This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK Public Media and NPR’s Station Investigations Team. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

When Alaska House Speaker Bryce Edgmon toured the public school in Sleetmute last fall, he called the building “the poster child” for what’s wrong with the way the state pays to build and maintain schools. The tiny community 240 miles west of Anchorage had begged Alaska’s education department for nearly two decades for money to repair a leaky roof that over time had left part of the school on the verge of collapse.

Seated at a cafeteria table after the tour, Edgmon, a veteran independent lawmaker, told a Yup’ik elder he planned to “start raising a little bit of Cain” when he returned to the Capitol in Juneau for the 2025 legislative session.

Other lawmakers said similar things after an investigation by KYUK Public Media, ProPublica and NPR earlier this year found that the state has largely ignored hundreds of requests from rural school districts to fix deteriorating buildings, including the Sleetmute school. Because of the funding failures, students and teachers in some of Alaska’s most remote villages face serious health and safety risks, the news organizations found.

Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, an Anchorage Democrat, called the investigation’s findings “heartbreaking” and said in an email during the legislative session earlier this year that “the current state of these schools is unacceptable.” Sen. Scott Kawasaki, a Fairbanks Democrat, wrote to say that the “responsibility lies squarely on the legislature” and acknowledged “we do not do enough.” Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, a Republican from Fairbanks, wrote, “We are working to right the ship!”

Yet during a legislative session where money for education was front and center, lawmakers were only able to pass $40 million in school construction and maintenance funding, about 5% of the nearly $800 million that districts say they need to keep their buildings safe and operating.

In June, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed more than two-thirds of that, nearly $28 million.

“Basically, we don’t have enough money to pay for all of our obligations,” Dunleavy explained in a video posted on YouTube.

In the video, seated at an empty table in a darkened room and flanked by U.S. and Alaska flags, Dunleavy, a Republican, painted a grim picture of the state’s future. “The price of oil has gone down; therefore our revenue is going down,” he said.

The crisis Dunleavy described isn’t just a short-term problem. State officials have known for decades that relying on oil to fund the budget is risky as prices and production have declined. But year after year, they have failed to agree on a solution to finance school repairs and renovations. Alaska is one of only two states without an income tax or statewide sales tax.

Average annual spending on education facilities declined by nearly 60% after 2014, the year oil prices plummeted, according to a 2021 report by the University of Alaska Anchorage. Overall spending on rural facilities is now less than half of what the National Council on School Facilities recommends.

Sen. Löki Tobin, a Democrat from Anchorage who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said it’s hard to get “momentum” around various ideas to fund education, “let alone just getting folks to realize that we have been by attrition defunding our schools.”

Alaska’s Legislature seemed primed this year to address education funding. Several new candidates from both parties campaigned on education and won seats in November’s statewide election.

“We flipped an entire statehouse,” said Tobin, who was elected to the Legislature in 2022, “based on the question of adequate school funding.”

Lawmakers filed a bill to fund education before the session even began. And in the first months of the year, dozens of superintendents, students and school board members traveled to Juneau to testify before lawmakers and urge them to increase funding for curriculum, teacher salaries and other costs.

During one Senate Finance Committee hearing, panel co-chair Lyman Hoffman, who has represented rural Alaskan school districts for 38 years, raised the specter of a civil rights lawsuit similar to those the state has faced in the past over education in primarily Indigenous communities.

The prospect, he said, could be “more costly to the state than if we came forward and tried to do something about the condition of these schools.”

In April, Alaska’s House and Senate passed a bipartisan bill that would have offered the largest increase in nearly a decade in what the state spends on each student annually. It did not include capital funds for school construction or maintenance.

Days later, Dunleavy, a former superintendent and school board member, vetoed it. He said it didn’t include enough support for homeschooling and charter schools — policy changes that he’s long pushed for.

Before the legislative session adjourned in May, lawmakers passed a compromise bill that included less spending and eased regulations for charter schools. Dunleavy again vetoed it, but lawmakers overrode the veto. The next month, Dunleavy used his line-item veto power to slash 3% from the education budget, the largest cut to any department in the state.

This year’s total state budget came to $14.7 billion, about $1 billion less than the previous year. Some lawmakers have described it as “bare bones” and “flat funded.”

Among Dunleavy’s cuts was more than $25 million that was supposed to pay for school construction and maintenance. School districts have to apply to the state for those funds each year, and their proposed projects are then ranked. The reduction doesn’t leave enough money this year to pay for even the top three projects among the 84 maintenance proposals school districts submitted. Seventeen major construction projects, including the replacement of five rural schools, received no funding at all.

One of those projects is a new school in Stebbins, a Yup’ik village on the coast of the Norton Sound and the Bering Sea where the building burned down last year. More than 200 K-12 students now attend classes in about a dozen small temporary buildings. Mayor Sharon Snowball said several students left the community after the fire to attend boarding school or live with family in other communities.

Two hundred miles southwest in Mertarvik, a village that recently relocated due to climate change, the school district did not receive the funds it applied for to build a wastewater system for a school that’s set to open in 2026. The district said it couldn’t answer questions about how it will move forward with the project.

Dunleavy has called lawmakers back to Juneau on Aug. 2 for a special session to discuss reforming the state’s education system. It’s unclear whether maintenance and construction funds will be part of those discussions.

Alaska’s budget crisis has been detrimental to the state’s rural school districts, which rely almost entirely on the annual budget for funding to fix and maintain buildings because they serve unincorporated communities that don’t have the power to levy taxes.

The budget depends heavily on profits from the production and sale of crude oil, which go into the state’s Permanent Fund, a state-owned investment fund. Returns on those investments pay for more than half of Alaska’s operational needs each year.

Prices of crude oil from Alaska’s North Slope dropped by more than a third from 2014 to this spring, according to the Alaska Department of Revenue. The result is a budget deficit that some economists say will exceed $1 billion by next year.

State lawmakers have failed to address the warning signs of a budget crisis for decades. By the early 2000s, Alaska’s daily oil production had fallen by half from its peak in the 1980s. Last year, it was a quarter of that.

But for a time, high oil prices allowed Alaska to make it work. When Edgmon came into office in 2007, he said every day was a windfall.

“We put a ton of money into schools both operationally and capital budgetwise,” he said.

Legislators have weighed numerous options to fund the budget. They’ve considered whether to trim the annual dividend checks that Alaska pays to its year-round residents from the return on Permanent Fund investments. Last year, Alaskans received just over $1,700. Cutting payments is wildly unpopular, in part because research has shown the money reduces the number of Alaskans in poverty by up to 40%.

Lawmakers have dipped into the state’s dwindling savings accounts to cover the deficit, said Matt Berman, a University of Alaska Anchorage economics professor who co-authored a 2016 report that examined various deficit-reduction methods.

“The fact that the study was done 10 years ago and that absolutely no action has taken place since then speaks for itself,” Berman wrote in an email.

Some lawmakers have long called for Alaska to adopt a statewide income or sales tax, but neither idea has gained much traction. A bipartisan working group studied the possibility of enacting taxes in 2021. After a year on the working group, state Rep. Kevin McCabe, a Republican from north of Anchorage, said he wasn’t convinced taxes were the answer.

“We experimented with sales tax, maybe a seasonal sales tax, we tried an income tax, progressive income tax,” he said. “It’s just not gonna bring in the money that we need for all of our infrastructure deficit.”

Alaska used to have a special tax on every employed resident to help pay for education. But it was repealed in 1980 after the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which allowed the state to sell more oil from North Slope.

“I’ll never forget my first payroll check,” said Click Bishop, a former six-term Republican senator from Fairbanks. He said his boss went through the statement with him. “He gets down here on this line, and it says ‘education head tax $5,’ and he said, ‘Kid, that $5 is going to the state to help you get your education,’” he recalled.

Bishop, who is exploring a run for governor, has proposed reinstating an annual education tax. But his proposal would only raise about $14 million each year, hardly enough to scratch the surface on the state’s school maintenance needs.

Instead of taxes, McCabe and other lawmakers say a more long-term solution for both schools and Alaska’s overall budget would be to build a natural gas pipeline that would raise money from gas sales.

Estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey show the state is home to more than a hundred trillion cubic feet of untapped natural gas, but there’s no way to bring it to market.

Described by the industry as “big, expensive and complex,” the pipeline project has been in discussions for at least 50 years. In 2020, the Alaska Gasline Development Corp., an independent state corporation tasked with developing the infrastructure, estimated construction could cost close to $40 billion. Though an energy developer recently announced interest from dozens of international customers, it’s unclear who would foot that bill.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Emily Schwing, KYUK.

President Donald Trump on July 4 signed into law an omnibus reconciliation bill, branded in MAGA propaganda (and much of corporate media) as the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The legislation scraped up just enough votes to narrowly pass in both chambers of the Republican-controlled Congress, with 51 to 50 votes in the Senate and 218 to 214 in the House.

The focal point of the bill is a $4.5 trillion tax cut, partly paid for by unprecedented slashes in funding for healthcare and food assistance. The wealthiest 10% will gain $12,000 a year from the legislation, while it will cost the lowest-earning 10% of families $1,600 annually. Media addressed the fiscal aspects of the bill, though more often through a fixation on the federal debt rather than looking at the effect of the budget on inequality (FAIR.org, 7/17/25).

But it’s not just a question of money. Many of the bill’s key provisions—including Medicaid, SNAP and clean energy cuts, as well as handouts to the fossil fuel, military and detention industries—will be literally deadly for people in the US and abroad, in both the near and long term.

FAIR’s Belén Fernandez (7/9/25) closely examined the dramatic lack of coverage of the vast expansion of the government’s anti-immigrant capacities. But the deadly consequences of the other aspects of the bill were also remarkably underexplained to the public.

To see how major media explained the contents and consequences of the reconciliation bill to the public before its enactment, FAIR surveyed New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and NPR news coverage from the Senate’s passage of the final version of the bill on July 1 through July 4, the day Trump signed the bill into law. This time frame, when the actual contents of the bill were known and the House was deliberating on giving it an up or down vote, was arguably the moment when media attention was most critical to the democratic process.

‘We all are going to die’

This USA Today article (7/1/25) was one of the more informative in detailing the impact of the bill, but it still fell short of detailing the projected cost in human lives.

While corporate media reported that the finalized bill with the Senate’s revisions would significantly cut healthcare funding to subsidize the tax breaks, they rarely explained the social consequences of such cuts. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the bill will reduce $1.04 trillion in funding for Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program over the next decade. This will strip health insurance from 11.8 million people.

The New York Times (7/1/25), acknowledging these statistics, quoted Democrats who opposed the bill due to “the harmful impact it will have on Medicaid,” and who noted that people will soon “see the damage that is done as hospitals close, as people are laid off, as costs go up, as the debt increases.”

But the outlets in our sample, at this crucial time of heightened attention, failed to mention the most significant consequence of cutting Medicaid: death.

These outlets (New York Times, 5/30/25; NPR, 5/31/25; CNN, 5/31/25;  Washington Post, 6/1/25) had all earlier acknowledged what the Times called Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) “morbid” response to her constituents’ concerns about deaths from Medicaid cuts: “Well, we all are going to die.”

But as the House deliberated on whether these cuts would become law, these outlets failed to reference credible research that projected that the large-scale loss of health insurance envisioned by the bill would have an annual death toll in the tens of thousands. One USA Today piece (7/1/25) did headline that “Trump’s Tax Bill Could Cut Medicaid for Millions of Americans,” but didn’t spell out the potential cost in human lives.

Before the Senate’s revisions, researchers from Yale’s School of Public Health and UPenn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (Penn LDI, 6/3/25) projected that such massive cuts to healthcare would result in 51,000 deaths annually. That number is expected to be even higher now, as the calculation was based on an earlier CBO estimate of 7.7 million people losing coverage over the next decade (CBO, 5/11/25).

‘Harms to healthcare’—not to people

CNN (7/4/25) euphemized life-threatening withdrawal of care as “harm to the healthcare system.”

CNN (7/4/25), in a piece on “Who Stands to Gain From the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ And Who May Struggle,” similarly failed to spell out the dire consequences of the Medicaid cuts. It wrote that low-income Americans would be “worse off” thanks to those cuts, yet it extensively described only the fiscal impacts, as opposed to the costs in life and health, on lower- and middle-class families.

Hospitals would also be “worse off” due to the bill, as it would “leave them with more uncompensated care costs for treating uninsured patients.” This rhetorically rendered the patient, made uninsured by legislation, a burden.

The article quoted American Hospital Association CEO Rick Pollack, who said that

the real-life consequences…will result in irreparable harm to our healthcare system, reducing access to care for all Americans and severely undermining the ability of hospitals and health systems to care for our most vulnerable patients.

But CNN refused to spell out to readers what that “harm to the healthcare system” would mean: beyond “reducing access,” it would cause people to die preventable deaths.

Outlets often seemed more concerned with the impact of the bill on lawmakers’ political survival than its impact on their low-income constituents’ actual survival. The Washington Post (7/4/25), though acknowledging that their poll revealed that “two-thirds [of Americans] said they had heard either little or nothing about [the bill],” made little or no effort to contribute to an informed public. Instead, it focused on analyzing the “Six Ways Trump’s Tax Bill Could Shape the Battle for Control of Congress.”

The New York Times (7/1/25) similarly observed that the Senate Republicans’ “hard-fought legislative win came at considerable risk to their party’s political futures and fiscal legacy.” In another article (7/1/25), they noticed that it was the “more moderate and politically vulnerable Republicans” who “repeated their opposition to [the bill’s] cuts to Medicaid.”

‘Winners and losers’

“Opponents of the bill say the proposed cuts will leave millions of adults and children hungry”; the New York Times (7/1/25) apparently doesn’t know whether that’s true or not.

The Medicaid cuts aren’t the only part of the bill that will result in unnecessary deaths. The bill will cut $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a program that helps low-income individuals and families buy food. CBO (5/22/25) estimated that 3.2 million people under the age of 65 will lose food assistance. This contraction is expected to be even more deadly than the healthcare cutbacks: The same researchers from UPenn (7/2/25), along with NYU Langone Health, projected that losing SNAP benefits will result in 93,000 premature deaths between now and 2039.

SNAP cuts were mostly only mentioned alongside Medicaid, if at all (Washington Post, 7/3/25; New York Times, 7/3/25; CNN, 7/4/25). And when they did decide to dedicate a whole article to the singular provision, they rarely ventured beyond the fiscal impacts of such cuts into real, tangible consequences, such as food insecurity, hunger and death. The New York Times (7/1/25) asked “how many people will be affected,” but didn’t bother to ask “how will people be affected?”

What’s more, according to the Center for American Progress (7/7/25), the bill’s repeal of incentives for energy efficiency and improved air quality “will likely lead to 430 avoidable deaths every year by 2030 and 930 by 2035.”

The New York Times (7/3/25), however, analyzed this outcome as a changing landscape with “energy winners and losers.” It described how the bill will eliminate tax credits that have encouraged the electrification of homes and alleviated energy costs for millions of families. Somehow, the “loser” here (and all throughout the article) is the abstract concept of “energy efficiency” and private companies, not actual US families.

Another little-discussed provision in the bill is the funding for the Golden Dome, an anti-missile system named for and modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome. The bill set aside $25 billion for its development, along with another $128 billion for military initiatives like expanding the naval fleet and nuclear arsenal.

Media, though, did little more than report these numbers, when they weren’t ignored entirely (CBS, 7/4/25; CNN, 7/4/25). The New York Times (7/1/25) characterized these measures to strengthen the military/industrial complex as “the least controversial in the legislative package”; they were “meant to entice Republicans to vote for it.” In utterly failing to challenge $153 billion in spending on a military that is currently being deployed to bomb other countries in wars of aggression and to suppress protests against authoritarianism at home, the media manufacture consent for militarism as a necessity and an inevitability.

Ignorance a journalistic fail

The Washington Post’s headline and article (7/3/25) perfectly exemplified the paradox with today’s media—calling out how “The Big Problem With Trump’s Bill [Is That] Many Voters Don’t Know What’s in It.” Yet it tosses in an unsubstantial explanation about how “it deals with tax policy, border security, restocking the military/industrial complex, slashing spending on health and food programs for the poor—as well as many, many other programs.”

By reducing sweeping legislative consequences to vague generalities and by positioning ignorance as a voter issue rather than journalistic failure, media outlets maintain a veneer of critique while sidestepping accountability.

Featured image: PBS  depiction (7/30/25) of President Donald Trump signing the reconciliation bill. (photo: Alex Brandon/Pool via Reuters.)

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Shirlynn Chan.

The bill will have a remarkably regressive distributional impact. While top incomes will balloon by thousands of dollars, lower-income Americans will actually see their incomes decline. One analysis from before the bill’s final passage found that its major provisions would reduce incomes for the bottom 20% by about 2%.

Tax cuts, after all, are only one part of the bill. More relevant to lower-income Americans is that this bill will deliver the largest cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in US history.

Such a historic weakening of the safety net—the programs that support the finances of lower-income Americans—should warrant not only major attention, but significant scrutiny from national media outlets. And yet, at the New York Times, the approach has been to distract and obscure above all else.

‘Defined by staggering debt’

As Trump slashed $1 trillion from healthcare, the New York Times (6/27/25) stressed the importance of reducing the deficit. 

One manifestation of this approach has been the Times’ insistence on elevating the bill’s effect on the debt as a foremost concern. In the week or so leading up to the bill’s passage, in fact, both an editorial (6/27/25) and an episode of the Times’ flagship podcast the Daily (7/2/25) were dedicated entirely to a discussion of the national debt.

The Daily episode went as far as claiming, “The legislation is defined by the staggering amount of debt that it’s creating.” It then warned of the potential for a debt “doom loop,” whereby rising debt raises borrowing costs and forces the government to issue more debt in order to pay for its existing debt load.

Meanwhile, the Times editorial board opted to focus more heavily on the costs already being imposed by high federal debt. In a piece titled “The National Debt Is Already Causing Bigger Problems Than People Realize,” the board highlighted the “staggering amount of money” the government puts towards interest payments each year. The board’s solution:

The government needs to raise taxes, especially on the wealthy, and it needs to make long-term changes in Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of spending growth.

In other words, at a time when the Republican Party is gutting the safety net in epic fashion, the New York Times is coyly hinting that Social Security and Medicare will need to be cut.

‘Enough to repair every bridge’

The New York Times‘ own chart (6/27/25) indicates that Trump’s budget bill will have only a modest impact on US interest payments. What did cause interest costs to soar was the political decision to fight inflation through higher interest rates, a decision the Times applauded  (FAIR.org, 1/25/23, 6/27/23).

Across both the editorial and the podcast episode, the primary reason put forward by the Times for concern over the national debt was the borrowing costs associated with it. But is the bill’s effect on borrowing costs—the amount of money the federal government will have to spend to pay off the interest on its debts—genuinely that significant of a concern?

The Times editorial board seems to think so. Warning of the ill effects of increasing borrowing costs, the board observed:

The House version of Mr. Trump’s bill, already approved by that chamber, would increase interest payments on the debt by an average of $55 billion a year over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The increase alone is enough money to fully repair every bridge in the United States.

This comparison is useful to a degree. It exposes the priorities of the Trump administration, which seems to value tax cuts for the wealthy above delivering basic public goods.

But the comparison ultimately obscures more than it illuminates. The reality is that $55 billion is a relatively small sum for the US government. It represents only about 0.8% of the 2024 federal budget, and 0.2% of US GDP.

High cost of high interest rates

The interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bills has risen from 0.6% in 2020 to 4.5% today (chart: CNBC).

The total amount the federal government pays in interest—the amount it pays in excess of what it borrowed when it pays back loans—is of course much larger: The Times relays that interest payments are on pace to surpass $1 trillion this year, representing around 15% of last year’s federal budget. As the editorial board notes, this level of spending on interest payments crowds out other, more useful spending by the government. In other words, it does impose a not-insignificant cost.

What the board de-emphasizes or ignores, however, is that high interest payments are really just a symptom of other more fundamental policy choices.

On the one hand, they reflect the political decision to rely on the blunt instrument of interest rates to combat the pandemic-era spike in inflation. The result has been a rise in interest rates on ten-year government bonds, from under 1% in 2020 to above 4% today.

This was not an inevitable development. Other methods exist for combating inflation. But these methods were sidelined in favor of a regressive, debt-inflating approach. Would you know this by reading the Times editorial? Absolutely not.

The incredibly low tax rate

The United States has one of the lowest effective tax rates among wealthy countries (chart: Tax Policy Center).

On the other hand, high interest payments also reflect the political decision to run up the US debt load through tax cuts for the wealthy. This history of tax cuts is discussed by the editorial board, but it is framed as more of a secondary issue. Little would readers know that the crowding-out effect imposed by high interest payments, which the Times depicts climbing above the cost of Social Security in coming years, is dwarfed by the crowding-out effect of low tax revenue.

For such a rich country, the US collects incredibly little in taxes. Its tax revenue registers a meager 29% of GDP, compared to 42% in Canada, 52% in France and 62% in Norway.

Meanwhile, interest payments as a percentage of GDP are set to double over the next 30 years, reaching about 6% of GDP in the 2050s. That’s not even half the revenue deficit the US faces versus Canada—and Canada’s a low-tax country compared to France and Norway!

The Times nonetheless has run no editorial in recent months decrying the US for being such a low-tax country. Even in its editorial about interest payments, a breakdown of the pitiful state of US tax collection by international standards is nowhere to be found. Instead, we get a muddled denunciation of the bill’s irresponsible contribution to burdensome borrowing costs.

But, again, the bill’s contribution is tiny. Yes, interest payments are projected to reach 6% of GDP by the 2050s, but they will hit 5% even in the absence of this bill. With this single percentage of GDP boost in borrowing costs, the bill imposes a cost in 30 years that is a fraction of the cost of our tax deficit versus Canada today.

‘People benefit from working’

In its one editorial (5/23/25) on the reconciliation bill’s cuts to the safety net, the New York Times endorsed the idea “that some government benefits should be tied to employment.”

This is not to say that the Big Beautiful Bill will not impose Major Gratuitous Pain. But it is to say that such pain will not be found in an analysis of its impact on borrowing costs.

Rather, where we should look to see clear evidence of negative effects is the savings side of the bill, where Republicans have enacted brutal cuts to the social safety net, cuts that the economist James Galbraith calls “the direct result of bipartisan scaremongering over deficits and debt.”

The Times editorial board has run one editorial (5/23/25) on the bill’s cuts to the safety net. Published over a month before the bill’s passage, the piece was headlined “Republicans Can’t Hide Medicaid Cuts in a ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill.” As it pointed out, the Republican bill would reverse the progress that has been made over the past decade or so in expanding health insurance access to more Americans.

Oddly, however, the editorial extended an olive branch to the GOP, conceding:

We are sympathetic to the idea that some government benefits should be tied to employment. People benefit from working, and society benefits when more people are working.

Explaining the decision to insert this concession into the piece, editorial director David Leonhardt (New York Times, 7/1/25) has since elaborated:

I actually understand why, at a top-line way, people would want to put work requirements on a federal program, and actually I do think there are federal programs that should have work requirements. I’m a pretty big skeptic of universal basic income, of the idea that we’re just going to have the federal government give people lots of money outright. I don’t think it’s worked very well. I think it’s hugely expensive.

This is a baffling explanation. As worded in the editorial, it appears that the board is expressing sympathy for work requirements for some existing government benefits, and justifying them with reference to the value of work, despite work requirements’ long history of doing nothing to increase employment. Yet Leonhardt gives no example of a current government program that should be saddled with a work requirement. Instead, he merely expresses his opposition to universal basic income, using conservative arguments against the policy in doing so. This level of clarity, however, may be all we can expect from the Times.

Unnoted cutbacks

At least as notable as the contents of the editorials published by the Times on the Big Beautiful Bill is what the Times has failed to highlight about the legislation. After all, the paper has run just two editorials on what is probably the most regressive major piece of legislation in at least a generation. What have these missed? A lot.

For one, the largest cuts to food stamps in history are entirely absent from the Times editorial board’s critiques of the bill. That millions would lose access to food stamps and tens of millions would see their benefits cut is apparently an afterthought for the board. It evidently does not warrant the denunciation that somewhat higher borrowing costs require.

Decimation of clean energy provisions and heavy new restrictions on student loans likewise appear a grand total of zero times in the Times’ editorials on the bill. This is the sort of resistance that the most prominent establishment newspaper in the country has to offer.

‘Big ugly battle’

The situation at the Daily has been better, though it had only a rather low bar to clear. Through the day the bill was signed into law, the show published three episodes on the legislation. The first (6/5/25), titled “The Big Ugly Battle Over the Big Beautiful Bill,” touched on the bill’s attacks on climate provisions in its first half, and devoted its second half to a conversation about cuts to Medicaid.

Food stamps, by contrast, were mentioned in just two sentences. And student loans didn’t make a single appearance.

The following episode (7/2/25), discussed above, centered on the debt, but the third episode (7/4/25) dedicated additional airtime to cuts to the safety net, again including a discussion of Medicaid cuts in the second half of the episode. Its first half also centered the serious negative impacts of the legislation, mostly focusing on the array of tax cuts in the bill, but framing the overall impact as wildly regressive:

The most important thing to know about this package is that it delivers its greatest benefits to the wealthy, and it extracts its greatest cuts on the poor.

The largest cuts to food stamps in American history, however, garnered no airtime. Same goes for the massive pullback in student loans.

A ripple in a tsunami

We found only two New York Times headlines like this one (6/5/25)—out of nearly 800 in its US politics section—that straightforwardly conveyed the impact of the budget bill’s cuts.

Unfortunately, this poor coverage is not limited to Times editorials and the Daily. As it turns out, the news section of the Times has been similarly lacking in serious coverage.

The paper’s US Politics section is case in point. From the start of June through July 4, when Trump signed his bill into law, this section of the Times featured a total of seven articles that mentioned “food stamp(s),” “SNAP” or “food aid” in either their headline or subhead. For “Medicaid,” “health cuts” and “Obamacare,” the number was ten.

But few of these articles bore headlines straightforwardly reporting the facts of what’s projected to happen to millions of Americans as a result of cuts to food stamps and healthcare spending. In total, only two headlines, both about healthcare, really fit this description:

• “GOP Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, CBO Says” (6/29/25)
• “Millions Would Lose Their Obamacare Coverage Under Trump’s Bill” (6/5/25)

Other headlines mentioned cuts, but some didn’t even reference that information. For instance, one headline (6/3/25) read, “Trump Administration Backs Off Effort to Collect Data on Food Stamp Recipients.”

Amazingly, at least in the US Politics section of the paper, zero headlines included the phrase “student loans,” despite substantial retrenchment in student loan policy. The term “safety net” appeared in the headline or subhead of only six articles.

With around 800 articles appearing in the Times’ US Politics section during this timeframe, coverage of historic cuts to crucial safety net programs resembled a ripple in a tsunami.

‘Fair to criticize Democrats’

The type sizes conveys the relative importance the New York Times (7/1/25) places on prices paid by politicians vs. those paid by the public.

Nonetheless, when Times editorial director David Leonhardt was asked whether he thinks “Americans who will be impacted by these cuts understand what’s happening,” given the lack of public outcry so far, he gave credit to Republicans for succeeding in minimizing public opposition, and blamed Democrats for failing to make a bigger deal out of the bill:

I also think it’s fair to criticize the Democratic Party and activists who are aligned with the Democratic Party for not figuring out ways to make a bigger deal out of these cuts. To some extent, they’ve allowed the Republican cynical strategy of staying away from town halls to work better than it might have.

The role of corporate media, and more particularly of the New York Times, may never have even crossed Leonhardt’s mind. But, of course, the Times is a critical player in US politics. With around 12 million subscribers and millions of daily listeners to the Daily, the outlet has incredible reach. If it wanted to, the Times could play a significant role in raising public awareness of this bill. The problem is that it seems completely uninterested in adopting this role.

I would argue, therefore, that the paltry public outcry is fundamentally a result of editorial decisions, not least those made at the Times. By refusing to cover cuts to the social safety net with more than minimal urgency, the Times has done a good deal to deprive the Democratic Party and other opponents of the legislation of the sort of informational environment in which public opposition to harmful policies can be effectively mobilized.

Through inaction, through poor coverage, the Times is making a political choice to undermine opposition to some of the Trump administration’s most damaging policies.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Conor Smyth.

When nations boost military budgets, they also boost their carbon emissions. With a bump of $157 billion, thanks to the budget the Trump administration passed earlier this month, the United States now spends $1 trillion each year on defense. That’s more than three times as much as China, the next highest spender, as well as the entire European Union. If combined, the world’s armed forces would have the fourth highest carbon footprint, behind India, the U.S., and China. 

Yet it’s been maddeningly difficult for researchers to monitor the emissions of militaries, which aren’t required to report these things. “There’s a guessing game involved,” said Nick Buxton, who has coauthored reports on military emissions from the Transnational Institute, an international research and advocacy group. “One of the overwhelming calls for everyone working in the sector is just for more open and transparent data, so we can come up with some reliable figures.”

To that end, using what data the Department of Energy has made publicly available between 1975 to 2022, researchers have calculated that if the U.S. consistently decreased military spending — by even a little — instead of increasing it, it’d be saving as much energy as Delaware and Slovenia use in a year. A decrease of less than 7 percent each year over about a decade would theoretically reduce energy consumption from about 640 trillion to 394 trillion British thermal units (a measurement of heat energy produced from burning fuels).

The study gives observers not just a better idea of how much carbon the American military is spewing, but also how effective it would be to reduce its funding. “We realize that the feasibility of military spending reductions taking place anytime soon within the U.S. context is probably quite questionable, to put it mildly,” said Andrew Jorgenson, professor of sociology and founding director of the University of British Columbia’s Climate and Society Lab and coauthor of the study, which was published June 2 in the journal PLOS Climate. “But it does highlight that it is a possible pathway to decarbonization and climate mitigation, just with very modest reductions in military spending.”

The researchers note that between 2010 and 2019, the Department of Defense’s emissions were over 636 million metric tons of atmosphere-warming emissions. (The DOD did not respond to a request to comment for this story.) And that’s a conservative and necessarily incomplete estimate, Jorgenson said. Fuel use can give researchers a general idea of how much carbon the armed forces are directly sending into the atmosphere, but there are also all kinds of indirect emissions that come with operating a military. Vegetables, for instance, took energy to grow and ship to bases, to say nothing of all the other supplies flowing around a military’s supply chain: bullets, blankets, boots. 

“If anything, our findings are then perhaps undercounting and underestimating the actual scope of the U.S. military’s contribution to energy consumption and carbon emissions and climate change,” Jorgenson said. “That’s a speculative statement — I just want to be clear about that.”

