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Becky Pringle: Hungry Children Can’t Learn

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2025 //
6

Trump and his compliant allies in Congress took pride in the One Big Ugly Bill that they passed in early July. But it offers reasons for shame, not pride. The Trump bill finances tax cuts for the richest Americans by cutting food for schoolchildren and Medicaid for millions of children.

The Republican budget bill locks in benefits for the rich and hunger for children of the poor.

Imagine laughing, applauding, and feeling proud of this heartless bill! I

President Trump Signs His "Big, Beautiful Bill" Into Law And Celebrates Independence Day At The White House

President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, signs the One, Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will cut federal spending on SNAP by around $186 billion over the next decade. Samuel Corum—Getty Images

Becky Pringle, President of the NEA, writes in TIME magazine about the shamefulness of this legislation.

She writes:

Hunger in America’s public schools is a real problem, and it is heartbreaking. As the head of the largest union of educators in the country, I hear stories almost daily of how kids struggle and how schools and teachers step up to fill the gaps. It’s the school community in Kentucky filling a Blessing Box with foods to help fellow students and families who don’t have enough. It’s the teacher in Rhode Island who started a food “recycling” program to ensure no food goes to waste and to give students access to healthy snacks like cheese sticks, apples, yogurt, and milk.

School meals are more than a budget line item. They are lifelines that help millions of students learn and grow. But as families across America prepare for the new school year, millions of children face the threat of returning to classrooms without access to school meals.

President Donald Trump’s newly-signed tax bill, which Republicans overwhelmingly voted to pass, slashes food assistance benefits via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by an estimated $186 billion over the next decade—thelargest cut in American history. These devastating reductions will result in an estimated 18 million children losing access to free school meals.

The cuts shift the cost of school lunches to the states, costing them more than they can afford when they are already grappling with tighter budgets and substantial Republican-led Medicaid cuts.Twenty-three governors warned these cuts will lead to millions of Americans losing vital food assistance.

It’s hard to understand if you’ve never faced hunger, but millions of American children do not have access to enough food each day. In a recent survey of 1,000 teachers nationwide, three out of every four reported that their students are already coming to school hungry. 

Our children can’t learn if they are hungry. As a middle-school science teacher for more than 30 years, I have seen the pain that hunger creates. It’s the student who skips breakfast so she can give it to her little brother. It’s the student who misbehaves because his stomach is rumbling. It’s the students who struggle in class after a weekend where they didn’t have a single full meal. Educators see this pain everyday, and that’s why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students. 

Free school meals represent commonsense and cost-effective public policy. They don’t just prevent hunger, they help kids succeed. Decades of research reviewed by the Food Research & Action Center shows that when students participate in school breakfast programs, behavior, academic performance, and academic achievement go up and tardiness goes down. When I stand in a room of bright and curious children, it breaks my heart that some of them are going without the food they need to learn and thrive—not because America can’t afford to feed them, but because adults in Washington decided they’d rather spend the money on tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.

The cuts from the Republican tax bill will hit hardest in places where families are already struggling the most, especially in rural and Southern states where school nutrition programs are a lifeline to many. In Texas, 3.4 million kids, nearly two-thirds of students, are eligible for free and reduced lunch. In Mississippi, 439,000 kids, 99.7% of the student population, were eligible for free and reduced lunch during the 2022-2023 school year.

These are not abstract numbers. These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger and uncertainty about when they will eat again. America’s kids deserve better. 

The National School Lunch Act of 1946 laid the foundation that public schools are places where children can receive a free breakfast and lunch each day. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike expanded school lunch programs, operating under the shared understanding that no child should go hungry at school in the richest country in the world.

But the extreme right wing of today’s Republican Party has walked away from that moral consensus—ripping away these programs to give another tax break to billionaires.

The Trump Administration’s authoritarian blueprint outlined in Project 2025 takes the anti-public education attacks even further by attempting to gut the Department of Education and to send tax dollars to private schools, and promoting ideologically-driven book bans and classroom censorship.

And now, as the Trump Administration and its allies work to destroy public education, they also have attempted tointimidate the National Education Association and our 3 million educators. They know we are powerful and vocal advocates for students and a formidable opponent to their attacks on public education. Last month, the relentless efforts of organized educators and our allies got the Trump Administration to release $7 billion in education funds it had tried to withhold.

Together, we will fight forward: for our vision where every student attends a safe, inclusive, supportive, and well-resourced public school, which includes nutritious meals for all students regardless of race or place. 

We are educators. We don’t quit. We will continue to engage with school boards, town halls, state legislatures, and Congress to fight for students. Public education does not belong to politicians trying to dismantle it. It is for every student, parent, and educator who understands it has the power to transform lives.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Poverty, Trump

Trump Administration is Extorting Hundreds of Millions from Universities

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2025 //
11

Donald Trump hates higher education. He hates education. He loves “the poorly educated.” Of course. It is the poorly educated who believe his lies. They vote against their self-interest when they vote for him. The poorly educated vote for a tax break for billionaires. The poorly educated vote to eliminate their own health insurance.

Trump’s vendetta against elite universities punishes them and extracts huge fines, which were asserted, never proven. He is swaggering about his ability to bring down universities that would never have admitted him.

Where is the money going? The Boston Gkobe reports:

With Harvard University’s negotiations with the Trump administration still underway, the White House’s recent deals with other elite institutions suggest the nation’s oldest university may have to pay a large sum of money to make its problems go away.

