How a Democrat Won as Governor in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2025 //
0

Thomas Mills writes a blog called PoliticsNC. In this post, he explains how a Democrat won the Governor’s race in North Carolina, which is now a red state. North Carolina used to be considered the most progressive state in the south, electing Democrats to state level offices and the General Assembly with regularity.

But in 2010, the Tea Party Republicans swept the state legislature. They gerrymandered the state so adeptly that Democrats had no chance to win control of the legislature again.

While the legislature has a Republican supermajority, the governorship has been captured by a Democrat in the last three elections: by Dr. Roy Cooper in 2016 and 2020, and by Josh Stein in 2024.

Governor Josh Stein

Political observers have long wondered about North Carolina’s split ticket voting. The state routinely elects Democrats to top statewide jobs like governor and attorney general while voting for Republicans for president and US Senate in the same election cycle. Josh Stein has won three elections, two for attorney general and one for governor, while Trump carried the state. His State of the State address offers insight into how Democrats win here. National Democrats should take notice. 

Stein delivered his address to the legislature on Wednesday night. At its core, the speech was people-oriented. He put the struggles of the state in human terms instead of political ones. He downplayed political divisions and his swipes at Republicans were muted. 

He led off with the recovery from Hurricane Helene, recognizing several families and business owners who are recovering from the disaster. He praised their resilience and the commitment of both individuals and community organizations like Baptists on Mission. He declared, “[T]he people who have been aiding folks out west don’t care a whit about the politics of the people they are helping.”

Stein never mentioned FEMA. His only reference to the federal response to the disaster was his declaration that he’s working with the Trump administration and Congress to get more money into the state. He kept the focus on the people who were most affected by the storm. His only political shot was urging the GOP led legislature to pass a bill giving $500 million more to disaster recovery. 

He moved from disaster recovery to job development. He leaned heavily into apprentice programs and community colleges. The focus was inherently working class. Stein said, “Folks should not have to get a bachelor’s degree to get a good-paying job and provide for their family.” He never mentioned the university system. 

Stein next shifted to child care and education. He highlighted the shortage and expense of child care in the state, calling for a task force to find “innovative solutions.” He called for family friendly tax cuts instead of reducing the corporate income tax. He called for raising teacher pay and pointed out that North Carolina is 48th in the nation in per pupil spending. He proposed a $4 billion bond to build more schools and fix existing ones.

He challenged the Republicans on their voucher program. While he didn’t focus on the vouchers themselves, he called out the tax breaks offered to wealthy families who receive voucher money and the unregulated schools that tax dollars support. He framed the debate in terms favorable to Democrats, looking for wins on accountability and shifting resources to working families instead of wealthy ones. 

Stein also built on one of his priorities as attorney general, combatting fentanyl. He highlighted the death of a young man and asked the legislature to fund a Fentanyl Control Unit. He’s getting on the right side of an issue that concerns much of rural North Carolina and setting up a challenge for Republicans if they rebuke his request. 

Stein stayed away from divisive cultural issues. He was inclusive in the broadest sense of the word. He focused on shared priorities that cross ethnic, racial, and gender lines. 

Stein’s overall tone was bipartisan or nonpartisan. He laid out priorities that are widely shared—Helene recovery efforts, creating jobs and developing our workforce, increasing access to child care, improving public education, combatting fentanyl deaths—while acknowledging we might differ in how to achieve these goals. He offered hope instead of pointing fingers. 

When Stein did pick fights, they were subtle and put Democrats on the side of working people —child care tax breaks for working families instead of the corporate tax cuts, raising teacher pay instead of subsidizing tuition of wealthy families. He brought a populist tone to his education and tax arguments. He made direct appeals to the working class voters that Democrats need to attract. 

Democrats across the country should take notice. Stein turned down the heat instead of inviting divisions. He gave very little red meat to the base, but stayed true to core Democratic values, like supporting public education and helping working families. While he set up subtle contrasts with Republicans in the legislature, he also celebrated bipartisan victories like Medicaid expansion. 

Stein gave a unifying speech, one that was hard for Republicans to attack. He laid down the foundation for working across party lines. He focused on solutions instead of problems. He set priorities that were largely noncontroversial. He made clear that he would be governor of the whole state, not just the leader of a party. He offered a sharp contrast to the divisive politics of Washington. That’s how Democrats win in a state like North Carolina.

Categories Education Reform, Health, North Carolina, Supporting public schools

Dana Milbank: Trump & Musk vs. The U.S. Constitution

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2025 //
2

In this essay in The Washington Post, columnist Dana Milbank offers to give Elon Musk private lessons about the Constitution. At no extra fee, he will let Donald Trump join the class. Both men are woefully ignorant of the foundational principles of American law. Musk was raised in South Africa, when apartheid was in force, so his ignorance is understandable. Trump has no excuse.

Milbank writes:

The man President Donald Trump put in charge of taking a chain saw to federal agencies showed once again this week that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the government he is dismembering.

“This is a judicial coup,” Elon Musk proclaimed, reacting to the growing list of federal judges who have moved to halt the Trump administration’s headfirst plunge into lawlessness. “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.”

How did this guy pass his citizenship test?

As the framers wrote in the Constitution, it is the House, not the Senate, that has “the sole power of impeachment.” And the Senate needs “the concurrence of two thirds of the members present” — 67, assuming full attendance, not 60 — to convict.

More important, the framers wrote that judges hold their offices for life “during good behavior” — which has been understood to mean they can only be impeached for corruption. That is how it has been since the 1805 impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, when Chief Justice John Marshall, himself a Founding Father, persuaded the Senate to abandon the idea that “a judge giving a legal opinion contrary to the will of the legislature is liable to impeachment.”

Musk, growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, probably wasn’t taught to revere constitutional democracy. But what’s the excuse of his colleagues in the Trump administration?

They have issued scores of executive orders that flatly contradict the Constitution and the laws of the land. Apparently, they are hoping a submissive Supreme Court will reimagine the Constitution to suit Trump’s whims — and federal judges have reacted as they should, by slapping down these lawless power grabs. As such, the administration is on a prodigious losing streak in court. Judges, in preliminary rulings, have already blocked the administration more than 50 times. Over the past week alone, judges:


• Ended Musk’s access to the private Social Security data of millions of Americans for a “fishing expedition.”
• Halted Musk’s continued destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
• Blocked enforcement of Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from military service.
• Stopped the administration from terminating $20 billion in grants from a congressionally approved climate program.
• Ordered the Education Department to restore $600 million in grants to place teachers in struggling schools.
• And, most visibly, required the administration to halt the deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison without any judicial review — an order the administration evidently defied.

