came to be known as the Age of the Robber Barons, when the gaps between the very rich and the very poor were huge.

What disaster happened in 1913? Congress introduced the income tax. Trump believes that the federal government paid its expenses solely by charging tariffs on imported goods.

In Trump’s view, the government should once again rely on tariffs.

What he doesn’t acknowledge is that the federal government provided few services in 1913: no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no subsidized housing, management of public lands, no environmental protection, no air traffic control. On and on.

The rich lived in grandeur. The poor lived in squalor.

That’s what Trump considers our best era.

Historical ignorance is dangerous.

Categories Ethics, Lies, Trump

Republicans Were Eager to Investigate Biden, But Not Trump

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2025 //
7

Philip Bump of The Washington Post notes the hypocrisy of Republicans, especially James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who searched and searched forevidence of President Biden’s corruption. He never found it but he never stopped looking and releasing press releases about the corruption he expected to find.

Now there is a genuine grifter in the White House, and Comer has lost interest in corruption, even when it’s detailed on the front pages of the daily press.

Yesterday, we learned that a fund in Abu Dhabi had invested $2 billion in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business. Is this what we expect of our presidents? Will there be a Congressional investigation?

Bump writes:

One of the more striking aspects of Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal government has been that it is, at least in theory, redundant. There already exist congressional bodies and powers that are ostensibly focused on waste and corruption. The House Oversight Committee, for example, declares as its mission to “ensure the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of the federal government and all its agencies.” Why deal with Musk’s messiness when Republicans control how the House exercises that power?

We are not so naive that we cannot summon some answers to that question. One reason for this approach, for example, is that Musk was tasked with operating outside the system by design, pushing for sweeping cuts to congressionally appropriated spending specifically to get around the system of checks and balances.

A more important reason, though, is that the majority of members on the House Oversight Committee and, in particular, Chairman James Comer (R-Kentucky.) have a specific vision for how their power should be deployed. Their mission is not to work across the aisle to make government faster and cleaner. As has been made very clear in the two years since Republicans retook the majority, their mission instead is to generate allegations of impropriety by their political opponents while shielding their allies.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the conflicting approach Comer and his committee have taken to allegations of self-enrichment by the nation’s chief executive.

Days after Republicans won their majority in November 2022, Comer held a news conference in which he sought to draw attention to claims — stoked in right-wing media and embraced by his party while in the minority — that President Joe Biden had benefited from his son Hunter Biden’s consulting work. He insisted that “the Biden family swindled investors of hundreds of thousands of dollars — all with Joe Biden’s participation and knowledge” and suggested that the sitting president (and presumed 2024 Democratic presidential nominee) might be “a national security risk” who was “compromised by foreign governments.”

What ensued over the next 16 months was far less “Law & Order” than “Keystone Kops.” Comer and other Republican leaders made little progress in tying Biden to his son’s business beyond the vaguest of connections, like that Hunter Biden would put his father on speakerphone during business meetings. Countervailing evidence for the idea that Joe Biden was entwined with Hunter’s foreign partners was ignored or spun away. One particular allegation hyped by Comer backfired spectacularly.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) was eventually pressured into announcing an impeachment probe targeting the president mostly centered on the same things Comer had been claiming since 2022. It went nowhere.
To put a fine point on it, two years of searching and subpoenas and depositions provided no concrete evidence (and very little circumstantial evidence!) that Joe Biden had used his position for his own personal benefit. Two seconds into Donald Trump’s second term in office, by contrast, there could have been any number of ripe targets for a similarly focused investigation.

Comer very obviously has no interest in doing so. When he inherited the Oversight Committee in 2023, in fact, he quietly ended an investigation into Trump’s finances, despite the committee having prevailed in a legal fight to obtain documentation from Trump’s accounting firm. Even with the former president pushing for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, the various ways in which Comer’s allegations against Biden were much more obviously applicable to the Trumps attracted no interest from House Republicans.

Since the inauguration in January, viable avenues for investigation have become only more numerous.

