The New Republic: The GOP Plot to Un-Educate America

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2025 //
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This is a startling and frightening article about the poison pill embedded in Trump’s One Big Ugly Budget Bill. It contains a plan for destroying the student aid program that has subsidized the cost of higher education for middle-income and low-income students. The plan was described in the 900-page Project 2025. Previous generations of lawmakers believed that the nation benefited by investing in the postsecondary education of young people. They could choose the program they wanted, whether in a liberal arts college or a trade school. Whichever route they chose, their education benefited the nation.

But today, Republicans don’t want the federal government to lend money for students to go to college.

The author of the education chapter in Project 2025 is now in charge of implementing the plan to deep-six student loans inside the Department of Education. Read this article and weep.

The article was written by Astra Taylor and Eleni Schirmer and appears in The New Republic:

The Trump administration’s bombastic attacks on the nation’s most prestigious universities have commanded the public’s attention all year long. Now congressional Republicans are poised to dramatically expand that onslaught. If you think the last few months have been bad for Harvard, brace yourself—the “big, beautiful bill” is coming, and with it, a new dimension of destruction. 

While it’s mostly gone unremarked upon in the mainstream media, institutions of higher learning across the country are about to be pummeled by the looming reconciliation bill, which may portend an extinction event for higher education as we know it. The bill weaponizes working-class families’ reliance on debt to finance their college dreams with such intensity that not only will it push millions to the financial brink, it will push them out of higher education altogether. 

For colleges and universities, the potential fallout is hard to overstate. Whatever schools survive are likely to be drained of working- and middle-class families, instead populated only by society’s most wealthy. As it is, millions of people rightly consider universities to be a costly endeavor that is irrelevant to their everyday life. But rather than remaking higher ed into a vibrant and more democratic institution, this bill threatens to do the opposite. It will cement the stereotype of higher education as an elite institution into an ironclad reality. On June 25, student debtors and their allies will be protesting these devastating cuts in Washington, D.C. But so far, very few elected officials are sounding the alarm on these issues with the fever pitch they deserve, let alone doing the work required to slow down and obstruct their passage into law.  

The overhaul of the student lending system championed by Republican legislators has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility or balancing the budget. Instead, it provides an ominous articulation of the Republican Party’s authoritarian ambitions, one that is chillingly consistent with the bill’s massive increases for immigration and border security. This is not a budget bill, it is a debt and deportation bill—and one built on the fascist foundation laid by the Heritage Foundation’s now-notorious Project 2025

As of this month, Lindsey Burke, formerly the Heritage Foundation’s top education policy official, serves as the Education Department’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs. As the author of Project 2025’s chapter on education policy, Burke recommended gutting student loan relief (along with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and scientific research funding) to bring universities to heel and reorient American society toward the far right. 

In the words of influential conservative activist Christopher Rufo, “Reforming the student loan programs could put the whole university sector into a significant recession” and state of “existential terror.” The goal is to use economic policy to impose an unpopular and stifling ideological agenda, exacted by punitive student debt. 

Whereas President Biden’s administration was defined by debates over how much student debt should get canceled and how quickly, this bill kicks away the concept of student loan relief altogether. In a draconian sweep, this bill removes the congressionally authorized power to cancel federal student loans that sitting presidents have long possessed. This means that even if the Democrats win back the White House in 2028, the next president will lack a critical tool—one that Biden possessed but, to his lasting shame, refused to use. 

Though many details are not yet settled, as the Senate and House negotiate between their respective versions, there is no doubt that the bill’s impact will be immediate and profound. Eight million student debtors will see their monthly payments spike from $0 to over $400. Dentists and doctors who choose to work in low-paying community health care centers will no longer be eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs, dramatically reducing the number of health care providers in communities that are already underserved. The bill even comes after the long-standing, Republican-approved federal student loan repayment plans, which allow borrowers to discharge their debts after a certain number of years of regular payments. 

While existing repayment programs cancel loans after 10 to 25 years of repayment, this bill moves the goalposts back to 30 years. As it is, Americans over 60 are the fastest-growing demographic of student debtors: the only age cohort to increase every single quarter of President Biden’s administration. This bill will all but ensure millions of working people carry their debts until death. 

House Republicans, whose proposals are even more extreme than their Senate colleagues’, want to end subsidized loans, driving up costs by tens of thousands of dollars, and place restrictive caps on federal loan amounts. The House bill viciously cuts Pell Grants while increasing the course load required for part-time students to access aid, making it more difficult for people with jobs or family responsibilities to afford to study. 

Both House and Senate versions strive to reduce Parent PLUS and Grad PLUS programs, decreasing working-class families’ abilities to take on loans commensurate with the costs of tuition. Families that can’t afford to pay up front will either have to take their chances with private lenders—who are likely to shut out the neediest families—or choose to forgo the education altogether. Those who take the gamble will face rising debt loads with little possibility of relief, prompting a doom loop of delinquencies, defaults, and tanked credit scores, exacerbating the financial precarity of already over-stressed and stretched borrowers. 

These cuts won’t just harm students who rely on loans to afford college; they will take the doors off colleges’ and universities’ capacity to expand minds and redistribute opportunity. Lost revenue will encourage schools to close programs, squeeze staff, and perhaps shutter entirely. A proposed endowment tax for colleges and universities has prompted fury among higher education lobbyists, but those players have said very little about the bill’s vigorous imposition of debt as a tool of social control. 

