Trump’s Insane War on Science

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2026 //
7

The New York Times published this excellent article by Jeneen Interlandi about the Trump administration’s mad effort to defund and distort science. Our nation’s leadership in science has been extraordinary. Our scientists have led the world in discovering cures for diseases, extending the human life span, exploring space and the oceans, and extending the bounds of knowledge. This is a gift article, meaning you can open it without a subscription. You should open it to see the many photographs and illustrations.

Interlandi writes:

Thirteen months into the second Trump administration, science, medicine and public health have been hijacked by a cadre of grifters and ideologues and by the politicians in obvious thrall to both. Federal institutions have been all but dismantled. Researchers have been defunded en masse and the universities that support them deliberately destabilized. Discourse on crucial scientific questions and key public health challenges has been stifled. And along the way, trust has been broken between scientists and the nation’s leaders — and the people that both are supposed to serve.

It’s tempting to view this undoing as temporary. Americans love science and revere innovation, almost as a rule, and politicians of every stripe have spent the better part of a century promoting and protecting both. However imperfect the resulting system was, hardly a modern convenience exists that can’t be traced back to it — central air-conditioning, the internet and ChatGPT; polio vaccines, statins and weight-loss drugs; the human genome sequence and CRISPR gene editing. The National Institutes of Health alone generates about $2.50 in economic returns for every dollar of investment. It’s also the largest government-funded biomedical research agency in the world and until recently was the envy of scientists across the globe.

The president’s attacks on this legacy have been relentless and all encompassing. He has turned the federal health department over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer. For months, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget all but froze operations at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His newly established so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, fired thousands of civil servants from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a process that was wildly disorganized, frequently unlawful and needlessly cruel. Global health initiatives were also eviscerated.

Stacked against these measures, the administration’s explanations — which focus on cutting waste and eliminating so-called woke politics from science — have been inadequate and disingenuous.

It can be difficult to imagine a future in which American science does not prevail. But, as the president’s many critics have warned, institutions like the C.D.C., F.D.A. and N.I.H. will be far more difficult to rebuild than they have been to destroy — especially if their intended beneficiaries lose all faith in them or forget why they existed in the first place.

The current administration seems to understand as much. Top officials have taken pains to describe the nation’s scientific bodies as corrupt and ineffective and the nation’s scientists as elitist and excessively woke. “Science and public health have achieved much more than current leaders seem to recognize,” said Tom Frieden, the author of “The Formula for Better Health” and president of the public health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. “We actually know a lot about how to make America healthier. But very little of that knowledge is in line with what the current administration has done so far.”

Nowhere is this disconnect on fuller display than in the long war against H.I.V. Forty years ago, the infection was a mystery and a death sentence. Today, thanks to a combination of biomedical breakthroughs and diligent, boots-on-the-ground public health (testing, education, robust social safety nets), it is a chronic but manageable condition that really flourishes only among society’s most marginalized groups.

The first Trump administration vowed to finally end the American H.I.V. epidemic no later than 2030 by doubling down on prevention efforts in the hardest-hit communities. The resulting initiative has clearly paid off: Transmission rates are down in the targeted ZIP codes, according to the National Minority AIDS Council, a nonprofit devoted to stopping the virus’s spread. Racial health gaps are narrowing as a result, and because prevention is cheaper than treatment, money is being saved.

The second Trump administration seems determined to reverse course anyway.

On March 20 of last year, Kathryn Macapagal, a clinical psychologist and a faculty researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, was sitting at her in-laws’ dining room table when her phone and laptop began pinging and ringing furiously.

Ping. The Adolescent Trials Network, a huge research apparatus focused on treating and preventing H.I.V. infection in teenagers and young adults, was abruptly closed. The network was responsible for several studies that Macapagal and her colleagues were collaborating on.

Ping. A close colleague’s 10-year study on H.I.V. and substance use in L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers and young adults was suspended. So was another project on reducing H.I.V. risk in relationship.

Ring. Another of her projects, on how to improve the measurement of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal surveys, was also done for. So were at least two fellowship programs for early-career scientists who wanted to specialize, as she did, in L.G.B.T.Q. health and dozens of other projects affecting just about everyone she worked with or knew professionally.

Her husband, Dan Fridberg (also a scientist, also reliant on N.I.H. funding), paced frantically behind her as she announced each new bit of carnage. “At this rate, you’ll be out of a job by dinnertime,” he said. “Oh, my God. What are we going to do?”

“I cannot go there right now,” she replied. She was determined to remain calm. She was also too stunned to panic, although in truth, she was not surprised. Her research sat in just about every one of the administration’s cross hairs: All of her projects included the new red-flag terms, and most of the researchers on her staff fell into at least one disfavored category. All of their salaries (including hers) were reliant on N.I.H. funding, and all of their jobs were now gravely imperiled.

And not just theirs: Federal grants were the lifeblood of academic research. They supported scientists and students, institutes and administrators. They covered overhead costs. It was not uncommon for one person to be funded by several grants, nor was it rare for professors like Macapagal, working at elite universities like Northwestern, to be wholly dependent on grants that had to be renewed every few years. It was a deeply precarious arrangement, sustained for decades by the certainty that, come what may, the federal government would honor its commitments.

When the dust finally settled, four of Macapagal’s grants had been terminated, nearly a quarter of her salary was gone, and a project she had spent many months developing was on seemingly permanent hold. As they struggled to make sense of what was happening, she and her colleagues found themselves drawing grim battlefield analogies: It was as if a bomb had gone off and some of them were dead on the field and others, like her, were maimed. “One colleague who lost everything told me that he thought I actually had it worse,” she said. “Because, you know, if you’re going to die, it’s probably better to do it quickly.”

Of the 1.2 million people living with H.I.V. in the United States, more than 60 percent are Black or Latino. Transgender women, gay and bisexual men and teenagers and young adults of color face the greatest overall risk of contracting the virus in any given year.

Those inequities are no mystery: less access to health care, more social stigma and a negative feedback loop, wherein a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities begets a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities. But resolving them is no small feat.

In the years leading up to 2025, as she tried to do exactly that, Macapagal was consumed by several thorny challenges. A troubling dichotomy had emerged since the medication that prevents H.I.V. transmission (known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP) first became widely available. Within the gay community, middle-aged white professionals had embraced the treatment as an ordinary component of overall health and wellness. But younger adults, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities still had not.

“It’s not unlike birth control when it was first introduced,” said Jim Pickett, a board member of TaskForce, an L.G.B.T.Q. youth center on Chicago’s West Side and a collaborator of Macapagal’s. “It’s pretty straightforward as a treatment, but it’s attached to all of this cultural baggage that makes it challenging to get across.”

In 2018, when PrEP was approved for adolescent use, Pickett and Macapagal began searching for ways to overcome these challenges. They knew teens would be an especially tough sell. Health care systems intimidated the boldest of them, sexual identities were still developing at that age, and this particular form of protection could easily become a source of embarrassment or even shame.

