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Republicans Planning Major Increase in Tax on College Endowments

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2025 //
15

Republicans are looking for ways to subsidize tax cuts for billionaires, and one likely target is endowments of colleges and universities. This move is an extension of Trump’s war against elite higher education, especially Harvard.

In Trump’s 2017 tax bill, he levied a tax of 1.4% on institutions of higher education with large endowments, relative to their enrollments. Current Republican thinking is a huge increase in that tax.

Be it noted that endowments fund scholarships for low-income students. The proposed taxes are mean-spirited and short-sighted.

Politico reported:

Endowments valued at $750,000 or less per student would be taxed at the current 1.4 percent rate, according to two of those people. Endowments valued between $750,000 to $1million per student would be taxed at a 10 percent rate and those greater than $1 million per student would be taxed at a 20 percent rate…

Under Trump’s 2017 tax bill, only universities with more than 500 students and endowment assets surpassing $500,000 per student face the current 1.4 percent tax. Ways and Means Republicans have considered both bumping up that tax rate significantly and applying it to a broader mix of U.S. colleges.

A menu of policies prepared by the House Budget Committee and obtained by POLITICO in January suggested bumping up the endowment tax to 14 percent. That would raise $10 billion over 10 years, according to the document.

One bill, introduced by Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas), would raise the excise tax on endowment profits up to 21 percent.

Categories Higher Education, Republicans, Trump

Republicans Were Eager to Investigate Biden, But Not Trump

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2025 //
7

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

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

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

Bump writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joyce Vance: Do Republicans Care About Trump’s Tyranny? If Not Now, When?

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2025 //
16

Joyce Vance was US Attorney for Northern Alabama and a steady voice of reason. She wonders in this post what it will take to awaken Republicans to Trump’s erosion of the Constitution and our rights.

She writes:

Why doesn’t any of this break through? Why do Republicans still support Trump?

The reporting in The Atlantic on the Signal chain? The voter suppression executive order Trump issued…? The foul-ups in deporting supposed gang members who turn out not to be? Why aren’t Americans out on the streets protesting in massive numbers like we have seen people in other countries doing—Israel, Georgia, Turkey, South Korea, and others? In part, it’s because a large number of people who are Trump supporters just don’t care. Their guy can do anything, and they don’t care. They’ll believe any lie, and they’ll ignore any horrible; they’re all in for Trump for reasons the rest of us still struggle to understand.

The question is, how many of the rest of us are there? By that I mean Americans who, regardless of party affiliation, still care about truth and democracy. Those words are no longer just philosophical notions to be bandied about, an elite construct. They are the reality of what we are fighting a rearguard action to try and save.

Statistics from the last election provide reason for some optimism. Donald Trump won with 49.9% of the popular vote. Although he has claimed he has a mandate for a radical transformation of government, the numbers just don’t back that up. And they don’t suggest there’s a mandate for putting out military information on a Signal chain being used on personal phones, rather than on secured government systems. If there ever truly was a mandate for Trump, the reality is, it’s evaporating day by day as egg prices stay high and people lose their jobs. And now, there’s this, a cavalier disregard for the safety of our troops, lax security with one member of the Signal group apparently in Russia while communications were ongoing, what looks like an effort to do an end run around government records retention procedures.

Will the Atlantic story break through? It should. Trump’s Vice President, his Secretary of Defense, his CIA director, his DNI, all put American pilots in harm’s way. If that’s not enough for Senate Republicans to break ranks with Trump, especially those on subcommittees that have oversight into military and intelligence community operations, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

Why use Signal in the first place when American leaders have some of the most secure communications technology in the world available to them? Is it just for convenience? If so, that’s sloppy, and they should be committing to do better, not arguing over whether the information was classified or not. (But if it looks like a duck…) 

The truth is that by going to Signal, they avoided leaving a paper trail. No annoying records that could be unearthed down the road. Remember Trump’s first impeachment? It came about in large part because after the call where he threatened Ukraine’s president with withholding security aid if he wouldn’t announce his country was investigating Joe Biden for financial misconduct, records of the call were buried inside a classified information system where they didn’t belong. That was what got the ball rolling. It was about trying to hide records of an official call that everyone knew was wrong. 

As far as we know at this point, there was nothing improper about the attack on the Houthis. So why were high-ranking members of the Trump administration communicating off the books? How pervasive is the practice, and who knows/authorizes it? We are a government of the people. Transparency isn’t optional. There are rules about public records that have to be followed, and this president who likes to operate in secret and at the margins of our laws has frequently tried to skirt them.

It’s hard to imagine that the Signal chain for the Houthi attack was just a one-off, that they only went to Signal for this moment. Is this how this new government is operating routinely—off the books, in a hidden fashion designed to avoid scrutiny and accountability? 

