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Jan Resseger: Ohio Legislature Robs Public Schools to Fill Pockets of the Rich

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2025 //
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Jan Resseger writes here about the injustice of the budget for public schools passed by the Ohio legislature. Firmly in the control of hard-right Republicans, the legislature eagerly funds vouchers and charter schools while underfunding the public schools. As in every other state, the vast majority of Ohio students attend public schools. The only evaluation of the Ohio voucher program showed that most students who used the vouchers were already attending private schools; those who transferred from public schools fell behind the peers they left behind.

Ohio legislators know that vouchers and charters do not increase educational opportunity. They don’t care. Parents of public school students must inform themselves and act to protect their public schools.

She writes:

In the last week of June, two important events happened almost simultaneously in Ohio: A district court in Columbus found the state’s EdChoice voucher program unconstitutional, and the state legislature passed a budget that at the same time shorts the state’s public schools that serve the mass of our state’s children, significantly cuts the state income tax, and increases funding for private school vouchers over the next two years.

We all desperately hope the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit will save our public schools, but appeals of the case to higher courts will likely take several years, a period when the  new budget’s underfunding of the Fair School Funding Plan, the effect of the income tax cuts and the diversion money to private school vouchers will inevitably continue to diminish the state’s investment in Ohio’s public schools.

In the new budget, the legislature technically phased in a new Fair School Funding Plan—a mathematical formula to ensure that the state will guarantee adequate and equitably distributed state school funding. However, after the House Speaker called the plan unsustainable, the legislature failed fully to fund the new formula’s provisions and thereby ensured the new formula’s ultimate failure before Ohio can even try it out.

The Ohio legislature’s income tax reduction along with lawmakers’ choice to permit continuing growth of publicly funded, universal EdChoice private school tuition vouchers emerges from a philosophy that government’s responsibility is to protect individual parents’ freedom. Solid support for the state’s public schools would instead embody a commitment to what we call the social contract, explained here by economist Joseph Stiglitz:

“A social contract defines the relationship between individuals and societies, much as an actual contract would, outlining the obligations of the parties to the contract and to each other. There is one big difference between the social contract and ordinary contracts. When an actual contract is breached, there are consequences both for the relationship and especially for the breaching party… But when the state violates what it is supposed to do, there is no corresponding mechanism for enforcing the social contract.” The Road to Freedom, p. 86)

Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution definesthe state’s responsibility to provide a strong system of public education as part of the social contract: “The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”

Here are three ways in which the new state budget undermines Ohio’s public education social contract.

The New Ohio Budget Does Not Commit the State to Equitable and Adequate Public School Funding.

In a new brief, Lawmakers Underfund Ohio Schools by $2.86B in FY26-27; Veto Overrides Risk Another $330M, along with an attached PowerPoint slide presentation, Policy Matters Ohio shows how Ohio’s Fiscal Year 2026-2027 budget undermines the new Fair School Funding Plan just as it is being launched.

The first slide of Policy Matters’ PowerPoint presentation summarizes the impact of the new budget for the state’s public schools: “Ohio lawmakers give a billion-dollar annual tax break to Ohioans earning six figures, underfund (public) schools by $2.86 billion, and leave behind students with the greatest need.”

In Slide 3, Policy Matters compares the amount of public school funding allocated in the new state budget to the amount the new Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP) would have awarded to each school district if the legislature had, as the formula requires it to do, correctly factored in the district’s current costs instead of old cost data from FY 2022. “Under the enacted plan, 74% of Ohio’s school districts will receive less than what the FSFP says they need to meet the costs of an adequate education.”

In a recent Hannah News Service publication, Howard Fleeter, Ohio’s well known school finance expert, explains¹ exactly how the legislature robs school districts of what they had expected under the Fair School Funding Plan: “One of the most important features of the Fair School Funding Plan is its utilization of an inputs-based approach to determining adequacy, which results in a base per-pupil amount which can vary across districts based on the number of students and their distribution across grade levels… In order to not just fully phase in the funding formula but to adequately fund it, the base cost in FY 26 should be based on FY 24 input data and the base cost in FY 27 should be based on FY 25 data.” However, this year the legislature used old, FY 2022 cost data, thereby failing accurately to measure school districts’ costs. In other words, the state should recognize that school district expenses rise year after year due to inflation, and the formula should recognize that school districts have to keep up or risk losing teachers and services.

In Policy Matters’ Slide 5, a bar graph demonstrates that in the new budget, legislators leave farthest behind the school districts serving concentrations of the state’s poorest students. These school districts will fall 107% behind what the FSFP would have brought them in state funding. Their school funding is actually being cut this year.

Part of the loss to school districts serving masses of poor children comes from a recalculation of Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid.  Slide 7 explains that the legislature used “direct certification, a process of identifying low-income students by relying on public benefits data that will lead to fewer low-income students being counted in the system and fewer DPIA dollars going to the places that desperately need them.” Why has the legislature chosen to base DPIA on a data set that will, “cut more than $200 million in DPIA funds over the next biennium, from FY 2025 levels of support”?

Slide 7 adds, as a preface to Slide 8, that the new budget, “appears use that money to offset the ‘performance’ supplement which is estimated to cost $215 million over the biennium.”  What is the Performance Supplement? Slide 8 explains: “The Performance Supplement would rely on (each district’s)  state report card data, increasing funding by $13 per student times the number of stars on their state report card or progress report… Report card scores are built on testing performance as well as factors like chronic absenteeism, and the ‘breadth of coursework available in the district.’ ”

Policy Matters Slide 8 clearly identifies the injustice embedded in the Performance Supplement: “Low scores on these indicators should signal to policymakers that the school and the community it serves are devalued, under-resourced, and in need of more help, not less.  It explicitly reverses course on closing opportunity and education gaps, which would help schools improve.” In Slide 8, we also learn that the budget adds a $225 per student Enrollment Growth Supplement for the fastest growing suburban school districts. While the supplement will help meet the costs of serving new students moving to these districts, it is important to remember that these are districts serving wealthier families.

