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

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2025 //
19

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

The sections of the BLS report that outraged Trump said:

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

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

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

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

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

@GenebSperling:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parents Are the Most Important Element in Student Learning

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2025 //
18

Way back in 2014, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was selling the idea that teachers should be rewarded or punished based on their students’ test scores. That idea, baked into Race to the Top, was a dismal failure. Teachers who taught the neediest kids got low ratings, and teachers in the most advantaged schools got the highest ratings. Bill Gates was similarly infatuated with the idea, and he handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to districts and charter chains to test it. Rigorous evaluation showed it to be demoralizing to teachers with no impact on test scores.

What we should have learned from the experience of Race to the Top is that carrots and sticks applied to teachers do not help students and do not improve education.

It’s parents and home life that have the largest effect on student learning. So said the American Statistical Association in 2014, making a futile attempt to persuade Secretary Duncan that he was on the wrong track.

Susan E. Mayer and Ariel Kalil explain why policymakers should focus on parents and help them become better parents. [Let me add, however, that I disagree with their comments about reading and math proficiency. As I have written many times before, NAEP proficiency is not grade level; it is a high bar, and it’s unlikely that most students would ever score the equivalent of an A.]

They write:

American schoolchildren are performing abysmally in tests of basic skills. Only 36% of fourth-grade students were deemed proficient in national math tests and only 33% were deemed proficient in reading as of 2022, the latest year for which such data is available.

Those numbers are even worse than before the pandemic – 5 percentage points lower in math from 2019 and 2 percentage points lower in reading. And the drop in reading and math proficiency after the pandemic has happened to both economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. Students across the board need help.

There is a tendency to blame schools – and by extension, teachers – for students’ poor performance. The temptation to focus solely on schools, however, is misguided. Parents are the ones who must build the foundation for children’s learning. Yet parenting has long been viewed as a private behavior for which women are presumed to possess unique instincts, leaving parents with little evidence-based guidance on how to develop their children’s skills.

Meanwhile, the political right often favors more accountability for teachers, more charter schools and more vouchers for private schools. The political left often favors more teacher training, reducing class sizes, more equitable distribution of school resources and patience as students recover from the pandemic-related dip in scores.

But it’s parents and family background that make the biggest difference. This is evident because the gap in children’s math and reading test scores is already large at the start of kindergarten, in line with their socioeconomic status, and does not narrow as children progress through schooling.

Many people think that the solution, therefore, is to improve parents’ socioeconomic status, which will in turn improve children’s skills. But the reason that low-income parents parent their children differently than high-income parents is not a causal result of the low income itself. Improving parents’ household income would be laudable for many reasons, but experimental evidence shows that giving parents cash payments after they have a child neither changes parental investments nor changes the child’s skills. [Note from Diane: I disagree. Making cash payments is not the same as improving family socioeconomic status; investing in good jobs, housing, and long-term improvements in SES would make a huge difference.]

Instead, we need to support parents in directly changing what they do. Our experimental research on specific parent behaviors that boost child skills points to the importance of reading and talking to children. Analysis we conducted of the American Time Use Survey shows that on average, however, only 21% of mothers of children ages 3 to 6 report spending daily time reading with their child, only 30% report any daily time playing games with them, and only 11% report daily time dedicated to “listening or talking with” their child.

Worse, many parents are misinformed about how to prepare their young children for school. According to a survey we conducted with 2,000 parents in Chicago, about 25% more parents thought it was essential that children know the alphabet before starting school than thought it was important to spark children’s curiosity.

But this is misguided. Children will eventually learn the alphabet and how to count to 50. Especially for parents with less than a four-year college degree, language interactions with young children – parental storytelling, reading books and asking questions about them – along with math interactions such as playing with shape blocks and reading books about numbers are correlated more strongly with growth in children’s language and math skills than activities such as teaching the alphabet and counting or practicing letter sounds and how to calculate simple sums.