They enlisted, among others, Skai Underwood, TaskForce’s dance instructor and youth engagement specialist, in their quest.

Underwood, who was assigned male at birth, knew by the age of 5 that she was a girl but did not medically transition until her early 20s. She was intimately familiar with the shame and isolation that gay and transgender people often faced — how even friends and family would signal their rejection when you declared yourself, how that rejection could lead you to retreat inward. Her goal was to help TaskForce teens resist that impulse, so that instead of hiding, they might thrive.

To her, the solution to Macapagal’s public health conundrum was clear: If you wanted to teach teenagers — or anyone else — to take safe sex seriously, you had to convince them that there was something to protect in the first place. “What it really comes down to is self-love,” she told me when I visited TaskForce in November.

With that in mind, she, Macapagal and Pickett created a two-pronged public health initiative called PrEP-4-Teens. The first prong involved a media campaign linking safe sex to empowerment and joy. The second wove an L.G.B.T.Q. sexual education curriculum into a suite of community-building activities. “They basically come together to dance and make art,” Underwood said. “We celebrate queer identity, and then in between all of the fun, we teach them how to protect themselves.”

The program’s early results were promising: Among other things, participants came away with an understanding of PrEP and a sense that it was no more shameful to use than condoms or birth control. But before they could scale it up or study it in greater depth, a new administration began.

On his first days in office, the president issued a flurry of executive orders rolling back transgender rights and bringing federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to an abrupt end. By many accounts, the DOGE officials tasked with carrying out those orders had little to no understanding of the projects they were supposed to evaluate. “They seem to have confused D.E.I., which is about diversifying the work force, with health equity, which is about reducing health disparities in marginalized communities,” Amy Knopf, a professor at Indiana University’s School of Nursing, told me. “They’re making it so that you can’t study certain groups without violating these edicts. But you can’t really tackle H.I.V., or any number of other conditions, without looking at those exact groups.”

In the weeks after the March 20 Massacre (as some of them had taken to calling it), Macapagal and her colleagues began working furiously to cover as much and as many of their salaries as they could. The main conference space morphed into a war room of sorts, as her boss, Brian Mustanski, tried to match any open position or bit of unused grant money he heard of with whichever recently defunded staff member who was qualified.

Macapagal’s job was saved by one colleague who stepped up without even being asked. “We have some money that we’re not using yet and some work that you could definitely do,” the woman explained. “Let me add you to that project.” Macapagal accepted and for many months afterward would tear up just recalling the kindness.

In April the federal government froze some $790 million in funding for Northwestern, without notice or explanation. The university was apparently being accused of antisemitism and racism over its diversity initiatives, but it was unclear whether the freeze was related to those charges, and no one seemed to know when or whether or how the funds would be restored. Researchers would have to tighten their belts as much as possible, university officials explained, while they tried to sort out the situation.

Among other things, the new strictures meant that Macapagal would not be able to pay Pickett for all the work he had done on her projects. He had presided for decades over a community center that prided itself on perseverance, and he took the news in stride. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll make do.” But she felt awful.

Nobody outside the scientific community seemed to realize what was happening. Friends and family had all tried to reassure her that everything would be fine in the long run, that she just needed to hang in there until the midterms or the next presidential election. She found it exhausting to explain how irreversible the damage was. They had lost years of research in a matter of weeks. Whole labs had been closed, and successful, decades-long careers ended — and none of it appeared to have anything to do with the quality or import of the research itself. The decisions were political and ideological. They were also arbitrary and needlessly cruel.

Trust had been broken as a result, at just about every level of the scientific enterprise (between study participants and scientists, between scientists and universities and between universities and the federal government). Whatever came next, it seemed extremely unlikely to her that any of them, let alone all of them together, would be able to just pick up where they had left off.

In the meantime, those who were left — the maimed but still breathing — leaned on one another. When they were advised to pre-emptively change the language in their public-facing documents, Macapagal and her colleagues did the edits together, grousing in unison over the aggravation of revising terms like “inclusion criteria” and the moral grossness of erasing the word “transgender” from their work.

It was not the first time their field had been forced to make such compromises; the eldest among them remembered culling words like “gay” and “sex” back in the early 1990s. But this was different. In the past, even if they had to change a word or two, they still got to do their research. Now Macapagal found herself contorting a study on H.I.V. vaccine misinformation (her attempt to get ahead of the hesitancy that had plagued Covid vaccines) into something else entirely.

She found herself making other changes, too, including dyeing her pink hair back to a soft brown. “It might be safer for me to not be so out there with how I look,” she said. Some of her friends and colleagues were taking similar precautions. They were losing facial piercings and gay pride stickers. They were also changing slide deck images to include more white people, even when the conditions they studied did not, for the most part, affect white people. It felt gross because it was gross, but what else could they do? They had families and mortgages and work that they still wanted to complete. They knew people who had been doxxed and threatened — and worse — just for studying gender-affirming care. And they were anxious and, in some cases, afraid.

As spring bled into summer and the university explained that it could no longer provide offices with free coffee or free tissues, Macapagal turned a worried eye to her lab and began doing what she could to help people secure other jobs. It was a risky gamble: If they left and her funding was then restored, she’d be hamstrung. But she thought of the group as a kind of family, and she wanted to protect whomever she could.

Her lab manager, Andrés Alvarado Avila, was here on an H-1B visa, and if his funding was cut, he would have just 60 days to find another job, secure an exception or return to Mexico. Her project coordinator, Zach Buehler, was only a few years out of college. She found herself wondering if it was fair or right to encourage him down a career path whose future looked so bleak. Like many of her lab members, Alvarado Avila and Buehler were gay men. As anachronistic as it sounded, she could not help but worry about what that might mean for their futures, in an America that was less recognizable by the day and that seemed to be coming for them all.

In the past year or so, scientists funded through the National Institutes of Health have developed potential treatments for pancreatic cancer, broken the logjam on Huntington’s disease, shepherded a male birth control pill through clinical trials and saved a baby’s life with the first personalized gene editing procedure. In a different time and place, any one of those breakthroughs would have been hailed as the triumph of an epoch and might have lured a new generation of talent to the cause of scientific research.

Instead, six years after the pandemic began and one year into the second Trump administration, we have the opposite: seasoned scientists fleeing the profession (or the country) and younger prospects deciding not to pursue it at all. It’s impossible to say what new medicines those minds might have developed or what wicked problems their efforts might have solved.

What seems clear is that Americans have entered a grim new era, one in which science itself is a political weapon, rather than a tool for the collective good. It would be simplistic to argue that the two — science and politics — should be wholly disentangled. (As a human endeavor that involves trade-offs and requires public support, science is inherently political.) But real data and hard, neutral facts still drive the work that most scientists do, and the best of that work should still frame public discourse and, ideally, inform public policy. And right now, it does not.

