DOGE (or DOGS, as I prefer to call them) just won the authority to see your most important personal data, thanks to the rightwing bloc of six on the SupremeCourt.,

It’s really unbelievable. There is legislation protecting our personal data. But the Court split 6-3 to allow these mostly very young, very inexperienced kids to review and gather our personal data. The Court also shielded members of the DOGE group from public scrutiny.

The six Republicans on the Court claim to be conservatives. They are not. Some of the six claim to be “originalists,” ruling in accord with the wishes of the Founding Fathers. Nonsense.

Who are these people that Elon Musk left behind? No one knows for sure. Were they confirmed by the U.S. Senate? No. What are their credentials? No one knows for certain. What right do these shadowy people have to know our personal data? They are not a government agency. They are friends of Elon.

This decision gives open access to our records by shadowy figures whose purposes are hidden.

Are they building a data base for the next election? Will the data be used to blackmail people?

These are frightening decisions.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Data and Data Mining, Discipline, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Musk, Elon, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Republicans, Scandal

It’s Dangerous to Call Him “TACO” Trump

By dianeravitch

June 6, 2025 //

Tim O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion News. He writes here about why it is dangerous to call Trump “TACO Trump,” a moniker given to him by Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times.

TACO means “Trump Always Chickens Out.” It refers to his brash statements about draconian tariffs, followed by his usual backing down and deferring them. It happened on “Liberation Day,” April 2, it happened with his shakedown of Canada and Mexico, then his latest occurred when he announced 50% tariffs on the EU and the very next day, postponed them until July 9.

O’Brien writes about Trump’s huge and fragile ego. Although he evaded the draft when he was draft-eligible, he needs to be perceived as strong, tough, fearless, and fierce. A super-hero. A warrior. A man with nerves of steel.

O’Brien has a long history with Trump. In 2006, he wrote a book about Trump called TrumpNation. In the book, he said that Trump was not a billionaire, that he was worth only $150-200 million. Trump sued him for $10 billion for defamation. The suit was tossed out in 2009.

Being called “chicken” makes Trump very angry, O’Brien says.

^{“That’s a nasty question,” he told a reporter who asked about the TACO moniker at a White House press briefing on Wednesday. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. … To me, that’s the nastiest question.”}

^{Trump, who fashions himself a brilliant dealmaker and strategist despite ample evidence to the contrary, is, of course, always going to bristle at the notion that he is a chicken — and a predictable one at that. He also routinely peddles himself as an infallible winner, so the nastiest question is also one that speculates about whether he’s mired in a losing streak. His tariff policy, unleashed on allies and competitors alike, has been rolled out on a seesaw and riddled with economically damaging ineptitude.}

O’Brien says we must prepare for a Trumpian show of force. He must show the world that he is no chicken. Not Putin’s puppet! Not a chicken! Tough! Strong! Never chicken!

Categories Billionaires, Character, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Florida: DeSantis Degraded Education at Every Level

By dianeravitch

June 6, 2025 //

Governor Ron DeSantis has done everything possible to destroy education in Florida. He apparently hates public schools. He pushed through an expansion of vouchers that provides a subsidy to every student in the state, no matter if the family is rich or poor. Of course, most of those using the voucher never attended public schools. Most vouchers go to students in religious schools. Florida currently spends $4 billion annually on vouchers, a sum sure to increase.

Bad as public K-12 education is, the state’s public higher education system is in worse shape. DeSantis has placed political cronies in charge of every state university. He took charge of tiny New College (700 students) because he was offended that Florida had one progressive institution of higher education where students were encouraged not to conform. DeSantis replaced the board with conservatives who put a political extremist in President. What was once a haven for free-thinking students was transformed into a school for jocks and business majors.

The editorial board of the Sun-Sentinel summarized DeSantis’s record of using higher education as patronage for political cronies:

When Gov. Ron DeSantis won his landslide re-election in 2022, a half-fawning and half-fearful Florida Legislature gave him whatever he wanted.

The Harvard graduate could have used that power to burnish Florida’s celebrated universities. He could have chosen the best and brightest to lead schools already among the nation’s best. He could have been the education governor.

That — not a bellyflopping bid for the White House — could have cemented his legacy.

Instead, DeSantis has earned a doctorate in cronyism. He’ll be remembered as the governor who did everything in his power to erode higher education and independent thought. He puts politics above merit and qualifications, with sham “searches” and secret deals.

College and university campuses are now soft-landing patronage pads for Republican allies, at sky-high salaries.

Former House Speaker Richard Corcoran was installed as president of New College in Sarasota. Another politician, former House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, was handed the FAU presidency. A run-of-the-mill former legislator, Fred Hawkins, won the presidency of a state college in Avon Park despite lacking academic qualifications.

Former Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez is now president of Florida International University. Former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska was given the prestigious UF presidency, then flamed out amid reports of over-the-top spending.