We do a disservice to parents by not redirecting their attention from rote skills, such as memorizing letters, sounds and numbers, to more open-ended inquiry. But researchers are limited as well. We need many more resources devoted to improving high-quality research on understanding precisely what types of parent engagement build the child skills necessary for success in later life. We also need much more research on how to boost parents’ capacity for child skill-building.

But first we must acknowledge that mothers, fathers and other caregivers play a crucial role in building children’s skills. Second, we have to acknowledge that as a nation, we have an interest in what parents do. Children are not just the property of their parents. They are the nation’s future.

Their schooling can only build upon the foundation that parents provide. The United States spends more on education per pupil and less on supporting parents than almost any other wealthy country. The government needs to expand its vision of what it means to support childhood development and invest in helping parents create nurturing learning environments at home in the years before formal schooling begins.

We should signal the value children have for the nation by making work compatible with raising children through family leave, providing access to health care for all children and caretakers and offering free access for children to libraries and museums where they can build a love of learning.

We should also explore new solutions, such as providing digital libraries and utilizing technology in innovative ways to support parents in helping their children learn. Evidence from our recent research shows that this can increase parental reading, boost child language development and close the socioeconomic gap in children’s language skill.

Susan E. Mayer is a professor and a dean emeritus at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. 

Ariel Kalil is the Daniel Levin Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. They are the directors of the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at the University of Chicago.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, Literacy, Parents, Race to the Top, Research

Environmental Protection Agency Fires Hundreds of Scientists, Stops Research

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2025 //
11

The New York Times reported this afternoon that the Trump administration has put the Environmental Protection Agency into reverse gear. Its leader, Lee Zeldin, was previously a Congressman representing the East End of Long Island, one of the most ecologically fragile places in the U.S.

The Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday that it would eliminate its scientific research arm and begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, after denying for months that it intended to do so.

The move underscores how the Trump administration is forging ahead with efforts to slash the federal work force and dismantle federal agencies after the Supreme Court allowed these plans to proceed while legal challenges unfold. Government scientists have been particular targets of the administration’s large-scale layoffs.

The decision to dismantle the E.P.A.’s Office of Research and Development had been widely expected since March, when a leaked document that called for eliminating the office was first reported by The New York Times. But until Friday, the Trump administration maintained that no final decisions had been made.

The E.P.A.’s science office provides the independent research that underpins nearly all of the agency’s policies and regulations. It has analyzed the risks of hazardous chemicals, the impact of wildfire smoke on public health and the contamination of drinking water by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Its research has often justified stricter environmental rules, prompting pushback from chemical manufacturers and other industries.

Categories Environment, Extremism, Research, Science, Trump

Trump Budget Guts Scientific Research

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2025 //
3

William J. Broad, science writer for The New York Times, reports on the Trump administration’s draconian cuts to scientific research. As the U.S. cuts back on investments in basic research, China is increasing its spending.

I invite anyone who reads this to try to explain why this administration is reducing spending on scientific research.

Broad writes:

President Trump’s budget plan guts federal science funding for the next fiscal year, according to an overview published by an external group. Particularly at risk is the category of basic research — the blue-sky variety meant to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and sow practical spinoffs and breakthroughs in such everyday fields as health care and artificial intelligence.

The group says it would fall by more than one-third.

The new analysis, made public Wednesday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a general scientific society based in Washington, D.C., added up cuts to the budgets of hundreds of federal agencies and programs that do scientific research or provide grants to universities and research bodies. It then compared the funding appropriated for the current fiscal year with the administration’s proposals for fiscal year 2026.

For basic science research, the association reported that the overall budget would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent. For science funding overall — which includes money for basic, applied and developmental work, as well as for facilities for research and development — the analysis found that the federal budget would fall to $154 billion from $198 billion, a drop of 22 percent.

The new analysis shows that the Trump administration’s budget plan, if adopted, “would essentially end America’s longstanding role as the world leader in science and innovation,” said Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.

