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Jamelle Bouie: Don’t Be Fooled Again by the GOP Tax Plan

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
3

Jamelle Bouie writes an opinion column for The New York Times, and he is my favorite on that site. His insights are clear and sharp. In this column, he reminds us that Republicans have a long history of promises about tax cuts for the middle class that have ended up enriching the wealthiest and increasing inequality.

He writes:

It’s 1981. A Republican president and his allies in Congress are promising large, broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

It’s 2001. A Republican president is promising broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

It’s 2003. That same president is promising another round of broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

It’s 2017. Yet another Republican president is promising broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

With each new Republican administration, it is the same promise. With each round of tax cuts, it is the same result: vast benefits for the wealthiest Americans and a pittance for everyone else. There is little growth but widening inequality and an even starker gap between the haves and have-nots.

President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, which inaugurated the pattern, slashed the top tax rate on investment income to 50 percent from 70 percent and the capital gains rate to 20 percent from 28 percent. “New tax benefits for business were so generous,” Michael J. Graetz writes in “The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America,” “that corporate tax receipts declined from about 15 percent to less than 9 percent of federal revenues.” The law, he continues, “substantially cut taxes on income generated from wealth, increased opportunities for tax-free savings by upper-income Americans and greatly expanded tax-shelter opportunities for high-income individuals and corporations.” It also “reduced taxes on transfers of wealth from the richest Americans to their descendants by exempting all but a small fraction of the wealthiest 1 percent” from the estate tax.

Over the next decade, Reagan and his successor George H.W. Bush were forced to raise taxes as a result of this profligacy. Reagan signed deficit-reducing tax increases in 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1987. Bush signed a significant tax increase in 1990, breaking his “Read my lips” election-year promise not to raise taxes.

George W. Bush rejected his father’s fiscal heterodoxy in favor of the unrepentant supply-side orthodoxy of Reagan’s first year. Sold as middle-class tax relief, the $1.7 trillion George W. Bush tax cuts — passed in 2001 and 2003 — were by and large a handout to the wealthiest Americans. As Graetz notes, they “reduced federal revenues from 20 percent of G.D.P. in 2000 to 15.6 percent in 2004,” and when all the changes were phased in, “they raised the after-tax incomes of people in the top 1 percent by nearly 6.5 percent — $54,000 on average — compared to about 1 percent, or an average of $207, for the bottom 40 percent.” In a 2017 analysis of the legacy of the George W. Bush tax cuts, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the top 1 percent of households received an average tax cut of over $570,000 from 2004 to 2012. Not surprisingly, it also found that these cuts “did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.”

We can basically copy and paste this dynamic from Reagan and George W. Bush to Donald Trump, who sold his 2017 tax cuts as — you guessed it — middle-class relief. “Our focus is on helping the folks who work in the mailrooms and the machine shops of America,” he told supporters in the fall of 2017. “The plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe fitters, the people that like me best.”

Except — surprise! — a vast majority of the benefits of the $1.9 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went to the highest earners — millionaire chief executives and billionaire owners of large companies. Americans in the middle received an average tax cut of $910. Americans in the top 1 percent received an average cut of $61,090. The 2017 law also cut estate taxes and gave new advantages to real estate investors, direct benefits for Trump and his family.

We are now looking at another round of Republican tax cuts. Yet again the claim is that this will benefit most Americans. “The next phase of our plan to deliver the greatest economy in history is for this Congress to pass tax cuts for everybody,” Trump said in his March 4 address to Congress. But as Paul Krugman points out in his Substack newsletter, this latest package is both a shameless giveaway to the rich and a ruinous cut to safety net programs for lower-income and working Americans.

The tax and benefit cuts are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. To pay for the more than $1.1 trillion in tax cuts for people with incomes above $500,000, the House Republican framework would cut $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — snatching food assistance away from millions of low-income families — and $800 billion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, leaving an estimated 10 million or more Americans without health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The top 0.1 percent of earners would see their income grow; the bottom 20 percent would see it plummet.

It remains to be seen whether Republicans can pass their bill in the form they want. They have had some trouble moving it out of the House of Representatives and into the Senate. But if they can, it’s hard to imagine that there will be much appetite to kill the president’s “big, beautiful bill.”

Which is all to say that it’s 2025, and a Republican president has promised a broad tax cut that will help the middle class and strengthen the economy. I think we know what is going to come next.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, Hoax, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump and Musk Are Destroying the Government

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
14

Heather Cox Richardson demonstrates the negative effects of Elon Musk’s DOGS, which protected his interests and saved little, if any, money. With Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax plan, the deficit will increase by $4-5 trillion, so Musk’s chainsaw contributed nothing but demoralization and destruction of the federal workforce. She also summarizes the multiple ways in which Trump is sabotaging the rule of law. She includes footnotes, as usual. Subscribe to her blog to see them.

She writes:

In July 2024, according to an article published today by Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey in the New York Times, billionaire Elon Musk texted privately about his concerns that government investigations into his businesses would “take me down.” “I can’t be president,” he wrote, “but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will.”

After appearing on stage with Trump on October 5, Musk texted a person close to him: “I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight. Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” About an hour later, he added: “This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised. “‘Lasers’ from space.”

Musk invested about $290 million in the 2024 election and, when Trump took office, became a fixture in the White House, heading the “Department of Government Efficiency.” It set out to kill government programs by withholding congressionally approved funds, a practice that courts have ruled unconstitutional and Congress expressly prohibited with the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.

Musk vowed that his “Department of Government Efficiency” would cut $2 trillion from the U.S. budget, but he quickly backed off on those numbers. In the end, DOGE claimed savings of $175 billion, but that claim is unverifiable and CNN’s Casey Tolan says it’s probably wrong: less than half of it is backed up with any documentation.

Instead, as CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf reported today, since DOGE cut staffing at the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service, for example, and cut employees at national parks, which also generate revenue, its cuts may well end up costing money. Max Stier, who heads the Partnership for Public Service, suggests DOGE cuts could cost U.S. taxpayers $135 billion because agencies will need to train and hire replacements for the workers DOGE fired. Stier called DOGE’s actions “arson of a public asset.”

Grind and Twohey reported that Musk’s drug consumption during the campaign—they could not speak to his habits in the White House, although he appeared high today at a White House press conference—was “more intense than previously known.” He was a chronic user of ketamine, took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, and traveled with a box that held about 20 pills for daily use. Those in frequent contact with him worried about his frequent drug use, erratic behavior, and mood swings. As a government contractor, Musk should receive random drug tests, but Grind and Twohey say he received advance warning of those tests.

It was never clear that Musk’s role at DOGE was legal, and the White House has tried to maintain that he was only an advisor, despite Trump’s February 19 statement, “I signed an order creating [DOGE] and put a man named Elon Musk in charge.” On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” saying the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’”

Trump posted today on social media: “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way. Elon is terrific!” In a press conference today, Trump reiterated that Musk “is not really leaving.”