Most insidiously, the House bill conscripts colleges and universities themselves into debt. Under the guise of “accountability,” House Republicans want to force colleges and universities to pay back any unpaid federal loans for “high risk” students. This move is designed to penalize institutions for serving the low-income students who often struggle to pay their loans and discourage them from offering majors that are not maximally remunerative. They want to turn the working-class kid studying to become a social worker, artist, or a physician into a liability to her university. 

This kind of social engineering through debt isn’t new. In fact, it hails from the origins of the student loan crisis. In the early 1960s, an ambitious politician named Ronald Reagan made his name by picking a fight with the students protesting racism and war on the state’s then tuition-free campuses. “Those there to agitate and not to study might think twice before they pay tuition—they might think twice how much they want to pay to carry a picket sign,” he said. As California’s governor, Reagan tapped into his base’s anxieties about a rapidly integrating and evolving society to chip away at state support for education. As president, he doubled down on this strategy, following the recommendations of the first edition of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025’s precursor, slashing Pell Grants and tightening student loan eligibility for middle-class families. 

As Ryann Liebanthall details in Unburdened,an in-depth history of the student debt crisis, the number of Black college freshmen fell by nearly 8 percent between 1980 and 1983. More than any other figure, Reagan deserves credit for undermining what once passed as common sense in the U.S.—the principle that public college should be high quality, widely accessible, and tuition-free. Like today’s Republicans, Reagan invoked the figure of the student protester, the specter of racial equality, and the tool of student debt to implement a retrograde agenda. 

Contemporary Republicans are even more brazen. Consider a recent report released by the Heritage Foundation that recommends terminating higher education “subsidies” and student loan cancellation in order to “increase the married birthrate.” What does this goulash mean in plain English? Widespread access to college has enabled women to envision lives beyond childrearing; restricting access will increase fertility rates. Conservative power players are more than willing to cast the country into a scientific dark age in their quest to shore up traditional worldviews, outmoded hierarchies, and concentrated wealth. 

The reconciliation bill threatens to supercharge their oligarchic cause. Rising costs will reinforce the perception that education is the domain of an out-of-touch elite, prompting many to abandon or abort their academic dreams, which will resegregate broad swaths of society. The threat of mounting debt will discourage people from studying their passions or pursuing careers in public service, steering them instead toward the private sector or the military. It will weaken the general bargaining position of workers, who will be less able to use education as a path of upward mobility, while making the labor force more docile; workers burdened by debt are less likely to strike. By funneling student debtors’ ballooning payments into Wall Street coffers and regressive tax cuts, it will ensure that social and economic disparities become more entrenched.

And it will shrink our horizons. At their best, colleges and universities are not just places where people get trained in a skill or earn a degree; they enable people to grapple with bigger questions—to find out who they are, to unlock what they want to be and do, to discover how the world is made, and to dream how it could be remade differently. This is why authoritarians find education so threatening, and why the reconciliation bill must be understood as a strike against our freedom to question, learn, and choose our fates. Even, or especially, when that process challenges authority.

While some Democratic leaders have begun to warn of the economic dangers posed by this bill, none yet seem to grasp the existential stakes—nor the transformative vision required to build the political will required to change course. 

Where higher education is concerned, it is not enough to defend a status quo that the American public knows is broken. Today, an astonishing $1.6 trillion in federal student loans crushes nearly 43 million people. This insurmountable burden has made ordinary people increasingly skeptical of the value of education and more susceptible to anti-intellectual appeals. 

To counter the Republicans’ vision for higher education, Democrats must go far beyond a milquetoast goal of a less predatory student debt system. They must articulate a galvanizing vision for free college. The measure is popular: Surveys show that many people, including pluralities of Republicans and independents, are supportive of free college, despite decades of Republican propaganda demonizing academia. In recent months, faculty, staff, students, and student debtors have come together to lay this groundwork. It’s time for Democratic politicians to catch up. We need a legislative and executive agenda that courageously resists Republican tyranny by defending higher education as a public good that is both universal and free. Free as in cost and, just as importantly, free as in aimed at enhancing individual and collective freedom. We can’t afford anything less.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

Trump Administration Forces Resignation of UVA President Over DEI

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2025 //
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James Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia since 2018, announced his resignation under intense pressure from the Trump administration.

The Civil Rights Division of the Trump administration pressured the Board of Governors of the university to remove Ryan because of his support for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

They said that he pretended to comply with the federal demands to eliminate DEI but merely renamed them.

For the past half century, DEI was considered a hallmark of compliance with civil rights laws. DEI programs encouraged women and nonehites to enroll in higher education and to study the history of discrimination.

Under Trump, DEI has been reinterpreted to mean favoring those groups at the expense of white men and thus discriminating against white men.

The Trump administration has cut federal grants to universities that are slow or unwilling to dismantle DEI programs.

The New York Times reported that lawyers for the Civil Rights Division demanded Ryan’s ouster.

The demand to remove Mr. Ryan was made over the past month on several occasions by Gregory Brown, the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, to university officials and representatives, according to the three people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Brown, a University of Virginia graduate who, as a private lawyer, sued the school, is taking a major role in the investigation. He told a university representative as recently as this past week that Mr. Ryan needed to go in order for the process of resolving the investigation to begin, two of the people said.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights lawyer, has also been involved in negotiations with the university. She received her law degree from the University of Virginia, where she was a student in the law school at the same time as Mr. Ryan…

Mr. Ryan, hired in 2018 as the university’s ninth president, has leaned into issues like making the school more diverse, increasing the number of first-generation students and encouraging students to do community service. But his approach, which he says will make the university “both great and good,” has rankled conservative alumni and Republican board members who accuse him of wanting to impose his values on students and claim he is “too woke.”

