دسته: 4

Governor Gavin Newsom: Do Not Give In to a Lawless President

Governor Gavin Newsom spoke to the situation in Los Angeles, which Trump is using as a target in his campaign to distract the public from his incompetence. In his hateful way, Trump always refers to Governor Newsom as “Newscum.”

Governor Newsom said, as transcribed by The New York Times:

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California delivered a speech on Tuesday, titled “Democracy at a Crossroads.” The following is a transcript of his remarks as broadcast online and on television channels:

I want to say a few words about the events of the last few days.

This past weekend, federal agents conducted large-scale workplace raids in and around Los Angeles. Those raids continue as I speak.

California is no stranger to immigration enforcement. But instead of focusing on undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records and people with final deportation orders, a strategy both parties have long supported, this administration is pushing mass deportations, indiscriminately targeting hardworking immigrant families, regardless of their roots or risk.

What’s happening right now is very different than anything we’ve seen before. On Saturday morning, when federal agents jumped out of an unmarked van near a Home Depot parking lot, they began grabbing people. A deliberate targeting of a heavily Latino suburb. A similar scene also played out when a clothing company was raided downtown.

In other actions, a U.S. citizen, nine months pregnant, was arrested; a 4-year-old girl, taken; families separated; friends, quite literally, disappearing.

In response, everyday Angelinos came out to exercise their Constitutional right to free speech and assembly, to protest their government’s actions. In turn, the State of California and the City and County of Los Angeles sent our police officers to help keep the peace and, with some exceptions, they were successful.

Like many states, California is no stranger to this sort of unrest. We manage it regularly, and with our own law enforcement. But this, again, was different.

What then ensued was the use of tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets, federal agents detaining people and undermining their due process rights.

Donald Trump, without consulting California law enforcement leaders, commandeered 2,000 of our state’s National Guard members to deploy on our streets, illegally and for no reason.

This brazen abuse of power by a sitting president inflamed a combustible situation, putting our people, our officers and even our National Guard at risk.

That’s when the downward spiral began. He doubled down on his dangerous National Guard deployment by fanning the flames even harder. And the president, he did it on purpose. As the news spread throughout L.A., anxiety for family and friends ramped up. Protests started again.

By night, several dozen lawbreakers became violent and destructive. They vandalized property. They tried to assault police officers. Many of you have seen video clips of cars burning on cable news.

If you incite violence — I want to be clear about this — if you incite violence or destroy our communities, you are going to be held to account. That kind of criminal behavior will not be tolerated. Full stop.

Already, more than 220 people have been arrested. And we’re reviewing tapes to build additional cases and people will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Again, thanks to our law enforcement officers and the majority of Angelenos who protested peacefully, this situation was winding down and was concentrated in just a few square blocks downtown.

But that, that’s not what Donald Trump wanted. He again chose escalation, he chose more force. He chose theatrics over public safety. He federalized another 2,000 Guard members.

He deployed more than 700 active U.S. Marines. These are men and women trained in foreign combat, not domestic law enforcement. We honor their service. We honor their bravery. But we do not want our streets militarized by our own armed forces. Not in L.A. Not in California. Not anywhere.

We’re seeing unmarked cars, unmarked cars in school parking lots. Kids afraid of attending their own graduation. Trump is pulling a military dragnet all across Los Angeles, well beyond his stated intent to just go after violent and serious criminals. His agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers and seamstresses.

That’s just weakness, weakness masquerading as strength. Donald Trump’s government isn’t protecting our communities. They are traumatizing our communities. And that seems to be the entire point.

California will keep fighting. We’ll keep fighting on behalf of our people, all of our people, including in the courts.

Yesterday, we filed a legal challenge to President Trump’s reckless deployment of American troops to a major American city. Today, we sought an emergency court order to stop the use of the American military to engage in law enforcement activities across Los Angeles.

If some of us can be snatched off the streets without a warrant, based only on suspicion or skin color, then none of us are safe. Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.

Trump and his loyalists, they thrive on division because it allows them to take more power and exert even more control.

And by the way, Trump, he’s not opposed to lawlessness and violence as long as it serves him. What more evidence do we need than January 6th.

I ask everyone: Take time, reflect on this perilous moment. A president who wants to be bound by no law or constitution, perpetuating a unified assault on American traditions.

This is a president who, in just over 140 days, has fired government watchdogs that could hold him accountable, accountable for corruption and fraud. He’s declared a war, a war on culture, on history, on science, on knowledge itself. Databases quite literally are vanishing.

He’s delegitimizing news organizations and he’s assaulting the First Amendment. And the threat of defunding them. At threat, he’s dictating what universities themselves can teach. He’s targeting law firms and the judicial branch that are the foundations of an orderly and civil society. He’s calling for a sitting governor to be arrested for no other reason than to, in his own words, “for getting elected.”

And we all know, this Saturday, he’s ordering our American heroes, the United States military, and forcing them to put on a vulgar display to celebrate his birthday, just as other failed dictators have done in the past.

Look, this isn’t just about protests here in Los Angeles. When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard. he made that order apply to every state in this nation.

This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next.

Democracy is next.

Democracy is under assault right before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball, a wrecking ball to our founding fathers’ historic project: three coequal branches of independent government.

There are no longer any checks and balances. Congress is nowhere to be found. Speaker Johnson has completely abdicated that responsibility.

The rule of law has increasingly been given way to the rule of Don.