His group, Mr. Smith added, is working with Congress to develop “a funding plan for strategic investment that would help to sustain continued American scientific leadership rather than destroying it.”

Mary Woolley, president of Research America, a nonprofit group that promotes science, said the new analysis showed that the budget plan “is threatening not only science but the American public. If approved by Congress, it will make the public less safe, poorer and sicker.”

Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, did not reply to a request for comment on the new analysis.

In early May, the White House unveiled a budget blueprint that listed proposed cuts to a handful of science agencies. For instance, it sought a reduction in the budget of the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much basic research, to $3.9 billion from $8.8 billion, a drop of 55.8 percent.

Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the science association, said in an interview that the comprehensive analysis drew on several hundred proposed budgets from federal science agencies and programs, as well as figures supplied by the White House Office of Management and Budget. In May, the budget office made public the rough sketch of the administration’s overall proposal for next year but included only a small number of science agencies and figures.

The Gutting of America’s Medical Research: Here Is Every Canceled or Delayed N.I.H. Grant. Some cuts have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye.

Ms. Zimmermann added that the association’s new compilations would be updated as new budget data from federal agencies and programs became available. However, she said, the group’s estimates of cuts to federal basic research are “not going to be undone by a minor number change.”

The science group has long recorded the ups and downs of the federal government’s annual spending on science. Taking inflation into account, Ms. Zimmermann said the administration’s proposed cut of $44 billion would, if approved, make the $154 billion figure the smallest amount that the federal government has spent on science in this century…

In May, science appeared to be high on the list for significant funding cuts, while large increases were proposed for the Pentagon and Homeland Security. Until the science association updated its reports on the proposed presidential budget for fiscal year 2026, however, the public had no clear indication of the overall size of the federal cuts.

The proposed drop in federal funding for science research, if approved by Congress, could let China match or take the lead in global science investments, Ms. Zimmermann said.

In April, the science group published figuresshowing that China had greatly increased support for its scientific enterprise in the past two decades. As of 2023 — the most recent year available for comparisons — China’s investment was close to equaling that of the United States.

Experts say it could take years of data gathering to know if China is pulling into the lead.

Categories Budget Cuts, Economy, Extremism, Funding, Health, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

Billionaires Are Running Our Country, Says German Data Firm

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2025 //
9

The German data company Datapulse released a report showing the vast and growing power of billionaires in the U.S. The report confirms your and my suspicions about the rigging of our economy and our politics. Surely it’s no surprise that Trump’s Cabinet is packed with billionaires. Guess who they are looking out for? Not you.

They cheered on Elon Musk’s ignominious DOGS as they slashed vital government programs. They didn’t complain when Musk closed USAID, causing the ultimate deaths of millions of children and parents because of the halt in US food, medicine and health clinics.

They are thrilled to see Trump send in the troops to halt protests against ICE tactics.

A democracy is supposed to be of the people, for the people, by the people. We are rapidly devolving into an autocratic regime where the rich run the show.

Here is what Datapulse found:

The report, “The Rich Aren’t Just Getting Richer—They’re Running the Show” moves beyond familiar headlines to provide fresh, specific data points on wealth, power, and policy.

Key findings include:

  • The Myth of “Tax Flight”: Contrary to popular narratives, the mega-rich are not fleeing high-tax states. Our data shows that California and New York, states with progressive tax codes, are home to 40% of all U.S. billionaires.
  • Explosive Growth: The number of U.S. billionaires has nearly tripled since 2007, growing from 329 to 877 today. This trajectory is unique to America; China’s billionaire class, by comparison, is stalling.
  • The Rise of the Billionaire Political Class: In the post-Citizens United era, the top 10 political donors, all billionaires, contributed over $420 million in the 2024 cycle alone, directly translating wealth into political influence.
  • Policy for the Few: The study analyzes the direct impact of billionaire-backed policy, such as the House’s 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill,” which could see billionaires gain over $390,000 in annual after-tax income while households earning under $51,000 see their incomes shrink.
  • Concentrated Wealth: Tech and Finance now account for nearly half of all U.S. billionaires, with tech titans alone commanding 37% of total billionaire wealth.