Musk’s time at the helm of DOGE might not have saved taxpayer money, but it has changed the world in other ways. Musk has used his time in the government to end investigations into his companies, score government contracts, and get the government to press countries to accept his Starlink communications network as a condition of tariff negotiations. According to John Hyatt of Forbes, Musk’s association with Trump has made him an estimated $170 billion richer.

The implications of DOGE’s actions for Americans are huge. DOGE operatives are now embedded in the U.S. government, where they are mining Americans’ data to create a master database that can sort and find individuals. Former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper called it “a full-scale redirection of the government’s digital nervous system into the hands of an unelected billionaire.”

Today, Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik of the New York Times reported that Musk put billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir data analysis firm into place across the government, where it launched its product Foundry to organize, analyze, and merge data. Thiel provided the money behind Vice President J.D. Vance’s political career. Wired and CNN had previously reported how the administration was using this merged data to target undocumented immigrants, and now employees are detailing their concerns with how the administration could use their newly merged information against Americans more generally.

Internationally, Musk’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development, slashing about 80% of its grants, is killing about 103 people an hour, most of them children. The total so far is about 300,000 people, according to Boston University infectious disease mathematical modeller Dr. Brooke Nichols. Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect reported today that about 1,500 babies a day are born HIV-positive because Musk’s cuts stopped their mothers’ medication.

In the New York Times today, Michelle Goldberg recalls how Musk appeared uninterested in learning what USAID actually did—prevent starvation and provide basic healthcare—and instead called it a “radical-left political psy-op,” and reposted a smear from right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos calling USAID “the most gigantic global terror organization in history.” Goldberg also recalls Musk’s tendency to call people he disdains “NPCs,” or non-player characters, which are characters in role-playing games whose only role is to advance the storyline for the real players.

Aside from DOGE, the focus of Trump’s administration—other than his own cashing in on the presidency—has been on tariffs and immigration. Like the efforts of DOGE, those show a disdain for the law in favor of concentrating power in the executive branch.

During the campaign, Trump fantasized that constructing a high tariff wall around the U.S. would force other countries to fund the national deficit, enabling a Republican Congress to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. In fact, domestic industries and consumers bear the costs of tariffs. Trump’s high tariffs, many of which he imposed by declaring an economic emergency and then using the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), created such havoc in the stock and bond markets that he backed off.

Yesterday, Sayantani Ghosh, David Gaffen, and Arpan Varghese of Reuters reported that although most of the highest tariffs have yet to go into effect, Trump’s trade war has cost companies more than $34 billion in lost sales and higher costs.

Trump has changed tariff policies at least 50 times since he took office, and traders have figured out they can buy stocks cheaply when markets plummet after a dramatic tariff announcement, and sell when Trump changes his mind. This has recently given rise to Trump’s nickname “TACO,” for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

This moniker has apparently irritated Trump so much he has taken to social media to defend his abrupt dropping of tariffs on China, saying he did it to “save them” from “grave economic danger,” although in fact, China turned to other trading partners to cushion the blow of U.S. tariffs. Trump went on to suggest China did not live up to what he considered its part of the bargain, and he would no longer be “Mr. NICE GUY!”

On Wednesday a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs based on the IEEPA are illegal. The Constitution gives to Congress, not to the president, the power to levy tariffs. Trump launched a social media rant in which he attacked the judges, insisted that “it is only because of my successful use of Tariffs that many Trillions of Dollars have already begun pouring into the U.S.A. from other Countries,” and said that he could not wait for Congress to handle tariffs because it would take too long—in fact, most of Congress does not approve of the tariffs—and that following the Constitution “would completely destroy Presidential Power.” “The President of the United States must be allowed to protect America against those that are doing it Economic and Financial harm.”

Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit paused that ruling until at least June 9, when both parties will have submitted legal arguments about whether the stay should remain in place as the government appeals the ruling that the tariffs are illegal. White House senior counsel for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro, the key proponent of Trump’s trade war, said: “Even if we lose, we’ll do it another way.”

Today Trump said he will double the tariff on steel imports from 25% to 50%.

The other major focus of the administration has been expelling undocumented immigrants from the U.S. During the 2024 campaign, Trump whipped up support by insisting that former President Joe Biden had permitted criminals to walk into the U.S. and terrorize American citizens. Trump vowed to launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and often talked of deporting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., although his numbers have ranged as high as 21 million without explanation.

The administration has hammered on immigration to promote the idea that it is keeping Americans safe. But its first target of arresting at least 1,200 individuals a day has fallen far short. In Trump’s first 100 days, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it arrested an average of about 660 people a day.

On Wednesday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who along with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is the face of the administration’s immigration policy, told the Fox News Channel that the administration is now aiming for “a minimum of 3,000 arrests…every day.” Administration officials hope to deport a million people in Trump’s first year in office.

CNN reported yesterday that those officials are putting intense pressure on law enforcement agencies to meet that goal. This means that hundreds of FBI agents have been taken off terror threats and espionage cases involving China and Russia to be reassigned to immigration duties. Some FBI offices are offering overtime pay if agents help with “enforcement and removal operations.” Officers from other agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) have also been deployed against immigrants in place of their regular duties.

Steven Monacelli of The Barbed Wire noted today that local law enforcement and state troopers have also been diverted to immigration, using a national network of cameras that read license plates. Joseph Cox and Jason Keobler of 404 Media reported yesterday that a Texas sheriff used the same system over the course of a month to look for a woman whom he said had a self-administered abortion, saying her family was worried about her safety.

Their attempt to appear effective has led to very visible arrests and renditions of undocumented migrants to prisons in third countries, especially the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador. The administration has deliberately flouted the right of persons in the United States to due process as guaranteed by the Constitution. The administration has met court orders with delay and obfuscation, as well as by attacking judges and the rule of law.

The administration continues to insist those it has arrested are dangerous criminals who must be deported without delay, but more and more reporting says that many of those expelled from the country had no criminal convictions. Today, ProPublica reported that the Trump administration’s own data shows that officials knew that “the vast majority” of the 238 Venezuelans it sent to CECOT had not been convicted of crimes in the U.S. even as it deported them and called them “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters,” and “the worst of the worst.”

ICE has increasingly met quotas by arresting immigrants outside of immigration check-ins and courtrooms: yesterday Dina Arévalo of My San Antonio reported that ICE arrested five immigrants, including three children, outside of an immigration court after a judge had said they were no longer subject to removal proceedings. The officers used zip ties on all five individuals.

At stake is the turn of the United States away from democracy and toward the international right wing. Yesterday the U.S. State Department notified Congress that it intends to use the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor to promote “Democracy and Western Values.” On Tuesday a senior advisor for that bureau, Samuel Samson, who graduated from college in 2021, explained that the State Department intends to ally with the European far right to protect “Western civilization” from current democratic governments.