All these variables not only make it difficult for researchers to accurately determine the climate costs of war — governments themselves can be in the dark too. “Militaries are decades behind in their ability to even understand their emission sources and where they’re coming from,” said Ellie Kinney, military emissions campaigner at the nonprofit Conflict and Environment Observatory. “There is this lag compared to other industries, because no one’s asked them to.”

Calculations get even more complicated when a military actually goes to war. More jet flights require more fuel, and even missiles produce their own emissions. The resulting fires in conflict zones, like the ones that have been devastating Ukraine’s forests, release still more carbon into the atmosphere. While the U.S. spends an outsized amount of money on its armed forces, other nations, particularly those involved in active wars, seem intent to catch up. Russia is now spending a third of its federal budget on defense as its invasion of Ukraine drags on. Last year, Israel’s military spending jumped by 65 percent to $46.5 billion as the country assaulted Gaza. 

Last month, at President Trump’s urging, NATO allies committed to investing 3.5 percent of their gross domestic product each year on defense, and a further 1.5 percent on domestic security like new infrastructure, by 2035. That combined 5 percent is more than double their previous agreement to spend 2 percent of GDP. And on Monday, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte joined Trump in the Oval Office to announce a deal in which “billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment” will be purchased from the U.S. and delivered to Ukraine to support its defense against Russia. 

According to a Transnational Institute report, if every NATO state actually reaches its new military spending goal, by 2030 the alliance’s annual military carbon footprint would be 2.3 billion metric tons CO2 equivalent. (The group published the report prior to the formalization of the June agreement, hence the discrepancy of using 2030 in their modeling instead of 2035.) That’s nearly 700 million metric tons extra than if 2024 levels of military spending were sustained until that time. 

“We’re moving to a world which is readying itself constantly for war, which often makes war much more inevitable,” Buxton said. “And when war happens, emissions just skyrocket.”

All this additional military investment can create a feedback loop, Buxton and Kinney warn. Military leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere recognize climate change as a “threat multiplier,” meaning that it exacerbates existing hazards and conflicts. But with more investment in defense comes more emissions, and more warming, and more threats, which encourages more investment in armed forces. That also means less money for investing in renewable energy and adaptation measures: The richest nations are spending 30 times more on their militaries than on climate finance for the world’s most vulnerable countries.

“An escalation beyond control feels like the situation that we’re heading into,” Kinney said. “This is obviously deeply concerning from a broader security perspective, but really concerning from a climate perspective.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How reducing the U.S. military budget would also reduce emissions on Jul 16, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Intercept (7/8/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Along with many other hate-driven harms, the budget bill puts Stephen Miller’s cruel and bizarre mass deportation plan on steroids. $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers; that’s a 62% larger budget than the entire federal prison system.

The goons hiding their faces and IDs while they snatch people off the street? ICE’s “enforcement and deportation operations” get $30 billion. $46 billion for a “border wall,” because that’s evidently not a cartoon. And in a lesser-noticed piece: While courts are backlogged with immigrants complying with legal processes to access citizenship, the bill caps the number of immigration judges to 800, ensuring more people will be kept in vulnerable legal status.

The Economic Policy Institute tells us that increases in immigration enforcement will cause widespread job losses for both immigrant and US-born workers, particularly in construction and childcare: “While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased deportations will somehow magically create jobs for US-born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true: They will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.”

That’s without mentioning how ICE is telling people they’re being moved from Texas to Louisiana and then dumping them in South Sudan, as the Intercept’s Nick Turse reports. Or the puerile delight Republicans find in holding people in an alligator swamp, and forbidding journalists and public officials from seeing what goes on there.

It’s important to see that Donald Trump, while especially craven, is using tools he was given, in terms of the apparatus for mass deportations, including in the acceptance of prisons as economic boons for struggling localities. So the fight can’t be just anti-Trump, but must be rooted in policy and practice and law—and most of all, in community and shared humanity.

We’ll talk about standing up for human beings because they’re human beings with Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Texas floods.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Salon (7/3/25): “The funds going towards deportation would…be enough to fully fund the program to end world hunger for four years.”

And so it has come to pass: US President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has set the stage for tax cuts for the rich, slashed services for the poor, and a host of other things that qualify as “beautiful” in the present dystopia. Some cuts, like those to Medicaid, have been heavily covered by the corporate media. But one key piece of the bill has gotten much less media scrutiny: The preposterous sum of $175 billion has been allocated to fund Trump’s signature mass deportation campaign, which, as a Salon article (7/3/25) points out, exceeds the military budget for every single country in the world aside from the US and China.

Approximately $30 billion of that is destined directly for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the goons who have recently made a name for themselves by going around in masks and kidnapping people. This constitutes a threefold increase over ICE’s previous budget, and propels the outfit to the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history. $45 billion will go toward building new ICE detention centers, including family detention centers.

Prior to the signing into law of the sweeping bill on July 4, US Vice President JD Vance took to X to highlight what really mattered in the legislation:

Everything else—the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.

Scant attention to ICE expansion

“What happens if we spend more than the military budget of Russia on deportation?” was not a question the New York Times (7/3/25) thought needed answering.

And yet many US corporate media outlets have paid scant attention to this aspect of the bill and refrained from delving too deeply into the matter of what exactly this massive ramping up of ICE portends for American society. According to a search of the Nexis news database, while half (50%) of newspaper articles and news transcripts mentioning the reconciliation bill from its first passage in the House (May 20) to its signing into law (July 4) also mentioned Medicaid, less than 6% named Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.

Even many of those that did mention ICE barely gave it any attention. On July 3, for example, the New York Times presented readers with “Nine Questions About the Republican Megabill, Answered,” which in response to the first question—“Why is it being called a megabill?”—did manage to mention “a 150% boost to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget over the next five years.” However, there was no further discussion in the article’s remaining 1,500-plus words of potential ramifications of this boost—although there was a section devoted to the “tax break for Native Alaskan subsistence whaling captains.”

That was more than CNN’s intervention managed, also published on July 3, and headlined “Here’s Who Stands to Gain From the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ And Who May Struggle.” The article aced a couple of no-brainers, including that “corporate America” would be “better off” thanks to the bill, while “low-income Americans” would be “worse off.” But there was not a single reference to the ICE budget—or who might “struggle” because of it.

‘Detention blitz’

Washington Post (7/4/25): “Immigrant rights advocates are imploring the government not to award more contracts to…companies they say have failed to provide safe accommodations and adequate medical care to detainees.”

This is not to imply, of course, that there are no articles detailing what ICE has been up to in terms of persecuting refuge seekers, visa holders, legal US residents and even US citizens—who supposedly have greater protections under the law—and how all of this stands to get worse, in accordance with the impending deluge of anti-immigration funds.

In its report on ICE’s looming “detention blitz,” the Washington Post (7/4/25) noted that “at least 10 immigrants died while in ICE’s custody during the first half of this year,” and cited the finding that ICE is “now arresting people with no criminal charges at a higher rate than people charged with crimes.”

The Post article also contained sufficiently thought-provoking details to enable the conscientious reader to draw their own conclusions regarding the ultimate purpose of manic detention schemes. (Hint: it’s not to keep America “safe.”) For instance, we learn that the share prices of GEO Group and CoreCivic—the two largest detention companies contracted by ICE, which have notorious reputations for detainee mistreatment—“each rose about 3%… as investors cheered the passage of congressional funding likely to result in a flurry of new contracts.”

Lest there remain any doubt as to the centrality of profit flows to the immigration crackdown, the article specifies that GEO Group and CoreCivic “each gave $500,000 to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to Federal Election Commission data.”

This article, however, came after the legislation was passed.

A Post opinion piece (6/30/25), meanwhile, put a human face on some of ICE’s victims, such as Jermaine Thomas, born to a US soldier on a military base in Germany. Following an incident of “suspected trespassing” in Texas, Thomas was deported by ICE to Jamaica, a country he had never set foot in. Other victims spotlighted by the Post include 64-year-old Iranian immigrant Madonna Kashanian, nabbed while gardening at her house in New Orleans, and a six-year-old Honduran boy with leukemia who was arrested at an immigration court in California while pursuing his asylum case with his family.

It was also possible, if one sought it out, to find reporting on what the cash infusion entails from a logistical perspective: more agents, more arrests, more racial profiling, increased detention capacity, and a deportation system that runs “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours,” as ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons charmingly put it.

‘Police state first’

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (Jacobin, 7/3/25): “Mass deportation wouldn’t only reshape American society and cause the economy to go into a tailspin. It would also lead to a very different relationship between the US populace and law enforcement.”

Gutting Medicaid is certainly an angle on the reconciliation bill that deserved the media attention it got, and will devastate millions in this country. But the massive infusion of money and power to ICE will likewise devastate millions with a ballooning police state that unleashes terror, rips apart families and creates a network of concentration camps across the country. Given ICE’s contemporary track record and de facto exemption from the constraints of due process, the public desperately needs a media that will connect the dots in order to convey a bigger-picture look of what America is up against.

In an interview with Jacobin magazine (7/3/25) on how “ICE Is About to Get More Money Than It Can Spend,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick—a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council—made the crucial observation: “You don’t build the mass deportation machine without building the police state first.”

This is precisely the analysis that is missing from corporate media coverage of the bill. Beyond making life hell for the undocumented workers on whose very labor the US economy depends, ICE has become a tool for political repression as well—as evidenced by a slew of recent episodes involving the abduction and disappearance of international scholars whose political opinions did not coincide with those of the commander in chief of our, um, democracy.

Take the case of 30-year-old Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student and Fulbright scholar studying childhood development at Tufts University in Massachusetts. While walking to an iftar dinner in March, Öztürk was accosted by six plainclothes officers, some of them masked, and forced into an unmarked van, after which she was flown halfway across the country to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. Her crime, apparently, was to have co-written an opinion piece last year for the Tufts Daily (3/26/24), in which she and her co-authors encouraged the university to accede to demands by the Tufts Community Union Senate by recognizing the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip and divesting from companies with ties to Israel.

Öztürk’s case is hardly an isolated one. There’s Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University who was seized by masked agents outside his Virginia home and swept off to an ICE facility in Texas. There’s Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian former PhD student at Cornell who sued the Trump administration over the crackdown on Palestine solidarity and then self-deported, explaining that he had “lost faith [he] could walk the streets without being abducted.” And the list goes on (Al Jazeera, 5/15/25).

‘Homegrowns are next’

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (NPR, 4/15/25): The Trump administration believes it “could deport and incarcerate any person, including US citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

In the twisted view of the US government, of course, opposing the US-backed genocide of Palestinians equals support for “terrorism”—and in Trump’s view, basically anything that goes against his own thinking and policies potentially constitutes a criminal offense. It follows that Öztürk-style politically motivated kidnappings by the state are presumably merely the top of a very slippery slope that US citizens, too, will soon find themselves careening down—especially as Trump has already exhibited enthusiasm at the prospect of outsourcing the incarceration of US citizens to El Salvador: “The homegrowns are next,” he told Salvadoran autocrat Nayib Bukele.

The line between citizens and residents has been intentionally blurred, with the Trump Justice Department announcing it was “Prioritizing Denaturalization”—that is, stripping citizenship from foreign-born citizens. This draconian punishment has been proposed for Trump’s political enemies, from New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to former BFF Elon Musk. Trump has also taken aim at the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, potentially turning millions of other Americans into ICE targets.

Somehow, the elite media have not deemed it necessary to dwell even superficially on the implications of super-funding a rogue agency that has essentially been given carte blanche to indiscriminately round people up—be they undocumented workers, political dissidents, or just somebody who “looks like somebody we are looking for.” As for CNN’s write-up on “who stands to gain from the ‘big, beautiful bill,’” it’s definitely not all the folks currently living in a permanent state of fear, deprived of basic freedoms like movement, speech and thought.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Belén Fernández.

There is no question that cybersecurity and protecting the privacy of Americans’ health care records are important issues that we need to deal with.

But, Mr. Chairman, let me be very clear. That is not the issue that is right now on the minds of the American people. What people are worried about is the catastrophic impact that the reconciliation bill that was passed last week will have on the health and well-being of the American people. And that is the issue that I'm going to be focused on today.

That legislation, passed by one vote here in the Senate, will be making the largest cut to Medicaid in American history to pay for the largest tax break for billionaires in American history.

At a time when our current health care system is broken, dysfunctional and cruel — 85 million today are uninsured or underinsured. This bill will make a horrible situation even worse.

This legislation will cut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by more than $1.1 trillion.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this bill, along with the expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits, will cause 17 million people to lose their health insurance.

Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health and health care economists at the University of Pennsylvania have found that these health care policies would cause over 50,000 people in our country to die unnecessarily every year. That's what happens when you can't get to a doctor.

I am delighted that one of the lead researchers of this report, Dr. Alison Galvani, is here with us today to talk more about that study.

Mr. Chairman: it is not rocket science. You're a doctor, you know this. If people don’t have access to health care, if they can’t get to a doctor when they need to, people will suffer and tens of thousands will die. It happens today and it will only get worse.

Make no mistake about it: This bill is a death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans.

Further, as a result of this bill, more than 300 rural hospitals are now at risk of closing down altogether or substantially reducing their services. That is not my estimate. That’s what the Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina recently estimated.

And we are already beginning to see the devastating impact this bill will have on rural America: The Curtis Medical Center in Southwest Nebraska has already announced that it will be shutting down because it cannot withstand the cuts to Medicaid contained in this bill.

It’s not just rural hospitals that are now in crisis as a result of this legislation.

According to a recent survey from the American Health Care Association, as a result of this bill, 27% of nursing homes have indicated that they will be forced to close their doors and 58% will have to reduce staff. And it’s not just nursing homes.

Health care researchers at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University have found that this bill will be a disaster for community health centers.

They have estimated that as a result of the passage of this bill, over 40% of community health center sites will shut down. Today, there are over 15,000 community health center clinics throughout America. This could result in the shutting down of some 9,000 of them.

And it's not just community health centers, it's not just nursing homes and it's not just individuals.

This legislation will substantially increase the uninsured rate in every state in this country.

As a result of this bill, the uninsured rate in my own state of Vermont would go up from 3.3% to 6%.

In Louisiana, the Chairman's state, the uninsured rate will go up from 6.7% to 12.4%.

In Florida, the uninsured rate will go up from 10.4% to 18.8%.

In Texas, the second largest state in this country, the uninsured rate will go up to 20% — in the United States, in the richest country in the history of the world.

Mr. Chairman, this is an issue that needs to be explained to the American people, and I look forward to discussing it with all of our panelists.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

We speak with investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz about how President Trump’s major tax and spending bill hurts environmental justice efforts in Louisiana communities affected by the climate crisis and pollution from oil and gas facilities. The Trump administration had already canceled much of the funding for local environmental monitoring and advocacy, and the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill further entrenches the power of the fossil fuel industry. “It’s a frontal assault on environmental and climate justice, and it will set us back significantly unless we take action to confront the climate crisis,” says Juhasz, who wrote about the bill’s impact for Rolling Stone.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

President Donald Trump and his allies are celebrating the passage of his sweeping tax and spending bill, which he signed into law on July 4 after a monthslong effort to shepherd it through Congress. Ultimately, just three Republicans in the Senate and two in the House voted against the legislation. The so-called Big, Beautiful Bill includes about $1 trillion in federal cuts to Medicaid and could kick 17 million people off their healthcare. It makes the largest-ever cuts to food assistance benefits, could cause the closure of nursing homes and rural hospitals across the country, raises housing and energy costs, and supercharges the Trump crackdown on immigrants — all while delivering massive tax benefits for the wealthiest people in the country. “This is the most massive transfer of wealth upward in American history,” says John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

• Completely strip Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) access for more than 2 million vulnerable Americans. The bill cuts $186 billion, an approximate 20 percent cut – the largest cut to the program in U.S. history. As many as 5 million people, including about 1 million children, live in households that could lose some or all of their hunger and nutrition assistance.
• Mandate more oil and gas sales on public lands and offshore, drastically increasing pollution and climate risks for all Americans.
• Increase subsidies for oil extraction by $14 billion through changes to the 45Q tax credit for carbon capture and utilization, on top of provisions in the bill that create tax loopholes that would allow the carbon capture industry to escape federal income taxes.
• Repeal major clean energy and environmental justice programs, including funding to address air pollution at schools, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, and Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grants.
• Create a pay-to-play scheme to fast track environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act.

In response, Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter said:

“As we approach Independence Day, Republicans in Congress have passed a budget that is a direct attack on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness we should be celebrating. This draconian budget will mean more hunger, more premature death from lack of healthcare, and more people’s lives and homes devastated by climate disasters. This is a massive handout to big corporations and billionaires at the expense of ordinary people. Extravagant White House celebrations won’t save the millions of people impacted by this terrible bill.
“Congress acted on Trump’s artificial deadline to get this bill passed by July 4th, but there is nothing patriotic or freeing about this direct attack on American’s safe food, clean water and a livable climate.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

As we broadcast, the House was soon set to vote on the so-called big, beautiful bill before the July 4 deadline imposed by President Trump. Should the House pass the legislation, the bill would be sent to Trump’s desk to be signed into law. The bill massively increases funding for ICE, cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid over a decade and adds $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt.

“It makes people in the country who are in the bottom 30%, working hard to pay their bills, poorer, because it’s stripping away healthcare from them, stripping away food assistance from them. And it is all in the name of giving tax breaks to the wealthiest. … The top 20% in this country get 60% of the benefits,” says Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The budget bill just passed by the Senate provides more than $170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement and detention. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who worked on an analysis published by the American Immigration Council, says the new budget would make ICE “the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Senate lawmakers are debating President Trump’s 940-page so-called big, beautiful bill as Republicans race to meet a Trump-imposed July 4 deadline and are set to vote on key amendments. Senate Republicans have deepened the cuts to Medicaid while cutting taxes for the wealthy and increasing the national deficit. “Basically, you have Republicans taking food and medicine and other things away from vulnerable people in order to finance tax cuts for the rich,” says David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect.

Dr. Adam Gaffney, a critical care physician and professor at Harvard Medical School, co-authored a report that found the bill could lead to 1.3 million Americans going without medications, 1.2 million Americans being saddled with medical debt, 380,000 women going without mammograms, and over 16,500 deaths annually. “I work in the ICU. I see patients with life-threatening complications of untreated illness because they didn’t get care because they couldn’t afford it. What happens when we add to that number massively?” says Gaffney.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Fiji government is spending big on this year’s budget.

The country’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Biman Prasad, unveiled a FJ$4.8 billion (about NZ$3.5 billion) spending package, complete with cost of living measures and fiscal stimulus, to the Fijian Parliament on Friday.

This is about F$280 million more than last year, with the deficit widening to around $886 million.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji reports

Dr Prasad told Parliament that his government had guided the country to a better economic position than where he found it.

“When we came into office we were in a precarious economic crossroad . . . our first priority was to restore macroeconomic stability, rebuild trust in policymaking institutions, and chart a path towards sustainable and inclusive growth.”

The 2025/2026 budget consisted of a spending increase across almost every area, with education, the largest area of spending, up $69 million to $847 million overall.

The health sector received $611.6 million, the Fijian Roads Authority $388 million, and the Police force $240.3 million, all increases.

A package of cost of living measures costing the government $800 million has also been announced. This includes a value-added tax (VAT) cut from 15 percent to 12.5 percent on goods and services.

Various import duties, which firms pay for goods from overseas, have been cut, such as  chicken pieces and parts (from 42 to 15 percent) and frozen fish (from 15 to 0 percent).

A subsidy to reduce bus fares by 10 percent was announced, alongside a 3 percent increase in salaries for civil servants, both beginning in August.

Drastic international conditions
In a news conference, Dr Prasad said that responding to difficult global economic shocks was the primary rationale behind the budget.

“This is probably one of the most uncertain global economic environments that we have gone through. There has been no resolution on the tariffs by the United States and the number of countries, big or small,” he said.

“We have never had this kind of interest in Fiji from overseas investors or diaspora, and we are doing a lot more work to get our diaspora to come back.”

When asked why the VAT was cut, reducing government revenue and widening the deficit, Dr Prasad said there was a need to encourage consumer spending.

“If the Middle East crisis deepens and oil prices go up, the first thing that will be affected will be the supply chain . . . prices could go up, people could be affected more.”

On building resilience from global shocks, Dr Prasad said the budget would reduce Fiji’s reliance on tourism, remittances, and international supply chains, by building domestic industry.

“It kills two birds in one [stone]. It addresses any big shock we might get . . .  plus it also helps the people who would be affected.”

In their Pacific Economic Update, the World Bank projected economic growth of 2.6 percent in 2025, after a slump from 7.5 percent in 2023 to 3.8 percent in 2024.

Senior World Bank economist Ekaterine Vashakmadze told RNZ that Fiji was an interesting case.

“Fiji is one of the countries that suffered the sharpest shock [post-covid] . . .  because tourism stopped.”

“On the other hand, Fiji was one of the first countries in the Pacific to recover fully in terms of the output to pre-pandemic level.”

Deficit too high — opposition
Opposition members have hit out at the government over the scale of the spend, and whether it would translate into outcomes.

Opposition MP Alvick Maharaj, in a statement to local media outlet Duavata News, referred to the larger deficit as “deeply troubling”.

“The current trajectory is concerning, and the government must change its fiscal strategy to one that is truly sustainable.”

“The way the budget is being presented, it’s like the government is trying to show that in one year Fiji will become a developed country.”

MP Ketal Lal on social media called the budget “a desperate cloak for scandal” designed to appeal to voters ahead of elections in 2026.

“This is what happens when a government governs by pressure instead of principle. The people have been crying out for years. The Opposition has consistently raised concerns about the crushing cost of living but they only act when it becomes politically necessary. And even then, it’s never enough.”

He also pointed out, regarding the 3 percent increase in civil servants salaries, that someone earning $30,000 a year would only see a pay increase of $900 per year.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s LaToya Parker about the Trump budget’s racial impacts for the June 20, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

MarketWatch (3/7/25)

Janine Jackson: “Most Americans Can’t Afford Life Anymore” is the matter-of-fact headline over a story on Dow Jones MarketWatch. You might think that’s a “stop the presses” story, but apparently, for corporate news, it’s just one item among others these days.

The lived reality is, of course, not just a nightmare, but a crime, perpetrated by the most powerful and wealthy on the rest of us. As we marshal a response, it’s important to see the ways that we are not all suffering in the same ways, that anti-Black racism in this country’s decision-making is not a bug, but a feature, and not reducible to anything else. What’s more, efforts to reduce or dissolve racial inequities, to set them aside just for the moment, really just wind up erasing them.

So how do we shape a resistance to this massive transfer of wealth, while acknowledging that it takes intentionality for all of us to truly benefit?

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.” She joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome to CounterSpin, LaToya Parker.

LaToya Parker: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: I just heard Tavis Smiley, with the relevant reference to Martin Luther King, saying: “Budgets are moral documents.” Budgets can harm or heal materially, and they also send a message about priorities: what matters, who matters. When you and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad looked at the Trump budget bill that the House passed, you wrote that, “racially, the impact is stark”—for Black people and for Black workers in particular. I know that it’s more than one thing, but tell us what you are looking to lift up for people that they might not see.

OtherWords (5/28/25)

LP: Sure. Thank you so much for raising that. This bill is more than numbers. It’s a moral document, like you mentioned, that reveals our nation’s priorities. What stands out is a reverse wealth transfer. The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.

JJ: You just said “historic pathways.” You can’t do economics without history. So wealth, home ownership—just static reporting doesn’t explain, really, that you can’t start people in a hole and then say, “Well, now the Earth is flat. So what’s wrong with you?” What are some of those programs that you’re talking about that would be impacted?

LP: For instance, nearly one-third of Black Americans rely on Medicaid. These cuts will limit access to vital care, including maternal health, elder care and mental health services.

Nearly 25% of Black households depend on SNAP, compared to under 8% of white households. SNAP cuts will hit Black families hardest, worsening food insecurities.

But in terms of federal workforce attacks, Black Americans are overrepresented in the public sector, 18.7% of the federal workforce, and over a third in the South. So massive agency cuts threaten thousands of stable, middle-class jobs, undermining one of the most successful civil rights victories in American history.

LaToya Parker: “The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.”

So if I was to focus on the reverse wealth transfer, as we clearly lift up in the article, the House-passed reconciliation bill is a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the ultra-wealthy. It eliminates the estate tax, which currently only applies to estates worth more than $13.99 million per person, or nearly $28 million per couple. That’s just 1% of estates. So 99.9% of families, especially Black families, will never benefit from this.

Black families hold less than 5% of the US wealth, despite being over 13% of households. The median white household has 10 times the wealth of the median Black household. Repealing the estate tax subsidizes dynastic wealth for the majority white top 1%, and does nothing for the vast majority of Black families who are far less likely to inherit significant wealth.

JJ: I feel like that wealth disconnection, and I’ve spoken with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad about this in the past, there’s a misunderstanding or just an erasure of history in the conversation about wealth, and Why don’t Black families have wealth? Why can’t they just give their kids enough money to go to school? And it sounds like it’s about Black families not valuing savings or something. But of course, we have a history of white-supremacist discrimination in lending and loaning and home ownership, and in all kinds of things that lead us to this situation that we’re in today. And you can’t move forward without recognizing that.

LP: Absolutely. Absolutely.

JJ: I remember reading a story years ago that said, “Here’s the best workplaces for women.” And it was kind of like, “Well, if you hate discrimination, these companies are good.” Reporting, I think, can make it seem as though folks are just sitting around thinking, “Well, what job should I get? Where should I get a job?” As though we were just equally situated economic actors.

But that doesn’t look anything like life. We are not consumers of employment. Media could do a different job of helping people understand the way things work.

LP: Absolutely. And I think that’s why it’s so important that you’re raising this issue. In fact, we bring it up in our article, in terms of cuts to the federal workforce and benefits. So, for instance, to pay for these tax breaks to the wealthy, the bill slashes benefits for federal employees, and it guts civil service protections, saving just $5 billion a year in the bill that costs trillions, right?

So just thinking about that, Black employees make up, like I said before, 18.7% of the federal workforce, thanks to decades of civil rights progress and anti-discrimination law. Federal jobs have long provided higher wages, stronger benefits and greater job security for Black workers than much of the private sector.

And the DMV alone, the DC/Maryland/Virginia region, more than 450,000 federal workers are employed, with Black workers making up over a quarter in DC/Maryland/Virginia. In the South, well over a third of the federal workers in states like Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Louisiana are Black. In Georgia, it’s nearly 44%. So federal employment has been a cornerstone for Black middle-class advancement, helping families build generational wealth, send children to college and retire with dignity.

JJ: And so when we hear calls about, “Let’s thin out the federal government, because these are all bureaucrats who are making more money than they should,” it lands different when you understand that so many Black people found advancement, found opportunity through the federal government when they were being denied it at every other point. And it only came from explicit policies, anti-discriminatory policies, that opened up federal employment, that’s been so meaningful.

LP: Exactly. Exactly. Federal retirement benefits like the pensions and annuities are a rare source of guaranteed income. Nearly half of Black families have zero retirement savings, making these benefits critical to avoiding poverty in retirement. So these policies amount to a reverse wealth transfer, enriching wealthy heirs while undermining the public servants and systems that have historically offered a path forward for Black workers. Instead of gutting the benefits and eliminating the estate tax, we should invest in systems that have provided pathways to the middle class for Black workers, and expand these opportunities beyond government employment. Ultimately, this isn’t just about policy, it’s about what kind of nation we want to be, right? So that’s what it’s all about.

JJ: And I’ll just add to that with a final note. Of course, I’m a media critic, but I think lots of folks could understand why I reacted to this line from this MarketWatch piece that said, “Years of elevated prices have strained all but the wealthiest consumers, and low- and middle-income Americans say something needs to change.” Well, for me, I’m hearing that, and I’m like, “So it’s only low- and middle-income people, it’s only the people at the sharp end, who want anything to change.”

And, first of all, we’re supposed to see that as a fair fight, the vast majority of people against the wealthiest. But also, it makes it seem like such a zero-sum game, as though there isn’t any shared idea among a lot of people who want racial and economic equity in this country. It sells it to people as like, “Oh, well, we could make life livable for poor people or for Black people, but you, reader, are going to have to give something up.” It’s such a small, mean version of what I believe a lot of folks have in their hearts, in terms of a vision going forward in this country. And that’s just my gripe.

LP: I agree. These aren’t luxury programs. They’re lifelines across the board for all Americans. The working poor—if you like to call it that, some like to call it that—cutting them is just cruel, right? It’s economically destructive, it’s irresponsible. Fiscally, states would lose $1.1 trillion over 10 years, risking over a million jobs in healthcare and food industries alone. So I agree 100%.

JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note for now. We’ve been speaking with LaToya Parker, senior researcher at the Joint Center. They’re online at JointCenter.org, and you can find her piece, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, on the impact of the federal budget on Black workers at OtherWords.org. Thank you so much, LaToya Parker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LP: Thank you again for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

In response to the release of the letter, Sierra Club Clean Transportation for All Director Katherine García released the following statement:

“There’s nothing beautiful about toxic air pollution, saddling drivers with higher costs, and rolling back progress on clean transportation. At this moment, as half of the country is affected by an intense heat wave, we need to focus on investing in climate solutions and holding polluters accountable. The previous Congress had funded innovative and strategic programs to reduce costs, protect American jobs, and drive the competitiveness of the U.S. vehicle industry, and they’re working in communities across the nation in Republican and Democratic districts. This disastrous bill threatens to strip away that progress in giveaways to billionaires and corporate polluters. We urge all Senators to vote one, big beautiful no on this bill.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

CEPR (3/3/25)

This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Inequality.org (5/29/25)

Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The Parliamentarian is tasked with issuing rulings to determine which provisions of the bill are subject to the “Byrd rule” and thus not eligible to be passed by simple majority using the reconciliation process. However, Thune and the Senate Republican majority recently took steps to override the Parliamentarian’s guidance on the Congressional Review Act, another fast-track legislative mechanism, to pass a measure by simple majority that otherwise would have required 60 votes.

“While the signatories to this letter have a range of views on the ongoing utility of the Senate filibuster, there is a unifying principle upon which we all can agree: the law as it stands must be followed,” the letter reads. “Indeed, you acknowledged as much earlier this Congress, when asked whether you would advise against moving to override the Senate Parliamentarian’s determinations under Byrd, stating, ‘[T]hat’s totally akin to killing the filibuster. We can’t go there. People need to understand that.’ This public stance would be heartening, had you not made similar assurances on maintaining the integrity of CRA process and followed them up by improperly extending that Act’s expedited procedures to the disapproval of any executive branch action, forging a primrose path around the filibuster in the process. Such depredations on law, precedent, and the institution of the Senate must end.”

“The Senate majority has already demonstrated it is willing to follow or ignore the rules based entirely on their preferences. But lives hang in the balance depending on the outcome of this bill, and it would be inexcusable for the majority to again burn the rulebook in the service of the destructive Trump agenda,” added Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen.