The full study with all 10 interactive charts is available here:
https://www.datapulse.de/en/billionaires-usa/ 

This data provides a new lens through which to view the intersection of wealth and power in America.

The report was compiled by Datapulse.


https://www.datapulse.de/en/
(+49) 30-75437064

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reformers, Data, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Garfield High School, Research

ProPublica: How Trump Is Killing Medical Research: But Why?

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2025 //
17

ProPublica published a searing critique of the medical research that has been cancelled by the Trump administration. The fact that this research has been canceled is not at question; at least some of the cancellations have been reversed (for now) by federal courts.

What’s truly puzzling is why the Trump administration wants to eliminate so much vital research. The U.S. has led the world in biomedical research that has saved countless lives. Why does Trump wants to abandon this vital and beneficent role. Other nations are wooing our top scientists. Why are we terminating their projects?

Some grants were canceled because they dealt explicitly with health and health disparities of nonwhites and LGBT people. A Reagan-appointed federal judge reversed those terminations and said that their purpose was clearly discriminatory.

But what about the search for causes and cures of diseases that affect many populations?

ProPublica posted:

The National Institutes of Health is responsible for more than 80% of the world’s grant investment in biomedical research. Its funding has sparked countless medical breakthroughs — on cancer, diabetes, strokes — and plays a fundamental role in the development of pharmaceutical drugs.

Scientists compete vigorously for a slice of the more than $30 billion that the agency doles out annually; they can spend years assembling grant applications that stretch thousands of pages in hopes of convincing peer reviewers of the promise of their projects. Only 1 in 5 gets chosen.

The NIH has rarely revoked funding once it has been awarded. Out of the tens of thousands of grants overseen by the institution since 2012, it terminated fewer than five for violations of the agency’s terms and conditions.

Then Donald Trump was reelected.

Since his January inauguration, his administration has terminated more than 1,450 grants, withholding more than $750 million in funds; officials have said they are curbing wasteful spending and “unscientific” research. The Department of Government Efficiency gave the agency direction on what to cut and why, ProPublica has previously found, bypassing the NIH’s established review process.

“The decision to terminate certain grants is part of a deliberate effort to ensure taxpayer dollars prioritize high-impact, urgent science,” said Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services. He did not respond to questions about the terminated grants or how patients may be impacted, but he said, “Many discontinued projects were duplicative or misaligned with NIH’s core mission. NIH remains focused on supporting rigorous biomedical research that delivers real results — not radical ideology.”

Targeted projects, however, were seeking cures for future pandemics, examining the causes of dementia and trying to prevent HIV transmission.

The mass cancellation of grants in response to political policy shifts has no precedent, former and current NIH officials told ProPublica. It threatens the stability of the institution and the scientific enterprise of the nation at large. Hundreds of current and former NIH staffers published a declaration this week — cosigned by thousands of scientists across the world, including more than 20 Nobel laureates — decrying the politicization of science at the agency and urging its director to reinstate the canceled grants. Many researchers have appealed the terminations, and several lawsuits are underway challenging the cuts.

It has been difficult for scientists and journalists to convey the enormity of what has happened these past few months and what it portends for the years and decades to come. News organizations have chronicled cuts to individual projects and sought to quantify the effects of lost spending on broad fields of study. To gain a deeper understanding of the toll, ProPublica reached out to more than 500 researchers, scientists and investigators whose grants were terminated.

More than 150 responded to share their experiences, which reveal consequences that experts say run counter to scientific logic and even common sense.

They spoke of the tremendous waste generated by an effort intended to save money — years of government-funded research that may never be published, blood samples in danger of spoiling before they can be analyzed.