There’s an obvious reason Trump is getting swatted down so often: He’s breaking the law. Instead of changing course, the administration is now trying to discredit the courts — and the rule of law. White House adviser Stephen Miller denounced “insane edicts of radical rogue judges” and declared that a judge had “no authority” to stop Trump. Border czar Tom Homan went full-on authoritarian on Fox News: “We’re not stopping,” he said of the deportation flights a judge had temporarily halted. “I don’t care what the judges think.”

Trump called the U.S. district judge in the case, James Boasberg (appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and elevated by Barack Obama) a “radical left lunatic” who, “like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” This drew a quick rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts (in case Musk doesn’t know this, he’s also a Bush appointee), who reminded Trump: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

Trump later told Fox News that he “can’t” defy a court order — welcome news, except he apparently had done exactly that in more than one case — while arguing that something had to be done “when you have a rogue judge.”

Someone has gone rogue here, but it isn’t the judge. Boasberg’s actions are squarely within the best tradition of the judiciary, for they are in defense of principle, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that no person in this country, citizen or alien, may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This is precisely what the Trump administration denied to those it deported and imprisoned.

Violations of due process have been alleged in dozens of the cases against Trump’s executive actions: terminating workers and programs; eliminating grants; violating union contracts; denying care to transgender people; banning the Associated Press from the White House; abolishing civil rights enforcement and everything else the administration calls “DEI”; harassing law firms; and summarily deporting migrants. All of these things were done without notice, without recourse, without adjudication and without clarity about which laws give the president the power to do them.


“Due process” might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding and remains at the heart of our legal system. Trump’s flagrant denial of due process is so radical that it isn’t only at odds with 200 years of U.S. law — it’s also contrary to another 600 years of English law before that. For the benefit of Musk (who doesn’t seem to know about such things) and his colleagues (who don’t seem to care), perhaps a refresher is in order.

For this, I called Jeffrey Rosen, who runs the nonpartisan National Constitution Center, which finds consensus between conservative and liberal scholars. The concept of due process, he explained, is in the Magna Carta, which in 1215 asserted that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned … except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Britain’s 1628 Petition of Right, written during parliament’s struggle against the dictatorial Charles I, holds that “no man … should be put out of his land or tenement nor taken nor imprisoned nor disherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.” The king, who imposed forced loans on his subjects and imprisoned people without trials, was beheaded during the English civil war.


“That example completely inspired the American Revolution,” Rosen explained. “They compared the tyranny of George III to the arbitrary rule of Charles I, saying George III was violating due process of law by insisting that patriots are tried in England rather than in local courts, that they can be put in jail without trial, and their liberty is at the whim of the king.” During the revolution, due-process provisions appeared in the constitutions of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Vermont. Similar language was included in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, then eventually repeated in the 14th Amendment to apply to all states.
“The very foundation of constitutionalism, which means a government according to law rather than autocratic whim, is the due process of law,” Rosen told me. “What distinguishes a constitutional officeholder from an absolute monarch or a tyrant is that he is bound by the Constitution and by laws.” Without due process, there is no free market, because private property can be taken without justification or explanation. Without due process, there are no civil liberties, for a person’s freedom can be taken for any reason, or none at all.


Without due process, you have what we see today: a leader using a wartime statute in peacetime to declare certain people to be dangerous gang members without providing any evidence, then imprisoning them without charges and finally denying the authority of the courts and defying a court order requiring the leader to obey the laws as written. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the road to despotism.

The Trump administration’s attempt to upend 800 years of settled law is staggering, but it is easily lost in all the other chaos the president is spreading. The Federal Reserve this week said that it expects slower growth and higher inflation than it did before Trump took office, in large part because of his tariffs, while falling confidence among consumers and businesses has raised the danger of recession.

In foreign affairs, Israel has restarted the war in Gaza, and Trump has launched a military campaign to see the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen “completely annihilated.”

Trump failed to get Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, despite Trump’s bullying of Kyiv and his termination of efforts to document Russian war crimes — including the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.

Trump silenced the Voice of America, to the benefit and delight of China, Russia and Iran. Even the annual visit of the Irish prime minister to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day became mired in controversy when MMA fighter Conor McGregor, given the podium in the White House briefing room, proclaimed that “Ireland is at the cusp of potentially losing its Irishness” because illegal migrants are “running ravage on the country.” Responded the prime minister: “Conor McGregor’s remarks are wrong, and do not reflect the spirit of St Patrick’s Day, or the views of the people of Ireland.”

The new administration’s bows to white nationalism continue apace. It removed, at least temporarily, thousands of pages from the Pentagon website and others that celebrated the integration of the armed forces and the contributions of people of color: a Native American who helped hoist the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima, the Navajo code talkers of World War II, the Native American who drafted the Confederacy’s terms of surrender, baseball great Jackie Robinson, and a Black Vietnam veteran, on whose page the URL was changed to “deimedal-of-honor.” Trump, meanwhile, reiterated his offer to give “safe refuge” to White South Africans, while at the same time expelling the South African ambassador. The administration has restored the names of Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, which honored Confederates — getting around a law prohibiting this by technically renaming the bases for other people with the surnames “Benning” and “Bragg.”

The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, reported this week that the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force shared a post on X on March 14 from a white-supremacist leader asserting that “Trump has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.” (The aide apparently later unshared the post, whose author led a group that called on Trump supporters to become “racially aware and Jew Wise.”)

The sabotage of the federal government continues, as recklessly as before: dramatically cutting Social Security staff, offices and phone support while simultaneously requiring millions more of the elderly and disabled to apply for benefits in person rather than online; slashing the taxpayer help staff at the IRS and calling off audits; scaling back scientific research at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. Paul Dans, the former chief of Project 2025, told Politico that there “is almost no difference between Project 2025 and what Trump was planning all along and is now implementing.”

Trump appointed conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon’s daughter and the former White House valet to boards overseeing the U.S. military academies. He took time to visit the Kennedy Center, where he has fired the leadership — and used the visit to share “personal stories and anecdotes, including about the first time he saw ‘Cats’ and which members of the cast he found attractive,” as The Post’s Travis Andrews reported. The administration ordered the release of files on the John F. Kennedy assassination before bothering to remove the Social Security numbers of some people who are still alive.