The founding fathers didn’t live and die to see this kind of moment. It’s time for all of us to stand up. Justice Brandeis, he said it best. In a democracy, the most important office — with all due respect, Mr. President — is not the presidency, and it’s certainly not governor. The most important office is office of citizen.

At this moment, at this moment, we all need to stand up and be held to account, a higher level of accountability. If you exercise your First Amendment rights, please, please do it peacefully.

I know many of you are feeling deep anxiety, stress, and fear. But I want you to know that you are the antidote to that fear and that anxiety. What Donald Trump wants most is your fealty, your silence, to be complicit in this moment.

Do not give into him.

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11/06/2025
Six Nobel Laureates in Economics Denounce Trump Budget Bill

The Economic Policy Institute issued an open letter to the American people, written and co-signed by six economists who won the Nobel Prize.

They wrote:

As economists who have devoted our careers to researching how economies can grow and how the benefits of this growth can be translated into broadly shared prosperity and security, we have grave concerns about the budget reconciliation bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 22, 2025.

The most acute and immediate damage stemming from this bill would be felt by the millions of American families losing key safety net protections like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. The Medicaid cuts constitute a sad step backward in the nation’s commitment to providing access to health care for all. Proponents of the House bill often claim that these Medicaid cuts can be achieved simply by imposing work reporting requirements on healthy, working-age adults. But healthy, working-age adults are by definition not heavy consumers of health spending, so achieving the budgeted Medicaid cuts will obviously harm others as well.

Medicaid provides health insurance coverage for low-income Americans, but this includes paying out-of-pocket health costs for low-income retired Medicare recipients and providing nursing home and in-home care services for elderly Americans. Medicaid also covers 41% of all births in the United States, including over 50% of all births in Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Work reporting requirements will obviously yield no savings from these Medicaid functions.

Besides providing affordable health care to families, Medicaid is also crucial to state budgets and hospital systems throughout the country—particularly in rural areas. In 2023, the federal government sent $615 billion to state governments to cover Medicaid spending; this federal contribution accounted for over 75% of total state Medicaid spending in more than 19 states. Rural hospitals in states that accepted the Medicaid expansion that was part of the Affordable Care Act were 62% less likely to close than rural hospitals in non-expansion states.

In addition to Medicaid, the House bill also significantly cuts SNAP. These steep cuts to the social safety net are being undertaken to defray the staggering cost of the tax cuts included in the House bill, including the hidden cost of preserving the large corporate income tax cutpassed in the 2017 tax law. But even these sharp spending cuts will pay for far less than half of the tax cuts (not even including the cost of maintaining the corporate income tax cuts of the 2017 law).

U.S. structural deficits are already too high, with real debt service payments approaching their historic highs in the past year. The House bill layers $3.8 trillion in additional tax cuts ($5.3 trillion if all provisions are made permanent) on top of these existing fiscal gaps—and these tax cuts are overwhelmingly tilted toward the highest-income households. Even with the safety net cuts, the House bill leads to public debt rising by over $3 trillion in coming years (and over $5 trillion over the next decade if provisions are made permanent rather than phasing out). The higher debt and deficits will put noticeable upward pressure on both inflation and interest rates in coming years.

The combination of cuts to key safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP and tax cuts disproportionately benefiting higher-income households means that the House budget constitutes an extremely large upward redistribution of income. Given how much this bill adds to the U.S. debt, it is shocking that it still imposes absolute losses on the bottom 40% of U.S households(if some of the fiscal cost is absorbed in future bills with extremely high and broad tariffs, the share of households seeing absolute losses will increase rapidly).

The United States has a number of pressing economic challenges to address, many of which require a greater level of state capacity to navigate—capacity that will be eroded by large tax cuts. The House bill addresses none of the nation’s key economic challenges usefully and exacerbates many of them. The Senate should refuse to pass this bill and start over from scratch on the budget.

Daron Acemoglu
MIT Economics

Peter Diamond
MIT Economics

Oliver Hart
Harvard University

Simon Johnson
MIT Sloan School of Management

Paul Krugman
Graduate Center, City University of New York

Joseph Stiglitz
Columbia University

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11/06/2025
New Hampshire: GOP is “Willfully and Knowingly” Sabotaging Public Education

Gary Rayno is a veteran journalist who writes about politics and government in New Hampshire. He knows more about school finance than most members of the State Legislature.

He wrote recently about the nefarious plan to privatize public funding and undermine public education in the Granite State, even though 90% of the students in the state attend public schools. New Hampshire has an unusual problem with a libertarian party called “Free Staters,” who don’t want government to pay for anything. They are well represented in the legislature.

He wrote:

If you watched the House session Thursday, you had to realize the message the Republican majority is sending on public education.

Republicans quickly passed expanding Education Freedom Accounts, or vouchers, that will cost the state’s taxpayers well over $110 million for the next biennium with most of the money going to higher-income parents who currently send their children to religious and private schools or homeschools.

The expansion to vouchers-for-all has been a goal of the Free State/Libertarian controlled GOP for some time and they are likely to reach this year by daring Gov. Kelly Ayotte to veto the budget package, something she is not likely to do although she wanted the students to actually attend public schools before they join the EFA program with few guardrails and little academic accountability.

Instead much of the debate was over two bills that would significantly change the educational environment in public schools.

Senate Bill 72, would establish a parental bill of rights in education, and Senate Bill 96 would require mandatory disclosure to parents. And for good measure they added Senate Bill 100 which could cost a teacher his or her teaching credentials if they violate the divisive concepts law and school districts could be fined $2,500 plus attorneys’ fees and court costs.