Work to address disparities in health, once considered so critical to medical advancement that it was mandated by Congress, is now being cut if the administration determines it has any connection to “diversity,” “equity” or “gender ideology.” Caught in this culling were projects to curb stillbirths, child suicides and infant brain damage.

Researchers catalogued many fears — about the questions they won’t get to answer, the cures they will fail to find and the colleagues they will lose to more supportive countries. But most of all, they said they worried about the people who, because of these cuts, will die.

Please open the link to finish reading the article.

Categories Accountability, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Health, Research, Science, Trump

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

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
13

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

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

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

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

He wrote on Truth Social yesterday:

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

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

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

Leonie Haimson: How States Can Inspire One Another to Fight for Successful Policies

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2025 //
3

Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters in New York City, is a tireless advocate for reform policies that work. She has spent years collecting research about the benefits of class size reduction and prodding legislators to take action.

She wrote recently about the cross-pollination between New York State and Michigan, where state school board leaders used her research to advocate for lower class sizes.

She wrote:

On April 5 and 6, the Network for Public Education, on whose board I sit, held its annual conference in Columbus, Ohio.  More than 400 parents, teachers, advocates, school board members, and other elected officials gathered to learn from each other’s work and be re-energized for the challenges of protecting our public schools from the ravages of budget cuts, right-wing censorship, and privatization.  

It was a great weekend to reconnect with old friends, meet new ones, hear from eloquent education leaders, and participate in eye-opening workshops.  I led a workshop on the risks of using AI in the classroom, along with Cassie Creswell of Illinois Families for Public Schools, and retired teacher/blogger extraordinaire, Peter Greene. You can take a look at our collective power point presentation here.

At one point, Diane Ravitch, the chair and founder of NPE,introduced each of the board members from the floor.  When she told me to stand, I asked her to inform the attendees about the law we helped pass for class size reduction in NYC.  She responded, you tell it –and so I briefly recounted how smaller class sizes are supposed to be phased in over the next three yearsin our schools, hoping this might lend encouragement to others in the room to advocate for similar measures in their own states and districts.

Perhaps the personal high point for me was the thrill of meeting Tim Walz, on his birthday no less,  who said to me that indeed class size does matter.  Here are videos  with excerpts from some of the other terrific speeches at the conference. 

Then, just four days ago, Prof. Julian Heilig Vasquez, another NPE board member, texted me a link to this news story from the Detroit News:

State Board of Education calls for smaller class sizes after Detroit News investigation

Lansing — Michigan’s State Board of Education approved a resolution Tuesday calling for limits on class sizes to be put in place by the 2030-31 school year, including a cap of 20 students per class for kindergarten through third grade.

The proposal, if enacted by state lawmakers, would represent a sea change for Michigan schools as leaders look to boost struggling literacy rates. Across the state, elementary school classes featuring more than 20 students have been widespread.

Mitchell Robinson, a Democratic member of the State Board of Education, authored the resolution and said action on class sizes was “overdue.”

“Smaller class sizes are going to be a better learning situation for kids and a better teaching situation for teachers,” said Robinson of Okemos, a former music teacher.

A months-long Detroit News investigation published in April found 206 elementary classes — ranging from kindergarten through fifth grade — across 49 schools over the 2023-24 and 2024-25 years that had at least 30 students in them. Among them was a kindergarten class at Bennett Elementary, where the Detroit Public Schools Community District said 30 students were enrolled.

Less than a month after The News’ probe, the Democratic-led State Board of Education, which advises state policymakers on education standards, voted 6-1 on Tuesday in favor of Robinson’s resolution. The resolution said lawmakers should provide funding in the next state budget for school districts with high rates of poverty to lower their student-to-teacher ratios in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms.

By the 2030-31 school year, the resolution said, limits should be instituted to cap class sizes at 20 students per class in kindergarten through third grade, at 23 students per class in fourth grade through eighth grade, and at 25 students per class in high school.