Columbia University and Brown University in the last month both came to arrangements with the White House that involved paying millions of dollars and making a wide swath of changes in order to restore billions in lost research funding and end ongoing investigations and lawsuits. 

The Trump administration proposed a $1 billion settlement with UCLA, several news outlets reported Friday, after freezing more than $500 million in federal funds to the school last week.

Both deals with the Ivy League schools came as they faced complaints they had allowed antisemitism to proliferate on campus during protests against the war in Gaza, as well as allegations they had discriminated against students via diversity-related policies and programs. 

Neither Brown nor Columbia in their agreements admitted any wrongdoing — something Harvard has indicated in court fights with the federal government it is also unwilling to do.

The measures the schools adopted to get the government off their backs differ wildly.

Both Columbia and Brown are paying millions to resolve their disputes

Columbia agreed to pay about $200 million to the US Treasury Department over the next three years, as well as another $21 million to address alleged civil rights violations of its Jewish employees. 

Congress will then have the power to appropriate those funds — though it’s unclear what they will be used for.

In exchange, Columbia will receive many of the research grants the government had previously canceled as early as March, and resolve violations of the law alleged by the federal government. The administration had frozen “the majority” of the school’s $1.3 billion in federal funding, Columbia’s president said.

Brown, meanwhile, pledged to give $50 million to state workforce development organizations in Rhode Island that are “operating in compliance with anti-discrimination laws” over the next 10 years, avoiding making a direct payment to the Trump administration. 

In exchange, the federal government would restore Brown’s funding — the government had put about $510 million on hold — and close all pending investigations over Brown’s compliance with anti-discrimination laws.

The schools agreed to other changes

Columbia agreed to implement an outside monitor to oversee whether it was complying with the changes it had promised the government, such as to reform disciplinary measures for student protesters and remove diversity-related policies.

Brown said it would not perform gender-affirming surgeries on minors — which Brown’s medical school has never done — or prescribe puberty blockers. It adopted the Trump administration’s definitions of “male” and “female,” sparking outrage among current and former students who say that change harms transgender and nonbinary students who are excluded from those definitions.

The two schools also took different approaches to addressing antisemitism: Columbia’s measures included adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism and a review of its programs related to the Middle East. Brown, meanwhile, said it would commit resources to support programs related to Jewish students, as well as conduct a campus climate survey in 2025 that would include information about the climate for Jewish students on campus.

Both schools also said they would share admissions data about applicants’ standardized test scores and grade point averages, as well as demographic data such as their race. On Thursday, the administration made that a requirement of all schools that receive federal aid.

Neither agreement, however, appeared to place any restrictions on what or how the school teaches, avoiding infringement on academic freedom many critics of the Trump administration had feared.

The schools negotiated under different circumstances

Many critics of Trump’s war on higher education viewed Brown’s agreement to invest in local education as more aligned with its mission as a university, rather than simply paying a fine for the government to use as it sees fit. Some have also voiced concerns the implementation of an outside monitor at Columbia could allow the federal government to infringe on its independence, despite the deal they had reached.

The arrangements reflect differences in the amount of pressure the administration had applied to each school, down to the number of pages in the deal — Columbia’s deal was 22 pages long, while Brown’s was nine.

Columbia had seen among the most high-profile protests against the war in Gaza and was the first institution to face government sanctions, beginning in March with the cancellation of more than $400 million in funding. The federal government has since found it in violation of civil rights law for allegedly acting with “deliberate indifference” to harassment of Jewish students.

The administration’s investigation into Brown’s alleged civil rights violations, however, was ongoing at the time the deal was struck.

What the Trump deals could mean for Harvard

The Trump administration has quickly touted each agreement as a victory. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon called the Columbia settlement a “roadmap for elite universities” and President Trump declared on Truth Social “woke is officially DEAD at Brown” after announcing that deal.

Still, some worry any agreement with the administration only opens the door to further coercion if the federal government finds something else it doesn’t like at any of the schools it is dealing with.

Trump and his allies have long seen Harvard, the nation’s wealthiest university, as its best opportunity to influence higher education and have aimed to force an agreement by canceling more than $3 billion in funding, threatening international students’ statuses, and levying a number of civil rights complaints against the school. 

In response, the school has put up the most forceful legal and public relations fight against the federal government, meaning any agreement it reaches could reverberate further than that of its peers.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Higher Education, Trump

Rachel Maddow: Our Worst Fears Have Come True

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2025 //
5

This is one of Rachel Maddow’s best clips. She says that we worried about what Trump might do if he won re-election. Wonder no more. It is happening. He is a full-fledged authoritarian, intent on smashing the Constitution and our rights. what can we do? She has some ideas.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Immigration, Trump

Thomas Friedman: The World As We Knew It Is Rapidly Slipping Away

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2025 //
6

Thomas Friedman writes a regular column for The New York Times. This one is unusually perspicacious. I was deeply moved by its candor. And I agree with him. Trump and his enablers are turning the Presidency into a monarchy, giving him more power than any President ever had and more power than the Founders imagined. Checks and balances have been wiped out. The Supreme Court’s rightwing majority approves of all his power grabs. He is imposing heavy fines on universities without regard to basic principles of academic freedom. He has made it criminal to support policies that advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. He is waging war on science. He is forcing the news media to pay him tribute. He fires veteran data scientists unless they report good news.