Last June the F.D.A. approved the latest version of PrEP: an injection that patients would need to receive only twice a year and that appeared to work even better than its predecessors at preventing infection. In July the N.I.H. director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, laid out yet another strategy for eliminating H.I.V. in the United States. Rather than pour limited resources into more basic research, his agency would simply deploy existing PrEP medications. “Why is there any reason to wait?” he asked on his podcast. “Why don’t we just really commit to ending the H.I.V. epidemic, actually doing it with the tool kit we have now?”

The director’s epiphany frustrated H.I.V. specialists. He was right about the import of using existing tools more effectively. But many of them, including Macapagal, had been working on exactly that challenge when Bhattacharya’s agency cut their funding back in March. What’s more, almost all of the current administration’s stances — not only on science but also on health care and public health, immigration and social safety nets — were anathema to his stated goals.

If health officials really wanted to extirpate H.I.V. from the United States, they would increase access to health care, ramp up testing and education and fortify the social safety net.

At every turn, Trump and his deputies did the exact opposite. They tried to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for H.I.V. testing, treatment and prevention services. They cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars and played chicken with Democrats over Affordable Care Act subsidies. They also weakened the social safety net, sowed terror in immigrant communities and upended public health programs just about everywhere.

If those policies persisted, even as the newest PrEP medication was made commercially available, H.I.V. would continue to linger. “Most of what we’ve done to beat back AIDS comes down to this extremely fragile safety net that is right now being destroyed,” Dr. Jon Mannheim, a pediatric H.I.V. specialist who sometimes collaborates with Macapagal, told me when I visited Chicago in November. Illinois was facing one of the largest Medicaid cuts in the nation, and his clinic was already bracing for impact. Among other things, he worried that fewer social workers would be hired for even less pay than before.

Without them, he said, the whole system might collapse. Patients who lost health insurance would have a harder time getting into the fail-safe programs meant to keep them on PrEP (and to keep AIDS at bay). The pregnant women he treated would lose their main point of contact for a whole suite of stabilizing services. “I don’t know how many babies would have to be born with H.I.V. for the federal government to care,” he said. “But I guess we’ll find out.”

In the meantime, his Latin American patients were still avoiding the clinic altogether, months after ICE had descended on the city. He had lost several of them to follow-up care over the summer. The one that troubled him most was a 10-year-old girl from Venezuela who lived in a car with her mother and whose H.I.V. infection might have already progressed to AIDS. “I have not seen her in months,” he said. “She could be dead by now.”

A few miles away in Chicago, the TaskForce community center was facing similar challenges. It had lost some $500,000 in anticipated funding, thanks not only to state and federal budget cuts but also to a new reluctance among donors. “We heard a lot of, ‘Hey, these dollars that we thought that we could give you we actually can’t now, because you’re L.G.B.T.Q., which is a no, and BIPOC, which is also a big no,’” said the center’s director, Chris Balthazar, using an acronym for “Black, Indigenous and people of color.”

It was getting by, but the strain of moving through the world with so many targets on its back was starting to show. One of its regulars, a 15-year-old Haitian boy, had nearly taken his own life after his parents were abruptly deported. And Underwood had detected a new reluctance in some of her L.G.B.T.Q. students. They were not expressing themselves as freely as they did before, she thought. Some mentioned creeping anxieties, when she asked. Others talked about fear.

She wanted to prevent those feelings from dimming the light she saw in each of them, but it was complicated. Self-expression and personal safety could cut brutally against each other for a gay or transgender teen, and a lot of her TaskForce students had bigger worries, in any case. They did not always have enough food to eat or safe places to stay; winter was coming, and they needed warm coats. “It’s OK,” was sometimes all she could think to tell them. “This is nothing new. We’re just going to keep on jumping these hurdles, one at a time, until we’re free and clear.”

By the start of 2026, Macapagal and her colleagues had settled into an uncertain quiet. The university’s funding was unfrozen in December, and thanks to a couple of lawsuits, most of the grants that her group had lost were in the process of being restored. But confusion still reigned: When would that money be disbursed? Would researchers be given additional time to complete their work? What would happen when those grants came up for renewal in the coming year?

No one seemed to know, but the N.I.H. was still expecting annual progress reports from all its grantees in the meantime. “We are supposed to tell them what we did with the money they gave us and what progress we’ve made in our research,” Alvarado Avila explained. “But they did not really give us the money, and our biggest barrier to progress has been them. How do you say that in a way that’s diplomatic?” The institute where Macapagal worked had 30 fewer staff members now and lots of empty offices and cubicles. One conference room had become a storage facility for the H.I.V. and sexually transmitted infection test kits that they had planned to send to study participants.

“These are supplies that your tax dollars paid for, to get people tested for H.I.V. and S.T.I.s in the context of a research study,” Macapagal said. “And now they’re just sitting there, and like any medical kit, they will eventually expire.” She was torn about the future. On the one hand, she could not help but hope. State officials had expressed interest in partnering with her and TaskForce to expand the Prep-4-Teens program, and she had just applied for yet another N.I.H. grant based on the agency’s stated interest in using implementation science to conquer H.I.V.

On the other hand, hope seemed a delusional response to the events of the past year. Word was that new grant applications would ultimately be decided on not by fellow scientists, as had always been the case, but by political appointees who had apparently effectively taken over the N.I.H. Macapagal had spent nearly all of her adult life cultivating expertise in behavioral health and disease prevention and then training the next generation to do the same. She could not help but wonder now what the point of any of that had been.

She still wanted to show up for her team. She believed that the work was important, and she knew that Alvarado Avila, Buehler and their peers were its future. But truth be told, she was also thinking about going into private practice.

Alvarado Avila was holding off on applying to graduate programs for now, in part because prospects were skimpy for noncitizen scientists who wanted to stay in the United States and also because he had watched ICE agents descend on Chicago and raid the communities around him. He had also watched them kill an unarmed woman in Minnesota — who was a mother and a poet and a white U.S. citizen and who happened to be a lesbian — and his heart was sick and he was angry.

“They say that by focusing on marginalized groups, we are discriminating against everyone else,” he said. “But those are the communities most impacted by these issues. They say visa holders like me are stealing jobs from Americans. I don’t think they understand that, one, for a specialty visa, you have to prove to the government that you can do the work and, two, we contribute to a tax system that we have no assurance that we will get back from.”

More and more, he wondered what fighting back looked like and whether it was incompatible with a career that forced you to erase whole categories of people from your work or treat words like “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” as toxins instead of virtues. More and more he wondered if America, where he had lived, studied and worked for most of his life, was still the place for him.

Buehler, for his part, had applied to more than a dozen Ph.D. programs, almost all of them focused on exactly the kind of research he was doing in Macapagal’s lab. “I love this work,” he told me. “I really want to create the kind of programs that I wish I’d had when I was coming up.” He knew the risks, knew that he was probably consigning himself to a path marked by deep uncertainty and that he would find neither glory nor gratitude on the other side of that struggle. But he also knew that perseverance was the key to progress. And the way he saw it, resilience could be an identity, too.