“Many studies show that class size reduction leads to better student outcomes in every way that can be measured, including better grades and test scores, fewer behavior problems, greater likelihood to graduate from high school on time and subsequently enroll in college,” the resolution said.

The resolution added that the Legislature should increase funding to ensure schools are “able to lower class sizes to the mandated levels.”

In an interview, Pamela Pugh, the president of the state board, labeled the resolution an “urgent call” for action. Pugh said the board hasn’t made a similar request in the decade she’s served on the panel.

…Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have called for action on class sizes after the reporting from The News and as Michigan’s reading scores have fallen behind other states.

During her State of the State address in February, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said just 24% of Michigan fourth graders were able to read proficiently. Michigan invests more per student than most states but achieves “bottom 10 results,” the governor said.

Asked, in April, if she thought having 30 students in a kindergarten class was appropriate, Whitmer, a Democrat, said, “No. Of course, I don’t.”

“I think the science would tell us that we’ve got to bring down class sizes,” Whitmer said in April.

On Wednesday, state Sen. Darrin Camilleri, D-Trenton, said he was open to a conversation about timelines for implementing class size limits and about how schools could achieve the proposed standards with staffing and physical space.

He noted the Senate Democrats’ budget proposal for next year features nearly $500 million that could be used by school districts to lower class sizes. “I think it’s going to be a culture change,” Camilleri said.

As I read the story, I was delighted, of course; and noticed that the class size caps cited in the resolution were identical to those required to be phased in for NYC schools.  I also noted language in the resolution that echoed the words in some of our research summaries. 

I reached out to Diane to ask her if she knew whether Mitchell Robinson had attended the NPE conference, and she confirmed that indeed he had.  I then emailed him to ask if our New Yorklaw had played any role in his decision to introduce the resolution, and he immediately responded,

“Leonie, your work in NYC was the direct model and inspiration for this resolution! I was in your session in Columbus, and went home motivated to put together the resolution, using the figures from your bill and the research base on the website.”

He cautioned me that the proposal still has to be enacted into law, and that it would be “an uphill battle,” as Republicans hadretaken the state House. 

Then he added: “But that doesn’t mean we sit on our hands for another 2 years—we need to stay on offense and advance good ideas whenever we can.”

I wholeheartedly agree.  This resolution and what may hopefully follow for Michigan students reveals just how importantgatherings like the NPE conference are to enable the exchangeof ideas and positive examples of what’s occurring elsewhere.  This sort of interaction can be vital to our collective struggle,not just to defend our public schools from the attempts of Trump et.al. to undermine them, but also to push for the sort of positive changes that will allow all our kids to receive the high qualityeducation they deserve.

 

Categories Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, Michigan, New York, New York City, Research

Why Does the Trump Administration Want to Deport or Imprison This Cancer Researcher?

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2025 //
4

I have been following the case of Kseniia Petrova, a cancer researcher at Harvard, with a sense of outrage and helplessness. She attended a conference in France and returned last February with samples of frog embryos for her laboratory. She was detained by Customs for failing to declare them and has been incarcerated ever since. The other day, the charge of bringing in an undeclared item was upgraded to a felony, and this young woman faces a possible 20 years in prison.

Is she the kind of dangerous, violent criminal that Trump promised to deport? No.

Jay Kuo is both a lawyer and a playwright, whose blog is called The Status Kuo. He writes about the case today in hopes of rallying support for her. Petrova left Russia to protest the invasion of Ukraine. If she is deported there, she will be immediately jailed.

He writes:

We need to pay close attention to the case of Kseniia Petrova. She’s a Russian-born researcher who was detained by Customs and Border Protection back in February when traveling back from a conference in France.

Like others caught up in the “immigration crackdown” by the Trump administration, Petrova has been held in ICE detention ever since. In her case, a custom agent alleged she had failed to declare frog embryo samples that she’d picked up from a colleague to bring back to the U.S.