On Tuesday, the New York Times published an exhaustive look at the Trumps’ creation of a crypto-centered investment structure called World Liberty Financial. It has explicit manifestations of nearly everything Comer was unable to prove about Biden and his family: exercising presidential power for the benefit of the company (and by extension himself and his sons), allowing partners to assume the trappings of the federal government for private financial discussions, foreign investors admitting that their interest is driven by the president’s participation.

The Washington Post recently detailed Trump’s rollout of a different cryptoworld product: a bespoke coin that serves as little more than a speculative vehicle — one from which Trump and his family can directly profit. Trump recently announced that top investors in the coin would be granted an audience with him. At around the same time he did so, the federal government registered the domain thetrilliondollardinner.gov.

“He’s actually selling access, personal access, to him and to the White House if people invest in this meme coin, which really has no intrinsic value,” Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel for the watchdog group State Democracy Defenders Action, told The Post. “If you are a foreign government burdened by tariffs, will you be enticed to invest? If you’re a criminal felon, will you maybe invest in hopes of they’ll give you an opportunity to make your case for a pardon?”
Oh, that reminds me: At least two investors in World Liberty Financial have already received presidential pardons.

Then there was the announcement last month that Donald Trump Jr. is the co-founder of a new private club in D.C. For a membership fee of $500,000, you can mingle with MAGAworld luminaries and — if the kickoff event is any indicator — members of the Trump administration. None of this rinky-dink “I’ll put my dad on speakerphone if he calls” stuff. Aptly enough, the club is called Executive Branch.

Those are just recent reports, mind you. The Trump Organization (which directly enriches the president) still operates private businesses around the world, at times in partnership with foreign governments. Trump himself has visited properties run by his private company on 42 of his 102 days in office, giving customers a decent shot at getting face-time with the president. Even when he isn’t at a Trump Organization property, he’s still selling pro-Trump merchandise (like a “Trump 2028” hat) both directly through the Trump Organization and through licensing deals.

Comer, meanwhile, has been focused not on investigating the obvious questions about Trump but, instead, on probing ActBlue — a fundraising system used by Democratic politicians. In an egregious break with the tradition of presidents avoiding interference in the Justice Department, Trump used the pretext of the House probe to demand that ActBlue face criminal investigation.

On Wednesday morning, Comer appeared on Fox Business to discuss Republican efforts to draft a budget bill. He began by asserting that his committee had identified billions in potential budgetary savings (which he later explained would come from targeting federal employee benefits, not from any robust investigation unearthing fraud or waste). Asked about articles of impeachment filed against Trump this week, he leveled a deeply ironic charge at his colleagues across the aisle.

“Harassing, obstructing — that’s all the Democrats know,” Comer said, while insisting that impeachment would go nowhere. “They don’t have any ideas or vision for the future.”

If there is one thing that can be said of Trump, it is that he has a vision for the future — in particular as it relates to the robustness of his own bank account. Comer and his colleagues in the House have proved to be more than happy to not stand in his way.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Evil, For-Profit, Hypocrisy, Republicans, Trump

Conflict of Interest? No Problem. Trump Family Will Collect Hundreds of Millions

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2025 //
10

David Yaffe-Bellany of The New York Times reported on a startling development in Dubai that will enrich the Trump family by hundreds of millions of dollars. Is it a conflict of interest? Of course. Will it matter to the Republican leaders in Congress? No. Has there ever been a President who used his office for financial gain so brazenly? No. Trump is #1.

Gaffe-Bellamy writes:

Sitting in front of a packed auditorium in Dubai, a founder of the Trump family cryptocurrency business made a brief but monumental announcement on Thursday. A fund backed by Abu Dhabi, he said, would be making a $2 billion business deal using the Trump firm’s digital coins.

That transaction would be a major contribution by a foreign government to President Trump’s private venture — one that stands to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family. And it is a public and vivid illustration of the ethical conflicts swirling around Mr. Trump’s cryptofirm, which has blurred the boundary between business and government.

Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, revealed that a so-called stable coin developed by the firm, would be used to complete the transaction between the state-backed Emirati investment firm MGX and Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world.

Virtually every detail of Mr. Witkoff’s announcement, made during a conference panel with Mr. Trump’s second-eldest son, contained a conflict of interest.