Before becoming the University of Virginia’s president, Mr. Ryan served as the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was praised for his commitment to D.E.I. programs. Harvard has been one of the Trump administration’s chief targets since it began its assault on higher education.

The administration’s attempt to assert federal influence over state university leadership decisions is also illustrative of how Mr. Trump’s political appointees continue to wield the Justice Department’s investigative powers to achieve policy goals long sought by a top Trump adviser, Stephen Miller.

Legal experts said they could think of few other instances in which an administration had demanded that a school have its president removed in order to resolve a Justice Department investigation.

“This is a tactic you would expect the government to use when it’s playing hard ball in a criminal case involving a corporation accused of serious wrongdoing or pervasive criminal activity,” said Daniel C. Richman, who is a law professor at Columbia University and a former federal prosecutor.

Categories Academic Freedom, Civil Rights, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Higher Education, History, Injustice, Race, Racism, Trump, Virginia

Federal Judge Enjoins Trump’s Order to Bust Government Employee Unions

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2025 //
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Government Executive pays close attention to the federal workplace; its reporting is especially crucial these days, as Trump attempts to downsize, demoralize, and politicize career civil servants. It reported today that a federal judge in California blocked Trump’s plan to crush federal employee unions. It is not clear how this decision will be affected by the U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier today that federal judges would no longer be able to issue national injunctions. Will the judge’s decision apply only in the 9th Circuit, which includes California and other western states?

Erich Wagner wrote in Government Executive:

A federal judge in California issued a preliminary injunction late Tuesday once again blocking President Trump’s executive order to strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of their right to join and be represented by a union, finding “persuasive evidence” that the measure was implemented in retaliation for speech protected by the First Amendment.

In March, President Trump signed an executive order invoking a rarely used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to strip most federal employees of their collective bargaining rights under the auspices of national security. Since then, although agencies have ostensibly refrained from formally repudiating union contracts as they await a green light from courts, they have broadly disregarded the terms of those agreements, withdrawing from ongoing negotiations and grievance proceedings and cancelling the automatic collection of union dues from workers’ paychecks.

In a 29-page decision, U.S. District Judge James Donato, an Obama appointee, found that a coalition of unions led by the American Federation of Government Employees raise a “serious question as to whether their First Amendment rights have been violated.”

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“In the words of a physical therapist who works at a VA medical center and is an executive vice president for the National Veterans Affairs Council of AFGE, ‘From my interactions with other VA employees, I believe many workers will feel pressure to conform to the administration’s political views and be reluctant to raise health and safety concerns or otherwise criticize agency management, for fear of further retaliation,’” Donato wrote. “[This] is persuasive evidence of the chilling effect of the government’s challenged conduct.”

Donato carefully crafted his ruling solely around the unions claims that they were retaliated against for opposing the Trump administration’s workforce policies. Last month, a federal appeals court issued a stay blocking a similar injunction in a legal challenge brought by the National Treasury Employees Union, finding the injuries in that case were still too “speculative” in nature, and impinging on the president’s legal deference on national security issues.

“The court has no intention in this order of second-guessing the president’s national security determinations or calling on the government to prove the determinations were properly made,” he wrote. “As noted, the executive branch is owed deference in such matters. But a claim of national security does not, of course, automatically negate the Constitution, particularly with respect to the First Amendment.”

Attorneys for the Trump administration contended that Donato lacked jurisdiction to hear the case and that the unions should instead pursue their claims before the Federal Labor Relations Authority. But Donato found the argument too circular in nature, describing it in a footnote as a “Heads, I win; tails, you lose” proposition.

“The government says plaintiffs’ claims should still go to the FLRA because plaintiffs allege that ‘Executive order 14,251 is invalid, meaning the agencies and subdivisions identified in the executive order remain subject to [federal labor law],’” Donato wrote. “[This] is an dd suggestion, particularly in light of the government’s insistence that EO 14251 has already excluded a large swath of agencies and subdivisions from Chapter 71 [of Title 5 of the U.S. Code]. The question of the court’s jurisdiction is not answered by the plaintiffs’ or defendants’ beliefs about the merits of the case. It is answered by the plain language of the [statute].”

In a statement Wednesday, AFGE National President Everett Kelley applauded the ruling.

“President Trump revoked our members’ union rights in retaliation for our advocacy on behalf of federal workers and the American people, and we are grateful that Judge Donato saw through his disingenuous ‘national security’ justification and has ordered the immediate restoration of their rights,” he said. “Federal employees have had the right to join a union and bargain collectively for decades, including during President Trump’s first term, and at no time have employees’ union rights caused concern for our nation’s national security.”

Categories Ethics, Freedom of Speech, Injustice

Senate Parliamentarian Removes Vouchers from GOP “One Big Ugly Bill”

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2025 //
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Politico reports great news for America’s public schools. The Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, removed the private school voucher part of Trump’s “One Big Ugly Bill,” because it runs afoul of the Byrd Rule. The Byrd Rule prevents the inclusion of extraneous issues that are not directly related to fiscal issues. She also ruled that the Senate’s effort to protect religious colleges from an onerous tax on their endowment had to be removed from the bill. Here is the official history and definition of the Byrd Rule, which applies only in the Senate.

Juan Perez Jr. writes:

A Republican proposal to enact a multibillion-dollar private school tax credit program would be subject to a 60-vote threshold if it is included in conservatives’ domestic policy megabill, the Senate parliamentarian advised early Friday in a significant challenge to what would be a sweeping federal school choice program.