For this, the government canceled Petrova’s visa and threatened to deport her. But her case is about far more than frog embryos.

For starters, her home country is Russia, where she was outspoken against the war in Ukraine and was part of the exodus of Russians opposed to Putin’s invasion. She now faces persecution or worse for her anti-war activism should she be sent home, even while the Trump administration bends over backwards for Putin and the Kremlin.

She’s also a researcher and valued member of the Harvard medical sciences community, which has been the constant target of the Trump White House. Being deliberately cruel to Petrova means Trump gets to traumatize Harvard in yet another way.

Petrova has been languishing in a detention facility in Louisiana, but things had begun to move her way. This week, Judge Christina Reiss, a federal judge in Vermont hearing Petrova’s habeas petition, questioned government lawyers over whether Customs and Border Protection actually had the authority to cancel Petrova’s visa. Judge Reiss had set a bail hearing for next Friday, and many viewed it as a hopeful signal that she was set to release Petrova from custody.

Not so fast, said the government. What they did next was frankly shocking, even in this corrosive and highly politicized environment.

The government charges Petrova criminally

Apparently out of sheer spite, and faced with the prospect of losing another case where they had egregiously overreached and overreacted, the government charged Petrova with felony smuggling. That’s a charge that carries up to 20 years in prison. 

Felony smuggling laws are intended to deter profiteers from deliberately carrying in endangered species, not to punish researchers who fail to declare frog embryo samples.

Normally when you fail to declare something that should have been itemized at customs, you could face a fine. It’s considered a minor infraction. And in this case, it isn’t even clear that frog embryos count. According to Petrova’s lawyer, customs experts conveyed that that she “did not need a permit to bring in her non-living scientific samples that are not considered biological material under U.S. Customs law.”

The criminal complaint itself is a just single page attaching an affidavit from a Homeland Security agent. In that affidavit, the agent makes much of the fact that, after checking her text messages on her phone (!!), he learned that Petrova apparently had been told by a colleague that she should declare the samples. But she had joked about not having a plan to carry them in, saying, “I won’t be able to swallow them.”

When asked, Petrova told the agent that she was not sure she needed to declare anything. (I should add here that advice from a colleague is not the same as legal advice from a customs lawyer.) Per the Customs and Border Protection website, U.S. government agencies “regulate the importation of biological materials that can pose a threat to agriculture, public health, and natural resources” (emphasis added). But frog embryo samples don’t pose any threat. So it’s hardly clear that Petrova knew these had to be declared.

“Yesterday’s hearing in federal district court in Vermont confirmed that Customs and Border [Protection] officials had no legal basis for cancelling Kseniia’s visa and detaining her,” wrote Petrova’s attorney. The judge in Vermont seemed prepared to agree and to rule that canceling her visa over this was excessive. 

Filing criminal charges now? Really?!

When someone is taken into custody by immigration officials, it is customary to charge them first with any crimes they have committed. This makes sense because criminal charges, which are far more serious, should always take priority over any immigration violations, which are normally just civil violations.

Once the individual has been prosecuted, explained Ingrid Eagly, co-director of the Criminal Justice Program at the UCLA School of Law, to the New York Times, the authorities can begin the process of removing them from the country. In Petrova’s case, “they put her in removal proceedings, and now are saying it is a criminal case.” Dr. Eagly explained that this was a “ratcheting up of the charges,” an atypical move that “seems retaliatory, designed for a particular end.”

Prof. Marisol Orihuela of Yale Law School told the Times that this was the first time she had seen a case where criminal charges were brought against someone who had already been in removal proceedings for so long. “The question it raises in my mind is why would it take three months” to decide to charge Petrova, remarked Prof. Orihuela. “It doesn’t really quite add up,” she added, wondering why the government would “need this amount of time if you thought this was a crime worth charging.”