In the brief itself, you can link to your own school district’s profile to see how your district fares under the new budget here.

The New Budget Reduces Ohio’s State Income Tax—Undermining the State’s Capacity to Raise Its Share of Public School Funding.

The Plain Dealer‘s Anna Staver explains: “Lawmakers eliminated the state’s top income tax bracket, collapsing Ohio’s tax structure from two rates to one. It’s the last step in a decade-long push for a flat tax —and this final move amounts to a $1.14 billion cut.”  Signal Ohio‘s Andrew Tobias adds: “That new top tax rate of 2.75% is lower than any surrounding state and lower than any time in the past five decades… About 96% of the $1.1 billion in annual lost revenue… will stay in the pockets of those earning $138,000 or more….” Policy Matters Ohio’s Slide 10 depicts the legislature’s new flat tax diverting a billion dollars of essential state revenue to wealthy individuals and away from the state’s social contract. The new budget exacerbates a long trend of tax slashing in Ohio. Last fall, Policy Matters Ohio’s Bailey Williams tracked two decades of Ohio tax cuts that have progressively reduced Ohio’s capacity to support the needs of the public and to support the system of common schools promised in the Ohio Constitution.

The New Budget Allows Private School Vouchers to Continue Eating Up School Revenue.

In his June 27th On the Money¹ school funding expert Howard Fleeter describes another primary drain on state revenue: private school tuition vouchers will continue to eat up an increasingly large chunk of the new state budget. Fleeter compares the legislature’s investment in public school funding to the legislature’s investment in private school vouchers. Fleeter calculates, “that state foundation funding for Ohio’s traditional school districts—spread across the state’s 609 local school districts—will increase by $281.9 million over the Fiscal Year 2026-2027 biennium compared to current funding levels.” He continues: “Voucher funding is slated to increase by $327.1 million over the FY26-27 biennium…. This increase is $45 million more than the increase slated for the traditional K-12 districts over the biennium, despite the fact that K-12 districts educate roughly 8 times as many students as do private schools.”

In the New Budget, Legislators Shift the Responsibility for Funding Public Schools More Heavily onto Local School Districts.

We continue to hear a lot from our legislators about the danger of rising property taxes, but ironically, by reducing the state’s investment in public education, the legislature itself has made it necessary for school districts to increase reliance on local property taxes or cut programs and teachers. Howard Fleeter concludes¹ that, in the current fiscal year (FY 2025) under the budget that passed two years ago, the state is paying 38.4% of public school funding in Ohio. In the new budget, in which the legislature has failed to update the cost data in the formula, has cut the state income tax, and has kept on letting an uncapped voucher program grow,“the average state share (of total public school funding) will drop to 35.0% in FY 26 and to 32.2% in FY 27….”

When a state violates the social contract by reneging on its responsibility to fund public schools, the funding burden falls more heavily and more inequitably on local school districts.

¹Howard Fleeter, “On The Money,” Hannah News Service, June 27, 2025, (available free in many public library research collections).

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Ohio, Parents, Privatization

Judd Legum: Elon Musk Company Sought Federal Designation as “Disadvantaged”

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2025 //
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Judd Legum writes a terrific blog called Popular Information. He also has another blog called Musk Watch. He recently posted a story about one of Musk’s businesses, which applied for a federal grant designated for the economically disadvantaged.

Caleb Ecarma wrote:

On April 24, Elon Musk’s $9 billion neurotechnology company falsely self-certified as a “small disadvantaged business” (SDB) on a federal filing, a designation that qualifies the company for preferential treatment as part of a racial and ethnic diversity initiative.

The SDB designation can also only be legally claimed by companies owned by “economically disadvantaged individuals.”

Neuralink, which is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces, registered with the government as an SDB while Musk leveraged his position at the White House to cut federal funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Excerpt from a Neuralink federal government filing, dated April 24, 2025.

The SDB designation is clearly defined by the Small Business Administration and in federal regulations. A SDB must be “unconditionally and directly” majority-owned (51%) by a member of a socially and economically disadvantaged group, meaning a demographic “subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias.”

Even if a business clears that hurdle, not all are eligible for the designation. To be considered an SDB, the company must also be majority-owned by an “economically disadvantaged individual.” According to the Code of Federal Regulations:

Economically disadvantaged individuals are socially disadvantaged individuals whose ability to compete in the free enterprise system has been impaired due to diminished capital and credit opportunities as compared to others in the same or similar line of business who are not socially disadvantaged.

Federal regulations state that individuals with a net worth exceeding $850,000, excluding the value of their primary residence, are not “economically disadvantaged individuals.”

Musk, the owner of Neuralink, has an estimated net worth of $404 billion. A South Africa-born white man raised in the Anglican Church, Musk is also not a part of any recognized disadvantaged ethnic or racial group.

As a private company, Neuralink’s exact ownership structure is opaque. But in a September 2018 letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Neuralink lawyer Roel Campos wrote, “Neuralink is a private Delaware Corporation with its head offices at 3180 18th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, in which Mr. Musk has a majority ownership stake.” Neuralink has since reincorporated in Nevada. “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware,” Musk said in January 2024, a few days after Neuralink left the state of Delaware.

