The DeVos family has poured millions into persuading the people of Michigan to endorse vouchers but they have failed. So far. In a statewide referendum in 2000 sponsored by the DeVoses, voters resoundingly rejected vouchers. Since no voucher referendum has ever passed in any state, the voucher pushers have to find another route that does not include letting voters decide.
Josh Owen thinks they may have found the strategy. He wrote the following editorial for The Detroit Free Press. His article was republished by the Network for Public Education.
Noted voucher scholar Josh Cowen wrote an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press warning Michigan that the GOP is trying yet another backdoor approach to getting vouchers into the state.
Michiganders don’t want school vouchers. But the federal government might force vouchers into Michigan, whether we want them to or not.
In the coming days, Congress will consider whether to include the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA) among many GOP priorities as part of the budget reconciliation process that will set federal spending for next year and beyond.
That bill, which GOP leaders have introduced in both the Senate and the House, is a school voucher plan mixed with a tax credit that would allow donors to divert all or part of what they owe in federal taxes to other organizations that then distribute those funds for private K-12 tuition and other private educational expenses.
Put another way, this is the federal version of the voucher plans spreading in red states across the country — except this one is nestled inside a tax shelter for mostly wealthy donors. Those donors can give either $5,000 or up to 10% of their adjusted income — whichever is greater — for $10 billion in diverted revenue in the first year alone. Then that spending cap can go up. A similar, Michigan-specific version of this scheme was unsuccessfully backed by Betsy DeVos and allies three years ago.
The new federal bill would top off voucher spending in states that have those systems already, and force vouchers into states that have don’t have or want them — states like Michigan.
Our state constitution bans state funding from going to private K-12 schools. But the new voucher tax credit could circumvent that ban by using federal dollars instead. So much for “giving education back to the states,” as the Trump Administration says it wants to do.
CNN reported on one of Trump’s absurd stunts: He insisted on releasing billions of gallons of water from two dams in California as a show of his genius in sending water to douse the fires in Los Angeles. But the water flowed far away from Los Angeles and wasted water that local farmers needed in the summer.
Representatives from the Department of Government Efficiency repeatedly pressured the head of a United States water management agency to open a major California pump system in late January, intending to release a huge amount of water south toward Los Angeles — even though the water would have never made it to the fire-scarred metropolis.
When the acting head of the Bureau of Reclamation did not relent, the DOGE agents flew to California with the goal of turning the pumps on themselves, in what people familiar with the incident characterized as a stunt for a “photo op.”
The account comes from six people with knowledge of the events that took place as President Donald Trump falsely claimed the LA fires were a result of the state’s water policies, and demanded more water be sent south. The people who spoke with CNN were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the events. They also feared retaliation from the Trump administration.
The new details serve as a peek into the inner workings of the chaotic second Trump administration in its first weeks as it sparred with California Gov. Gavin Newsom over the response to the Los Angeles fires.
A power outage — and the fact that at least one of the DOGE representatives was not yet an employee of the federal government and therefore was not allowed near the pump controls — ultimately threw a wrench in the plan to engage the pumps in late January.
But a few days later, in a show of authority that superseded California’s own water policy, Trump ordered the US Army Corps to open two dams in central California, which ultimately flooded farmland in the San Joaquin Valley with 2.2 billion gallons of fresh water. State water experts previously told CNN it was a regrettable waste as farmers look anxiously toward the state’s dry season….
Water experts told CNN after the incident the water release was wasteful and put farmers at risk of running out of water this summer and fall. The water flowed into the dry Tulare lakebed and soaked into the ground.
Trump celebrated the water release on January 31 by posting a photo of what looked like a river near a dam. He said 1.6 billion gallons was initially being released but more would come.
“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California,” Trump said. “Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory!”
ProPublica is an amazing investigative organization. They report on abuses of power, without fear or favor. This story explains why the DOGE cuts of personnel at the IRS will be very costly. People with complex tax returns like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are unlikely to be audited, as if anyone would dare to do so.
Andy Kroll of ProPublica reports:
Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox.
Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.
But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.
As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.
Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but he was befuddled by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS specialists like him who, even by the logic of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”
Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his billionaire top adviser Musk have launched an all-out blitz to cut costs and shrink the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administration leaders not only say the U.S. government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a bastion of political opposition, calling it the “deep state.”
The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
One tactic used by the administration is to target probationary workers who are easier to fire because they have fewer civil service protections. Probationary, in this context, means only that the employees are new to their roles, not that they’re newbies or underperformers. ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency.