Categories Creativity, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

When a U.S. Citizen Was Wrongly Arrested by ICE…

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2026 //
21

This story could be told again and again. George Reyes was on his way to work. He is a citizen and a veteran. ICE agents stopped his vehicle, smashed his windshield, dragged him away, and jailed him for three days.

This should not happen in our nation.

Retes wrote:

The author being detained by federal agents on July 10 / Credit: Blake Fagan via AFP

“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.” – Thomas Paine

By George Retes

Last Wednesday, February 18, I officially launched my lawsuit against the federal government. For me, this was something that felt like it was never going to happen. Not because I didn’t want to or because I was afraid, but because I thought that was just the way the law works when you’re trying to hold federal officials—and the government that employs them—accountable for violating someone’s rights.

On July 10, 2025, I was driving to my job as a security guard at a licensed farm in Camarillo, CA. Federal immigration agents were lined across the road that led to the farm I worked at. I clearly stated my citizenship and fully complied with officers, even though they were all yelling contradictory orders and no one was clearly in charge. Yet, despite doing everything right, I was detained and treated as if I had no rights. Agents engulfed my car with tear gas, smashed my window, sprayed pepper spray in my face, and dragged me out. I was choking on gas, unable to breathe, and even though I wasn’t resisting, I had one agent kneeling on my back and another kneeling on my neck while my hands were already behind my back.

I was first taken to a Navy base, where the agents took my fingerprints, picture, and swabbed my DNA. I was then taken off the base to a detention center and held for three days without charges. No phone call. No lawyer. No medical care, even though my skin burned from the chemicals. I never even got to shower. Friday morning, I was put on suicide watch, which means they put me in a yellow concrete room with a concrete bed and tiny mattress on top. They left the light on 24/7. I was in a hospital gown, and a guard watched me. I was in those conditions from Friday morning to the point I was released. I was released with zero charges and no explanation for anything that happened.

After my release, the harm did not stop. Instead of correcting the record, officials from DHS, specifically DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, used social media to spread false and misleading statements about me, in an attempt to justify my detention and undermine my credibility.

I was wrongfully detained and then publicly misrepresented by the very agency that violated my rights. That is not transparency. That is damage control at the expense of the truth. And since they only respond through social media, I would like to ask them to answer these questions, not only to me, but to the world: Why didn’t I ever get a phone call? Or a shower? Or a lawyer? If your accusations are true, why was I released without charges?

Under a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), a person filing a lawsuit against the government must wait six months before they are even allowed to file suit. And even after all that, the chances of actually prevailing in your lawsuit are very low because of the so-called “discretionary function immunity” that the federal government gets. It is even harder to sue federal officials individually. Not because the court system is defending this, but because there is no clear law that allows people to sue individual federal officials for violating their rights.

There is another law that’s sadly relevant here: 42 USC 1983. As my attorneys wrote in Bloomberg Law, Section 1983 “allows constitutional claims to be brought against those acting under color of state law.” But, if, instead, an official is acting under color of federal law (which generally means an official working for the federal government), the result is “near-complete immunity from conventional lawsuits.”

All of that could be easily fixed by Congress. All Congress would have to do is amend the law to allow us to hold federal officials accountable for violating someone’s rights. The law already does this for state officials, so this change would be an easy fix that would hold all law enforcement to the same standards, implying that no one, no matter the badge, is above the law.

This week, I attended the State of the Union as a guest of Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.). I was honored and extremely grateful for the opportunity. Never did I think I would be in this situation, surrounded by these people, and yet here I was. By attending, I was a living reminder of government overreach and how it has impacted so many people, contrary to this administration’s claims that they are only going after “the worst of the worst.” I listened as the president painted DHS’s actions as appropriate simply because we need to fix the border issue. But this characterization is not true. This is not immigration enforcement; it’s madness.

When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

I’m fully aware that my lawsuit might fail; that the world might look at my story and choose to just move on; that the federal officials who did this to me might get off scot-free. But there’s another future possible here: one where we succeed in court, where people choose not to look away, where federal agents can’t unjustifiably detain a US citizen with impunity. That’s the future I choose to believe in, and the one I’m fighting to make real—not only for myself, but for every single person in this country.

What happened to me is not about politics. It is not about immigration policy. And it is not about one bad decision made in a chaotic moment. It is about power without accountability. If a US citizen, an Army veteran, someone who complied with officers’ directions, identified himself, and broke no law, can be treated this way—detained without charges, denied basic rights, physically restrained, and then publicly smeared to justify it—then no one in this country is as safe as they believe they are.

The Constitution does not only apply when it is convenient. Civil rights do not disappear because an agency makes a mistake. And truth does not stop mattering because it is uncomfortable. I am asking for accountability and my day in court, not just for myself, but for everyone who does not have a platform, a lawyer, or the ability to stand in front of you and tell their story. Because if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.

The measure of this country is not whether we admit when we are wrong, but whether we are willing to correct it.

George Retes is a US citizen and Army veteran who served in Iraq and was jailed by ICE and held for three days without an explanation.

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Florida Legislature Planning a New Cash Subsidy for Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2026 //
1

Jason Garcia, an investigative reporter who writes, a blog called “Seeking Rents” uncovered a new Republican plan to shovel taxpayers’ money to charter schools. Under Ron DeSantis and a Republicanncontrolled legislature, Florida is determined to crush public schools by sending public money to charter schools and vouchers.

Here is a new twist: Republicans want school districts to share their funding with charter schools they did not authorize.

Garcia reports:

Five years ago, Republican leaders in Tallahassee gave the charter school industry something it had been seeking for years: A way around local voters.

The change — obscured inside larger education legislation that also included restrictions on the participation of transgender students in school sports — gave state colleges and universities the power to authorize new charter schools.

In other words, it enabled charter schools — public schools run by private management entities rather than public school districts — to bypass locally elected School Boards and work instead through the governor-appointed boards that control state colleges and universities.

The industry now wants to make local voters help pay for these state-imposed charters, too.

The idea is contained inside a package of tax cuts and tax-policy changes proposed last week by the Florida Senate. It would require school districts to split revenue from what’s sometimes called the “additional millage” — an optional property tax that county voters can levy via referendum in order to raise extra funding for their local schools — with every charter school in the area.

A school district currently only has to share proceeds from the additional millage with charters that the school district itself approved.

The immediate impact would be minor: There are currently only 12 charter schools across Florida that have been approved by an “alternate authorizer” like a college or a university.

But it could escalate quickly.

Just last month, for instance, the board of trustees at Miami Dade College signed off on six new charter schools — doubling, in one meeting, the number of charters in Florida approved without permission from the local school board.