With the federal government awarding $50 billion to SDBs annually, carrying the SDB designation is a significant advantage for companies seeking government contracts. SDBs also receive increased visibility on federal databases, including the Small Business Administration’s Dynamic Small Business Search (DSBS). Neuralink currently appears on the DSBS as a “Self-Certified Small Disadvantaged Business.”Since 2017, Neuralink has made the SDB business claim in all 11 of its filings on SAM.gov, the federal government’s contracting database. Many of those filings were signed by Jared Birchall, Musk’s top fixer and Neuralink’s CEO. The SDB designation is also visible on the main page of the company’s SAM.gov profile. (Open the link to view the pdf. File.)

There is no indication that Neuralink has received federal funds, although it may have bid on federal contracts. Based on its SAM.gov filings, the company may have also requested grants, loans, or other financial assistance from the federal government while certifying itself as an SDB.

In three SAM.gov filings, Neuralink responded “Yes” to the question, “Does Neuralink Corp. wish to apply for a Federal financial assistance project or program, or is Neuralink Corp. currently the recipient of funding under any Federal financial assistance project or program?” Those filings were all submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic, in September 2020, May 2021, and August 2021.

Birchall and other Neuralink executives who signed the SDB self-certification forms attested to the following:

I understand that I may be subject to criminal prosecution under Section 1001, Title 18 of the United States Code or civil liability under the False Claims Act if I misrepresent NEURALINK CORPORATION in any of these representations or certifications to the Government.

Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.

The Department of Justice has prosecuted government contractors for submitting false self-certification claims or misrepresenting the status of their companies on federal databases. In 2023, one contractor received a 15-month prison sentence and was ordered to pay $72,000 in restitution after he fraudulently self-certified his company as a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. Last year, another company was fined nearly $4 million for misrepresenting itself as a women-owned small business on its SAM.gov profile.

Neuralink’s misrepresentation is particularly notable, given Musk’s past condemnations of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs aimed at helping members of historically disadvantaged groups. “DEI is just another word for racism,” Musk said in January of this year. “Shame on anyone who uses it,” he added. Musk has also described DEI as “actually illegal.”

While leading the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration’s austerity program, Musk claimed that he was ferreting out and terminating federal DEI initiatives. DOGE, under Musk’s guidance, focused on purging federal DEI grants and contracts for minority owned businesses, including legitimate SDBs.

In May, after Neuralink secured $600 million in fresh funding, the company had a $9 billion before-cash valuation, according to Semafor.

Categories Ethics, Fraud, Funding, Musk, Elon

Trump’s “One Big Ugly Budget Bill” Increases Taxes on Some Colleges, Eliminates It on Others

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2025 //
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In 2017, Trump imposed a tax of 1.4 % on the endowments of colleges and universities that had large endowments relative to the number of students enrolled. Institutions of higher education, like churches, foundations, and other non-profits, have never been taxed. Typically, endowment income is used for scholarships and operating expenses, so this tax cut the money available to help low-income students who were admitted to excellent colleges.

In 2025, the Trump administration proposed making the tax even higher, inflicting more pain.

But the GOP got twisted in knots over their wish to exclude rightwing Hillsdale College. At first, they thought they could exempt it by exempting religious institutions. But Hillsdale isn’t really a religious college, and the Senate Parliamentarian quashed that idea.

They they decided they could keep Hillsdale tax-free by exempting all colleges with fewer than 3,000 students. That worked.

But it also exempted a number of liberal arts colleges that had previously paid the 1.4 % tax.

I’m happy to report that my Alma mater Wellesley College is again tax-exempt, as all colleges and universities should be.

What will the GOP tax next? Churches, synagogues, mosques? Foundations? Museums and other cultural institutions? The March of Dimes? The ASPCA? Other charities?

To see the list of lucky colleges that will no longer be taxed and those that will see a tax increase, open the link.

Forbes reported:

Strange things happen when details of a massive tax and budget bill, like the one President Donald Trump signed…, are tweaked behind closed doors. Among them: A couple dozen of the nation’s wealthiest small private colleges will be getting a tax cut next year, even as bigger rich universities, including Princeton, MIT, Yale and Harvard, will be slammed with higher taxes.

It all began as an effort by House Republicans to dramatically raise the excise tax imposed on the earnings of college endowments, and particularly the endowments of wealthy “woke” schools like Harvard University that they (and President Donald Trump) have targeted.

But as it turns out, while Harvard’s tax bill will likely more than double, some smaller schools with famously left-leaning student bodies (e.g. Swarthmore College and Amherst College) are getting tax relief. That’s because schools with fewer than 3,000 full-time equivalent tuition-paying students will be exempt from the revamped endowment tax beginning next year. It currently applies to private schools with more than 500 full-time equivalent tuition-paying students and endowments worth more than $500,000 per student.

Using the latest available federal data from fiscal year 2023, Forbes identified at least 26 wealthy colleges that are likely subject to the endowment tax now, but will be exempt next year based on their size. Along with top liberal arts schools like Williams College, Wellesley College, Amherst and Swarthmore, the list includes the California Institute of Technology, a STEM powerhouse, and the Julliard School, the New York city institution known for its music, dance and drama training. Grinnell College in Iowa, which enrolled 1,790 students in 2023, will save around $2.4 million in tax each year as a result of the change, President Anne Harris said in an email to Forbes.

Here’s what happened. As passed by the House in late May, the One Big Beautiful Bill (its Trumpian name) increased the current 1.4% excise tax on college endowments’ investment earnings to as high as 21% for the richest institutions—those with endowments worth more than $2 million a student. (While these schools are all non-profits and traditionally tax exempt, the 1.4% tax on investment earnings was introduced by Trump’s big 2017 tax bill. According to Internal Revenue Service data, 56 schools paid a total of $381 million in endowment tax in calendar 2023.)