It’s no surprise, then, that Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, a former Republican legislator from Hialeah who oversees state colleges and K-12 education, will slide into the presidency of the University of West Florida in Pensacola.

For DeSantis and Diaz, no university is too big and no kindergarten picture book is too small to escape being recast in the governor’s philosophy.

Step 1: Stack the board

First, DeSantis stacked UWF’s board of trustees. Then, newly appointed trustee Zach Smith quickly made clear that UWF president Martha Saunders was unwelcome.

Smith, a Heritage Foundation fellow, had to reach back to six years ago to find even a speck of mud to throw: Two student-organized drag shows in 2019; social media messaging about a Black Lives Matter co-founder and a book, “How to be an Antiracist,” once recommended by university librarians.

It’s true that best-seller is full of provocative opinions. But so is Smith’s book, “Rogue Prosecutors,” which pushes dark conspiracies about prosecutors corrupted by a wealthy Jew.

That did not stop his nomination to the UWF board by DeSantis, who only last year declared war on campus antisemitism amid great fanfare.

The widely popular Saunders saw the writing on the wall, and she resigned.

A farcical scene

That board meeting was an ambush, said trustee Alonzie Scott. The next one was a farce.

Without a job posting or a search, Diaz’s name alone surfaced as a replacement. Just as quickly, a special meeting was called by UWF trustees. There would be no search for a temporary president and no effort to pick an interim leader from the university.

There was only a perfunctory vote to install Diaz. Then, farce upon farce, the board voted with a straight face to begin looking for a permanent replacement for Diaz.

Barring a political earthquake, that will be Diaz. As former Pensacola mayor and UWF alum Jerry Maygarden said at the meeting, what serious candidate would apply for a job that smacks of a done deal?

Even Diaz’s roots defy all logic.

UWF’s strength is its strong community support among residents and businesses, including Republican leaders. Diaz’s Miami-Dade home is a 10-hour drive, 700 miles and culturally worlds apart from Escambia County in “Lower Alabama.”

None of this is about rescuing students who feel intimidated and indoctrinated.

After all, a state-mandated 2022 Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity report found that a majority of UWF students surveyed felt the school provided them the freedom to express their own opinions. Half said they had no idea if their professors were liberal or conservative.

New College 2.0

Never mind. In April, DeSantis told UWF to “buckle up,” announcing he would do for them what he did for New College.

It’s hard to see the success story in New College since the governor declared war on it. DeSantis’ hostile takeover of the tiny liberal arts college has devolved into a money pit: The state’s cost for each New College student shot to more than $90,000. Other state universities average roughly $8,000.

Last month, New College and the University of South Florida were found to be secretly working on a deal to “transfer” USF’s Sarasota-Manatee campus to New College. It’s dead for the moment. Community leaders, kept in the dark as usual, demand answers.

Meanwhile, USF has become the latest fertile field for DeSantis to reward his friends. USF’s president said she will resign, creating yet another job opportunity for a like-minded crony.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

Categories Corruption, Curriculum, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Higher Education, Vouchers

Glenn Kessler Fact-Checks Marco Rubio’s Claim that No One Died When Foreign Aid Stopped

By dianeravitch

June 6, 2025 //

Glenn Kessler is a professional fact-checker for The Washington Post. He recently reviewed a controversy about the consequences of the Trump administration’s shutdown of USAID. Democrats said that people have died because of the cuts; Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not agree. Kessler reviews the record.

He writes:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “No one has died because of USAID —”
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California): “The people who have died …”
Rubio: “That’s a lie.”

— exchange at a congressional hearing, May 21

“That question about people dying around the world is an unfair one.”
— Rubio, at another congressional hearing later that day

When Rubio testified last week about the State Department budget, Sherman confronted him about numerous anecdotal accounts of people around the world dying because the Trump administration, at the direction of billionaire Elon Musk, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and shut down many of its programs.

Sherman used his time mainly to pontificate, and Rubio’s attention must have wandered. He asked Sherman to repeat the question after Sherman said: “We next focus on USAID. Musk gutted it. He said no one died as a result. Do you agree no one had died yet as a result of the chainsawing of USAID? Yes or no.”

Sherman repeated: “Has anyone died in the world because of what Elon Musk did?”

Rubio stumbled a response — “Uh, listen” — and Sherman cut him off. “Yes or no?” he said. “Reclaiming my time. If you won’t answer, that’s a loud answer.”

That’s when Rubio said it was “a lie.” As Sherman’s staff held up photos of people alleged to have died because they stopped receiving services from USAID programs, Rubio denounced the claim as “false.”

Later in the day, at another hearing, Rep. Grace Meng (D-New York) gave Rubio an opportunity to clean up his statement. “Do you stand behind that testimony?” she asked. “And has there been any assessment conducted by the department to this point of how many people have died?”