They are the first of what could become a wave of new charters unleashed by the Miami college, which just launched a new authorization program late last year, according to WLRN Public Radio and Television.

WLRN reported in December that Dade College had begun pitching its authorization services to prospective charter operators. During one webinar, a college administrator told attendees that they could expect friendlier treatment from governor-appointed college boards than voter-elected school boards.

“I think one of the benefits of going to a college authorizer is that colleges are wanting to do this,” he said. “We’re going to be looking at the same types of things that the districts look at, but with the mindset that we really do want to make this a partnership, and we want to make it successful.”

It’s not the only potential accelerant that could lead to more charters sidestepping school boards.

Florida lawmakers last year approved a major expansion of the state’s “Schools of Hope” program, an incentive program through which charter school operators can get lucrative cash grants and low-interest loans if they open up new campuses in certain locations. The law was pushed through Tallahassee in part by lobbyists for Success Academy, the New York charter network that plans to open new schools in Miami.

The new law enables Schools of Hope charters to work through college and universities rather than solely through school districts.

Miami, Florida’s most populous county, certainly seems to be the focal point of this latest legislative proposal, too. 

Additional millage property taxes expire every four years unless extended by voters through. And Miami’s tax, which generates more than $400 million a year, is currently set to lapse on June 30, 2027 — which means the School Board may soon schedule another countywide referendum.

The provision requiring local school districts to share money with state-imposed charters would take effect just before that vote could happen. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, Funding

The Very Important Texas Primaries: What’s Next?

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2026 //
7

As many of you know, I was born and raised in Texas. I grew up in Houston, third of eight children. I went to public schools, then to college in Massachusetts. I have never stopped being a Texan. I live in Brooklyn now but a part of my heart will always be in Texas. So I keep a close watch over developments in my home state.

The victories of James Talarico for Senate and Gina Hinojosa for Governor put Texas Democrats in a good position to turn Texas blue.

Gina Hinojosa coasted to victory in the Democratic primary over seven opponents. Soon after the polls closed, she had 61% of the vote. She will face incumbent Greg Abbot in November.

Talarico won the primary by 52.8% to Crockett’s 45.9%.

(Full disclosure: I contributed to all three campaigns.)

Talarico was a member of the state legislature. He has studied theology and is working towards a Master of Divinity at the Austin Presbyterian Seminary. He hopes to win independents and Trump voters with his deep religious faith and his rhetoric of love and reconciliation.

Under Governor Greg Abbot–now seeking his fourth term–Texas became an extreme MAGA state. Abbot echoes whatever Trump says , or says it first. Abbot is mean and has a stone heart.

Gina Hinojosa swept the Democratic primary for Governor. She is smart, articulate, beautiful, and Hispanic. One of the reasons that Democrats have not won a statewide office since 1994 is low turnout and growing Hispanic support for Trump. Gina was a featured speaker at the last conference of the Network for Public Education in Columbus, Ohio, and she was wonderful! As she explains in her PBS interview, strengthening neighborhood public schools is her top priority.

The Republicans running for Senate will compete in a May run-off. Jon Cornyn, the incumbent, is a reliable vote for Trump but not really MAGA. He seems like a moderate Republican who votes with Trump to protect his hide. Cornyn is running for his fifth term.

His opponent Ken Paxton is Attorney General of Texas, and it’s fair to say that he’s been scarred by scandals. His wife is a state senator. He cheated on her. Some of his staff blew the whistle on him and said he took payoffs from men he was investigating. The Republican House impeached him; the Republican Senate cleared him, thanks to generous donations by hard-right MAGA billionaires.

Paxton and Cornyn will have a runoff in May.

Talarico will be a strong candidate for the Senate. Hinojosa will be a strong candidate against Abbot, if Texans are sufficiently sick of pay-to-play politics.

The outcome will depend on turnout. Right now, Texas is run by a handful of oil billionaires. They want low taxes and minimal public services. They are Christian nationalists who love money and power.

If Talarico can attract the support of non-MAGA Republicans and if Gina can bring Hispanic voters to the polls, Texas will flip blue.

To learn why Gina Hinojosa ran for governor and what she wants to do, watch this excellent interview.

Watch Gina Hinojosa explain why “we don’t want handouts,” we want the services we paid for.

See Gina Hinojosa speaking at the Network for Public Education conference in April 2025, before the Republican-dominated Texas legislature passed vouchers. The passage of vouchers happened only after Governor Abbot primaried anti-voucher Republicans with the millions given him by billionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania.

To see Talarico in action, watch him talk on the power of love.

See Talarico on how the worst people quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on MLK Day and then violate his teachings every other day of the year.

Talarico on Christian nationalists, who–he says–are “more committed to the love of power than to the power of love.”

I love these two and will support them both. There will be a tidal wave of money pouring into Texas Republican coffers from other states to try to stop these two exciting Democrats!

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Love, Politics, Religion, Republicans, Texas, Vouchers

Trump Aides Insert Citizenship Question into 2030 Census

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2026 //
7

In his first term, Trump wanted the U.S. Census to ask about citizenship. Critics worried that inserting the question would lower the response rate, leading to an undercount. In June 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court “ruled that Trump had not provided a sufficient rationale to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census as part of his broader campaign to stop illegal immigration.”

But that was then, this is now.

Science reports that the Trump administration scrapped plans to overhaul the census and inserted the citizenship question. The result, say knowledgeable insiders, will be an inaccurate census.

The U.S. Census Bureau spent 6 years preparing for a test this spring of ways to make the 2030 decennial census both more accurate and less expensive. In 1 day this month, the administration of President Donald Trump discarded many of those changes and replaced them with an approach researchers warn will likely do the opposite. That’s in part because the test will now include a citizenship question—something Trump has wanted to add since the previous census.

The agency originally planned to ask more than 650,000 residents in six test sites to respond to the same nine questions as on the 2020 census. But on 3 February, the Census Bureau posted a notice that “turned the plan on its head,” says Terri Ann Lowenthal, former staff director of a congressional panel that oversees the agency. In addition to paring down the sites to two, both midsize cities in the South, the agency said it would use some version of the much longer American Community Survey (ACS), an annual survey that monitors demographic changes and asks where residents were born and whether they are a U.S. citizen.

Taken together, the changes blow up the agency’s carefully crafted plans to better reach groups who are traditionally undercounted and to hold down costs, which reached $13 billion in 2020, says former Census Bureau Director and statistician Robert Santos. “It’s no longer a test of how to conduct the decennial census,” explains Santos, an appointee of former President Joe Biden who stepped down 1 month after Trump took office. “The changes make no sense and are not something the Census Bureau would have done on its own.”

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Data, Immigration, Trump

John Thompson: Saving Science from Disinformation, Propaganda, and Lies

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2026 //
5

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, explains how distrust of science has colored every important issue and is deployed by big money donors. Every important debate these days is undermined by propaganda and suspicion of science.