It also plans to turn the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which manages the flow of people into the U.S., into an “Office of Remigration” to “actively facilitate” the “voluntary return of migrants” to other countries and “advance the president’s immigration agenda.”

“Remigration” is a term from the global far right. As Isabela Dias of Mother Jones notes, its proponents call for the “mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of immigration status or citizenship, and an end to multiculturalism.” Of the congressional report, a person who works closely with the State Department told Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket: “All of it is pretty awful with some pieces that definitely violate existing law and treaties. But institutionalizing neo-Nazi theory as an office in the State Department is the most blatantly horrifying.”

This concept is behind not only the expulsion of undocumented immigrants, but also the purge of foreign scholars and lawful residents. The Supreme Court blessed this purge today when, during the period that litigation is underway, it allowed the administration to end immigration paroles for about 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela admitted under a Biden-era program, instantly making them undocumented and subject to deportation.

The court decided the case on the shadow docket, without briefings or explanation. In a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote: “[S]omehow, the Court has now apparently determined…that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”

Jackson added a crucial observation. The court, she wrote, “allows the Government to do what it wants to do regardless [of the consequences], rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process.”

—

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Citizenship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom, Funding, History, Immigration, Musk, Elon, Propaganda, Trump

Secretary of ED McMahon Wants to Destroy US Education with Her Budget!

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
6

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon released her budget proposal for next year, and it’s as bad as expected.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, reviewed the budget and concluded that it shows a reckless disregard for the neediest students and schools and outright hostility towards students who want to go to college.

We know that Trump “loves the uneducated.” Secretary McMahon wants more of them.

Burris sent out the following alert:

Image

Linda McMahon, handpicked by Donald Trump to lead the U.S. Department of Education, has just released the most brutal, calculated, and destructive education budget in the Department’s history.

She proposes eliminating $8.5 billion in Congressionally funded programs—28 in total—abolishing 10 outright and shoving the other 18 into a $2 billion block grant. That’s $4.5 billion less than those 18 programs received last year.

Tell Congress: Stop McMahon From Destroying Our Public Schools

And it gets worse: States are banned from using the block grant to support the following programs funded by Congress:

  • Aid for migrant children whose families move frequently for agricultural work
  • English Language Acquisition grants for emerging English learners
  • Community schools offering wraparound services
  • Grants to improve teacher effectiveness and leadership
  • Innovation and research for school improvement
  • Comprehensive Centers, including those serving students with disabilities
  • Technical assistance for desegregation
  • The Ready to Learn program for young children

These aren’t just budget cuts—they’re targeted strikes. 

McMahon justifies cutting support for migrant children by falsely claiming the program “encourages ineligible non-citizens to access taxpayer dollars.” That is a lie. Most migrant farmworkers are U.S. citizens or have H-2A visas. They feed this nation with their backbreaking labor.

The attack continues for opportunity for higher education:

  • Pell Grants are slashed by $1,400 on average; the maximum grant drops from $7,395 to $5,710
  • Federal Work-Study loses $1 billion—an 80% cut
  • TRIO programs, which support college-readiness and support for low-income students, veterans, and students with disabilities, are eliminated
  • Campus child care programs for student-parents are defunded

In all, $1.67 billion in student college assistance is gone—wiped out on top of individual Pell grant cuts. 

Send your letter now

And yet, McMahon increased funding for the federal Charter Schools Program to half a billion dollars for a sector that saw an increase of only eleven schools last year. Meanwhile, her allies in Congress are pushing a $5 billion private school and homeschool voucher scheme through the so-called Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA).

And despite reducing Department staff by 50%, she only cuts the personnel budget by 10%.

This is not budgeting. It is a war on public education.

This is a blueprint for privatization, cruelty, and the systematic dismantling of opportunity for America’s children.

We cannot let it stand.

Raise your voice. Share this letter: https://networkforpubliceducation.org/tell-congress-dont-let-linda-mcmahon-slash-funding-for-children-college-students-and-veterans-to-fund-school-choice/  Call Congress.

Let Congress know that will not sit silently while they dismantle our children’s future.

Thank you for all you do,

Carol Burris

Network for Public Education Executive Director

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Community Schools, Cruelty, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Privatization, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Vouchers

NYC: ICE Snatches High School Student Who Entered Legally

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2025 //
18

Michael Elden-Rooney wrote in Chalkbeat about the arrest and detention of a public high school student in New York City, which has spurred protests on the student’s behalf. He was attending a school for students learning English. His earnings after school were devoted to helping his mother and two younger siblings move out of a shelter and into an apartment. He entered the country legally. Mayor Eric Adams, who is indebted to Trump for pardoning him, has remained silent.

The campaign pushing for the release of a Bronx high school student arrested by immigration authorities last week continued to escalate with a new legal petition challenging the validity of his detention.

Attorneys for Dylan, 20, a native of Venezuela, made several moves Thursday they hope will slow, and ultimately stymie, the government’s efforts to fast-track his deportation following his arrest last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents after a routine court date.

Dylan is the first known current New York City public school student to be detained by immigration authorities in President Donald Trump’s second term. In the days following Chalkbeat’s Monday report on Dylan’s arrest, his case has become national news and galvanized local efforts to oppose Trump’s immigration policies, including a rally Thursday on the steps of the city’s Education Department headquarters in lower Manhattan.

Dylan’s attorneys from the New York Legal Assistance Group, or NYLAG, filed a “habeas corpus” petition late Thursday night in federal court in Western Pennsylvania, where Dylan is being held, arguing that immigration officials violated his due process rights by preventing him from making full use of the court system. They assert that Dylan is ineligible for “expedited” deportation because he had legal permission to enter the country under a Biden-era humanitarian program.

Dylan’s arrest was part of a nationwide enforcement blitz where government lawyers move to dismiss migrants’ immigration cases, allowing authorities to arrest them on the spot and thrust them into a fast-tracked deportation process with fewer legal protections.

Officials from the Department of Homeland security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new legal petition. They previously criticized former President Joseph Biden’s policy allowing migrants like Dylan to enter the country and said “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been.”

For the first week of his detention, Dylan’s lawyers could not reach him because he was shuttled so rapidly between four different states, according to a NYLAG spokesperson and his mother, Raiza, whose last name is being withheld at her request to avoid retaliation.

His lawyers finally managed to make contact Wednesday morning — just in time to prepare him for an interview with an asylum officer about whether he has a “credible fear” of returning to Venezuela — a hurdle Dylan must clear to avoid immediate deportation.

The interview took place early Thursday morning, with no advance notice to Dylan’s lawyers. They were only able to get a lawyer patched into the interview after Raiza alerted them shortly before, according to one of the attorneys….