Rubio said it was “an unfair question.” He tried to reframe the question, arguing that other countries such as Britain and France also have cut back on humanitarian spending, while China has never contributed much.

“The United States is the largest humanitarian provider on the planet,” he said. “I would argue: How many people die because China hasn’t done it? How many people have died because the U.K. has cut back on spending and so has other countries?”

There’s a lot to unpack there.

The facts

At least until the Trump administration, the United States was the largest provider of humanitarian aid in the world — in raw dollars. In the 2023 fiscal year, the most recent with complete data, USAID’s budget was about $42 billion, while the State Department disbursed about $19 billion in additional aid, and other agencies (such as the Treasury Department) did, as well. Now USAID is all but gone, folded into the State Department. Nonetheless, when the dust settles, the United States might still be the biggest aid donor — again, in raw dollars.

When measured as a percentage of a country’s economy, even before the Trump administration, the U.S. was far behind nations such as Britain, Norway, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. The United Nations has set a target of contributing 0.7 percent of gross national income in development aid; the U.S. clocks in with less than 0.2 percent, near the bottom of the list of major democracies, according to a 2020 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Most economists would say that a percentage of a nation’s economy is a more accurate way to measure the generosity of a country.

Rubio is correct that Britain and France have cut back, and that China has not been much of a foreign-aid donor. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for instance, said he would pay for increased defense spending by cutting the foreign-aid budget from roughly 0.5 percent of gross national income to 0.3 percent. (That is still higher than the U.S. share before President Donald Trump began his second term.) China’s aid budget is a bit opaque — numbers have not been published since 2018 — but it appears to be an average of just over $3 billion a year, according to the Brookings Institution.

But when it comes to whether people have died as a result of the Trump administration’s cuts, we have to look at how the cuts unfolded. Starmer announced his plans in a pending budget proposal. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 imposing a 90-day freeze on all U.S. foreign aid — and then Musk forced out thousands of employees who worked at USAID, helping to manage and distribute funds. The resulting chaos was devastating, according to numerous news reports.

Sherman’s staff held up a photo of Pe Kha Lau, 71, a refugee from Myanmar with lung problems. On Feb. 7, Reuters quoted her family as saying she died “after she was discharged from a U.S.-funded hospital on the Myanmar-Thai border that was ordered to close” as a result of Trump’s executive order. The International Rescue Committee said it shut down and locked hospitals in several refugee camps in late January after receiving a “stop-work” order from the State Department.

Another photo held up as Rubio said the death claims were false was of 5-year-old Evan Anzoo. He was featured in a March article by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof titled: “Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.” Kristof focused on South Sudan and the impact that a suspension of HIV drugs — under a George W. Bush program called PEPFAR — had on the poor country ravaged by civil conflict. PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is regarded as a singular success, saving an estimated 26 million lives since it was created in 2003. Kristof focused on individual stories of people who died after they lost access to medicines because of Trump’s order.

“Another household kept alive by American aid was that of Jennifer Inyaa, a 35-year-old single mom, and her 5-year-old son, Evan Anzoo, both of them H.I.V.-positive,” Kristof wrote. “Last month, after the aid shutdown, Inyaa became sick and died, and a week later Evan died as well, according to David Iraa Simon, a community health worker who assisted them. Decisions by billionaires in Washington quickly cost the lives of a mother and her son.”

Anecdotal reports can go only so far. It’s clear that people are dying because U.S. aid was suspended and then reduced. But it’s difficult to come up with a precise death toll that can be tied directly to Trump administration policies. The death certificates, after all, aren’t marked “Due to lack of funding by U.S. government.”

Kristof cited a study by the Center for Global Development that estimated how many lives are saved each year by American dollars: about 1.7 million HIV/AIDS deaths averted; 550,000 saved because of other humanitarian assistance; 300,000 tuberculosis deaths prevented; and nearly 300,000 malaria deaths forestalled. But that shows the positive impact of U.S. assistance, not what happens when it is withdrawn.

Brooke Nichols, a Boston University infectious-disease mathematical modeler and health economist, has developed a tracker that attempts to fill this gap. As of Monday, the model shows, about 96,000 adults and 200,000 children have died because of the administration’s cutbacks to funding for aid groups and support organizations. The overall death count grows by 103 people an hour.

With any calculation like this, a lot depends on the assumptions. The methodology uses a straight-line estimate of program terminations based on 2024 data and published mortality data to estimate the impact of loss of treatment. Nichols said that because it is not entirely clear what aid has been restored, she has not updated the tracker to account for that. But she noted that Rubio claimed on Capitol Hill that “85 percent of recipients are now receiving PEPFAR services.”