Trump and his cronies continue to use the federal government for personal gain. Following last week’s promotional event for Musk’s Tesla at the White House, the commerce secretary recommended people buy Tesla stock, and the White House has installed Musk’s Starlink service despite security concerns. At the same time, Trump’s crypto project released a second crypto coin, raising $250 million to bring its total to $550 million — and 75 percent of the earnings go into the Trump family’s pockets. All of this is about as on the level as Trump’s golf game. “I just won the Golf Club Championship … at Trump International Golf Club,” he announced on Sunday, as storms and tornadoes ravaged a swath of the country. “Such a great honor!”

The most ominous development, though, is Trump’s expanding abuse of power to silence critics and disable political opponents. He went to the Justice Department last week and delivered a speech attacking lawyers who opposed him, such as Jack Smith, Andrew Weissmann, Norman Eisen and Marc Elias, as “scum” and “bad people” — and the administration has revoked the security clearances of many such lawyers. After issuing executive orders seeking to destroy three law firms because of their ties to Trump’s opponents, the administration has gone after 20 more law firms over their supposed DEI programs.

In the case of the alleged Venezuelan gang members, administration officials and allies are celebrating their defiance of the court. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, which the Trump administration is paying to jail deported migrants at its infamous 40,000-inmate prison, responded on X to Judge Boasberg’s order by saying “Oopsie … too late,” with a laugh-cry emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted it, and Musk added his own laughing emoji. And Attorney General Pam Bondi outrageously claimed “a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans” — even though the migrants would not have been released under the court order, which only delayed their deportation.

After a reporter asked the president whether he would cut off Secret Service protection for former president Joe Biden’s children, Trump did exactly that. Trump’s acting head of the Social Security Administration admitted that he had canceled contracts with the state of Maine because he was “upset” at Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, for not being “respectful” of Trump during a public exchange they had. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have asked Trump’s FBI to probe the main Democratic fundraising platform, saying it “has advanced the financial interests of terror.”

Trump cut off $175 million of government funds going to the University of Pennsylvania because of its policy on trans athletes, following the White House’s suspension of $400 million of funds to Columbia University over Gaza protests there and its demand that the school change its discipline and admissions policies. More than 50 other universities are under investigation. Trump’s acting U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, has threatened to punish Georgetown Law School if it doesn’t change its curriculum, calling it “unacceptable” for the school to “teach DEI.”

Trump, in his appearance at DOJ, said negative coverage of him on CNN and MSNBC “has to be illegal.” He proclaimed that Biden’s use of the pardon, a constitutional power, to preemptively protect members of the House Jan. 6 committee from Trump’s harassment was “null and void.”

He fired the two Democratic commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission, his latest defiance of federal statutes protecting independent commissions. His administration fired the board of the independent U.S. Institute of Peace and seized control of its building, physically removing its president and threatening prosecution.

Then there are the summary deportations of people Trump finds undesirable. The administration has arrested and is seeking to deport a Columbia graduate student who is a green-card holder with no criminal record because of his role in Gaza protests. It deported a Brown University doctor even though a judge had issued an order requiring 48 hours’ notice before her deportation.

In the House, Trump’s allies raced to obey his instructions, filing impeachment articles against Boasberg on Tuesday. Freshman Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) submitted the articles, joined by five others. House Republicans have also moved to impeach four other federal judges over disagreements with their rulings.

Thus are Trump and his allies ignoring 215 years of precedent, going back to Samuel Chase, that objections to courts’ opinions are to be resolved through the appeals process, not impeachment.
Thus are Trump and his allies turning their backs on 810 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta, in which we protect ourselves from tyranny through the due process of law.

But this is where we are. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a delectable Freudian slip, proclaimed in a briefing this week that “we want to restore the Department of Justice to an institution that focuses on fighting law and order.”


If that is the goal, the Trump administration is to be congratulated on a job well done.

Categories Civics, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, History, Ignorance, Justice, Musk, Elon, Trump

The Greatest Hoax in Sports History?

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2025 //
3

Since today is April Fools Day, I had to dig to find something humorous. It wouldn’t be about education, because there’s nothing funny about a billionaire wrestling entrepreneur leading the charge to close the U.S. Department of Education. It wouldn’t be about politics, because there’s nothing funny about a befuddled, doddering old man pretending to be Mussolini.

But then I landed on this article in The New York Daily News about what might be the greatest hoax in sports history. It’s not laugh out loud funny, but it’s pretty funny to think of the people who spent hours pulling off this stunt.

The article was written by Jay Horowitz, the media director for the New York Mets.

He wrote:

I have been honored to be part of the Mets organization for 46 years now. Over that time, I have been associated with some pretty great events. One thing I am extremely proud of is to have played a small role in perhaps the greatest sports hoax in the history of baseball, or for that matter in the history of all sports.

The hoax, prank or joke, whatever you want to call it came to life 40 years ago in the April 1, 1985 Sports Illustrated cover story. The story was titled “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch” written by the renowned sportswriter, George Plimpton. According to the article, Sidd was a rookie pitcher training with us in St. Petersburg after being discovered in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. He also wore one shoe, a heavy hiker’s boot, when pitching.

Sidd was raised in an English orphanage, learned yoga in Tibet, and by the way could throw a fastball 168 mph. As an aside, he also played the French horn.

It was like a bombshell when the story hit. For a period of three or four days, the entire baseball world brought our subplot. It had to be true because it was in SI and it had to be true because the great George Plimpton wrote it. George was also the co-founder of the Paris Review and he would never lie.

In fact the entire story was completely made up by George. It was right there in front of everybody but no one picked it up right away. The subhead of the article read:

“He’s a pitcher, part yogi, and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga and his future in baseball.”

The first letters of these words spell out “Happy April Fools Day — a(h) fib.”

Joe Berton, who posed as Sidd Finch in a 1985 Sports Illustrated hoax, reenacts his famous shot outside Oak Park High School in Illinois on Friday, March 25, 2011. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
Joe Berton, who posed as Sidd Finch in a 1985 Sports Illustrated hoax, reenacts his famous shot outside Oak Park High School in Illinois on Friday, March 25, 2011. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)

Let me take you back to how this all started. It was late February 1985 and I had just settled in to my spring training office in St Petersburg. I got a call from our general manager, the late Frank Cashen, who asked me to come see him.