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough also determined that an effort to carve religious schools — including Hillsdale College in Michigan — out of a planned expansion of the federal college endowment tax does not meet the Senate Byrd rule’s criteria for the filibuster-skirting reconciliation process, according to Senate Budget Democrats.

Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee had proposed a permanent, $4 billion annual tax credit for individuals who donate to organizations that support educational expenses including private-school tuition, which was projected to cost $26.046 billion between 2025 and 2034, according to estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation.

The tax credit scholarship plan, which is based on the Educational Choice for Children Act, would allow scholarships to students whose families make up to 300 percent of the area median gross income.

The committee also aimed to soften the blow of expanded taxes on private college and university endowments compared to a House-passed tax bill, though many qualifying private schools would still be in line to pay a tax rate of up to 8 percent of their net annual investment income.

It’s not yet clear if Republicans would try to rework some of the tax provisions that MacDonough found violated the Byrd rule, effectively blocking their inclusion in a GOP-only reconciliation measure. Republicans have successfully tweaked other proposals to the parliamentarian’s liking, but her rulings this week certainly helped upend GOP senators’ efforts to bring their fiscal package up for a vote.

Categories Education Industry, Vouchers

Diane Francis: Why Won’t Trump Try to Stop the War in Ukraine?

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2025 //
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During the presidential campaign of 2024, Trump boasted that he could end the war in Ukraine in one day. We are still waiting. He continues to make phony demands of Putin, who ignores his demands, and intensifies his attacks on Ukraine.

What’s going on?

Diane Francis titled her Substack post “Comrade Trump.” She explains:

The contrast between Trump’s principled war with Israel against Iran and his fawning toward Russia’s Putin stands couldn’t be starker. Tehran has been toppled, but on May 28, Trump imposed a two-week deadline on Russia to stop bombing Ukraine to see if Putin was serious about peace. He didn’t stop, and it has worsened since. Trump has said nothing and taken no action. By June 9, he dismissed Russia’s constant attacks, then commented that Ukraine’s audacious “Operation Spiderweb” attack on June 1, against Russian aircraft, “gave Putin a reason to go in and bomb the hell out of them”. Then, on June 12, on Moscow’s national holiday, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio released an official statement, which read: “On behalf of the American people, I want to congratulate the Russian people on Russia Day. The United States remains committed to supporting the Russian people as they continue to build on their aspirations for a brighter future.”

Bombing escalation against Ukrainian civilians on the Trump watch

What “aspirations”? What “brighter future?” The “Russian people” do not, and cannot, build toward a brighter future because they are modern-day serfs, entrapped in a kleptocracy run by a mafia controlled by a delusional and homicidal dictator. Trotting out such diplomatic drivel does not move the dial, and is as sincere as are phony claims by Russia that it seeks only peace. It does not. It “seeks” Kyiv, Odesa, and lands bordering the European Union’s eastern borders, as well as world dominance.

Still, Trump doubles down. On June 16, Trump attended the G7 gathering in Canada. He was clearly upset that Ukraine’s President had been invited to attend the following day (which is why he left before Zelensky arrived). But on day one, he scolded the leaders for expelling Russia from the G8 back in 2014. “The G7 used to be the G8,” said Trump. He blamed the current war on this major snub, which was bizarre because Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine took place in 2014, and its second happened in 2022 and was a continuation of the war started in 2014.

Trump’s accusation didn’t surprise his former national security advisor, John Bolton, who later commented that Trump “never seemed to understand that Russia had been kicked out of the G8 for invading Ukraine or that the G7 membership consists of a group of like-minded industrial democracies.” But Trump’s fibbing would have pleased his pal, Putin, to no end, as would his cold shoulder toward Zelensky and Ukraine. 

Of course, it was nothing new. Trump never lets the facts about Putin and Russia get in the way of one of his Russian revisionist rants, a notably worrisome trait. More importantly, he continues to broadcast Russian talking points that Ukraine is losing the war to Russia, which are untrue but designed to dampen support for Western military assistance to Ukraine and to demoralize Ukrainians. 

Here are the facts, and Russia is not winning the war:

1. Russia is, militarily and economically, “bleeding out”. Since January 2024, its massive ground forces have seized less than 1% of Ukraine, an area slightly bigger than Rhode Island, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Ukraine is the largest country in Europe, apart from Russia, and the size of Texas.

2. The Russians advance 50 meters per day in their latest offensive in Kupyansk and 135 meters daily in Donetsk – a pace slower than the notoriously futile battles fought in The Sommes during World War I.

3. One million Russians will have been killed or wounded by June 20 when summer begins.

4. Russia’s military supply chain has been disrupted and drained financially. Reports are that citizens whose loved ones have died as soldiers are forced to crowdfund and obtain charitable donations to buy body bags and hire transportation so that they can bring the home in order to bury them. 

5. Ukraine’s technological superiority is shredding Russian conventional armed forces. The battlefield is drenched with Ukrainian drones that do most of the killing and wounding. This intensifies.

6. Russia’s massive manpower losses are resulting in desertions and sabotage among the ranks, and forcing its military to offer huge signing bonuses to attract contract soldiers. The rate of attrition is skyhigh and so are the costs.

7. One-third of Russia’s navy was destroyed and the rest driven from Crimea and the Black Sea by Ukraine’s state-of-the-art sea drones.