“For HIV, the total mortality estimates reflect either a 3-month complete cessation of PEPFAR, or 12 months of PEPFAR reduced by 25 percent (the total results are the same),” Nichols said in an email. “If what Rubio says is true … and 85 percent of PEPFAR is back up and running, then the numbers here are still very accurate.”
In a statement to The Fact Checker, the State Department put it differently from Rubio: “85 percent of PEPFAR-funded programs that deliver HIV care and treatment are operational.” We asked for documentation for the “85 percent” figure, because the phrasing might not include funding for drugs that prevent HIV infection. We did not receive a response.

Nichols acknowledged that the tracker was not adjusted for double counting — a child counted as dying from malnutrition and diarrhea — though she didn’t think it would affect the overall results much. Some of the estimates are based on country-specific information; others are not. Data limitations required her to assume an equal distribution between children treated for pneumonia and diarrhea through USAID.

“The biggest uncertainties in all of these estimates are: 1) the extent to which countries and organizations have pivoted to mitigate this disaster (likely highly variable), and 2) which programs are actually still funded with funding actually flowing — and which aren’t,” Nichols said.

A key source document for the tracker is an internal memo written on March 3 by Nicholas Enrich, then USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health, estimating the impact of the funding freeze on global health (including how such diseases might spill over into the United States). Enrich, a civil servant who served under four administrations over 15 years, estimated that a permanent halt in aid would result in at least 12.5 million cases of malaria, with an additional 71,000 to 166,000 deaths annually, a 28 percent to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally and an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year.

As a result of writing the memo — and others — he was placed on administrative leave.

Nichols said the death toll would not be so high had the administration pursued a deliberate policy to phase out funding over a 12-month period, which would have permitted contingency planning. “It’s true that other countries are cutting back on humanitarian spending. But what makes the U.S. approach so harmful is how the cuts were made: abruptly, without warning, and without a plan for continuity,” she said. “It leads to interruptions in care, broken supply chains, and ultimately, preventable deaths. Also, exactly because the U.S. is the largest provider of humanitarian aid, it makes the approach catastrophic.”

When we asked the State Department about Rubio’s dismissal of the idea that anyone had died as a result of the suspension of aid — and that it was clearly wrong — we received this statement: “America is the most generous nation in the world, and we urge other nations to dramatically increase their humanitarian efforts.”

The Pinocchio Test

Given numerous news reports about people dying because they stopped getting American aid, you would think Rubio’s staff would have prepared him with a better answer than “lie” and “false.” His cleanup response wasn’t much better. The issue is not that other nations are reducing funding — but how the United States suddenly pulled the plug, making it more likely that people would die.
There is no dispute that people have died because the Trump administration abruptly suspended foreign aid. One might quibble over whether tens of thousands — or hundreds of thousands — have died. But you can’t call it a lie. Rubio earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

The Fact Checker is a verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles

Glenn Kessler has reported on domestic and foreign policy for more than four decades. Send him statements to fact check by emailing him or sending a DM on Twitter.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, International, Trump

Elon’s Tweets Today About Trump, Trump’s Responses

By dianeravitch

June 5, 2025 //

The most famous and powerful bros broke up today. Elon Musk and Donald Trump turned on one another. Elon had spent months slashing and burning the federal government, destroying agencies and Departments.

Congress sat back and watched, happy to relinquish their Constitutional powers to the richest man in the world. No, he can’t close down USAID, which is Congressionally authorized. No, he can’t shutter the U.S. Department of Education, without the consent of Congress. Republicans in Congress did nothing to slow him down or reclaim their Constitutional duties.

Apparently, Elon was not happy to learn that Trump’s new budget will increase the national debt.

The tweets flew today between Musk and Trump. I don’t have them all, but you will get the picture of intense acrimony.

The most amazing tweet: Musk wrote that Trump would have lost and Republicans would have lost the House without Elon’s help. What did Elon do that turned the election for Trump? We know he offered million dollar rewards to Trump voters, but only a few. What else did he do? Was it something about voting machines?

I am not taking sides. They deserve each other.

The Boston Globe summed it up:

May 27: Musk says he’s ‘disappointed’ in Trump’s spending bill

Musk criticized Trump’s spending bill, saying he was “disappointed” in the president’s bill in a CBS News interview.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk told CBS.

DOGE stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been responsible for slashing federal programs and jobs during Trump’s first months back in office.

June 3: Musk calls Trump’s spending bill a ‘disgusting abomination’

Just days after Musk departed as a senior adviser at the White House, the billionaire issued a scathing criticism on X, calling President Trump’s spending bill a “disgusting abomination”

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote on X. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

June 4: Musk continues to blast Trump’s bill

Musk on Wednesday escalated his attacks, urging lawmakers to “KILL the BILL.”

“Call your Senator, Call your Congressman,” Musk wrote. “Bankrupting America is NOT ok!”