I walked over to meet him and was joined by Jean Coen, Frank’s administrative assistant. Frank asked me if I had a sense of humor and I laughed yes. Frank told me he had just gotten a call from his friend Mark Mulvoy, who was the managing editor of SI. Mark had asked Plimpton to come up with an April 1 story and when he couldn’t find something to his liking he made up one of his own, our buddy Sidd.

Frank wanted to know if I could help sell it. I said by all means. Working with human interest stories was in my bones. For eight years at Fairleigh Dickinson University as the SID, I sold story ideas on a one-armed soccer player, a priest who played hockey, a 43-year-old freshman football player and a 5-4 second baseman who was hit by a pitch 128 times in his career.

This was right up my alley

We didn’t let too many Mets people know what the plan was. Of course, Davey Johnson was in the loop and Mel Stottlemyre was my go-to guy. In mid March, I met Lane Stewart, the photographer for SI at our Huggins Stengel Fieldhouse. We sent up photo ops for the story. We gave Sidd a locker, his number was 21, between Darryl Strawberry and George Foster. Sidd went down to the beach to play his French horn.

I spoke to Straw the other day and he remembered Sidd with a smile. “I remember thinking how could a guy who looked like that throw that hard.”

Kevin Mitchell, a rookie back then recalled interacting with Sidd and found him to be a fun guy with a great sense of humor.

Dwight Gooden, who was the rookie of the year in 1984, thought the hoax was real at first.

”I knew a little, but not too much,” said Gooden, “and it wasn’t until the third day I found out it was a prank.”

Mets public relations executive Jay Horwitz
Jay Horwitz

Lane took photos of Sidd with all the guys  I went to some of our younger players — Dave Cohcrane, Ronn Reynolds, John Christensen and Lenny Dykstra — and asked for their help. I told them we had this young phenom coming in that we needed their help.

I didn’t spill all the beans, I just told them we had this youngster who you wouldn’t believe.

We erected a huge closed tarp on the field where Sidd was to throw BP. All the kids bought in and were great in the photos.

April 1 was a Sunday and the story started to surface a few days before. We held a mock press conference with Reynolds, a catcher. We burnt a hole in his glove and said this was from Sidd’s 104-mph curve. Christensen and Cochrane said they never saw somebody throw as hard. Dykstra was in awe.

The one who sold it the best was Mel. He had such credibility because of his great Yankee career. There is no doubt in my mind people believed it because Mel was involved.

The writers would ask how would Sidd fit into the rotation. Mel said we will just have to wait and see. We have to find a place for him because he is such a talent.

Plimpton kept it going, too. He made himself unavailable to the media which added to the mystique.

When the story hit the newsstand, my phone rang off the hook. I had a nasty conversation with a sports editor of a New York paper and he asked how could I have given the story to SI when his paper was there every day. I remained calm and asked how would he feel if he got the scoop and I gave it to SI. He was not amused.

My beat guys were not too happy with me either. They felt I had played favorites.

Two baseball owners called the editor of SI wanting to know if the story was true. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan also called Sports Illustrated and wanted to know the truth. The sports editor of Life Magazine was really upset, too!

One of our coaches who moved on to another team called me in disbelief and said no one from his new club had ever heard of Sidd. I just laughed again.

I have to give a shout out to Bobby Schaeffer, who was the manger of our Triple-A team at Tidewater. He made  a scouting report on Sidd and called him a great prospect.

Slowly but surely the truth began to seep out. On April 7 at Al Lang Stadium we held a press conference that Sidd had moved on from baseball and was moving on to golf. Sidd, who was really Joe Berton, a junior high school teacher from Chicago, came back for the occasion. Joe was recruited by Lane and they were close friends.

Joe was a big Cubs fan at the time and he has remained tight with Lane. He never thought this would be as big as it turned out. He asked me to give him his name plate so so he could remember his time as a Met.

I have kept in touch with Lane, too. He said the people at SI never expected it to be this big that we would be still be talking about Sidd 40 years later. He said the magazine was never trying to fool anybody, just have fun.

The New York Mets' bobblehead of Sidd Finch. (New York Mets)
The New York Mets’ bobblehead of Sidd Finch. (New York Mets)

Its been 40 years and Ron Darling still remembers with fondness the spring he spent with Sidd (I mean Joe in St. Petersburg).

“That was my first introduction to a New York media experience,” said Ron. “It was wonderful. I loved when Joe walked around talking to the guys. I am a big reader and I was thrilled to be a part of something that George Plimpton was associated with in some capacity. I didn’t know everything that was going on but I knew the premise was a hoax.

“When I got back to NYC that year all my friends wanted to talk about Sidd. It was an experience I never will forget.”

Jay Horwitz started his Mets PR career 45 years ago on April Fools’ Day, 1980. One of his major accomplishments is helping spread the Sidd Finch story, perhaps the No. 1 hoax in sports history.

Categories Education Reform, Hoax, Humor

An Update on Downsizing of Federal Workforce

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2025 //
13

Government Executive has gathered data on the number of layoffs, RIFs, and firings in various federal agencies. These cuts of employees are supposed to make government more efficient, but they are so haphazard that government is likely to be less efficient. The data are current as of March 28.

The cuts are expected to help fund massive tax cuts for the richest Americans.

A President Trump executive order and subsequent guidance from the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management has to plan for the “maximum elimination” of federal agency functions not required by law. As a starting point for the cuts, OMB and OPM said, agencies should focus on employees whose jobs are not required in statute and who face furloughs in government shutdowns—typically around one-third of the federal workforce, or 700,000 employees.

Agencies are expected to eliminate some offices wholesale and slash their regional offices across the country. 

Here are the departments and agencies where Government Executive has confirmed RIFs have taken place or about to occur. We will update as we learn more. More in-depth reporting is linked where available:

Commerce Department: Commerce is seeking to cut its workforce by 20%, or nearly 10,000 employees, but plans to use attrition, incentives and other measures to get to that level without RIFs. 

Defense Department: Defense plans to issue RIFs in the coming weeks for 5% to 8% of its civilian workforce, or as many as 61,000 employees. It will fire 5,400 probationary employees as part of those cuts. 

Education Department: Education has laid off one-third of its workforce, or about 1,300 employees. The notices went out on March 11 and the department closed its offices on March 12 for the day. Education previously offered buyouts of up to $25,000 to most of its employees, who had until March 3 at 11:59 p.m. to accept the offer. About 300 employees accepted those and combined with other voluntary separations, Education’s total workforce is set to be about half the size it was before Trump took office. 