Along with raising the rate, the House voted to exempt from the tax both religiously-affiliated schools (think the University of Notre Dame) and those that don’t take federal student financial aid. (The religious exemption was structured in a way that Harvard, founded by the Puritans to train ministers, wouldn’t qualify.) The House also sought to penalize schools like Columbia University, with heavy international student enrollments, by excluding students who aren’t U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents from the per capita calculations.

Then the bill went to the Senate, where the Finance Committee settled on more modest–albeit still stiff–rate hikes. Schools with endowments of $500,000 to $750,000 per capita would still pay at a 1.4% rate, while those with endowments above $750,000 and up to $2 million would pay 4%. Those with endowments worth more than $2 million per student would pay an 8% tax on their earnings, not the 21% passed by the House.

Enter Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who makes decisions on the Senate’s Byrd rule, which requires parts of a budget reconciliation bill like this one to have a primary purpose related to the budget—not other types of policy. The Byrd rule was put in place because reconciliation isn’t subject to filibuster. “You can’t get into a lot of prescriptive activity” in a budget reconciliation bill, explains Dean Zerbe, a national managing director for Alliantgroup, who worked on college endowment issues back when he was tax counsel for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “Like, ‘you’ve got to hop on one foot,’ or ‘you’ve got to make tuition affordable,’ or ‘you’ve got to do better in terms of admission.’”

The Parliamentarian ruled that those three House provisions—exempting religious-affiliated schools, exempting schools that don’t take federal aid, and excluding foreign students from the per capita calculation—didn’t pass the Byrd test.

At that point, Republican senators settled on the 3,000-student threshold in large part to specifically exempt one school from the tax: Hillsdale College, an ultra-conservative, Christian liberal arts college in Hillsdale, Michigan and a GOP darling. It enrolled 1,794 students in 2023, had an endowment worth $584,000 per-student, and notably accepts no federal money, including student aid. (So both the religious exemption and the one for schools taking no federal student aid would have presumably shielded Hillsdale from the endowment tax—before the Parliamentarian gave them the thumbs down.)

There was also a broader group of small schools pushing for the exemption, notes Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. “They made an argument that I think got some positive reception among Republican senators of saying that essentially, while their endowments may be big relative to the fact that they have small student bodies … their endowments weren’t big.” A school like Amherst, he adds, “might have a big endowment for a small school, but they don’t have a big endowment relative to the Ivies and the more heavily resourced [universities].”

House Republicans, under intense pressure to meet Trump’s July 4th deadline, ended up accepting the final Senate product in full. That meant exempting the smaller schools, including the “woke” ones, while levying a rate of up to 8% on the endowments of bigger schools. Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation estimates colleges will now pay an extra $761 million in tax over 10 years, compared to the extra $6.7 billion they would have paid under the House version with its higher 21% rate and broader reach.

Based on data from 2023, Forbes estimates that at least 10 universities will have their endowment earnings taxed at an 8% or 4% rate in 2026, while five will continue to pay the 1.4% rate.

Update: Smith College, which likely would have been subject to the 4% tax given its 2023 stats—an endowment worth $2.47 billion, which worked out to $780,000 for each of its 3,192 students—contacted Forbes on July 8 to note that its full-time tuition-paying student enrollment is now below 3,000. The school currently pays a 1.4% tax on its endowment (worth $2.6 billion as of June 30, 2024). Starting in January, Smith will likely be exempt from an endowment tax. Smith declined to say how much tax it has been paying.

Three schools—Princeton University, Yale University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—will likely be required to pay an 8% excise tax on their endowment earnings. Another seven, including Harvard, Stanford University, Dartmouth College and Vanderbilt University, will likely pay a 4% tax. The remaining five schools—Emory University, Duke University, Washington University in St Louis, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown University—would pay the same 1.4% endowment tax rate they’re paying now, based on fiscal 2023 numbers.

One school that will likely pay 4% is the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic-affiliated school which would have been exempt from the tax were it not for the Byrd rule. “We are deeply disappointed by the removal of language protecting religious institutions of higher education from the endowment tax before passage of the final bill,” Notre Dame wrote in a statement to Forbes. “Any expansion of the endowment tax threatens to undermine the ability of a broad range of faith-based institutions to serve their religious purpose. We are proud to have stood with a coalition of these institutions against that threat, and we are encouraged by the strong support for a religious exemption received from both chambers.”

Fansmith, for his part, won’t call the exemption of the small schools a win. “We think the tax is a bad idea and it’s bad policy, and no schools should be paying it. But, by the standard that fewer schools are paying, it’s better, but it’s still not good,” he says. “It’s not really about revenue,” adds Fansmith. “It’s really about punishing these schools that right now a segment of the Republican party doesn’t like.” The schools make the argument that it’s students who are being punished, since around half of endowment spending pays for student scholarships.

Meanwhile, Zerbe warns the now exempt schools shouldn’t take that status for granted. “Once revenue raisers are in play and out there, they come back again and again,” he says. “It would be a disaster for [colleges] to think somehow this was a win for them. This was a billion dollar hit on them and there’s more to come later.”

Categories Ethics, Funding, Higher Education

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Distractions from Epstein Files Are Not Working

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2025 //
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Heather Cox Richardson makes two important points in this post:

  1. Trump’s poll numbers have gone down on his deportation policy (the public wants him to deport criminals, not honest, hard-working non-citizens) and on his tariff policy.
  2. Trump has thrown red meat to his base (stripping Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship, telling Coke to change to cane sugar, demanding that two sports teams return to their original names, which were offensive to Native Americans), but his distractions have not worked.

I wonder: How can we survive another 3 and one-half years of this craziness?