8. The war is cratering Russia’s economy. Ukraine’s economy is doing okay because its government is prudent, its financial institutions are well run, and corruption is negligible. However, Russia hurtles toward economic catastrophe due to corruption, stagnation, a brain drain, sanctions, labor shortages, capital flight, government debt, incompetence, and inflation.

Mr. Rubio: There is no “bright future” for these Ukrainians who were attacked on Russia’s National Day, June 12

And no “bright futures” for these Ukrainian men and boys:

Military cemetery in Kharkiv. Reuters

Or for their Russian foes:

Russian soldier graveyard. Reuters

The correlation between Trump’s accession to the Oval Office and Russia’s increasing attacks against Ukraine’s cities and civilians is established and disturbing. Arguably, his praise and defense of Putin enables the slaughter: “With Trump so far failing to respond to Russia’s escalating drone strikes, the Kremlin has little incentive to stop. All signs point to Moscow’s defense industry only increasing its ability to launch ever-larger mass attacks,” observed the Kyiv Independent. 

Why is Trump doing this? Some suspect that the President or his family is corrupt. This is unproven, but it is undoubtedly a result of impaired judgment, which consists of a brew of intellectual laziness, vanity, and a proclivity toward geopolitical “name-dropping”. Instead of calling out atrocities, Trump drops Putin’s name a lot. “Putin speaks to me; he doesn’t speak to anybody else because he was very insulted when he got thrown out at the G8, as I would be, as you would be, as anybody would be,” he boasted to reporters at the G7. 

Trump bragged that Putin gave him a painted portrait on his birthday, along with a birthday phone call, just before Trump hosted a massive parade of American troops and military hardware. It’s also curious that Trump’s love of tariffs does not include support for a clever tariff bill by Senator Lindsey Graham that would impose 500% tariffs on Russian oil customers — a levy that would help stop the war. He has also refused to sign British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s massive new sanctions bill, designed to squeeze Russia’s energy revenues, which support his war. And Trump continues to badmouth Zelensky often, blames him for the war, and has mused about cutting off military aid to Ukrainians as a means of ending the war.

It is also apparent that Trump is naïve enough to believe he can pull off a rapprochement with the world’s most hated and treacherous leader, presumably so that the two can carve up the planet. Another explanation for his lavish “Putinizing” is that he and Steve Bannon have long feared China and have an affinity for Russia because they believe in a “civilizational realignment”. Whatever the pathology, Trump is the guy who likes the guy who keeps committing genocide in Ukraine. 

Fortunately, Trump fools no one, except himself, especially after he trotted out an example of false equivalency to justify doing nothing to stop Putin’s rampage. He said, “Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy,” Trump said in the Oval Office, with his German counterpart Friedrich Merz looking on silently. “They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try to pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled. Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”

His analogy was erroneous. This is not about two young children fighting. Russia is ten times bigger than Ukraine and a giant bully who wants to destroy it, then murder the other “kids” in the neighborhood. It must be stopped; they cannot be allowed to “fight for a while”. This attitude puts Trump at odds with most Americans who support Ukraine and with the 91% who don’t trust and intensely dislike Putin and Russia. 

Trump’s policies and pronouncements about this gigantic war in Europe are not aligned with the beliefs and wishes of the American people. But there’s no accounting for ignorance. France’s Voltaire said it best: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.”

Categories Ethics, Extremism, International, Trump

Dr. Jeremy Faust: RFK’s Farcical, Frightening Vaccine Committee’s First Meeting

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2025 //
2

Dr. Jeremy Faust is an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. He is also the editor-in-chief of MedPage Today and author of the Inside Medicine newsletter on Substack. 

This post appeared on his blog Inside Medicine. Dr. Faust demonstrates that RFK Jr. lied at his Senate hearings when he pledged not to inject his anti-vaccine views into national policy. As Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he is a danger to public health.

Dr. Faust writes:

Along with several colleagues, I watched large portions of this week’s CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP) so that you didn’t have to. Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and I debriefed afterwards. Our conversation is above. 

Closed captions (㏄) and a transcript option (📄) can be found beneath the video playback control bar above. (Note: this session is free for everyone, thanks to recent upgrades that make this all possible. If you’d like to support this work, click here.)

Some adjectives came to mind while watching the meeting: Surreal. Embarrassing. Kafkaesque. In place of seventeen highly respected voting members, all fired by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, were seven new characters whose opinions ranged from unhinged (several of the members) to reasonable (mainly voiced by Dr. Cody Meissner).

Various members asked questions that revealed incomplete understandings of the legal process around these votes. One member wasn’t sure whether or not she had a conflict of interest. Random conspiracy theories got air time, while vetted scientific materials created by CDC scientists were literally removed from the meeting’s website, after having been posted earlier in the week. 

Indeed, we learned during the meeting that the CDC’s briefing document on the safety of thimerosal in vaccines was removed because Secretary Kennedy’s office (i.e., RFK Jr. himself) did not approve of it. That of course means that the error-ridden, cherry-picked data in another presentation on the topic by an outside speaker (a longtime RFK Jr. ally) was approved. It was a dystopian nightmare. 

The quasi-good news is that the committee voted in favor of flu shots for everyone ages 6 months and up (whew). They also voted to add a second RSV immunization option. Here are those recommendations (lightly adapted from CDC language): 

  • One dose of clesrovimab, a monoclonal antibody for infants whose mothers are not protected by maternal respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccination. Clesrovimab is one of two RSV monoclonal antibody products available (including for the Vaccines for Children Program). 
  • Routine annual influenza vaccination of all persons aged over six months who do not have contraindications.