It may seem like a minor point with everything else that’s going on, but this is how autocrats work, not how a democracy operates. That’s the danger we are now facing, and this is another marker on the path to tyranny.

Calls are mounting for Hegseth and others to resign. Anyone who would engage in this kind of behavior and then argue that it was not improper rather than apologizing and promising to do better should leave government, whether voluntarily or not. But they should never have been confirmed in the first place. There is a cancer on the heart of the presidency, to quote from the Watergate era, and it’s infecting all of us.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Injustice, Lies, Republicans, Trump, Tyranny

Jennifer Berkshire: What’s Behind the Republican War on Education? Part 2.

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2025 //
8

Jennifer Berkshire has been writing about the politics of education for many years. She has written two books with education historian Jack Schneider, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and The Education Wars. This is the second installment in her excellent series called “Connecting the Dots.” Her Substack blog is called “The Education Wars.”

She writes:

BAs are out, babies are in

The Trump world’s obsession with the declining birthrate doesn’t quite rank with rooting out “DEI,” tariff-ing, or expelling immigrants but it’s up there. In a recent interview, Elon Musk confessed that a fear of the shrinking number of babies keeps him up at night. What does this have to do with education? Everything. Last year, two of the big education ‘thinkers’ at Heritage released a guide to how changes in education policy could increase “the married birthrate”:

Expensive and misguided government interventions in education are, whether intended or not, pushing young people away from getting married and starting families—to the long-term detriment of American society.

What are those government interventions? Things like subsidizing student loans, thereby encouraging young women to go to college. Or requiring teachers, who are mostly women, to have bachelor degrees, thereby encouraging young women to go to college. Of course there is a voucher angle—there always is with these folks. But the key here is that a chorus of influential Trump thinkers like this guy keep telling us that there are too many women on campus, and that policy shifts could get them back into the home where they belong. 

If the administration succeeds in privatizing the government-run Student Loan Program, college will become much more expensive, significantly shrinkign the number of kids who’ll be able to attend. And that seems to be the point, as conservative activist Chris Rufo explained in an interview a few weeks ago.

By spinning off, privatizing and then reforming the student loan programs, I think that you could put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession. And I think that would be a very salutary thing.

So when you hear the rising chorus coming from Trump world that there are too many of the wrong people on the nation’s campuses, recall that an awful lot of these self-styled ‘nationalists’ believe this: “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers.”

Some people are more equal than others 

I’ve been making the case that both the Department of Education and public education more broadly are especially vulnerable because of the equalizing roles that they play. Of course, education is not our only equalizer. Indeed, all of the institutions and policy mechanisms intended to smooth out the vast chasms between rich and poor are on the chopping block right now. While you were clicking on another bad news story, Trump eviscerated collective bargaining rights for thousands of federal workers. While teachers weren’t affected, a number of red states have been rushing to remedy that, including Utah which just banned collective bargaining for public employees. 

Writer John Ganz describes the unifying thread that connects so much of Trump world as ‘bosses on top,’ the belief that “the authority and power of certain people is the natural order, unquestionable, good.” We got a vivid demonstration of what this looks like in Florida this week as legislators debated whether to roll back (more) child labor protections, allowing kids as young as 14 to work over night. 

Governor Ron DeSantis is busily spinning the bill as about parents rights, but what it’s really about is expanding the power of the boss. The ‘right’ to work overnight while still in school is actually the boss’ right to demand that young employees keep working. Nor is it hard to imagine the long-term consequences of this policy change. Teen workers who labor through the night end up dropping out of school, their futures constrained in every possible way. Here’s how Marilynn Robinson described the rollback of child labor laws in her adopted home state of Iowa: “If these worker-children do not manage to finish high school, they will always be poorer for it in income and status and mobility of every kind.”

Go back one hundred years when the country was in the midst of a fierce debate over child labor, and you’ll hear the same arguments for ‘bosses on top’ that are shaping policy today. At a time when public education was becoming compulsory, conservative industry groups like the National Association of Manufacturers cast their opposition to both child labor laws and universal public education in explicitly bossist terms, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway recount in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market:

“They believed that men were inherently unequal: it was right and just for workers to be paid far less than managers and managers far less than owners. They also believed that in a free society some children would naturally enter the workforce. Child labor laws wer (to their minds) socialistic because they enforced erroneous assumptions of equality—for example, that all children should go to school—rather than accepting that some children should work in factories.”

Back to the states

Did you hear the one about how we’re returning education to the states? Back-to-the-states has become a mantra for the Trump Administration on all kinds of favored policy issues, as the New York Times recently pointed out. Of course, education is already a state ‘thing,’ which means that we can look at the states Trump keeps pointing to as models and see how they’re faring. So how are they faring? Not so well, as the education reform group EdTrust lays out here, reviewing both NAEP scores and the track records of these states in supporting low-income students and students of color.