Environmental Protection Agency: RIFs began to take shape at EPA on March 11 when agency Administrator Lee Zeldin eliminated offices related to environmental justice and diversity. Those were expected to impact around 170 employees. President Trump said during a cabinet meeting that he expected 65% of the workforce, or nearly 11,000 employees, to be let go. An EPA spokesperson declined to verify that number, saying only that Trump and Zeldin are “in lock step” to find efficiencies in government and those efforts would include “organizational improvements to the personnel structure.” A White House spokesperson subsequently told Politico Trump meant to say EPA would slash 65% of its “wasteful spending.”

Federal Trade Commission: FTC dismissed around a dozen employees on Feb. 28, impacting its Bureau of Competition, Bureau of Consumer Protection, Office of Public Affairs and Office of Technology. 

Open the link to see reports on the cuts in more departments and agencies.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Economy, Funding, Trump, Tyranny

Catherine Rampell: DOGE Is Making Government “Comically Inefficient”

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2025 //
11

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/21/doge-government-efficiency-federal-workers/

A senior aide to President Donald Trump once said the administration hoped to traumatize civil servants, an objective it has handily accomplished through arbitrary layoffs and other indignities. But government workers are not the only victims.

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Taxpayer dollars are being abused, too, as the “Department of Government Efficiency” makes the federal government almost comically inefficient.

  • At the IRS, employees spend Mondays queued up at shared computers to submit their DOGE-mandated “five things I did last week” emails. Meanwhile, taxpayer customer service calls go unanswered.
  • At the Bureau of Land Management, federal surveyors are no longer permitted to buy replacement equipment. So, when a shovel breaks at a field site, they can’t just drive to the nearest town or hardware store. Instead, work stops as employees track down one of the few managers nationwide authorized to file an official procurement form and order new parts.
  • At the Food and Drug Administration, leadership canceled the agency’s subscription to LexisNexis, an online reference tool that employees need to conduct regulatory research. Some workers might not have noticed this loss yet, however, because the agency’s incompetently planned return-to-office order this week left them too busy hunting for insufficient parking and toilet paper. (Multiple bathrooms have run out of bath tissue, employees report.)

I’ve spent the past few weeks interviewing frustrated civil servants, whose remarks typically rotate through panic, rage and black humor. Almost none are willing to speak on the record because of concerns about purges by the U.S. DOGE Service. But their themes are easy to corroborate: Routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity. DOGE is also bogging down employees with meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties.

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For example, many have been diverted away from their usual responsibilities in order to scrub forbidden words from agency documents, as part of Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” said a Pentagon employee. “Crazy town.”

What counts as DEI wrongthink also changes almost daily, meaning employees must perform the same word-cleansing tasks repeatedly.

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One NASA employee said they were asked multiple times to scour performance plans and contracts for offending terms. The first sanitization came shortly after Trump’s Day 1 executive order regarding DEI, and resulted in deleting references to “diversity” and “equity.” Weeks later, more banned words (“environmental justice,” “socioeconomic”) were identified, and the scrubbing began anew. Mere hours after that, someone in upper management emailed staff again to say those new deletion orders were “not NASA policy and should not be used,” and told workers to simply check the contracts for compliance with the executive order.

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Whatever that means. Meanwhile, NASA’s real work languishes.

Another Kafkaesque executive order requires agency heads to send the White House a list, within 60 days, of their agency’s “unconstitutional regulations” — the ultimate “When did you stop beating your wife?”-style directive.

“Obviously, no agency is going to say, ‘Whoops! You caught me! I wrote that unconstitutional regulation and had it approved through [the Office of Management and Budget] before you asked me. Sorry!’” a Department of Health and Human Services employee told me. Agencies are weighing whether to affirm everything on their books as being constitutional or offer up some token regulations as tribute. Both options could attract further retaliation.

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Meanwhile, some federal payments have stopped. Credit cards used for routine purchases have been canceled or had their limits shrunk to $1. Contracts are being arbitrarily canceled midway through. DOGE officials appear to wrongly believe this saves money.

But there are costs to, say, not feeding the Transportation Security Administration’s bomb-sniffing dogs. And if contracts lapse when they could have been easily extended, projects must restart the time-consuming and expensive bid process. Again, this stops other critical work, costing both the government and the public.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, no contracts may be initiated or extended without sign-off from the commerce secretary, creating a bottleneck. One NOAA contract that expires soon is for maintenance and repair of the all-hazards weather radio network, which broadcasts tornado warnings and watches, among other life-and-death alerts. The contract has been stuck in limbo, just as an already-deadly tornado season is getting underway.

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“They’re like a kid in a nuclear power plant running around hitting buttons,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service(which actually focuses on government efficiency), when asked about DOGE’s measures. “They have no sense of the cascade of consequences they’re causing.”

These new directives are not only wasting government manpower and taxpayer dollars. They’re also resulting in worse services for Americans.

The Social Security Administration announced on Tuesday that it will require millions of people to visit their regional office in person to file claims (or use an online system that retirees might have trouble navigating) rather than by phone, as beneficiaries had been able to do. Meanwhile, the agency is laying off workers and closing those field offices. If you’re one of the unlucky Americans whom the agency has prematurely labeled “dead,” good luck getting your benefits reinstated.

The IRS, meanwhile, is deleting all non-English forms and notices, employees were told this week. This will mean less taxpayer compliance and more work for employees. Lose-lose, if you’re trying to keep the government efficiently run.

These days, that’s a big “if.”

Categories Musk, Elon, Stupid, Trump

Texas: Beware of Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2025 //
4

The Texas House of Representatives is moving to a vote on vouchers. Governor Greg Abbott has been pushing vouchers for years, but the House legislators have defeated them again and again, even though Republicans have a super-majority in both houses. The votes were provided by a combination of urban Democrats and rural Republicans. The rural Republicans decided that protecting their local public school was more important than pleasing Governor Abbott.

But then a billionaire in Pennsylvania gave Governor Abbott $6 million so he could defeat the recalcitrant Republicans who blocked vouchers.

Abbott managed to knock off several of the Republicans he targeted by lying about their records. In theory, he has the votes to pass voucher legislation.

But will he? There are still rural Republicans who know that vouchers will destroy their hometown school. How will they vote?

Worse, vouchers have failed wherever they have been tried.

And Texans need to know these facts.