He writes:

Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World, by Michael Mann and Peter Hotez, starts with two of the three biggest threats to humanity – the climate crisis and pandemics.  Then they describe the “third leg to that tripod,” a network of anti-science institutions which is on the way to bringing “the collapse of civilization as we know it.” 

That may sound extreme but both have a sterling record in the fields, despite being attacked by rightwingers; Mann is an environmental scientist and Hotez is an expert in pandemics. 

Mann and Hotez describe the five “P’s” that are undermining our future.  The first two Ps, plutocrats and petrostates, were the original founders, funded by fossil fuel elites, like the Koch brothers, to protect their profits from government regulations. 

I should have known better, but it wasn’t until I read Science Under Siege that I realized how and why the plutocrats also “had a huge financial stake in fighting medical science during the pandemic.” I had long known about their attacks on clean air and drinking water, in addition to fending off the victims of the pollution. But, I was unaware about how these were interconnected. 

Mann and Hotez then document the roles of international petrostates, as well as the Texas petrostate. They estimate that around 40,000 Texans died because they believed the petrostates’ propaganda and refused Covid vaccines. 

Mann and Hotez then explained how elites promoted the “pros,” now known as rightwing media “influencers;” the propagandists, the think tanks that make up falsehoods that they present in papers that look like scientific research; and the fake news press. 

They also criticize a number of mainstream  journalists and commentators in newspapers like Washington Post and New York Times, explaining that they “often fall victim to [a] sort of false framing, what we call performative neutrality, where anti-science will be placed on an equal footing with the consensus of the world scientists.” 

They conclude with the history of why 75% of Americans cannot name a living scientist. 

Science Under Siege follows the same dynamics I’ve seen since the 1990s when social and cognitive science came under siege.  At first, I assumed that we could bring data-driven researchers, funded by the “Billionaires Boys Club,” and traditional  education scholars together. 

I repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to explain to smart data-driven researchers, who didn’t know what they didn’t know about public education, why their methodologies for real world policy issues was inappropriate. The issue wasn’t what data-driven approaches “can” do, but what they likely “will” do. The most common reply was that isn’t what I was hired to do. 

Worse, the big money donors also hired skilled propaganda providers, who demonized teachers. Having previously been a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood, I saw them borrow the “pro-Life” approach of slandering  the supposed type of women who would seek an abortion. They applied it to teachers who supposedly didn’t care enough to hold students to “High Expectations” and “No Excuses.” 

Even worse, “astro-turf” think tanks, funded by foundations like the Koch brothers, spread this PR campaign in order to push privatization. 

To take a recent example, advocates for the “Mississippi Miracle” push the Big Lie that Proficient NAEP test scores are “grade level.” Actually “Basic” is closest to grade level. But privatizers send the false message that up to 90% of urban school students score below grade level, meaning those schools were irreparable broken. 

That led to the claim that reward-and-punish accountability is the only path to literacy, even though so many social and cognitive scientists had long predicted that that learning culture would more likely to undermine reading for comprehension. 

Worse still, you can’t improve the highest-challenge schools, like those I taught in, without building a team effort. 

And guess what? 

Similar attacks are being launched against our team players, such as medical and mental health providers, housing advocates, and higher education, etc. They are being targeted by Trumpists,  the Koch brothers, Project 2025, etc. in the same way public and higher education is being assaulted by privatizers.

Similarly, I love the NYTimes, but I was especially upset by commentaries during the COVID pandemic, often written by people who I highly respect but who didn’t know squat about school cultures and who, for instance, would proclaim: When Trump was Right and Many Democrats were Wrong. with the subtitle, “Children have suffered because many mayors and governors were too willing to close public schools.” 

As Mann and Hotez explain, “It took centuries to build the leading scientific infrastructure in the world here in the United States. And it’ll only take years to destroy it. And once you destroy it, you’re not going to rebuild it.’ 

They call for “urgency” and “agency.” Today, Science under Siege makes an urgent call for a fight against  disinformation that is “infecting” our public schools. They call for investments in media training for young people so they do not succumb to fake news. 

And, if we cannot protect the culture of agency that protects higher education, scholars will be driven out of science for generations to come. 

In other words, if we cannot come together to defeat the tripod of disinformation by those seeking an “anti-science empire,” humanity will undergo extreme suffering which could be extremely long-lasting.

Categories Environment, Evil, Extremism, Science

Two Hurrahs for Our Legal System!

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2026 //
1

Despite the Trump regime attacking the Constitution, eroding our rights, and filling every office with incompetent or malevolent individuals, our legal system has frustrated some (certainly not all) of their evil designs.

Not three hurrahs but only two. Why? The Department of Justice is now wholly under Trump’s control. It has become Trump’s law firm, answering only to him. The U.S. Supreme Court has been far too accepting of Trump’s reckless policies. Too many federal judges have gone along with him.

All too often, the regime has ignored the judges. Rulings against Trump’s policies have come from all kinds of judges, including some appointed by Trump. Grand juries have refused his efforts to indict his enemies.

Nonetheless, many federal judges across the country have repeatedly blocked the regime. Many have defended the right of due process for immigrants, many of whom are arrested without a warrant or access to a lawyer, then disappeared into a detention camp or deported to a country they never lived in.

Here are reasons for cheer.

The U.S. Supreme Court declared that Trump does not have the power to slap tariffs on every other country, because the Constitution gives the power of the purse to Congress, not the President. Trump, furious, responded by slapping a 10% tariff on every country, then raised it to 15%. Will the Supreme Court ignore his open defiance?

This is the same Court that ruled that the President is above the law. Absolute immunity. Trump is the kind of guy who loves absolute immunity for any actions he takes.

Even more powerful than the decisions of judges has been the refusal of grand juries to indict Trump’s enemies and critics. That’s why he attacked Iran without congressional approval. Why should he bother? He is above the law, the dream of a habitual law-breaker.

Many federal judges have repeatedly defended the very American idea that immigrants–even undocumented immigrants–have legal rights. They have repeatedly interfered with ICE’s efforts to arrest, detain, and oust immigrants, without a hearing, without due process.

Federal judges confounded Trump’s vendetta against big law firms who represented Trump’s enemies.They frustrated his vengeance so consistently that the Justice Department dropped the charges. The law firms that quickly acquiesced to Trump have egg on heir collective faces.

The grand juries have been dogged in their refusal to bow to Trump’s pursuit of vengeance.

When Sean Charles Dunn, a paralegal in the Justice Department hurled his footlong Subway sandwich (turkey) at US Customs and Border Patrol agents, he was charged with a crime, fired from his job, and hauled before a grand jury. The grand jury refused to indict him. The “Sandwich Guy” was briefly a folk hero for his defiance.

Mark Joseph Stern, writing in Slate, said that the grand jury’s refusal to indict appeared to be an instance of jury nullification, stating that “a grand jury will typically indict a ham sandwich, but it turns out a D.C. grand jury won’t indict the guy who threw the sandwich.”