The second offense is a permanent ban from teaching and school districts would have to pay a $5,000 fine and the penalties for third-party education contractors are even more onerous.

The state is prohibited from enforcing the law because a US District Court judge found the law unconstitutionally vague and the changes in Senate Bill 100 do nothing to change that except encourage more litigation.

These are just the latest attempt to convince the state’s residents that public schools are filled with far left teachers who want to indoctrinate students, to shield LGBTQ+ students from their parents and to encourage deviant behavior.

Nine-nine percent of parents with children in the public schools would tell you that is not true and the other 1 percent are in the New Hampshire legislature or related to someone who is.

Public schools are not perfect but the Free State/Libertarian talking points about public education are not being created in New Hampshire. They are the work of far-right think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and American Legislative Exchange Council, the same groups that generate the wording for these bills.

The legislature has not addressed the real problems facing public schools, but have instead been exacerbated by the GOP controlled legislature. The bills passed this session have created more work for educators and school boards and they divert time and money away from educators’ first responsibility: to educate students and prepare them to survive and compete in today’s world.

The elephant in the room is the lack of state funding for public education at the elementary, secondary and postsecondary levels where the state of New Hampshire, one of the wealthiest per capita in the country, is dead last behind such educational meccas as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and West Virginia.

Public schools do not need to spend more money for their educational system that continually ranks near the top nationally, but the state needs to pay its share of the cost which nationally averages a little less than 50 percent.

In New Hampshire local property taxpayers pay 63 percent of the cost of public education, while the state contributes 28.8 percent, leaving a little over 8 percent for the federal government to contribute, the 45th lowest for states.

Property taxes pay about 70 percent of the cost of education when you add in the Statewide Education Property Tax which is included in the state’s share although it all comes out of property owners’ pockets.

This legislature did two things to address the funding issue this session, one would be to bring the Statewide Education Property Tax collection methods in line with a superior court judge’s ruling that requires the property wealthier communities to turn their excess revenue not needed to cover the cost of an adequate education for their students over to the state and to stop the Department of Revenue Administration from approving negative local education property tax rates allowing unincorporated places to avoid paying the statewide property tax.

That action does not require any more state money and in fact increases state revenue by about $30 million.

The Legislature increased spending on special education in the second year of the biennium, but the Senate budget reduced that figure by $27 million.

Just a few years ago, the Education Trust Fund, which pays for state adequacy grants to public and charter schools, special education, building aid and several other educational needs, had a surplus approaching $250 million, but since that time the EFA program has also drawn its money from the same source of funds totally $76 million through this school year.

The additional draw from the EFA program and declining state revenues have combined to substantially change the financial picture. At the end of this fiscal year at the end of the month, the surplus will be around $100 million.

At the end of the upcoming biennium the surplus in the Senate’s budget will be less than $20 million, with the fund in deficit under the House’s budget, and $14 million in the governor’s plan.

All three plans reduce the percentage of state revenues that go into the Education Trust Fund and increase the amount going to the state’s general fund.

Drying up the Education Trust Fund was a plan hatched long ago to have vouchers competing with public schools for state education money. When that happens, if you think your property taxes are too high now, just wait until the money goes to the voucher program first before adequacy grants to school districts.

The Free State/Libertarians have long sought to have public schools house only special education students and kids with disciplinary programs. The rest of the students and their parents will be on their own to find and pay for their education, meaning the rich will do just fine and everyone else will scramble to find an inferior education they can afford.

That is a pathway to retaining the oligarchy.

Another significant issue facing public education is the dearth of teachers as many school districts cannot find certified teachers to hire and instead have to rely on non-credentialed personnel or para educators to fill the gap.

See above and and you could reasonably ask, with these kinds of bills that put teachers between their students and their parents and make schools less than safe spaces for many kids, who in their right mind would want to be an educator.

At last week’s session, Rep. Stephen Woodcock, D-Center Conway, a retired teacher and school principal, said “Parental rights go hand in hand with parental responsibilities. It is not a teacher’s responsibility to do the parents’ job, which is talking with their children.”

And you could argue that public education ought to be more rigorous than it is now, but society has pressured schools to “make every child succeed,” and that translates into lower academic standards.

And that describes the new state education standards recently approved by the State Board of Education in the name of competency-based education.

If this group of legislators continue to control the agenda, it will not be long before public education will be in tatters, which will suit them fine.

But with about 90 percent of the state’s children in the public school system, it is hard to believe that is their parents’ or their desire.

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11/06/2025
Florida: College Presidencies Go to Grifters and GOP Cronies. Merit Doesn’t Count.

Scott Maxwell is an opinion columnist for The Orlando Sentinel. He tells the truth about the state’s sordid politics and backs it up with facts. Learn here how the state chooses college and university presidents.

He writes:

You probably know that Florida’s GOP politicians have taken a wrecking ball to the state’s university system. And the narrative is that they’re on a noble crusade to exorcise evil, “woke” ideology from college campuses.

But if you believe that’s the only goal here, you’ve been duped. This isn’t about politicians going after liberal doctrines nearly as much as it’s about them going after tax dollars.

They’ve turned the university system into a political spoils system where politicians with no higher-ed experience can score lucrative higher-ed jobs for themselves.

It’s been going on for a while now, but the grift was fully exposed this past week. That’s when it was revealed that one of the political has-beens fuming about diversity — as a supposed reason to deny the University of Florida presidency to a qualified applicant — had secretly made a play to try to get the $3 million-a-year job for himself.