“The leadership in the Senate is heading down a dangerous path of ignoring the rules to get what it wants. If the Senate majority disregards the existing rules again for its massive tax bill, that would do incalculable damage to law, precedent, and the institution of the Senate,” added Kyle Jones, director of federal affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser about DOGE “after” Elon Musk for the June 6, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

USA Today (5/28/25)

Janine Jackson: “A Bruised Musk Leaves Washington,” the New York Times told readers. USA Today said, “Musk Leaves Trump Administration, Capping His Run as Federal Government Slasher.” The Washington Post said “his departure marks the end of a turbulent chapter.”

While most outlets acknowledge that the impacts of Musk’s time as “special government employee” are still in effect, and even that many of the minions he placed are still hard at work, the focus was still very much on the great man—What drives him? What will he do next?—rather than on the structures and systems whose flaws are highlighted by the maneuvers of Musk and the so-called Department Of Government Efficiency.

Our guest says now is not the time to take our eye off the ball. Jeff Hauser is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jeff Hauser.

Jeff Hauser: Hi, great to be here.

JJ: I feel as though we spoke recently because we spoke recently, but for the press corps, there’s a new story. To imagine, as some headlines suggest, that Elon Musk has packed up his toys and left town, so some kind of chapter has concluded—that’s not just inaccurate, but rather worrisomely so, don’t you think?

JH: Absolutely. Elon Musk brought dozens of people with him to Washington, DC, to government. They were very homogeneous, in the sense that none of them were qualified to work at senior levels of government, and they all were motivated by a hatred for public service and a hatred for government protecting ordinary people from the whims of corporate America.

Politico (3/24/25)

And they remain in government right now. They’re implementing Musk’s agenda, which happens to be pretty similar to Russell Vought’s agenda, which happens to be very similar to Project 2025’s agenda, which was an agenda that Donald Trump disavowed, but is obviously governing with.

JJ: Talk about Russell Vought a little bit. I know he’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, but what else do we need to know about him, in this context?

JH: Russell Vought is sort of like Elon Musk, if Elon Musk had been paying attention to politics for a couple of decades, and minus the allegations of ketamine usage. Russell Vought brings a unique combination of hard-right social views and hard libertarian views on economic policy. He is the personal marriage of all the sort of worst tendencies within the Republican coalition, and he knows what he’s doing.

He had a senior role in the Trump administration go-around one. He thinks that they underperformed, that they could have attacked government more, they could have made the country even “freer” and more supportive of the richest, most rapacious corporations; and he’s determined that they succeed at doing so again. And he spent the four-year interregnum planning, in exquisite detail, how to bring about the devastation of American government–of the professionalization of the American government that has been the project for more than 140 years, since the Pendleton Act and the rise of the civil service in the early 1880s.

ProPublica (3/20/25)

JJ: ProPublica revealed some speeches Vought gave a little while back, and touching on Project 2025, which he’s an architect of, goes right to what you’re just saying. Part of myriad things they want to do is revive Schedule F, which would make it easier to fire large groups of government workers who right now have civil service protections. But what struck me was the quote; this is Vought:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry, because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

I have a feeling if that quote were put in front of people, it might provide some light on the project here.

JH: Absolutely. It was hiding in plain sight. They told us what they were going to do, but Donald Trump disavowed it. Donald Trump said, I’m not going to run on Project 2025. This stuff is so extreme. It’s crazy. Obviously I’m not going to do it. But they’re doing it, note for note.

And I can tell you, as somebody who not only does politics but lives in Washington, DC, when you’re in the community, there are a lot of traumatized public servants who really, deeply believe in the mission of their agencies, people who could have made a lot more money and had easier, more comfortable lives outside of government service, but are in government for the right reasons. And they are genuinely traumatized right now, and they have a lot of capacity to do good in the world that was underappreciated. Now they are being radically disempowered, and it’s going to take a very long time; it’s going to take a lot of great energy, to ever rebuild this government that Russell Vought, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are destroying.

JJ: I think it’s so interesting how you say that, even though this Trump administration is acting out the points of Project 2025, the story is still, “Oh, he disavowed it.” And it really highlights the way media have difficulty focusing on what’s happening when they’re so busy listening to what folks are saying, and what other folks are saying about what those folks are saying. But what we really need them to do is to track actual actions.

JH: Absolutely. It’d be great if the media were more focused on letting people understand what it is that the government can be doing, ordinarily does, is doing and should be doing.

I don’t think people have a good understanding of government. Even political junkies who can tell you a lot about Nebraska’s Second District, and the chances of Democrats taking back that house seat, and how that one electoral vote might influence the Electoral College in the presidential cycle—people who know that level of minutia can’t really tell you what the Office of Management and Budget does.

AP (via PBS, 4/27/25)

They almost certainly can’t tell you what OIRA, which is a subset of the Office of Management and Budget that focuses on regulatory issues, does. They wouldn’t have been able to tell you about what the civil service does, or the role of the EPA as law enforcement against corporate criminality. They don’t know these things. The media do not convey these things.

And so if there is an abstract threat about government bureaucrats, even political junkies don’t understand, definitely, what that will mean for their real lives. And I think it’s going to become, unfortunately, painfully clear in the coming years what that means. But the process is not immediate, and it’s incumbent upon the media to, as things go wrong, show the causality, show how these bad things were made much more likely to occur by Trump’s actions, by Musk’s actions, by Vought’s actions, by their disdain for public service, and their embrace of corporate titans being able to do whatever they want to do.

JJ: I want to just ask you, finally, what Revolving Door is up to, but I just saw this quote from AP, which said Musk “succeeded in providing a dose of shock therapy to the federal government, but he has fallen short of other goals.” And we’re supposed to take away that providing “shock therapy” to the federal government is somehow benign or necessary or a good thing; it’s remarkable.

But let me ask you, finally, what Revolving Door is up to, and how you hope journalists and others can use the tools and the information that you’re providing?

Jeff Hauser: “Taking seriously the notion that Musk was some sort of deficit hawk is part of the inanity of American political coverage.”

JH: Yeah, I think the quote really actually gets at a lot of what the Revolving Door Project is up to, because we do two types of work. One is pushing back on Trump, on creeping authoritarianism, and rapacious oligarchs destroying the government so they can pillage society.

So we do that work, but we also fight back against neoliberals within the Democratic Party. We’re a nonpartisan organization, and we attack neoliberalism in all of its many forms. And the idea that government required shock therapy, that there were too many people working in government, even though the number of people working in government is the same as it was two or three generations ago, when America’s population was half of what it currently is.

But the notion of this is a nonpartisan idea, that government required shock therapy: That is the marriage of Democratic neoliberals and Republican neoliberals, and that is what allowed Musk and DOGE and Trump to happen. It’s that belief that things really were broken, that there was some legitimacy to the concept of DOGE from the jump. No one should have ever validated the idea of DOGE, or talked about, “Here’s my vision for what government efficiency pursuits would happen.”

Because Musk’s goals were not to cut government spending. In fact, Silicon Valley wants way more financial support for their artificial intelligence data centers and the like. They want subsidies for all sorts of tech projects, and they want a bigger military industrial complex that is more heavily dependent on Silicon Valley. So they want lots of spending, they just want it on their priorities. They want to attack government workers, because those government workers enforce the rules that limit and constrain corporate oligarchs.

So that’s what they wanted. They did not want to reduce the deficit, and taking seriously the notion that Musk was some sort of deficit hawk is part of the inanity of American political coverage. And I’d like the media to be less credulous about people who have obvious economic stakes in public policy, and pretending that the rhetoric that they deploy, especially when they’re known liars, is something that we should take seriously.

Rolling Stone (8/19/23)

JJ: And so the work you’re doing is tracking the ins and outs of what these predations have meant, and what they could mean, and how to stay on top of them?

JH: Yes. We are cataloging under our DOGE Watch feature the ways in which Trump and Musk are attacking the ability of government to protect ordinary people. And we’re also monitoring, separately—we have a website, Hackwatch.us—how ostensible Democratic-aligned, center-left neoliberal pundits, people like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias and Derek Thompson, are making things easier for corporate oligarchs, are carrying water for Silicon Valley and are pursuing neoliberalism, because we’re against neoliberalism in all forms.

JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note—for now. We’ve been speaking with Jeff Hauser from the Revolving Door Project. Jeff Hauser, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JH: It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

White House photo (5/30/25) of Elon Musk’s farewell press conference with President Donald Trump.

This week on CounterSpin: An email we got this week tells us: “The radical left is up in arms about DOGE. Just think about it—DOGE has exposed BILLIONS in wasteful spending, and is rooting out fraud and corruption at every turn. They’re making the government work for the people of this great nation once again, as the founders intended, and that is why the left simply can’t stand DOGE.” The ask is that we fill out a survey that represents “our once-in-a-lifetime chance to slash the bloated, woke and wasteful policies in the federal government. Thank you, and God Bless, Speaker Mike Johnson. (Paid for by the NRCC and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.)”

Reports are that Elon Musk is leaving government, going back to make Tesla great again or something. But if that’s true, why did we get this weird, sad email? We’ll talk about how to miss Musk when he won’t go away with Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project.

Lever (5/17/24)

Also on the show: The New York Times has its stories on the Boeing “non-prosecution agreement” in the “Business” section, suggesting that whether planes drop out of the sky is mostly a concern for investors. A huge corporation paying money to dodge criminal charges is evidently not a general interest story. And the families and friends of the hundreds of people dead because of Boeing’s admittedly knowing malfeasance? They’re just another county heard from. If you want reporting that calls crimes “crimes,” even if they’re committed by corporations, you need to look outside of corporate media. We’ll hear about Boeing from independent journalist Katya Schwenk.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of trans youth in sports and gender-affirming care.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” now before the Senate could result in over 51,000 preventable deaths each year in the United States. That’s according to public health experts at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, who sent a letter warning about the bill’s impact to the Senate Finance Committee. An estimated 16 million people stand to lose their health coverage as a result of the changes in the bill, which “imposes onerous paperwork and fails to safeguard healthcare tax credits,” says Alison Galvani, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling at Yale and one of the signatories to the letter. She also notes universal healthcare would have the opposite effect and save tens of thousands of lives each year. “There are a lot of ways we can improve how expensive our healthcare is, but taking healthcare away from people is not how to do it,” says Galvani.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s Parliament has confirmed the unprecedented punishments proposed for opposition indigenous Te Pāti Māori MPs who performed a haka in protest against the Treaty Principles Bill.

Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi will be suspended for 21 days, and MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke suspended for seven days, taking effect immediately.

Opposition parties tried to reject the recommendation, but did not have the numbers to vote it down.

• READ MORE: NZ’s Treaty Principles Bill haka highlights tensions between Māori tikanga and rules of Parliament
• Other haka reports

Te Pati Maori MPs speak after being suspended.  Video: RNZ/Mark Papalii

The heated debate to consider the proposed punishment came to an end just before Parliament was due to rise.

Waititi moved to close the debate and no party disagreed, ending the possibility of it carrying on in the next sitting week.

Leader of the House Chris Bishop — the only National MP who spoke — kicked off the debate earlier in the afternoon saying it was “regrettable” some MPs did not vote on the Budget two weeks ago.

Bishop had called a vote ahead of Budget Day to suspend the privileges report debate to ensure the Te Pāti Māori MPs could take part in the Budget, but not all of them turned up.

Robust, rowdy debate
The debate was robust and rowdy with both the deputy speaker Barbara Kuriger and temporary speaker Tangi Utikare repeatedly having to ask MPs to quieten down.

Tākuta Ferris spoke first for Te Pāti Māori, saying the haka was a “signal of humanity” and a “raw human connection”.

He said Māori had faced acts of violence for too long and would not be silenced by “ignorance or bigotry”.

“Is this really us in 2025, Aotearoa New Zealand?” he asked the House.

“Everyone can see the racism.”

He said the Privileges Committee’s recommendations were not without precedent, noting the fact Labour MP Peeni Henare, who also participated in the haka, did not face suspension.

Henare attended the committee and apologised, which contributed to his lesser sanction.

‘Finger gun’ gesture
MP Parmjeet Parmar — a member of the Committee — was first to speak on behalf of ACT, and referenced the hand gesture — or “finger gun” — that Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer made in the direction of ACT MPs during the haka.

Parmar told the House debate could be used to disagree on ideas and issues, and there was not a place for intimidating physical gestures.

Greens co-leader Marama Davidson said New Zealand’s Parliament could lead the world in terms of involving the indigenous people.

She said the Green Party strongly rejected the committee’s recommendations and proposed their amendment of removing suspensions, and asked the Te Pāti Māori MPs be censured instead.

Davidson said the House had evolved in the past — such as the inclusion of sign language and breast-feeding in the House.

She said the Greens were challenging the rules, and did not need an apology from Te Pāti Māori.

NZ First leader Winston Peters said Te Pāti Māori and the Green Party speeches so far showed “no sincerity, saying countless haka had taken place in Parliament but only after first consulting the Speaker.

“They told the media they were going to do it, but they didn’t tell the Speaker did they?

‘Bunch of extremists’
“The Māori party are a bunch of extremists,” Peters said, “New Zealand has had enough of them”.

Peters was made to apologise after taking aim at Waititi, calling him “the one in the cowboy hat” with “scribbles on his face” [in reference to his traditional indigenous moko — tatoo]. He continued afterward, describing Waititi as possessing “anti-Western values”.

Labour’s Willie Jackson congratulated Te Pāti Māori for the “greatest exhibition of our culture in the House in my lifetime”.

Jackson said the Treaty bill was a great threat, and was met by a great haka performance. He was glad the ACT Party was intimidated, saying that was the whole point of doing the haka.

He also called for a bit of compromise from Te Pāti Māori — encouraging them to say sorry — but reiterated Labour’s view the sanctions were out of proportion with past indiscretions in the House.

Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the debate “would be a joke if it wasn’t so serious”.

“Get an absolute grip,” she said to the House, arguing the prime minister “is personally responsible” if the House proceeds with the committee’s proposed sanctions.

Eye of the beholder
She accused National’s James Meager of “pointing a finger gun” at her — the same gesture coalition MPs had criticised Ngarewa-Packer for during her haka. The Speaker accepted he had not intended to; Swarbrick said it was an example where the interpretation could be in the eye of the beholder.

She said if the government could “pick a punishment out of thin air” that was “not a democracy”, putting New Zealand in very dangerous territory.

An emotional Maipi-Clarke said she had been silent on the issue for a long time, the party’s voices in haka having sent shockwaves around the world. She questioned whether that was why the MPs were being punished.

“Since when did being proud of your culture make you racist?”

“We will never be silenced, and we will never be lost,” she said, calling the Treaty Principles bill a “dishonourable vote”.

She had apologised to the Speaker and accepted the consequence laid down on the day, but refused to apologise. She listed other incidents in Parliament that resulted in no punishment.

NZ Parliament TV: Te Pāti Māori Privileges committee debate.  Video: RNZ

Maipi-Clarke called for the Treaty of Waitangi to be recognised in the Constitution Act, and for MPs to be required to honour it by law.

‘Clear pathway forward’
“The pathway forward has never been so clear,” she said.

ACT’s Nicole McKee said there were excuses being made for “bad behaviour”, that the House was for making laws and having discussions, and “this is not about the haka, this is about process”.

She told the House she had heard no good ideas from the Te Pāti Māori, who she said resorted to intimidation when they did not get their way, but the MPs needed to “grow up” and learn to debate issues. She hoped 21 days would give them plenty of time to think about their behaviour.

Labour MP and former Speaker Adrian Rurawhe started by saying there were “no winners in this debate”, and it was clear to him it was the government, not the Parliament, handing out the punishments.

He said the proposed sanctions set a precedent for future penalties, and governments might use it as a way to punish opposition, imploring National to think twice.

He also said an apology from Te Pāti Māori would “go a long way”, saying they had a “huge opportunity” to have a legacy in the House, but it was their choice — and while many would agree with the party there were rules and “you can’t have it both ways”.

Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi said there had been many instances of misinterpretations of the haka in the House and said it was unclear why they were being punished, “is it about the haka . . . is about the gun gestures?”

“Not one committee member has explained to us where 21 days came from,” he said.

Hat and ‘scribbles’ response
Waititi took aim at Peters over his comments targeting his hat and “scribbles” on his face.

He said the haka was an elevation of indigenous voice and the proposed punishment was a “warning shot from the colonial state that cannot stomach” defiance.

Waititi said that throughout history when Māori did not play ball, the “coloniser government” reached for extreme sanctions, ending with a plea to voters: “Make this a one-term government, enrol, vote”.

He brought out a noose to represent Māori wrongfully put to death in the past, saying “interpretation is a feeling, it is not a fact . . .  you’ve traded a noose for legislation”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

President Donald Trump is pushing Republican senators to back his “big, beautiful bill,” which includes new funding to carry out his mass deportation agenda by hiring additional ICE officers and adding detention space. ICE has already signed new agreements with jails around the country for additional capacity, and confirmed nine deaths in custody since Trump took office. “It really feels like a paradigm-shifting moment,” says Detention Watch Network executive director Silky Shah. “People are being packed into overcrowded cells. People are not getting medical care. They’re in conditions where they’re languishing. And they’re doing everything they can to expand, expand, expand, both here in the U.S. and also seeing people be now detained in third countries abroad.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Since becoming general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, To Lam has drawn international attention with his aggressive plans for cost-cutting within the government but he’s been quiet about another drain on the state budget – the ruling party itself.

After taking office last August, he has moved this year to eliminate and merge ministries and central government agencies, reduce the number of provinces and cities by half, and dismantle district-level administrative units. Tens of thousands of civil servants have already lost their jobs. The Ministry of Interior has estimated that in five years, this will have saved 130 trillion dong (US$5.2 billion at today’s exchange rate) in the state budget.

To Lam’s campaign has been likened to the drastic cuts that U.S. President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk have made to U.S. federal agencies through the Department of Government Efficiency.

But when it comes to making savings in Vietnam’s state apparatus, To Lam appears to have hedged his bets.

Vietnam operates under two intertwined systems: the party and the government. Although each has a separate budget, both draw from the same source — taxpayer money. The party, in power since the end of the Vietnam War and the reunification of the country in 1975, exists as a parallel structure to the government and plays the leading role in policymaking and governance.

While the government’s budget is occasionally made public, the party’s finances remain classified under Vietnamese law.

This policy predates To Lam’s leadership. However, given his sweeping efforts to streamline the state apparatus and reduce spending, his silence on the party’s own budget raises questions about how far he’s willing to go on fiscal reform.

Vu Tuong, a professor and expert on Vietnamese politics from the University of Oregon, said data shows that from 2008 to 2015, the Central Party Office’s budget increased steadily.

“Although actual spending figures are not disclosed, the Central Party Office alone saw its planned budget quadruple in seven years — from nearly US$27 million (622 billion dong) in 2008 to about US$105 million (more than 2,400 billion dong) in 2015,” he said.

The office functions as the party’s command center, where the general secretary oversees both party and government operations. From 2011 to 2015, its budget rose by 180 percent — three times higher than the increase in the government office’s budget, according to Vu Tuong. The publication of data on its spending stopped in 2015.

Budget is a secret

Zachary Abuza, an expert on Southeast Asia at the National War College in Washington, noted the lack of transparency.

“The party’s budget is a secret, so researchers must work with imperfect data,” he told Radio Free Asia. He said To Lam is mindful of ballooning recurrent expenditures and has made some attempts to rein them in. For example, the party’s foreign affairs committee has been merged into other entities. However, despite these changes, the party’s overall budget continues to grow.

“While the budgets of government agencies have shrunk or stagnated, the budget for the CPV’s bureaucracy has steadily increased over the past few years, if we count the Fatherland Front, the organization that supports the party’s activities,” Abuza said. CPV stands for the Communist Party of Vietnam.

He said more transparency could help improve the party’s legitimacy, but given its obsession with maintaining supreme power, “it’s hard to see them cutting the party’s budget,” he said.

In 2016, the Vietnam Institute for Economic and Policy Research estimated that the economic cost of maintaining public mass organizations — directly controlled by the Communist Party — ranged from 45,600 to 68,100 billion dong annually (about US$2 billion to US$3 billion at the time). These organizations are intended to fulfill roles that, in democratic countries, would be played by independent civil society groups. To Lam has not indicated whether he intends to cut their funding.

According to Abuza, To Lam’s ongoing radical restructuring of the national government, including the consolidation of five ministries and several government agencies, and the reduction of nearly 50% of the number of provinces, created a rare opportunity to further cut both state and party organizations.

However, the budgets for the party and its supporting organizations are difficult to cut because they are tied to the inherent interests of the bureaucracy, he said.

There may be a political reason behind To Lam’s reluctance to target the party’s spending.

The next National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam is approaching in early 2026, when a new generation of leaders will be elected. To Lam, 67, is believed to be seeking another term as general secretary.

“There’s only half-a-year left until the Party Congress,” said Abuza. “So there won’t be any major changes. Normally, spending and policy implementation would be completely locked down by this stage.”

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Truong Son for RFA Vietnamese.

Janine Jackson interviewed independent journalist Bryce Covert about Medicaid work requirements for the May 23, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

The Nation (2/28/20)

Janine Jackson: Welcome to USA 2025, where the only immigrants deserving welcome are white South Africans, germ theory is just some folks’ opinion, and attaching work requirements to Medicaid and SNAP benefits will make recipients stop being lazy and get a job.

Everything old is not new again, but many things that are old, perverse and discredited are getting dusted off and reintroduced with a vengeance. Our guest has reported the repeatedly offered rationales behind tying work requirements to social benefits, and the real-world impacts of those efforts, for many years now.

Bryce Covert is an independent journalist and a contributing writer at The Nation. She joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Bryce Covert.

Bryce Covert: Thank you so much for having me back on.

JJ: Most right-wing, top-down campaigns rely on some element of myth, but this is pretty much all myth: that there’s a problem: Medicaid and also SNAP benefits discourage recipients from seeking work, that this response will increase employment, that it will save the state and federal government money, and that it won’t harm those most in need. It’s layer upon layer of falsehood, that you have spent years breaking down. Where do you even start?

BC: That’s a great place to start, pointing out those claims essentially are all false, and I think it’s important to know, the reason we know that those things are false is because we have years of experience in this country with work requirements in various programs, and they have produced the same results over and over again.

Urban Institute (4/23/25)

So this started, essentially, with welfare, which is now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In the 1990s, with cash assistance to families, there was a work requirement imposed on recipients in that program that still stands today. And just wave after wave of research has found these requirements did not help increase employment on a long-term basis.

Most people were not actually working after they were subjected to the work requirement, and instead it increased poverty. It reduced the recipients of these benefits. So it essentially didn’t help them get to work, but it did take away the money that they were relying on.

That pattern plays out over and over again, and we have some newer evidence in Medicaid because, up until the first Trump administration, states could not impose a work requirement in Medicaid. The Trump administration allowed waivers to do so. Only one state actually did it. But Arkansas, the state that did impose this work requirement, kicked over 18,000 people off the program with no discernible impact on employment.

JJ: And it has to do with a misunderstanding about who Medicaid recipients are, and their relationship to the workplace, period, right?

BC: Right. Most Medicaid recipients are either working, or have some good reasons for why they’re not working. Either they can’t find full-time work, or they have conflicts, like they’re taking care of family members.

People are disabled, many of them have an official disability and they’re on the actual disability program, but many more are disabled and can’t get on that program. It is a very difficult program to enroll in. The burdens to enrollment are super, super high. And others say it’s because they are in school, or they’re trying to find work, or they’re retired.

So among those who aren’t working, there’s not a lot who are in any good position to go out and start working. And that’s true of a lot of recipients of other public benefits as well. So when you talk about imposing a work requirement on people in Medicaid, what you’re doing is adding administrative burden, which is to say extra steps they have to take to keep getting their benefits, that aren’t going to actually change the situation they’re facing when it comes to their employment.

Think Progress (4/13/17)

JJ: When you wrote about Mississippi, I know, with TANF, you were saying you had to prove you had a job, or were searching for one, before you could get help with childcare. And if people would just take a second and think, how do you search for a job or hold a job without childcare? So it’s not even logical. It’s more a kind of moral, strange misunderstanding of why people are outside of the workforce.

BC: I think this applies to other programs, too. It’s hard to get to work if you don’t have health insurance like Medicaid to get yourself healthy and in a good working position. If you’re not able to get food stamps and buy food for yourself, it’s going to be hard to be out there looking for a job.

These are basic necessities, and I think that’s another really important point to make here, is that Republicans have tried to paint lots of different programs as “welfare,” because that word is very stigmatizing. But what we’re talking about with Medicaid is healthcare. We are talking about feeling as if we need to force people to work—although really what we’re doing is forcing them to document on some pieces of paper that they’re working, which is an important distinction—in order to get healthcare, in order to take care of their bodies and be healthy.

Same with food stamps. We’re saying “you must work in order to eat.” These are basic, basic necessities that people need simply to survive.

JJ: And then we hear about the “dignity” of work. You need to work because there’s dignity there, and yet somehow a person whose grandfather owned the steel mill doesn’t need that dignity. Wealthy people who don’t work somehow are outside of this moral conversation.

BC: Yeah, and we’re talking about imposing work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid, which is what Republicans say they want to do, in the service of tax cuts for the wealthy. Essentially, they are literally paying for tax cuts for the wealthy, to return more money to the rich, by cutting programs for the poor. And those rich people, many of them do not work, or these tax breaks help them to avoid work—the inheritance tax, for example. So that moral obligation to work does not apply.

New York Times (5/14/25)

JJ: The New York Times column recently, from four Trump officials—I don’t remember the headline, but it was something like, “If You Can Work, You Must.” They didn’t marshal any evidence. They didn’t have data, just vibes. Those are some racist, racist vibes, aren’t they?

BC: Yes. That is an important point, that all of this cannot be separated out from racism.

I mean, the conversation over welfare and TANF in the 1990s, that was all race. It was about white Americans feeling like Black Americans were getting the dole, and were too lazy to work and had to be forced to work. The numbers at the time did not bear that out. More white Americans were getting cash assistance than Black ones.

But it’s a really deep-seated belief among Americans, and I think when you see, as in that op-ed, for example, or other places where Republicans are trying to call these other programs “welfare,” it’s barely even just a dog whistle. It is pretty blatant that they are trying to paint other programs as things that help Black people who are too lazy to work.

It’s all caught up in that idea, even though, again, the numbers do not bear this out. White people are more likely to be on these programs. We see equal employment rates among both populations. This is not actually a problem to solve for, but it is one I think a lot of Americans, unfortunately, really believe.

The Nation (6/8/23)

JJ: I’m going to ask you about media in another second. I just wanted to pull up another point about the racism, which is that it’s not just the mythologizing and the “welfare queen,” that those of us who are old enough will remember. But you wrote about how states with larger Black populations have stricter rules, and how when states were asked for exemptions on pushing these work requirements, they exempted majority white counties. So it’s not just the racism in the rationale, the racism in how it plays out is there too?

BC: Absolutely. I mean, these policies hit Black people more heavily. They are more stringently applied in Southern states that have higher Black populations, that are more hostile to their Black populations. And like you said, in the first Trump administration, when states were seeking exemptions, it was more majority white populations who got them. This is just really a fundamental racist myth we have in this country that’s proven very hard to shake, that Black people are lazy and rely on the government to get by and must be forced to work, when just nothing about the actual numbers and data bears that out.

JJ: I sometimes feel like reporters, even if they’re well-intentioned and trying to make it personal, they can kind of make it a thought experiment for folks who are better off. If you were struggling, wouldn’t you take the time to fill out a form? It’s just paperwork. Couldn’t you go across town to the office and fill out that form? And it just represents a total disconnect, experiential disconnect between anyone who has ever had to deal with this and those who have no idea about it at all and just kind of parachute in and say, Oh wow, filling out a form. What’s the big deal?

Bryce Covert: “This is not about, in fact, helping people to work. This is, instead, about kicking people off the program.” 

BC: Yeah, I think most well-off Americans have no idea how hard it is to apply for these programs, to stay on these programs, the paperwork that’s involved, the time that’s involved. And also when we’ve seen work requirements in Medicaid, for example, they are set up in a very complex way. Arkansas’s website was only available during the working day, and then it would shut down, and you couldn’t log your work requirement hours at night. I think that belies the fact that this is not about, in fact, helping people to work. This is, instead, about kicking people off the program.

You can see that in the fact that the reason Republicans are talking about work requirements right now is because they need to find spending savings to pay for the tax cuts. If this were not about kicking people off and spending less on benefits, then this wouldn’t be part of this current conversation about their “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” So these are huge administrative burdens, and it’s also a big burden for something that is a deep necessity. I think the mental impact, the emotional impact of being made to jump through these huge hoops for something as basic as food, it’s really extreme.

For example, I recently had to go to the DMV to get my Real ID. I had to go to the office in person. I had to wait for hours. I had to bring all the right paperwork. It was a huge burden, but this was for something that would just make it a little easier to travel on an airplane.

Think about going through the same process, having to show up somewhere in person, waiting for hours, making sure you have all the right documentation, and if you don’t, then you don’t get the thing that you’re seeking, but what we’re talking about is whether or not you get healthcare. What we’re talking about is whether you get food stamps. I think it’s an experience that’s hard for people who haven’t gone through it to grasp.

New York Times (5/13/25)

JJ: To bring it back to today, May 21, some coverage that I’m reading straight up says some 8.6 million people are going to find themselves uninsured. Other stories matter-of-factly describe work requirements, and some Republicans’ anger that they’re not going to kick in sooner, as about “offsetting” the tax cuts for the wealthy, as though we’re just kind of recalibrating, and this is going to balance things in a natural way.

I guess I would say I’m not getting the energy that there are 14 million children who rely on both Medicaid and SNAP, and there’s children who could lose healthcare and food at the same time, and that includes 20% of all children under the age of five. From news media, I’m getting Republicans versus Democrats; I’m not so much getting children versus hunger.

BC: Yeah, I think, unfortunately, these kinds of political debates tend to be covered like they are just political back and forth. Democrats think this, Republicans think that. It is legitimately harder to explain to people what this will mean in real life. I have reported on the impact of work requirements. For example, I went to Arkansas when they were in effect. It’s hard to report on. The people who are impacted are vulnerable. They have chaotic lives. They may not even know that they are subject to it.

Unfortunately, I think it’s likely that if this passes and these cuts are implemented, we will see more stories about what happens, because it will be a little easier to say concretely, “This kid right here doesn’t get food or healthcare anymore.” But it would be nice to have that conveyed ahead of time, so the public understood what was happening before it went into effect.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with independent reporter Bryce Covert. You can find her work online at BryceCovert.com. Bryce Covert, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

BC: Yeah, thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Janine Jackson interviewed independent journalist Bryce Covert about Medicaid work requirements for the May 23, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

The Nation (2/28/20)

Janine Jackson: Welcome to USA 2025, where the only immigrants deserving welcome are white South Africans, germ theory is just some folks’ opinion, and attaching work requirements to Medicaid and SNAP benefits will make recipients stop being lazy and get a job.