Trump told Pam Bondi to go after his enemies and she did.

She charged former FBI Director James Comey with lying to Congress, but the grand jury refused to indict him. She charged him again, and the next grand jury did not indict him.

Bondi then went after New York State Attorney General Leticia James, who won successful convictions of Donald Trump in New York state courts.

Trump wanted her indicted for bank fraud and mortgage fraud. (DOJ allegedly received confidential information from Bill Pulte, chair of the Federal Housing Finance Agency). Eric Siebert, the first interim federal prosecutor in Virginia, who was respected by both parties, refused to bring charges because the evidence was flimsy. He resigned and was replaced by Lindsay Halligan, a personal attorney of Trump’s who had no experience as a prosecutor.

Halligan persuaded a grand jury to indict James but the prosecution was invalidated because Halligan had not been confirmed by the Senate and her predecessor had used up the 120 days when he was interim prosecutor.

Two new grand juries refused to indict James, even though they heard only the prosecutors’ evidence, not her defense. .

In another high-profile case, Secretary of Hegseth wanted to punish six members of Congress–all military veterans–who endorsed a video declaring that members of the military should not obey illegal orders. Hegseth himself was on video saying exactly the same thing a few years ago, but no matter. Trump said that their actions were “seditious” and deserved the death penalty. In another comment, he called them “traitors.” Trump’s top aide Stephen Miller said that the six were engaged in an “insurrection.”

The case was put before a grand jury by the U.S. Attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, a former FOX News host.

The grand jury unanimously refused to indict them.

Not one member of the Grand Jury supported the indictment.

In a separate case, Hegseth tried to reduce Senator Mark Kelly’s rank and pension to punish him for participating in the video. Kelly said he had free speech rights. Federal Judge Richard Leon, a Bush II appointee, enjoined Hegseth’s actions. Hegseth is appealing; he wants to bring Kelly down. His case, however, is absurd. How can a U.S. Senator be muzzled because he is a veteran? How can the Secretary of Defense be allowed to vindictively reduce the rank and pension of those who served honorably but had the temerity to speak their mind?

A few days ago, Federal Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts ruled that the government’s policy of deporting immigrants to third countries–countries they have never lived in–is illegal. This is an unusually cruel policy. The decision will of course be appealed.

So three cheers for the brave judges who stand up for the rights of individuals.

Three cheers for Grand Juries, especially those who think for themselves and refuse to be cowed by political bigwigs.

And two cheers for our legal system, which moves very slowly and can bankrupt anyone who does not have a pro bono lawyer.

Categories Accountability, Injustice, Justice

Trump Administration Abruptly Reverses Its Decision to Stop Prosecuting Law Firms

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2026 //
9

That was fast. Yesterday the Justice Department announced it was withdrawing from efforts to punish four big law firms that refused to capitulate to Trump’s demands. Today, it changed course.

Did Trump intervene? We know he never admits defeat. He’s still searching for evidence that he won the 2020 election.

One would think that between launching a war and obsessing about the drapes in the new White House ballroom, he would have enough on his plate.

But give in to defiant law firms? Let them boast that they beat him? Him, the most powerful, most winningest man in the world? Never!

The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration indicated on Tuesday that it planned to renew its defense of executive orders that it had leveled against law firms, a sharp reversal a day after asking a court whether it could abandon the fight.

In a motion filed with the appeals court in the District of Columbia, where the cases are playing out, the Justice Department formally asked to withdraw its request on Monday to abandon the cases against four law firms. It was not immediately clear how the court would respond; the department is scheduled to file a brief in the case on Friday.

The Justice Department did not comment. The White House declined to comment.

On Monday, the administration, in a court filing, asked an appeals court if it could walk away from its appeal of victories the firms had won against the White House. The move was a significant concession by the White House that it could not stand behind its orders.

But on Tuesday morning, the Justice Department abruptly changed its position. In an email to the four firms contesting the executive orders, a department official apologized for the short notice and said it would file a motion to withdraw its voluntary dismissal.

The email was sent to the firms shortly after 10 a.m. The Justice Department asked the firms to indicate whether they planned to oppose its attempt to reverse course by 10:30 a.m. It was not immediately clear how the firms would respond.

But nearly two hours later, the Justice Department formally filed a motion to withdraw the motion from the previous day.

A White House official said that there were ongoing discussions in the White House Counsel’s Office about how to proceed.

The orders seek to bar firms that refuse to capitulate to President Trump from government business and suggest that their clients could lose government contracts. They had spurred widespread panic in the legal profession and led many firms to submit to Mr. Trump rather than face the existential threat his directives represented.

But four firms — Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block and Susman Godfrey — fought the orders, quickly receiving favorable rulings from district court judges. Nine others struck deals, most notably Paul Weiss, drawing sharp criticism.

It was not immediately clear on Tuesday what had prompted the about-face. One question that the administration’s decision a day earlier to abandon its cases raised was whether the deals it made with the nine firms would survive and whether those contracts — which were not made public — were considered unconstitutional given that the district court ruling would be final.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Extremism, Trump, Turnaround

Peter Greene: West Virginia Reduces Accountability for Private Schools That Get Public $$$

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2026 //
3

The introduction of vouchers for private and religious schools is accompanied by certain lies.

  1. Vouchers won’t cost much
  2. Vouchers will save poor kids from failing public schools.
  3. Voucher schools will be more accountable than public schools.
  4. Vouchers won’t hurt public schools.

Every one of those claims is a lie. Vouchers always cost far more than was predicted. In every state, most vouchers are claimed by students who are already in enrolled nonpublic schools. Voucher schools typically are completely unaccountable for their use of public funds.

Peter Greene offers the example of West Virginia.

West Virginia passed a law to allow taxpayer-funded school vouchers in 2021, and they’ve been tweaking it ever since. They opened it up to more and more students. Consequently, the costs of the program are ballooning: when the law was passed, supporters declared it would cost just $23 million in its first year, and now the estimate for the coming school year is $245 to $315 million.

With that kind of money on the line, you’d think that the state might want to put some accountability and oversight rules in place. You know– so the taxpayers know what they’re getting for their millions of dollars.

But you would be backwards. Instead, the legislature is considering a bill to reduce accountability for private and religious schools.
SB 216, the Restoring Private Schools Act of 2026, is short and simple. It consists of the current accountability rules for private, parochial or church schools, or schools of a religious order– with a whole lot of rules crossed out.