See, you have to separate the theater from the grift. The theater was a bunch of privileged guys griping about the concept of diversity and inclusion. The grift was one of those same guys making a secretive play for the very job he was griping about.

More about that in a moment, but first, let’s remember where this all started — at New College of Florida with Richard Corcoran. Two years ago, the former House Speaker craved a fat, higher-ed paycheck. The problem was that Corcoran had as much higher-ed experience as my dead cat, Furball.

So to distract from his lack of qualifications, Corcoran fumed — about DEI, CRT and other scary-sounding acronyms. It was red meat for the trolls. And Corcoran laughed all the way to the bank. He got a $1 million deal to run a tiny college with 698 students. Elementary school principals oversee more pupils.

Then Corcoran and Co. invited other political has-beens to feed at the New College trough. They gave a former Senate president a $500-an-hour legal contract, the governor’s former spokesman a $15,000-a-month PR contract and the wife of the former Republican Party of Florida chairman $175,000 to run the school’s foundation.

With the chow bell rung, the politicians came running. Former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska scored a $10 million deal for a short-lived and disastrous tenure at UF where the student newspaper discovered he’d quickly blown through $17 million in public money, including $38,000 he spent on a sushi bar.

Lieutenant Gov. Jeanette Nunez snagged the top spot at Florida International University. A cable-company lobbyist friendly with the administration is in line to lead FAMU.
At one college, they had to actually remove the requirement that the president have an advanced degree so that they could give the job to Fred Hawkins, a GOP legislator who lacked one.

But then this past week, the scheme was fully exposed in cringe-worthy fashion.

The scene was the Board of Governors meeting in Orlando where appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis were once again fuming about the alleged evils of diversity and inclusion. Their reason this time was to try to deny the UF presidency to former University of Michigan President Santa J. Ono.

Somehow, a qualified candidate had actually advanced through the secretive application process — and that would not be tolerated.

So the political appointees accused Ono of all kinds of terrible things like embracing equality and believing in science. Former House Speaker Paul Renner led the anti-woke war.

But then one board member who’d apparently heard enough posturing went off-script.
Eric Silagy, the former CEO of Florida Power and Light, asked if any of his fellow board members — the ones savaging Ono for being too woke — had applied for the very job Ono was seeking.
Yes, responded board chairman Mori Hosseini. “Paul Renner.”

It turned out the very guy claiming Florida needed an anti-woke warrior in this $3 million-a-year position had been salivating over the post.
Renner became visibly enraged when exposed. He indignantly responded that he’d only inquired about the job because other people suggested he do so and that he’d since decided not to accept the high-paying job even if it was offered to him. Sure, Mr. Speaker. Your nobility is noted.

Most of the time, qualified candidates like Ono don’t even get a shot. But occasionally, well-intentioned leaders at individual schools try to give them one — as trustees at Florida Atlantic University did two years ago when they nominated Vice Admiral Sean Buck, the superintendent of the United States Naval Academy, to be FAU’s president.

That’s how these folks treat these positions.

DeSantis would later admit in a moment of surprising candor that he only supported Fine because other GOP legislators disliked Fine and wanted him gone. “They wanted to get him out of the Legislature,” DeSantis said. “So they asked me to put him up for Florida Atlantic president, and I did.”

But Buck didn’t stand a chance in this environment. DeSantis allies savaged the respected admiral’s reputation so that yet another GOP legislator, Randy Fine, could have a shot at the job.

Fine and DeSantis later had a falling out, and Fine didn’t get the gig. But the rules of the game were clear: Qualified applicants need not apply.
An irony is that former politicians actually can become impressive university leaders. Florida State University President John Thrasher, a former GOP house speaker, was one of them. I respected him. So did many others.

But Thrasher, who sadly passed away last week, was a different kind of man than the Florida politicians of today. He was a statesman — not someone willing to savage others’ reputation simply to enrich himself.

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11/06/2025
Brookings Analysis: Trump’s “School Choice” Plan Enables Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Jon Valant is doing a great job as Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D. C. He keeps close tabs on federal legislation. What follows is an excellent analysis of Trump’s legislation to use federal funds to underwrite the privatization of federal education funding. The potential for fraud, waste, and abuse is huge, he writes.

He writes:
- The Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) would create a $5 billion federal tax-credit scholarship program through a tax shelter for wealthy individuals.
- The bill would provide minimally regulated scholarship-granting organizations with a great deal of discretion over how federal education funds are spent.
- A hypothetical scenario illustrates the possibility of waste, fraud, and discriminatory behaviors.
The Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) continues to move, quietly, towards becoming one of America’s costliest, most significant federal education programs. Now part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ECCA would create a federal tax-credit scholarship program that’s unprecedented in scope and scale. It has flown under the radar, though, and remains confusing to many observers.

Recently, a colleague and I showed how ECCA is poised to redistribute funds from poor and rural communities to wealthy and non-rural communities. A study from the Urban Institute drew similar conclusions. Since those pieces were published, ECCA—then a standalone bill—has passed through the House of Representatives and now moves to the Senate. ECCA’s fate remains uncertain, which makes this as good a time as any to examine its potential implications.

How would ECCA work?

ECCA’s stealthiness is partly due to the confusing nature of tax-credit scholarship programs. These programs move money in circuitous ways to avoid the legal and political hurdles that confront vouchers. Tax-credit scholarship programs like ECCA aren’t quite private school voucher programs, but they’re first cousins.