In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency has been hit especially hard, current and former employees said, because it spent 2023 preparing to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service personnel and had only started hiring and training those workers at any scale in 2024, meaning many of those new employees were still in their probationary period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave, in the spring of last year. The boost came after Congress had underfunded the agency for much of the past decade, which led to chronic staffing shortages, dismal customer service and plummeting audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more a year.
Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.
Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owns, whether they would “like @DOGE to audit the IRS,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service team of lawyers and engineers led by him. DOGE employees have sought to gain access to IRS taxpayer data in an attempt to “shine a light on the fraud,” according to a White House spokesman.
For this story, ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals. Within the IRS, the LB&I division has the highest return on investment, and the widespread cuts there put in stark relief the human and financial cost of the Trump administration’s approach to slashing government functions in the name of saving money and combating waste and fraud.
According to current and former LB&I employees, the taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction firms and major technology corporations, as well as more obscure private corporations and high-net-worth individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to ProPublica would disclose specific taxpayer information, citing privacy laws.
With the recent influx in funding, employees said, the leadership of LB&I had pushed to hire not only more revenue agents and appraisers but also specialized employees such as petroleum engineers, computer scientists and experts in corporate partnerships. These employees, usually known internally as general engineers, consulted on complicated tax returns and helped determine whether taxpayers properly claimed certain credits or other tax breaks.
This work happened in cases where major companies claimed a hefty research tax credit, which is a legitimate avenue for seeking tax relief but can also be improperly used. Highly skilled appraisers have also recouped huge savings in cases involving notorious tax schemes, such as what’s known as a syndicated conservation easement — a break abused so often that both congressional Democrats and Republicans have criticized it, while the IRS has included it on its list of the “Dirty Dozen” tax scams.
“These are cases where revenue agents don’t have the technical expertise,” said one IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and who, like other IRS employees, wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We are working on things where expertise is absolutely necessary.”
Current and former IRS employees told ProPublica that the agency had expended a huge amount of resources to recruit and train new specialists in recent years. Vanessa Rollins, an engineer in the IRS’ Chicago office who was recently fired, said probationary employees in LB&I outnumbered full-time staffers in her office. Much of her team’s work centered on training and mentorship for the waves of new employees — most of whom were recently fired. “The entire office had been oriented around bringing us in and getting us trained,” Rollins said.
These specialists said they earned higher salaries compared with many other IRS employees. But the money these specialists recouped as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than what they cost. The current engineer told ProPublica that they estimated their team of less than 10 people had brought in $5 billion in adjusted tax returns over the past four years. (By contrast, a Wall Street Journal analysispublished on Feb. 22 found that DOGE had found savings of $2.6 billion over the next year, far less than the $55 billion claimed by DOGE itself.)
A former LB&I revenue agent added that their work didn’t always lead to the IRS recouping money from a taxpayer; sometimes, they audited a return only to find that the taxpayer was owed more money than they had expected.
“The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly so they pay the tax they legally owe, including making sure they’re not paying any more than legally required,” the former revenue agent said.
Notwithstanding its return on investment and the sense of duty espoused by its employees, LB&I was hit especially hard by the most recent wave of firings, employees said. According to the current IRS engineer, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the jobs of about 120 LB&I engineers out of a total of roughly 260. The person said they had heard more terminations were expected soon. The acting IRS chief and a longtime agency leader, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement amid the firings.
Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the mass layoffs had been ordered from a very high level and that several layers of managers had no idea they were coming or what to expect. The cuts, employees said, did not appear to distinguish between employees with certain specialties or performance levels, but instead focused solely on whether they were on probationary status. “It didn’t matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut,” another current LB&I employee told ProPublica.
The current and former IRS employees said the firings and the administration’s deferred resignation offer led to situations that have wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Jack McCumber was an LB&I senior appraiser in Seattle who got fired about six weeks before the end of his probationary status. He said not only did he lose his job, but the veteran appraiser who was his mentor took early retirement. McCumber and his mentor often worked on syndicated conservative easement cases that could recoup tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out the experienced people, and they’re pushing out people like me,” McCumber said. “It’s a double whammy.”
The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.
“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn’t anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I’ll do it again this year.’”
“When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”
The Trump administration plans to roll out a massive voucher program that will be available in every state.
We know from the statistics of every voucher program that most vouchers will be claimed by students who never attended public schools. The voucher recipients are already attending religious and private schools. Their parents are able to pay tuition, but will gladly accept a government subsidy to lower their costs. In every state with universal vouchers, most are taken by students already in nonpublic schools.
We also know that vouchers will not help the poorest kids, who are likely to be rejected by good private schools and end up losing ground in substandard schools. Vouchers have not improved education in any state that adopted them. One of the nation’s most expansive voucher programs is in Florida; that state just posted its worst NAEP score in two decades. To learn more, read Josh Cowen’s The Privateers.