But there are plenty of warning signs beyond test scores. Ohio seems poised to slash funding for public education, even as the state’s voucher program balloons. (And let’s not even get into the just-enacted Senate Bill 1, which limits class discussions of any ‘controversial’ topic and goes hard at campus unions.) But for a glimpse of the future that awaits us, pay attention to another state in my beloved Heartland, and which Trump has repeatedly showered with praise: Indiana.

Now, Indiana happens to be home to one of my favorite economists, Ball State’s Michael Hicks, who has been warning relentlessly that the state’s decision to essentially stop investing in K-12 and public higher education has been an economic disaster. Hoosiers, he pointed out recently, earn less than the typical Californian or New Yorker did in 2005. As the number of kids going to college in Indiana has plummeted, the state now spends more and more money trying to lure bad employers to the state. Here’s how Hicks describes the economic and education policies that Indiana has embraced:

“If a diabolical Bond villain were to craft a set of policies that ensured long-term economic decline in a developed country, it would come in two parts. First, spend enormous sums of money on business incentives that offer a false narrative of economic vibrancy, then cut education spending.”

As for Indiana’s 25-year-long school choice experiment, Hicks concludes that it has been a failure. Why? Because the expansion of school vouchers and charter schools was used to justify spending less on public schools—precisely the policy course that we’re hurtling towards now. Today, Indiana spend less money per student on both K-12 and public higher education than it did in 2008.

GOP-run states have already begun to petition what’s left of the Department of Education for ‘funding flexibility’—the ability to spend Title 1 dollars, which now go to public schools serving low-income and rural students, on private religious education. We shouldn’t be surprised. This is precisely the vision laid out in Project 2025. (Fun fact: the same Heritage thinker who penned the education section of Project 2025 also co-authored the above referenced guide to getting young married ladies to have more babies.)

And just like in Indiana, school privatization will be used to justify reducing the investment in K-12 public education. So when an economist tells us that school choice “risks being Indiana’s single most damaging economic policy of the 21st century,” we should probably listen.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, DeSantis, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Funding, History, Indiana, Iowa, Lies, Privatization, Republicans, Trump

Peter Greene: Why the Department of Education Matters

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2025 //
6

Peter Greene, veteran teacher, master writer, the voice of wisdom and experience, sets the record straight about the purpose of the U.S. Department of Education. Contrary to what wrestling-entrepreneur Linda McMahon (Trump’s Secretary of Education) says, the Department was not created to raise test scores. The Department was created to promote equal access to educational opportunity. That equalization of resources has not yet been achieved, but Trump intends to abolish the goal altogether. In his thinking, everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike him, who was born into wealth and privilege.

Peter Greene writes:

The official assault on the Department of Education has begun.

If it seems like there’s an awful lot more talking around this compared to, say, the gutting of the IRS or USAID, that may be because the regime doesn’t have the legal authority to do the stuff that they are saying they want to do. The executive order is itself pretty weak sauce– “the secretary is to investigate a way to form a way to do stuff provided it’s legal.” And that apparently involves sitting down in front of every camera and microphone and trying to make a case.

A major part of that involves some lies and misdirection. The Trumpian line that we spend more than anyone and get the worst results in the world is a lie. But it is also a misdirection, a misstatement about the department’s actual purpose.

Likewise, it’s a misstatement when the American Federation of Children characterizes the “failed public policy” of “the centralization of American education.” But the Department wasn’t meant–or built–to centralize US education.

The department’s job is not to make sure that American education is great. It is expressly forbidden to exert control over the what and how of education on the state and local level.

The Trump administration is certainly not the first to ignore any of that. One of the legacies of No Child Left Behind is the idea that feds can grab the levers of power to attempt control of education in the states. Common Core was the ultimate pretzel– “Don’t call it a curriculum because we know that would be illegal, but we are going to do our damnedest to standardize the curriculum across every school in every state.” For twenty-some years, various reformsters have tried to use the levers of power in DC to reconfigure US education as a centrally planned and coordinated operation (despite the fact that there is nowhere on the globe to point to that model as a successful one). And even supporters of the department are speaking as if the department is an essential hub for the mighty wheel of US education.

Trump is just working with the tools left lying around by the bipartisan supporters of modern education reform.

So if the department’s mission is not to create central organization and coordination, then what is it?

I’d argue that the roots of the department are not the Carter administration, but the civil rights movement of the sixties and the recognition that some states and communities, left to their own devices, would try to cheat some children out of the promise of public education. Derek Black’s new book Dangerous Learning traces generations of attempts to keep Black children away from education. It was (roughly) the 1960s when the country started to grapple more effectively with the need for federal power to oppose those who would stand between children and their rights.