In a voucher program, a government gives money (a voucher) to a family, which the family can use to pay for private school tuition or other approved expenses. With a tax-credit scholarship, it’s not that simple. Governments offer tax credits to individuals and/or corporations that donate to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs). These SGOs then distribute funds (“scholarships”) to families.

The U.S. already has 22 tax-credit scholarship programs, but they’re relatively modest, state-level programs. ECCA is different. ECCA would create a massive, federal tax-credit scholarship program, operating across all 50 states, with a current price tag of about $5 billion in the first year (down from $10 billion in the bill’s earlier draft). It offers an extremely generous tax credit. Individuals get a full, 1:1 tax credit (not just a deduction) for their contributions, which fully offsets their contributions. In other words, these “donors” don’t actually give up any money—hence the quotation marks. On top of that, ECCA allows individuals to donate marketable securities (e.g., stocks) rather than cash. This provides an avenue to treat ECCA as a tax shelter and avoid paying capital gains taxes. More on that in a moment.

Most students would be eligible for a scholarship, with the exception of those from households that earn more than three times their area’s median gross income. (More on that in a moment, too.) The list of qualified expenses covers everything from private school tuition to online educational materials.

Rather than go through all of the bill’s details, let’s take a look at a scenario that illuminates what this program could do. Remarkably, this scenario appears—to my eye, at least—fully compliant with the House bill (even if the characters are a bit overstated).

A hypothetical scenario to illustrate some of ECCA’s risks

A ‘donor’ who benefits from ECCA’s tax shelter

Let’s imagine a billionaire, Billy, who couldn’t care less about K-12 education but cares a whole lot about his own wealth. Billy hears about ECCA from an acquaintance who tells him about how much money Billy could save by “donating” to an SGO. Billy’s adjusted gross income (AGI) was $20 million last year. That means, according to ECCA, that he’s eligible to donate $2 million to an SGO this year (10% of his AGI).

Let’s walk through the math for Billy’s donation. Billy is looking to give $2 million in stock shares to an SGO. He bought these shares a few years ago for $1 million and then they doubled in value. That means that Billy’s earnings are subject to long-term capital gains tax if he sells the stock. With his AGI, that would be 23.8% in federal taxes plus another 4.7% or so in state taxes (depending on where he lives). In other words, if Billy sold the stocks today and kept the funds for himself, he’d owe about $285,000 in combined federal and state taxes on his $1 million in earnings (28.5% of $1 million).

By donating the $2 million in stock to an SGO, not only does Billy get his entire $2 million back as a tax credit; he also dodges those capital gains taxes. He’s a billionaire who is $285,000 wealthier for having made this supposed donation. (For a detailed illustration of how this works—and some nice figures—I’d recommend this piece from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.)

A scholarship-granting organization with extraordinary leeway in how to direct ECCA funds

Now, let’s get back to that SGO. Billy’s acquaintance, Fred, lives in the same town as Billy, which is one of the wealthiest areas in the United States. In fact, Fred set up the SGO, looking to capture ECCA funds within their shared community—and, just maybe, for himself. Like Billy, Fred doesn’t particularly care about K-12 education. He does have a penchant for fraud, though, along with a strong distaste for Republicans.

It might seem that Fred’s SGO couldn’t distribute funds to families in their ultra-wealthy area, since ECCA has income restrictions for scholarship recipients. That’s not the case. ECCA restricts eligibility to households with an income not greater than 300% of their area’s median income. In Fred and Billy’s town, with its soaring household incomes, even multimillionaire families with $500,000 in annual income are eligible. In more modest (and rural) areas, the cutoffs aren’t nearlyso high.

So, Fred is looking to give scholarship money to some wealthy families in his hometown. Notably, ECCA doesn’t limit the amount of money that he can give to any one recipient. ECCA just requires that he provide scholarships to at least two students—who, between them, attend at least two different schools—and that he not earmark the funds for any particular student. Fred offers students $100,000 apiece for supplemental tutoring. That might seem like a lot, but, hey, this is high-end tutoring.

A vendor with little oversight or accountability

In fact, Fred stipulates that the funds must be spent at a new tutoring shop, High-End Tutoring, just created by his buddy, a former teacher. ECCA seems to allow that. ECCA also allows Fred to take a nice cut for himself for running the SGO: 10% of the SGO’s total receipts.

No one really knows the arrangement that Fred and his tutoring friend have, if they have one, because there are hardly any transparency or accountability provisions in ECCA (aside from a requirement to obtain annual financial and compliance audits). We also won’t know if High-End Tutoring provides any educational value, because that’s not part of ECCA either. ECCA’s proponents have claimed there’s accountability to the SGO donors, who want to see their generous donations being put to good use. Billy, though, is enjoying his $285,000 money grab and content to leave Fred alone until it’s time for next year’s donation.

An invitation to discriminate—and an attempt to keep local and state governments from intervening

Fred does have one requirement of his own for High-End Tutoring that he doesn’t need to hide. High-End Tutoring isn’t going to serve any children of Republican parents. All students must complete an attestation form—stating that they and their parents are progressive—before receiving any tutoring services from this publicly funded vendor. Across town, another SGO leader is formally excluding LGBTQ+ children and children of LGBTQ+ parents from their pool of scholarship recipients.

ECCA, in its current form, seems to allow all of this, as objectionable as it may seem. And it’s not just an issue with SGOs funding tutoring companies or other supplemental services. Similar issues could arise with private schools, especially in states without strong anti-discrimination protections.

From hypotheticals to reality

The scenario above might seem ridiculous or caricatured, and to some extent it probably is. But the point is, it’s allowable under the proposed legislation, and we should be realistic about how much fraud, waste, and bad behavior a program like ECCA would invite.