No matter what Trump does or says, he will stil be President. The Republicans who control the House and Senate will not impeach him, no matter what. His Cabinet of lapdogs will not invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him. The best we can hope for is a Democratic sweep of both houses of Congress in 2026 so Trump is not allowed to get away with lying and grifting and destroying the global economy.

Richardson writes:

On Friday, G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that “polls show Trump’s position plummeting.” On Friday morning, the average job approval rating for Trump was 42.6% with 53.5% disapproving.


Those numbers break down by policy like this: Gallup polls show that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s immigration policy with 62% opposed. A new poll out from CBS News/ YouGov today shows that support for Trump’s deportations has dropped ten points from the start of his term, from 59% to 49%. Fifty-eight percent of Americans oppose the administration’s use of detention facilities. The numbers in a CNN/SSRS poll released today are even more negative for the administration: 59% of Americans oppose deporting undocumented immigrants without a criminal record while only 23% support such deportations, and 57% are opposed to building new detention facilities while only 26% support such a plan.


American approval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is unlikely to rise as news spreads that last Monday, the government gave ICE unprecedented access to the records of nearly 80 million people on Medicaid, allegedly to enable ICE to find undocumented immigrants. Kimberly Kindy and Amanda Seitz of the Associated Press reported that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that enables ICE to access Medicaid recipients’ name, ethnicity and race, birthdate, home address, and social security number.

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, although they may use it in an emergency to cover lifesaving services in a hospital emergency room. The release of personal information from Medicaid lists is unprecedented. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) warned: “The massive transfer of the personal data of millions of Medicaid recipients should alarm every American…. It will harm families across the nation and only cause more citizens to forego lifesaving access to health care.”


Trump’s tariffs are not popular. An Associated Press–NORC poll on Thursday found that 49% of Americans thought Trump’s policies have made them worse off while only 27% think his policies have helped.


And then there are the Epstein files.


A YouGov poll from Tuesday showed that 79% of Americans think the government should release all the documents it has about the Epstein case while only 4% think it should not. Those numbers included 85% of Democrats, but also 76% of Independents and 75% of Republicans. And that was BEFORE the publication of the Wall Street Journal article detailing the lewd and suggestive birthday letter Trump apparently contributed to Epstein’s fiftieth birthday album.


As Morris notes, Trump is underwater on all the issues of his presidency, but he is most dramatically underwater over Epstein.


You don’t need polls to see that Trump, at least, is panicking. He is throwing red meat to his base in what appears to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative. After his July 12 threat to strip comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship (she was born in New York, and he does not have that power), he has kept up a stream of social media posts that seem designed to distract his wavering followers from the news around them.


On Wednesday, Trump announced on social media: “I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them—You’ll see. It’s just better!”


But Coca-Cola had apparently not gotten the memo. It uses cane sugar in a number of foreign markets but has used high-fructose corn syrup in U.S. products since 1985. On its website, it wrote: “We appreciate President Trump’s enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand. More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca‑Cola product range will be shared soon.”


Social media users posted memes of Coke bottles emblazoned with the words “Trump is on the List” and, in small letters below, “Now with cane sugar.”


On Thursday, after observers had noted both the president’s swollen ankles and what appeared to be makeup covering up something on his hand, the White House announced that Trump has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that his physician described as a “benign” and common condition in which veins don’t move blood back to the heart efficiently.


Trump has never offered any information about his health, and his doctors have presented accounts of his physical exams that are hard to believe, making observers receive this announcement at this moment with skepticism. “Chronic venous insufficiency is a condition where the veins in the legs have difficulty drawing attention from the fact that the Epstein Files still haven’t been released,” one social media meme read.


Today, Trump posted on social media: “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”


Hours later, he posted that his post “has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way.” Then he threatened to block the deal to move the Commanders back to Washington, D.C., from a Maryland suburb unless they “change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins.’”
At the turn of the last century, those worried that industrialization was destroying masculinity encouraged sports to give men an arena for manly combat. Sports teams dominated by Euro-Americans often took names that invoked Indigenous Americans because those names seemed to them to harness the idea of “savagery” in the safe space of a playing field. By the end of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had come to recognize the racism inherent in those names, and colleges started to retire Native American team names and mascots. In 2020 the Washington football team retired its former name, becoming the Commanders two years later. At about the same time, the Cleveland baseball team became the Cleveland Guardians in honor of the four pairs of art deco statues installed on the city’s Hope Memorial Bridge in 1932.


Trump’s attempt to control the narrative didn’t work. “The thing about the Redskins and Indians is that Donald Trump is on the Epstein list,” one social media user wrote. The post was representative of reactions to Trump’s post.


Today marked the end of the first six months of Trump’s second term, and he marked it with a flurry of social media posts praising his performance as “6 months of winning,” and attacking those he sees as his opponents. He again went after the Wall Street Journal, which ran the story about Epstein’s birthday album. He complained the paper had run a “typically untruthful story” when it said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had had to explain to Trump that firing Fed chair Jerome Powell would be bad for markets. Trump took exception to the idea he did not understand the interplay of the Fed and markets, despite his repeated threats against Powell.


“Nobody had to explain that to me,” he wrote. “I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market, and what’s good for the U.S.A. if it weren’t for me, the Market wouldn’t be at Record Highs right now, it probably would have CRASHED! So, get your information CORRECT. People don’t explain to me, I explain to them!”