Nonetheless, Laura Meckler reports in The Washington Post, the Trump administration is prepared to dole out billions of federal dollars to pay for tuition at nonpublic schools, most of them religious.
Meanwhile, the public schools, which enroll nearly 90% of all K-12 students in the U.S., would receive less funding, have larger class sizes, and less money for teachers’ salaries.
Vouchers have been tested in state referenda repeatedly and have consistently, often by huge margins.
Meckler writes:
The school voucher movement has scored victories in conservative states in a quest to send public dollars to private schools, with tax money following the child. Now backers see their best chance yet to go national.
Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, are pushing for a new tax credit that would direct billions of dollars a year to school voucher programs — and not just in conservative states.
The program would be fueled by a powerful, never-before-tried incentive: Taxpayers who donate to voucher programs would get 100 percent of their money back when they file their taxes. That means the tax break for giving to voucher programs would dwarf tax incentives for giving to churches, hospitals, food banks and every other charity.
Taxpayers who donate to other charities might qualify for a tax deduction — meaning they would not pay taxes on the dollars they contribute. But donors to voucher programs would get a dollar-for-dollar tax credit, meaning they could subtract the full value of the donation from their bottom line tax liability.
The goal is to give more families more options for their children’s education. Too many children, supporters say, are stuck in public schools that do not serve them well but cannot afford other options. A federal program would give more children in more states the opportunity to make a different choice for their education. The tax credit, they say, would encourage and allow taxpayers who want to help to do so.
One version of the plan would cost the federal government $5 billion a year in lost revenue; another version, $10 billion. At $10,000 per student, $5 billion would be enough to pay for about 500,000 vouchers, which families could use to send their children to private schools or to pay for home schooling expenses. Under a version of the bill approved by the House Ways and Means Committee last fall and a new version introduced this year, all but the wealthiest families would be eligible to receive vouchers.
“It would be transformational,” said Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, which advocates for school choice programs. [Blew worked for Betsy DeVos when she was Secretary of Education.] “Although the numbers are very small in the federal context, in the context of the school choice movement, these are huge numbers.”
About 46 million American children — nearly nine in 10 — attend public schools; about 5 million are enrolled in private schools, according to federal data.
But opposition is fierce from those who say these plans drain resources from public schools, which are required by law to take all children. Public school advocates are mobilizing publicly and privately against the plan, lobbying Republicans who might oppose it based on the merits or the cost.
“We’re making sure the public understands this is the greatest threat to public education we’ve ever had at the federal level,” said Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy for AASA, the School Superintendents Association, who helps lead a coalition of more than 60 groups opposed to the voucher plan.
Pudelski noted that unlike public schools, private schools can reject students based on their religion, test scores, disability or ability to pay tuition. The vast majority of vouchers in existing state programs go to religious schools.
“It would be the first time the federal government is choosing to subsidize a secondary private system of education that can pick and choose the students it educates over the one that welcomes all,” she said.
Voters, too, have opposed these plans. In November, ballot measures to allow vouchers in Kentucky and Colorado failed, while voters in Nebraska voted to repeal a voucher program put into place by the legislature.
But the federal plan enjoys robust support from the most powerful people in today’s Republican Party. President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to create a federal school choice program. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) have both co-sponsored versions of the voucher legislation.
There goes the separation of church and state. There goes common sense. Voucher programs don’t help students. They hurt public schools, which enroll the vast majority of students. Vouchers are a huge drain on the budget.
Why should taxpayers pay tuition for wealthy families? Why should taxpayers underwrite tuition at schools that discriminate against students for any reason they want, be it race, religion, disability status, sexual orientation, or low test scores? If public schools did that, their test scores would be sky-high, but it would betray the promise of public schools: equal educational opportunity. Not for only those we choose to admit.
Mona Charen was a bona fide rightwing conservative and a syndicated columnist until Trump was elected in 2016. She then became an outspoken Never-Trumper and joined her fellow disillusioned Republicans–which some no longer are–at The Bulwark. The Bulwark is consistently most interesting blog that I read, offering the views of sadder-but-wiser smart people, disillusioned by Trump. Maybe I enjoy because I was in the same place 17 years ago.
In this column, Charen takes Trump’s defenders over the coals. This is not her full column. She also took aim at Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who was one a staunch defender of Ukraine, but turned on a dime when he saw Trump’s disdain for Zelensky. Open the link and read it all.
She writes:
IN 2022, AFTER RUSSIAN TANKS ROLLED across an international border into Ukraine and missiles pierced the quiet of cities like Kharkiv and Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky earned worldwide acclaim for his courage and heroism. Famously, in response to an American offer of a safe exit, he replied “I don’t need a ride. I need ammunition.” Former President George W. Bush expressed what many were thinking when he declared that Zelensky was the “Winston Churchill of our time.”