The programs that now rest with the department came before the department itself, programs meant to level the playing field so that the poor (Title I) and the students with special needs (IDEA) would get full access. The creation of the department stepped up that effort and, importantly, added an education-specific Civil Rights office to the effort.

And it was all created to very carefully not usurp the power of the states. When Trump says he’ll return control of education to the states, he’s speaking bunk, because the control of education has always remained with the states– for better or worse.

The federal mission was to make the field more level, to provide guardrails to keep the states playing fair with all students, to make sure that students had the best possible access to the education they were promised.

Trump has promised that none of the grant programs or college loan programs would be cut (and you can take a Trump promise to the… well, somewhere) but if all the money is still going to keep flowing, then what would the loss of the department really mean?

For one thing, the pieces that aren’t there any more. The Office of Civil Rights is now gutted and repurposed to care only about violations of white christianist rights. The National Center of Education Statistics was the source of any data about how education was working out (much of it junk, some of it not). The threat of turning grants into unregulated block grants, or being withheld from schools that dare to vaccinate or recognize diversity or keep naughty books in the library.

So the money will still flow, but the purpose will no longer be to level the playing field. It will not be about making sure every child gets the education they’re entitled to– or rather, it will rest on the MAGA foundation, the assumption that some people deserve less than others.

That’s what the loss of the department means– a loss of a department that, however imperfectly, is supposed to protect the rights of students to an education, regardless of race, creed, zip code, special needs, or the disinterest and prejudice of a state or community. Has the department itself lost sight of that mission from time to time? Sure has. Have they always done a great job of pursuing that mission? Not at all. But if nobody at all is supposed to be pursuing that goal, what will that get us?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Poverty, Privatization, Racism, Republicans, School Choice, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

GOP Wants to Honor Trump Right Now!

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2025 //
23

Politico reports that Republican members of Congress are competing to honor Trump as the incredible remarkable president that he is: right now.

This is a summary. Open the link to read the adulation heaped on Trump and historians’ reactions.

PLAYBOOK: Members of the Republican-controlled Congress have filed a rush of bills seeking to honor President Donald Trump while he is still in office — a multifront effort that has no precedent in congressional history and underscores the lengths that some House Republicans are willing to go to both curry favor with the president and to demonstrate their support, POLITICO’s Ben Jacobs and Gregory Svirnovskiy write this morning.

A look at the bills: In total, there are five such bills introduced in the House over the past two months, which would: put Trump’s face on the $100 bill, create a new $250 bill with Trump’s face adorning it, make Trump’s birthday (June 14) a federal holiday, rename Dulles Airport in Trump’s honor and carve Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore. While the Republicans crafting these bills say they are well-earned recognition, some scholars of American history view them through a darker lens: “This is exactly what the American Revolution was fought to prevent,” said Princeton’s Sean Wilentz.

Categories Republicans, Stupid, Trump

Trump Fires Democratic Members of “Independent” Boards

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2025 //
20

In his desire to control every aspect of the federal government, Trump has fired Democrats whose term has not expired on independent boards; terminated nonpartisan Departmental Inspectors General whose job is to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse; fired the Ethics Officer (Hampton Dillinger) who receives whistleblower complaints; and tried to dominate every independent agency.

Our government was designed with many checks and balances to assure that no president has total control. Trump, or the people who think for him, are deliberately tearing down every such check or balance.

Currently, Trump is waging a battle to take full control of the Merit Systems Protection Board y firing one Democratic member, leaving it without a quorum and unable to function.

Government Executive reports:

The Trump administration on Tuesday asked a three-judge circuit court panel to suspend rulings from district judges that reinstated ousted Biden appointees to the Merit Systems Protection Board and National Labor Relations Board in a case that ultimately seems likely to end up in the Supreme Court. 

The judges were respectively appointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Earlier this month, the trio allowed for Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger to be removed while the court heard the Trump administration’s appeal of a similar district judge ruling that blocked Trump’s firing of the special counsel. Following that decision, Dellinger decided to drop his lawsuit.  

Trump on Feb. 10 attempted to fire MSPB board member Cathy Harris, whose term expires in 2028. Harris represents one-third of the federal employee appeals board that has experienced a surge in cases as a result of the president’s mass firings and layoffs of civil servants. 

A district judge on March 4 stopped the removal, agreeing that the president can only remove an MSPB member for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” 

Harris on March 5 ordered the temporary reinstatement of thousands of Agriculture Department probationary employees who were fired by the Trump administration. 

“Congress, which is the people’s representatives, have enacted a law…to say that these types of neutral arbiters have a measure of protection [from removal] because otherwise they can’t decide cases free of fear or favor,” Harris’ lawyer argued on Tuesday. 