In his first term, his most notable achievement was the funding of “Operation Warp Speed,” which invested in the rapid production of mNRA vaccines. These vaccines dramatically reduced COVID, which killed one million people in the U.S. Yet just days ago, Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cancelled $500 million in research grants for mNRA vaccines. RFK killed further development of Trump’s greatest triumph. When asked about it at a press conference, Trump took pride in what RFK was doing. Did he understand the question?

His actions are unprecedented. They are the actions of a dictator.

He writes:

Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.

He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.

What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”

As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.

The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.

Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett; Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer; and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?

Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”

If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.

In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.

And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.

One of America’s premier cyberwarriors, Jen Easterly, who was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration, had her appointment to a senior teaching position at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point revoked last week by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll after Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, posted that Easterly was a Biden-era mole.

Read that sentence again very slowly. The Army secretary, acting on the guidance of a loony Trump acolyte, revoked the teaching appointment of — anyone will tell you — one of America’s most skilled nonpartisan cyberwarriors, herself a graduate of West Point.

And when you are done reading that, read Easterly’s response on LinkedIn: “As a lifelong independent, I’ve served our nation in peacetime and combat under Republican and Democratic administrations. I’ve led missions at home and abroad to protect all Americans from vicious terrorists …. I’ve worked my entire career not as a partisan, but as a patriot — not in pursuit of power, but in service to the country I love and in loyalty to the Constitution I swore to protect and defend, against all enemies.”

And then she added this advice to the young West Pointers she will not have the honor of teaching: “Every member of the Long Gray Line knows the Cadet Prayer. It asks that we ‘choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ That line — so simple, yet so powerful — has been my North Star for more than three decades. In boardrooms and war rooms. In quiet moments of doubt and in public acts of leadership. The harder right is never easy. That’s the whole point.”

That is the woman Trump did not want teaching our next generation of fighters.

And that ethic — always choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong — is the ethic that Bessent, Hassett, Chavez-DeRemer and Greer know nothing of — not to mention Trump himself.

That is why, dear reader, though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don’t know how we will get it back.

Categories Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Injustice, Lies, Trump

John Thompson: Immigrant Children in Oklahoma Live in Fear

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2025 //
4

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes about the cloud of fear that has settled over the schools, as children of immigrant families fear harm to themselves and their families.

Teachers in other districts have reported that the children of immigrant families are not showing up for school. They are afraid that the masked gunmen of ICE might suddenly appear and take them away. School is no longer a safe space.

About John Thompson:

After growing up in Oklahoma City, John Thompson earned a doctorate in American history at Rutgers University and became an award-winning author. He worked as a researcher for the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and as a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood. Thompson is a former award-winning teacher at the former John Marshall High School and Centennial Mid-High School. Now retired, Thompson lives in Oklahoma City.

Thompson writes:

Oklahoma schools find themselves in a challenging position, suddenly caught in the middle of the Trump administration’s push to deport illegal immigrants.

Schools have found themselves at the forefront of immigration debates before, but this feels different.

They face so many more challenges ranging from the threat of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to decreasing attendance rates as families choose to keep their children home to avoid the trauma associated with them. The Trump administration has withheld funding for school programs, including migrant education and services for English language learners. And State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ policies, such as trying to require schools to collect data on the immigration status of students, are further destabilizing our education system.

This isn’t the first time I’ve attended OK Justice Circle’s Breaking Bread panel and group discussions. This panel has met 14 times since 2020 in order to “increase community awareness of the lived experiences of racial and ethnic minorities in Oklahoma City area.”

The latest Breaking Bread topic, which focused on the harm state and federal policies are causing to our state’s Hispanic community, was the most emotional one I’ve ever attended during the last five years.

For instance, as a panelist was leaving for the conference, a student told her that she is studying the Holocaust and could see parallels forming between that horrific event that ultimately resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jewish people and the ramping up of our country’s immigration enforcement efforts.

An elected school board member, who represents a majority Hispanic district, reported receiving death threats.

Another urban district reported seeing an alarming surge in absenteeism.

I heard stories about how students now come to school every day with their birth certificates in their backpacks just in case ICE raids their schools. I can’t remember the last time a child had to prove they were an American citizen while in school.

These raise tough questions about what schools can do to protect the students they’re entrusted to serve.

Schools cannot politicize the issues they deal with, but they can help provide “wrap-around services” like increased access to food and or solutions to housing insecurity. They can also address the physical and mental health issues their students are experiencing. And, they can refer students to nonprofit and public agencies that have support structures.

But those solutions require trust in the law and the procedures that ICE agents are required to follow. It is really difficult to trust the immigration enforcement process right now.

The Trump administration held funding for English language services. I worry that federal leaders could one day try to take it even a step further by denying access to public school to undocumented children.

That would inflict incredible hardships on families and untold amounts damage on our state’s social and economic future.

Fortunately, Rep. Arturo Alonzo-Sandoval, D-Oklahoma City, gave me some reason for hope. Over 20 anti-immigration bills were introduced to the Legislature this year, but only one became law.

Only time will tell if the majority of Oklahomans can find the courage to push back on the policies that are causing immeasurable harm to our Hispanic neighbors.

I often find myself wondering, what would it say about Oklahomans and our integrity if we did not stand up and reject today’s cruelty?