The bad news is that the committee also voted to recommend that influenza vaccines that use thimerosal (a safe preservative in relevant concentrations) not be used. This won’t do anything to improve vaccine safety, but it did escalate pseudoscience to national policy. This is remarkable. In every previous ACIP vote, comprehensive data has been presented before a vote. In this case, one friend of RFK Jr. gave a talk (whose contents were not vetted or fact-checked by CDC scientists) before a national vote. It also may eventually be used as a rationale for denying vaccines to people around the world, because preservatives are needed to keep multi-dose vaccine vials from becoming contaminated, especially in settings where the chain of refrigeration may not be complete. Also, the CDC’s own experts were not permitted to speak on this, nor was their briefing document permitted to remain online. My heart goes out to the dedicated CDC scientists who had to sit through this. Here’s a screenshot I took during the meeting yesterday during Lyn Redwood’s (right) unvetted, highly problematic presentation on thimerosal. That poor CDC scientist (left) looks like a hostage. 

Nevertheless, the new voting members of the committee patted itself on the back for its “transparency” in an email sent to the media after the meeting. Here’s what it said (bold added by me for emphasis):

“Honesty, transparency and compassion with regard to public health. These are the three pillars that we, the new ACIP members, are guided by. Our central duty is to protect public health, and we understand that we must answer the call for reestablishing confidence in the scientific examination process. This committee strongly supports the use of vaccines, and other countermeasures, predicated on evidence-based medicine, including rigorous evaluation and expansive credible scientific data, for both safety and efficacy.”

I’m sorry but this is bullshit. The committee undermined vaccine confidence by scaring people about thimerosal. Also, the notion that the proceedings were transparent or expansive simply was not borne out by the facts. This committee specifically suppressed work by CDC scientists. It also failed to publish the language of national vaccine policy votes in advance, which is probably illegal. Claiming all of these virtues as though they were innovations while actually undermining them by turning away from the prior committee’s genuine commitment to those principles is what the kids call “gaslighting…”

Closing Thoughts.

The ACIP meeting was a bizarre spectacle. It was as bad as feared, if not worse. Reasonable science from CDC experts was presented side-by-side with debunked misinformation presented by RFK-allied anti-vaxxers. Other times, only one side (the unscientific side) was permitted to present. What we witnessed was a circus, masquerading as dignified proceedings. (Well, mostly.) The whole thing would be hilarious, but for the stakes. Lives are on the line. Scientific integrity is under attack. Transparency is now just a buzzword, a stand-in for a newly discovered opaqueness from this once-august committee, whilst it claims the opposite. 

Once again, I urge Senator Bill Cassidy—a physician now being routinely humiliated by his vote to confirm Secretary Kennedy based on false promises—to stand up against this attack on science.

Open the link to read the important material I omitted, in the form of downloads and videos.

Categories Education Reform

Stephen Dyer: Vouchers in Ohio Are a Disaster! I Told You So!

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2025 //
18

Stephen Dyer is a public policy expert, a specialist in school finance, and a former legislator in Ohio. He warned 11 years that vouchers would drive the state budget over a fiscal cliff. The court decision a few days ago proves that he was right on target.

Let this be a warning to all the other states that are adopting vouchers (without the consent of the governed, in every case).

He writes:

Proponents have claimed for years that Ohio and U.S. Supreme Court cases from the program’s infancy allows for explosive growth. Judge Jaiza Page warns, “Not so fast.” Just like I did 11 years ago.

Dyer wrote the following 11years ago:

“Overall, the state is sending nearly $144 million to private schools this year. In 2010-2011, that number was $78.85 million — nearly half the amount. Makes you wonder whether the case upholding Ohio’s Vouchers in 2002 would have the same outcome today. Also makes me want to kind of find out.” — Stephen Dyer on 10th Period blog, Jan. 25, 2014

Now he writes:

I guess we found out Tuesday, didn’t we?

To be clear, I had no idea that anyone would actually file a lawsuit against Ohio’s unconstitutional Voucher system when I wrote that on Blogspot 11 years ago (though I really did want someone to do that). But given the Ohio and U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings on vouchers at the turn of the century, I did question whether the state’s explosive funding of vouchers actually was justified under those rulings.

Guess who else agreed with me? Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page. While I focused in 2014 on the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, Judge Page focused on the 1999 Ohio Supreme Court case Simmons-Harris v. Goff. 

Goff reached a similar conclusion as Zelman — that given the program’s then-small educational footprint, both in terms of kids and money — it did not interfere with Ohio’s overall ability to educate its public school students, so the program (which at the time only included Cleveland) was ok.

However, when Goff was decided, the Cleveland Voucher Program cost $5.7 million. The just-passed state budget allocated $2.5 billion over the biennium to the current program.

And that’s where voucher proponents got waaaay out over their skis. I realized this 11 years ago. But now, it’s even more obvious. The programs examined by the U.S. and Ohio Supreme Courts at the turn of the century look very different from the current budget hog Judge Page examined.

And she made that factual difference really clear in her ruling:

“As to the thorough and efficient challenge, the court ultimately held, “[w]e fail to see how the School Voucher Program, at the current funding level, undermines the state’s obligation to public education.” (Emphasis added.) Id. From this language, the Court concludes that the Goff court foresaw a renewed challenge to a larger scholarship or voucher program like EdChoice as an unconstitutional state supported system of private schools. Goff warned that a system that does not create but supports nonpublic schools in a way that jeopardizes the thoroughness and efficiency of the State’s system of public schools violates Article VI Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution.”