MGX’s use of the World Liberty stablecoin, USD1, brings a Trump family company into business with a venture firm backed by a foreign government. The deal creates a formal link between World Liberty and Binance — a company that has been under U.S. government oversight since 2023, when it admitted to violating federal money-laundering laws.

And the splashy announcement served as an advertisement to crypto investors worldwide about the potential for forming a partnership with a company tied to President Trump, who is listed as World Liberty’s chief crypto advocate.

“We thank MGX and Binance for their trust in us,” said Mr. Witkoff, who is the son of the White House envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. “It’s only the beginning.”

Mr. Witkoff and Eric Trump were speaking on a panel at Token2049, a major crypto conference in the United Arab Emirates, where more than 10,000 digital currency enthusiasts have gathered for a week of networking. It was the latest stop in an international tour by Mr. Witkoff, who visited Pakistan last month with his business partners to meet the prime minister and other government officials. Eric Trump, who runs the family business, has spent the week in Dubai, where he announced plans to back a Trump-branded hotel and tower.

There is more.

This is a gift article so you should be able to read it in full even without a subscription.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, International, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Democracy Can Die in Broad Daylight

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2025 //
11

Thom Hartmann sees the pattern on the rug. Trump and Musk are stifling democratic institutions and rushing headlong towards the tyranny they both admire. Trump thinks that he can make himself dictator for life, Like his buddies in Russia and North Korea. Will the public defend the Constitution?

He wrote:

When Harvard, one of America’s oldest and most revered institutions of higher learning, stands defiant as the federal government freezes billions in funding simply because it refuses to knuckle under to authoritarian demands — like gutting DEI programs and turning faculty into immigration informants — we’re no longer playing the usual game of politics.


This is the open throttling of academic freedom, part of a larger, deliberate campaign to silence dissent, centralize power, and erase democratic norms.


We’ve seen this playbook before in other countries — but now it’s being run right here, in the land that once proudly called itself the world’s beacon of liberty.


Democracy doesn’t die in darkness, as the saying goes; it suffocates in broad daylight.


Americans are witnessing an unprecedented assault on the very foundations of our democratic experiment, orchestrated with a precision that would make authoritarian strongmen worldwide nod in approval.


Senator Chris Murphy has raised alarm bells about what he describes as a methodical attack on American institutions that are supposed to keep government accountable to its citizens. By his account, the strategy isn’t dramatic coups or burning parliaments; that’s not how modern democracies perish. Instead, they’re slowly dismantled through the calculated erosion of accountability mechanisms.


History provides a disturbing playbook, and we’re watching it unfold right now here in America. Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğan didn’t need tanks in the streets. They understood that the process is multi-part but straightforward:


— Legitimize political violence,
— Capture the media,
— Intimidate lawyers,
— Install corrupt leaders within regulatory and police agencies,
— Disappear first minorities and later opposition leaders,
— Silence universities, and
— Starve opposition movements by denying their nonprofit status and funding.


Consider what we’re seeing unfold. The recent January 6 pardons sent an unmistakable message about the acceptability of political violence. When legislators openly express fears of “retaliation” — as Senator Lisa Murkowski just did — we’re already several steps down a dangerous path.


Meanwhile, the concentration of media power in the hands of billionaires who increasingly bend to political pressure isn’t accidental. Whether through ownership, lawsuits, or regulatory threats, the ability to speak truth to power is being systematically constrained.


Universities, traditionally bastions of free thought and youth activism, face unprecedented pressure to conform or lose federal support.

Legal professionals, our front-line defenders of constitutional rights, are being asked to choose between principles and practice.


The economic dimension of this strategy can’t be ignored. Targeted tariffs and funding cuts effectively create a corporate compliance regime where business survival depends on political loyalty. When small-dollar online giving platforms become targets, it’s clear this is about drying up resources for political opposition.


Senator Murphy’s warning carries particular weight: “I still believe we can stop it,” he says. His prescription includes institutional solidarity, mass mobilization, and political courage. These steps aren’t just wishful thinking: history shows they work when deployed with determination.