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Freedom to Learn, Oklahoma, Trump

Dan Rather: The Absurdity of Installing a “Bias Monitor” at CBS

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2025 //
3

Dan Rather is a veteran of CBS News. He was understandably upset by the CBS payoff of $16 million to Trump in exchange for getting him to drop his $20 billion lawsuit against the network and “60 Minutes” for editing a tape of Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign. It was a frivolous lawsuit, which Trump was likely to lose, but CBS chose to placate him because it needed FCC approval of a sale to Paramount for $8 billion. The Federal Conmunications Commission is headed by Trump ally, Brendan Carr, and is completely politicized, at the service of The Donald.

Dan Rather takes strong exception to CBS’s agreement to accept a “bias monitor” who reports to Trump. Be it noted that Columbia University also agreed to a “bias monitor” along with its $200 million payoff. Brown University agreed to accept Trump’s definition of gender, which means transgender does not exist at Brown.

Rather wrote:

As bad as it is that CBS’s parent company was extorted by Donald Trump for $16 million, that wasn’t the worst of it.

In the final merger deal, New Paramount has agreed to appoint a “bias monitor” who will report directly to Donald Trump, says the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This person will work with the company’s new president to review “any complaints of bias or other concerns.” In other words, Paramount is installing a censor at CBS News with a direct line to the president.

One would think that if a bias monitor is called for, there has been evidence of blatant bias. By definition, bias is unfair prejudice in favoring one side over the other. The far-right defines it as any story they don’t like.

Let’s be clear: By any sane or objective measure, CBS News is not a biased organization, no matter what the president and his FCC chair would have you think.

In addition to hiring a bias monitor, Paramount has promised that “news and entertainment programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum,” while also eliminating all diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Hard to do both, unless what you really mean is embodying only “conservative” (read: Trump’s) viewpoints.

CBS has a history of mega-wealthy owners, but no one as rich as Oracle founder Larry Ellison and his son David, whose estimated net worth is $300 billion. Both Ellisons are tight with Trump.

One wonders how deep will this go? Does “60 Minutes” now submit scripts for approval by a Trump toady? What about “The CBS Evening News?” Will its reporters have to give equal time to disinformation? And what will be the effect on other news outlets? The intended outcome is to foster fear.

Insiders at CBS already have a term for the censor: “hall monitor.” The credibility of the news organization that was my home for more than 40 years is suddenly threatened because of a bogus lawsuit and an FCC that is supposed to be independent but clearly is not. Donald Trump might as well be CEO of CBS.

We are now on the slipperiest of slopes. Who will be next? Trump could certainly make similar demands of other news organizations. The White House communications team is doing its damnedest to curve coverage to embellish their boss through lies, intimidation, and extortion.

Despite the questionable characterizations from the White House, not every story is left versus right. Most actually deal with the truth, or as near as journalists can get to the truth, versus what Trump & Co. want you to believe is the truth. They have a 10-year history of bald-faced lying.

According to The Washington Post, which tracked Trump’s (lack of) truthfulness during his first term, he lied an average of 21 times a day for four years, totalling 30,573 false or misleading claims. Respected historian David Brinkley called him a “serial liar.”

The argument that CBS and other legacy media outlets have a left-leaning bias and therefore need monitoring falls apart quickly when you realize the far-right doesn’t want unbiased reporting. They want Trump’s version of the story and his version of the truth. To them, it simply can’t be negative and true. If it goes against their agenda, it’s biased.

After all, it was Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway who coined the term “alternate facts.” That is just doublespeak for lies. The network of “alternative facts,” Fox “News,” was formed to combat perceived bias. We all know Fox “News” hits it right down the middle.

Trump supporters point to Americans’ declining trust in the news media as a reason for the need for his administration’s “monitoring” of the mass media. Clearly what they intend is not monitoring but censorship, led by a man who eschews the truth and whose constant spewing of propaganda has been a factor in the loss of trust in the media.

They are led by the most transparently thin-skinned person imaginable. In the space of a week, the prickly president has officially lashed out at several entertainment programs that have had the temerity to make fun of him.

When Joy Behar of the morning talk show “The View” joked that Trump was jealous of President Obama’s swagger, a White House spokesperson told Entertainment Weekly, “Joy Behar is an irrelevant loser suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome” who “should self-reflect on her own jealousy of President Trump’s historic popularity before her show is the next to be pulled off air.”

After the animated series “South Park” aired an episode that depicted a naked Trump hanging out with the devil, the White House said “no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.” Meanwhile the creators of the cartoon just inked a $1.5 billion, five-year deal with Paramount. Yes, that Paramount. One wonders if the bias monitor will be script doctoring new “South Park” shows.

This comes after the questionably timed cancellation of “The Late Show,” whose host, Stephen Colbert, is an ardent critic of the president and the most popular host on late-night television.

Everyone interprets the world through their own prism. People are influenced by where they grew up, what their parents taught them, where they went to school, and the beliefs of the people they respect. Journalists included.

Journalists sometimes make mistakes. But the media is not a monolith driven by a collective desire to elect Democrats. The vast majority of people I worked with throughout my career were dedicated journalists, rock-solid reporters. They believed in objectivity and curiosity and in questioning authority and standing up to power, regardless of whom they voted for.

As details of the new deal at CBS News remind us, the need for independent journalism has never been greater — journalism that doesn’t need sign-off from a censor.