Should we not expect wealthy stockowners to jump at the opportunity to exploit ECCA’s tax shelter? Is it unreasonable to think that many of these wealthy donors will look to benefit their own communities through their donations? Have we not seen bad actors creep in when governments offer large checks with hardly any accountability or strings attached?

This isn’t some tiny, insignificant program either. This is a $5 billion federal program that, because of a “high-use calendar year” provision in ECCA, is almost certain to grow 5% annually. In fact, the cost is likely to be considerably higher than thatdue to the foregone capital gains tax revenue. That’s not quite the size of the behemoth federal K-12 programs—Title I ($18.4 billion in FY 2024) and IDEA ($15.5 billion)—but it’s not all that far off.

And let’s be clear about cost, because ECCA certainly isn’t paid for by the contributions of generous donors. Tax credits are would-be revenue that the IRS is no longer collecting. That money is coming from somewhere else in the budget, whether it’s cuts in education spending, cuts to Medicaid or other social services, tax hikes, or increased debt.

This bill would introduce the most significant and costliest new federal education program in decades. It has virtually no quality-control measures, transparency provisions, protections against discrimination, or evidence to suggest that it’s likely to improve educational outcomes. It’s very likely to redirect funds from poor (and rural) areas to wealthy areas.

And, in its current form, ECCA leaves a whole lot of room for waste, fraud, and abuse.
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11/06/2025
Gary Legum: ABC Punishes Reporter for Accurate Description of Stephen Miller

Gary Legum writes at the blog “Wonkette.” Legum was appalled when he heard that ABC had suspended its reporter Terry Moran for posting a tweet about the hatefulness of Trump’s top aide Stephen Miller. Miller prides himself on his open hatred of immigrants and his eagerness to expel millions of them. He is ultra-MAGA and proud of it.

ABC punished Moran because he told the truth.

By the way, there is a reference in this piece to Stephen Miller’s wife Katie. I have not seen any reason to mention the flurry of reports that she has left her government job to work as a personal assistant for Elon Musk. Did she leave Stephen? Did she move to Texas with Elon? what about their children? Are they in DC or Starland, Texas?

Legum writes:

Something happened to ABC News reporter Terry Moran over the weekend: He was brought low by a brutal attack of unvarnished honesty.

Sir, really. Honesty? In Donald Trump’s America?

Even better, Moran’s honesty was an assessment of the character — or complete and utter lack thereof — of Stephen Miller, the irredeemably evil sack of donkey vomit who does whatever it takes to stay on Donald Trump’s good side, all so he can continue to hold the power — as shadow president, basically — to destroy lives for no other reason than his parents apparently never hugged him and told him he was worthy of love.

Which, quite frankly, can you blame them? We imagine raising Stephen Miller involved mysterious supernatural happenings around the house and nannies hanging themselves from the top floor of the family manor in full view of the guests at Miller’s birthday party.

The trouble started, as it so often does, with a tweet. On Saturday, Moran posted his opinion, for which your Wonkette congratulates him even though we know this sort of thing is frowned upon by the giants of journalism:

The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism.

Yes, he is one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy.

But that’s not what’s interesting about Miller.

It’s not brains. It’s bile.

Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater.

You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.

Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end is his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.

None of this is news about Stephen Miller to anyone who has ever known him, going back to his high school days when he once got booed off a stage for excoriating his fellow students for being nice to the school’s janitors. A journalist who wrote a book about Miller during Trump’s first term titled it Hatemonger, and we doubt many people blinked an eye.

Shoot, the man’s own family disowned him, and his childhood rabbi called him out in a sermon on Rosh Hashanah. Do you know how horrible of a person you have to be to get a rabbi to denounce you from the bema during the High Holidays? That’s an honor usually reserved for biblical villains and Adolf Hitler, and we are not glibly invoking Godwin’s Law when we say that. We have sat through a lot of High Holiday sermons.

Moran deleted the tweet at some point, but the damage was done. The White House jumped all over Moran in defense of Miller. Vice President JD Vance called the tweet “an absolutely vile smear” and declared that Miller is motivated by “a love of country.” White House Press Nazi Karoline Leavitt, perhaps forgetting who she works for and what kind of crap he puts out every day, called it “unhinged and unacceptable” in a tweet.

Then the press secretary, her face shining like a highly polished apple, went on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show and said that “ABC is gonna have to answer” for Moran’s comments:

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com

Leavitt: “ABC is gonna have to answer for what their so-called journalist put out on twitter … we have reached out to ABC. They have said they will be taking action, so we will see what they do … hopefully this journalist will either be suspended or terminated.”

Miller himself called Moran a radical “adopting a journalist’s pose.” Oh no, was he so upset he couldn’t eat his usual Sunday brunch consisting of a live bat?

Moran posted his screed at 12:06 a.m. Sunday morning, the “drunk texting your ex because you’ve been drinking all night and are now all caught up in your lonely feels” hour. Nothing good ever comes of picking up your phone at that hour.

ABC News promptly suspended Moran. Via Deadline:

“ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” a network spokesperson said. “The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards — as a result, Terry Moran has been suspended pending further evaluation.”

ABC should try being like Wonkette, whose only standard is the truth. Then Moran could have called Stupid Nosferatu whatever he wanted: hideous shit goblin, Skeletor, fascist taint shavings, a lower life form than the crud under the fridge, a loser husband who rumors are abounding may have been cucked by Elon Musk, a motherfucking shanda fur di goyim … the list goes on and on and on.