If Harris is removed, that would leave MSPB without a quorum. From 2017 to 2022, the board also lacked a quorum, which created a 3,500-case backlog that was only virtually eliminated at the end of 2024. Due to an interim final rule established that same year, MSPB can conduct some actions without a quorum.

Likewise, a district judge on March 6 reinstated Gwynne Wilcox to the NLRB. Trump in late January fired Wilcox ahead of the end of her term in 2028, leaving the agency that resolves unfair labor practices in the private sector without a quorum to hear and decide cases. 

“The president has no legitimate interest in disabling this body created by Congress from performing its functions. He does have a legitimate interest in, [as] a new president elected by the people, putting his stamp on the agency,” Wilcox’s attorney said. “He does that by naming a new general counsel [and] he does that by naming the chair, which he has done. And he could do that, hasn’t done so yet, by naming people to the two vacancies. All of that would put his stamp on the agency and allow it to function in the way that he would like.” 

The Trump administration, on the other hand, contended that the president should be able to remove members of the MSPB and NLRB at will. 

Categories Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Elon Musk Is Pillaging Our Government

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2025 //
8

Heather Cox Richardson reports on the depredation of Elon Musk, whom Trump has empowered to destroy government services. This destruction is the prelude to privatization. At the Department of Agriculture, his DOGE boys laid off bird flu experts. At the Departnent of Transportation, they laid off air traffic controllers. The story was repeated across the government. Nothing is off-limits from the DOGE vandals, other than the billions of dollars awarded to Elon Musk every year. One can’t help wondering, at least I can’t, whether this crippling of our government was Putin’s idea.

Richardson wrote:

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to slash the federal government and to privatize its current services. As the stock market has dropped and economists have warned of a dramatic slowdown in the economy, he told CNBC “There’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, we’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.”

Bessent’s comments reveal that the White House is beginning to feel the pressure of the unpopularity of its policies. Trump’s rejection of 80 years of U.S. foreign policy in order to prop up Russia’s Vladimir Putin has left many Americans as well as allies aghast. Trump’s claims that Putin wants peace were belied when Russia launched massive strikes at Ukraine as soon as Trump stopped sharing intelligence with Ukrainian forces that enabled them to shoot down incoming fire.

The administration’s dramatic—and likely illegal and unconstitutional—cuts are infuriating Americans who did not expect Trump to reorder the American government so completely. While billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump repeatedly say they are cutting only “waste, fraud, and abuse” from the government, that insistence appears to be rhetorical rather than backed by fact. And yesterday, new cuts appeared to continue the gutting of government services that generally appear to be important to Americans’ health, safety, and economic security.

On Friday night, employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—about 80,000 of them—received an email offering them a buyout of up to $25,000 if they resign and giving them a deadline of March 14 to respond. Also as of Friday, nearly 230 cases of measles have been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico, and two people have died.

The secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is frustrating even allies with his response to the outbreak. Kennedy, who has long been an anti-vaccine activist, said last week that measles outbreaks were “not unusual,” and then on Sunday he posted pictures of himself hiking above Coachella Valley in California. On Monday the top spokesperson at HHS, a former Kennedy ally, quit in protest. As Adam Cancryn of Politicoreported, Kennedy has said that the measles vaccine protects children and the community, but has said the decision to vaccinate is personal and that parents should talk to healthcare providers about their options. He has also talked a lot about the benefits of nutritional supplements like cod liver oil, which is high in Vitamin A, in treating measles. In fact, vaccines are the key element in preventing people from contracting the disease..

“It’s a serious role, he’s just a couple of weeks in and measles is not a common occurrence, and it should be all hands on deck,” one former Trump official told Adam Cancryn, Sophie Garder, and Chelsea Cirruzzo of Politico. “When you’re taking a selfie out at Coachella, it’s pretty clear that you’re checked out.”

In another blockbuster story that dropped yesterday, the Social Security Administration announced it will begin to withhold 100% of a person’s Social Security benefits if they are overpaid, even if the overpayment is not their fault. Under President Joe Biden the agency had changed the policy to recover overpayments at 10% of monthly benefits or $10, whichever was greater.

Those who can’t afford that level of repayment can contact Social Security, the notice says, but acting commissioner Leland Dudek has said he plans to cut at least 7,000 jobs—more than 12% of the agency—although its staff is already at a 50-year low. He is also closing field offices, and senior staff with the agency have either left or been fired.

Dudek yesterday retracted an order from the day before that required parents of babies born in Maine to go to a Social Security office to register their baby rather than filling out a form in the hospital. Another on Thursday would also have stopped funeral homes from filing death records electronically.

One new father told Joe Lawlor of the Portland Press Herald that he had filled out the form for his son’s social security number and then his wife got a call saying they would have to go to the Social Security office. But when he tried to call Social Security headquarters to figure out what was going on, the wait time was an estimated two hours. So he called a local office, where no one knew what he was talking about. “They keep talking about efficiency,” he said. “This seemed to be something that worked incredibly efficiently, and they broke it overnight.”