Eight Things to Know – State’s Proposed Education Savings Account Program for Private Schools (March 2025)Download

Eight Things to Know: State’s Proposed Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) for Private Schools

Governor Abbott’s ongoing promotion of universal school choice through taxpayer funded Education Savings Account’s (ESA) focuses on helping low-income, low-performing, and SPED students obtain a better education. However, this material highlights eight things to know that contradict the state’s promotion of taxpayer funded ESAs for private schools.

1.) Taxpayer Cost: The fiscal note for ESAs is $4.6 billion per year in year 2030. In lieu of funding ESAs for private schools, the state could:

 Further reduce property taxes,
 Stop funding public schools below the national average (Texas students are not “Below Average”),
 Provide each Texas public-school graduate with $12,100 to obtain college or technical degrees, or
 Fund public highways versus toll roads.

2.) ESAs Primarily Benefit Students/Families Currently Attending Private Schools: Despite the promotion of providing opportunities for low-income students in public schools, the state estimates that 88% of existing private school students, 9% of home school students, and only 1.8% of current public-school students will receive ESAs (see table below). Source: SB 2 Fiscal Note

2.) Arizona and Universal School Choice: With Arizona being the first state to provide universal school choice, Governor Abbott invited former Governor Ducey to promote the importance of universal school choice at a recent press conference. But no one mentioned that the 2024 NAEP scores of Arizona are among the lowest in the nation and significantly below the NAEP scores of Texas, especially for English Language Learners and Economically Disadvantaged students that ESAs are supposed to benefit. Source: The Nation’s Report Card.

5.) State Currently Funds School Choice With Separate System of Charters and Unproven Results: Over the last 30-years, the State has directed taxpayer funding to provide school choice in local communities through a separate system of privately managed charter schools. Currently, charters:
 Operate 905 schools,
 Enroll over 420,000 students,
 Annually receive taxpayer funding of $4.6 billion,
 Serve students with lower teacher experience, fewer certified teachers, higher student to teacher ratios, administrative costs, and attrition rates compared to locally governed public schools, and
 Underperform locally governed school districts (see “2024 STAAR” below). Source: Texas Education Agency and Txreasearchportal.com.

6.) Admission Policies Mitigate Low-Income, Low-Performing and SPED Student Enrollment: Private school admission requirements directly limit of the enrollment of current low-income, low-performing, and SPED public school students. Based upon various Texas private school Student/Parent Handbooks, private schools restrict admissions based upon academic performance, religious persuasion, special needs/learning differences, and/or cost.
 Academic Performance: Private schools often require students to be “at grade level,” thereby prohibiting the enrollment of low-performing students. Example Student/Parent Handbook – Admissions:

“The student must test at grade level (50 percentile) or above in mathematics and reading on a nationally recognized standardized test…No accommodations are provided for entrance testing.”

“Once students are placed on academic probation (for not achieving a GPA of at least 2.0), they will be given one semester to improve their academic performance to a level of 70%. If not achieved, the student may be required to withdraw from the school

 Religious Persuasion: Religious educational institutions are exempt from Civil Rights legislation relating to the enrollment and acceptance of individuals with a particular religious persuasion. For example, a new non-Catholic student is the last enrollment priority at many Catholic schools. Example Student/Parent Handbook – Admissions:

Enrollment Priority – Children of:
1.) Faculty,
2.) Active parishioners with siblings in school,
3.) Active parishioners without siblings in school,
4.) Non-Active parishioners with siblings in school,
5.) Non-active parishioners without siblings in school,
6.) Catholics that are parishioners of other Catholic communities,
7.) Non-Catholics with siblings in school, and
8.) Non-Catholics.

Further enrollment limitations for non—Catholic students may also be higher tuition relative to Catholic students.

2024/25 Tuition: Catholic – $8,160 and Non-Catholic – $10,408

 Special Needs/Learning Differences: While there are certainly private schools that focus on serving students with special needs/learning differences, private schools are not required to follow the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and may choose to discriminate against students with disabilities. Example Student/Parent Handbook – Admissions:

“The school does not admit students with more severe learning differences or those requiring extensive special education services… (To be admitted), the family must provide current diagnostic testing that recognizes the student’s performance on recognized aptitude testing is 90 or higher.”

“Private schools are not required to significantly alter their programs, lower, or modify their standards to accommodate a child with special needs.”

 ESA Does Not Cover the Cost of Private Schools: SB 2 provides a $10,000 ESA for students to attend a private school. For low-income students, the amount is insufficient to cover the $14,750 estimated average annual private school cost, which is $11,350 for tuition and $3,400 for fees (application, testing, enrollment, computer, sports, club fees, transportation, mandatory parent service hours, and uniforms).

7.) Choice Forces Public-School Closures that Denys the “School Choice” of Public-School Families: It has become common for urban, suburban, and rural school districts to close high-performing campuses due to declining enrollment due to the state’s expansion of charters. In fact, school districts have recently closed over 125 campuses due to the expansion of state-approved charters. As such, providing school choice for certain students is disrupting and denying the school choice for over 50,000 students experiencing closure of their public school. With the state projecting 98,000 existing public-school students will utilize ESAs to attend private schools, additional public-school closures are imminent, and ESAs will further deny choice for families choosing their public school.

8.) Voters Consistently Defeat School Choice: Despite claims the majority of Texans support school choice, voters have defeated school choice initiatives placed ono the ballot in every state. In 2024, voters in Colorado and the conservative states of Kentucky and Nebraska repealed or defeated school choice initiatives for private schools.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Texas, Vouchers

Are Trees “WOKE”? Are They Infected with DEI?

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2025 //
8

Doktor Zoom at the Wonkette blog alerts us to the elimination of a federal program to plant trees.

If you have worried that “from little acorns, DEI will grow,” you will be pleased. If you fear that planting trees is the first step towards a “Green New Deal,” you can relax. Words like “justice” and “equity” alerted the AI censor to the risks. The federal government grant to plant trees has been axed. Put in Elon musk’s wood chipper, so to speak.

Doktor Zoom writes:

Rejoice, America! Donald Trump’s war on wokeness has chalked up another victory over the forces of Marxism and divisiveness, so we will never again be torn apart by racial hatred aimed at white people. In the name of combating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (this is the new rightwing code for Black people and gay people existing in public) as ordered by the Great Leaderhis first day in office, the US Forest Service in February cancelled all unspent funds in a $75 million grant that had already started planting trees in communities all over America. You probably thought that trees were green, but it turns out that these particular trees were also anti-white, at least according to the Trump administration. 