Everything old is not new again, but many things that are old, perverse and discredited are getting dusted off and reintroduced with a vengeance. Our guest has reported the repeatedly offered rationales behind tying work requirements to social benefits, and the real-world impacts of those efforts, for many years now.

Bryce Covert is an independent journalist and a contributing writer at The Nation. She joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Bryce Covert.

Bryce Covert: Thank you so much for having me back on.

JJ: Most right-wing, top-down campaigns rely on some element of myth, but this is pretty much all myth: that there’s a problem: Medicaid and also SNAP benefits discourage recipients from seeking work, that this response will increase employment, that it will save the state and federal government money, and that it won’t harm those most in need. It’s layer upon layer of falsehood, that you have spent years breaking down. Where do you even start?

BC: That’s a great place to start, pointing out those claims essentially are all false, and I think it’s important to know, the reason we know that those things are false is because we have years of experience in this country with work requirements in various programs, and they have produced the same results over and over again.

Urban Institute (4/23/25)

So this started, essentially, with welfare, which is now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In the 1990s, with cash assistance to families, there was a work requirement imposed on recipients in that program that still stands today. And just wave after wave of research has found these requirements did not help increase employment on a long-term basis.

Most people were not actually working after they were subjected to the work requirement, and instead it increased poverty. It reduced the recipients of these benefits. So it essentially didn’t help them get to work, but it did take away the money that they were relying on.

That pattern plays out over and over again, and we have some newer evidence in Medicaid because, up until the first Trump administration, states could not impose a work requirement in Medicaid. The Trump administration allowed waivers to do so. Only one state actually did it. But Arkansas, the state that did impose this work requirement, kicked over 18,000 people off the program with no discernible impact on employment.

JJ: And it has to do with a misunderstanding about who Medicaid recipients are, and their relationship to the workplace, period, right?

BC: Right. Most Medicaid recipients are either working, or have some good reasons for why they’re not working. Either they can’t find full-time work, or they have conflicts, like they’re taking care of family members.

People are disabled, many of them have an official disability and they’re on the actual disability program, but many more are disabled and can’t get on that program. It is a very difficult program to enroll in. The burdens to enrollment are super, super high. And others say it’s because they are in school, or they’re trying to find work, or they’re retired.

So among those who aren’t working, there’s not a lot who are in any good position to go out and start working. And that’s true of a lot of recipients of other public benefits as well. So when you talk about imposing a work requirement on people in Medicaid, what you’re doing is adding administrative burden, which is to say extra steps they have to take to keep getting their benefits, that aren’t going to actually change the situation they’re facing when it comes to their employment.

Think Progress (4/13/17)

JJ: When you wrote about Mississippi, I know, with TANF, you were saying you had to prove you had a job, or were searching for one, before you could get help with childcare. And if people would just take a second and think, how do you search for a job or hold a job without childcare? So it’s not even logical. It’s more a kind of moral, strange misunderstanding of why people are outside of the workforce.

BC: I think this applies to other programs, too. It’s hard to get to work if you don’t have health insurance like Medicaid to get yourself healthy and in a good working position. If you’re not able to get food stamps and buy food for yourself, it’s going to be hard to be out there looking for a job.

These are basic necessities, and I think that’s another really important point to make here, is that Republicans have tried to paint lots of different programs as “welfare,” because that word is very stigmatizing. But what we’re talking about with Medicaid is healthcare. We are talking about feeling as if we need to force people to work—although really what we’re doing is forcing them to document on some pieces of paper that they’re working, which is an important distinction—in order to get healthcare, in order to take care of their bodies and be healthy.

Same with food stamps. We’re saying “you must work in order to eat.” These are basic, basic necessities that people need simply to survive.

JJ: And then we hear about the “dignity” of work. You need to work because there’s dignity there, and yet somehow a person whose grandfather owned the steel mill doesn’t need that dignity. Wealthy people who don’t work somehow are outside of this moral conversation.

BC: Yeah, and we’re talking about imposing work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid, which is what Republicans say they want to do, in the service of tax cuts for the wealthy. Essentially, they are literally paying for tax cuts for the wealthy, to return more money to the rich, by cutting programs for the poor. And those rich people, many of them do not work, or these tax breaks help them to avoid work—the inheritance tax, for example. So that moral obligation to work does not apply.

New York Times (5/14/25)

JJ: The New York Times column recently, from four Trump officials—I don’t remember the headline, but it was something like, “If You Can Work, You Must.” They didn’t marshal any evidence. They didn’t have data, just vibes. Those are some racist, racist vibes, aren’t they?

BC: Yes. That is an important point, that all of this cannot be separated out from racism.

I mean, the conversation over welfare and TANF in the 1990s, that was all race. It was about white Americans feeling like Black Americans were getting the dole, and were too lazy to work and had to be forced to work. The numbers at the time did not bear that out. More white Americans were getting cash assistance than Black ones.

But it’s a really deep-seated belief among Americans, and I think when you see, as in that op-ed, for example, or other places where Republicans are trying to call these other programs “welfare,” it’s barely even just a dog whistle. It is pretty blatant that they are trying to paint other programs as things that help Black people who are too lazy to work.

It’s all caught up in that idea, even though, again, the numbers do not bear this out. White people are more likely to be on these programs. We see equal employment rates among both populations. This is not actually a problem to solve for, but it is one I think a lot of Americans, unfortunately, really believe.

The Nation (6/8/23)

JJ: I’m going to ask you about media in another second. I just wanted to pull up another point about the racism, which is that it’s not just the mythologizing and the “welfare queen,” that those of us who are old enough will remember. But you wrote about how states with larger Black populations have stricter rules, and how when states were asked for exemptions on pushing these work requirements, they exempted majority white counties. So it’s not just the racism in the rationale, the racism in how it plays out is there too?

BC: Absolutely. I mean, these policies hit Black people more heavily. They are more stringently applied in Southern states that have higher Black populations, that are more hostile to their Black populations. And like you said, in the first Trump administration, when states were seeking exemptions, it was more majority white populations who got them. This is just really a fundamental racist myth we have in this country that’s proven very hard to shake, that Black people are lazy and rely on the government to get by and must be forced to work, when just nothing about the actual numbers and data bears that out.

JJ: I sometimes feel like reporters, even if they’re well-intentioned and trying to make it personal, they can kind of make it a thought experiment for folks who are better off. If you were struggling, wouldn’t you take the time to fill out a form? It’s just paperwork. Couldn’t you go across town to the office and fill out that form? And it just represents a total disconnect, experiential disconnect between anyone who has ever had to deal with this and those who have no idea about it at all and just kind of parachute in and say, Oh wow, filling out a form. What’s the big deal?

Bryce Covert: “This is not about, in fact, helping people to work. This is, instead, about kicking people off the program.” 

BC: Yeah, I think most well-off Americans have no idea how hard it is to apply for these programs, to stay on these programs, the paperwork that’s involved, the time that’s involved. And also when we’ve seen work requirements in Medicaid, for example, they are set up in a very complex way. Arkansas’s website was only available during the working day, and then it would shut down, and you couldn’t log your work requirement hours at night. I think that belies the fact that this is not about, in fact, helping people to work. This is, instead, about kicking people off the program.

You can see that in the fact that the reason Republicans are talking about work requirements right now is because they need to find spending savings to pay for the tax cuts. If this were not about kicking people off and spending less on benefits, then this wouldn’t be part of this current conversation about their “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” So these are huge administrative burdens, and it’s also a big burden for something that is a deep necessity. I think the mental impact, the emotional impact of being made to jump through these huge hoops for something as basic as food, it’s really extreme.

For example, I recently had to go to the DMV to get my Real ID. I had to go to the office in person. I had to wait for hours. I had to bring all the right paperwork. It was a huge burden, but this was for something that would just make it a little easier to travel on an airplane.

Think about going through the same process, having to show up somewhere in person, waiting for hours, making sure you have all the right documentation, and if you don’t, then you don’t get the thing that you’re seeking, but what we’re talking about is whether or not you get healthcare. What we’re talking about is whether you get food stamps. I think it’s an experience that’s hard for people who haven’t gone through it to grasp.

New York Times (5/13/25)

JJ: To bring it back to today, May 21, some coverage that I’m reading straight up says some 8.6 million people are going to find themselves uninsured. Other stories matter-of-factly describe work requirements, and some Republicans’ anger that they’re not going to kick in sooner, as about “offsetting” the tax cuts for the wealthy, as though we’re just kind of recalibrating, and this is going to balance things in a natural way.

I guess I would say I’m not getting the energy that there are 14 million children who rely on both Medicaid and SNAP, and there’s children who could lose healthcare and food at the same time, and that includes 20% of all children under the age of five. From news media, I’m getting Republicans versus Democrats; I’m not so much getting children versus hunger.

BC: Yeah, I think, unfortunately, these kinds of political debates tend to be covered like they are just political back and forth. Democrats think this, Republicans think that. It is legitimately harder to explain to people what this will mean in real life. I have reported on the impact of work requirements. For example, I went to Arkansas when they were in effect. It’s hard to report on. The people who are impacted are vulnerable. They have chaotic lives. They may not even know that they are subject to it.

Unfortunately, I think it’s likely that if this passes and these cuts are implemented, we will see more stories about what happens, because it will be a little easier to say concretely, “This kid right here doesn’t get food or healthcare anymore.” But it would be nice to have that conveyed ahead of time, so the public understood what was happening before it went into effect.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with independent reporter Bryce Covert. You can find her work online at BryceCovert.com. Bryce Covert, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

BC: Yeah, thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Tax policy isn’t the only way that this bill proposes to further widen the gap between the wealthy and the poor. Though the more than 1,000-page megabill will look somewhat different once it advances through the Senate, analysts say that there are three food and agricultural provisions expected to remain intact: an unprecedented cut to the nation’s nutrition programs; an increase of billions in subsidies aimed at industrial farms; and a rescission of some Inflation Reduction Act funding intended to help farmers deal with the impacts of climate change.

If they do, the changes will make it harder for Americans to afford food and endure the financial toll of climate-related disasters. They will also make it more difficult for farmers to adapt to climate change — from an ecological standpoint and an economic one. Overall, the policy shifts would continue Trump’s effort to transform the nation’s food and agricultural policy landscape — from one that keeps at least some emphasis on the country’s neediest residents to one that offers government help to those who need it least.

Ever since the inception of the federal food stamps program in 1939, when it was created during the Great Depression to provide food to the hungry while simultaneously stimulating the American economy by encouraging the purchase of surplus commodities, what’s now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has been falsely portrayed as a contributor to unemployment rates and politicized as an abuse of taxpayer dollars. 

A vast body of research has found the opposite: roughly 42 percent of SNAP recipients are children, more than half of adult recipients who can work are either employed or actively seeking employment; the program’s improper payments are most often merely mistakes made by eligible workers or households, not cases of outright fraud; and the benefits keep millions of Americans out of poverty. 

Right now, more than 40 million Americans are enrolled in SNAP, an anti-hunger program written into the farm bill and administered through the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service. The federal government has always fully paid for benefits issued by the program. States operate the program on a local level, determining eligibility and issuing those benefits, and pay part of the program’s administrative costs. How much money a household gets from the government each month for groceries is based on income, family size, and a tally of certain expenses. An individual’s eligibility is also constrained by “work requirements,” which limit the amount of time adults can receive benefits without employment or participation in a work-training program. 

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the cuts to SNAP now being proposed could amount to nearly $300 billion through 2034. An Urban Institute analysis of the bill found that the cuts would be achieved by broadening work requirements to apply to households with children and adults up to the age of 64; limiting states’ ability to request work-requirement waivers for people in high unemployment areas; and reducing the opportunities for discretionary exemptions. But most unprecedented is how the bill shifts the financial onus of SNAP’s costs onto states — increasing the administrative costs states have to cover to up to 75 percent, as well as mandating that states pay for a portion of the benefits themselves. 

If the Senate approves the proposed approach to require states to cover some SNAP costs, the Budget Office report projects that, over the next decade, about 1.3 million people could see their benefits reduced or eliminated in an average month.

The burden of these changes to federal policy would only cascade down, leading to a variety of likely outcomes. Some states might be able to cover the slack. But others won’t, even if they wanted to: Budget-strapped states would then have to choose between reducing benefits or sharing the costs with cities and counties. Ultimately, anti-hunger advocates warn, gutting SNAP will undoubtedly increase food insecurity across the nation — at a time when persistently high food costs are among most Americans’ biggest economic concerns. As communities in all corners of the country endure stronger and more frequent climate-related disasters, the slashing of nutrition programs would also likely decrease the amount of emergency food aid that would be available after a heatwave, hurricane, or flood — funding that has already been reduced by federal disinvestment. 

Sweeping cuts to SNAP would also constrain how much income small farmers nationwide would be able to earn. That’s because SNAP dollars are used at thousands of farmers markets, farm stands, and pick-your-own operations throughout the country. 

Read Next

Trump radically remade the US food system in just 100 days

Ayurella Horn-Muller

Groups like the environmental nonprofit GrowNYC helped launch the use of SNAP dollars at farmers markets in New York almost two decades ago, and have since built matching dollar incentives into their business model to encourage shoppers at the organization’s greenmarket and farmstand locations to spend their monthly food aid allotments on fresh, locally grown produce. 

The program “puts money in the farmers pockets,” said Marcel Van Ooyen, CEO of GrowNYC, and “helps low-income individuals access healthy, fresh, local food. It’s a double-win.” 

He expects to see the bill’s SNAP cuts result in a “devastating” trend of shuttering local farmers’ markets across the nation, which, he said, ”is going to have a real effect both on food access and support of the farming communities.”

While the ethos of this bill can be gleaned by counting up the proposed cuts to social safety nets like SNAP, looking at the legislation from another perspective — where Trump wants the government to spend more — helps to make it clearer. These dramatic changes to nutrition programs would be accompanied by a massive increase in commodity farm subsidies.

The budget bill increases subsidies to commodity farms — ones that grow crops like corn, cotton, and soybeans — by about $50 billion. Commodity farmers “typically have larger farms,” according to Erin Foster West, a policy campaigns director specializing in land, water, and climate at National Young Farmers Coalition. A trend of consolidation toward fewer but more industrial farm operations was already underway. Less than 6 percent of U.S. farms with annual sales of at least $1 million sold more than three-fourths of all agricultural products between 2017 and 2022. The Trump plan might just help that trend along.

Earlier this year, the USDA issued about a third of the $30 billion authorized by Congress in December through the American Relief Act to commodity producers who were affected by low crop prices in 2024. Because the program significantly limited who could access the funding, it funneled financial help away from smaller farmers and into the pockets of industrial-scale operations. An April report by the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute concluded the $10 billion bailout for commodity farmers “was probably not justified.” 

Later in their report, the American Enterprise Institute authors note that lobbyists representing commodity farms have already begun pushing for more subsidies because of the fallout of the Trump administration’s tariffs. 

Then they pose a question: “Does the Trump administration need to give farmers further substantial handouts, especially when it is doing nothing for other sectors and households significantly affected by its policy follies?”

The budget bill, with its $50 billion windfall for commodity farms, may be its own answer. 

This September will mark the deadline for the second consecutive year-long extension that Congress passed for the farm bill, the legislation that governs many aspects of America’s food and agricultural systems and is typically reauthorized every five years without much contention. Of late, legislators have been unable to get past the deeply politicized struggle to agree on the omnibus bill’s nutrition and conservation facets. The latest farm bill was the 2018 package.

The farm bill covers everything from nutrition assistance programs to crop subsidies and conservation measures. A number of provisions, like crop insurance, are permanently funded, meaning the reauthorization timeline does not impact them. But others, such as beginning farmer and rancher development grants and local food promotion programs, are entirely dependent upon the appropriations within each new law. 

Trump’s tax plan contains a slick budgeting maneuver that takes unobligated climate-targeted funds from the agricultural conservation programs in President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, and re-invests that money into the same farm bill programs. The funding boost provided by the IRA was designed to reign in the immense emissions footprint of the agricultural industry, while also helping farmers deal with the impacts of climate change by providing funding for them to protect plants from severe weather, extend their growing seasons, or adopt cost-cutting irrigation methods that boost water conservation.

On its surface, the inclusion of unspent IRA conservation money in the tax package may seem promising, if notably at odds with the Trump administration’s public campaign to all but vanquish the Biden-era climate policy. Erin Foster West, at the National Young Farmers Coalition, calls it “a mixed bag.” 

By proposing that the IRA funding be absorbed into the farm bill, Foster West says, Trump creates an opportunity to build more and longer-term funding for “hugely impactful and very effective” conservation work. On the other hand, she notes, the Trump megabill removes the requirements that the unspent pot of money must fund climate-specific projects. Foster West is wary that the removal of the climate guardrails could lead to more conservation money funneling into industrial farms and planet-polluting animal feeding operations. 

The House budget package also omits many of the food and agricultural programs affected by the federal funding freeze that would typically have been included in a farm bill. Those include programs offering support to beginning farmers and ranchers, farmer-led sustainable research, rural development and farm loans, local and regional food supply chains, and those that help farmers access new markets. None of these were incorporated into the Republican megabill. 

“It’s just a disinvestment in the programs that smaller-scale, and beginning farmers, younger farmers, tend to use. So we’re just seeing, like, resources being pulled away,” said Foster West. 

Moreover, up until now, several agricultural leaders in Congress have expressed confidence about passing a new “skinny” farm bill, to address all programs left out by reconciliation, before September. Provisions in the Trump budget bill may erode that confidence. By gutting funding for SNAP and increasing funding for commodity support, two leading Republican farm bill priorities, the need for GOP legislators to negotiate for a bipartisan bill diminishes. 

Inherent to the farm bill are provisions set to incentivize Congress to break through its own gridlock. If neither a new farm bill nor an extension is passed ahead of its deadline, some commodity programs revert to a 1930s and 1940s law, which helps trigger what is colloquially known as the “dairy cliff” — after which the government must buy staggering volumes of milk products at a parity price set in 1949 and risk spiking milk prices at the supermarket. Trump’s tax package would suspend this trigger until 2031.

Under Trump’s vision, encoded in the tax bill, U.S. food and agriculture policy would “cannibalize” itself, according to Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. The policies meant to make better food more available to more people, and support the producers that grow it, in other words, could make way for a world in which fewer people will be able to farm — and to eat.

“It’s an irresponsible approach to federal food and farm policy,” Lavender said. “One that does not support all farmers, does not support the entire food and farm system.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s budget bill is on the verge of transforming how America eats on May 30, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

Prime Minister Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa has advised Samoa’s head of state that it is necessary to dissolve Parliament so the country can move to an election.

This follows the bill for the budget not getting enough support for a first reading on yesterday, and Fiame announcing she would therefore seek an early election.

Tuimaleali’ifano Va’aleto’a Sualauvi II has accepted Fiame’s advice and a formal notice will be duly gazetted to confirm the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly.

• READ MORE: Other Samoan reports

Parliament will go into caretaker mode, and the Cabinet will have the general direction and control of the existing government until the first session of the Legislative Assembly following dissolution.

Fiame, who has led a minority government since being ousted from her former FAST party in January, finally conceded defeat on the floor of Parliament yesterday morning after her government’s 2025 Budget was voted down.

MPs from both the opposition Human Rights Protection Party and Fiame’s former FAST party joined forces to defeat the budget with the final vote coming in 34 against, 16 in support and two abstentions.

Defeated motions
Tuesday was the Samoan Parliament’s first sitting since back-to-back no-confidence motions were moved — unsuccessfully — against prime minister Fiame.

In January, Fiame removed her FAST Party chairman La’auli Leuatea Schmidt and several FAST ministers from her Cabinet.

In turn, La’auli ejected her from the FAST Party, leaving her leading a minority government.

Her former party had been pushing for an early election, including via legal action.

The election is set to be held within three months.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A last-minute addition to President Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill seeks to ban Affordable Care Act healthcare plans from covering abortion, in addition to defunding hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics that provide reproductive healthcare throughout the United States. “Congress is literally walking us into a crisis of forced birth,” says Mini Timmaraju, president of the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, which is launching a series of campaigns targeting key senators ahead of the Senate vote on the GOP-backed budget bill.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Common Dreams (5/14/25)

This week on CounterSpin: On a Sunday night, not when officials do things they’re most proud of, House Republicans passed a plan to give more money to rich people by taking it from the non-rich. Call it what you will, that’s what’s ultimately happening with the plan to cut more than $700 billion from Medicaid in order to “offset,” as elite media have it, the expense of relieving millionaires from contributing to public coffers. Even the feint they’re using—we’re not cutting aid, just forcing recipients to work, like they should—is obvious, age-old and long-disproven, if evidence is what you care about. Thing is, of the millions of people at the sharp end of the plan, most are children, who have no voice corporate media feel obliged to listen to. We’ll nevertheless talk about them with independent journalist Bryce Covert.

Washington Post (5/11/25)

Also on the show: You may have seen an editorial in the Washington Post indicating that, despite what you have heard for years, from trans people and from doctors and medical associations that work with trans people, maybe it’s OK for you to still entertain the notion that, weirdly, on this occasion, it’s not science but talkshow hosts who have it right, and trans kids are just actually mentally ill. We’ll talk about that with journalist and trans rights activist Erin Reed, of Erin in the Morning.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Trump’s sweeping budget legislation has been described as the biggest Medicaid cut in U.S. history. House Republicans passed the bill early Thursday morning in a 215-214 vote. The legislation would trigger massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next 10 years, denying coverage to an estimated 7.6 million Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Food assistance under the federal SNAP program would also see $300 billion in cuts, while adding billions in funding for Trump’s mass deportation agenda and giving the wealthiest Americans a tax break.

“The legislation is basically a mugging conducted by the 1% against the rest of us. It represents the single largest upward redistribution of wealth effectuated by any piece of legislation in our history,” says Chris Lehmann, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation.

Senate Republicans, who have voiced some concerns over the bill, will now have to pass their own version of the budget. With all Democratic senators opposed to the package, Republicans are working to use the reconciliation process to avoid a filibuster.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Funding for New Zealand’s Ministry for Pacific Peoples (MPP) is set to be reduced by almost $36 million in Budget 2025.

This follows a cut of nearly $26 million in the 2024 budget.

As part of these budgetary savings, the Tauola Business Fund will be closed. But, $6.3 million a year will remain to support Pacific economic and business development through the Pacific Business Trust and Pacific Business Village.

• READ MORE: Budget 2025 at a glance: The big changes, winners and losers
• Govt should defuse NZ’s social timebomb – but won’t
• Budget 2025: Pasifika community braces for impact

The Budget cuts also affect the Tupu Aotearoa programme, which supports Pacific people in finding employment and training, alongside the Ministry of Social Development’s employment initiatives.

While $5.25 million a year will still fund the programme, a total of $22 million a year has been cut over the last four years.

The ministry will save almost $1 million by returning funding allocated for the Dawn Raids reconciliation programme from 2027/28 onwards.

There are two years of limited funding left to complete the ministry Dawn Raids programmes, which support the Crown’s reconciliation efforts.

Funding for Pasifika Wardens
Despite these reductions, a new initiative providing funding for Pasifika Wardens will introduce $1 million of new spending over the next four years.

The initiative will improve services to Pacific communities through capacity building, volunteer training, transportation, and enhanced administrative support.

Funding for the National Fale Malae has ceased, as only $2.7 million of the allocated $10 million has been spent since funding was granted in Budget 2020.

The remaining $6.6 million will be reprioritised over the next two years to address other priorities within the Arts, Culture and Heritage portfolio, including the National Music Centre.

Foreign Affairs funding for the International Development Cooperation (IDC) projects, particularly focussed on the Pacific, is also affected. The IDC received an $800 million commitment in 2021 from the Labour government.

The funding was time-limited, leading to a $200 million annual fiscal cliff starting in January 2026.

Budget 2025 aims to mitigate this impact by providing ongoing, baselined funding of $100 million a year to cover half of the shortfall. An additional $5 million will address a $10 million annual shortfall in departmental funding.

Support for IDC projects
The new funding will support IDC projects, emphasising the Pacific region without being exclusively aimed at climate finance objectives. Overall, $367.5 million will be allocated to the IDC over four years.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the Budget addressed a prominent fiscal cliff, especially concerning climate finance.

“The Budget addresses this, at least in part, through ongoing, baselined funding of $100 million a year, focused on the Pacific,” she said in her Budget speech.

“Members will not be surprised to know that the Minister of Foreign Affairs has made a case for more funding, and this will be looked at in future Budgets.”

More funding has been allocated for new homework and tutoring services for learners in Years nine and 10 at schools with at least 50 percent Pacific students to meet the requirements for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).

About 50 schools across New Zealand are expected to benefit from the initiative, which will receive nearly $7 million over the next four years, having been reprioritised from funding for the Pacific Education Programme.

As a result, funding will be stopped for three programmes aimed at supporting Tu’u Mālohi, Pacific Reading Together and Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities.

Republished from Pacific Media Network News with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ANALYSIS: By Susan St John

With the coalition government’s second Budget being unveiled, we should question where New Zealand is heading.

The 2024 Budget laid out the strategy. Tax cuts and landlord subsidies were prioritised with a focus on cuts to social and infrastructure spending. Most of the tax package went to the well-off, while many low-income households got nothing, or very little.

Even the tiny bit of the tax package directed to low-income people fell flat. Family Boost has significantly helped only a handful of families, while the increase of $25 per week (In Work Tax Credit) was denied all families on benefits, affecting about 200,000 of the very poorest children.

• READ MORE: Budget 2025 at a glance: The big changes, winners and losers
• Budget 2025: Pasifika community braces for impact

In the recession, families that lost paid work also lost access to full Working for Families, an income cut for their children of about $100 per week.

No one worked out how the many spending cuts would be distributed, but they have hurt the poor the most. These changes are too numerous to itemise but include increased transport costs; the reintroduction of prescription charges; a disastrous school lunch system; rising rents, rates and insurance; fewer budget advisory services; cuts to foodbank funding and hardship grants; stripping away support programmes for the disabled; inadequately adjusted benefits and minimum wage; and reduced support for pay equity and the living wage.

The objective is to save money while ignoring the human cost. For example, a scathing report of the Auditor General confirms that Oranga Tamariki took a bulldozer to obeying the call for a 6.5 percent cut in existing social services with no regard to the extreme hurt caused to children and struggling parents.

Budget 2025 has already indicated that Working for Families will continue to go backwards with not even inflation adjustments. The 2025 child and youth strategy report shows that over the year to June 2024 the number of children in material poverty continued to increase, there were more avoidable hospitalisations, immunisation rates for babies declined, and there was more food insecurity.

Human costs all around us
We can see the human costs all around us in homelessness, food insecurity, and ill health. Already we know we rank at the bottom among developed countries for child wellbeing and suicide rates.

Abject distress existing alongside where homes sell for $20 million-$40 million is no longer uncommon, and neither are $6 million helicopters of the very rich.

At the start of the year, Helen Robinson, CEO of the Auckland City Mission, had a clear warning: “I am pleading with government for more support, otherwise what we and other food relief agencies in Auckland can provide, will dramatically decrease.

“This leaves more of Auckland hungry and those already there become more desperate. It is the total antithesis of a thriving city.”

The theory held by this government is that by reducing the role of government and taxes, the private sector will flourish, and secure well-paid jobs will be created. Instead, as basic economic theory would predict, we have been handed a long and protracted recession with few signs of growth and prosperity.

Budget 2025 signals more of the same.

It would be a mistake to wait for simplistic official inequality statistics before we act. Our current destination is a sharply divided country of extreme wealth and extreme poverty with an insecure middle class.

Underfunded social agencies
Underfunded and swamped social agencies cannot remove the relentless stress on the people who are invisible in the ‘fiscally responsible’ economic narrative. The fabricated bogeyman of outsized net government debt is at the core, as the government pursues balanced budgets and small government-size targets.

A stage one economics student would know the deficit increases automatically in a recession to cushion the decline and stop the economy spiralling into something that looks more like a depression. But our safety nets of social welfare are performing very badly.

Rising unemployment has exposed the inadequacy of social protections. Working for Families, for instance, provides a very poor cushion for children. Many “working” families do not have enough hours of work and face crippling poverty traps.

Future security is undermined as more KiwiSavers cash in for hardship reasons. A record number of the talented young we need to drive the recovery and repair the frayed social fabric have already fled the country.

The government is fond of comparing its Budget to that of a household. But what prudent household would deliberately undermine the earning capacity of family members?

The primary task for the Budget should be to look after people first, to allow them to meet their food, dental and health needs, education, housing and travel costs, to have a buffer of savings to cushion unexpected shocks and to prepare for old age.

A sore thumb standing
In the social security part of the Budget, NZ Super for all at 65, no matter how rich or whether still in full-time well-paid work, dominates (gross $25 billion). It’s a sore thumb standing out alongside much less generous, highly targeted benefits and working for families, paid parental leave, family boost, hardship provisions, accommodation supplement, winter energy and other payments and subsidies.

Given the political will, research shows we can easily redirect at least $3 billion from very wealthy superannuitants to fixing other payments to greatly improve the wellbeing of the young. This will not be enough but it could be a first step to the wide rebalancing needed.

New Zealand has become a country of two halves whose paths rarely cross: a social time bomb with unimaginable consequences. It is a country beguiled by an egalitarian past that is no more.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Biological Diversity’s Ashley Nunes about the selloff of public lands for the May 9, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Common Dreams (4/22/25)

Janine Jackson: 

From lease sales to expedited permitting processes, the committee’s proposal creates an unprecedented pathway for developing our vast natural resources on federal lands and waters for generations to come.

That’s a response to a piece of the budget reconciliation bill making its way through Congress, and it comes from the American Petroleum Institute. So you can sense what’s up, and why our guest calls this piece of Republicans’ effort to fund Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires nothing more than opportunities for industry to plunder, profit and pollute.

Ashley Nunes is a specialist in public lands policy at the Center for Biological Diversity. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ashley Nunes.

Ashley Nunes: Thank you, Janine. Good to be with you.

Outdoor Alliance (5/6/25)

JJ: Let’s timestamp ourselves. We’re recording on May 8, and this is about the House Natural Resources Committee, and their contribution to the Republican House Reconciliation Bill, that’s going to tell us how to offset the billionaire tax cuts that they want to push through. But it’s not a done deal yet, right?

AN: Right.

JJ: So it’s still in process. There are lots of implications, but what would this plan do, particularly with regard to–I could say public lands, but I really appreciate your phrase, “precious wild places.” What would this do?