The administration did not explain why it had imposed this rule in Maine. Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent, said he was glad the administration had changed its mind, but added that “this rapid reversal has raised concerns among Maine people and left many unanswered questions about the Social Security Administration’s motivations.”

Trump has said that Social Security “won’t be touched” as his administration slashes through the federal government.

Trump also said there would not be cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, but on Wednesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which figures the financial cost of legislation, said that Republicans will have to cut either Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to meet their goal of cutting at least $880 billion from the funding controlled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Cutting the funding for every other program in the committee’s purview would save a maximum of $135 billion, Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post noted, meaning the committee will have to turn to the biggest ticket items: healthcare programs.

Also yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said it was getting rid of union protections for the approximately 47,000 employees of the Transportation Security Administration who screen about 2.5 million passengers a day before they can board airplanes. A new agreement in May 2024 raised wages for TSA workers, whose pay has lagged behind that of other government employees. Union leaders say the move is retaliation for its challenges to the actions of the administration toward the 800,000 or so federal workers it represents.

As Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times have reported more detail about the Cabinet meeting Trump convened abruptly on Thursday, we have learned more about Musk’s determination to cut the government. As Musk appeared to take charge of the meeting, he clashed with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who complained that Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to lay off air traffic controllers.

Swan and Haberman report that Duffy asked what he was supposed to do. He continued by saying: I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers? Musk said it was a lie that they were laying off air traffic controllers, and also insisted that there were people hired under diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives working as air traffic controllers. When Duffy pushed back, Musk said Duffy should call him with any concerns, an echo of the message he gave to members of Congress. Like them, Cabinet members are constitutionally part of the government. Musk is not.

What Musk is, according to an interview published today by Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson in Public Notice, is a businessman who believes that there is waste wherever you look and that it is always possible to do something more cheaply. Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, who wrote a book about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Character Limit, said that creating confusion is part of the point. Musk creates drama, Conger said, to scare away workers he doesn’t want and attract ones he does.

The pain that he is inflicting on the country is not making him popular, though. Protests at Tesla dealerships that handle his cars are growing, as are instances of vandalism against Tesla dealerships and charging stations, which now number more than a dozen, including attacks with bottles filled with gasoline and set on fire. Pranshu Verma and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post report that Tesla’s stock has dropped more than 35% since Trump took office. Tesla sales have dropped 76% in Germany, 48% in Norway and Denmark, and 45% in France.

On Thursday, another of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded, raining debris near south Florida and the Bahamas. The Federal Aviation Administration said 240 flights were disrupted by the debris.

The New York Times editorial board today lamented the instability that Musk is creating, noting that the government is not a business, that “[t]here are already signs the chaos is hurting the economy,” and that “Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die.”

The editorial board did not let Trump hide behind Musk entirely, noting that he has increased instability not only with DOGE, but also “with his flurry of executive orders purporting to rewrite environmental policy, the meaning of the 14th Amendment and more; his on-again-off-again tariffs; and his inversion of American foreign policy, wooing Vladimir Putin while disdaining longtime allies.”

One of the things that the radical extremists in power hated about the modern American state was that it was a nonpartisan machine that functioned pretty well regardless of which party was in charge. Now Musk, who is acting as if he is not bound by the constitution that set up that machine, is taking a sledgehammer to it.

In the Public Notice interview, Thor Benson asked Ryan Mac: “What’s something about Elon’s huge role in the Trump administration that people perhaps aren’t understanding?” Mac answered that Musk is the manifestation of the nation’s extreme wealth inequality. “What happens,” he asked, “when there is unfettered capitalism that allows people to accumulate this much money and this much power?”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Funding, Health, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Privatization, Republicans, Trump

Thom Hartmann: The GOP Plan to Cut Social Security

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2025 //
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Despite the multiple pledges by Trump and Republicans that they would never custodial Security, don’t believe them. Republicans opposed Social Security when it was created by FDR, and many still thinks it’s socialism, even though it’s not a handout. People have paid for it throughout their working like.

Thom Hartmann says they are looking for ways to cut Social Security but to do it quietly, so you hardly notice. Trump’s Chief budget-cutter Elon Musk doesn’t understand why anyone needs Social Security. He was recently interviewed by Joe Rogan and said that Social Security is “a Ponzi scheme.” It certainly is not. It’s not a grifter’s scheme to take people’s money. It pays out to everyone. Without it, very large numbers of older people would be impoverished.

Why would the world’s richest man know or care?

Hartmann warned:

The plan to “demolish” Social Security is underway right before our eyes: who will stop them? 