June 5: Trump threatens to cut Musk’s government contracts

During an Oval Office meeting Thursday with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump told reporters that he was “very disappointed” with Musk as the tech billionaire continued to blast the president’s massive tax and spending cuts package.

“I’m very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill,” Trump said. “I’m very disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped Elon a lot.”

Trump added that he and Musk “had a great relationship” but “I don’t know if we will anymore.”

Musk swiftly responded to the president’s criticism on social media, saying “Slim and beautiful is the way.”

“Whatever. Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X.

“In the entire history of civilization, there has never been legislation that both big and beautiful. Everyone knows this! Either you get a big and ugly bill or a slim and beautiful bill. Slim and beautiful is the way,” Musk added.

Musk continued his criticism in a series of posts, saying Trump has him to thank for winning back the Oval Office.

“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk wrote.

“Such ingratitude,” Musk wrote in a follow-up post.

Just hours after Trump said he was “disappointed” with Musk, the billionaire fired back online — prompting Trump to stoke the flames by threatening to cut Musk’s government contracts.

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump wrote Truth Social, his social media network. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

Musk then claimed Trump is in the Jeffrey Epstein files, then reposted a comment calling for the president’s impeachment.

Trump fired back on Truth social, saying Musk “just went CRAZY!”

In a separate post, Trump touted his spending bill and suggested Musk should’ve turned against him months ago.

OnnElin’s Twitter account (@Elonmusk), he tweeted that Trump would cause a recession in the second half of the year. He also retweeted videos of Trump partying with Jeffrey Epstein and young women.

At 3:10 pm today, Musk tweeted:

Time to drop the really big bomb:

@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.

Have a nice day, DJT!

Categories Extremism, Musk, Elon, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: GOP Budget Bill Is Packed with Deadly Cuts and Lies

By dianeravitch

June 5, 2025 //

Heather Cox Richardson warns about the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” which cuts Medicaid and other vital services while increasing the deficit. Republicans cover up the cruel cuts to vital services by lying about them.

She writes:

The Republicans’ giant budget reconciliation bill has focused attention on the drastic cuts the Trump administration is making to the American government. On Friday, when a constituent at a town hall shouted that the Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income Americans, meant that “people will die,” Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) replied, “Well, we are all going to die.”

The next day, Ernst released a video purporting to be an apology. It made things worse. “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth. So, I apologize. And I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ,” she said.

Ernst blamed the “hysteria that’s out there coming from the left” for the outcry over her comments. Like other Republicans, she claims that the proposed cuts of more than $700 billion in Medicaid funding over the next ten years is designed only to get rid of the waste and fraud in the program. Thus, they say, they are actually strengthening Medicaid for those who need it.

But, as Linda Qiu noted in the New York Timestoday, most of the bill’s provisions have little to do with the “waste, fraud, and abuse” Republicans talk about. They target Medicaid expansion, cut the ability of states to finance Medicaid, force states to drop coverage, and limit access to care. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the cuts mean more than 10.3 million Americans will lose health care coverage.

House speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that those losing coverage will be 1.4 million unauthorized immigrants, but this is false. As Qiu notes, although 14 states use their own funds to provide health insurance for undocumented immigrant children, and seven of those states provide some coverage for undocumented pregnant women, in fact, “unauthorized immigrants are not eligible for federally funded Medicaid, except in emergency situations.” Instead, the bill pressures those fourteen states to drop undocumented coverage by reducing their federal Medicaid funding.

MAGA Republicans claim their “One Big, Beautiful Bill”—that’s its official name—dramatically reduces the deficit, but that, too, is a lie.

On Thursday, May 29, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed the measure would carry out “the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years with $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings.” She echoed forty years of Republican claims that the economic growth unleashed by the measure would lead to higher tax revenues, a claim that hasn’t been true since Ronald Reagan made it in the 1980s.

In fact, the CBO estimates that the tax cuts and additional spending in the measure mean “[a]n increase in the federal deficit of $3.8 trillion.” As G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers notes, the CBO has been historically very reliable, but Leavitt and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tried to discount its scoring by claiming, as Johnson said: “They are historically totally unreliable. It’s run by Democrats.”

The director of the CBO, economist Philip Swagel, worked as chief of staff and senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisors during the George W. Bush administration. He was appointed in 2019 with the support of Senate Budget Committee chair Michael Enzi (R-WY) and House Budget Committee chair John Yarmuth (D-KY). He was reappointed in 2023 with bipartisan support.

Republican cuts to government programs are a dramatic reworking of America’s traditional evidence-based government that works to improve the lives of a majority of Americans. They are replacing that government with an ideologically driven system that concentrates wealth and power in a few hands and denies that the government has a role to play in protecting Americans.