We are not in the habit of giving ABC any advice, but we think their response to Leavitt’s demand that they “answer for” Moran should be two middle fingers raised high, accompanied by a sneer that could melt the press secretary’s face off. It is way past time for high-level journalists to be consistently frank about what Stephen Miller is and what he’s doing, instead of couching his vile bigotry and single-minded pursuit of extremist actions as some sort of polite disagreement between right and left over immigration policy.

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10/06/2025
Trump Will Cut More Federal Workers Next Year

Since his second inauguration, Trump has fired tens of thousands of federal workers, based on snap recommendations by Elon Musk’s team of whippersnappers. They have gone into government departments and agencies and decided in a day or so which workers to fire and which contracts to terminate. They don’t have enough information or time to make considered judgments, so they treat every federal worker as dispensable. The numbers fired are hard to determine, because federal judges have repeatedly reversed their actions. Some have been approved by the courts. The outcome is still in flux, though we do know that little is left of USAID or the U.S. Departnent of Education.

Government Executive reports that Trump plans a new round of layoffs in his second year. It’s unclear what his end goal is: is he destroying the federal government for some reason? With all the laid-off workers, he hasn’t reduced the budget. It’s grown, due to greater expenses for ICE, border security, and defense.

Some agencies, like FEMA and the National Weather Service, are being stripped to the bone. What will remain of our government at the end of his term?

Government Executive reports:

The Trump administration is looking to slash a net of 107,000 employees at non-defense agencies next fiscal year, which would lead to an overall reduction of more than 7% of those workers.

Agencies laid out their workforce reductions in an expanded version of President Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget released on Friday, which includes both ideas they can implement unilaterally and proposals that will require congressional approval. If agencies follow through on their plans, the cuts will likely be even steeper, as the Defense Department and some other agencies did not include their announced cuts in the new budget documents.

The cuts represent changes projected to take effect next year relative to fiscal 2025 staffing levels. The ongoing cuts that have already occurred were generally not factored into the current workforce counts and the White House noted those figures “may not reflect all of the management and administrative actions underway or planned in federal agencies.”

Agencies are currently operating under a directive from Trump to slash their rolls, though those plans are largely paused under court order and awaiting resolution at the Supreme Court.

Under the budget forecasts, the Education Department will shed the most employees, followed by the Office of Personnel Management, General Services Administration, Small Business Administration and NASA. Education has already moved to lay off one-third of its workforce, but those reductions in force are currently paused by a separate court order.

The departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development and Agriculture are also expecting to cut more than 20% of their workforces.

The Trump administration will seek to eliminate more than 107,000 jobs across government, but the net impact is mitigated by targeted hiring at certain agencies and offices. The Transportation Department is the only agency to project an overall staffing increase, driven by hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration and for IT. The Homeland Security Department will seek to significantly staff up at Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the administration ramps up its border crackdown and deportation operations, though DHS will see an overall cut due to planned reductions at the Federal Emergency Management Agency—which is set to shed 13% of its workforce—and the Transportation Security Administration—which will cut around 6%.

Many offices will be cut nearly entirely, such as the research and state forestry offices within USDA’s Forest Service. The department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service would shed nearly 4,000 employees, including two-thirds of employees providing technical assistance on conservation planning and forecasting on snowpack and water supply.

HHS, which has already laid off 10,000 employees, would eliminate 10 offices entirely, though some of the impacted employees are being absorbed into the new Administration for Health America or other reorganized areas. NASA is planning to shutter its Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Engagement office and would cut its Science office in half. DHS would eliminate its Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction office. Cuts at the Treasury Department would be driven by reductions at the Internal Revenue Service— which would zero out its Business Systems Modernization office—though the Bureau of Fiscal Service is also planning to slash one-quarter of its staff.

At the Interior Department, the National Park Service is planning to cut about 27% of its employees, Fish and Wildlife Service would cut 19% and U.S. Geological Survey would cut 32%.

The full scope of the cuts across government will likely expand over time: The Veterans Affairs Department is set to shed more than 80,000 employees and layoffs—assuming a court injunction is lifted—are expected as soon as this month, though they are not a part of the budget. The Defense Department has said it will cut around 60,000 civilian employees, but it has yet to detail those plans in Trump’s budget.

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10/06/2025
Russ Vought Will Keep the DOGS going Without Elon

In case you wondered, I now call DOGE something else. I call it DOGS, although truthfully that’s not fair to dogs. Dogs are wonderful creatures; In my experience, dogs give you unconditional loyalty and love. These DOGS are loyal to one man, Elon Musk. They are shredding the federal government, destroying the careers and lives of tens of thousands of professional civil servants. They have gathered our personal data. They are embedded in high-level positions across the government. They should all be fired and sent back to Elon Musk.

But the bigger risk to our democracy is Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, one of the most powerful positions in the federal government. He is a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist. He is working in opposition to the Founding Fathers, who made clear their intention to keep religion out of government.

Democracy Docket reports on Vought:

Though Elon Musk is leaving the White House, DOGE isn’t going anywhere.

It appears that Russell Vought — Trump’s budget hawk and one of the chief architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — is stepping in to become DOGE’s new power broker.

With Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist, at the helm, the slash-and-burn effort against the federal government may be on the cusp of an even darker turn.

In many ways, Vought is what Musk is not. After working at public policy organizations for nearly two decades, he has a far better understanding of how the government works — and how its weaknesses can be exploited. Despite advising Trump for almost 10 years, he’s also kept a fairly low profile, rarely giving interviews or speaking in public.