The good people and proven professionals of CBS News will do their best under their new circumstances. But they, and the rest of us, are left to ponder where this all leads.

Categories Education Reform, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Media, Trump

Ex-CIA Whistleblower: The 2024 Election Was Rigged

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2025 //
37

We have learned, over the past decade, that Trump often projects what he is doing, what he has done, or what he intends to do, on others. We have heard his nonstop claim that the 2020 election was rigged since the day it was decided. Even now, his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard says that the 2020 election, which he lost, was rigged. Apparently it is a job requirement to agree with his delusions and lies.

There are people who suspect the 2024 election was rigged to enable Trump’s re-election. I am one of them, though I have no evidence, just a gut feeling that the American electorate would not re-elect a twice-impeached convicted felon and sexual predator who campaigned on a platform of hate, divisiveness, and lies. But that’s just me. Time and again, Trump thinks, acts, and speaks like a mobster, so why would he not cheat to win? Winning means redemption, revenge, and riches. He never accepts losing.

A CIA whistleblower claims that the voting machines were programmed to produce a Trump win. He believes that Harris and Walz won, and it was not close.

During their week of breaking up, Elon Musk said several indiscreet things about Trump. Among them was a tweet saying that Trump would not have won without him, and that Republicans would not control the House without him. Was he referring to his gift of $300 million to the campaign? Or, did he mean another kind of help? Did Trump spill the beans when he said that no one understood the voting machines in Pennsylvania better than his close friend Elon?

An investigation of voting irregularities in Rockland County, New York, was initiated a few months ago. Some districts in Rockland posted surprising results in a few districts. Governor Kathy Hochul won one district by hundreds of votes, but Presidential candidate Kamala Harris received zero votes. An MIT professor claimed that the vote reflected bloc voting by Orthodox Jews, but others questioned his analysis. The judge will decide whether to proceed in late September.

A side note: I was a member of a federal commission created after the debacle of the 2000 election to make recommendations for improving elections. The commission was bipartisan, chaired by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. One of our recommendations was that the federal government should pay the cost of replacing existing voting machines with electronic touch screens. We made this recommendation after reviewing all existing and proposed machines.

Interestingly, the most accurate voting machine tested in 2001 was the one in New York City, known as a mechanical lever machine. The voter enters an enclosed space, closes a curtain behind her, pulls individual little levers for the preferred candidates, then records the vote by pulling a large lever that also opens the curtain, and exits. Every vote is cleanly and correctly registered on paper. That machine had 100% accuracy but it was considered antiquated. It was likened to an old-fashioned cash register that would soon be replaced by touch-screen technology.

Congress adopted some of our commission’s recommendations, including the purchase of touch-screen technology and allocated $350 million to states that agreed to buy the new machines.

Some members of the commission–including me– were concerned about the possibility of hacking. Hackers had demonstrated that there were no electronic machines, no matter how sophisticated, that were secure. But our doubts were dismissed. There was no reversing the inevitable march of progress.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Trump Foolishly Fired BLS Commissioner Because He Didn’t Like the Data

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2025 //
19

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the number of new jobs created in the past month–73,000. The BLS lowered its estimates of new jobs created in the previous two months by 258,000.

The sections of the BLS report that outraged Trump said:

Total nonfarm payroll employment changed little in July (+73,000) and has shown little change 
since April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported today. The unemployment rate, 
at 4.2 percent, also changed little in July. Employment continued to trend up in health care 
and in social assistance. Federal government continued to lose jobs...

Revisions for May and June were larger than normal. The change in total nonfarm payroll employment
for May was revised down by 125,000, from +144,000 to +19,000, and the change for June was revised 
down by 133,000, from +147,000 to +14,000. With these revisions, employment in May and June 
combined is 258,000 lower than previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional 
reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and 
from the recalculation of seasonal factors.)

Trump was furious. The revisions meant that the labor force grew not by 291,000 new jobs, but by only 33,000 jobs. He insisted that the numbers were “rigged,” and he announced that they had been rigged for political reasons, to make him look bad. He fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, accusing her of chicanery. She had worked for the BLS for 20 years.

The message that was sent to all agencies was that Trump wants only good news. Numerous commentators wondered if any government data could be trusted during Trump’s tenure.

Gene Sperling posted this tweet. Sperling was a senior economic advisor to both President Clinton and President Obama.

@GenebSperling:

For anyone who spends even a split second taking even 1% of the Administration’s explanation for firing the BLS commissioner seriously, read the words of Bill Beach, the former Trump-appointed BLS commissioner:

“These numbers are constructed by hundreds of people. They’re finalized by about 40 people. These 40 people are very professional people who have served under Republicans and Democrats.

And the commissioner does not see these numbers until the Wednesday prior to the release on Friday. By that time, the numbers are completely set into the IT system. They have been programmed. They are simply reported to the commissioner, so the commissioner can on Thursday brief the president’s economic team.

The commissioner doesn’t have any hand or any influence or any way of even knowing the data until they’re completely done. That’s true of the unemployment rate. That’s true of the jobs numbers.”