AN: So as someone who’s focused on public lands policy, I am most interested in the part of the reconciliation package that’s come out of the House Natural Resources Committee. The proposed Republican budget hands over power to private industries to destroy our public lands and offshore waters. The excessive and indiscriminate development of fossil fuels, minerals and timber will harm wildlife and communities. This reckless development would undermine environmental protections. It would simply make air and water quality worse. And, of course, that’s harmful for wildlife and communities. So this budget wouldn’t just give tax breaks to billionaires, but it would give polluters the green light to raise emissions, destroy wild places and harm endangered species.

JJ: In particular, I know that you look at, for example, Alaska. We’re looking at oil leases in Alaska, we’re looking at Minnesota. There are very specific things, and I wonder if you could just lift up some examples for folks to know what we’re talking about.

AN: Absolutely. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but I think I could do some highlights industry by industry.

JJ: Please.

NRDC (4/4/25)

AN: So let’s start with oil and gas on public lands. This bill would mandate dozens of lease sales every quarter, as you say, also sometimes in very sensitive locations, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. There’s also at least 4 million acres on the coastal plains of Alaska for oil and gas, some of the most important bird breeding areas in the country, and really one of the last great wild places, not only in the Arctic, but in the world.

Then if we go to offshore waters for oil and gas, this bill would mandate six lease sales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, and at least 30 lease sales in Gulf waters over the next 15 years. This offshore oil and gas development, when it pushes into sensitive ecosystems and deeper waters, it really risks another tragedy like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill that resulted in loss of human life and non-human life. The Gulf waters are home to the Rice’s whale, the world’s most endangered whale. So oil and gas here is really doing the most.

The other fossil fuel we’re mentioning is coal. This bill would open at least 4 million acres for new coal leasing. Coal is a dying and downright dirty industry, but this bill would have taxpayers subsidizing to keep that industry alive.

So across the board, there’s reduced royalty payments for these fossil fuel companies, for oil, gas and coal. And even though Republicans say that this is a bill intended to raise revenue, polluters get a really good deal here.

New York Times (4/19/24)

So that’s just fossil fuels. And if I could say a bit more, as you said, there’s also mining and timber. These are other extractive industries in the bill. So, mining: The bill undoes protections put in place by the Biden administration, it pushes through contentious mining projects, one of which you mentioned. So reversing a ban on 225,000 acres adjacent to Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota, and then also a ban on a 211-mile mining road that would stretch across unspoiled wilderness in Alaska.

And then for timber, there’s a mandated 25% increase in timber production on public lands. And I fear this puts a target on the biggest and oldest trees, because of their economic value for timber. A bigger tree would produce more timber, but these are also the most ecologically valuable trees for carbon sequestration, habitat protection and wildfire resilience. So this is a huge giveaway to extractive industry that would be hugely harmful for the places we love.

JJ: And maybe to just pull it out a bit, this is opposing what communities want to do with their land, right? Land use is a local issue, and we hear hollering about states’ rights, but this is actually in opposition to what a number of places have said they want to do with their land.

AN: That’s right, Janine, and this is wonky, but there are many provisions, across the bill, that would take away environmental review. And that’s the process that allows the public to have their say, to give their input. So if Congress rubberstamps projects, the public doesn’t have that opportunity.

JJ: It’s so important. The fight to resist clean energy in this country is intense, and it’s also transparent. And those thumbprints are all over this as well. The fossil fuel companies, they’re following tobacco. They’re just going to hold onto it, to the very last penny. And that seems evident in this legislation.

AN: You’re so right. There are provisions, as I said, to reduce royalties on fossil fuels, and that’s the status quo. But there’s also provisions to add rents for clean energy, renewable energy on public lands. So this is really a giveaway to polluters, and it’s to the detriment of that clean energy transition that we need.

JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally: I think transparency is the least that reporters could demand from this process, that has such myriad implications. But what would you like to see from journalism on this set of issues? And maybe what would you like to see less of?

Ashley Nunes: “This budget proposal is one of the worst attacks on the environment that we have seen in our lifetime.”

AN: There’s just so much to say here, really. I think I would just say a couple of things.

First of all, we were warned that this would happen. This budget bill is the Project 2025 and Agenda 47 playbooks in action. It’s not just “drill, baby, drill,” it’s also “mine, baby, mine” and “log, baby, log.” This proposal uses public resources to enrich private interests. It’s extreme. And if these provisions stay in the reconciliation package, and are enacted, this would be an obscene giveaway of our public resources to private industry, and it would put these places at serious risk. It’s heartbreaking. I think journalists, like you and others, can help people understand what’s at stake.

So, secondly, I would just add that we are living through a climate crisis and an extinction crisis, and this budget proposal is one of the worst attacks on the environment that we have seen in our lifetime. It would not only cause harm to our cherished landscapes, coastal waters and wildlife, but also to our public health, and our ability to recreate on our public lands across the country. So people want to know what they can do, and ultimately, people need to call their congressional representatives and tell them to vote no, to stop.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. They’re online at BiologicalDiversity.org. Thank you so much, Ashley Nunes, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AN: Thanks, Janine.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

“This bill will raise costs for consumers and folks in need, while destroying American innovation and lowering taxes for the already super rich,” said David Watkins, director of government affairs for the Climate and Energy Program at UCS. “Not only is this bill shockingly cruel in the depth of cuts it would impose, it shows the majority and president are totally cut off from reality. In their fantasy world, people deserve to fall through the massive holes cut in the U.S. social safety net, consumers should pay more for energy and transportation to support the oil and gas industries, and billionaires deserve lower taxes. In addition, Congress went out of its way to create a loophole by which the administration can target nonprofits the president doesn't like without due process—stunning and shameful.”

Below is information about the sections of the bill UCS analysts are following.

Energy sections of the bill, including those that would:

o Undermining the clean electricity tax credits threatens to send electricity prices soaring, severely slowing the deployment of the lowest-cost sources of electricity generation right as demand is expected to surge.

o Shifting eligibility to “placed in service” would further accelerate the credit phaseout and threaten to fully derail future projects.

Clean transportation sections of the bill, including those that would:

o While drivers can save hundreds of dollars a year in reduced fuel and maintenance costs by switching to electric, the upfront cost of electric cars and trucks can be a hurdle, which is why the tax credits were targeted to increase everyone’s accessibility to EVs.

o Lack of access to charging stations is cited as one of the most common barriers for drivers interested in switching to electric. Repealing this credit would only benefits the oil industry, at the expense of suppliers manufacturing the charging infrastructure, union workers installing and maintaining the chargers, and drivers and fleet operators looking to save money and clean the air by switching to electric.

o Eliminating the global warming pollution rules would increase fuel and maintenance costs for new vehicles by $6,000 over the life of the vehicles; rolling back the commonsense CAFE standards would increase fuel costs by $23 billion through 2050.

o The vehicles, vessels, and equipment that move freight create hot spots of some of the worst air quality in the country and contribute significantly to climate change. There is no safe level of soot to breathe, and despite making up a small fraction of vehicles on the road, heavy duty vehicles are disproportionately responsible for global warming emissions, soot and smog-forming pollution.

SNAP and ag sections of the bill, including the plan to:

Defense sections of the bill that would:

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

• Newsom budget plan would cap health program for undocumented Californians to help close $12 billion Trump Slump deficit
• Deadly Israeli air strikes continue in Gaza amid ceasefire talks in Doha
• Californians rally at hospitals across state to protest Medicaid cuts, Mayor Elect Barbara Lee joins rally at Oakland’s Highland Hospital
• SF workers rally against Mayor Lurie’s cuts to services
• Rashida Tlaib D-MI introduces resolution to recognize 77^th anniversary of Naqba expulsion of Palestinians
• Republican lawmakers propose measure to label as “terrorist” non-profits that oppose Trump policies

The post Newsom budget plan would cap health program for undocumented Californians; Deadly Israeli air strikes continue in Gaza amid ceasefire talks in Doha – May 14, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

“If it were signed into law, the legislation would allow this or any other administration to accuse any nonprofit it dislikes of supporting terrorism — putting the burden on the organization to prove otherwise, or risk losing its tax-exempt status. The bill would have a widespread chilling effect not only on nonprofit groups but on the millions of people across the United States who rely on these organizations to help them access crucial services and engage in the political process.

“The bill has dangerously broad statutory language that would allow the Trump administration to interpret its authority in any number of harmful ways. Every member of Congress must oppose handing such sweeping powers to an increasingly dictatorial executive. When H.R. 9495 came before Congress last year, tens of thousands of people picked up their phones or signed petitions to express deep concerns about this profoundly anti-democratic measure. People must again reach out to their elected representatives and senators and call out the massive potential for abuse before it’s too late.

“This measure’s real intent lurks behind its hyperbolic and unsubstantiated anti-terrorist rhetoric: It would allow the Treasury Department to explicitly target, harass and investigate thousands of U.S. organizations that make up civil society, including nonprofit newsrooms. The bill’s language lacks any meaningful safeguards against abuse. Instead it puts the burden of proof on organizations rather than on the government. It’s not hard to imagine how the Trump administration would use it to exact revenge on groups that have raised questions about or simply angered the president and other officials in his orbit.

“Chilling free speech doesn’t keep Americans safe. Instead it gives an authoritarian regime another tool to violate the rights that form the foundation of a healthy democracy.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

• A repeal of the Methane Emissions Reduction Program’s funding and the delay of the implementation of its Waste Emissions Charge for 10 years.
• A provision to allow methane gas export companies to pay a $1 million fee in exchange for LNG projects being automatically deemed in the public interest. LNG exports increase pollution and supercharge climate change while diminishing domestic energy supplies and raising prices for American consumers.
• Another provision to allow other gas infrastructure developers to receive an "expedited permitting process" from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under the Natural Gas Act if the applicant pays $10 million or 1 percent of the project's projected cost.
• $1.6B in cuts to the Department of Energy’s Industrial Demonstrations Program, Loans Program Office, and Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations — programs that help to decarbonize and innovate the heavily polluting industrial sector.
• Provisions to cut and repeal features of the federal Buy Clean Initiative, including environmental product declaration assistance and low-embodied carbon labeling to verify the cleanliness of innovative U.S. manufacturers.
• A provision to repeal and cut greenhouse gas corporate reporting, a critical tool to protect leading U.S. manufacturers from foreign carbon tariffs and encourage polluters to modernize.
• Repeal of EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which supports renewable energy projects in low-income communities.
• Cuts to programs that lower diesel emissions, reduce pollution at public and private ports, and support domestic electric vehicle manufacturing.
• And the repeal and rescinding of funding for environmental and climate justice block grants that provided financial and technical assistance to support community efforts to reduce pollution.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“Donald Trump ran for President on a promise to protect Social Security. This budget breaks that promise.

It keeps funding for the Social Security Administration (SSA) flat, which is a de-facto cut since SSA’s fixed costs, such as field office rents, go up every year by over $600 million.

Furthermore, it forces SSA to spend more money on so-called “program integrity” — clawing back money from Americans who have been overpaid through no fault of their own — which creates extreme hardship, including homelessness.

The truth is that Social Security is extremely understaffed, which is increasing backlogs and wait times. This budget will make those backlogs and delays worse. It will make mistakes — including the Orwellian nightmare of being inadvertently declared dead when you are not — harder to fix.

This budget’s cuts to Social Security are right in line with Elon Musk’s DOGE, which has pushed out over 7,000 SSA workers, including some of the most experienced and highly trained. Many Social Security field offices have lost half their staff, even as DOGE is forcing millions more people a year to visit those offices. What good are earned benefits that Americans can’t access?

Despite these massive cuts, as well as cuts to other essential programs like Meals on Wheels, the Trump administration continues to lie that it is protecting seniors and Social Security. No one should believe them.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“President Trump’s skinny budget cuts much of what helps poor, working-class and middle-class Americans, seemingly to pay for tax cuts for the rich. You can’t make this up.

“The draconian cuts to public education and lifesaving medical research and health agencies demonstrate a lack of care for Americans’ future and well-being.

“Our concern when the president started dismantling the Department of Education was not the bureaucracy but the funding. And now we know, he’s actually shortchanging kids. He would gut K-12 programs by $5.4 billion. Support for student aid would be slashed.

“Healthcare programs would be cut by more than a quarter and labor by more than one-third. And what he isn’t gutting he’s using to create a slush fund for state bureaucrats to do whatever they want with Title I money.

“Every president gets to pursue their agenda, but Trump’s budget proposal just strips away the supports children get in public schools across America, disproportionately in places that voted for him.

“Voters didn’t expect to lose their reading or after-school programs for a tax cut for the ultra wealthy. Meanwhile, Trump’s allies in Congress are trying to take an even bigger hatchet to critical supports for Americans—like healthcare, food assistance and education.

“We won’t stop fighting for America’s children, and we hope members of Congress will join us in opposing this proposal, which is a blatant attack on all of us.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Trump’s budget request puts a sledgehammer to the programs that millions of Americans rely on. It would cut nondefense discretionary spending by $174 billion, leaving it at the lowest level as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) on record. The proposed cuts are extreme by any standard, but they’re extreme even by Trump’s own standards. For comparison, in his skinny budget in 2017, Trump called to cut this category of funding by $54 billion. The cuts in this budget are especially egregious when you consider that Trump is also trying to push the largest Medicaid and food assistance cuts in American history through Congress over the next few months.

If it goes into effect, Trump’s budget proposal would make it much harder for Americans to cover basic needs such as child care and education—harming American households and leaving vulnerable families even worse off. Specifically, his budget request calls for enormous cuts to K-12 education and rental assistance as well as for the elimination of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps poor households heat their homes in the winter. Americans are not going to be better off by any means. Trump’s budget proposal will come at the expense of the American people.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Trump’s budget reinforces the Republican plan to reimagine government for the ultra-wealthy and special interests, as Republican lawmakers clear a path for tax cuts for themselves, their wealthy donors, and giant corporations.

“President Trump is again betraying the millions of Americans who believed him when he promised to lower costs. This time, he’s taking aim at anyone who attends a public school, relies on rental assistance to keep a roof over their heads, or accesses healthcare through Medicaid or Medicare. Instead of standing up for everyday Americans, Trump is prioritizing his own wallet and the tax benefits of his wealthy donors—leaving local communities and small towns to bear the brunt of his cuts.” —Accountable.US Executive Director Tony Carrk

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The Trump administration’s slashing of jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, then, is coming at a dangerous time, experts say, as the agency generates a stream of data essential to creating hurricane forecasting models. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has eliminated hundreds of positions at NOAA as part of Musk’s stated aim of cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget. Last week, news broke that the administration was proposing to cut NOAA’s overall budget by 25 percent, with plans to eliminate funding for the agency’s research arm. 

NOAA and its various divisions, like the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, are the ones collecting and processing the data that weather apps like AccuWeather use for their daily forecasts. Hurricane forecasters also rely on data coming from a range of government-owned instruments: real-time measurements of ocean temperatures from a network of buoys and satellites and wind speeds from weather balloons. Those readings help scientists predict what the conditions leading up to hurricane season might say about the number of storms that could arrive this summer and their potential intensity.

All those NOAA instruments require people to maintain them and others to process the data. Though Klotzbach says he hasn’t had any issues accessing the data when running his seasonal forecast model, scientists like him are worried that losing those agency staffers to cost-cutting efforts will disrupt the stream of information just as hurricane season is getting going. The National Weather Service is already reducing its number of weather balloon launches. And on Wednesday, the New York Times reported that due to severe shortages of meteorologists and other employees, the National Weather Service is preparing for fewer forecast updates. (The National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center did not return requests to comment for this story.)

The seasonal forecasts coming out now help to raise awareness in hurricane hotspots like the Gulf Coast, said Xubin Zeng, director of the Climate Dynamics and Hydrometeorology Center at the University of Arizona. But as the start of hurricane season approaches on June 1 and NOAA loses staff, researchers are worried that their shorter-term forecasts — the ones that alert the public to immediate dangers — could suffer, a result that would endanger American lives. 

“Now we are nervous if those data will be provided — and will be provided on time — from NOAA,” Zeng said. “We are thinking about what kind of backup plans we need to have for our early-June prediction.”

To make their predictions, researchers are looking in particular at three main ingredients that hurricanes need to grow large and strong: a hot ocean that acts as fuel, high humidity, and low vertical wind shear — basically, a lack of winds that would normally break up a storm. 

Getting that full picture is critical because hurricanes churn the ocean. Their winds push away the top layer of water, and deeper water rushes up to fill the void. If deeper water is colder, it can mix upward to cool the surface waters, removing the fuel that hurricanes feed on. By contrast, warmer waters from the deep might mix toward the surface, providing more storm fuel. Forecasters are predicting an above-average season this year because the Atlantic is already several degrees Fahrenheit warmer than usual.

Buoys provide a snapshot of this dynamic, measuring ocean temperatures, both for the conditions that give rise to hurricanes and the conditions that sustain them. “The buoys are critical for getting not only what’s going on with the ocean surface, but what’s going on deeper down in the ocean,” said Phil Klotzbach, a senior research scientist who oversees Colorado State University’s seasonal hurricane forecast. 

They also require maintenance if their instruments break. If forecasters lose access to that data, they can’t accurately predict the strength of a hurricane and where it will make landfall: They might alert local authorities that an incoming storm will be a Category 3, only for it to spin up into a much more dangerous Category 5. 

This is what’s known as rapid intensification, an increase in sustained wind speeds by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours. Last October, Hurricane Milton jumped 90 mph in a day before slamming into Florida. These rapid intensification events are happening much more frequently thanks to global warming heating up the oceans, and researchers are getting better at predicting them — thanks in no small part to NOAA’s data. 

Once a hurricane arrives, NOAA scrambles aircraft to take still more measurements, which helps improve forecasts of future storms. If Congress approves the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the agency, the Hurricane Research Division — which contributes crew to these “hurricane hunter” aircraft — would be shut down, according to Rick Spinrad, a former NOAA administrator. “Without the researchers being part of those flights,” Spinrad said, “the data they collect and contribute won’t be there anymore, and so the hurricane hunter efficiency goes down.”

While the Trump administration is slashing NOAA’s budget and staff ostensibly to save money, the agency actually saves Americans six dollars for every dollar invested in the agency, according to Justin Mankin, director of the Climate Modeling and Impacts Group at Dartmouth College. An accurate forecast can, for instance, help communities better prepare for extreme weather and mitigate any damage. Cutting jobs at NOAA, Mankin suspects, might be a step toward turning it into a for-profit entity, instead of one providing free data to hurricane researchers and the public at large. 

“The institutions that are being taken apart by DOGE have some of the highest credibility and return on investment of any in the government,” Mankin said. “The perverse thing that seems to be happening here is that this is about a systematic degradation of the quality of the science coming out of these institutions and about instilling a loss of confidence.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Scientists predict a brutal hurricane season while Trump takes aim at NOAA’s budget on Apr 17, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

As federal agencies face crippling cuts and are forced to cut essential services, President Trump has announced he will seek a $1 trillion budget for the Pentagon, a record-setting number that would mark the highest level of U.S. defense spending since World War II. William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, blasts the promised budget as “completely unnecessary” and says that “almost the only beneficiaries are going to be the weapons manufacturers.” Hartung also discusses the growing political influence of Silicon Valley defense technology startups, including Alex Karp’s Palantir and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

• Senate to vote Saturday on Republican budget measure, Dems plan amendments against “bailout for billionaires”
• Thousands expected to join Saturday march on Washington against Trump agenda, other rallies in Oakland, San Francisco and across nation
• UN blasts killings of 15 medics and aid workers in Gaza, apparently shot exection-style
• Supreme Court hears challenge to South Carolina plan to block Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood
• Myanmar earthquake amid civil war leads to calls for international action, UN calls for peace and international solidarity

The post Senate plans Saturday vote on Republican budget plan; Thousands expected at Saturday rallies against Trump agenda – April 4, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Overall, Australia announced A$5.1 billion (US$3.2 billion) for foreign aid in the 2025-26 budget released Tuesday, a 2.7% increase on the previous year, but about flat in real terms.

Pacific island nations were allocated A$2.157 billion, up from A$2.05 billion for the 2024-25 financial year, budget documents show.

The region now accounts for about 42% of Australian aid, almost doubling from a decade ago and making it the Pacific’s biggest donor, partly in response to China’s inroads with Pacific island states.

In a statement Tuesday, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said in “uncertain times” Australian aid was going to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, “where Australia’s interests are most at stake.”

(Dave Hunt/Reuters)

In the Pacific, the largest aid increases are directed towards the Federated States of Micronesia and Tonga, the latter of which will receive A$85 million over the next four years to support its economy.

Tonga’s small and fragile economy is under strain amid looming debt repayment obligations to China of about US$120 million, which is roughly a quarter of its gross domestic product, according to a Lowy Institute analysis.

Assistance to Tonga is part of a broader A$296 million package for Pacific island nations to respond to shocks and bolster economic resilience. A total of A$355 million will also be provided over four years for climate resilience projects in Pacific and Southeast Asian countries.

Australia will spend about A$81 million over three years on health in the Pacific and Southeast Asia to continue services for HIV and tuberculosis, maternal and child health, family planning and sexual and reproductive health.

The announcement comes amid widespread fears that U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order in January to freeze almost all U.S. foreign aid would wind back progress made in containing deadly diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV.

“TB and HIV programs in PNG and Fiji might be affected by the U.S. cuts,” said Cameron Hill, a senior research officer at Australian National University’s Development Policy Center.

“That is an area where I think the government is concentrating some effort and also some civil society programs in the Pacific ... which aren’t big in dollar terms, but the U.S. has traditionally played a big role in those,” he said at a panel Wednesday on the budget’s aid component.

(LSIS Jarrod Mulvihill/Australian Defence Force)

Hill said about A$120 million, or about 2.3% of aid spending, had been reprioritized in 2025-26 away from multilateral and global programs.

The “unprecedented divergence between defense and development spending is still growing” and will likely rise to a ratio of about 13:1 by the end of the decade, he said.

Canberra announced last year it will spend an additional A$50.3 billion on defense over the next decade.

Australia’s aid budget has held relatively steady amid a global retreat in foreign development assistance, led by the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Trump on Jan. 20 ordered a 90-day program-by-program review of which foreign assistance programs deserved to continue.

Robin Davies, an honorary professor at the Development Policy Center, said about 10 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries –including the three largest the U.S., Germany and Britain — have announced significant cuts to foreign aid over the past year.

He estimated that anywhere from a third to a half of existing aid from OECD sources might disappear within the next few years.

“I think the real impact in our region of the U.S. cuts will be through the weakening of multilateral organisations that we really want to remain in places like Suva, Port Moresby or Jakarta,” he said at the panel discussion.

(LSIS Daniel Goodman/Australian Department of Defence)

Total American aid spending reached US$3.4 billion in the Pacific between 2008-22, according to the Lowy Institute, with most money directed towards the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau.

The three Pacific Island countries give the U.S. exclusive military authority in their territories in exchange for economic assistance under compacts of free association.

“About 80% of American aid to the Pacific goes to those three countries, and it is still unclear what shape that compact assistance will take in the future,” said Hill.

“The Biden administration signed last year new 20-year compact agreements, but it’s not clear whether the Trump administration will honor those or the new congress will honor those.”

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Harry Pearl for BenarNews.

Myanmar’s junta chief said the military would increase the defense budget, while seeking to expand his international presence with a reported plan to join a regional summit in Thailand next month.

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing announced on Monday that the junta would increase the budget for its defense ministry to “enhance the strength and capacity of defense forces” as well as to “maintain peace and stability.” He did not provide specific figures.

Since the 2021 coup, the junta has tripled its defense budget from 1.746 trillion kyats to 5.635 trillion kyats (US$2.68 billion) by 2023, according to media reports, accounting for about a quarter of the government’s total spending. The military has also invested over US$1 billion in weapons, primarily from Russia, China, Singapore, India and Thailand.

Despite bolstering its capabilities, the junta faces intense international criticism for human rights violations, including indiscriminate attacks and mass detentions, leading to accusations of war crimes and increasing global isolation.

Min Aung Hlaing has been also sanctioned by multiple countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union’s 27 member states.

These sanctions include asset freezes, travel bans, and prohibitions on transactions, aimed at holding him accountable for human rights violations and the military’s seizure of power.

However, Min Aung Hlaing appears to be attempting to reshape his international standing, as media reports indicate that he plans to participate in a regional summit in Bangkok next week – marking his first visit to Thailand.

According to Thai media outlet ThaiPBS on Monday, Min Aung Hlaing is scheduled to visit Bangkok from April 3 to 4 to attend the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, or BIMSTEC, summit. The summit is expected to be attended by heads of state from member countries, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

BIMSTEC is a regional cooperation organization established in 1997, comprising seven countries bordering the Bay of Bengal: India, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan.

Min Aung Hlaing also recently visited Russia and Belarus, where he held meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Separately, he attended the Mekong River Basin Summit held in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China, in November – marking his first visit to China since the coup.

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Assaults in northern Myanmar

As the junta leader looks abroad for support for his unelected government and approval for elections he plans to hold by January, his military’s attacks on pro-democracy forces and ethnic armies fighting for autonomy continue in an indiscriminate and brutal fashion.

A resident from Mandalay’s Natogyi township said that junta forces bombed two villages around 1 a.m. on Sunday morning, injuring two women and six men, including a 13-year-old child.

Insurgent groups, which retain control over much of the township, have seen a resurgence in junta offensives, following a series of failed ceasefires between the junta and rebel militias in the country’s north.

“They were all just civilians, Although most were people avoiding conflict, there were those who couldn’t avoid it and were stuck in Let Wea and Myinni villages,” said the resident, who declined to be named over security concerns. “When the bomb fell, they ran but they didn’t get away.”

(Natogyi Journal)

A 65-year-old man was severely injured, and over 10 houses were destroyed by the blast, he added.

Most residents from the two villages were sheltering in nearby mountains, but about a third had chosen to remain in their homes, residents said.

Junta spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Htun has declined to comment.

According to data compiled by RFA, 3,554 people have been killed by junta-led attacks since the coup began in February 2021, and another 7,064 have been injured.

Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

Image by Getty and Unsplash+.

America’s military budget is more than just numbers on a page—it’s a reflection of the priorities that shape our society. Right now, that nearly trillion dollar budget is bloated, inefficient, and far removed from the needs of everyday Americans. We’ve identified six simple yet effective ways to cut at least $100 billion from the Pentagon’s budget—without sacrificing even the most hawkish of war hawk’s sense of national security. Ready to take the scissors to that excess spending? Here’s how we can do it.

1. Halt the F-35 Program (Save $12B+ per year)

The F-35 is the poster child for military mismanagement. It’s a fighter jet that was supposed to revolutionize our military—except it’s plagued by cost overruns, delays, and underperformance. Despite a projected lifetime cost of over $2 trillion, this aircraft only meets mission requirements about 30% of the time. If we ended or paused the F-35 program now, we’d free up $12 billion annually. The military-industrial complex can afford a few less fancy jets that destroy land and lives, especially when they don’t even do their job right.

2. Reassess Long-Range Missile Defense (Save $9.3B+ per year)

For over half a century, we’ve sunk an eye-watering $400 billion into long-range missile defense systems that have never delivered. The cold, hard truth is these systems are ineffective against real-world threats. In fact, no missile defense technology has ever proven capable of neutralizing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. Cutting back on these programs would save us $9.3 billion per year—money that could be better spent on diplomacy initiatives that actually work.

3. Cut the Sentinel ICBM Program (Save $3.7B+ per year)

ICBMs were once the crown jewels of our nuclear deterrence strategy, but they’re outdated in today’s geopolitical climate. With more reliable and flexible platforms like submarines, bombers, and emerging hypersonic technologies, maintaining an expensive, high-risk ICBM arsenal makes little sense. Ending the Sentinel ICBM program would save taxpayers $3.7 billion annually, and even more in the long run, with total savings over its lifespan estimated at $310 billion. It’s time to face facts: we don’t need to keep pouring money into a strategy that no longer aligns with modern defense needs. Especially when the best nuclear deterrence system is ending nuclear weapons programs to begin with.

4. Cease Procurement of Aircraft Carriers (Save $2.3B+ per year)

Aircraft carriers are relics of a bygone era, costing billions to build and maintain, while becoming increasingly vulnerable to modern missile technology. These floating cities are no longer the symbols of naval power they once were. By halting new aircraft carrier procurements, we can save $2.3 billion a year—money that could be better allocated to ways that actually keep us safe in the 21st century like housing, healthcare or climate justice.

5. Cut Redundant Contracts by 15% (Save $26B per year)

The Pentagon’s bureaucracy is a cash cow for contractors—more than 500,000 private sector workers are paid to do redundant and often wasteful work. Many contracts overlap or go toward projects that are, frankly, unnecessary. Cutting back just 15% on these contracts would save $26 billion annually. That’s a massive chunk of change that could be reallocated to more efficient and effective defense projects. Want a starting point? Look no further than SpaceX’s lucrative contracts—it’s time we hold these companies accountable.Maybe DOGE knows a guy there?

6. Prioritize Diplomacy (Save $50B+ per year)

The best way to avoid unnecessary military spending is to prevent conflicts from happening in the first place. By focusing on diplomatic solutions instead of military interventions, we can scale back expensive overseas bases, reduce troop deployments, and use reserves and National Guard units more effectively. This shift could save up to $50 billion a year—and possibly as much as $100 billion in the long term. It’s about time we put our resources into creating peaceful solutions rather than preparing for endless wars.

What Could We Do with the $100 Billion in Savings?

The possibilities are endless when we take a more practical approach to national security spending. What could we do with the $100 billion we save? Here’s a snapshot of just some of the incredible investments we could make in American society:

787,255 Registered Nurses: Filling critical healthcare gaps nationwide.

10.39 million Public Housing Units: Making affordable housing a reality for families across the country.

2.29 million Jobs at $15/hour: Providing good jobs with benefits, boosting the economy.

1.03 million Elementary School Teachers: Giving our children the education they deserve.

579,999 Clean Energy Jobs: Building a sustainable, green future for the next generation.

7.81 million Head Start Slots: Giving young children a foundation for lifelong success.

5.88 million Military Veterans receiving VA medical care: Ensuring those who served our country receive the care they earned.

The Bottom Line?

Cutting $100 billion from the Pentagon budget isn’t just a pipe dream—it’s a tangible, achievable plan that could deliver real benefits to everyday Americans. While it’s just a starting point, this reduction would allow us to prioritize what truly matters: healthcare, education, infrastructure, and the well-being of our people. If we’re going to spend taxpayer dollars, let’s make sure they go toward initiatives that directly benefit the lives of the citizens who fund them.

The post Dear DOGE: Here’s how to Cut the Pentagon Budget by $100 Billion in 6 Easy Steps appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melissa Garriga.

Donald Trump is back in office. Tech mogul Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to the president, is helming a government advisory body with an acronym derived from a memecoin: DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). That organization is sinking its teeth into the federal government, and drawing blood.

Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of federal employees are being laid off this year. Over a dozen agencies have been affected. Executive power is being wielded so wildly that a federal judge has lamented “what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.”