And yet, those who get their news by watching the Fox News Channel are likely unaware of the Republicans’ planned changes to Medicaid. As Aaron Rupar noted, on this morning’s Fox and Friends, the hosts mentioned Medicaid just once. They mentioned former president Joe Biden 39 times.

That change shows dramatically in cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA is an agency in the Commerce Department, established under Republican president Richard Nixon in 1970, that monitors weather conditions, storms, and ocean currents. The National Weather Service (NWS), which provides weather, wind, and ocean forecasts, is part of NOAA.

NWS forecasts annually provide the U.S. with an estimated $31.5 billion in benefits as they enable farmers, fishermen, businesspeople, schools, and individuals to plan around weather events.

As soon as he took office, Trump imposed an across-the-board hiring freeze, and billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” fired probationary employees and impounded funds Congress had appropriated. Now, as hurricane season begins, experts in storms and disasters are worried that the NOAA will be unable to function adequately.

Cuts to the NWS have already meant fewer weather balloons and thus less data, leaving gaps in information for a March ice storm in Northern Michigan and for storms and floods in Oklahoma in April. Oliver Milman of The Guardianreported today that 15 NWS offices on the Gulf of Mexico, a region vulnerable to hurricanes, are understaffed after losing more than 600 employees. Miami’s National Hurricane Center is short five specialists. Thirty of the 122 NWS stations no longer have a meteorologist in charge, and as of June 1, seven of those 122 stations will not have enough staff to operate around the clock.

On May 5, the five living former NWS leaders, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, wrote a letter to the American people warning that the cuts threaten to bring “needless loss of life.” They urged Americans to “raise your voice” against the cuts.

Trump’s proposed 2026 budget calls for “terminating a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs” and cutting about 25% more out of NOAA’s funding.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also suffered dramatic cuts as Trump has said he intends to push disaster recovery to the states. The lack of expertise is taking a toll there, too. Today staff members there said they were baffled after David Richardson, the head of the agency, said he did not know the United States has a hurricane season. (It does, and it stretches from June 1 to the end of November.) Richardson had no experience with disaster response before taking charge of FEMA.

Trump’s proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are even more draconian. On Friday, in a more detailed budget than the administration published in early May, the administration called for cuts of 43% to the NIH, about $20 billion a year. That includes cuts of nearly 40% to the National Cancer Institute. At the same time, the administration is threatening to end virtually all biomedical research at universities.

On Friday, May 23, the White House issued an executive order called “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” The order cites the COVID-19 guidance about school reopenings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to claim that the federal government under President Joe Biden “used or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner.” (Schools closed in March 2020 under Trump.) The document orders that “[e]mployees shall not engage in scientific misconduct” and, scientists Colette Delawalla, Victor Ambros, Carl Bergstrom, Carol Greider, Michael Mann, and Brian Nosek explain in The Guardian, gives political appointees the power to silence any research they oppose “based on their own ‘judgment.’” They also have the power to punish those scientists whose work they find objectionable.

The Guardian authors note that science is “the most important long-term investment for humanity.” They recall the story of Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who is a prime example of the terrible danger of replacing fact-based reality with ideology.

As Sam Kean of The Atlantic noted in 2017, Lysenko opposed science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century in favor of the pseudo-scientific idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. This idea reflected communist political thought, and Lysenko gained the favor of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Lysenko claimed that his own agricultural techniques, which included transforming one species into another, would dramatically increase crop yields. Government leaders declared that Lysenko’s ideas were the only correct ones, and anyone who disagreed with him was denounced. About 3,000 biologists whose work contradicted his were fired or sent to jail. Some were executed. Scientific research was effectively banned.

In the 1930s, Soviet leaders set out to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, and when their new state-run farming collectives failed, they turned to Lysenko to fix the problem with his new techniques. Almost everything planted according to his demands died or rotted. In the USSR and in China, which adopted his methods in the 1950s, at least 30 million people died of starvation.

“[W]hen the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end,” Kean said of Lysenko. He concludes: “It never did.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Lies, Republicans, Science, Trump

Jan Resseger: Trump Guts Civil Rights Laws

By dianeravitch

June 5, 2025 //

Jan Resseger reviews Trump’s vigorous crusade to eliminate civil rights laws by inverting their meaning. These laws were passed to break the monopoly held by white men in hiring and promotions. But now, any program that favors women and nonwhites is treated as a crime. Universities and corporations that once featured their efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion are now warned by the federal government that these efforts discriminate against white men and must be abolished.

Resseger writes:

When it comes to President Trump’s threatened tariffs and his foreign policy demands, we have all been reading about the phrase coined by a Financial Times reporter: “Trump always chickens out—TACO.” But when it comes to Trump’s attack on civil rights and racial justice in the nation’s public schools, the President has been doggedly persistent.