But perhaps no one was more pro-Ukrainian than Sen. Lindsey Graham, who exulted in an arrest warrant the Russians had issued against him:
I will wear the arrest warrant issued by Putin’s corrupt and immoral government as a Badge of Honor. To know that my commitment to Ukraine has drawn the ire of Putin’s regime brings me immense joy. I will continue to stand with and for Ukraine’s freedom until every Russian soldier is expelled from Ukrainian territory.
Last Friday, after mad king Donald and his scheming viceroy, JD Vance, performed a tag-team ambush on Zelensky in the Oval Office, Graham sounded a different note. “A complete, utter disaster,” he told reporters, which is okay as far as it goes. But then it became clear that he had inverted victim and aggressor. He continued, “Somebody asked me if I was embarrassed about President Trump. I have never been more proud of the president. I was very proud of JD Vance for standing up for our country.”
Disgusting. A politician whose identity was forged as a hawk and staunch defender of liberty and democracy now praises the most powerful man in the world for sandbagging the beleaguered leader of a bleeding ally, a victim of aggression? That’s standing up for America?
There are still millions of Americans who value loyalty to the country and its values over loyalty to a party that lost all its values. Join us.Join
Ditto Marco Rubio, that gelding who has likewise transformed himself from a champion of freedom into an obedient toady to the man whose project is to destroy the Western alliance.
We live in an upside-down world where the far greater man, Zelensky, is being hounded to apologize to the gangster who behaved abominably.
Consider that even before the Oval Office debacle, Trump and his team had been grossly disrespectful and abusive toward Zelensky and Ukraine. Trump called him a “dictator” (though he declined to say as much about Putin) and lambasted him for failing to hold elections. (It is not permitted under Ukrainian law to hold elections during wartime.) He did not mention Putin’s failure to hold free elections for 25 years. Trump then repeated Putin’s propaganda that Ukraine, not Russia, had started the war. Secretary of Defense (God help us) Pete Hegseth pronounced that it would be unrealistic for Ukraine to win back its own territory. Vance told a European audience that he feared “the threat from within” far more than Russia or China. And then Trump proposed a “deal” that amounted to extortion, demanding the right to mine rare earth elements (which Trump called “raw earths”) on Ukrainian soil in return for . . . nothing. At first, Trump claimed that it was to compensate the United States for aid already donated, and though there were later iterations of the deal—all of which were blown up when Zelensky was ejected from the White House—the essential nature of the proposed agreement was clear. It was a shakedown. As Trump unguardedly admittedwhen he lost his temper, he regards Ukraine as a target for extortion because they “don’t have any cards.” Without the United States, Trump thundered, “you have nothing.”
It was the most shameful moment in American presidential history in at least a century. And while the focus of opprobrium should be on Trump and his smarmy understudy, a special shame also attaches to the explainer class of analysts who, without even the excuse of fearing voters, perform pirouettes on their principles.
AS RECENTLY AS JUNE 2023, Marc Thiessen had seen his role differently—that of guide to help MAGA types remain on side with Ukraine. He outlined an “America First Case for Supporting Ukraine,” arguing that “a Ukrainian victory would help deter China”; that a “Russian victory would further popularize the ‘decline of the West’ narrative, eroding U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia”; and that a Russian victory would “mean more nuclear states and more wars of aggression.”
But now, when the leader has pivoted, so has Thiessen.
It’s dizzying to watch the changing views of Jeff Bezos since he bought the Washington Post. First, he pledged not to interfere in the editorial content of his prize bauble. Last fall, he yanked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. Now he has new instructions for editorialists and opinion writers: we support personal liberties and free markets.
The thing about American newspaper opinion sections is this: Their owners get final say. If the man who signs the checks — it’s almost always a man — really really really wants to see his cocker spaniel run City Hall, you’ll probably see “Our Choice: Fluffernutter for Mayor” stripped atop the editorial page. For generations — from Murdoch to Loeb, Hearstto Pulitzer, Daniels to Greeley — this has been one of the overriding perks of media ownership. If Jeff Bezos wanted to turn The Washington Post’s opinion section over to an AI-powered version of Alexa, he’d be within his rights to. So his announcement this morning — that Post Opinions would henceforth reorient “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets” — is, in a sense, merely restating the traditional droit du seigneur given over to capital.
But the scale of the hypocrisy on display here is eye-watering.
But Bezos’s assertion of power is downright laughable compared to the rhetoric he was using just four months ago when trying to justify his killing of the Harris endorsement. Remember his muddled, oligarch-splaining op-ed? His core argument back then was that the worst thing a newspaper’s opinion section could do is appear to be taking one side politically.