Tonight, Trump’s social media posts seemed to project his own fears on Democrats he perceives as enemies. He once again claimed Senator Schiff, who managed one of the impeachment cases against Trump when he was a representative, had falsified loan documents in 2011 and should go to prison. In 2023, a judge determined that the Trump Organization had falsified loan documents. Trump posted: “Adam Schiff is a THIEF! He should be prosecuted, just like they tried to prosecute me, and everyone else—the only difference is, WE WERE TOTALLY INNOCENT, IT WAS ALL A GIANT HOAX!”


On Late Night with Stephen Colbert last night, Schiff said: “Donald, piss off…. But Donald, before you piss off, would you release the Epstein files?”
Trump also posted an image of intelligence agents and politicians in prison garb as if in mug shots, and reposted both an image of what appears to be lawmakers in handcuffs and an AI-generated video showing former president Barack Obama being arrested by FBI agents and then being held in a jail cell.


Meidas Touch posted: “The crazy thing about Donald Trump posting an AI video of Obama getting arrested is that Trump once had someone organize a party for him and invite a bunch of ‘young women’ and it turned out Jeffrey Epstein was his only other guest.” Alan Feuer and Matthew Goldstein broke the story of that party in Saturday’s New York Times.
—

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Immigration, Obama, Opinion Polling, Scandals, Stupid, Trump

404 Media: White House Partners with PragerU to Produce Cheerful Videos about U.S. History

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2025 //
9

I recently subscribed to 404 Media, which offers fascinating content about technology, like this post by Samantha Cole about the collaboration between the White House and PragerU. The post shows different AI-generated videos of the Founding Fathers, speaking and animated. There is a hackneyed phrase about “bringing history to life.” Now you can see it happen, even though it’s fake and politically slanted.

Does it bear repeating that PragerU is not a university by any definition? Or that its founder Dennis Prager was a rightwing talk-show host before he started hawking his whitewashed history videos? Or that some red states have adopted his videos for classroom instruction even though Prager is not a historian and has no credentials to teach history?

Samantha Cole:

Conservative content mill PragerU is partnering with the White House to make AI-generated videos of founding fathers and Revolutionary War-era randos.

PragerU is a nonprofit organization with a mission “to promote American values through the creative use of digital media, technology and edu-tainment,” according to its website. It’s been criticized for advancing climate denial and slavery apologism, frequently publishes videos critical of “wokeness” and “DEI,” and is very concerned about “the death of the West.” It has also been increasingly integrated into school curricula around the country.

PragerU held a launch event for the series, “Road to Liberty,” on June 25. Secretary Linda McMahon took some time away from dismantling the Department of Education to speak at the event. In person at the White House, visitors can tour a display of notable Revolutionary War people and places, and scan a QR code on displays that take them to PragerU’s AI-generated videos of people from that time period speaking. 

Each of the videos highlights a different person who was alive during the signing of the Declaration of Independence, from former presidents to relatively minor players in the fight for independence. The videos are clearly AI-generated, with the sepia-toned peoples’ mouths moving almost independently from the rest of their faces in some of them. In one, an AI-generated John Adams says “facts do not care about our feelings,” a phrase commonly attributed to conservative commentator and PragerU contributor Ben Shapiro. 

At the end of the videos, there’s a logo for the White House with the text “brought to you by PragerU,” and a disclaimer: “The White House is grateful for the partnership with PragerU and the U.S. Department of Education in the production of this museum. This partnership does not constitute or imply U.S. Government or U.S. Department of Education endorsement of PragerU.”

Professor of history Seth Cotlar spotted the videos in a thread on Bluesky….

I asked Cotlar, as someone who specializes in American history and the rise of the far-right, what stood out to him about these videos. I thought it was odd, I said, that they chose to include people like politician and disgraced minister Lyman Hall and obscure poet Francis Hopkinson alongside more well-known figures like John Adams or Thomas Jefferson. 

“You’re right to note that it’s a pretty odd collection of figures they’ve chosen,” Cotlar said. “My guess is that this is part of the broader right wing populist push to frame themselves as the grassroots ‘true Americans,’ and they’re including all of these lesser known figures with the hopes that their viewers will be like ‘oh wow, look at all of these revolutionary freedom fighters like me who were just kinda ordinary guys like me but who still changed history.’” 

He also said it’s noteworthy that the “Road to Liberty” lineup so far is almost entirely white men, including the random dudes like Hall and Hopkinson. “The lack of any pretense to inclusion is pretty notable. Even conservative glosses on the Revolution from the pre-Trump era would have included things like the Rhode Island Regiment or Lemuel Haynes or Phyllis Wheatley. Needless to say, they absolutely do not include Deborah Sampson,” Cotlar said. All of the people in the “coming soon” section on PragerU’s website are also white men. 

AI slop has become the aesthetic of the right, with authoritarians around the world embracing ugly, lazy, mass-produced content like PragerU’s founding father puppets. Here in the U.S., we have President Donald Trump hawking it on his social media accounts, including AI-generated images of himself as the Pope and “Trump Gaza,” an AI video and song depicting the West Bank as a vacation paradise where Trump parties alongside his former bestie Elon Musk. As Republicans used the response to Hurricane Helene to blame migrants, Amy Kremer, founder of Women for Trump, posted an AI image of a child caught in a flood hugging a puppy and then said she didn’t care that it wasn’t real: “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” she wrote on X. Mike Lee shared the same image. AI slop makes for quick and easy engagement farming, and now it’s being produced in direct partnership with the White House.

I’m not sure what app or program PragerU is using to make these videos. I thought, at first, that they might be using one of the many basic lipsyncing or “make this old photo come alive” mobile apps on the market now. But the videos look better, or at least more heavily produced, than most of those apps are capable of. Just to make sure they haven’t somehow advanced wildly in the last few months since I checked one out, I tried one of them, Revive, and uploaded an image of John Adams to see if it would return anything close to what PragerU’s putting out. It did not. 