“Dylan’s arrest and ongoing detention cause him enormous and continued harm,” the filing alleges. “He has been ripped away from his high school studies, his work, and his mother and young siblings who rely on him.” The full-time student at ELLIS Prep, which caters to older newly arrived immigrants, has also been working part-time as a delivery worker, helping his mom and two younger siblings move out of a shelter and into their own apartment. 

His attorneys argue that Dylan’s arrest and detention have curtailed his ability to access the court system — a violation of the due process rights guaranteed to anyone in the U.S., regardless of immigration status. In addition to his asylum claim, Dylan is applying for Special Immigration Juvenile Status, a type of legal protection for youth under 21 who can’t be reunited with both parents (his father passed away years ago), according to the petition.

Dylan was scheduled to have a hearing in family court for that case Friday morning but was unlikely to be able to attend from detention — endangering his case, according to his attorneys.

The lawyers argue that Dylan was never eligible for “expedited removal” in the first place, since the procedure is not meant for people who were “admitted or paroled” into the country like Dylan was, according to federal immigration law.

Adding to the urgency of the situation is the fact that Dylan is facing severe gastrointestinal issues that doctors were still trying to diagnose when he was detained. “These specialists are currently in the process of assessing whether Dylan’s symptoms are the result of cancer or [Crohn’s] disease,” and recommended an “immediate in-person follow up appointment,” the filing states...

Meanwhile, Dylan’s case has continued to pick up public attention. An online fundraiser that launched Wednesday to help Dylan’s mom with expenses related to his legal case and caring for her two younger children had collected more than $27,000 by Friday morning.

And hundreds of supporters — including elected officials and city schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos — rallied outside of the Education Department’s downtown Manhattan headquarters calling for his release.

Chants of “Free Dylan” echoed through the crowd of teachers union members, immigration advocates, students, and anti-Trump protesters.

“Dylan is a student, a worker, and part of our community. He did everything right, and still, ICE tore him away from his life and family in New York,” U.S. Rep. Nydia Velasquez said in a statement, the second federal elected official to publicly challenge Dylan’s detention.

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Immigration, New York City

Trump Regime Inflicts Chaos on Prestigious Science Agencies

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2025 //
11

Jocelyn Kaiser wrote in Science magazine about the chaos inflicted on the National Institutes of Health by Trump appointees and Elon Musk’s DOGS (not a misspelling) wrecking crew. Large numbers of scientists were fired, some were rehired, then fired again. What was the goal? Was it to sow demoralization and fear? If so, it succeeded.

Since World War II, the U.S. has led the world in science, medicine, and technology, which are important components of our economy. It’s by no means clear why Trump selected people who were determined to disrupt and destabilize the core of the federal science program. Kaiser interviewed many insiders to compile this overview of a machine of destruction, unleashed for unknown reasons on some of our most important science agencies.

Kaiser wrote

On a cool, sunny, mid-April day, the cheerful redbuds and other flowering trees amid the sprawling labs on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) main campus belied the pervasive gloom. Nearly 3 months into President Donald Trump’s administration, NIH in-house scientists and other workers were reeling from mass layoffs of colleagues; the removal of leaders; and limits on travel, communication, and purchasing that have shut the agency off from the outside world, hamstrung experiments, and crushed the community’s spirits.

On that spring day in Bethesda, Maryland, one senior scientist lamented that two star colleagues in his institute were heading back to their native China from NIH, abandoning a destination that had always drawn talent from around the world. “I want to cry,” he said. Another pointed to the abrupt retirement the previous day of a noted NIH nutrition scientist who said the agency had censored his publications and interactions with the media.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), billionaire Elon Musk’s quasi-official White House enforcer, “pops in and out” of online meetings of senior leaders, the scientists said. Another researcher, who is not a U.S. citizen, mentioned that he has prepared a “deportation plan,” including a company lined up to ship belongings back to his native country, in case he’s fired and loses his work visa.

The atmosphere is one of “chaos and fear and frustration and anger,” said a senior scientist with NIH’s intramural research program who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect themselves and others from retribution. This scientist added: “It’s this feeling of utter powerlessness and repeated insults.”

A former top NIH official who was forced out believes that’s the intent. “I think the plan is to sow as much chaos as possible. … I think they want a dispirited workforce at NIH so people will just say ‘to hell with it’ and leave.”

It’s working. Hundreds of NIH employees took voluntary buyouts offered by the Trump administration. And at least 25 of the roughly 320 physician-researchers who lead trials of drugs, cell therapies, and vaccines at NIH’s massive Clinical Center are leaving, as are consulting physicians, a researcher there told Science.

In NIH entryways, recently installed portraits of Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and new NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya have become a forum for silent protests. A photo of tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square during China’s 1989 student uprising was briefly plastered below one set of visages. On a different wall on another day, flyers appeared for a nationwide protest of Trump’s science cuts along with a Post-it note with the word “Shame.” A staff memo sent out the day a Science reporter visited warned of penalties for “damage or destruction of federal property” including “defacement of portraits.”

A researcher who has spent more than 2 decades with NIH’s intramural research program believes the world’s largest biomedical agency will never be the same. “However bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse. They’re dismantling and destroying everything.”

Along with firing about 2500 of the agency’s 20,000-strong federal workforce and pushing others to retire, Trump officials have used what some call “bureaucratic sabotage” in ways that likely explain why NIH has disbursed at least $1.8 billion less in funding to outside researchers in this administration’s first 3 months than it did in the same time period in 2024. They have canceled more than 800 grants on topics such as HIV research, transgender health, and vaccine hesitancy. NIH, at HHS’s behest, also tried to impose a crippling cut in the overhead payments made to universities that carry out grant-funded research.

More disruption looms, including HHS-demanded cuts to billions of dollars in contracts that fund key support staff and research centers and a White House proposal due any day now that will likely aim to slash up to 44% from NIH’s $47.4 billion budget and overhaul its structure. An agency that once had strong bipartisan support and was seen as the crown jewel of U.S. science, and the envy of the world, now faces a diminished, uncertain future.

I think the plan is to sow as much chaos as possible. … I think they want a dispirited workforce at NIH so people will just say ‘to hell with it’ and leave.

Some on the NIH campus that April day held out hope for Bhattacharya, who has said he wants to “undo some of the disruptions” and get NIH research back on track. Bhattacharya told Science this week, “It’s been a tough period” at NIH, but “I think things have turned around significantly.”

But others see him as firmly aligned with the Trump administration. In recent remarks to the research community, Bhattacharya said he wants to pivot NIH toward Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda, which focuses on chronic diseases, a shift that could come at the expense of the basic research and infectious disease studies that the agency now funds. “His presentation was distressing on multiple fronts,” says longtime NIH observer Keith Yamamoto, a cell biologist at the University of California (UC) San Francisco. 

Others outside the agency share a pessimistic assessment of NIH. “I don’t think there’s any way to sugarcoat the last 100 days. The state of the enterprise is chaotic and it’s in jeopardy,” says Mary Woolley, president of Research!America, a biomedical research advocacy group. “I am terribly worried,” says molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman, former president of Princeton University. “It will take years to undo the damage that is being inflicted right now.”