Bezos, October 28, 2024: We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.
Endorsing a candidate for president is bad because it can create the perception of bias — that the newspaper is institutionally tilted to one side or another.
So the solution is…to have the owner spend months shipping millions off to Trump HQ and then declare that certain opinions not in favor on the political right will now be verboten in the Post’s pages?
Bezos, February 26, 2025: We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
Back in October, Bezos was saddened by even the concept that his personal interests might influence the Post’s content.
Bezos, October 28, 2024: When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post.Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.
You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.
But of course — when one of the wealthiest humans in the history of the species decides to block critiques of “free markets” from one of the nation’s most important news outlets, it has nothing to do with any of his interests. Completely unrelated.
Bezos, February 26, 2025: I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity…
I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.
A few months ago, Bezos was confident that the Post had to differentiate itself from the swarm of misleading online content by being staunchly independent of any ideological agenda:
Bezos, October 28, 2024: Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions…
While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world?
But today, the existence of all that internet muck is positioned as a perfect excuse to abandon all desire for a broad-based opinion section.
Bezos, February 26, 2025: There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.
So, to recap: A newspaper can’t be seen as taking a side. Until it’s essential that it be seen as taking a side. Bezos would never use his own ideological beliefs to restrict the Post’s work. Until he decides he must use his own ideological beliefs to restrict the Post’s work.
As was the case in the fall, the problem with these swings is less their content than their naked service to one man’s agenda. A newspaper is free to endorse or not endorse whoever it wants. An owner is free to shape his opinion section to his will. But the realpolitik context of those decisions clashes wildly with Bezos’s lecturing tone and freshman-level political analysis. I doubt today’s announcement will generate another 250,000 subscription cancellations, if only because there are so many fewer subscribers left to cancel. But the impact will be felt. Only three months ago, the Post was prepping a plan to “win back” wayward subscribers by focusing on the paper’s star reporters and columnists — people like Ashley Parker, Eugene Robinson, and Dana Milbank. Parker’s already jumped ship; how are opinion voices like Milbank and Robinson supposed to fit into the new no-critiquing-the-genius-of-unrestrained-markets regime?
Julie Creswell of The New York Timesreported that The Washington Post killed an ad calling on Trump to fire his best buddy Elon Musk. The story was first reported in The Hill. Who could have given such an order?
Creswell writes:
An advertisement that was set to run in some editions of The Washington Post on Tuesday calling for Elon Musk to be fired from his role in government was abruptly canceled, according to one of the advocacy groups that had ordered the ad.
Common Cause said it was told by the newspaper on Friday that the ad was being pulled. The full-page ad, known as a wraparound, would have covered the front and back pages of editions delivered to the White House, the Pentagon and Congress, and was planned in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund.
A separate, full-page ad with the same themes would have been allowed to run inside the newspaper, but the two groups chose to cancel the internal ad as well. Both ads would have cost the groups $115,000.
“We asked why they wouldn’t run the wrap when we clearly met the guidelines if they were allowing the internal ad,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and chief executive of Common Cause. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason.”
News of The Washington Post canceling the ad was earlier reported by The Hill.
Although it is unclear who made the decision to pull the ad or why, the move comes amid growing concern about the changing mission of the Washington Post newsroom under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. The newspaper’s decision last fall to end its longstanding tradition of presidential endorsements and Mr. Bezos’ front-row seat at Mr. Trump’s inauguration have led some to wonder whether the news organization has been accommodating a Trump administration.
Last month, more than 400 employees sent a letter to Mr. Bezos requesting a meeting to discuss leadership decisions that they said “led readers to question the integrity of this institution.”
Mrs. Kase Solomón said that all the content for the ad — art and text — had been sent to The Post’s advertisement department last Tuesday and that “no alarm bells were rung” by anyone from the newspaper at that time. She said she did not know who inside the organization made the decision to pull the wrap.
The ad featured an image of Mr. Musk laughing over a picture of the White House with text that reads: “Who’s Running This Country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?” The ad called for readers to contact their senators and tell them it’s time for Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Musk…
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man who controls six companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has been given far-reaching power by the president, who has allowed Mr. Musk to dismantle federal agencies and freeze funding for various grants and programs.
Margaret Huang, president and chief executive of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the disappearance of critical programs and grants would have a direct and negative effect mostly on lower-income individuals and people of color.
Remember the claim that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing public schools”? As we see in state after state, it’s not true. Josh Cowen wrote in his new book The Privateers that voucher researchers have known for years that vouchers don’t help poor kids; in reality, vouchers actually hurt poor kids. The poor kids don’t go to elite private schools; they mostly go to religious schools with uncertified teachers. The greatest benefit of vouchers goes to wealthy kids, who use the money to subsidize their private school tuition. In every state with universal vouchers, the majority are used by students who are already attending private schools.