And Vought appears to be motivated first and foremost by creating a Christian nation controlled by an overtly Christian government.

Last year, Vought told undercover journalists with the Centre for Climate Reporting that he wants “to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation.”

“And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism,” Vought said. “That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”

To achieve that, Vought said in the interview he seeks to replace the non-partisan and merit-based federal civil service with a bureaucracy in which employment hinges on allegiance to Trump. He said he also seeks to impound congressionally approved funding, help coordinate mass deportations and find ways to let Trump use the military to put down protesters.

As former Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently told The Atlantic, “Russ has got a vision. He’s not an anarchist. He’s a true believer.”

Federal agencies, in particular the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), have already implemented numerous policies that Vought drafted to achieve those goals.

Earlier this year, OPM proposed new regulations that would formally revive Schedule F, a key tool developed by Vought to gut the federal government and replace career public servants with partisan ideologues.

In another move championed by Vought, the personnel office last week also announced a s0-called “Merit Hiring Plan” that would, if implemented, ask prospective hires for the thousands of DOGE-induced vacancies across the federal government to write short essays explaining their levels of patriotism and support for the president’s policies.

“How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired,” reads one of the essay prompts.

Vought, too, has recently taken steps to impound funds.

This week, the White House sent Congress proposed spending cuts — also called a rescission package — that’s been backed by Vought in order to formalize cuts made by DOGE. The $9.4 billion package targets funding for NPR, PBS, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other foreign aid spending.

The rescission process allows a president to avoid spending money on discretionary programs, and since rescission bills only require simple majority approval in the House and Senate, there’s a chance some of the proposed cuts will become law. If they do, they will be the first presidentially proposed rescissions accepted by Congress since 1999.

If Congress doesn’t pass the package, the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which restricts when and how the president can delay or withhold federal funds, requires Trump to release the funds — that’s assuming that the administration follows the law.

The same day the White House sent Congress the package, Vought threatened that if lawmakers don’t pass the rescissions, the executive branch would find ways to override Congress’ constitutional authority to allocate funding.

“We are dusting off muscle memory that existed for 200 years before President Nixon in the 1970s and Congress acted to try to take away the president’s ability to spend less,” Vought said.

When asked by CNN whether he was attempting to tee up a legal fight to challenge the Impoundment Control Act as unconstitutional, Vought implied he was.

“We’re certainly not taking impoundment off of the table. We’re not in love with the law,” Vought said.

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10/06/2025
Trump Is Trying to Seize Control of Public Broadcasting, But Judge Blocks Him, for Now

Trump is determined to defund NPR and PBS. He claims they are radical, far-left media outlets. The federal funding these media receive is funneled through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In his effort to control CPB, Trump told three members of the board of CPB that they were fired. Trump intends to control every outlet of public information, either by threatening their funding or (if private) suing to intimidate them. This is fascism.

The CPB board sued and said that it was created by Congress to be independent of political direction.

A federal district judge in DC, appointed by Obama, issued a decision that caused both sides to claim victory. The decision said that the board members would not suffer irreparable harm if removed, but that CPB is an independent agency. The judge declined to block the firings but CPB treated the ruling as a victory for its independence.

Brian Stelter of CNN described the decision:

Yesterday a federal judge declined to immediately intervene in Trump’s attempt to remove three Corporation for Public Broadcasting board members, “ruling the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate a strong likelihood the firings were unlawful or that they would suffer irreparable harm,” The Hill’s Sarah Fortinsky reports.

“But CPB officials celebrated the ruling as a win, pointing to part of the ruling that acknowledges that ‘Congress intended to preclude the President (or any subordinate officials acting at his direction) from directing, supervising, or controlling the Corporation.’” The entity’s statement on the matter is titled “Court Recognizes CPB’s Independence.”

The bottom line: CPB is keeping its board members in place and continuing to fight.

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10/06/2025
RFK Jr. Fires Every Member of CDC Expert Advisory Panel on Vaccines

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the Center for Disease Control’s expert advisory panel on vaccines. This clears the way for him to appoint people who share his wacko views about vaccines. When asked why he fired them, he lied and said they had conflicts of interest. This was not true.

Apoorva Mandavilli of The New York Times reported:

The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on Monday retired all 17 members of an advisory committee on immunization to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, arguing that the move would restore the public’s trust in vaccines.

He made the announcement on Monday in an opinion column for The Wall Street Journal.

The C.D.C.’s vaccine advisers wield enormous influence. They carefully review data on vaccines, debate the evidence and vote on who should get the shots and when. Insurance companies are required to cover the vaccines recommended by the panel.

This is the latest in a series of moves Mr. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, has made to drastically reshape policy on immunizations. A vaccine panel more closely aligned with Mr. Kennedy’s views has the potential to significantly alter the immunizations recommended to Americans, including childhood vaccinations.

Mr. Kennedy said the panel, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, “has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest….”

In fact, ACIP members are carefully screened for major conflicts of interest, and they cannot hold stocks or serve on advisory boards or speaker bureaus affiliated with vaccine manufacturers.

On the rare occasion that members have indirect conflicts of interest — for example, if an institution at which they work receives money from a drug manufacturer — they disclose the conflict and recuse themselves from related votes.

Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and former member of the panel, expressed concern that Kennedy wants to replace members of the panel with people who share his antagonism towards vaccines.

How many Americans will die because of this extremist who has strong opinions but limited knowledge of science or medicine?

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10/06/2025