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S interference with NIH began the day after he took office, when HHS political appointees imposed a “pause” on communications from its 27 institutes and centers. Past administrations had sometimes briefly halted press releases and other communications, but this time, NIH extended the pause to public meeting attendance by scientists who handle grant programs and reviews. That meant meetings were abruptly halted, sometimes minutes before the start time or even midway through. In-house scientists and grants staff were also told to freeze hiring, purchasing, and travel. Days later, on 27 January, the White House froze grant payments from all federal agencies.

That first week, Trump appointed an acting director to replace Monica Bertagnolli, who had stepped down as NIH director days before the presidential transition. But instead of veteran Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, who had previously held the acting role, he chose Matthew Memoli, a longtime influenza researcher with NIH’s intramural program. Memoli had questioned the need for widespread COVID-19 vaccinations during the pandemic. That put him at odds with Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a frequent target of conservatives, and may have elevated Memoli in the administration’s eyes.

On Friday of the second week, the director’s office, known as Building 1, received an order to post a notice imposing an immediate 15% cap on indirect costs, the overhead payments the agency includes with each grant, to save $4 billion. Former NIH officials say they were alarmed by the sudden memo, which had multiple errors and directly conflicted with congressional restrictions on the agency’s indirect costs rates. By Monday, universities had won a court order halting the cap, arguing it was illegal.

That same week, the first signs of a widely expected purge of NIH leadership emerged. Tabak was called to a meeting at HHS headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., and told he was reassigned to a job there and would lose his NIH lab. The 25-year NIH veteran announced his retirement later that day. Deputy Director for Extramural Research Michael Lauer, who oversaw NIH grant policies, abruptly retired later that week amid rumors he, too, would be reassigned. Before he left, Lauer ordered staff to lift the NIH grant freeze after a court ruled it was illegal.

Next came what many dubbed the “Valentine’s Day massacre”—the dismissal of nearly 1200 NIH employees who, along with thousands of other federal workers, had a “probationary” status because they were new to the agency or, in many cases, were veterans but had recently changed positions. Among them were crucial Clinical Center staff along with more than a dozen tenure-track investigators. Illustrating the haphazard nature of the firings, the clinical staff and animal care workers were quickly rehired when it became clear they were essential, and the firings of the tenure-track scientists were also eventually reversed. HHS also abruptly halted routine renewals of the many intramural scientists on term-limited appointments—a policy reversed after an appeal from Memoli but that NIH researchers say has recently resurfaced.

AS FEBRUARY ROLLED into March, a new threat crystallized for the university scientists and other extramural researchers who receive the bulk of NIH funds: HHS ordered NIH to cancel hundreds of grants that allegedly violated Trump executive orders barring funding for topics that touched on diversity, equity, and inclusion and LGBTQ health. The cuts included HIV trials in South Africa, training grants, health equity and environmental studies, as well as work on vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19.

“It was soul sucking every time to see those lists of grants that were vulnerable,” says Emily Erbelding, an NIAID division director who was put on leave this month. NIH letters terminating the grants stated that the work “no longer effectuates agency priorities”—language meant to satisfy recently revised grant policy requirements.

The cuts have made a huge dent in some research fields, such as transgender health, which has lost at least $157 million in unspent NIH funding. Although researchers can appeal terminations, and a few cancellations have been reversedwithout explanation, some scientists have already shut down their programs. After losing $5 million in research and training grants studying ways to improve health care for Alzheimer’s disease in sexual and gender minorities, social scientist Jason Flatt of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas laid off his two full-time staff and is scrambling to find other support for five graduate students. “This has been my life’s work,” says Flatt, who now expects to pivot to less politically fraught Alzheimer’s studies.

It will take years to undo the damage that is being inflicted right now.

At some top research universities all NIH funding, regardless of its focus, has become leverage as the Trump administration pressures the institutions on matters unrelated to science. First the White House killed NIH grants, and other federal funds, to Columbia University in March saying it had not properly combated antisemitism in the wake of campus protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Columbia has been negotiating policy changes, so far without winning back its funding, more of which was frozen. At dozens of other universities NIH funding is threatened. Harvard University, facing the loss of at least $2.2 billion in multiyear grants from NIH and other agencies, has called the demands an attack on academic freedom and on 21 April, filed a lawsuit challenging the cancellations. Bhattacharya told Science he supports the freezes because “these institutions ought to obey the civil rights laws.” 

Much of the money flowing from NIH to universities supports early-career researchers. Other changes at the agency also threaten the U.S. pipeline for scientists. Virtually all NIH-funded training programs aimed at attracting underrepresented groups to science are now gone. “I’m concerned that these events are very likely to affect who decides to stay in science and we will lose important and necessary scientific talent,” says cell biologist Needhi Bhalla of UC Santa Cruz, who has mentored several trainees supported by these awards.

THE FIRST DAY OF APRIL, Bhattacharya’s start date, brought another wave of about 1300 job cuts at NIH as part of Kennedy’s plans to downsize and centralize operations at all HHS agencies. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) faced similarly huge reductions in force. That same week, four institute directors and one acting director at NIAID and other NIH institutes were told they had been put on leaveand in most cases offered reassignments to sites with the Indian Health Service far from their current homes. (None has publicly resigned or accepted the reassignment so far.) Other NIH leaders, including the chief of the agency’s well-regarded international center and some close to Fauci, were removed as well.

The HHS-imposed staff cuts, which ignored a plan developed by NIH leadership and submitted by Memoli, wiped out many communications, acquisitions, human resources, and policy offices. They swept up intramural scientists who many thought would be protected, including 10 tenured neuroscientists who Kennedy later said were fired by mistake—one of many acknowledged errors at NIH, CDC, and FDA. (As this story went to press, these scientists were back in the lab but had still not been officially reinstated.)

Even NIH’s biggest supporters acknowledge that some parts of the massive agency could be improved or made more efficient through centralization of necessities such as information technology. But as one senior scientist put it, “There was no planning.” Institute leaders are now scrambling to get functions handled by the disbanded offices operating again.

However bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse. They’re dismantling and destroying everything.

Some of the internal restrictions have recently been eased. Peer-review meetings to consider grant proposals have resumed, as well as institute council meetings, which do the second level of funding review. Bhattacharya quickly lifted the freeze on travel and purchasing.

Yet the staff shortages are still taking a toll. One intramural scientist had to cancel a talk at a local university because his slides, submitted 30 days earlier, had not yet been approved. The few senior scientists who have rare agency credit cards are swamped with requests to buy lab supplies. “The backlogs are crazy,” a postdoc says—6 months for mice or a microscope part that would normally take 2 weeks. Researchers are getting by with workarounds such as sharing antibodies.