If you have read Josh Cowen’s new book about the failure of vouchers, called The Privateers, this story would not surprise you.
Louisiana ‘s academic results for poor kids has been consistently dismal. The state plans to increase the voucher program and weaken or remove regulations. That’s a way to help failing voucher schools evade accountability.
School vouchers were supposed to be an academic lifeline for Louisiana’s neediest children.
Under a 2012 law, the state would pay for poor students in struggling public schools to attend private or parochial schools where, it was promised, they would receive a better education.
But more than a decade since the statewide voucher program began, after Louisiana has spent half a billion taxpayer dollars to send thousands of students to private schools, data show the state’s lofty promise has not panned out.
On average, voucher students at private schools fare worse on state tests than their public-school peers, according to scores examined by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate. In 2023, just 14% of voucher students in grades 3-8 met state achievement targets, compared with 24% of low-income students at public schools.
“If the goal was to improve achievement, then the program is not succeeding,” said Doug Harris, an economist at Tulane University who has written about Louisiana’s voucher program.
Even voucher proponents acknowledge the lackluster results
“Louisiana is kind of famous for having one of the weakest, or maybe the weakest, private scholarship program in the country,” said Ginny Gentles, a school-choice advocate and former U.S. Department of Education official, while interviewing Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley on a podcast last year. Brumley agreed that “it’s called the worst (voucher) program in the country” and “has its limitations.”
The private schools that get about $6,800 per voucher student face scant oversight. Unlike public schools, most don’t receive state ratings because they enroll too few voucher students. But 30 private schools were graded last year, and nearly 80% earned Ds or Fs.
State regulations forbid F-rated private schools from enrolling new voucher students. Brumley waived that rule in recent years, allowing even the worst-performing schools to take in more students and tax dollars.
“These kids, there’s no price we won’t pay to make sure they get a good quality education,” Gov. Jeff Landry said while promoting the program at a Catholic school in Metairie last year.
While the scholarship program will replace vouchers, many of the same private schools already have signed up — including over 20 with D or F ratings.
“It makes absolutely no sense,” said Ashana Bigard, a New Orleans public school parent and advocate. The voucher schools struggled academically, “so we’re going to give them more kids?”
But proponents insist the scholarship program, which includes fewer regulations, will attract stronger schools and achieve better results than vouchers.
“I think what we learned is that a private-school choice program is only as good as the quality of the private schools that are enticed to participate,” said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas who studied Louisiana’s vouchers.
In that program, he added, the “quality level appears to have been quite low.”
Early results disappoint
Louisiana first offered vouchers in the 1960s to parents fleeing school desegregation, before resurrecting them decades later as a refuge from struggling public schools.
“Parents and kids should not be trapped in a failing school,” then-Gov. Bobby Jindal said when the statewide voucher program launched in 2012, adding that all children deserve “an excellent education.”
One of several Republican-led states to adopt vouchers, Louisiana targeted its program to families with incomes at or below 250% of the poverty line with children in public schools rated C or lower. Participating private schools had to admit all applicants, charge no more than the voucher amount and administer the state’s annual LEAP test to voucher recipients.
“We’re talking about some of the worst results we’ve ever seen in the history of education research,” said Josh Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University who opposes vouchers.
The low scores persisted for several years, especially in math. It was a far cry from Jindal’s assertion that vouchers would give students access to an excellent education. (Jindal did not respond to a request for comment.)
Voucher proponents posited that the private schools’ curriculums could be misaligned with the state tests or the program’s rules could have deterred higher-performing schools from joining. Less than a third of the state’s roughly 400 private schools participated in 2012, and those that did tended to be Catholic, have declining enrollment and charge low tuition.
“It was a very heavily regulated program and it tended to attract schools that were more desperate for the money,” said Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, a pro-voucher group.
Advocates point to surveys showing many parents who receive vouchers are happy with their children’s schools. They also say public schools improve when forced to compete with private schools for students.
Last school year, nearly 6,000 students received vouchers, costing taxpayers $45 million. More than 75% of those students attended private schools where fewer than 1 in 4 voucher students achieved “mastery” on the state tests, meaning they’re ready for the next grade level, according to an analysis of state data by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate. At least 26% went to schools where fewer than 1 in 10 voucher students achieved mastery.
The raw scores don’t show where students started academically and whether the voucher schools helped them grow. But the state’s rating system tracks students’ academic progress, giving schools credit for boosting student achievement even if their scores remain low.