On May 22nd, The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser mused about the President’s Oval Office ambush of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as capturing how things are going in “Washington a hundred and twenty-one days into Trump’s second term: a manufactured scene of outrage about a nonexistent ‘white genocide’ ” and “a reminder of how explicitly Trump has, in his second term, defined the goal of his Presidency as a sort of racial-justice quest for white people.” Glasser describes “a President who has terminated affirmative-action decrees that have been in place for the federal government since the nineteen-sixties, unleashed a wave of arrests and deportations aimed at illegal migrants of color, gutted federal civil-right-enforcement offices, and blamed D.E.I. for just about every evil at home and abroad.”

New York Times reporter Erica Green summarizes the Trump administration’s consistent work since the winter to attack racial justice and twist the meaning of the protection of civil rights: “In his drive to purge diversity efforts in the federal government and beyond, President Trump has expressed outright hostility to civil rights protections. He ordered federal agencies to abandon some of the core tenets of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the basis that they represented a ‘pernicious’ attempt to make decisions based on diversity rather than merit. But in recent weeks, Mr. Trump has turned to those same measures—not to help groups that have historically been discriminated against, but to remedy what he sees as the disenfranchisement of white men. The pattern fits into a broader trend… as Trump officials pick and choose which civil rights protections they want to enforce and for whom. Across the government, agencies that have historically worked to fight discrimination against Black people, women and other groups have pivoted to investigating institutions accused of favoring them.”

Beginning on Valentines Day, when Trump’s Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Craig Trainor sent all public school officials a “Dear Colleague” letter threatening their federal funding if they did not remove all diversity, equity, and inclusion from their schools, the Trump Administration turned its sights on U.S. public schools. In March, the administration closed seven of the nation’s twelve regional Office for Civil Rights locations that have traditionally investigated complaints filed by parents and families. At the same time the Office for Civil Rights abandoned its traditional practice of carefully investigating complaints and working with school districts to end discriminatory practices. Trump’s OCR turned to directed investigations aimed at punishing school districts failing to comply with the administration’s priorities and threatening loss of federal funding. In early April, the Department of Education threatened K-12 public school districts’ Title I funding unless school leaders (and statewide officials) signed a certificate that they were in full compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as well as in compliance with the administration’s broad, and many believe mistaken, interpretation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which specifically banned affirmation in college admissions. The Trump administration has declared that the Students for Fair Admissions decision instead bans all DEI programming and policy.

School districts and state departments of education, along with teachers unions and civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU, have put the consequences of almost all of these threats on hold by filing injunctions, which have yielded temporary stays in most of these cases, but Education Secretary, Linda McMahon and her Department of Education keep on persisting by conducting more investigations and threatening punitive consequences for school districts persisting in efforts to help particular groups of students.

In mid-May, by executive order, President Trump banned the use of disparate impact as a standard for investigating Civil Rights investigations. For ProPublica, Jennifer Smith Richards and Judi Cohen reported: “Remaking the Office of Civil Rights isn’t just about increasing caseloads and reordering political priorities. The Trump administration now is taking steps to roll back OCR’s previous civil rights work. Last month, Trump issued an executive order that directs all federal agencies, including the Education Department, to stop enforcing cases involving policies that disproportionately affect certain groups—for example when Black students are disciplined more harshly than white students for the same infractions or when students with disabilities are suspended more than any other group even though they represent a small percentage of student enrollment.”

Smith Richards and Cohen examine how the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has reduced its capacity to process complaints and changed its procedures in ways that bias investigations to reflect the Trump administration’s priorities: “The OCR, historically one of the government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has been known for being a neutral fact-finder. Its investigators followed a process to determine whether complaints from the public met legal criteria for a civil rights claim, then carried out investigations methodically. The vast majority of investigations were based on discrimination complaints from students and families, and a large share of those were related to disability discrimination… Investigations being publicized now have largely bypassed the agency’s civil rights attorneys… McMahon and OCR head, Craig Trainor created what amounts to a shadow division. The Trump administration has ordered more than a dozen investigations in the past three months on its own, not initiated by an outside complainant. These ‘directed investigations’ are typically rare; there were none during President Joseph Biden’s administration. The investigations have targeted schools with transgender athletes, gender-neutral bathrooms and initiatives that the administration views as discriminatory to white students.”