I was going to post this but then I saw this brilliant article in The New York Times by Peter Baker, the Times‘ chief White House correspondent. He put Trump’s latest effort to control the jobs data into a broad perspective. Trump wants to control the news, the arts and culture, and history. He is a deeply insecure man. He wants the world to believe that he’s the most amazing person who ever lived and superior to all past presidents. Deep down he knows he’s in over his head. He has surrounded himself with sycophants and blocks out any news that disrupts his fantasy of greatness.

In an article titled “Trump’s Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook,“ Baker writes:

An old rule in Washington holds that you are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts. President Trump seems determined to prove that wrong.

Don’t like an intelligence report that contradicts your view? Go after the analysts. Don’t like cost estimates for your tax plan? Invent your own. Don’t like a predecessor’s climate policies? Scrub government websites of underlying data. Don’t like a museum exhibit that cites your impeachments? Delete any mention of them.

Mr. Trump’s war on facts reached new heights on Friday when he angrily fired the Labor Department official in charge of compiling statistics on employment in America because he did not like the latest jobs report showing that the economy isn’t doing as well as he claims it is. Mr. Trump declared that her numbers were “phony.” His proof? It was “my opinion.” And the story he told supposedly proving she was politically biased? It had no basis in fact itself.

The message, however, was unmistakable: Government officials who deal in data now fear they have to toe the line or risk losing their jobs. Career scientists, longtime intelligence analysts and nonpartisan statisticians who serve every president regardless of political party with neutral information on countless matters, such as weather patterns and vaccine efficacy, now face pressure as never before to conform to the alternative reality enforced by the president and his team.

Mr. Trump has never been especially wedded to facts, routinely making up his own numbers, repeating falsehoods and conspiracy theories even after they are debunked and denigrating the very concept of independent fact-checking. But his efforts since reclaiming the White House to make the rest of government adopt his versions of the truth have gone further than in his first term and increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries have sought to control information.

“Democracy can’t realistically exist without reliable epistemic infrastructure,” said Michael Patrick Lynch, author of the recently published “On Truth in Politics” and a professor at the University of Connecticut.

“Anti-democratic, authoritarian leaders know this,” he said. “That is why they will seize every opportunity to control sources of information. As Bacon taught us, knowledge is power. But preventing or controlling access to knowledge is also power.”

The British philosopher Francis Bacon published his meditations on truth and nature more than four centuries before Mr. Trump arrived in Washington, but history is filled with examples of leaders seeking to stifle unwelcome information. The Soviets falsified data to make their economy look stronger than it was. The Chinese have long been suspected of doing the same. Just three years ago, Turkey’s autocratic leader fired his government’s statistics chief after a report documented rocketing inflation.

Mr. Trump’s advisers defended his decision to fire the Labor Department official, saying he was only seeking accuracy, and they released a list of recent job estimates that were later revised. While revisions of job creation estimates are normal, they argued without evidence that recent ones indicated a problem.

The bureau’s “data has been historically inaccurate and led by a totally incompetent individual,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesman, said on Saturday. “President Trump believes businesses, households and policymakers deserve accurate data when making major policy decisions, and he will restore America’s trust in this key data.”

Mr. Trump has spent a lifetime trying to impose his facts on others, whether it be claiming that Trump Tower has 10 more floors than it actually has or insisting that he was richer than he actually was. He went so far as to sue the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien for $5 billion for reporting that Mr. Trump’s net worth was less than he maintained it was. The future president testified in that case that he determined his net worth based in part on “my own feelings.” (The suit was dismissed.)

His fast-and-loose approach to numbers and facts finally caught up with him last year when he was found liable for fraud in a civil case in which a judge found that he used his annual financial statements to defraud lenders and ordered him to pay what has now exceeded $500 million with interest. Mr. Trump has appealed the ruling.

During his first term as president, Mr. Trump chastised the National Park Service for not backing up his off-the-top-of-his-head estimate of the crowd size at his inauguration. He used a Sharpie pen to alter a map to argue that he was right to predict that a hurricane might hit Alabama, and federal weather forecasters were rebuked for saying it would not.

Most explosively, he pressured Justice Department officials to falsely declare that the 2020 election was corrupt and therefore stolen from him even after they told him there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

This second term, however, has seen Mr. Trump go further to force his facts on the government and get rid of those standing in the way. After just six months of his return to office, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group, counted 402 of what it called “attacks on federal science,” nearly double its count from the entire first term.

Gretchen T. Goldman, president of the union and a former science adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said federal agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose director was fired by Mr. Trump on Friday, are meant to operate more independently to avoid the politicization of data collection and reporting.

“Firing the top statistical official sends a clear signal to others across the government that you are expected to compromise scientific integrity to appease the president,” she said. “This puts us in dangerous territory far from an accountable and reality-based government.”

Mr. Trump’s team has aggressively sought to steer information emerging from the federal government since January if it contradicted the president. The top aide to Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, ordered intelligence analysts to rewrite an assessment on the Venezuelan government’s relationship with the gang Tren de Aragua that undermined the president’s claims. Ms. Gabbard later fired two intelligence officialsbecause she said they opposed Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump and his allies assailed the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for projecting that his tax and spending legislation would add trillions of dollars to the national debt and offered his own numbers instead.

“I predict we will do 3, 4, or even 5 times the amount they purposefully ‘allotted’ to us,” he said, referring to growth expected to be stimulated by tax cuts, which he insisted would “cost us no money.” Mr. Trump called the budget office “Democrat inspired and ‘controlled,’” even though it is nonpartisan and Republicans have majorities in both chambers of Congress.