The PragerU videos aren’t this bad, but they also aren’t as good as what would come out of Veo 3, the newest AI video generator, which generates highly realistic videos complete with sound and speech, from text prompts. I gave Veo a painting of John Adams and told it what to say; PragerU probably isn’t using this generator, because the result is much more realistic than what’s in the “Road to Liberty” series, even when I use a screenshot from one of their videos.

JOHN ADAMS IN VEO 3 USING A PAINTING AS A PROMPT.

On the off chance the culprit is Midjourney—although the series’ style and the way the subjects’ mouths move almost independently of the rest of their faces don’t match what I’ve seen of Midjourney’s videos—I tried that one, too. I just gave Midjourney the same Adams portrait and a prompt for it to animate him praising the United States and it returned a raving lunatic, silently screaming. 

Striking out so far, I emailed Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and Chief Science Officer of synthetic media detection company GetReal, and asked if he had any leads. He said it looked similar to what comes out of AI video creation platform HeyGen, which creates AI talking heads and generates speech for them using ElevenLabs. I tried this on screenshots of the avatars in PragerU’s Martha Washington and John Adams videos to see if the puppet-mouth-style matched up, and they were pretty close.

0:00

/0:011×

HEYGEN JOHN ADAMS

HEYGEN MARTHA WASHINGTON

PragerU’s videos are still more heavily produced than what I could make using the free version of HeyGen; it’s possible they used a combination of these to make the videos, plus some old-fashioned video editing and animation to create the final products. PragerU reported almost $70 million in income last year, they can afford the effort. 

“While the PragerU stuff is distinctly terrible, it’s not like our culture has commemorated the Revolution with high-minded sophistication,” Cotlar told me. “I was 8 during the bicentennial and while I definitely learned some stuff about the founding era, most of what I absorbed was pretty schlocky.” He mentioned the “Bicentennial minutes” that were broadcast in 1975 and 76, sponsored by Shell, and which TV critic John J. O’Connor called “so insubstantial as to be almost meaningless.” The series won an Emmy.

In the last two years, several states, beginning with Florida, have approved PragerU content to be taught in public school classrooms. In Oklahoma, teachers relocating from states with “progressive education policies” will have to undergo an assessment in partnership with PragerU to determine if they’re allowed to teach. “If you want to teach here, you’d better know the Constitution, respect what makes America great, and understand basic biology,” State Superintendent Ryan Walters said in a press release. “We’re raising a generation of patriots, not activists, and I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep leftist propaganda out of our classrooms….”

Open the link to continue reading.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam Cole is writing from the far reaches of the internet, about sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She’s the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.

Samantha Cole

404 Media is a new independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.

© 2025 404 MEDIA. PUBLISHED WITH GHOST.

Categories Curriculum, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fake News, History, Trump

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

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2025 //
4

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

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

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

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

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

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

As Chalkbeat reported, this bill:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Didn’t Pam Bondi Prosecute Jeffrey Epstein When She was Florida AG?

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2025 //
8

Blogger Dean Obeidallah raises a very important question: why didn’t Pam Bondi prosecute her state’s most notorious child sex predator when she was Attorney General of Florida? Who was she protecting?

He wrote on his Substack blog:

Donald Trump is so panicked by what is contained in the Trump-Epstein files that he’s now slamming his own followers demanding its release, calling them “stupid” and “weaklings.” Whine as he may, Trump has lost control of the narrative given a new poll released Wednesday which found nearly 70% of Americans believe the Trump regime has engaged in a cover up of the Epstein files–including 59% of Trump supporters. At the very least it appears that Trump knew Jeffrey Epstein was involved in sex ring where children were raped yet did nothing to stop that evil. But Trump’s actions could be worse than that.

However, lost in the discussion is that Trump’s current Attorney General Pam Bondi was Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019 in the very state that was ground zero for Epstein raping and trafficking children. Why didn’t she investigate and prosecute Epstein for these heinous crimes committed in Florida?!

Taking a quick step back, Epstein received in 2008 the “deal of a lifetime” from local Florida prosecutors and George W. Bush’s Department of Justice. At the time, Bush’s DOJ had identified 36 underage girls who were victims of Epstein. But they offered the well-connected Epstein a deal to plead guilty to just two prostitution charges in state court. He was then sentenced to 18 months in jail–which he served in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail where he was allowed daily work release. In addition, Bush’s DOJ agreed not to prosecute him for federal crimes. Worse, Epstein’s victims were not even told of the deal in advance so they could object.

After Epstein’s release from jail in 2009, Epstein returned to his lavish lifestyle and was able to “continue his abuse of minors”—a point made in a 2020 report by Trump’s own DOJ after Epstein died in the custody of the Trump administration. So again, why didn’t Bondi investigate Epstein for his crimes while she was AG from 2011 to 2019?!

Open the link to finish reading.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Florida, Scandal, Trump

Ellie Leonard on Ghislaine Maxwell–The Woman Who Knew Too Much

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2025 //
3

Ellie Leonard’s blog is called “The Panicked, Unpaid Writer.” This post is remarkable because it includes the drawing that, according to the Wall Street Journal, was sent by Trump to his friend Jeffrey Epstein on the occasion of his 50th birthday.

Trump denies that he wrote the note. He is suing Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion for publishing the story, which he says is fake. This open break between Trump and Murdoch may have interesting consequences, since Murdoch s FOX News is Trump’s biggest cheering section.