The program was meant to help grow trees in neighborhoods that lacked them, to provide shade, make the places nicer, reduce the “urban heat island effect” that makes cities more miserable in the summer, and even capture some carbon. The grant, from funds in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, was administered by the revolutionary cadres at the National Arbor Day Foundation, which distributed the money to around 100 cities, nonprofits, and tribes. 

As NPR reported Friday, such dangerous slight improvements to the lives of some Americans had to be stamped out, as the Forest Service explained in a form letter advising the affected green freaks that the tree ride was over. The program, the letter said, “no longer aligns with agency priorities regarding diversity, equity and inclusion.” And so the program had to be not just nipped in the bud but destroyed, root and branch. 

Wonkette knows our readers’ fertile imaginations will keep germinating hope, letting a thousand flowers of resistance bloom.

Oh yes, and let’s once more remind you, dear reader, that pulling back the funds doesn’t merely breach a contract between the Forest Service and the Arbor Day Foundation, it’s also blatantly unconstitutional, because Congress appropriated the funding for the IRA, and Trump has no legal authority to stop it from going for its intended purpose. 

Arbor Day Foundation Executive Director Dan Lambe said the sudden termination of the program uprooted some terrific efforts, telling NPR that the project had been an opportunity to join with partners to “plant trees in communities, to create jobs, to create economic benefits, to create conservation benefits, to help create cooler, safer, and healthier communities.” Now, it seems, these communities will have to do without the magic of frondship. 

Among the local tree-planting programs shut down was an effort to 1,600 plant trees in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. The city lost some 200,000 trees in Hurricane Katrina, and replanting was an important part of improving climate resilience, since trees not only cool urban neighborhoods, they also help slow stormwater and improve air quality. 

The project in the majority Black Lower 9th Ward was managed by local nonprofit Sustaining Our Urban Landscape, or SOUL, which had a $1 million Forest Service grant for urban forestry. SOUL Executive Director Susannah Burley suspects that the labeling of the tree planting program as a crime of “equity” may have at least partly been due to the kind of boneheaded CTRL-F search for wokeness that we’ve seen in other parts of the War On DEI: 

“That has nothing to do with this grant funding. The word ‘equity’ is pervasive in the grants that were funded by this, but in a totally different context,” Burley said, adding that in this context, equity meant planting trees in neighborhoods without them.

“Funding would have allowed us to finish planting the Lower 9th Ward, which is a really big deal,” Burley said. “That’ll be the third neighborhood that we’ve planted every street.”

Nobody in the Trump administration ever explains anything, so it’s possible that seeking to have an equal distribution of trees wasn’t at the root of the cancellation. More likely, it was because the urban forestry grant was part of Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which sought to direct 40 percent of the benefits of his administration’s major climate programs to help disadvantaged communities, especially those that bore the brunt of pollution and damage from fossil fuels. While that often meant minority communities, like those in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” it also included places that were in economic peril because they’d depended on fossil fuels for most of their jobs, like majority-white towns where coal mines or coal-fired power plants had closed. 

The NPR story also looks at municipal forestry projects in infamously woke inner-city ghettos like Butte, Montana (90.8 percent white), and the small town of Talent, Oregon (population 6,332, 86.5 percent white). In Talent, a scary DEI grant of about $600,000 was supposed to go to replanting parts of town scorched by the 2020 Almeda Wildfire, including mobile home parks where greenery has been slow to come back, but thank goodness, Donald Trump ensured the place will continue looking like a lifeless post-fire hellscape for the foreseeable future. 

Maybe both communities should simply be thankful Trump hasn’t decided to help them out by flooding them.

Ladd Keith directs the University of Arizona’s Heat Resilience Initiative, and points out that trees in urban areas are a great investment, resulting in far more benefits than they cost, in the form of improved health, lower utility bills, and even higher property values, not that Trump wants anyone but himself seeing those. 

Keith dared to suggest that planting trees in low-income communities wasn’t actually some sort of pinko-greenie plot to harm wealthy white people who don’t also get money for trees in suburbs, seeing as how they have ‘em already. 

“Our governments historically have disinvested in low-income communities, and so it’s our responsibility to make that right now,” Keith said. “These grants allocated to these lower-income communities to plant trees would have done a little bit of justice, in bringing that urban canopy back up to more on par with higher-income neighborhoods.”

God God, man, you’re talking about arboreal reparations!! We were about to make a joke about Trump eliminating funding for the U of Arizona, my graduate alma mater, but then we remembered that’s exactly what the fucker is already doing, so good luck, Dr. Keith. 

Considering that the clawback of funding for this modest program is insanely unconstitutional, we hope there will be lawsuits by states and nonprofits harmed by it. Trees should be an uncontroversial good. But in the larger picture of Trump’s attempts to undo democracy, and to make sure Americans can never have nice things, this one may get lost in the chaos. That would be a damn shame. Maybe some of the donors who have been quietly filling in part of the funding gap for other frozen climate resilience efforts will help out. 

God damn what that man is doing. God damn the people who fell for, or willingly embraced, his lies. We want our trees back, goddamn it. 

But eventually this Trump winter must end, and if the roots are strong, all will be well again in the garden.

Categories Democracy, Environment, Equity, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Musk, Elon, Trump

Peter Greene: Arkansas Legislators Go Berserk Over Trans Students

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2025 //
21

Peter Greene, now retired after 39 years as a teacher in Pennsylvania, is a prolific writer. He has his own blog Curmudgacation, and he writes a column for Forbes. I am one of his most fervent admirers. He is a font of wisdom and common sense. In this post, he examines the cruelty of certain Arkansas elected officials who hate trans people. Greene notes the contradiction by those who claim they support “parental rights,” but not the rights of parents who support their children’s wish to be a different gender.

He writes:

The Arkansas state legislature is deeply worried about trans persons. Rep. Mary Bentley (R- 73rd Dist) has been trying to make trans kids go away for years as with her 2021 bill to protect teachers who used students dead names or misgender them (that’s the same year she pushed a bill to require the teaching of creationism in schools).

In 2023, Bentley successfully sponsored a bill that authorizes malpractice lawsuits against doctors who provide gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Now Bentley has proposed HB 1668, “The Vulnerable Youth Protection Act” which takes things a step or two further.

The bill authorizes lawsuits, and the language around the actual suing and collecting money part is long and complex– complex enough to suspect that Bentley, whose work experience is running tableware manufacturer Bentley Plastics, might have had some help “writing” the bill. The part where it lists the forbidden activities is short, but raises the eyebrows.