In recent days, Mr. Trump has sought to rewrite the history of the 2016 election when, according to multiple intelligence reports and investigations, including by Republicans, Russia intervened in the campaign with the goal of helping him beat Hillary Clinton. Ms. Gabbard released documents that she claimed showed that in fact President Barack Obama orchestrated a “yearslong coup and treasonous conspiracy” against Mr. Trump, even though the documents she released did not prove that.

Federal officials have gotten the hint. Throughout the government, officials have sought to remove references to topics like “diversity” that might offend Mr. Trump or his team and to revise presentation of history that might in his view cast the country in a negative light. After Mr. Trump ordered the National Park Service to remove or cover up exhibits at its 433 sites across the country that “inappropriately disparage Americans,” employees have flagged displays on slavery, climate change and Native Americans for possible deletion.

Just last week, the Smithsonian Institution confirmed that it had removed Mr. Trump from an exhibit on impeachment at the National Museum of American History, despite the fact that he is the only president to have been impeached twice. The exhibit was changed to say that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal,” referring to Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton — with no mention of Mr. Trump.

The Smithsonian, which has been under pressure from Mr. Trump to eliminate “anti-American ideology,” as he put it in an executive order, said in a statement that it had made the change after reviewing the “Limits of Presidential Power” section of the exhibit, which also includes sections on Congress, the Supreme Court and public opinion.

Because the other sections had not been updated since 2008, the Smithsonian said it decided to revert the impeachment section back to its 2008 version, even though it now presents a false account of history. After The Washington Post and other outlets reported about the change, the Smithsonian on Saturday said the exhibit would be “updated in the coming weeks to reflect all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history.”

The president’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, came just hours after her office issued its monthly report showing that job growth in July was just half as much as last year’s average. The bureau also revised downward the estimated job creation of the two previous months.

Mr. Trump erupted at the news and ordered her dismissed, claiming on social media that the numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” He offered no proof but just said it was “my opinion.”

Both Democrats and Republicans criticized the move, including Mr. Trump’s labor statistics chief in his first term, William W. Beach, who wrote on social media that it was “totally groundless” and “sets a dangerous precedent.”

Speaking with reporters before heading to his New Jersey golf club for the weekend, Mr. Trump asserted bias on the part of Dr. McEntarfer, who was appointed by Mr. Biden and confirmed by a large bipartisan vote in the Senate, including Vice President JD Vance, then a senator. The example Mr. Trump offered as evidence was flatly untrue.

“Days before the election, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala,” Mr. Trump said, referring to his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. “Then right after the election — I think on the 15th, Nov. 15 — she had an eight or nine hundred thousand-dollar massive reduction.” What he meant was that the bureau revised downward its estimate of how many jobs had been created by 800,000 or 900,000 only after the election so as not to hurt Ms. Harris’s chances of victory.

Except that it actually happened the exact opposite way. Dr. McEntarfer’s bureau revised the number of jobs created downward by 818,000 in August 2024 — before the election, not after it. And the monthly report her bureau released just days before the election was not helpful to Ms. Harris but instead showed that job creation had stalled. The White House offered no comment when asked about the president’s false account.

“It’s a post-factual world that Trump is looking for, and he’s got these sycophants working for him that don’t challenge him on facts,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia.

But firing the messenger, she said, will not make the economy any better. “The reality is the economy is worse, and he can’t keep saying it’s better,” she said. “Joe Biden learned that; people still experience the experience they have, no matter how much” you tell them otherwise.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Data, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Fraud, History, International, Jobs, Lies, Research, Stupid, Trump

Jennifer Berkshire: A New Path, with Less Opportunity and Less Social Mobility

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2025 //
10

Jennifer Berkshire sums up the malicious goals that are embedded in Trump’s One Big Ugly Budget Bill. It will widen the distance between those at the bottom and those at the top. It will reduce the number of students who can pay for graduate degrees. All to assure that the very rich get a a tax break.

While the media may have moved on from the big awful bill that is now the law of the land, I continue to mull over its mess and malice. The single best description I’ve come across of the legislation’s logic comes from the ACLU’s Stefan Smith, who reminds us that the endless culture warring is all a big distraction. The real agenda when you add up all of the elements is “creating more friction for those climbing up the economic ladder in order to ease competition for those already there.” In the future that this legislation entrenches, rich kids will have an even greater advantage over their poor peers, of whom there will be now be many more. Smith calls this “reordering pipelines;” moving the rungs on the ladder further apart or kicking the ladder away works too. However you phrase it, our ugly class chasm just got wider by design.

This is why, for instance, the legislation includes seemingly arbitrary caps on how much aspiring lawyers and doctors can borrow in order to pay for school. By lowering that amount, the GOP just narrowed the pipeline of who can, say, go to med school. As Virginia Caine, president of the National Medical Association, bluntly put it: “Only rich students will survive.” Indeed, college just got more expensive and a lot less accessible for anyone who isn’t a rich student. Meanwhile, cuts to federal Medicaid funding will lead to further cuts in spending on higher education—the sitting ducks of state budgets—meaning higher tuition and fewer faculty and programs at the state schools and community colleges that the vast majority of American students attend. All so that the wealthiest among us can enjoy a tax cut.