With continuing losses of key technicians, physicians, and administrative staff, the Clinical Center now lags in lab testing and faces difficulty bringing in patients from outside the United States, who are needed for studies of rare diseases. Its patient population has dropped by at least 30% since Trump took over, to below 70 in April compared with more than 100 during the same month in past years, a senior clinical investigator there tells Science. The Clinical Center’s Steven Rosenberg, a pioneer in using a person’s own immune cells to fight their advanced cancer, says the staff cuts and purchasing delays mean up to 2-month delays in treatment for his seriously ill patients and fewer treated overall. “We’re working at a much slower pace,” he says.

WHETHER THINGS WILL get better at NIH now that it has a permanent director is anyone’s guess. Although he has said he backs research on health disparities, which his own work has examined, Bhattacharya supports the Trump administration cuts to diversity programs, which he calls “a political ideology.” And he has brushed off killing HIV grants in South Africa as part of a shift of resources to support Kennedy’s focus on Americans’ health. “I’m concerned that he has little autonomy,” Yamamoto says.

Rosenberg, who has met with the new director, is more optimistic: “He seemed very reasonable and eager to improve things,” he says.

More reshaping of NIH could be coming. Career staffers in Building 1 have been replaced with political appointees with no experience with research agencies. DOGE and HHS are expected to approve new grant solicitations, and the agency this week began to absorb an HHS-mandated $2.6 billion cut in contracts that fund vaccine scientists, equipment maintenance, long-running heart disease studies, and much more.

Kennedy’s influence is a particular worry. The HHS director ordered NIH to launch a study of the causes of autism, which Kennedy has falsely blamed on vaccines, although he says other “environmental” causes could have a role. Another study the White House and Kennedy have told NIH to instigate will explore “regret” among transgender people who undergo hormone treatments. “The conclusions seem predetermined,” says biochemist Jeremy Berg of the University of Pittsburgh, former director of NIH’s basic science institute and former editor-in-chief of Science. “It undermines the credibility of NIH particularly because it seems designed to drive a particular political agenda.”

The Republicans in control of Congress so far have taken no action to protect NIH, although Senator Susan Collins (R–ME) said today at a hearing on the state of the biomedical research enterprise that the cuts to NIH scientists and grants “must be reversed.” Collins chairs the committee that oversees NIH’s budget and held the hearing in partnership with the panel’s senior Democrat, Senator Patty Murray (WA). Murray has protested the many NIH cuts, most recently to NIH’s landmark Women’s Health Initiative, which HHS said it had reversed after an outcry. Congress will also decide whether to go along with Trump’s proposed, radically smaller NIH budget and reorganization plan. Indirect cost payments will almost certainly be revisited and trimmed. “We are undoubtedly at an extremely challenging time for the biomedical research community,” says Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

For now, the biomedical research community and NIH staff are hoping the resumption of council meetings will allow grants to flow out again—although staff shortages will be an impediment. Disbursing NIH’s full budget before the end of the fiscal year on 30 September “is going to be a near impossible feat for the number of people left,” says a former cancer institute official. If so, hundreds of millions of dollars in congressionally approved funding meant to identify new medical treatments and test them in patients across the U.S. and world will go back to the Department of the Treasury.

Like those on the NIH campus who spoke with Science, many of the agency’s former leaders are also not optimistic about the next 100 days, or the rest of Trump’s term. Geneticist Francis Collins, NIH director from 2009 to 2021 who abruptly retired in late February and closed his NIH lab, is one. “Reckless decisions will disrupt a noble institution with a stunningly positive track record, drive young scientists to leave the country, and damage the future health of the nation.”

With reporting by Sara Reardon.

Update, 2 May, 11:55 a.m.: Additional comments from NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, from an interview after this story was posted, have been added.

Categories Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Courts Are Our Guardrail–For Now

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2025 //
11

Heather Cox Richardson is a national treasure. she is also an exemplar of the value of studying history as a guide to today’s events and their meaning.

She writes:

Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.

The administration sustained more losses today.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” The administration had tried to dismiss the case, but Chutkan ruled the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’” “The Constitution does not permit the Executive to commandeer the entire appointments power by unilaterally creating a federal agency…and insulating its principal officer from the Constitution as an ‘advisor’ in name only,” she wrote.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon struck down Trump’s March 27 executive order targeting the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, more commonly known as WilmerHale. This law firm angered Trump by employing Robert Mueller, the Republican-appointed special counsel who oversaw an investigation of the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

Leon, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, made his anger obvious. “[T]he First Amendment prohibits government officials from retaliating against individuals for engaging in protected speech,” Leon noted. “WilmerHale alleges that ‘[t]he Order blatantly defies this bedrock principle of constitutional law.’” Leon wrote: “I agree!” He went on to strike down the order as unconstitutional.

Today NPR and three Colorado public radio stations sued the Trump administration over Trump’s executive order that seeks to impound congressionally appropriated funds for NPR and PBS. The executive order said the public media stations do not present “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.” NPR’s David Folkenflik reported White House spokesperson Harrison Fields’s statement today that public media supports “a particular party on the taxpayers’ dime,” and that Trump and his allies have called it “left-wing propaganda.”

The lawsuit calls Trump’s executive order and attempt to withhold funding Congress has already approved “textbook retaliation.” “[W]e are not choosing to do this out of politics,” NPR chief executive officer Katherine Maher told NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. “We are choosing to do this as a matter of necessity and principle. All of our rights that we enjoy in this democracy flow from the First Amendment: freedom of speech, association, freedom of the press. When we see those rights infringed upon, we have an obligation to challenge them.”

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis today denied the administration’s motion for a 30-day extension of the deadline for it to answer the complaint in the lawsuit over the rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man sent to El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error.”

Despite five hearings on the case, the administration’s lawyers didn’t indicate they needed any more time, but today—the day their answer was due—they suddenly asked for 30 more days. Xinis wrote that they “expended no effort in demonstrating good cause. They vaguely complain, in two sentences, to expending ‘significant resources’ engaging in expedited discovery. But these self-described burdens are of their own making. The Court ordered expedited discovery because of [the administration’s] refusal to follow the orders of this court as affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court.”

Trump is well known for using procedural delays to stop the courts from administering justice, and it is notable that administration lawyers have generally not been arguing that they will win cases on the merits. Instead, they are making procedural arguments.

Meanwhile, stringing things out means making time for situations to change on the ground, reducing the effect of court decisions. Brian Barrett of Wired reported today that while Musk claims to have stepped back from the Department of Government Efficiency, his lieutenants are still spread throughout the government, mining Americans’ data. Meanwhile, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought will push to make DOGE cuts to government permanent in a dramatic reworking of the nation’s social contract. “Removing DOGE at this point would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water,” Barrett writes.

Political scientist Bonica notes that there is a script for rising authoritarians. When the courts rule against the leader, the leader and his loyalists attack judges as biased and dangerous, just as Trump and his cronies have been doing.