Added to this is this incredible fact that was brought out in the court case: 

Not a single penny of voucher money goes to a single parent or student. It goes directly to private, mostly religious schools.

Let me repeat that for those of you in the back:

Not a single penny of voucher money goes to a single parent or student. It goes directly to private, mostly religious schools.

That’s right. This whole money-following-the-kid/parental-choice narrative that voucher proponents are still spilling out is complete, utter Grade A Bullshit.

In 1999, the money did go to parents and kids. Page was quite concerned about this payment change because the Ohio Constitution bans state establishment of religious schools. And if state money flows directly to religious schools that rely heavily on taxpayer subsidies (she mentioned that some private schools have 75% or more of their kids on vouchers), that is establishment and unconstitutional.

“By bestowing participating private religious schools with complete control over prospective students’ participation, the “school choice” here is made by the private school, not “as the result of independent decisions of parents and students.””

It’s as if the original creators of the Voucher program carefully crafted the legislation to pass judicial muster. Then when they got a favorable ruling, the gloves came off.

Oh yeah. One more thing: Not a single penny of the nearly $9 billion we will have spent on vouchers since 1997 has ever been audited. So we have no idea how the money on this unconstitutional program has actually been spent.

But I digress.

Luckily for Ohio’s 1.5 million public school kids, Judge Page recognized the program’s current reality rather than voucher proponents’ fictional account.

Just as your friendly neighborhood blogger did 11 years ago.

Not to brag. 

Well, maybe a little!

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Bill Moyers, a Great American, Is Dead

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2025 //
18

Bill Moyers died yesterday at the age of 91. He was a remarkable man, who served as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s closest advisor and his press secretary, until he quit in 1966. He was a highly accomplished journalist and television star, who dealt with the most controversial issues of the day.

I was privileged to appear on his program.

The full interview is here.

He was one of the great men of the past half-century: Truly moral, ethical, deeply committed to a just world.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Media, Personal

The NY Times: DOGE Lied About Social Security

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2025 //
17

In a long and comprehensive article, three New York Times reporters document what happened when DOGE (or DOGS, as I prefer to say) arrived at the Social Security Administration to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Determined to prove that their services were needed, they misinterpreted data and spun outright lies about finding “millions” of dead people collecting Social Security checks.

The Times titled the article “The Bureaucrat and the Billionaire: Inside DOGE’s Chaotic Takeover of Social Security.” The bureaucrat in the title is Leland Dudek, who became the acting administrator of the giant Social Security Administration, even though he never previously oversaw more than a dozen employees. The billionaire, of course, is Elon Musk.

I wish I could give you a gift article but that option was not available to me as a subscriber.

The bottom line of the article is that the young wizards of DOGE came looking for “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and when they didn’t find it, they made it up. While rummaging through the huge agency, which sends out retirement checks to some 74 million senior citizens, they fired senior officers and thousands of other employees. These checks, by the way, are not government beneficence; people pay a percentage of their income into Social Security throughout their work life, which they collect monthly after they retire.

The DOGS sought access to the agency’s huge computer system, which contains sensitive personal data about those who receive those monthly checks. At first, the federal courts rejected their request but ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court decided that these 20-somethings were entitled to access the data. Privacy is dead. Yours and mine. Elon Musk has the data. What has he done with it, along with information about your taxes? No one knows or says. Musk referred to Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.”

Here are a few of the high points:

Elon Musk stood before a giant American flag at a Wisconsin political rally in March and rolled out an eye-popping allegation of rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration. Scammers, he said, were making 40 percent of all calls to the agency’s customer service line.

Social Security employees knew the billionaire’s claim had no basis in fact. After journalists followed up, staff members began drafting a response correcting the record.

That’s when Leland Dudek — plucked from a midlevel job only six weeks earlier to run Social Security because of his willingness to cooperate with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — got an angry call from the White House, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

“The number is 40 percent,” insisted Katie Miller, a top administration aide who was working closely with Mr. Musk, according to one of the people familiar with the April 1 call. President Trump believed Mr. Musk, she said. “Do not contradict the president.”

Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Mr. Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans, a New York Times investigation has found.

Their work has led to the departures of thousands of employees, thinning an already overstretched work force and setting off a wave of public anxiety over the state of an agency administering politically sacrosanct retirement benefits that Mr. Trump has vowed to protect.

Mr. Musk has left Washington amid a blowup with Mr. Trump, and some of his top aides at DOGE have also departed, leaving federal workers and the public to assess what Mr. Musk’s tornadolike path through Washington yielded. At Social Security, Mr. Musk’s efforts amount to a case study in what happened when his team of government novices ran a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts.

Musk’s senior aide was Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest aides and the architect of the ICE crackdown on immigrants. When Musk left, she left with him. Don’t ask me to explain how that works, because I don’t know. Did she move to Texas to join his sister-wives? Did she take her three children? Or did she stay in DC? I don’t know.

When he started the investigation of the SSA, Musk believed that he would find “massive fraud,” especially the millions of dead people that he believed were collecting Social Security. He didn’t believe the career bureaucrats who said that he was wrong, nor did he accept a secret DOGE memo concluding that the “massive fraud” didn’t exist. Trump’s presss secretary said on FOX News that “tens of millions” of dead people were collecting Social Security checks. Trump lowered the number in his March 4 address to Congress. He said that Social Security records reported “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149….And money is being paid to many of them.”

The Times reporters found:

One audit from 2015 found only 13 people older than 112 still receiving benefits. Other audits found payments being sent to an estimated 24,000 people who generally died more recently — a sign of Social Security needing tighter controls and monitoring — but not the millions Mr. Musk claimed.