Even by that measure, 11 of the 30 voucher schools that received ratings last year earned Fs, 12 got Ds and five earned Cs. Just two earned Bs.
Lakeside Christian Academy in Slidell posted some of the worst results last year: Fewer than 5% of its voucher students achieved mastery. The school, which enrolled 79 voucher students, earned Fs three years in a row.
Principal Buffie Singletary said voucher students typically arrive at the school far behind, with limited reading skills, making it difficult to catch them up.
“It’s just really hard,” she said.
Under state regulations, F-rated private schools can keep their current voucher students but may not enroll more. But Brumley used his authority as state education chief to pause that rule, saying in memos that he sought to promote stability and parental choice.
The move has been a boon for schools like Redemptorist St. Gerard, a Catholic school in Baton Rouge. It earned an F in 2023, then enrolled nearly 40 new voucher students the following year, for a total of 134. In 2024, just 8% of those students achieved mastery.
School leaders did not respond to a request for comment.
Jackson Parish Schools Superintendent David Claxton said if the state is going to give private schools tax dollars, they should be held to the same standards as public schools.
“You still want parents to have choice,” he said, “but let’s make it a fair playing field.”
At first, lower-income families will be eligible for the tax-funded scholarships, which will replace vouchers, but eventually, all will be eligible. Offering private school subsidies to all families, regardless of financial need, is a priority for Trump.
“With President Trump, we will continue working towards education freedom for all!” Landry posted on X last month.
Unlike with vouchers, private schools that participate in the scholarship program can decide which students to admit and how much to charge them. Rather than use the state test, they can choose which assessment to give students. And the schools will no longer be rated by the state.
“LA GATOR has fewer of the regulations that typically scare away high-quality schools,” Wolf said.
But critics are doubtful that the top-performing private schools will enroll students with the greatest academic needs. Instead, those students will likely land at less-selective private schools with more open seats, which tend to be lower performing.
“The fact that you’re getting rid of the regulations doesn’t solve that problem,” said Harris, the Tulane researcher.
As Landry and others set high expectations for the new scholarship program, the voucher results loom large.
Last year, as the Legislature considered a bill to establish the scholarship program, state board of education member Conrad Appel expressed misgivings to a state education official, according to an email obtained through a public records request. (In a recent interview, Appel emphasized that LA GATOR was designed to avoid the voucher program’s mistakes.)
With vouchers, “we ended up taking kids from bad public schools and basically encouraging them to go to even worse private schools,” he wrote. “I am afraid that the push to allow parental choice may mean a repeat of history.”
Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that 24% of low-income public school students in grades 3-8 achieved mastery or above on the state tests in 2023, not 23%.
Phillips P. Obrien is a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrew’s in the UK. The title of this article on his blog at Substack is “This is Not Appeasement, It’s Worse.”
He begins:
In the last few days, the US has made concession after concession to Russia before any formal negotiations have even started. Trump has said that Putin should be allowed back into the G7, Defense Secretary Hegseth has said Ukraine should be kept out of NATO and the US forces will not provide any security guarantees for Ukraine. The US has also made it clear that Russia will be allowed to keep most/all of the Ukrainian lands it has seized, while at the same time making no new promises of aid to Ukraine.
In other words—Trump is helping Putin—at exactly the time Putin needs it most. If you have not noticed (will write more about this in the weekend update), the Russian army is really struggling right now. Its advances are slowing and its losses are extremely high. In fact, what Trump seems to be doing is offering a hand of friendship and support to Putin, when the Russian dictator and war criminal most needs it.
A few days ago, I suggested in a post that every FBI agent should defeat Trump’s purge if every one said that he or she was involved in the arrest or investigation of the January 6 insurrectionists or the search of Mar-a-Lago. This is a good tactic of resistance.
But wiser heads at the FBI and its branch offices have another plan, which may also be effective. Basically, it is non-compliance.
Trump wants to fire every FBI agent who obeyed lawful orders.
Things have clarified enough today to say one thing clearly: A lot of people at the bureau—leadership and street agents, analysts and staff alike—are flirting with heroism right now.
Here is my best understanding of what is going on from a combination of press reporting and my own poking around.
Last week, as has been widely reported, the Justice Department leadership sought to force into retirement a variety of senior leaders at FBI headquarters. In addition, the FBI’s interim leadership was pressured to identify agents and other personnel who had worked on the Jan. 6 investigations. And special agents in charge around the country were told to help identify such personnel. Specifically, they were told to administer a questionnaire to staff—a questionnaire that was due at 3:00 pm today—in which agents and others are asked to self-report on their own Jan. 6-related activities.