The bill holds anyone who “knowingly causes or contributes to the social transitioning of a minor or the castration, sterilization, or mutilation of a minor” liable to the minor or their parents. The surgical part is no shocker– I’m not sure you could find many doctors who would perform that surgery without parental consent, and certainly not in Arkansas (see 2023 law). But social transitioning? How does the bill define that?

“Social transitioning” means any act by which a minor adopts or espouses a gender identity that differs from the minor’s biological sex as determined by the sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous profiles of the minor, including without limitation changes in clothing, pronouns, hairstyle, and name.

So a girl who wears “boy” jeans? A boy who wears his hair long? Is there an article of clothing that is so “male” that it’s notably unusual to see a girl wearing it? I suppose that matters less because trans panic is more heavily weighted against male-to-female transition. But boy would I love to see a school’s rules on what hair styles qualify as male or female….

The person filing the suit against a teacher who used the wrong pronoun or congratulated the student on their haircut could be liable for $10 million or more, and they’ve got 20 years to file a suit.

I’m never going to pretend that these issues are simple or easy, that it’s not tricky for a school to look out for the interests and rights of both parents and students when those parents and students are in conflict. But I would suggest remembering two things– trans persons are human beings and they are not disappearing. They have always existed, they will always exist, and, to repeat, they are actual human persons.

I was in school with trans persons in the early seventies. I have had trans students in my classroom. They are human beings, deserving of the same decency and humanity as any other human. I know there are folks among us who insist on arguing from the premise that some people aren’t really people and decency and humanity are not for everyone (and empathy is a weakness). I don’t get why some people on the right, particularly many who call themselves Christians, are so desperately frightened/angry about trans persons, but I do know that no human problems are solved by treating some human beings as less-than-human. And when your fear leads to policing children’s haircuts to fit your meager, narrow, brittle, fragile view of how humans should be, you are a menace to everyone around you. You have lost the plot. Arkansas, be better.

Categories Arkansas, Bigotry, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Gender

CDC Downplays Importance of Vaccines, Reflecting Malign Influence of RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2025 //
10

ProPublica reported that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently watered down its advice about how to respond to the danger of measles. Pre-Trump and RFK Jr., the CDC was quick to warn the public about the importance of getting vaccinated, especially when there was an uptick in contagious diseases. Now, with vaccine critic RFK Jr. in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services of which the CDC is a part, the message has been muted. Now, getting vaccinated is a matter of personal choice, not a matter of public health.

Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.

In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.

A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”

But what the nation’s top public health agency said next shows a shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines, a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines:

“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” the statement said, echoing a line from a column Kennedy wrote for the Fox News website. “People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines.”

ProPublica shared the new CDC statement about personal choice and risk with Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. To her, the shift in messaging, and the squelching of this routine announcement, is alarming.

“I’m a bit stunned by that language,” Nuzzo said. “No vaccine is without risk, but that makes it sound like it’s a very active coin toss of a decision. We’ve already had more cases of measles in 2025 than we had in 2024, and it’s spread to multiple states. It is not a coin toss at this point.”

For many years, the CDC hasn’t minced words on vaccines. It promoted them with confidence. One campaign was called “Get My Flu Shot.” The agency’s website told medical providers they play a critical role in helping parents choose vaccines for their children: “Instead of saying ‘What do you want to do about shots?,’ say ‘Your child needs three shots today.’”

Nuzzo wishes the CDC’s forecasters would put out more details of their data and evidence on the spread of measles, not less. “The growing scale and severity of this measles outbreak and the urgent need for more data to guide the response underscores why we need a fully staffed and functional CDC and more resources for state and local health departments,” she said.

Kennedy’s agency oversees the CDC and on Thursday announced it was poised to eliminate 2,400 jobs there.

Open the link to continue reading.

Measles is very serious. The World Health Organization estimated that 107,500 people--mostly unvaccinated children under the age of 5–died in 2023 from measles.

Categories Health, Science

Top Vaccine Official Resigns to Protest RFK Jr.’s “Lies and Misinformation”

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2025 //
8

Dr. Peter Marks, the leading vaccine expert at the Department of Health and Human Services resigned to protest Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s persistent lies about the efficacy of vaccines. At his Senate hearings, Kennedy assured the committee that his days as a vaccine opponent were over. He lied.

The New York Times reported:

The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure Friday and said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency’s acting commissioner. He reiterated the sentiments in an interview, saying: “This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.”

Dr. Marks resigned after he was summoned to the Department of Health and Human Services Friday afternoon and told that he could either quit or be fired, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Dr. Marks led the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which authorized and monitored the safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and gene therapies. He was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic but had come under criticism for being overly generous to companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.

His continued oversight of the F.D.A.’s vaccine program clearly put him at odds with the new health secretary. Since Mr. Kennedy was sworn in on Feb. 13, he has issued a series of directives on vaccine policy that have signaled his willingness to unravel decades of vaccine safety policies. He has rattled people who fear he will use his powerful government authority to further his decades-long campaign of claiming that vaccines are singularly harmful, despite vast evidence of their role in saving millions of lives worldwide.

“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at F.D.A. is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety and security,” Dr. Marks wrote.

Mr. Kennedy has, for example, promoted the value of vitamin A as a treatment during the major measles outbreak in Texas while downplaying the value of vaccines. He has installed an analyst with deep ties to the anti-vaccine movement to work on a study examining the long-debunked theory that vaccines are linked to autism.

And on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy said on NewsNation that he planned to create a vaccine injury agency within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the effort was a priority for him and would help bring “gold-standard science” to the federal government.

An H.H.S. spokesman said in a statement Friday night that Dr. Marks had no place at the F.D.A. if he was not committed to transparency.

In his letter, Dr. Marks mentioned the deadly toll of measles in light of Mr. Kennedy’s tepid advice on the need for immunization during the outbreak among many unvaccinated people in Texas and other states.

Dr. Marks wrote that measles, “which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia,” because of complications, “had been eliminated from our shores” through the widespread availability of vaccines.

Dr. Marks added that he had been willing to address Mr. Kennedy’s concerns about vaccine safety and transparency with public meetings and by working with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, but was rebuffed.

With the outbreak of measles in several states, Kennedy’s refusal to advocate immunization is a danger to public health. Only someone as dumb or malevolent as Trump could put a conspiracy theorist and vaccine opponent in charge of public health.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science
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