DOGE did not find the waste, fraud, and abuse they searched for but they pursued something of perhaps even greater value to them: the personal data of everyone who had a Social Security card, which is almost every citizen except young children.

DOGE demanded that the SSA hire a “21-year-old former intern at Palantir, a data analysis and technology firm, and grant him access to the personal data of every Social Security cardholder despite the executives’ concerns that he lacked sufficient training to handle such sensitive information.”

Despite their objections, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the SSA to give the young man whatever he wanted.

DOGE used its power to advance Trump’s political goals. When Trump quarreled with Maine Governor Janet Mills over transgender athletes, DOGE staffers canceled contracts with the state of Maine.

But under pressure from Mr. Musk’s team, nearly half of the Social Security Administration’s 140 senior executives, and thousands of employees overall, have taken buyouts or retired. As many as 12 percent of staff members, out of a bureaucracy that numbered around 57,000 people, are expected to depart their jobs as part of DOGE’s cost-cutting plan.

To try to make up for the staffing shortfall, the agency has encouraged specialized professionals like lawyers, human resources staff and technologists to take reassignments in customer service jobs — often at higher pay than what the people they’re replacing had made. Workers have said they felt pressured to volunteer for reassignments, or else risk being fired later.

No one knows at this juncture whether DOGE saved money by firing workers at the SSA. But the benefits to DOGE and Musk are enormous: they now have personal data on almost every American.

What will they do with it?

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Data and Data Mining, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Lies, Musk, Elon

Dr. Leana Wen: Where to Find Accurate Vaccine Information After RFK Jr.’s Coup

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2025 //
2

Dr. Leana S. Wen is a regular contributor to The Washington Post. She is an emergency physician and former health director for the city of Baltimore. In this column, she provides a list of reliable sources for vaccine information.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been a critic of vaccines for many years. Yet Trump put him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, despite his lack of experience in science or medicine. At his confirmation hearings, Kennedy insisted that he would not attack vaccines or question their validity. Once confirmed, he reneged on that promise. Just a few days ago, he fired every member of the independent board of vaccine experts and replaced them with people he knew and liked.

Dr. Wen writes:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision this week to fire 17 independent experts on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel — and replace them with people with limited expertise and questionable views — was not unexpected. In November, I warned that such a takeover and the subsequent replacement of experts with vaccine skeptics could be part of the now-Health and Human Services secretary’s playbook to undermine vaccine confidence.

Meanwhile, the CDC’s website has been changing. For instance, a new section on measles treatment includes vitamin A, one of Kennedy’s preferred “alternatives” to vaccines. And instead of recommending the coronavirus vaccine to everyone 6 months and older, the agency now says certain groups such as children and pregnant women “may” receive them.

Many readers say they no longer trust guidance from federal health agencies and have asked where else they can go for vaccine information now. I think they should still continue to consult government sites including the CDC, Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health, as most information featured there appears unaltered. This could change, especially if anti-vaccine voices gain additional influence.

Here are some additional resources I use to cross-reference information found on federal health websites:


• American Academy of Pediatrics: Pediatricians play a crucial role in guiding families to make science-based health decisions. The AAP has excellent information on its website, including entire sections on how scientists determined that vaccines are safe and effective. I especially love its infographics that help parents understand the seriousness of disease and the benefits of vaccination. The organization’s discussion guides for clinicians might also help laypeople who want to be better-equipped to speak with vaccine skeptics in their lives.


• American Medical Association: The AMA has recently been building up its vaccine reference materials for clinicians. Its resource site, while not the easiest to navigate, has accurate and practical information applicable to both health professionals and patients. I find their measles information especially useful.


• American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: ACOG offers superb guidance about vaccines in pregnancy. This includes a thorough analysis of the evidence behind the safety and efficacy of coronavirus shots. Other specialty societies offer similarly tailored tool kits for people with specific medical conditions. The American Society of Clinical Oncology, for instance, has immunization recommendations for cancer patients.


• National Foundation for Infectious Diseases: This organization hosts expert webinars and podcast episodes that I often consult for up-to-date information on treatment and prevention of infectious diseases. Its vaccine resources include well-researched and accessible articles from guest experts, such as this one on what the science says about autism and vaccines.


• The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Vaccine Education Center: Paul Offit of the University of Pennsylvania, one of my go-to trusted experts, oversees this website, which offers not only helpful vaccine information for the public but also real-time analysis of the federal government’s changes to vaccine recommendations. Several other academic institutions that I consult often include the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins University & Medicine.


• The University of Minnesota’s Vaccine Integrity Project: This is a new initiative started by Michael Osterholm, director of the university’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, with an all-star steering committee that is intended to strengthen vaccine confidence through cross-sector collaborations. CIDRAP itself is a terrific news aggregator that I rely on for summaries of the latest research.


• The Straight Shot by the Center for Science in the Public Interest: This is another new project that specifically focuses on changes to federal vaccine policy. Contributors include former top FDA and HHS officials who discuss implications of recent decisions. The analyses are very detailed and cover broader changes at the health agencies, such as how clinical trials will be affected by budget cuts and what is involved in Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative.


These are just some of the independent resources that patients and clinicians can continue to rely on. It’s a relief that they exist and that dedicated scientists and health professionals have stepped up their efforts to provide clear, credible guidance. But the fact that they have to do so points to the erosion of trust in the CDC and federal scientific leadership that was once considered the gold standard for health information. That trust will not be easily rebuilt.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science
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