Nor does it make any sense that after three whole months, there is still no further evidence beyond what one lone agent said Petrova did and said under questioning just before she was taken in. There are no interviews of Petrova’s colleagues. There is no showing, beyond a text thread with a colleague, that Petrova knew such samples must be declared. They’ve had three months, but the case has not advanced beyond what was known at the time.

On top of this, the timing of the charge is highly suspicious. Judge Reiss had only this week questioned whether Petrova’s visa revocation was proper, and from all accounts she would have likely ordered Petrova’s release on bail next Friday.

Here’s what I want to know. Who in the administration ordered Petrova to be criminally charged? Was there coordination between an overzealous Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Justice? When was the charging decision made? Did anyone object to it? Why was there apparently no investigation to obtain further evidence to support the charge?

Playing dangerous politics, holding political prisoners

Petrova’s case has been prominent in the headlines. She has received support from all across the country and the world. A feature on her plight was published in the New York Times. Her work as a scientist studying images for cancer diagnostics has been widely lauded, while her detention has been condemned as a pointless harm, not just to her but for medical science and the world.

It would not surprise me if orders to do everything possible to continue to punish and hold Petrova came from the very top of the Trump administration. After all, moving to criminally charge Petrova, three months after she was first detained, makes zero sense unless your point is to make an example of her and thumb your nose at customary prosecutorial practices.

The administration has basically said, “Oh, so you think you can get her out? We’ll stop you, just to show that we can. To hell with your ‘due process’ and ‘civil rights.’ We’re in charge, and she’s not going anywhere.”

This is of course the same position the government has taken with Kilmar Abrego García and all the other political prisoners in El Salvador’s CECOT facility. 

I say “political prisoners” because that is precisely what they’ve now become. Petrova, Abrego García, and others are being held for purely political reasons, by or at the request of the U.S. government. It’s not because they’ve committed any actual crimes or are in any way deserving of the treatment they are receiving. Rather, it’s because the administration wants to telegraph strength and cruelty, just like any other fascist regime.

It’s also why the White House is so desperate to cast them as “criminals” and stretch the laws and the truth, even to absurd degrees, to fit its narrative. That makes this fight not just about achieving justice for those wrongly arrested and held, but also about rejecting the raw politicization of their cases and of our immigration and criminal justice systems. 

Indeed, fighting for justice for Petrova and others now means no less than fighting for the rule of law, democracy and the very soul of our nation, now put at serious risk by the tyranny of the Trump regime.

Petrova is not a dangerous criminal. She has not raped or murdered anyone. She is a researcher trying to find a cure for cancer.

Categories Extremism, Fascism, Research, Science, Trump

Breaking News: Trump Administration Cancels Scores of Research Grants at Harvard

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2025 //
10

The Trump administration is determined to punish Harvard University for defiance of its efforts to take control of Harvard’s curriculum, admissions, and faculty hiring policies. Having already suspended $2.2 billion in research grants, the Trump administration expanded its attack on Harvard.

This level of petty vengefulness is unprecedented. Trump is turning his wrath upon Harvard and weaponizing the entire federal government to force the nation’s most prestigious institution of higher education to surrender.

The headline of the story: “A Bloodbath.”

Chris Serres at the Boston Globe reported this story:

In yet another escalation of its fight against higher education, the Trump administration has moved to terminate scores of research grants at Harvard University and its medical school, imperiling scores of research projects and potentially upending the futures of dozens of young scientists.

Harvard researchers who rely on federal grants to study cancer, infectious diseases and a range of other topics began receiving termination notices en masse on Thursday from a number of federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Energy, according to emails shared with the Globe.

The termination notices threaten tens of millions of dollars in research funding for Harvard and affect a broad swath of the university’s scientific community, including graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who are dependent on federal funding for income.

While not unexpected, the wave of termination letters has roiled the Harvard campus in Cambridge and has left many young scientists anxious about their futures, while others are scrambling to find ways to replace the anticipated loss of federal funding.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Evil, Fascism, Higher Education, Research, Science, Trump
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