The ProPublica reporters spoke with OCR attorneys who anonymously describe what they believe are serious violations of departmental protocol: “McMahon and Trainor created ways to divert complaints and investigations away from the OCR’s legal experts entirely. The administration made an ‘End DEI’ portal that bypasses the traditional online complaint system and seeks only grievances about diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. Unlike the regular complaint system, the diversity portal submissions are not routed to OCR staff. ‘We have no idea where that portal goes, who it goes to, how they review the cases… said the attorney who said he struggles with being unable to help families.” In other instances, “Conservative groups with complaints about diversity or transgender students have been able to file complaints directly with Trainor and get quick results… America First Legal, a group founded by Trump deputy chief of staff, Steven Miller… emailed Trainor a few days after Trump’s… executive order… (that) directs schools to stop teaching about or supporting diversity, equity, and gender identity. ‘AFL respectfully requests that the Department of Education open investigations into the following public school districts in Northern Virginia for continuing violations of Title IX,’ the letter read, listing five districts that have policies welcoming to transgender students. Senior leadership in Washington opened the cases the following week. America First issued a press release headlined ‘VICTORY!’ “

Education Week‘s Brooke Schultz reports: “The U.S. Department of Education has announced or confirmed at least 100 investigations into school districts, colleges, and universities, and other entities as it emerges as a prime enforcer of President Donald Trump’s social agenda.” Here are some of Schultz’s examples: “(F)our school districts have drawn investigations from the department over a Black student success plan in Chicago, a students of color summit in New York, racial affinity groups in Illinois, and a selective Virginia high school’s admissions policy that the education Department says appears to be racially discriminatory… The first investigation Trump’s Education Department announced was a probe into the Denver district over a high school’s all-gender bathroom, which the agency suggested was a violation of Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funds.”

Last Friday, in “Trump Administration Gives New York 10 Days to End Its Ban on Native American Mascots,” Education Week‘s Brooke Schultz reported on a Department of Education demand that clearly represents the Trump administration’s twisting and tangling the purpose and meaning of civil rights protection in public schools: an attack by the Trump Department of Education on a New York law banning Native American mascots in public schools. “The (U.S.) Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights argues that the state’s mascot policy, enacted in 2022, violates Title VI because it prohibits the use of Native American imagery but ‘allowed names, mascots, and logos that appear to have been derived from other racial or ethnic groups, such as the ‘Dutchmen’ and the ‘Huguenots.”… McMahon said in a statement Friday that the department would ‘not stand idly by as state leaders attempt to eliminate the history and culture of Native American tribes.”

Although McMahon seems to believe that the logo New York has banned in the Massapecqua School District connects with the history of American Indians in the region of the school district on Long Island, J.P. O’Hare of the New York Department of Education explained that neither the logo nor the term ‘Chief,’ was used by Native Americans in the area.

Schultz lets the president of the National Congress of American Indians, “the largest nonprofit representing Native nations which has long tracked and challenged the use of Native American mascots, Mark Macarro” correct Education Secretary McMahon’s bizarre misconception of racial justice and civil rights law: “Native people are not mascots… We have our own languages, cultures, and governments—our identities are not anyone’s mascot or costume. No political endorsement or misguided notion of ‘honoring’ us will change the fact that these mascots demean our people, diminish the enduring vibrancy of our unique cultures, and have no place in our country.”

Schultz adds: “Research has found that, for Native students, exposure to Native American mascots reduces self-esteem, their ability to imagine future accomplishments, and their belief that Native American communities can make a difference. For non-Native people, research shows that mascots are associated with negative thoughts and stereotypes about Native Americans… The portrayals are often outdated, whitewashed stereotypes, and aren’t grounded in realistic portrayals of Native people.”

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Gender, Race, Racism, Trump

The Insane Killing of Medical Research by Trump

By dianeravitch

June 5, 2025 //

It’s hard to say what is the very worst thing Trump has done in the first few months of his second term.

Here’s my candidate: the cancellation of vast numbers of grants for medical research. There is simply no rationale for the way he has laid waste to scientific research–to those seeking the causes and cures for deadly diseases that afflict the lives of millions of people.

The New York Times provided a public service by creating a database of the medical research that has been terminated.

This link is a gift article, so you should be able to open it.

It contains interactive features that I cannot duplicate.

Thousands of grants have been canceled or put in indefinite hold. They include research about effective vaccines. The search for cures for different types of cancer.

In his first months in office, President Trump has slashed funding for medical research, threatening a longstanding alliance between the federal government and universities that helped make the United States the world leader in medical science.

Some changes have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye, a New York Times analysis found. To understand the cuts, The Times trawled through detailed grant data from the National Institutes of Health, interviewed dozens of affected researchers and spoke to agency insiders who said that their government jobs have become unrecognizable.

In all, the N.I.H., the world’s premier public funder of medical research, has ended 1,389 awards and delayed sending funding to more than 1,000 additional projects, The Times found. From the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated through April, the agency awarded $1.6 billion less compared with the same period last year, a reduction of one-fifth. (N.I.H. records for May are not yet comparable.)

The impacts extend far beyond studies on politically disfavored topics and Ivy League universities like Columbia or Harvard. The disruptions are affecting research on Alzheimer’s, cancer and substance use, to name just a few, and studies at public institutions across the country, including in red states that backed Mr. Trump.

Why? What is the rationale? Whose interest does this serve?

Did the voters give Trump a mandate to destroy medical research?