The leader also works to delegitimize the judicial system, and that, too, we are seeing as Trump reverses the concepts of not guilty and guilty. On the one hand, the administration is fighting to get rid of the constitutional right of all persons to due process, rendering people who have not been charged with crimes to prisons in third countries. On the other, Trump and his loyalists at the Department of Justice are pardoning individuals who have been convicted of crimes.

On Monday, Trump issued a presidential pardon to former Culpeper County, Virginia, sheriff Scott Jenkins, a longtime Trump supporter whom a jury convicted of conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and seven counts of bribery. Jared Gans of The Hill explained that Jenkins accepted more than $70,000 in bribes to appoint auxiliary deputy sheriffs, “giving them badges and credentials despite them not being trained or vetted and not offering services to the sheriff’s office.” Jenkins had announced he would “deputize thousands of our law-abiding citizens to protect their constitutional right to own firearms,” if the legislature passed “further unnecessary gun restrictions.” Jenkins was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Although Jenkins was found guilty by a jury of his peers, just as the U.S. justice system calls for, Trump insisted that Jenkins and his wife and their family “have been dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden D[epartment] O[f] J[ustice].” Jenkins, Trump wrote on social media, “is a wonderful person, who was persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters,’ and ‘left for dead.’ This is why I, as President of the United States, see fit to end his unfair sentence, and grant Sheriff Jenkins a FULL and Unconditional Pardon. He will NOT be going to jail tomorrow, but instead will have a wonderful and productive life.”

Today Trump gave a presidential pardon to Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to tax crimes in 2024. The pardon arrived after Walczak’s mother donated at least $1 million to Trump. The pardon spares Walczak from 18 months in prison and $4.4 million in restitution. Also today, Trump announced plans to pardon reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who were sentenced to 7 and 12 years in prison for conspiracy to defraud banks of $36 million and tax evasion. Their daughter spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Bonica notes that delegitimizing the judicial system creates a permission structure for threats against judges. That, too, we are seeing.

Bonica goes on to illustrate how this pattern of authoritarian attacks on the judiciary looks the same across nations. In 2009, following a ruling that he was not immune from prosecution for fraud, tax evasion, and bribery, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi railed about “communist prosecutors and communist judges.” In 2016, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye rejected the authority of his country’s highest court and purged more than 4,000 judges. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe pushed judges to stop protests, and the judiciary collapsed. In the Philippines in 2018, Rodrigo Duterte called the chief justice defending judicial independence an “enemy,” and she was removed. In Brazil in 2021, Jair Bolsonaro threatened violence against the judges who were investigating him for corruption.

But, Bonica notes, something different happened in Israel in 2023. When Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition tried to destroy judicial independence, people from all parts of society took to the streets. A broad, nonpartisan group came together to defend democracy and resist authoritarianism.

“Every authoritarian who successfully destroyed judicial independence did so because civil society failed to unite in time,” Bonica writes. “The key difference? Whether people mobilized.”

—

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Trump

Maurice Cunningham: DFER Moves into MAGA Orbit

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2025 //
2

Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science at the university of Massachusetts and a specialist on dark money in education, exposes the rightward shift of Democrats for Education Reform, as well as its continuing disintegration. DFER spent years cheerleading for charter schools and test-based teacher evaluation, but its pretense has dissolved. Cunningham said it is now closely aligned with rightwing groups.

Cunningham writes:

Democrats for Education Reform, the front operation for billionaire privateering of public education, has gone all-in for right-wing policies. This likely reflects two factors: the collapse of DFER nationally, and an opportunistic pivot to Trump’s MAGA regime.

DFER was established upon the premise, according to its hedge fund co-founder Whitney Tilson, that it would spend lavishly as part of an “inside job” to turn the Democratic Party away from teachers unions and public education and toward charter schools. Its CEO Jorge Elorza has just announced the organization will race even further to the right: DFER will now “Explore innovative funding models such as education savings accounts (ESAs), vouchers, and tax credit programs.” (emphasis in original). This is the program of billionaires Linda McMahon, Betsy DeVos–and Donald Trump.

Judging by the number of high-level staff fleeing from DFER, Elorza has been driving the operation into the ground. Jessical Giles, who served for six years as Washington, D.C. executive director recently resigned because DFER’s policies “no longer align with my values and vision.” 

Other DFER leaders have complained of the group’s gallop toward political extremism. In a complaint filed in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, former Massachusetts executive director Mary Tamer wrote that Elorza retaliated against her for “inquiring about Mr. Elorza’s decision to join a Koch-funded right-wing coalition that seemed contrary to the organization’s best interests and mission.” The right-wing coalition seems to be the No More Lines Coalition, which includes not only Koch aligned organizations but Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Childrenand the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Elorza has been a guest speaker at the Charles Koch Institute. Tamer is seeking damages against  DFER, and the allied Education Reform Now and Education Reform Now Advocacy for gender and age discrimination.

Tamer’s complaint alleges a number of defections by key DFER leaders. Within months of Elorza’s arrival COO Shakira Petit left, and CFO Sheri Adebiyi was fired. Board Chair Marlon Marshall and Charles Ledley, a co-founder, resigned. The complaint further alleges that “Ms. Tamer is one of several women in leadership positions who have been terminated or pushed out by the Defendants.” That list includes Connecticut state director Amy Dowell and Jen Walmer of Colorado, a close adviser on education to Governor Jared Polis and one of DFER’s most effective advocates.

Despite the name, DFER has raised millions over the years from Republican-backing billionaires. The Walton Family Foundation, the non-profit corporation of the notoriously anti-union family that owns WalMart, has sustained DFER. Rupert Murchoch, who regards K-12 education as a $500 billion market gave DFER at least $1 million, apparently in the hopes the operation would help his ed tech company. 

Elorza’s announcement of DFER’s shift leans on the “market-based solutions” language of neo-liberal privateering, but the reality is that neo-liberalism is not where the action is in 2025. Families for Excellent Schools, at one time a privateering powerhouse, collapsed in 2018. In 2011 Stand for Children president Jonah Edelman boasted his organization had nine state affiliates and would grow to twenty states by the end of 2015. In 2025 Stand for Children is hanging on in seven states. 

Since its 2007 founding, DFER has claimedchapters in nineteen different states plus D.C. and a teachers group. By February 2025 only four chapters remained. In January 2023, DFER listed thirteen national staffers. By February 2025, it had only four. As of May 2025, the “States” and “National Staff” links on DFER’s webpage have disappeared. An Elorza biography lives on. 

The action now is with extremist organizations like the Koch and Leonard Leo aligned Parents Defending Education and Heritage Foundation offspring Moms for Liberty. 