Ellie Leonard writes:

Long before we knew the story of Jeffrey Epstein, a young Ghislaine Maxwell was coming of age in the 53-bedroom home of her father, Robert Maxwell, a British media proprietor and politician. He named his luxury yacht after the little girl, the “Lady Ghislaine,” but spent most of his time buying and selling businesses like MacMillan and Pergamon Press, and flying back and forth to Headington Hill in Oxford on his helicopter. Ghislaine would later say that she had a “difficult, traumatic childhood with an overbearing, narcissistic, and demanding father…(that) made [her] vulnerable to Epstein.” But despite being a billionaire, Robert Maxwell had a lot of debt, (having “plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies’ pension funds) and in 1991 his body was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The newspapers said he had apparently fallen overboard from the “Lady Ghislaine,” but Ghislaine never believed the stories.

“One thing I am sure about is that he did not commit suicide. I think he was murdered.” – Ghislaine Maxwell, Hello! Magazine, 1997

She would meet Jeffrey Epstein for the first time just a few months later. And despite the bad taste her father left, she found common ground with the young millionaire financier.

Final arguments at Maxwell trial | US News | Sky News

It is unclear how long Maxwell dated Epstein, though there is evidence to indicate it was from about 1992 to 1997. However, due to the nature of Epstein’s “extracurricular” activities and business dealings, those lines may be blurred. In a 2003 Vanity Fair article Epstein claimed that Maxwell was his “best friend,” indicating that, at least on paper, they were no longer together. But he stated that although she wasn’t on his payroll, she “organized much of [his] life,” and that when a relationship is over, the girlfriend “moves up, not down,” to friendship status.

Open the link to keep reading and to view the drawing at the center of Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against Murdoch.

Categories Ethics, Scandal, Trump

Politico: Tulsi Gabbard Threatens to Prosecute Obama Officials for “Treason”

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2025 //
13

As the controversy over Trump’s relationship to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein turned into a media frenzy, members of Trump’s team threw distractions into the mix. One of them came from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. She released a report calling for prosecution of high-level Obama-era officials for what she called “treasonous conspiracy” about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. She ignored a three-year investigation by a Republican-led Senate Committee, which concluded that Russia did try to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.

Politico posted:

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called for several Obama administration officials to face criminal prosecution for participating in a “treasonous conspiracy” surrounding the 2016 election on Friday afternoon, the latest example of the Trump administration targeting critics of the president.

In a newly declassified report, Gabbard on Friday alleged the officials “manipulated and withheld” key intelligence from the public related to the possibility of Russian interference in the election.

In a Friday afternoon statement, Gabbard said she would provide all related documents to the Justice Department “to deliver the accountability that President [Donald] Trump, his family, and the American people deserve.”

“No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again,” Gabbard said in the statement.

The DOJ declined to comment on Gabbard’s comments.

The ODNI’s memo names former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, among others allegedly involved in the White House’s review of possible Russian meddling in the election.

The administration has routinely targeted critics of the president and has sought to relitigate the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The president has repeatedly criticized former intelligence officials for their efforts to probe the Kremlin’s possible attempts to interfere in American politics, with Trump accusing Comey of leading a “corrupt and vicious witch hunt” against him.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Justice Department Employees Dismissed Without Reason, Creating Climate of Fear

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2025 //
1

Perry Stein of The Washington Post wrote about the arbitrary dismissals at the Justice Department, as Attorney General Pam Bondi clears out anyone suspected of disloyalty to Trump’s agenda.

Republicans complained in the past that Biden was “weaponizing” and “politicizing” the Justice Department. That was not true. But it’s happening now, and Republicans don’t care. Lawyers who worked on prosecution of January 6 insurrectionists are being terminated, as are those who worked on investigations of Trump. If Trump and Bondi succeed, only Trump loyalists will still have a job in the Justice Department. James Comey’s daughter, who was a prosecutor of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, was fired from

Her job in the New York office of the Justice Department.

Stein writes:

The Trump administration is firing and pushing out employees across the Justice Department and FBI, often with no explanation or warning, creating rampant speculation and fear within the workforce over who might be terminated next, according to multiple people with knowledge of the removals who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

Some people are simply fired, delivered a notice signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi that cites the broad powers afforded to the president in the U.S. Constitution. Others, particularly at the FBI, are told they can leave or be demoted or terminated.

The removals appear more individually targeted, and are happening in smaller numbers, than the high-profile ousters of senior Justice Department and FBI officials in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term, when he returned to the White House vowing to clean house at the federal law enforcement agency that had brought two criminal cases against him. They are unrelated to the mass reductions-in-force and reorganizations that Trump has launched at many other federal agencies, which the Supreme Court has said may move forward for now.

Multiple people familiar with the Justice Department said scores of experienced staffers are opting to voluntarily leave the government to avoid being fired at random or asked to do things that would potentially violate their legal ethics. Their departures are worsening staff shortages in major divisions and U.S. attorney offices and have created an opening for the Trump administration to further shape the Justice Department workforce, allowing officials to fill career staff vacancies with attorneys who align ideologically with the president.

“Many, many lawyers have resigned on their own power because they saw the writing on the wall,” said Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that pushes for a strong federal workforce. “They understood if they didn’t leave on their own volition they would be subject to firing — or if they stayed they felt they couldn’t uphold their oath in a way that was consistent with their integrity.”

The lack of explanation for the firings has fueled rumors, multiple people familiar with the situation said.

One Justice Department lawyer was suspected of being fired because he used “he/him” pronouns in his email signature. People interviewed say they believe another attorney was ousted because of a message he put on social media. Others told to leave may not mesh with or may be disliked by Trump’s political appointees, the people said. And some are suspected of speaking to the media without authorization.

“Notice of Removal from Federal Service,” the subject line in the email from Bondi to one employee read. It continued: “Pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States, you are removed from federal service effective immediately.”

Categories Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Trump
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