This is also the story of the federal school voucher program that has now been foisted upon us. While the final version was an improvement over the egregious tax-shelter-for-wealthy-donors that the school choice lobby wanted, the logic remains the same, as Citizen Stewart pointedly points out:

It’s a redistribution of public dollars upward. And it’s happening at the exact moment many of the same politicians championing school choice are cutting food assistance, slashing Medicaid, gutting student loan relief, and questioning whether children deserve meals at school.

In their coverage of the new program, the education reporters at the New York Times, who’ve been pretty awful on this beat of late, cite a highly-questionable study finding that students who avail themselves a voucher are more likely to go to college. In other words, maybe vouchers aren’t so bad! Except that this sunny view misses the fast-darkening bigger picture: as states divest from the schools that the vast majority of students still attend, the odds of many of those students attending college just got steeper. That’s because as voucher programs balloon in cost, states confront a math problem with no easy answer, namely that there isn’t enough money to fund two parallel education systems. (For the latest on where the money is and isn’t going, check out this eye-opening report from FutureEd.)

Add in the Trump Administration’s decision to withhold some $7 billion from school districts and you can see where this is headed. In fact, when the folks at New America crunched the numbers, they turned up the somewhat surprising finding that the schools that stand to lose the most due to the Trump hatchet are concentrated in red states. Take West Virginia, for example, which is home to 15 of the hardest-hit districts in the land. The state’s public schools must 1) reckon with $30 + million in federal cuts even as 2) a universal voucher program is hoovering up a growing portion of state resources while 3) said resources are shrinking dramatically due to repeated rounds of tax cuts for the wealthiest West Virginians. That same dynamic is playing out in other red states too. Florida, which is increasingly straining to pay for vouchers and public schools, just lost $398 million. Texas, where voucher costs are estimated to reach $5 billion by 2030, just lost $738 million. While 28 states are now suing the administration over the funding freeze, no red state has spoken up.

Shrinking chances

On paper, budget cuts can seem bloodless. Part of the Trump Administration’s strategy is to bury the true cost of what’s being lost in acronyms and edu-lingo, trusting that pundits will shrug at the damage. But as states struggle with a rising tide of red ink, what’s lost are the very things that inspire kids to go to school and graduate: extra curriculars, special classes, a favorite teacher, the individualized attention that comes from not being in a class with 35 other kids. That’s why I’ve been heartened to see that even some long-time critics of traditional public schools are now voicing concern over what their destabilization is going to mean for students. Here’s Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, warning that the explosion of vouchers in red states is going to have dire consequences, not just for students in public schools but for the states themselves:

Enrollment loss will likely reduce the quality of schools that will continue to educate most children in the state. States will be left with large numbers of students who are unprepared for college and career success. 

David Osborne, who has been banging the drum for charter schools since the Clinton era, sounds even more worried. 

Over time, as more and more people use vouchers, the education market in Republican states will stratify by income far more than it does today. It will come to resemble any other market: for housing, automobiles or anything else. The affluent will buy schools that are the equivalent of BMWs and Mercedes; the merely comfortable will choose Toyotas and Acuras; the scraping-by middle class will buy Fords and Chevrolets; and the majority, lacking spare cash, will settle for the equivalent of used cars — mostly public schools.

Meanwhile, the billions spent on vouchers will be subtracted from public school budgets, and the political constituency for public education will atrophy, leading to further cuts.

We’ve seen this movie before

Well, maybe not the exact same movie but a similar one. Anybody recall Kansas’ radical experiment in tax cutting? Roughly a decade ago, GOP pols slashed taxes on the wealthiest Kansans and cut the tax rate on some business profits to zero. Alas, the cuts failed to deliver the promised “trickle-down” economic renaissance. What they did bring was savage cuts in spending on public schools. As school funds dried up, programs were cut, teachers were pink slipped, and class sizes soared, all of which led to a dramatic increase in the number of students who dropped out. Meanwhile, the percentage of high schoolers going to college plunged. 

Young people in the state “became cannon fodder in the fight to redistribute wealth upward,” argues Jonathan Metzl, a scholar and medical doctor, who chronicled the impact of Kansas’s tax-cutting experiment in Dying of Whiteness. Just four years of school budget cuts was enough to narrow the possibilities for a generation of young Kansans. 

But by taking a chainsaw to the public schools, the GOP also gave rise to a bipartisan parent uprising. And not only were lawmakers forced to reverse the tax cuts and restore funding for schools, but voters, who could see with their own eyes what the cuts had meant for their own kids and kids in their communities, threw the bums out the next time they had a chance. Today we’re watching as a growing number of states, with the aid of the federal government and the ‘big beautiful bill,’ embark on their own version of the Kansas experiment—slashing spending, destabilizing public schools, and limiting what’s possible for kids. They’re betting that red state voters will fall in line, sacrificing their own schools, and even their own kids, to ‘own the libs.’ That’s what the ideologues in Kansas thought too.

As I’ve been arguing in these pages, Trump’s education ‘action items’ represent the least popular parts of his agenda. Eliminating the Department of Education is a loser with voters, while cutting funds to schools fares even worse. The idea of cutting funds in order to further enrich the already rich has exactly one constituency: the rich. As the MAGA coalition begins to fragment and fall apart, we should keep reminding voters of all colors and stripes of this fact.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Cheating, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Economics, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fake, Fake News, Higher Education, Ignorance, Immigration, NPE Action Fund, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, School Choice

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
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