The GOP’s plan to make Americans hate Social Security is well along in its execution. Their scheme — which they’ve been advancing in small increments for 44 years — is brilliantly simple: break the agency’s ability to respond to taxpayers, causing people to have to wait on the phone or travel for hours to stand in line for hours.

As complaints mount, Republicans will then point to the “broken Social Security Administration” and pitch a Medicare Advantage-like alternative: privatized “Social Security Advantage,” run by the big New York banks who are reliable GOP donors. Once a critical mass of seniors have moved from SS to the new privatized program, they’ll then just shut down legacy Social Security, arguing that “the free marketplace has spoken.”

The key to accelerating the process (Social Security’s administrative staff has been far too small for decades since Reagan first started cutting it) is a new demand from Trump’s acting Social Security Commissioner that the agency cut its workforce by fully fifty percent. Once that happens, all bets are off; the agency may not even be able to get checks out in a timely manner or process applications for new benefits, much less help SS recipients sign up or solve problems they may encounter.

As Congressman John Larson noted: “This is nothing more than a backdoor benefit cut and an insult to Americans who have paid into the system and earned their Social Security—all to pay for trillions in new tax cuts for the wealthy.” 

Social Security Works president Nancy Altman was blunt: “Field offices around the country will close. Wait times for the 1-800 number will soar.” Larson added: “Let me be clear—laying off half of the workforce at the Social Security Administration and shuttering field offices will mean the delay, disruption, and denial of benefits.”

Meanwhile, Idaho’s Republican Senator Mike Crapo blocked Bernie Sanders’ attempt this week to give all seniors on Social Security a $2400 annual raise. Noting that the raise would be paid for by having people earning more than $250,000 a year start paying Social Security taxes on all their income above that amount (which is currently exempt from Social Security taxes), Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (a co-sponsor of the legislation) said, “The Social Security Expansion Act will protect the national treasure that is Social Security by extending the trust fund’s solvency for 75 years and expanding benefits by $2,400 a year so that everyone in America can retire with the security and dignity they deserve after a lifetime of hard work.”

But big banks and the morbidly rich object, and they own the GOP…

Categories Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Musk, Elon, Poverty, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump

Robert Hubbell: Never Give Up! Now is the Time to Resist!

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2025 //
1

Robert Hubbell is a blogger with a huge following. He has that following because he is well-informed, reasonable and optimistic about the power of democracy. In the absence of any coordinated response from the Democratic Party, protests are occurring spontaneously and locally. At Tesla showrooms, where people are picketing. At town hall meetings, which Republicans have suspended. And in other public settings, where people are expressing their anger and frustration about the dismantling of their government.

He wrote recently:

It is a tough time to be an ordinary American who believes in democracy, the rule of law, and the value of good government. From the cheap seats, it appears that all three are under a brutal assault from Trump and Musk designed to weaken America as a global force for good. In a bizarre twist worthy of The Twilight Zone, Trump and Musk’s campaign of destruction seems carefully crafted to benefit the world’s worst dictator and sworn enemy of American democracy, Vladimir Putin, a goal that is warmly embraced by a party that only a decade ago wrapped itself in patriotism and pro-democracy foreign policy.

But America’s political and media classes seem oddly unconcerned and detached from reality. True, Democrats in Congress express concern—but in the same way, they express concern about policy fights over revisions to the tax code. (To be fair, a handful of notable exceptions are out on a limb without the support of their party.) Our Democratic leaders use their minority status in Congress to justify their strange quiescence—an explanation that accepts defeat as the status quo.

The media is a husk of its former self. Firebrands and self-styled crusaders who took Biden to task for every inconsequential verbal slip now report on grotesque lies and unprecedented betrayals by Trump with the ennui of a weatherman predicting increasing darkness in the late afternoon and early evening.

What is wrong with these people?…

Is the failure of Democratic leaders a lack of ability? Of desire? Or the triumph of personal ambition regarding 2028 presidential politics over their willingness to serve as a leader of the loyal opposition in our nation’s hour of need?

The silence is deafening. There is a grand disconnect. I had no answer for Americans abroad wondering why the deep pool of talented politicians in the Democratic Party was missing in action at a moment of crisis for their beloved country. But I was able to assure them that the grassroots movement is responding to the call without waiting for politicians to lead the way. 

Organic protests are spreading across the US, including protests targeting Tesla dealerships. See News24, ‘We are taking action’: 9 people arrested at Tesla dealership as anti-Musk protests break out in US. (“Throngs of protesters also descended on the electric vehicle maker’s showrooms in Jacksonville, Florida; Tucson, Arizona, and other cities, blocking traffic, chanting and waving signs . . . .”)

Like the Civil Rights Era in the 20th Century and the anti-war movement of the 1960s, we are experiencing a moment in our history where the people drag their leaders kicking and screaming into the future—at which point those reluctant leaders will take credit for victory. So be it. We must stop asking, “Where are our leaders?” and start doing the work until they show up to join us on the front lines.