What are some of the rules that the legislation proposes to eliminate for private and religious schools? Here’s the list of rules slated for erasure:

  • The requirement for a minimum number of hours of instruction.
  • The requirement to maintain attendance and disease immunization records for each enrolled student.
  • The requirement to provide, upon request of county superintendent, a list of the names and addresses of all students in the school between ages 7 and 16.
  • The requirement to annually administer a nationally normed standardized test in the same grades as required for public schools. Ditto the requirement to assess the progress of students with special needs.
  • Since there’s no test requirement, there is also no requirement to provide testing data to parents and the state department of education.
  • The requirement to establish curriculum objectives, “the attainment of which will enable students to develop the potential for becoming literate citizens.” Scrap also the requirement for an instructional program to meet that goal.
  • So under this bill, private schools would not have to have a plan for educating students, would not have to spend a minimum amount of time trying to educate students, and would not have to provide the state with any evidence that they are actually educating students.
  • The bill does add one bit of new language:
  • As autonomous entities free of governmental oversight of instruction, private, parochial, or church, schools may implement such measures for instruction and assessment of pupils as leadership of such schools may deem appropriate.

In other words, private religious schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers may do whatever the hell they want.

The bill is sponsored by Senator Craig Hart. Hart calls himself a school teacher, and is mentioned as an agriculture/FFA teacher, though I could find no evidence of where he teaches. He was elected in 2024 after running as a hardcore MAGA. He has pushed for requiring Bibles in school, among other MAGA causes.

Said Eric Kerns, superintendent of Faith Christian Academy, “It just gives private schools a lot more flexibility in what they would be able to do as far as assessment and attendance and school days. Our accountability is that if people aren’t satisfied with the education they’re receiving, then they go to another private school or back to the public school or they homeschool.” Also known as “No accountability at all.” A school is not a taco truck.

As reported by Amelia Ferrell Knisely at West Virginia Watch, at least one legislator tried to put some accountability back in the bill. GOP Sen. Charles Clements tried to put back a nationally-recognized testing requirement and share results with parents. Said Clements

I want to see private schools survive, but I think we have to have guardrails of some sort. There’s a lot of money around, and it’s a way for people to come in and not produce a product we need … I think it just leaves the door open for problems.

Exactly. And his amendment was rejected. The School Choice Committee chair said the school could still use a real test if they wanted to, but the bill would allow more flexibility to choose newer test options; I’m guessing someone is pulling for the Classical Learning Test, the conservative unwoke anti-SAT test.


Democrat Mike Woelfel tried to put the immunization record back; that was rejected, too.

Look, the Big Standardized Test is a terrible measure of educational quality, and it should be canceled for everyone. But for years the choice crowd promised that once choice was opened up, we’d get a market driven by hard data. Then it turned out that the “hard data” showed that voucher systems were far worse than public schools, and the solution has not been to make the voucher system work better, but to silence any data that reveals a voucher system failure.

The goal is not higher quality education. The goal is public tax dollars for private religious schools– but only if the private religious schools can remain free of regulation, oversight, or any restrictions that get in the way of their power to discriminate freely against whoever they wish to discriminate against.

This is not about choice. It’s about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools, and it’s about making sure those schools aren’t accountable to anyone for how they use that money. It’s another iteration of the same argument we’ve heard across the culture–that the First Amendment should apply because I am not free to fully exercise my religion unless I can unreservedly discriminate against anyone I choose and unless I get taxpayer funding to do it.

We’ve been told repeatedly that the school choice bargain is a trade off– the schools get autonomy in exchange for accountability, but that surely isn’t what’s being proposed here. If West Virginia is going to throw a mountain of taxpayer money at private schools, those schools should be held accountable. This bill promises the opposite; may it die a well-deserved death.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, Vouchers, West Virginia

Trump Administration Drops Effort to Punish Major Law Firms

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2026 //
1

At the beginning of his second term, Trump demanded that many large law firms be punished because they had opposed him in the past or represented his opponents. He threatened to bar them from any federal work unless they agreed to donate millions of dollars in pro bono services to causes of his choosing. Most law firms, among the most prestigious in the country, quickly accepted Trump’s demands.

Four major law firms decided to fight the executive order. They won in federal courts. Yesterday the Trump Department of Justice announced that it was dropping its efforts to punish the four resisting firms. The ones who quickly conceded owe Trump nearly $1 billion in legal services.

As historian Timothy Snyder wrote in his book On Tyranny, Do Not Obey in Advance. The losing law firms did not fight for their independence. They obeyed in advance.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

The Trump administration plans to abandon its defense of the president’s executive orders sanctioning several law firms, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department as soon as Monday was expected to drop its appeals of four trial-court rulings that struck down President Trump’s actions against law firms Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Susman Godfrey. 

Trump issued a string of executive orders last year against several law firms and individual lawyers that would have stripped security clearances, restricted their access to federal buildings and directed agencies to end any federal contracts with the firms and their clients.

While the administration lost its battle in court, the executive orders nonetheless put a lasting chill on the industry. Fear of the orders prompted nine large firms to make deals with the president, promising nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes favored by the administration. Many of the same firms that took a leading role opposing the Trump administration in court during his first term have shied away from taking on pro bono cases adverse to the government.

“This affected the interest of big law firms doing what they normally do, to stand up for people without representation,” said Scott Cummings, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In that sense, Trump achieved something important that will linger.”

In targeting the firms, Trump cited their connections to his political rivals and criticized their diversity initiatives and pro bono work advocating for immigrants, transgender rights and voting protections. The White House had singled out these firms for representing clients including Hillary Clinton and George Soros, and for ties to figures such as Robert Mueller, who as special counsel led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The orders set off a panic among law firm leaders across the country, especially after one of the biggest firms, Paul Weiss, chose to settle with the White House rather than gamble on suing the administration.

Others chose a combative approach, arguing in a series of lawsuits that Trump’s actions amounted to unconstitutional retaliation and an abuse of executive power. The firms said the orders would be devastating to their business and that they risked losing lucrative clients that work with the federal government….

An ideological mix of judges ruled against the administration, saying the executive orders undermined bedrock principles of the U.S. legal system. In one decision, Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said blocking the sanctions was necessary to preserve an “independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting.”

Joyce Vance has an excellent post about the law firms that defended themselves and those that capitulated at once to Trump.

She wrote:

So far, four different federal judges have held the orders are unconstitutional. While one of those judges was appointed by Barack Obama and another by Joe Biden, two of them were appointed by George W. Bush— bad math for the administration. 

As for the firms that capitulated early on, they too appear to have miscalculated. Neera Tanden, who served in the White House during the Biden administration, explained the cost on Twitter:

Former Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who is now the Director of the Center for Law and Public Trust at NYU Law School, explained it like this: “The law firms that capitulated to blatantly unconstitutional orders out of fear and for increased profit undermined the rule of law and the legal profession in this country. This episode will be remembered as demonstrating the difference between institutions that had the courage to uphold the Constitution and fight bullying, and those that didn’t and gained nothing. Let’s hope that media companies, universities, and other organizations pay heed.”

Standing up to the bully is the right response. Yes, it requires some initial courage. But the bully ultimately backs down. And every time he does, we win. Today, we won again, thanks to some lawyers who were willing to take the risk and be brave.

Categories Accountability, Justice, Trump
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