The Fourth Estate is tasked with serving as a check on abuses of power. But US media were not designed for this.

Though critical in much of their reporting, corporate outlets have at the same time substantially legitimized the project of DOGE. For one, longstanding fearmongering about government spending in the news sections of corporate outlets has elevated precisely the right-wing vision of government animating DOGE.

Even more worryingly, however, criticism of DOGE by major editorial boards has been weak, and in some cases has been overshadowed by these boards’ support for the ideas behind DOGE, or even for DOGE itself.

Government spending ‘skyrocketed’

The New York Times (1/30/25) claims “even progressives now worry about the federal debt”—though an extensive recent analysis (PERI, 4/20) of the impact of debt by progressive economists found that “the relationship between government debt and economic growth is essentially zero.”

Corporate media’s ever-present fearmongering about spending is well-illustrated by the New York Times, which, within a week and a half of Trump’s inauguration, had already run the headline: “Even Progressives Now Worry About the Federal Debt” (1/30/25). The next day, the paper ran a separate article (1/31/25) by Michael Shear, which stated:

The amount of money the government spends has skyrocketed under Democratic and Republican presidents. Total federal spending in 2015 was $4.89 trillion, according to federal data. In 2024, it was $6.75 trillion. Even when accounting for the growth of the overall economy, spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was higher in 2024 than it was eight years earlier.

The paragraph at least avoided the classic tactic of throwing out raw numbers without giving any sort of metric, like GDP, to measure them against. But it nonetheless gave far from the full picture, not even offering numbers for spending as a percentage of GDP, which showed a minor increase of 3 percentage points over this period, to 23%—the same percentage that was spent in 2011.

Even more useful to include than this data, however, would have been international data showing how much the US spends in comparison to other rich countries. As it turns out, the answer is: quite little. And the US taxes even less.

Readers might also be interested to learn that tax cuts, not spending increases, have been primarily responsible for increases in the US’s debt-to-GDP ratio in recent decades, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (3/27/23). The group emphasized: “Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.” Given that reality, CAP concluded:

If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.

Federal outlays as a percentage of GDP have been nearly constant for the past 75 years (FRED).

‘The big areas of the budget’

The New York Times‘ Michael Shear (1/31/25) wrote that Trump was attempting “to somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.”

If corporate media like the New York Times were serious about informing readers about the causes of and answers to high government debt, they would, like CAP, debunk right-wing deficit hawk propaganda, rather than reinforce it.

Instead, the Times‘ Shear (1/31/25) decided to provide his readers with extensive quotation from Maya MacGuineas, an extreme deficit hawk who got an early boost in her career “from the patronage of billionaire investment banker and arch-austerian Pete Peterson,” as the New Republic (3/4/21) recounted in a 2021 piece. Shear merely described her as “the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.”

MacGuineas is the only expert Shear cites in the piece, and the article closes with her warning that Musk’s cuts “would not be enough to confront the nation’s burgeoning debt from spending too much over many decades.” “To make a real impact on the debt,” MacGuineas said:

We are going to have to look at the big areas of the budget for savings—Social Security, healthcare and revenues—the very same areas both political parties are tripping over themselves not to address.

The decision to include only an austerity advocate, and to allow her proclamation about the need for cuts to Social Security to end the piece, inevitably grants legitimacy to her claims. These claims are at the very least meant to be taken seriously, even more so since they come from a supposedly independent expert rather than a politician or government official. The decision to include no left-wing expert has a similar effect in reverse.

Meanwhile, in the paper’s piece (1/30/25) from the previous day about “progressive worry,” reporter Lydia DePillis managed to bury the key point in the 21st paragraph:

But mostly, Democrats say, the government simply needs more revenue to support the increasing number of people who are becoming eligible for retirement benefits.

Debt-scolding reporting

The Washington Post (10/8/24) sounds the alarm over the United States having a debt-to-GDP ratio similar to that of Britain, France and Canada—and much lower than Japan’s.

The Times is hardly the only outlet to legitimize alarmism about government spending. In a debt-scolding piece of reporting from last fall, the Washington Post (10/8/24) hammered on the point that runaway spending should be a major concern.

The choice of headline, “US Deficit Hits $1.8 Trillion as Interest Costs Rise,” immediately linked debt concerns to spending, not taxes. The first paragraph described the $1.8 trillion figure as “an enormous sum”—probably equally applicable to any sum over a billion dollars in the average American’s mind—while the fourth paragraph warned:

The nation’s debt compared with the size of the overall economy, a key metric of fiscal stability, is projected to exceed its all-time high of 106% by 2027.

Once again, international comparison would have been helpful here. It could be noted that the US, in fact, has a rather typical amount of debt compared to many other rich countries these days, with Britain, Canada, Spain, France and Italy all posting similar debt-to-GDP numbers. Greece, meanwhile, has a debt-to-GDP ratio close to 170%, while Japan boasts a ratio of around 250%. As Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has noted:

If these countries can sustain debt levels 50–150% higher than our current levels, then the question of whether we can do so has already been answered. Indeed, it does not even need to be asked.

The Post, evidently, had no interest in providing such context. No international figures were cited. Instead, the next lines were a quote from a conservative economist:

A [nearly] $2 trillion deficit is bad news during a recession and war, but completely unprecedented during peace and prosperity…. The danger is the deficit will only get bigger over the next decade due to retiring baby boomers and interest on the debt.

Notice once more the linking of the increase in debt to spending rather than tax cuts.

The ‘soaring’ debt that wasn’t

The federal debt the Wall Street Journal (9/16/24) claimed was “soaring” was a smaller percentage of GDP in 2024 than in 2020.

The piece continued on to cite deficit hawk MacGuineas—described as the president of “a top Washington fiscal watchdog”—denouncing the “patchwork of targeted fiscal bribes” being offered to voters by the presidential candidates. And it ended with a quote from “president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and a former CBO director” Doug Holtz-Eakin, reminding us that debt servicing costs will have to be paid and will crowd out other spending priorities.

Unmentioned by the Post is that Holtz-Eakin held high posts in the George W. Bush administration and the John McCain presidential campaign. He also oversaw the creation of an infamous bogus cost estimate for the Green New Deal. Yet the Post portrays him as just an expert who leans a bit to the right.

Though the Post consulted three right-wing sources, they failed to include a single left-leaning independent expert. It’s not hard to understand how that fails readers, or how it legitimizes a certain set of priorities, while suggesting other views lack credibility.

The Wall Street Journal, for its part, has been more than happy to join the general fretting in corporate media about government spending. Back in the fall, for instance, a piece in its news section (9/16/24) complained that the presidential race was not focusing sufficiently on the issue of rising government debt, and flagged Social Security and Medicare as “the biggest drivers of rising spending.” The headline read: “Federal Debt Is Soaring. Here’s Why Trump and Harris Aren’t Talking About It.”

The problem with that headline? In the fall of 2024, federal debt was decidedly not soaring. This holds whether you look at federal debt in nominal dollar terms or as a percentage of GDP. Federal debt had “soared” briefly in 2020, when the Covid recession hit and the government rapidly expanded its spending to deal with the downturn. But for most of 2024, the quarterly percentage increase in the federal debt in dollar terms was actually below the historical average going back to 1970. And the debt-to-GDP ratio was at roughly the same spot as it had been three-and-a-half years earlier, at the start of Biden’s presidency.

‘Shutting off the lights’

For the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25), refusing to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “is like saying you want to go on a diet except for the beer, chips and ice cream sundaes.”

Even more concerning than corporate media’s penchant for running articles in the news section fearmongering about government spending, though, is what has been going on in corporate outlets’ opinion sections, specifically with the output of their editorial boards. Here, the legitimization of DOGE has reached its highest heights.

Unsurprisingly, the unabashedly right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board has been the prime offender. Most recently, it published an editorial (3/14/25) with the headline “Don’t Cry for the Education Department,” applauding the unconstitutional DOGE-led attack on the Education Department, which the Journal chastened for “harassing schools, states and districts with progressive diktats on everything from transgender bathroom use to Covid-19 mask rules.”

The final paragraph began: “The closer Mr. Trump can get to shutting off the lights at the Education Department, the better.”

This was just one of numerous Journal editorials in recent weeks cheering on the DOGE project. A sampling of other editorials:

• “Hurricane Musk and the USAID Panic” (2/4/25) argued that Musk should be contained, but that he is “also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the US Agency for International Development.”
• “The Federal Spending Boom Rolls On” (2/10/25) declared that “DOGE is a good idea,” and claimed that it had not gone far enough: “But for all of Mr. Musk’s frenetic tweeting, and the Beltway cries of Apocalypse Now, so far DOGE is only nibbling at the edges of Washington’s spending problem.”
• “Judge Wants DOGE Facts, Not Fears” (2/19/25) ended, “Democrats hunting for a constitutional crisis might want to show evidence before they cry ‘dictator.’”

In short, then, the Journal editorial board not only approves of a rogue pseudo-agency operating with no transparency or oversight, but has become a crusader in defense of DOGE’s attacks on constitutional checks and balances—which grant Congress, not a right-wing ideologue from the PayPal Mafia, the power of the purse.

Of course, you can expect little else from the Journal than salivation over cuts to federal spending—it has long been the lapdog of right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch. But it is jarring to witness exactly how rabid the Journal editorial board can be.

Not ‘audacious’ enough

The Washington Post says it’s “true that the $36 trillion national debt is unsustainable and there’s plenty of bloat in government.”

For its part, the Washington Post editorial board, while describing DOGE as a “circus” (2/24/25), has substantially legitimized DOGE’s mission.

An editorial (2/7/25) from early February is case in point. Headlined “Trump Needs to Erect Guardrails for DOGE,” the piece offered five ways for Trump to “be clear about who is boss,” effectively endorsing the mission of slashing government spending while expressing concern over some of Musk’s tactics.

The first four proposed guardrails in the piece, which include “Vet Musk’s operatives” and “Limit Musk’s access to sensitive files,” are all reasonable, but the fifth proposal reveals the board’s substantive concerns about the spending cuts being executed by DOGE. These concerns are not about whether cuts should be made—it is taken for granted that government spending should be reduced. Rather, they have to do with which spending is cut, aligning with the concerns raised by the Wall Street Journal about DOGE not going far enough.

This proposal, labeled “Focus on the biggest drivers of the national debt,” read:

To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts, Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent. Other sensitive areas of the balance sheet, including the Pentagon budget and veterans’ benefits, cannot stay off the table forever.

For the Post, then, the focus on programs such as USAID is simply too limited. We must put Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits on the table!

‘Embrace the same thinking’

The “DOGE ethos,” according to the Washington Post (3/3/25), means making “governments leaner and more efficient.”

The Washington Post’s preference for substantial cuts to federal government is further illustrated by an editorial (3/3/25) published in early March, following Jeff Bezos’s rebranding of the Post as Wall Street Journal–lite.

The editorial, titled “The DOGE Ethos Comes to State Governments,” showered praise on state governments that are capitalizing on DOGE branding while pursuing a more “thoughtful” approach to reducing government spending.

The piece favorably cited Washington state Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson’s insistence that “I’m not here to defend government…. I’m here to reform it.” The board elaborated:

Democrats in DC ought to embrace the same thinking. It’s foolish to defend a status quo that most voters think doesn’t work well. By fighting Trump and Musk tooth and nail, at the expense of presenting an alternative vision, the opposition risks appearing overly keen to protect hidebound institutions even as the world changes rapidly.

The Post’s take on DOGE? Let’s not center its blatant illegality. Let’s instead focus on what we can learn from it. After all, with a few minor tweaks, it’s exactly what we as a country need.

‘A great American success story’

New York Times says of Elon Musk, “he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.” But he’s going about it the wrong way.

The appallingly low bar set by the competition leaves the New York Times to assume the role of the major national newspaper that will seriously attack DOGE. It takes to this role…poorly.

The Times editorial board’s pushback against DOGE has been embarrassingly feeble. Its most direct assessment of DOGE thus far (3/8/25), for instance, began with an uncomfortably obsequious description of Musk:

Elon Musk’s life is a great American success story. Time and again, he has anticipated where the world was headed, helping to create not just new products but new industries.

The board quickly conceded a major point to Musk:

Mr. Musk claims that the government is a business in need of disruption and that his goal is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency. And he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient.

The editorial went on to make a number of criticisms of DOGE, but its critique was undermined by this odd willingness to bend over backwards to appease Musk and his supporters.

Meanwhile, though sharply critical of DOGE’s disregard for the Constitution, the editorial made no attempt at presenting a counter-vision of government. It lamented cuts to a hodgepodge of specific government programs, but it had nothing to say in defense of current levels of government spending, let alone in favor of even higher levels of spending. One would hardly know that many wealthy countries have significantly higher levels of government spending and happier populations—in fact, at least 16 OECD countries register both higher spending and higher happiness than the US.

A gaping hole

This, then, is the state of American corporate media at the start of the Trump presidency. Across arguably the three most important national newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal—there is broad agreement that government spending is out of control and that something, perhaps something drastic, needs to be done about it.

Even at the leftmost of these organizations, the New York Times, the editorial board appears incapable of mounting a case for social democratic levels of government spending in the face of extreme attacks on spending by the Trump administration. The Times, instead, finds itself caught between bowing before the titans of American capitalism and confronting their disregard for the US Constitution.

The Washington Post has been able to adopt a somewhat less tortured position, occupying the center/center-right in a way reminiscent of 1990s Democrats, supporting cuts to government, but in a “thoughtful” way.

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, is having the time of its life. Finding itself once again in an era when greed and meanness animate the daily actions of government, it must feel freer than it has in years to bare its teeth at the true enemies of the American republic: teachers’ unions and recipients of government aid.

News consumers have no major paper espousing a truly progressive perspective. On the topic of government spending, at least, the window of acceptable thought appears to span from the center to the far right. There is no direct marketing reason for this—there’s a sizeable audience in the US that would welcome a progressive outlet, the same way there’s a sizeable audience for right-wing outlets like the Wall Street Journal or Fox News.

Who doesn’t want such an outlet to appear? Ultra-wealthy right-wing Americans of the sort that own and sponsor much of the media landscape. If wealthy people aren’t willing to finance a progressive media outlet that can compete with major papers, it seems that such an outlet simply won’t exist. Crowdfunding could help progressive media overcome this issue, but the playing field is not level.

As it stands, a major progressive outlet that can compete with the existing dominant players does not exist, and does not seem to be coming anytime soon. The gaping hole left as a result is becoming only more apparent as we speed into Trump administration 2.0.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Conor Smyth.

In its March 12 decision, the HAAC also withdrew Benin Web TV director Paul Arnaud Deguenon’s press card over his outlet’s January 21 and 23 reporting that said the HAAC presented “erroneous” figures to parliament’s budget committee and its president demanded a new official car. 

“The media regulator should allow Bénin Web TV and journalist Paul Arnaud Deguenon to resume reporting,” said Moussa Ngom, CPJ’s Francophone Africa representative. “Benin’s High Authority for Audiovisual and Communication should respect journalists’ right to question the management of public funds, instead of punishing Bénin Web TV for scrutinizing the regulator’s finances.”

Deguenon attended a public hearing at HAAC’s offices on March 11 where he was ordered to publish an apology as the regulator said the journalist failed to provide evidence to support his outlet’s allegations.

In response, Bénin Web TV said that its journalism was based on facts and precise terms, with no desire to harm the HAAC. The media outlet published three letters from the HAAC and Deguenon’s responses, explaining that its reporting was based on the HAAC’s own 2025 budget presentation and public statement.

In its decision, the HAAC said that “Deguenon reoffended on the same day in his baseless accusations” and had “sharply attacked” the regulator.

The HAAC’s indefinite suspension of Benin Web TV appears to contravene its 2023 authorizationof the outlet’s operations, which specifies that suspensions for noncompliance with a formal regulatory notice may not exceed one month.

In January, the HAAC suspended six outlets and withdrew a press card for one of the outlet’s journalists, accusing them of publishing false allegations, without specifying, and of running unauthorized websites. The HAAC has not reversed the order.

CPJ’s calls to the HAAC to request comment were not answered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The letter states, in part:

Musk and Trump are illegally dismantling critical agencies and programs that protect workers, our environment and the economy, while ignoring Congress in the process. We call on you to take a strong public stance and rally the Senate to reject any spending bill that allows this lawlessness to continue… We call on you to withhold all votes for any spending bill until this stops.

“Musk and Trump are in the middle of executing an illegal partial government shutdown. Democrats must not vote for any spending bill that doesn’t address this,” said Mary Grant, water program director at Food & Water Watch. “Approving the budget bill passed in the House is an invitation for Musk and Trump to continue their efforts to shut down and eliminate key government functions that protect people’s food, water, health, and pocketbooks. Senator Schumer and Democrats in the Senate should stand strong and oppose this dangerous bill.”

Notably, the Republican spending measure eliminates Congressionally-directed spending for clean water projects. It zeros out the $1.4 billion in earmarked funding through the EPA’s State Revolving Fund (SRF) programs, and $117 million through USDA’s Rural Water and Waste Disposal assistance program. While the overall funding levels for the SRF programs are unaffected, he rural water program is reduced by the amount of the earmarked projects, amounting to a 20 percent cut in funding for rural water and wastewater projects.

The proposal would cut USDA’s Watershed and Flood Prevention Operations by 58 percent by zeroing out $20 million in earmarked projects, and it eliminates $39 million in EPA’s State and Tribal Assistance Grants that were previously earmarked for remediation and environmental management activities. It would also cut USDA’s Conservation by $19 million and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) by $14 million.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ANALYSIS: By Peter Davis

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ANALYSIS: By Peter Davis

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ANALYSIS: By Peter Davis

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

60% of U.S. military expenses get paid out from the Defense Department (the Pentagon), which is the only U.S. federal Department that has never passed an audit — never been audited — and is also the only federal Department that pays America’s military-weapons manufacturers, such as Lockheed Martin — the companies that depend mainly or even entirely on purchases by the federal Government. The Trump Administration has decided not to cut that Department’s budget, and might even increase it. The details, so far as they are yet known, were first published, on February 28, by In These Times magazine, in an article by Stephen Semler and Sarah Lazare, titled “As Trump and Musk slash social spending, military spending is set to soar.” An excellent article explaining this in a broader context than merely that Department’s budget was then published on March 2nd by the Naked Capitalism site, and headlined “The Empire Rebrands,” by Conor Gallagher.

Already, U.S. military expenses (including from all federal Departments) amount to 65% of the entire world’s military expenses; and yet, as-of 24 October 2024, the most-respected international ranking of nations’ militaries, the one in U.S. News & World Report, rated the top three in order, as: #1. Russia, #2. U.S., and #3. China. A lower-regarded ranking, by  “Global Firepower,” ranked: #1. U.S., #2. Russia, and #3. China. The site “Military Empires: A Visual Guide to Foreign Bases,” as-of 30 October 2024, showed the nations with the largest number of foreign military bases, as being #1. U.S., with 917 foreign military bases; #2. Turkiye, with 128; #3. UK, with 117; and #4. Russia, with 58. China was #10, with 6. (Numbers 5-9 were: India, Iran, France, and UAE.) However, the U.S. is overwhelmingly the most powerful empire, because right after FDR’s death on 12 April 1945, when Truman took over, the U.S. — which had entered WW2 the last of the major world powers and therefore suffered the lowest casualties and least destruction from it — was the only nation that had the assets by which to establish the post-WW2 international order, and did that for his imperialistic purposes, exactly contrary to FDR’s plan, as a consequence of which, the U.S. Government still controls the IMF, World Bank, and many other international institutions, and dominates even the U.N. (which FDR invented and was developing his plan for, but Truman mainly controled the writing of the U.N.’s Charter). So, most of America’s power doesn’t come from its military — which is America’s most-corrupt federal Department. The main purpose of the U.S. Government today is to boost its stock-markets, which are overwhelmingly controlled by its billionaires, and “93% of U.S. households’ stock market wealth (not 93% of the stock market) is held by the wealthiest 10% of those households.” So, this Government’s top concern is to pay-off the political high-donors and especially the mega-donors (all of whom are billionaires). It is a sophisticated type of bribery-operation. And by far the most lucrative segement of the U.S. stock markets is its “Defense and Aerospace” segment (that being the segment which sells to the Government instead of to the public — so, the U.S. Government is the main benefctor to America’s billionaires, and they know this). (For example: Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post headlined on February 26, “Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding: Government infusions at key moments helped Tesla and SpaceX flourish, boosting Musk’s wealth.” And on 25 March 2018, I reported that “since 2014, Amazon Web Services has supplied to the U.S. Government (CIA, Pentagon, NSA, etc.) its cloud-computing services, which has since produced virtually all of Amazon’s profits (also see “Cloud Business Drives Amazon’s Profits”), though Amazon doesn’t even so much as show up on that list of 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government; so, this extremely profitable business is more important to Jeff Bezos (the owner also of the Washington Post) than all the rest of his investments put together are.” This is called “neo-liberalism” or “libertarianism” but by any name means “Let the wealth rule, NOT the people rule.” It is the reigning principle in the U.S. empire.

On February 25, I reported that:

On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

An important point to be made here is that both #s 4&5, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid, are “discretionary federal spending” (i.e., controlled by the annual appropriations that get voted into law each year), whereas #s 1&2 (Social Security and Medicare) are “mandatory federal spending” (i.e., NOT controlled by Congress and the President). So, Trump and the Republicans are going after the poor because they CAN; they can’t (at least as-of YET) reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, by now, it is crystal clear that Trump’s Presidency will be an enormous boon to America’s billionaires, and an enormous bane to the nation’s poor. The aristocratic ideology has always been: to get rid of poverty, we must get rid of the poor — work them so hard they will go away (let them seek ‘refugee’ status SOMEWHERE ELSE).

This is an excellent example of a libertarian (or neo-liberal) Government.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

As China announced its defense budget on Wednesday, Premier Li Qiang reiterated “strong opposition” to those who push for Taiwan’s formal independence and their foreign supporters.

China has ramped up military activities around self-governed, democratic Taiwan, conducting frequent air and naval incursions into the island’s air defense identification zone and staging large-scale drills near its waters. Beijing views Taiwan as an inseparable part of its territory and insists on eventual reunification, by force if necessary.

The 7.2% increase, announced at the National People’s Congress, the annual meeting of China’s legislature, matches last year’s rate but remains significantly lower than the double-digit rises seen in previous years, reflecting an economic slowdown.

Analysts say actual military spending could be at least 40% higher due to expenditures hidden in other budgets.

China’s leadership has set a target for overall economic growth of around 5% for the year.

Since Xi Jinping became president more than a decade ago, the defense budget has ballooned to 1.78 trillion yuan (US$246 billion) from 720 billion yuan in 2013.

Xi aims to complete full military modernisation by 2035, with China’s military developing new missiles, ships, submarines and surveillance technologies.

Its military spending remains the second largest behind the U.S. and it already has the world’s largest navy.

‘Strong opposition’ to Taiwan independence

China announced the new military budget just days after sending dozens of aircraft into territory near Taiwan and briefly setting up a live-fire zone close to the island.

In his comments at the Congress, Premier Li told the nearly 3,000 party loyalists that China still preferred a peaceful solution to the Taiwan issue, but “resolutely opposes” those pushing for Taiwan’s formal independence and their foreign supporters.

“We will firmly advance the cause of China’s reunification and work with our fellow Chinese in Taiwan to realize the glorious cause of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” Li said.

(Tingshu Wan/Reuters)

Li’s remarks came a day after U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee for a top Pentagon post said Taiwan needed to increase its defense spending to about 10% of its gross domestic product to deter a war with China.

Elbridge Colby, the nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy, told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that Taiwan’s current level of defense spending was “well below 3%” and therefore far too low.

“They should be more like 10%, or at least something in that ballpark, really focused on their defense,” said Colby.

Taiwan’s Cabinet had earmarked $647 billion New Taiwan dollars (US$20 billion) for defense spending in 2025, equal to 2.45% of its GDP.

President Lai Ching-te later pledged to propose a special budget to raise defense spending to more than 3% of GDP, though that, too, would require legislative approval.

Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. is committed to assisting Taiwan to defend itself but it has long maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on whether it would intervene militarily to protect Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.

“Taiwan’s fall [to China] would be a disaster for American interests,” said Colby, explaining that he was trying to draw attention to the fact that the military balance vis-à-vis China has “deteriorated dramatically.”

“What I have been trying to do is shoot a signal flare that it is vital to enable U.S. forces for an ‘effective and reasonable’ defense of Taiwan, and for the Taiwanese and Japanese to do more,” he added.

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In response to Colby’s remarks, Taiwan’s defence ministry referred to Lai’s announcement of “a significant increase in the defense budget.”

“Taiwan’s military’s force modernization plans are based on careful assessments of evolving threats, ensuring that procurement aligns with strategic needs and available defense budgets,” Minister of Defense Wellington Koo Li-hsiung said in a statement to Radio Free Asia.

Referring to the president’s announcement of significant increase in defense spending, Khoo said the focus would be on four key areas: building asymmetric capabilities, strengthening defense resilience, enhancing reserve forces, and effectively responding to “gray-zone” threats.

“Any weapon systems that can rapidly contribute to force modernization will be prioritized for acquisition,” he said.

Taiwan’s defense minister this week said the island was planning to boost military spending in the face of the “rapidly changing international situation and the escalating threats from adversaries” while increasing the scope and duration of its annual military exercise. He did not elaborate on the budget.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang and Alan Lu for RFA.

NBC News (2/4/25) put Trump’s unconstitutional attack on USAID in a Cold War frame.

Are the corporate media outlets reporting on Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s authoritarian takeover smarter than a fifth grader? Recent coverage of the president and his henchman’s blatantly unconstitutional dismembering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) would suggest some are not.

Reports on the agency’s shuttering (Politico, 1/31/25, 2/14/25; NBC, 2/4/25) have often failed to sufficiently sound the alarm on how Trump’s efforts are upending the most basic—and vitally important—federal checks and balances one learns about in a Schoolhouse Rock episode. Instead, these reports have framed bedrock constitutional principles as if they were up for debate, and neglected to mention that the Trump administration is purposefully attempting to shirk executive restraints.

Meanwhile, much of corporate media’s justified attention on the foreign aid agency’s demise has wasted ink on a narrower, unjustifiable reason for audiences to draw objections: the loss of the “soft power” USAID gives America in its battle over global influence with its adversaries (CNN 2/7/25; New York Times 2/11/25). This sets up the precedent that Musk’s federal bludgeoning should be assessed based on the value of his target, rather than the fact that he is subverting the Constitution.

‘The least popular thing’

Michael Waldman (Brennan Center, 2/19/25): “Trump’s power grab…is the culmination of decades of pressure from conservative organizations and lawyers who have sought a way to dismantle government and curb its power to intervene in markets.”

A lawsuit by the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees against the Trump administration lays out the five-alarm constitutional fire the shuttering of USAID has set off. USAID was established as an independent agency outside the State Department’s control by an act of Congress in 1998.

Longstanding judicial precedent holds that only Congress has the ability to create and dissolve federal agencies. Last year, the legislature prohibited even a reorganization of USAID without its consultation in an appropriations law. The Trump administration’s actions—justified solely by an extreme interpretation of executive authority—violate the Constitution’s separation of powers, and are indeed designed to do so.

Together Trump and Musk share interest in reconstituting US governance. The checks and balances that help to constrain executive power, along with civil service workers, are also roadblocks to the billions in federal contracts that have underwritten Musk’s empire. USAID has become the first target in their federal bludgeoning, because its relative unpopularity among voters means they might get away with rewriting the Constitution without too much public outrage. Its “the least popular thing government spends money on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said to a USAID official earlier this month. (Americans tend to vastly overestimate how much the US government spends on foreign aid, and think it should be reduced to a level that is actually far more than USAID’s current budget—Program for Public Consultation, 2/8/25.)  

Trump and Musk’s withdrawal of nearly all foreign aid funded through USAID is another grave challenge to the constitutional order. Since those funds were congressionally appropriated, neither Trump nor Musk has the authority to stop them, especially not on the basis of their political preferences.

The act of a president indefinitely rejecting congressionally approved spending is known as impoundment, which has been effectively outlawed in all forms since 1974. Trump has been explicit about his intent to bring impoundment back, which threatens to render Congress—which is supposed to have the power of the purse—irrelevant.

‘Musk has been clear’

Politico (2/14/25) would have better helped readers’ understanding if it hadn’t taken “Trump’s plans to shrink the federal workforce” at face value.

Such a threat to democracy requires calling it for what it is. Simple but consequential abdications of responsibility abound, though. Politico (2/14/25), for example, saw fit to reprint at face value Trump and Musk’s claims that they just wish to drastically reduce federal spending. An explainer article on Trump and Musk’s efforts made no mention that they might have ulterior motives.

In response to the question, “What is Trump and Musk’s goal?” Politico simply answered: “With Trump’s blessing, Musk has been clear that his goal is to drastically reduce the size of the government.” That Musk, the richest person in the world, whose business empire spans the globe and dominates whole industries, has resolved to dedicate his undivided attention to the cause of reducing federal spending deserves more skepticism. The fact that Musk has prioritized going after federal agencies that have had the temerity to investigate his businesses suggests a more plausible scenario.

Though the article, which is meant to give readers a brief but comprehensive overview of Trump and Musk’s efforts, briefly mentions some of the court-ordered pauses to Trump’s orders, it doesn’t discuss the overarching implications for US democracy.

Another Politico story (1/31/25), breaking the news that Trump intended to subsume USAID into the State Department, gave the move a stamp of approval by pointing out it was the fulfillment of long-held bipartisan aspirations—corporate media’s highest praise—while ignoring the unconstitutional means that brought it about. For years, the article says, “both Democratic and Republican administrations have toyed with the idea of making USAID a part of the State Department.” That’s because, Politico claimed,

there have always been tensions between State and USAID over which agency controls what parts of the multibillion-dollar foreign aid apparatus, regardless of which party is in power.

The article qualifies that USAID “describes itself” as an independent agency, as if this were up for dispute.

‘Keep America safe’

CNN (2/3/25): “Trump’s claim that he can single-handedly shut down USAID is at odds with Congress’ distinct role in forming and closing federal agencies.”

Corporate media’s failure to foreground the authoritarian threat of Trump and Musk’s USAID takedown also includes a narrow focus on its geopolitical ramifications that smooths over the unsavory aspects of the agency’s humanitarian work.

USAID oversees billions in foreign aid that is responsible for lifesaving food, medical care, infrastructure and economic development. The massive disruption in that aid is already causing death, hunger, disease outbreak and economic hardship. But a defense of that lifesaving work, and the democratic norms threatened by its unraveling, need not require a rosy picture of its imperialist motivations.