The challenges are clear, but so is the path forward. Democrats and defenders of democracy must recognize this isn’t politics as usual. The systematic undermining of accountability mechanisms isn’t merely partisan: it’s anti-democratic in the most fundamental sense.


It’s the first stages of outright tyranny, the first American dictatorship.


If conventional resistance proves insufficient, Murphy suggests civil disobedience may become necessary. That’s not a suggestion to be taken lightly, especially from a sitting US senator.

The coming months will test America’s democratic resolve. The institutions being targeted aren’t merely political; they’re the scaffolding of self-governance itself. As Murphy warns, “We still have the power, but we probably have less time than most think.”


For those wondering where the line exists between alarmism and appropriate warning, consider this: When elected officials speak openly about fear of retaliation, when media owners preemptively capitulate, when universities face unprecedented political pressure, and when legal professionals must toe ideological lines, we’re no longer discussing hypotheticals.


The American experiment has faced threats before, but, outside of the Confederacy, rarely have they been so comprehensively designed or so methodically executed.


Recognition of this reality isn’t partisan, it’s patriotic. The future of American democracy depends on understanding what’s at stake and acting accordingly.


The assault on Harvard is just one chapter in a larger story — one where the villains aren’t hiding in shadows, but are operating in full view with chilling precision.


The question isn’t whether this is happening. It’s whether enough Americans will recognize the danger in time to stop it.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Musk, Elon, Trump, Tyranny

Musk’s DOGE Protects One (1) Person: Elon Musk

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2025 //
6

Before Trump was elected, Elon Musk was being investigated by multiple federal agencies. After Trump’s election, Musk persuaded Trump to put him in charge of a cost-cutting operation called “Department of Government Efficiency,” which was tasked with cutting the budgets or shuttering multiple federal agencies.

Musk and his team of hackers were ruthless in closing agencies that did not like. They shut down USAID, which provided food and medicine to the world’s neediest families and children.They terminated scientific research on a large number of university campuses and in the NIH, which sponsors critical research into cures for deadly diseases. They defunded large and small.

But there is one kind of project they not defund: anything that pays federal funds to Elon Musk.

More than that, Musk had a very lucky break. His good friend Trump, to whom he gave nearly $300 million for the 2024 election, is unlikely to prosecute his pal Elon.

Lawrence Darmiento of the Los Angeles Times had the story:

Elon Musk and his companies faced at least $2.37 billion in potential federal fines and penalties the day President Trump took office, according to a congressional report released Monday that highlights the possible conflicts of interest posed by the billionaire’s cost-cutting work in government.

The 43-page memo by the minority staff of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), is the most exhaustive attempt yet to detail Musk’s alleged conflicts as an advisor to Trump and chief promoter of his team called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Based on publicly available documents, media reports and the committee’s own calculations, the memo found that as of Jan. 20, Musk and his companies were “subject to at least 65 actual or potential actions by 11 different federal agencies” and that 40 of those created $2.37 billion in potential liabilities.

“Mr. Musk has taken a chainsaw to the federal government with no apparent regard for the law or for the people who depend on the programs and agencies he so blithely destroys,” the memo stated. “The through line connecting many of Mr. Musk’s decisions appears to be self-enrichment and avoiding what he perceives as obstacles to advancing his interests.”

The memo notes that Musk’s companies have received more than $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits going back more than 20 years. And it notes that SpaceX, as of Friday, had $10.1 billion in federal contracts.

“President Trump could not have chosen a person more prone to conflicts of interest,” states the memo, which calls on the president, executive departments and regulatory agencies to “take coordinated action to address Elon Musk’s threat to the integrity of federal governance.”

To no one’s surprise, the white Hohse press office indignantly insisted that Musk had no conflicts of interest.

The committee found that Tesla created most of the potential penalties for Musk — a cumulative $1.89 billion — due to investigations, lawsuits and other issues involving eight agencies.

The largest single liability was a potential $1.19-billion fine due to a reported criminal investigation opened by the Department of Justice into allegedly false or misleading statements made by Musk and the company about its Autopilot and Full-Self Driving Features since as early as 2016.

The Times previously reported the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is probing the Full-Self Driving technology after reports of four collisions in low-visibility conditions, including one in which a pedestrian was killed.