Self-described “school choice evangelist” Corey DeAngelis accurately sees that DFER has joined with the far right on education privateering.  DeAngelis was the face of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children  until he was fired after revelations he had starred in gay sex porn films. He is now a “senior fellow” at the American Culture Project, which is tied to the Koch network through the Franklin News Foundation. DeAngelis is cheering DFER’s embrace of the Republican education privateering platform. 

What has DFER really joined here? The end game was spelled out in a 2017 memorandumfrom the secretive Council for National Policy to Trump and DeVos: abandon public education in favor of “free-market private schools, church schools and home schools.” 

That is your “choice.” 

DFER has never been a membership organization—there are few real Democrats involved. To be sure, it has gotten donations from charter favoring Democratic billionaires as well as an array of Republican privateers, plus millions of dollars in untraceable dark money. DFER’s organizational drift and rank political opportunism have now cemented its bond with Trump’s MAGA regime.

Maurice T. Cunningham is a retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization(2021).

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Dark Money, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Hoax, Koch Brothers

Trump Threatens to Transfer Harvard’s Billions for Scientific Research to Trade Schools, Demands Names of Foreign Students

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
13

Trump is a petty man who is filled with rage, grievance, and a passion for retribution. His current target is Harvard University because the nation’s most prestigious university told him no. Harvard’s President Alan Garber said it would not allow the federal government to control its curriculum, its admissions, and its hiring policies. No.

Every Cabinet department has pulled research grants to Harvard. Now he warns he might turn the billions that were going to medical and scientific research and hand it over to trade schools.

He would rather stop researchers who are trying to find cures for cancer, tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases than back down on his efforts to stifle academic freedom and his vendetta against Harvard.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather see the federal government fund the search for a cure for MS than withdraw the funding. If he wants to fund trade schools, why should he do so at the expense of crucial research?

He wrote on Truth Social yesterday:

“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” Trump said in a post on social media. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”

Meanwhile, Trump dreamed up another way to harass Harvard during the hours when he couldn’t get to sleep. He demanded that Harvard give him a list containing the names and countries of origin of all its foreign students. Harvard has nearly 7,000 foreign students. Why? What will he do with those names? Will he say they are spies and try again to expel them? Funny thing is he already has all their names and countries. They were registered when they applied for a visa. It’s all a campaign of endless vengeance by a petty, bitter man.

Categories Academic Freedom, Economy, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Higher Education, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! The “Beautiful” Tax Bill Guts the Rule of Law!

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
12

That “One Big Beautiful Bill” is supposed to be about the budget and taxes but tucked into it are a variety of dangerous items that Trump partisans hope will go unnoticed.

The most dangerous item of all undercuts the rule of law.

Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger noticed it. They posted this warning on Twitter:

Our blog contributor called Quickwrit noticed the innocuous but dangerous insertion into the bill.

Quickwrit write here:

DANGER!!! DANGER!!! DANGER!!!

Buried at the bottom of Page 562 in the Republicans’ 1,116-page “Big Beautiful Bill” is a provision that will end all federal court challenges to anything that Trump orders and that will allow Trump to declare null and void all previous rulings against his orders.

It will be the beginning of genuine dictatorial rule.

The provision on Page 562 invokes enforcement of Federal Rules of Civil Procedures Rule 65(c) which says that a federal court can ONLY issue an injunction AFTER a plaintiff has posted a bond to cover the costs of damages that an injunction could have on the party against which the injunction was issued if subsequent appeals overturn the injunction.

Because Trump and his federal agencies could claim billions of dollars in damages if an injunction is overturned by the pro-Trump U.S. Supreme Court, there is NO ONE WHO CAN AFFORD to seek any future injunction against Trump’s orders or those of his agencies.

IN ADDITION: Rule 65(c) will be applied RETROACTIVELY to all the injunctions issued so far against Trump and his agencies, and all those injunctions will be removed because no bond was posted with any of them.

THE EFFECT WILL BE that everything that has been blocked by the federal courts will be unleashed and there will be NO FUTURE INJUNCTIONS issued against ANYTHING that Trump orders to be done.

Even if none of the many other odious things are removed from the Big Beautiful Bill, this provision to invoke Federal Court Rule 65(c) MUST BE ELIMINATED or there will be no future restraints on Trump. He will be free to dictate anything he wants with NO COURT INTERFERENCE. Rule by law will end in America.

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Republicans, Trump

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences Issues a Statement about the Current Crisis

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2025 //
4

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is the most distinguished scholarly organization in the nation. It is dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences. It is decidedly nonpartisan. I was elected to membership many years ago. AAAS rarely issues a statement. Its board did so in April because of unprecedented attacks on higher education, scholarly independence, and the rule of law.

A statement from the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 
Approved April 2025. 

Since its founding in 1780, the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences has sought “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuouspeople.” We do this by celebrating excellence in every field of human endeavor and by supporting the unfettered pursuit of knowledge and its application to the common good.

The Academy fosters nonpartisan, deliberative discourse on pressing issues facing our communities in the United States and the world.Our founders were also the founders of our nation. From them, we inherit a deep commitment to the practice of democratic self-governance. Our constitutional democracy has been imperfect, but almost 250 years since its inception, it remains an inspiration to peoplenear and far. Ours is a great nation because ofour system of checks and balances, separation of powers, individual rights, and an independent judiciary — as the Academy’s founder JohnAdams put it, “a government of laws, not of men.” And we are a great nation because we haveinvested in the arts and sciences while protecting the freedom that enables them to flourish.

These values are under serious threat today.Every president of the United States has the prerogative to set new priorities and agendas; nopublic or private institution is above criticism or calls for reform; and no reasoned arguments, from the left or the right, should be silenced. But current developments, in their pace, scale, and hostility toward institutions dedicated to knowledge and the pursuit of truth, have little precedent in our modern history.

We oppose reckless funding cuts and restrictions that imperil the research enterprise of our universities, hospitals, and laboratories, which contribute enormously to our prosperity, health, and national security. We condemn efforts to censor our scholarly and cultural institutions, to curtail freedom of the press, and to purge inquiry or ideas that challenge prevailing policies. We vigorously support the independence of the judiciary and the legal profession, and opposeactions and threats intended to erode thatindependence and, in turn, the rule of law.

In this time of challenge, we cherish theseprinciples and stand resilient against efforts to undermine them. The Academy will continue to urge public support for the arts and sciences, and also work to safeguard the conditions of freedom necessary for novel discoveries, creative expression, and truth-seeking in all its forms. We join a rising chorus of organizations and individuals determined to invigorate the democratic ideals of our republic and its constitutional values, and prevent our nation from sliding toward autocracy. 

In the coming months and years, the Academy will rededicate itself to studying, building, and amplifying the practices of constitutional democracy in their local and national forms, with particular focus on its pillars of freedom of expression and the rule of law. We call on all citizens to help fortify a civic culture unwavering in its commitment to our founding principles.

Categories Art, Censorship, Creativity, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Higher Education, History, Justice, Science
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