That’s exactly what the New York Times’ Daily podcast (2/11/25) accomplished, though, in an episode titled “The Demise of USAID and American Soft Power.” As has become all too frequent, nowhere during the episode’s 35-minute run time did the host, Times reporter Michael Barbaro, or his two guests, Times journalists Michael Crowley and Stephanie Nolen, mention the constitutional principles at stake in USAID’s closure (though the following episode was dedicated to the constitutional crises Trump has provoked—Daily, 2/12/25).

Instead, the podcast focused on what Barbaro described as Trump’s overturning of a decades-long bipartisan consensus about the best way to “keep America safe.” That safety, Barbaro learned by way of his guests’ contribution, is a supposedly serendipitous return on investment America receives through its strategic generosity abroad (effective altruism, one might say?). Trump has now abandoned that generosity, leaving a more brutish impression of America’s global role, and ceding ground to geopolitical adversaries, Barbaro and company said.

What threats do they identify that Americans have needed to be kept safe from? At first, Crowley said, it was the Soviet Union’s relative popularity in the developing world. After the Cold War ended, though, USAID’s justification for existence seemed thin, he acknowledged. But that didn’t last long, because it just so happened that after 9/11, “America realized that the Soviet Communist ideology that threatened us had been replaced by a new ideology. It was a terrorist ideology,” Crowley explained.

For one, it wasn’t just USAID, but the entire military industrial complex, that was inevitably going to identify a new justification for its existence, 9/11 notwithstanding. But the podcast also completely leaves out USAID’s modern role in conditioning aid to developing countries on opening up their economies to the International Monetary Fund and multinational corporations, creating the conditions for neo-colonial dispossession and Western dependency.

Dedicating a whole episode to portraying USAID’s work as a mutually beneficial marriage between developing nations’ humanitarian needs and US national security interests, all so that audiences might selfishly conclude that preserving foreign aid is in their own interests, perpetuates imperial propaganda. Pointing out how Trump’s actions harm people, including his own supporters, is well and good. But the loss of imperial soft power is not an example of that. And pointing out the actual harms without discussing the autocratic way they were inflicted risks suggesting that unconstitutional actions are acceptable as long as their results are beneficial.

Some journalists are doing a fine job of exposing the assault on USAID (e.g., New York Times, 1/28/25, 2/5/25; CNN, 2/3/25). But amid this unprecedented blitz on democratic norms, others are showing that they might need to revisit their elementary school textbooks.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.

AP (2/4/25) concludes with Elon Musk describing his government takeover as a card game: “If we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”

Associated Press (2/4/25) evidently needed the work of ten reporters to produce “Elon Musk Tightens Grip on Federal Government as Democrats Raise Alarms.”

At first blush, the story might seem to convey concern, but look closer: We see Musk matter-of-factly described as a “special government employee, which subjects him to less stringent rules on ethics and financial disclosures than other workers.”

He’s also described as “in charge of retooling the federal government.” Is that a thing? AP suggests we believe that it is.

The debate, AP tells us, is just between Republicans who “defend Musk as simply carrying out Trump’s slash-and-burn campaign promises,” and Democrats who, “for their part, accused Musk of leading a coup from within the government by amassing unaccountable and illegal power.”  Tomato, to-mah-to, you understand.

Musk locking federal workers out of internal systems, denying them access to their own personnel files, with their pay history, length of service and qualifications: Why, that’s just “Musk’s penchant for dabbling.” He’s been “tinkering with things his entire life,” the wire service says. He learned to code as a child in South Africa, you see, and “now Musk is popping open the hood on the federal government like it’s one of his cars or rockets.”

Popping open the hood of democratic processes to tinker with them? If you rely on reporting from nominally neutral outlets like Associated Press, you might imagine that’s only a concern of partisan Democrats, not regular folks like you and me.

You can send a message to Associated Press here (or via Bluesky @APnews.com).

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Adam Johnson (Column, 2/3/25): “The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN ran with the framing that ‘DOGE’ was some good-faith, post-ideological effort to ‘cut costs,’ ‘find savings’ and ‘increase efficiencies.’”

Having spent nearly $300 million to purchase the US presidency for Donald Trump, Elon Musk now feels entitled to do with it as he pleases. Just how radically Musk plans to remake the country was conveyed to the American people only after the election, when Musk stood behind the presidential seal on Inauguration Day and gave a Nazi salute. Then did it again. Maybe that sort of thing was OK to do in apartheid South Africa, where Musk grew up, but it’s jarring to see here in the United States.

Reporters initially struggled to meet the moment (FAIR.org, 2/4/25), downplaying Musk’s salute (the Washington Post described a “high-energy speech“), as well as his broader agenda, which Musk now openly declares a “revolution,” and consists of an unelected billionaire wresting control of nearly the entire executive branch of government. Early media reports went along with Musk’s “efficiency” mantra (Column, 2/3/25), but more recently reporters have started to find their footing, and the dangers of Musk’s project are being conveyed. Sort of.

“Reporters on the battlefield are doing what they can” to expose the radical nature of Trump’s second term, writes media columnist Oliver Darcy (Status, 2/5/25). “The news generals back in the command center, however, are largely abdicating their duties.”

‘Musk’s audacious goal’

Nowhere is this discrepancy more apparent than at the Washington Post, a newspaper famed for opposing a prior Republican president with an expansive view of executive power. These days, however, even as Post reporters like Jeff Stein are busy breaking stories (e.g., 1/28/25, 2/8/25) about the Trump power grab, the paper’s higher-ups are careful not to offend the president or Musk. The Post is even, incredibly, calling on the Constitution-defying billionaire duo to push further.

As Elon Musk seizes extraconstitutional control of the federal budget, Washington Post editors (2/7/25) urge him to use that power to go after Social Security and Medicare.

“To have any chance of achieving Musk’s audacious goal of $2 trillion in cuts,” the Post editorial board (2/7/25) wrote, “Trump will need to work with elected representatives in Congress to reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”

While claiming it wants Trump to “erect guardrails” for Musk, the Post urges the president to abandon one of the only guardrails he established—the cutting of Social Security and Medicare, which Trump repeatedly said he wouldn’t do, but recently started waffling on.

To be clear, the Post has long called for cutting so-called entitlements (FAIR.org, 11/1/11, 6/15/23). But to do so at this moment—by encouraging a coup attempt to push further—is quite extraordinary.

The Post’s move comes as its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family, while coaching his paper to take a less critical approach in its coverage (FAIR.org, 1/22/25). Bezos’s ingratiation toward Trump started prior to the election, when Bezos personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).

Good news for X from Amazon

The Washington Post (2/4/25) reports on “divergent views among Jewish leaders in how to respond to Musk”: Some object to his ” Nazi-esque salute and Holocaust jokes,” others appreciate his censorship of criticism of Israel.

Bezos has also been busy making nice with Musk, his longtime rival for most powerful man on Earth and in space. On both fronts, Musk now has a decided edge, aided by his control over much of the US government, which both men’s sprawling empires rely on for billions of dollars in contracts.

With Musk’s hand on the public-money spigot, Bezos apparently did him a favor. After Musk openly heiled Hitler, Jewish leaders renewed calls to boycott Musk’s social media platform, X (Washington Post, 2/4/25). “To advertisers—including Google, Amazon and the ADL: Pull your ads now,” the Jewish leaders wrote. “The pressure is working. X’s financial difficulties prove it.”

But the boycott’s pressure was countered by Bezos’s company. “[X] got good news last week, with Amazon reportedly planning to hike its advertising on the site,” the Post (2/4/25) reported, without mentioning Bezos.

While X’s finances “were once so bad that Musk floated the idea of filing for bankruptcy,” things are suddenly looking up, the Financial Times (2/12/25) reported:

Musk famously admitted to overpaying for Twitter after he bought the social media platform known now as X for $44 billion in 2022. But the billionaire’s foray into government has coincided with a turnaround in X’s fortunes, as advertisers, including Amazon, flock back to the platform.

‘Lemmings leaping in unison’

Kathleen Parker (Washington Post, 1/24/25) likened those who condemned Musk’s Nazi gesture to “lemmings leaping in unison from a cliff”—because it’s suicidal to notice fascism in high places?

It wasn’t just Bezos’s company that threw Musk a lifeline, but also his newspaper. An initial Post headline (1/20/25), which omitted mention of Musk’s Nazi salute, read “Elon Musk Gives Exuberant Speech at Inauguration.” The following day, Post columnist Megan McArdle, echoing the ADL, downgraded Musk’s salute to an “awkward gesture,” the same phrase Post columnist Kathleen Parker used to dismiss those who saw something more sinister as “lemmings leaping in unison from a cliff” (Washington Post, 1/24/25).

Interestingly, one of the most vociferous “lemmings” was Post columnist Catherine Rampell, who brilliantly called out Musk’s Nazi salute, but on CNN, and noticeably not in the Post, except once in passing (1/30/25).

Musk responded to Rampell’s CNN appearance by threatening to sue her in a post (1/27/25) to his over 200 million X followers.

I noted at the top that Musk spent nearly $300 million to elect Trump, but that’s only part of the story. Musk also provided inestimable support by transforming X into a pro-Trump bullhorn. Personally, when I logged onto X during the campaign, I routinely saw Musk’s pro-Trump tweets at the top of my feed, even though I didn’t follow Musk at the time.

Since the election, Musk ’s gifts to Trump have continued. X recently agreed to pay Trump $10 million to settle Trump’s 2021 lawsuit against the company, even though the case was dismissed in 2022. Trump was still appealing the ruling two-and-a-half years later when a deal was cut. “The settlement talks with X began after the election and were more informal, with both Trump and Musk personally involved in hammering out the $10 million number,” the Wall Street Journal (2/13/25) reported.

‘Cheering for change’

New York Times (2/11/25): Many of the federal agencies targeted by Musk “were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Mr. Musk’s companies.”

It’s quite something for Elon Musk—the world’s richest human and one of the largest government contractors—to gleefully slash public spending benefiting others. Especially when, by one measure, “virtually all of his net worth can be pinned to government help,” CNN (11/20/24) reported.

While Musk claims to wield a populist’s pitchfork as he attacks “the bureaucracy,” a closer look reveals the work of an oligarch’s scalpel. Musk’s coup team—called DOGE, and consisting mostly of twentysomething male engineers, several of whom appear to share Musk’s racist ideology (New York Times, 2/7/25)—is targeting the federal agencies investigating Musk’s companies, which in addition to X, include Tesla and SpaceX.

“President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting—or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit,” read the opening lines of a New York Times story (2/11/25):

At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by [Trump’s] moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.

While Trump claims Musk is “not gaining anything” from the arrangement, and Musk says the same, Wall Street sees things differently. Even as Musk says he’s turning his “efficiency” revolution to the Pentagon—the only federal agency never to pass an audit, and where any honest attempt to rein in government spending would begin—stocks for armsmaking companies associated with Musk are surging, while those without ties to him languish. “Palantir, as well as Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI and robotics and AI specialist Anduril Industries, are cheering for change,” the Wall Street Journal (2/10/25) reported.

In other words, having seized control of the levers of government, an oligarch will now be directing funding to himself and his cronies. That’s Wall Street’s view, anyhow.

It seems to be Bezos’s as well. With Amazon and Blue Origin, Bezos’s space company, competing for billions in government contracts, it makes perfect business sense for Bezos to cozy up to Musk and Trump. From a journalistic perspective, however, it’s nothing short of a disaster, one that’s playing out daily in the pages of the Washington Post.

You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com (or via Bluesky: @washingtonpost.com).

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread on FAIR.org.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Pete Tucker.

“Instead of tackling rising prices and delivering relief for American families, House Republicans are charging ahead with trillions of dollars in deeply unpopular tax breaks for billionaires like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. And, they’re paying for their billionaire handouts by ransacking health care, food assistance, and other vital programs that American workers and families rely on.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Without the agency, known as NOAA, weather forecasts wouldn’t be as reliable, and the impacts of extreme weather on a less prepared public could be devastating. “Everyone would be shocked about the negative things that could happen,” said Alan Sealls, president-elect of the American Meteorological Society and former chief meteorologist at WKRG-TV in Mobile, Alabama. “Those compromises will be not just unpleasant, and not just uncomfortable, but truly dangerous.”

It remains unclear just what President Donald Trump has in mind for NOAA. His nominee for commerce secretary, financier Howard Lutnick, has vowed to keep it intact. But Project 2025, the conservative roadmap to a second Trump term, calls for it to be “broken up and downsized,” and Russell Vought, an architect of that blueprint, now leads the federal Office of Management and Budget. In late January, employees at NOAA’s Asheville, North Carolina, office were told to remove internal web pages and cancel events and meetings. Last week, Elon Musk sent a Department of Government Efficiency team to the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in what has for other agencies been the start of radical downsizing.

“I’m in fear of losing my job every day,” said a National Weather Service employee who requested anonymity. So far, most cuts seem to have targeted diversity programs, including the organization’s head of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, who was put on leave after a right-wing social media account targeted them. As to what might happen next, this person said, “pretty much everybody is in the dark.”

President Richard Nixon established NOAA in 1970, but its roots stretch back to 1807 and the creation of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey to chart the nation’s coastline. The Weather Bureau followed in 1870 and the Commission of Fish and Fisheries one year later. NOAA still fulfills these roles through divisions like the National Weather Service, or NWS, and Marine Fisheries Service, which helps ensure sustainable harvesting of the oceans and a safe food supply. 

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Today, the agency employs about 12,000 people worldwide; over half are scientists and engineers. Its current budget is $6.5 billion. Of that, about $1.4 billion goes to the NWS, or about $4 for every citizen. In addition to providing free weather data, forecasts, and alerts, that allocation saves taxpayers money. The agency’s work predicting hurricanes saves billions in avoided damage alone, and allows crisis managers and first responders to better prepare for disasters. By one estimate, every dollar invested in the NWS reaps more than $9 in return. 

“It’s a great deal for the American public,” said Pat Spoden, who was a National Weather Service meteorologist from 1987 to 2022. “A lot of people don’t understand or know where the weather data comes from and how much the Weather Service, and NOAA, provides.”

The agency manages 18 satellites, nearly 100 weather balloon launch sites, and around 250 oceanic buoys that produce billions of observations each day. That information goes to 122 forecasting offices, where meteorologists generate weather projections that are disseminated across the country, including on a network of 1,000 NWS radio stations. Beyond providing the basis for weather watch and warning alerts, these reports are the foundation upon which private weather services like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel stand.

“AccuWeather does not have their own fleet of satellites and weather radar and ground stations. They do not operate their own weather predictive models,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “All these private weather enterprises are built upon the public backbone of data.” They’re either using NOAA data directly, Swain added, or adjusting it in some proprietary way.

The private sector also relies on NOAA’s vast research archive, housed at the four offices of the National Centers for Environmental Information. This trove includes historical records detailing changes in Earth’s oceans, land masses, ice sheets, atmosphere, and magnetic field. These repositories offer a wealth of local, national, and international climate findings and modeling, and have recorded nearly real-time analysis of temperature and precipitation changes since 2000. All of this info is invaluable to researchers, analysts, and myriad industries that predict future conditions.

“What most people don’t realize is insurance companies base your rates on that data record and how it is projected to go forward,” said Craig McLean, the agency’s former research division director. “Banking, finance, real estate, the transportation industry, agriculture, they all look in the futures market at data that is stored historically, but also collected daily around the world.”

Yet NOAA’s critics consider the agency, and its information, a threat. Thomas Gilman, who served in the Commerce Department, wrote in Project 2025 that it is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to the future of U.S. prosperity.” That document notes “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

Project 2025 seems to favor maintaining only those functions that serve corporate interests, noting that, “because private companies rely on this data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.” 

Critics of such a move argue that putting such an essential resource behind a paywall would harm the public. Megan Duzmal, a meteorologist at WYMT, a small TV station in eastern Kentucky, relies upon NOAA data to do her job. The station serves a largely rural area that those in larger markets like Louisville do not focus on. 

“They don’t look individually at these communities, but we are able to, as a smaller market, zoom into the small cities here,” Duzmal said, with enough precision to “point out road names.”

The station provided essential information to viewers during a spate of recent floods, most recently after Hurricane Helene. When a storm is brewing, Duzmal receives information about flash flooding risks from a hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Jackson, Kentucky. Assessing the danger requires analyzing complex factors like soil moisture, previous drought conditions, and topography. It demands a firm grasp of both science and local conditions. If the tools she and countless other local meteorologists rely upon are privatized, they could become too expensive for small stations in rural areas. That could prove deadly to residents of communities that already lack robust cellular service and reliable internet providers. 

Privatization could also create varying forecasts from competing companies, leading to confusion. “Without the one voice, you run into issues of what do you believe or who do you believe,” said Spoden, the former NWS meteorologist. “It’s just so important to have an official source.” 

That raises perhaps the most important question about privatization: What services would companies even be willing to take on? It’s unclear, for instance, that any private enterprise would want to be responsible, and thus liable, for issuing warnings or alerts. Spoden also wonders whether private sector meteorologists would deploy to disaster areas to brief emergency responders, like NWS employees did during the fires in Los Angeles. 

“They are the most dedicated group of civil servants you’re going to find,” said Spoden. “It would be very difficult for any private company to do what the National Weather Service does.”

It remains to be seen what the Trump administration will do. It’s an open question, for instance, whether the National Weather Service Employees Organization’s collective bargaining agreement, which runs through 2029, will hold up against any efforts to dismantle the organization. But the employee who fears for their job says the president’s attacks on NOAA feel unprecedented. 

“He’s going no holds barred,” they said. “It’s very aggressive.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s budget cuts could kill your local weather forecast — and put you in danger on Feb 12, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

Much has been and much more will be written about the looming abolition of USAID.

It’s “the removal of a huge and important tool of American global statecraft” (Konyndyk), or the wood-chipping of a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” (Musk) or, more reasonably, the unwarranted cancellation of an organisation that should have been reviewed and reformed.

Commentators will have a lot to say, some of it exaggerated, about the varieties of harm caused by this decision, and about its legality.

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Some will welcome it from a conservative perspective, believing that USAID was either not aligned with or acting against the interests of the United States, or was proselytising wokeness, or was a criminal organisation.

Some, often more quietly, will welcome it from an anti-imperialist or “Southern” perspective, believing that the agency was at worst a blunt instrument of US hegemony or at least a bastion of Western saviourism.

I want to come at this topic from a different angle, by providing a brief personal perspective on USAID as an organisation, based on several decades of occasional interaction with it during my time as an Australian aid official.

Essentially, I view USAID as a harried, hamstrung and traumatised organisation, not as a rogue agency or finely-tuned vehicle of US statecraft.

Peer country representative
My own experience with USAID began when I participated as a peer country representative in an OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) peer review of the US’s foreign assistance programme in the early 1990s, which included visits to US assistance programmes in Bangladesh and the Philippines, as well as to USAID headquarters in Washington DC.

I later dealt with the agency in many other roles, including during postings to the OECD and Indonesia and through my work on global and regional climate change and health programmes, up to and including the pandemic years.

An image is firmly lodged in my mind from that DAC peer review visit to Washington. We had had days of back-to-back meetings in USAID headquarters with a series of exhausted-looking, distracted and sometimes grumpy executives who didn’t have much reason to care what the OECD thought about the US aid effort.

It was a muggy summer day. At one point a particularly grumpy meeting chair, who now rather reminds of me of Gary Oldman’s character in Slow Horses, mopped the sweat from his forehead with his necktie without appearing to be aware of what he was doing. Since then, that man has been my mental model of a USAID official.

But why so exhausted, distracted and grumpy?

Precisely because USAID is about the least freewheeling workplace one could construct. Certainly it is administratively independent, in the sense that it was created by an act of Congress, but it also receives its budget from the President and Congress — and that budget comes with so many strings attached, in the form of country- or issue-related “earmarks” or other directives that it might be logically impossible to allocate the funds as instructed.

Some of these earmarks are broad and unsurprising (for example, specific allocations for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment under the Bush-era PEPFAR program) while others represent niche interests (Senator John McCain once ridiculed earmarks pertaining to “peanuts, orangutans, gorillas, neotropical raptors, tropical fish and exotic plants”) — but none originates within USAID.

Informal earmarks calculation
I recall seeing an informal calculation showing that one could only satisfy all the percentage-based earmarks by giving most of the dollars several quite different jobs to do. A 2002 DAC peer review noted with disapproval some 270 earmarks or other directive provisions in aid legislation; by the time of the most recent peer review in 2022, this number was more like 700.

Related in part to this congressional micro-management of its budget — along with the usual distrust of organisations that “send” money overseas — USAID labours under particularly gruelling accountability and reporting requirements.

Andew Natsios — a former USAID Administrator and lifelong Republican who has recently come to USAID’s defence (albeit with arguments that not everybody would deem helpful) — wrote about this in 2010. In terms reminiscent of current events, he described the reign of terror of Lieutenant-General Herbert Beckington, a former Marine Corps officer who led USAID‘s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) from 1977 to 1994.

He was a powerful iconic figure in Washington, and his influence over the structure of the foreign aid programME remains with USAID today. … Known as “The General” at USAID, Beckington was both feared and despised by career officers. Once referred to by USAID employees as “the agency’s J. Edgar Hoover — suspicious, vindictive, eager to think the worst” …

At one point, he told the Washington Post that USAID’s white-collar crime rate was “higher than that of downtown Detroit.” … In a seminal moment in this clash between OIG and USAID, photographs were published of two senior officers who had been accused of some transgression being taken away in handcuffs by the IG investigators for prosecution, a scene that sent a broad chill through the career staff and, more than any other single event, forced a redirection of aid practice toward compliance.

Labyrinthine accountability systems
On top of the burdens of logically impossible programming and labyrinthine accountability systems is the burden of projecting American generosity. As far as humanly possible, and perhaps a little further, ways must be found of ensuring that American aid is sourced from American institutions, farms or factories and, if it is in the form of commodities, that it is transported on American vessels.

Failing that, there must be American flags. I remember a USAID officer stationed in Banda Aceh after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami spending a non-trivial amount of his time seeking to attach sizeable flags to the front of trucks transporting US (but also non-US) emergency supplies around the province of Aceh.

President Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller has somehow determined to his own satisfaction that the great majority (in fact 98 percent) of USAID personnel are donors to the Democratic Party. Whether or not that is true, let alone relevant, Democrat administrations have arguably been no kinder to USAID than Republican ones over the years.

Natsios, in the piece cited above, notes that The General was installed under Carter, who ran on anti-Washington ticket, and that there were savage cuts — over 400 positions — to USAID senior career service staffing under Clinton. USAID gets battered no matter which way the wind blows.

Which brings me back to necktie guy. It has always seemed to me that the platonic form of a USAID officer, while perhaps more likely than not to vote Democrat, is a tired and dispirited person, weary of politicians of all stripes, bowed under his or her burdens, bound to a desk and straitjacketed by accountability requirements, regularly buffeted by new priorities and abrupt restructures, and put upon by the ignorant and suspicious.

Radical-left Marxists and vipers probably wouldn’t tolerate such an existence for long. Who would? I guess it’s either thieves and money-launderers or battle-scarred professionals intent on doing a decent job against tall odds.

Robin Davies is an honorary professor at the Australian National University’s (ANU) Crawford School of Public Policy and managing editor of the Devpolicy Blog. He previously held senior positions at Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and AusAID.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Established on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration via executive order, the new department is charged with implementing “the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”.  Trump made it clear that virtually no agency or department would be exempt.  “Pentagon, [the Department of] Education, just everything.  We’re going to go through everything.”  In an interview with Fox News, Trump was convinced that, “We’re going to find billions, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”

When it comes to Musk’s hungry intentions regarding the US Defense Department, things start getting cloudily confusing.  In the first place, letting this “special government employee” loose on a department with which his own companies, notably SpaceX, have contracts with, sounds like a recipe for self-interested slashing.

The broader premise of cutting back on wasteful Pentagon spending, however, is nigh irrefutable.  And as much as he is loathed by establishment wonks in the Pentagon, that other Trump ally-in-cutting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is merely stating the wondrously obvious in noting that many programs at the Pentagon “don’t have the impact you want them to.”

Much to the horror of defence mandarins, Hegseth has also insisted that the Pentagon pass “a clean audit.”  That, at the very least, was what the US taxpayers deserved.  “They deserve to know where their $850 billion go, how it’s spent, and make sure it’s spent wisely.”

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has already identified an area of interest for the DOGE razor gang: shipbuilding.  “Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long and deliver too little to the soldiers… We need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process.”

Defence departments the world over specialise in innovative, fantastic, even fraudulent accounting in justifying projects that will either never see fruition or, if they do, will only do so at vast cost to the taxpayer.  From the outset, the question of necessity is almost never asked in any serious way, let alone the need to coherently identify the relevant threat against which, presumably, the weapons system is intended to combat.

The unaccountable costs and expenditures associated with US defence place it in an almost peerless category.  When one can fork out money to the value of $5 trillion for failed and catastrophic conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan, something is rotten in the state of budgetary economics.  Much of this can be put down to post-9/11 spending, which dramatically departed from the previous model which focused on raising the marginal tax rate and reducing non-war expenditure.  Taxes were actually cut in 2001, 2003 and 2017, while expenditure ballooned.  Huge borrowings for war were made and emergency funds, which do not fall within standard processes of oversight, became the norm.

What emerged was the phenomenon Linda Bilmes describes as the “Ghost Budget”.  It was aided by abundant capital markets the US Treasury could readily draw upon, a dysfunctional budget system typified by hobbling federal government shutdowns, and a Pentagon determined to reverse the post-Cold War budget cuts it had suffered.  Money flowed in the nature of funding for emergency and Overseas Contingency Operations, passing under the radar of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting & Execution Process.  This incentive for underwriting permanent wars was also a license for permanent waste, characterised by the continuous resort by administrations to supplemental emergency funds (assistance to Ukraine being a case in point) with minimal administrative and Congressional scrutiny.

This situation is further complicated by the entanglements governments have with self-interested weapons companies and arms manufacturers, whose boards are very often packed by former government employees and civil servants who identify their own profits with the security of the nation.

Defence budgets the world over would seem to be subject to a more elastic treatment than those of other departments.  The $400 billion deal for the transfer and construction of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy by the United States is a case in point, a project criminally needless as to demand those overseeing it to be charged with sedition and baleful stupidity.  It has all the ingredients that should make it a prime target for trimming, if not culling altogether: the absence of a genuine security threat (China is lazily designated as the primary one); the presence of self-interested former politicians who quaff and gobble from a seemingly endless gravy train; and military fatuity.

Defence departments also tend to behave like powers unto themselves.  Criticism, however accurate, can be weathered with arrogant reserve.  The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), to take that other paragon of dedicated waste, has dutifully ignored criticism from Parliament’s watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO), to commit a string of budgetary howlers.  It would be hard to forget the £6 billion blow out on the aircraft carriers, Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, described by Lord David Richards, former chief of defence staff, as “behemoths … unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”.  Another former senior naval officer told national security reporter Richard Norton-Taylor that the carrier project involved a “combination of naval vanity and pork barrel politics”.

Since making it to sea, both vessels have been dogged by mechanical maladies (flooding and defective propeller shafts have featured), requiring them to spend lengthy sessions in dry dock for repairs.  Instead of participating in NATO exercises intended to show British prowess at sea, wasteful, inefficient indulgence has been on offer.

Trump, then, aided by the furniture breaking teams at DOGE, are onto something – but only up to a point.  Any proper slimming of the Pentagon must come with broader reforms to its funding agenda and how projects are accounted for.  Those arrangements were, after all, aided by previous US presidents convinced that the Republic, to survive, must be doing permanent battle across the globe.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

• House Progressive Caucus blasts Elon Musk for illegal power grab, calls for his removal from government meddling
• Poll shows Musk unpopular, as head of DOGE gets access to government data, power over spending and staffing
• Trump plans cutting USAID staff from 10,000 to 661, as foreign aid freeze halts medicine deliveries and clinical trials
• Senate confirms Vought to head OMB, as Dems blast him for making Project2025 into Trump’s agenda
• Border militarization continues as Pentagon sends another 1,500 active duty soldiers to border, 500 Marines arrive in Guantanamo Bay

The post Senate confirms Project2025 author Vought as budget chief; Progressive Caucus calls for Musk removal from government meddling – February 7, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

CNN (1/31/25) framed Elon Musk’s extra-constitutional power grab as part of “the war over federal spending.”

When President Donald Trump announced an unprecedented freeze on federal grants and loans last week, some of the most prominent US news outlets proved themselves largely uninterested in whether it was legal. Meanwhile, a few braver journalists called out the move as the constitutional crisis that it was (FAIR.org, 1/29/25).

When Democratic attorneys general rushed to challenge the move in court, with positive results, Trump rescinded the order. But the crisis is hardly over.

On the contrary: Elon Musk, the unelected centibillionaire who threw Nazi salutes at the inauguration, has wrested control of the Treasury Department’s payment system, after forcing out its most senior career civil servant, David Lebryk. As CNN (1/31/25) reported, the Treasury takeover happened after Trump’s team had repeatedly asked about the department’s ability to stop payments, to which Lebryk had insisted, “We don’t do that.”

These payments include everything from Social Security checks to tax refunds, federal employee salaries to contractor payments. It’s over $5 trillion a year, a fifth of the US economy. The database Musk and his tech bro allies in the non–congressionally approved “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have access to also contains enormous amounts of sensitive personal information for most Americans, including Social Security numbers. And Musk and a 25-year-old former X employee have access to the code that controls the payment systems, allowing them to make irreversible changes to it, according to Wired (2/4/25).

At the same time, Musk has infiltrated the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management—two other rather obscure and nonpolitical but hugely consequential agencies that manage federal offices, technology and employees (Wired, 1/28/25, 1/31/25).

‘An idea that crosses party lines’

The New York Times (1/31/25) put its seal of approval on Trump’s illegal attempt to freeze federal spending, calling the idea behind it “bipartisan.”

Instead of appropriately pushing the increasing lawlessness and opacity to the forefront of their reporting, the New York Times and Washington Post largely buried these stories, downplaying their earth-shattering break from democratic norms.

As Musk took over the Treasury system, the Times (1/31/25) did point out:

Control of the system could give Mr. Musk’s allies the ability to unilaterally cut off money intended for federal workers, bondholders and companies, and open a new front in the Trump administration’s efforts to halt federal payments.

And yet somehow this story struck editors as page 13 material.

Meanwhile, a piece (1/31/25) by the Times‘ Michael Shear published online the same day was deemed front-page material, causing even seasoned media critics to spit out their morning beverage at its breathtaking ability to bothsides the situation: “Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines.”

Shear wrote that Trump is simply “continuing a mostly failed effort by a long series of presidents and Congress” to “somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.” He thus clearly communicated that he is not up for the task of reporting on this administration.

The Times published Musk’s Treasury takeover on page 18, under the rather nonchalant headline: “Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payments System.” The subhead read:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Mr. Musk’s representatives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

And hey, don’t worry, the article suggests:

Mr. Musk’s initiative is intended to be part of a broader review of the payments system to allow improper payments to be scrutinized, and is not an effort to arbitrarily block individual payments, the people familiar with the matter said.