However, doubts have been raised about the Justice Department’s commitment to any prosecution. The memo notes that in February the department dismissed a lawsuit it filed against SpaceX for allegedly discouraging asylum seekers and refugees from applying for jobs or hiring them because of their citizenship status. It calculated the lawsuit could have exposed SpaceX to $46.1 million in liabilities.

The second single largest liability of $462 million facing Musk also involved Tesla. It arose out of a 2023 lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for the company’s alleged toleration of widespread racial harassment of Black employees at its Fremont, Calif., factory. Tesla has denied the allegations. In January, Trump fired two Democratic commissioners and the agency’s general counsel.

How likely is it that any of these charges will go to trial?

Categories Budget Cuts, Corruption, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Musk, Elon

Trump Fires Biden Appointees on Board of Holocaust Museum

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2025 //
16

Trump will leave no independent board untouched by his political venom, as he demonstrated by his hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, where he removed every Biden appointee and replaced a bipartisan board with an all-Trump board. He also removed the nonpartisan director of the Kennedy Center and replaced her with a Trump loyalist. And he named himself President of the Kennedy Center.

Now he has removed all Biden appointees on the board of the Holocaust Museum, including Doug Emhoff, husband of former Vice-President Kamala Harris, who was in the first year of a five-year term. Emhoff is Jewish.

The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration has begun firing at least some of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s appointees to the board that oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, including Douglas Emhoff, the husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris, and other senior Biden White House officials.

“Today, I was informed of my removal from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council,” Mr. Emhoff said in a statement on Tuesday. “Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized. To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous — and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”

Mr. Emhoff is Jewish and an outspoken critic of the rise in antisemitism. His appointment to the council was announced in January; presidential appointments are typically five-year terms.

The other officials who were dismissed include Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s first chief of staff; Tom Perez, the former labor secretary and senior adviser to Mr. Biden; Susan Rice, the national security adviser to former President Barack Obama and Mr. Biden’s top domestic policy adviser who led a major national strategic effort to counter antisemitism; and Anthony Bernal, a senior adviser to Jill Biden, the former first lady.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Ethics, Trump

Trump’s Insane War on Science

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2025 //
3

Since Trump invited Elon Musk and his DOGE team to cut the federal budget, the federal government has been subject to a bloodbath of firings, layoffs, and closed agencies. Some of the most shocking budget cuts have focused on scientific research. Reckless cuts have been imposed on the National Science Foundation and on every part of the Department of Health and Human Services, where the Secretary–conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.–is crushing genuine research and prioritizing his obsession with vaccines as the cause of autism, which has been debunked.

Trump has blocked the payment of millions of dollars to universities that fund basic science research. He is using those blocks to force universities to stop DEI programs.

We can understand why Kennedy wants to destroy science: it has an annoying tendency to undercut his pet conspiracy theories. No matter what science says, he will continue to warn the public that vaccines are dangerous, that fluoridating water is dangerous, and anything that contradicts his ideology is fake, regardless of how many scientists disagree. WHO you gonna believe? The addled RFK Jr. or the world’s top scientists? Or Ghostbusters?

But we do not know why Trump put the nation’s public health agencies into the hands of a man who does not respect science.

Why does Trump want more children to die of measles? Why does he allow Elon Musk to shut down agencies like USAID that have saved millions of lives? Why he is cancelling grants to universities for basic scientific research? Why does he want to stop the work of scientists who are seeking cures for cancer, tuberculosis, AIDS, and other lethal diseases? I don’t know.

Frankly, the cuts are coming so fast that I can’t keep track of them all. I hope soon to find a comprehensive summary of the destruction of federally-funded scientific research.

In the meanwhile, this is the best overview I have seen.

Alan Burdick of the New York Times wrote this story about Trump’s rampage against scientific research:

Late yesterday, Sethuraman Panchanathan, whom President Trump hired to run the National Science Foundation five years ago, quit. He didn’t say why, but it was clear enough: Last weekend, Trump cut more than 400 active research awards from the N.S.F., and he is pressing Congress to halve the agency’s $9 billion budget.