The pattern behind Trump’s embrace of Putin in Friday’s Oval Office meeting

On Friday, Trump ended 80 years of alliance between Western nations by attacking and dishonoring the leader of the European nation on the frontlines of the effort to halt Russian expansionism. As Trump berated President Zelensky, Trump characterized himself and Vladimir Putin as “co-victims” of the US investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The next day, Elon Musk agreed with a tweet asserting that the US should leave NATO and the UN.

When European leaders met on Sunday in a pre-planned security conference in London, Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev condemned the meeting as an “anti-Trump Russophobic coven [of witches].” Medvedev speaks for Putin.

On Sunday, the NYTimes reported that the US Department of Defense has unilaterally ceased cyber operations against Russia, hobbling the US’s ability to understand Russia’s true intentions at a critical juncture in world politics.

Late last week, The Guardian reported that the US no longer views Russian cyberattacks against the US as a priority. See The Guardian, Trump administration retreats in fight against Russian cyber threats. There is no indication that Russia has stopped cyberattacks against the US or that it has “de-prioritized” American cyberattacks on Russia.

In the span of 72-hours, Trump effectively surrendered to Russia in a cyberwar that has been waged continuously for decades. Trump’s disgraceful actions in the Oval Office on Friday must be viewed in the broader context of Trump’s embrace of Russia.

The media is failing to tell that broader story by trivializing a foreign relations debacle into a “Will he, or won’t he?” story about Trump’s ludicrous demand for Zelensky to “apologize.” See BBCr eport, Laura Kuenssberg, asking Zelensky if he would “express[] some regret to President Trump after your heated confrontation at the White House on Friday.”

At least the BBC reporter didn’t ask Zelensky if he would resign, which has become the new talking point for MAGA politicians in the US: Following Trump’s Lead, His Allies Lash Out At Zelenskyy And Suggest He May Need To Resign | HuffPost Latest News

DOGE hackers shut down key IT unit designed to coordinate US government public-facing computer networks

DOGE has summarily dismantled a key information technology group at the center of the federal government’s public-facing computer systems. See Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo, In-House Gov Tech Unit for State of the Art Web Portals Disbanded by Doge.

The unit that was disbanded was known as “18F.” Its job was to make public-facing websites of the federal government more user-friendly and functional—things like making it easier to complete and file your tax returns for free on the IRS website. 

The now-former employees of 18F published a letter on Sunday that explained what they did and why their dissolution will hurt the American people. See 18F: We are dedicated to the American public and we’re not done yet. The letter reads, in part, as follows:

[The terminations were] a surprise to all 18F staff and our agency partners. Just yesterday we were working on important projects, including improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, supporting free tax filing with the IRS, and other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels.

All 18F’s support on that work has now abruptly come to a halt. Since the entire staff was also placed on administrative leave, we have been locked out of our computers, and have no chance to assist in an orderly transition in our work. . . .

Before today’s RIF, DOGE members and GSA political appointees demanded and took access to IT systems that hold sensitive information. They ignored security precautions. Some who pushed back on this questionable behavior resigned rather than grant access.

The chaos-termination of the 18F computer group is being repeated across the federal government. Doge has apparently targeted 50% of the Social Security Administration staff—a move that will hurt service levels for seniors who depend on SSA payments to meet basic living expenses.

These cuts are painful and will cause chaos. That chaos and pain will spur a backlash against Republicans that should allow Democrats to take back the House (and possibly the Senate) in 2026 if only the Democratic Party can get its act together—PRONTO! We need a daily news conference with effective messaging by dynamic, charismatic leaders who are not Chuck Schumer!…

Concluding Thoughts

Apologies that this newsletter is more like a rant and less like my usual call to action. But I am reflecting the frustration and anger that I am hearing from readers (both in person and in the Comment section). There seems to be a disconnect that is exacerbating an already mind-boggling situation.

The good news is that everyone seems to “get it”—other than politicians and the media. As I noted, they will be dragged along with the tide of history—a tide whose course we will determine by our actions.

It is up to us to save democracy—a situation that does not distinguish this moment from the thousands of perilous moments that have brought us to this point.

I acknowledge that we are living through an extraordinarily difficult moment. Our most important task is to not quit. If all we do is endure and keep hope alive, that will be enough. That is what Winston Churchill did during the darkest hours of WWII. If we can do the same, we will see victory in 2026 and 2028.

But we can do more—much more. The tide is turning. Republicans are retreating from their constituents. Spontaneous protests are spreading across America. It is happening. Be part of the movement in whatever way you can. No effort is wasted. No gesture is meaningless. No voice is unheard. Everything matters—now more than ever.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Musk, Elon, Republicans, Resistance, Trump, Tyranny
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