From what I gather, the pushback has been remarkable. A large number of agents are refusing to fill out the questionnaire. The FBI Agents Association has sent around model language for agents who refuse to cooperate. At the management level, the leadership of a number of field offices has made clear that they will not take administrative action against those who do not self-report. And the bureau’s acting leadership itself is clearly pushing back against the demands for this information.
In his email to the workforce, Acting Director Brian J. Driscoll, Jr. made clear that the demand for information “encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts. I am one of those employees, as is acting Deputy Director Kissane.”
How widespread is the internal resistance? I don’t know. But we are going to find out soon.
The results of the questionnaire, over the next day or so, will be sent to the deputy attorney general’s office which—as Driscoll quotes a memo sent to him, “will commence a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”
Will the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, receive a pile of actionable material or will he receive what amounts to a large pile of spoiled questionnaires? And either way, what will he—and the White House—do with whatever it receives? In one situation, it will have to take on the reality that a shockingly large number of bureau personnel played a role, quite unsurprisingly, in the largest federal investigation in American history. They executed search warrants, ran down leads, interviewed people, made arrests and testified in one or more of the 1,500 plus federal prosecutions that resulted.
Does Bove imagine that he will fire all of these people? Does he imagine administering loyalty tests to them somehow? What do you do when you want to punish FBI agents for enforcing the law—and thousands of them did it faithfully?
Conversely, as seems more likely, Bove may find himself with a whole lot of survey refusal—and thus limited useful data on who the villains are who actually did their jobs with respect to Jan. 6. What does he do then? Does he fire everyone who refused to self-disclose? Does he fire the management in the field offices who tolerated—or even encouraged—the refusal?
What does an administration bent on revenge do when FBI personnel en masse choose to “hang together” rather than hanging separately?
The FBI rank and file have power in this equation that other agencies, such as USAID for example, do not have. The Trump administration does not need USAID. It wants to eliminate foreign aid anyway, so if the personnel at the aid agency get uppity, who cares? And if they quit? All the better.
The FBI is not that simple. For one thing, the administration does need law enforcement. If there’s a terrorist attack, and there will be, and the FBI is not in a position to prevent it or investigate it quickly and effectively, the administration will take the blame.
This administration also draws its legitimacy from backing the blue. Even in their war on the intelligence community, Donald Trump and his people always tried to distinguish between the rank and file and the “bad apples” who were running things. Waging a full-scale war against the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, a war that is all about targeting street agents for having done their jobs, is a dangerous game—far different from sacking an FBI director, or even two, who went to some elite law schools and served at the upper levels of the Justice Department.
Then there’s the problem of capacity. FBI agents are actually very hard to replace—good ones are, anyway. The physical demands are significant. Most have specialized education of one sort or another. And while people often imagine FBI agents as glorified cops who kick doors down, the truth is that a lot of agents have exquisitely specialized expertise. The training of a good counterintelligence agent takes many years. Some agents have specialized scientific training. There are even agents who specialize in art theft. Take out a thousand FBI personnel for political reasons, and you destroy literally centuries of institutional capacity. A good FBI agent is much harder to create than, say, a good assistant United States attorney.
It’s early yet, and I don’t want to wax over-optimistic in dangerous times.
But I will say this: I’m very proud of how the FBI is performing under incredible stress.
An FBI that was putting its collective foot down and refusing to be politicized, refusing to participate in a political witch hunt within its own ranks, and refusing to become political agents of the regime in power would, so far anyway, look almost exactly like what we are seeing.
It is always a dangerous thing to cheer when an armed component of the federal government resists political leadership. Nobody, after all, elected the FBI.
But when the political leadership seeks to conduct personnel actions against career officials based on who was involved in lawful and appropriate law enforcement actions against those who now have the protektzia of the faction in power, a certain measure of conscientious objection is in order—lest the entire operation become an organ of authoritarianism. And when the Justice Department tried to fire people because Trump does not trust them, which violates the Civil Service Reform Act—a law that forbids the government from taking adverse action against those in the competitive service for improper reasons, politics foremost among them—agents who resist are upholding the law, which is closely aligned with their own oaths and the FBI’s culture, and the rule of law itself.
Whether this is happening in the numbers it will take to force the administration to back down I don’t know. Whether it is happening in the numbers it will take to make some Republican senators reconsider their race to install a partisan apparatchik at the helm of the agency, I don’t know either. And whether the next week will see a wholesale elimination of decades of investment in law enforcement and intelligence under the rule of law, I cannot say.
Today, I can only say thank you to everyone who is doing the right thing in ways the public will probably never see. Right now. Today. When it’s very hard. To everyone who is telling Bove, “Fire me if you don’t like it but no, I’m not helping”: may all the gods keep you safe.
Diane Ravitch's blog 