The Trump administration has targeted the American scientific enterprise, an engine of research and innovation that has thrummed for decades. It has slashed or frozen budgets at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA. It has fired or defunded thousands of researchers.

The chaos is confusing: Isn’t science a force for good? Hasn’t it contained disease? Won’t it help us in the competition with China? Doesn’t it attract the kind of immigrants the president says he wants? In this edition of the newsletter, we break out our macroscope to make sense of the turmoil.

American research thrives under a patronage system that funnels congressionally approved dollars to universities, national labs and institutes. This knowledge factory employs tens of thousands of researchers, draws talent from around the world and generates scientific breakthroughs and Nobel Prizes.

It’s a slow-moving system, because science moves slowly. Discoveries are often indirect and iterative, involving collaboration among researchers who need years of subsidized education to become expert. Startups and corporations, which need quick returns on their investment, typically can’t wait as long or risk as much money.

Science is capital. By some measures, every dollar spent on research returns at least $5 to the economy.

President Trump is less patient. He has defunded university studies on AIDS, pediatric cancer and solar physics. (Two prominent researchers are compiling lists of lost N.I.H. grants and N.S.F. awards.) The administration has also laid off thousands of federal scientists, including meteorologists at the National Weather Service; pandemic-preparedness experts at the C.D.C.; black-lung researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. A next-generation space observatory, already built with $3.5 billion over a decade, awaits a launch that now may never happen.

Administration officials offer various reasons for the crackdown: cost-cutting, government efficiency, “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” Many grants were eliminated because they contain words, including climate, diversity, disability, trans or women. Some drew the administration’s ire because the applications included D.E.I. statements required by the previous administration.

It doesn’t take a telescope to see where this leads. American leaders have historically seen science as an investment in the future. Will this administration foreclose it? One-third of America’s Nobel Prize winners have been foreign-born, but an immigration crackdown has swept up scientists like Kseniia Petrova, a Russian who studied aging at Harvard and now sits in a Louisiana detention center. Australian academics have stopped attending conferences in the U.S. for fear of being detained, The Guardian has reported.

Now some American scientists are looking for the exits. France, Canada and other countries are courting our researchers. In a recent poll by the journal Nature, more than 1,200 American scientists said they were considering working abroad. The journal’s job-search platform saw 32 percent more applications for positions overseas between January and March 2025 than during the same period a year earlier.

These are mechanical threats to science — who gets money, what they work on. But there is a more existential worry. The Trump administration is trying to change what counts as science.

One effort aims at what science should show — and at achieving results agreeable to the administration. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wants to reopen research into a long-debunked link between vaccines and autism. He doesn’t want to study vaccine hesitancy. The National Science Foundation says it will no longer fund “research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” A Justice Department official has accused prominent medical journals of political bias for not airing “competing viewpoints.”

Another gambit is to suppress or avoid politically off-message results, even if the message isn’t yet clear. The government has expunged public data sets on air quality, earthquake intensity and seabed geology. Why cut the budget by erasing records? Perhaps the data would point toward efforts (pollution reduction? seabed mining limits?) that officials might one day need to undertake. We pursue knowledge in order to act: to prevent things, to improve things. But action is expensive, at a moment when the Trump administration wants the government to do as little as possible. Perhaps it’s best to not even know.

One sure way to shut down knowledge is to question who can gather it. The administration is painting scientists with the same liberal brush it has applied to academics more broadly — what Project 2025 describes as “the ‘enlightened,’ highly educated managerial elite.” The N.I.H. is controlled by “a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders,” the Project 2025 authors write. The regulatory work of the Environmental Protection Agency “should embrace so-called citizen science” and be left “for the public to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct.”

In science, as in a democracy, there’s plenty of room for skepticism and debate. That’s what makes it work. But at some point, calls for “further research” become disingenuous efforts to obscure inconvenient facts. It’s an old playbook, exploited in the 1960s by the tobacco industry and more recently by fossil-fuel companies.

Now it’s being weaponized by the government against science generally. Facts are elite, facts are fungible, facts are false. And once nothing is true, anything can be true.

Categories Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Health, Musk, Elon, Research, Science, Trump, Tyranny
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