At the Post, readers got language like, “The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy” (1/31/25), and “it is extremely unusual for anyone connected to political appointees to access” the payment systems (2/1/25). (In fact, it appears to be unprecedented—Independent, 2/3/25.)

‘Reminiscent of Stalin’

Wired (1/31/25): Musk’s team is “attempting to use White House security credentials to gain unusual access to GSA tech, deploying a suite of new AI software, and recreating the office in X’s image.”

There is another way to do journalism. It’s called connecting dots, asking questions, not accepting anonymous claims of benevolent intent—and helping people understand the gravity of the situation when unprecedented end-runs around democracy are happening before our very eyes. And it’s heartening to see quite a few news outlets engaging in it.

For instance, Wired has been doing a tenacious job following Musk’s assault on the government, connecting the dots between his actions and explaining the dangers to the country. It broke the news (1/28/25) that Musk workers from his various companies had taken over management positions at the Office of Personnel Management—well before Trump’s nominee to take over the OPM has even had a confirmation hearing. Its subhead noted: “One expert found the takeover reminiscent of Stalin.”

Wired explained that the installation of AI experts at OPM suggests a forthcoming effort to use AI on the reams of data it has access to in order to target federal employees for removal.

Regarding the GSA infiltration, Wired reported (1/31/25):

The access could give Musk’s proxies the ability to remote into laptops, listen in on meetings, read emails, among many other things, a former Biden official told Wired on Friday.

“Granting DOGE staff, many of whom aren’t government employees, unfettered access to internal government systems and sensitive data poses a huge security risk to the federal government and to the American public,” the Biden official said. “Not only will DOGE be able to review procurement-sensitive information about major government contracts, it’ll also be able to actively surveil government employees.”

Wired again put that danger (“the potential [for Musk minions] to remote into laptops, read emails, and more”) into its subhead—unlike the Times‘ muted headlines.

‘Incredibly dangerous’

Rolling Stone (2/3/25) pointed out that “the danger of operational access to the payments system is precisely that there are very little safeguards for its improper use or manipulation.”

Others are also raising alarms in their headlines, as at Rolling Stone (2/3/25): “Elon Musk’s Attempt to Control the Treasury Payment System Is Incredibly Dangerous.” The subhead explained: “Trump and Musk could use sensitive Treasury information to punish their enemies. Worse yet, they could break America’s payment system entirely.”

The piece, by Nathan Tankus, pointed out that there are glaring reasons to disbelieve administration claims about this being about “improper payments,” such as:

At 3:14 a.m. Sunday, Musk pledged to shut down supposedly “illegal payments” to Global Refuge, a faith-based organization that exists to provide “safety and support to refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants from across the world.”

Tankus also points out what the Post and Times won’t, which is that the seizure of the payment system means Trump and Musk

can just impound agency payments themselves. They could also possibly stop paying federal employees they have forced on paid administrative leave, coercing them to resign.

Even in bigger media, some critical voices could be heard. CNN‘s Zachary Wolf (2/1/25) asked some appropriate journalistic questions: “Has [Musk] taken an oath, like the federal workers he apparently has plans to fire, to uphold the Constitution?…. What are Musk’s conflicts of interests?”

Accessories to the coup

The Washington Post (2/4/25) assures readers that “the Education Department was created by Congress, and only Congress can eliminate it.”

The Washington Post put news about Musk’s takeovers on the front page today (2/4/25), as it reported on Trump preparing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, which Musk has apparently also infiltrated. But it still managed to sound rather sanguine about the threat: “The expected executive order would not shut down the agency, as there is widespread agreement in both parties that doing so would require congressional action.” Despite reporting daily on actions Trump and Musk have taken that have usurped congressional authority, the paper still seems to believe—and want readers to believe—against all evidence that our Constitution’s constraints on executive power continue to hold.

And the New York Times finally published an article (2/3/25) taking a deeper look “Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government,” as the headline stated. Still, it seemed to find it difficult to use language in its early framing paragraphs any stronger than to say that Musk’s actions “have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections,” as it explains in the third paragraph. These moves are “creating major upheaval,” the fifth paragraph allowed, and the sixth said it “represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.”

The piece was not published in the print newspaper the next day; FAIR has yet to see it rise to the top of the paper’s homepage.

As Musk and Trump continue to behave like kings, it’s incumbent upon news media to not just report on their actions, but put them in the proper context for the public to understand the threat level they represent; otherwise, we can’t respond appropriately.

That kind of reporting takes real bravery in the kind of moment we are in: Musk has already (falsely) called it a crime to reveal the names of those working for him at the agencies DOGE is targeting, which Wired and others have done. The Trump-installed DC attorney general has obsequiously promised Musk to go after those who identify his underlings—and to prosecute “anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people” (New Republic, 2/3/25).

While that might sound laughable, media outlets have already paid Trump handsome settlements to settle lawsuits that should have been seen as similarly laughable (FAIR.org, 12/16/24; PBS, 1/29/25; New York Times, 1/30/25). When prominent news outlets won’t summon the courage to vigorously oppose this descent into autocracy, they are accessories to the coup. We must demand better from them, and support the outlets and journalists doing the critical work we as citizens require to defend our democracy.

ACTION: Tell the New York Times and Washington Post to treat Musk’s actions like the existential threat to democracy that they are.

CONTACT:

New York Times
Letters: letters@nytimes.com
Bluesky: @NYTimes.com

Washington Post
Letters: letters@washpost.com,
Bluesky: @washingtonpost.com

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

New York‘s headline (1/28/25) was accurate—but was it “riveting storytelling”?

When President Donald Trump ordered an unprecedented freeze on all federal grants and loans, a few news outlets responded with at least some degree of appropriate alarm and scrutiny.

“Trump’s Massive Power Grab,” read the headline for Politico‘s Playbook newsletter (1/28/25). “Trump’s Blatantly Illegal Funding Freeze Causes Nationwide Chaos,” announced the headline over a column by New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore (1/28/25).

The order, both sweeping and confusingly worded, called for a halt to disbursement of federal funds that Congress has already authorized. The memo required all such funding to be reviewed to make sure it aligns with Trump’s “policies and requirements,” including his barrage of executive orders. (After a federal judge temporarily blocked the order, the White House rescinded it.)

The memo specifically highlighted “financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal.” But no funding was excluded from the freeze, aside from Social Security, Medicare and “assistance directly received by individuals.”

As the New York Times (1/27/25) pointed out, this would appear to include “hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to state, local and tribal governments. Disaster relief aid. Education and transportation funding. Loans to small businesses.” Medicaid, which is distributed through the states, also seemed to be frozen.

Politico described “the first big question” as being: “Is this legal?” The answer provided by most legal scholars appeared to be, “hell, no.”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the information offered by some in corporate media—with the multibillionaire-owned Washington Post among the worst offenders.

‘Democrats contend’

The New York Times (1/27/25) offered its readers agnosticism: “It is uncertain whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds allocated by Congress.“

As competent and useful reporting explained, Trump has long declared his interest in impoundment, or the executive’s ability to cancel funding that Congress has approved. It’s something presidents had done on occasion in the past, but Richard Nixon took it to an extreme, attempting to cancel billions in federal spending. Congress responded by passing the Impoundment Control Act in 1974, which requires congressional permission for presidents to impound funds (Forbes, 1/28/25).

In other words, there’s been a clear law on the books for over 50 years that expressly prohibits what Trump was attempting here. It should have been an easy call for journalists, then, to answer Politico‘s basic and central question. Some failed this basic task.

The New York Times report (1/27/25), while raising the question of the move’s legality in paragraph four, didn’t even attempt to answer it, only offering  a quote from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who argued, “Congress approved these investments and they are not optional; they are the law.“ The article gave readers no other information by which to judge “whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds allocated by Congress.”

In its follow-up on the state-led lawsuit to challenge the funding freeze, the Times (1/28/25) briefly described the Impoundment Control Act, but then wrote that “Democrats contend” that Trump can’t unilaterally block funds that have already been approved, as if it were simply a partisan claim whether the law just described exists.

At Axios, co-founder Mike Allen’s brief report (1/28/25) didn’t even address legality, taking the “Why it matters” of Trump’s memo to be that it

will provide the administration with time to review agency programs and determine the best uses of funding for those programs consistent with the law and Trump’s priorities.

‘Generally allowed under the law’

The Washington Post‘s first takeaway (1/28/25): “The feared disruption highlighted the extent of the new Trump administration’s determination to target long-standing functions of the federal government.”

But the Washington Post took craven reporting to another level. In its report on the directive (1/28/25), by reporters Jeff Stein, Jacob Bogage and Emily Davies, the Post‘s headline and lead focused on the “confusion” in Washington. After describing the order and what it appeared to target, the reporters’ first attempt to make meaning of the order came in the eighth paragraph: “The feared disruption highlighted the extent of the new Trump administration’s determination to target long-standing functions of the federal government.”

The president tried to usurp Congress’s power of the purse by fiat, and the Beltway paper’s biggest takeaway was that it “highlights” the Trump administration’s “determination”—not to shred US democracy, but to “target long-standing functions of the federal government.”

But it gets worse. It took another eight paragraphs (that’s the 16th paragraph, if you’re counting) to find the Post‘s first mention of Politico‘s No. 1 question—is this legal? That came in the same Schumer quote the Times used, about how these expenditures “are not optional; they are the law.”

And the Post quickly cast doubt on that idea:

The order’s legality may be contested, but the president is generally allowed under the law to defer spending for a period of time if certain conditions are met, according to budget experts.

The article went on to note that the order “may not have given sufficient grounds under the law to pause the funding,” and that a “left-leaning” expert says that “pausing it over policy disagreements is not legal.” Meanwhile an expert from a “bipartisan” group was offered to argue that Trump “should be legally able to pause the money temporarily,” even if there might be some formal hoops to jump through to extend it.

In other words, the Post‘s framing of the story gave the impression that the memo was “confusing,” but probably mostly legal.

This comes shortly after the announcement of the Post‘s new mission statement, “Riveting Storytelling for All of America,” which owner Jeff Bezos hopes will expand the Post‘s conservative audience (FAIR.org, 1/22/25). As for holding the powerful to account? Well, you might want to look to a media outlet not owned by a toadying oligarch.

ACTION: Please tell the Washington Post not to downplay illegal actions when they are committed by a president its owner is trying to curry favor with.

CONTACT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Bluesky @washingtonpost.com. 

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

Two Hanoi Facebook users have been fined and ordered to delete satirical content they posted online about Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, founder and former chief executive officer of VietJet Air, according to the capital city’s government and state media.

VietJet Air, a low-cost airline headquartered in Hanoi, was the first privately owned carrier to be established in Vietnam, a socialist republic governed by the Communist Party.

Often dubbed the “bikini airline,” VietJet is known for its ads featuring models in bikinis to promote resort destinations.

On Jan. 20, Hanoi’s Department of Information and Communications announced on its website that its Inspection Division had imposed administrative fines on two individuals identified by the initials N.Q.D. and N.T.N.

Bao Dien tu Chinh phu, the online newspaper of the government of Vietnam. republished the news and included screenshots of the offending posts, which appeared on the Facebook accounts of Nga Nguyen and Dzung Art Nguyen. Both posts contained similar content.

The posts describe a character named “Chi Thao” — an apparent reference to VietJet Air’s founder — ordering a bowl of noodles in Ho Chi Minh City.

Though the dish costs only 10,000 dong, or 40 U.S. cents, the diner must pay for many extras, including chopsticks, a spoon and a window seat, mimicking the additional fees the airline imposes on passengers.

The diner also faces long waits for service and has difficulty contacting the restaurant owner, a parody of the delayed flights and customer service issues often associated with VietJet.

The author of the “Chi Thao” story remains unknown, but the post went viral on Facebook in Vietnam at the beginning of January. However, many versions of the story have since disappeared from the platform.

Freedom of expression

The two individuals were fined for “providing fabricated and false information, insulting honor, reputation, dignity, or harming the legitimate rights and interests of other agencies, organizations, and individuals” under Article 16 of Vietnam’s cybersecurity law.

Human rights groups have criticized the law for restricting freedoms of expression, privacy and information, especially pointing to Article 16’s overly broad definition of what constitutes propaganda against the state.

Hanoi’s Department of Information and Communications did not disclose the amount of the fines or confirm that the individual offended by the post was Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, the 54-year-old self-made billionaire who established VietJet.

Thao took the company public in 2017 and currently serves as chairwoman of the airline’s board of directors.

The department said its decision was in line with related decrees stipulating that violators can be fined 5 million-10 million dong (US$200-400) and must remove offending content.

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When Radio Free Asia contacted Facebook user Dzung Art Nguyen, whose name and profile photo matched those reported by state media, he confirmed posting the content but said he deleted it about an hour later.

He also claimed that someone had created a fake account to repost the content after it was removed. Nguyen denied being summoned or fined by authorities.

RFA was unable to reach Facebook user Nga Nguyen for verification, and calls to Hanoi’s Department of Information and Communications went unanswered.

VietJet Air did not respond to a request for comment.

Black humor suppressed

Journalist Nam Viet from Ho Chi Minh City suggested that such punishments stem from the fact that business leaders and officials, accustomed to living a life of luxury, cannot tolerate mockery aimed at them.

“Looking back at the history of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia, you can see that caricatures and jokes targeting specific sitting officials were among the first forms of art to be eliminated,” he said in a text message to RFA. “And even political jokes, also known as black humor, were always [suppressed].”

Nam Viet cited the 1984 arrest and imprisonment of novelist Doan Quoc Sy as an example. Sy, whose writings had been banned by the communist government, was detained for gathering and documenting humorous anecdotes from the Vietnam War. These stories highlighted moments when North Vietnamese soldiers were astonished by the wealth they saw in the South — encounters that directly contradicted the communist regime’s propaganda.

Translated by Anna Vu for RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Vietnamese.

The island’s Legislative Yuan approved the 2025 central government general budget on Tuesday, which saw a record cut of approximately $207.5 billion New Taiwan dollars (US$6.34 billion) forced by the opposition Kuomintang and Taiwan People’s Party.

The affected items include Taiwan’s defense and diplomatic budgets, with half of the proposed NT$2 billion (US$66.67 million) funding for an indigenous defense submarine, or IDS, program being frozen on Monday.

The freeze prevents Taiwan’s navy from accessing the NT$1 billion until the IDS prototype, the Narwhal, completes its sea acceptance tests and the Ministry of National Defense briefs lawmakers.

The IDS program, which produces the island’s first self-made submarine, the ROCN Hai Kun submarine, also known as SS-711, is intended to develop the capacity to intercept Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy fleets from entering the Pacific Ocean, preventing the encirclement or blockade of waters around Taiwan or breaking through blockades.

The submarine is undergoing testing.

(Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

“This is a budget review that hurts our allies and pleases our adversaries. The nation’s interests are being undermined, our competing nations are catching up, and hostile China will be very satisfied,” said Executive Yuan Premier Cho Jung-tai, who is a member of the DPP.

A Kuomintang legislator, Hsu Chiao-Hsin, insists that the remaining budget will only be released after the first submarine passes its sea test but Deputy Defense Minister Po Hung-hui said that would negatively affect the program.

“The decision has greatly discouraged colleagues who have worked tirelessly on the submarine program for years,” Po told a press conference on Tuesday.

Some analysts, on the other hand, say overseeing the budget is “justified” on some conditions.

“The submarine is still a prototype with significant room for improvement. The concern now is that it has yet to undergo sea trials,” Shu Hsiao-Huang, an associate research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told Radio Free Asia.

“If the trials reveal numerous issues that require adjustments or system updates, there are doubts about whether this design can be applied to the second and subsequent mass-production vessels. And there are uncertainties about potential changes in shipbuilding costs.”

He added that although it was reasonable for legislators to oversee budget outlays, the ruling and opposition parties should not treat it as a tool for political purposes.

“Hopefully, this will not devolve into political infighting, which could lead to flawed policies and turn into a political battleground,” Shu said.

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Cooperation with US

Taiwan is expected to conclude a major arms purchase agreement with the new U.S. administration of President Donald Trump, with media reporting in November that Taiwan had already approached Trump’s team regarding a possible US$15 billion weapons package.

Nevertheless, Shu said that issues such as delayed deliveries of U.S. arms also complicated Taiwan’s use of its defense budget.

The Washington-based Cato Institute said in a September report that as of August 2024, the total value of undelivered U.S. arms to Taiwan had reached US$20.53 billion.

“Taiwan’s overall military procurement contract with the U.S. is fine,” Shu said. “The only issue that could disrupt the budget use is the delayed weapons,” he said, adding that inflation also complicated the process.

“The procurement details such as personnel training, follow-up equipment support, additional ammunition and spare parts can also lead to any adjustment of the budget,” he added.

Edited by Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alan Lu for RFA.

An emergency 231 million euro (NZ$428 million) French aid package for New Caledonia has been reduced by one third because of the French Pacific territory’s current political crisis.

The initial French package was endorsed in early December 2024, in an 11th-hour vote at the French National Assembly, minutes before French Prime Minister Michel Barnier and his government fell in a motion of no confidence.

The “end of management 2024” bill amounted to 231 million euros, specifically to allow New Caledonia’s essential public services to keep operating in the next few weeks.

• READ MORE: ‘Bloc’ resignation over riots recovery plan topples New Caledonia’s government
• Valls hopes to tackle New Caledonia in Rocard-style ‘spirit of dialogue’
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

But the financial package was pre-conditioned to New Caledonia’s Congress endorsing reforms before the end of the year.

Out of the three tranches of the total aid, the Congress managed, during its December 23, 2024, sitting, to endorse two.

Then, on Christmas Eve, New Caledonia’s government fell, due to a resignation by one of its members, Calédonie Ensemble.

Domino effect
Since the government led by Louis Mapou was toppled on Christmas Eve, pro-independence MPs at the Congress refused to take part in further votes.

They did not turn up on the Boxing Day sitting on Thursday, December 26.

This made it impossible for Congress to endorse the third and last tranche of the reforms, which were a precondition to the last third of the French aid package.

Letter from Bayrou and Valls
In a letter received by New Caledonia’s MPs at the weekend, both new French Prime Minister François Bayrou and his new Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls explained the failure for New Caledonia’s Congress to endorse the last third of the demanded reform package.

It means the whole package of 231 million euros will not be paid in full, and that one third of the total will have to wait until this year.

The confirmed amount, for the time being, is now 154 million euros (NZ$285 million) which will go towards New Caledonia’s Provinces and municipalities (125 million euros — NZ$231 million).

The remaining 29 million euros (NZ$54 million) will be paid and used for the payment of New Caledonia’s unemployment benefits and to allow the French Pacific territory’s power company, ENERCAL, which is on the brink of collapse without immediate assistance.

77 million euros withheld
“The last third of the initial 231 million euros package for New Caledonia (77 million euros [NZ$143 million]) will be released in 2025, once the pre-condition as stipulated in the initial agreement, regarding a reform of the TGC (General Consumption Tax, a local equivalent of a VAT) is adopted by (New Caledonia’s) Congress. Failing that, it will not,” Bayrou and Valls explained in the same letter.

They further wrote that those reforms were “indispensable” to ensure “visibility and stability” for New Caledonia’s “economic stakeholders and more generally to all of New Caledonians at a time when a dialogue is supposed to take place on its institutional future.”

The bloc resignation from Calédonie Ensemble entails that the whole government of New Caledonia is deemed to have resigned and acts in a caretaker mode until the inception of a new government.

New Caledonia’s Congress has been convened for a special sitting next week on 7 January 2025 to elect a new government, under the principle of proportional representation and a spirit of “collegiality”.

One particular point of contention was Mapou’s efforts to secure a loan of up to 1 billion euros from France, under a ‘PS2R’ (reconstruction, refoundation and salvage) plan to rebuild New Caledonia after the riots’ damage (estimated at some 2.2 billion euros) and the subsequent thousands of job losses.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Recently passed amendments to a fiscal planning law could reduce the defense budget by 28%, or NT$80 billion (US$2.44 billion), which would “have a serious impact on the national military’s buildup and preparedness,” the ministry said in a statement issued late Wednesday.

Last week, Taiwan’s opposition parties, which hold a majority in parliament, passed the amended Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures that if implemented would see a NT$375.3 billion (US$11.47 billion) reduction in the central government’s overall budget.

The current defense budget is approximately 2.4% of Taiwan’s gross domestic product, or GDP, but it would shrink to less than 2% after the cut, “at a time when every country in the region is increasing its defense spending,” said the ministry.

Previously, the Taiwanese government proposed a record high military budget that accounted for approximately 2.5% of the GDP for 2025 but that increase now seems unlikely.

“It may create a negative image in the international community that we … lack the determination to defend ourselves,” the ministry said.

The national defense budget should be decided in accordance with “the threats posed by the enemy and the need to build up the military and prepare for war,” it said.

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China has been ramping up military activities around Taiwan, which it considers a Chinese province that should be “reunified” with the mainland, by force if necessary.

An analyst said that in the face of constant cross-Strait threats, Taiwan needs to increase its defense budget, as well as social and economic resilience.

“We need to demonstrate that we’re willing to fight,” said Kuan-chen Lee, associate research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a government think tank.

“Taiwan must improve military capabilities and make war more costly for China,” Lee told Radio Free Asia.

The budget cut would “make it impossible to continuously upgrade major weapons and equipment, and it would be difficult to make payments for contracted purchases,” warned the defense ministry.

C-130 fleet upgrade

On Wednesday, the Taiwanese Defense Mission to the United States issued a public notice to invite tenders to upgrade its existing C-130 military transport aircraft for an estimated NT$126 million (US$3.85 million).

The money will be allocated to purchase new propellers, according to the procurement notice.

(RFA)

The acquisition is part of a six-year overhaul project, called Taiwu Mountain III, to be carried out between 2025-2030 and expected to cost NT$10 billion (US$ 305.86 million).

Taiwan’s air force has a fleet of 20 U.S.-made C-130s bought in the 1980s that serve as the main transport aircraft for the armed forces.

The upgrade would ensure that the aircraft have integrated cockpits and improved sea rescue capabilities.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes made this observation in 1936, in his masterwork The General Theory. Nearly a century later, readers and viewers of corporate media face the same fate.

The fundamental problem confronted by these news consumers is not that corporate news outlets consult economists in their reporting; as experts in their field, economists often have important and worthwhile contributions to make. The problem is that these outlets consistently elevate the views of specific economists who serve particular ideological interests over the views of other economists, or even the academic profession as a whole.

The austerity gospel

Simon Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/19/15): “‘Mediamacro’…prefers simple stories to more complex analysis. As part of this, it is fond of analogies between governments and individuals, even when those analogies are generally seen to be false by macroeconomists.”

Consider the case of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity mania that followed. The British economist Simon Wren-Lewis (London Review of Books, 2/9/15) has documented how media depictions of austerity diverged sharply from professional economists’ understandings and textbooks’ explanations of macroeconomics. His term for the media’s unique understanding of macroeconomics is “mediamacro,” which is characterized by an obsession with cutting the deficit over and above all other concerns.

In the wake of the banking crisis that followed the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007-08, and then the onset of the Eurozone crisis in 2010, standard textbook macroeconomics dictated a runup in the deficit to stimulate the economy out of a downturn. Corporate media, however, bought the arguments of political conservatives and a fringe of academic economists (who nonetheless held positions at prestigious universities), who maintained that austerity, specifically through spending cuts, could return the economy to health.

In the most notorious instance, corporate media outlets opportunistically promoted the findings of a 2010 paper, written by two Harvard economists, that were later famously invalidated due to an Excel error. As Paul Krugman noted in 2013 (New York Times, 4/19/13), this paper was controversial among economists from the start, but this did not stop corporate media from citing it—and its flimsy assertion that there existed a tipping-point for government debt at 90% of GDP, beyond which this debt supposedly imposed a major drag on economic growth—as gospel:

For example, a Washington Post editorial earlier this year warned against any relaxation on the deficit front, because we are “dangerously near the 90% mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.” Notice the phrasing: “economists,” not “some economists,” let alone “some economists, vigorously disputed by other economists with equally good credentials,” which was the reality.

The view from finance

As Mark Copelovitch (SSRN, 10/27/17) has noted, “The single most important factor [in elevating falsehoods about austerity] has been the media’s willingness to embrace and promote these narratives, while largely ignoring the overwhelming empirical and historical evidence that austerity is deeply contractionary and counter-productive.”

In another instance recounted by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15), after the return of some growth in 2013 in Britain following the election of a Conservative government committed to austerity in 2010, the Financial Times editorial board (9/10/13) declared the Conservatives victorious in their political argument for austerity. This despite the fact that “less than 20% of academic economists surveyed by the Financial Times thought that the recovery of 2013 vindicated austerity.”

Such false right-wing narratives about macroeconomic policy came to dominate media discourse, not merely because political elites adopted these false narratives and thus made them newsworthy, but because corporate media outlets were compliant messengers for elite views and prescriptions.

Why does the media adopt “mediamacro” as its approach to coverage of the economy? One reason proposed by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15) is the influence of City of London (or, in the US case, Wall Street) economists, whose

views tend to reflect the economic arguments of those on the right: Regulation is bad, top rates of tax should be low, the state is too large, and budget deficits are a serious and immediate concern.

Moreover, the political leanings of corporate media outlets, whether or not they are made explicit, may encourage them to seek the expertise of economists of a particular ideological bent. These economists’ views may, in turn, be out of step with the academic mainstream on topics like austerity.

The inflation oracle

The corporate media’s tendency to elevate economists of a specific type hasn’t disappeared in the 2020s. With the onset of Covid and the spike in inflation that followed, media broke out their familiar playbook of consulting prominent economists with extreme, and business-friendly, positions.

The infamous example was the elevation of Larry Summers, who slammed Biden’s 2021 stimulus as “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years” and warned stridently of inflation (Washington Post, 5/24/21). When inflation rose to a high of just over 9% the next year, Summers was hailed by the media as “an oracle: the man who saw it all coming,” as Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman (2/13/23) sarcastically put it.

In one sense, it was true that Summers had seen inflation as a strong possibility, and he did deserve some credit for that. Other economists, notably Paul Krugman, had downplayed the possibility of a jump in inflation and had to eat their words (New York Times, 7/21/22). But the fact that Summers had gotten this one point right, after an illustrious career of getting things wrong, did not exactly justify his skyrocketing status as the go-to voice on inflation, or the heaps of at times fawning media coverage thrown his way (Wall Street Journal, 6/27/22; Fortune, 9/23/22).

Did it justify, for example, Summers garnering six times as many mentions as Krugman on top cable news channels from 2021 through 2023? A Nobel laureate and widely respected commentator, Krugman also happened to be the most prominent proponent of a more dovish, less austere approach to inflation. Though he failed to foresee the initial rise in inflation, Krugman accurately predicted, in contrast to Summers, that the US economy could achieve a “soft landing,” a fall in inflation without a substantial rise in the unemployment rate (New York Times, 5/18/23).

Meanwhile, Summers capitalized on his new status as economic prophet to insist that extreme pain was required to tame inflation. By mid-2022, he confidently proclaimed (Bloomberg, 6/20/22):

We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5% unemployment or five years of 6% unemployment or one year of 10% unemployment.

Cherry-picking expertise

Like the views of extreme austerity advocates in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Summers’ views in 2022 were acutely out of sync with the mainstream among academic economists, as becomes apparent from surveys of professional economists taken over the course of the inflationary outbreak.

Financial Times/Booth survey of macroeconomists (9/13/22)

One FT/Booth survey taken in the fall of 2022 is particularly informative. It found that most economists thought that the Federal Reserve was on track to contain inflation with its pace of interest rate hikes. Specifically, when asked to react to the statement “Futures markets now suggest the Fed will raise the federal funds rate to about 3.9% by the end of 2022,” only 36% of economists classified the Fed’s actions as “too little too late and insufficient to help keep inflation under control.” The rest either thought that this policy path was sufficient to contain inflation (55%) or thought that it was overkill (9%).

When asked about the toll Fed policy would take on the labor market, academic economists took a moderate stance. Most agreed that the unemployment rate would peak below 6% and that a recession would last for less than a year. Incidentally, only a small minority of economists seem to have foreseen the possibility of inflation returning to target without a recession and with unemployment rising no higher than 4.3%, which is what in fact has occurred. But notwithstanding their apparent excess of pessimism, economists generally agreed that inflation would come under control with nowhere near the punishment Summers was prescribing.

To be fair, these economists were not asked directly what would be sufficient to contain inflation, and if asked directly, it is likely that some segment would have been in Summers’ camp—after all, about a third of the economists surveyed thought that the Fed was doing “too little too late.” But those backing Summers’ full diagnosis would be a fraction of those taking this minority view. So the central point that Summers was in the minority, and likely in quite a small minority, among professional economists is undoubtedly true.

Yet with his quasi-divine status granted by corporate media, Summers could pontificate freely about the need for mass suffering without fear of marginalization for lack of evidence or credibility. So when he prescribed 5% unemployment for five years, all that an outlet like Bloomberg (6/20/22) did was report on his views, no skepticism necessary. And no warning label stating: This is completely out of step with the academic mainstream. In effect, corporate media decided to once again cherry-pick expertise to legitimize austerity policies.

‘Not sensible policy’

James K. Galbraith and Isabella Weber (Boston Globe, 8/22/24) : “Americans still have some common sense…. It shows that all of the efforts of free-market economists to beat it out of them have not yet worked.“

At the same time, alternatives to the dominant austerity paradigm have been treated with caution, if not outright hostility. The New York Times (8/15/24), for example, in a recent piece on Kamala Harris’s advocacy for anti-price-gouging legislation, did consult Isabella Weber, a progressive economist who has become well known for her work on profit-driven inflation. But her testimony was overshadowed in the piece by that of economists with more conservative takes on the issue.

Most notably, the Times relied heavily on the insights of Harvard economist Jason Furman, who helped lead the push for extreme austerity alongside Summers (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22). His first quote in the article had a simple Econ 101 message: “Egg prices went up last year—it’s because there weren’t as many eggs, and it caused more egg production.” In other words, egg prices went up because of supply issues, and it’s good that prices went up because that spurred more egg production.

Unfortunately, this story doesn’t fit with the facts. Responding to this Furman quote, Weber and James Galbraith observed in a separate article (Boston Globe, 8/22/24):

In fact, US egg production peaked in 2019 and then fell slightly, through last year. Egg prices spiked from early 2022 to $4.82 a dozen on average in January 2023, before falling back again, with no gain in production. High prices did not stimulate America’s hens to greater effort. On these points, Furman laid an egg.

It might be assumed that the Times would engage in this sort of basic factchecking of its sources, and not leave it to two progressive economists writing in the Boston Globe to do that for them. But when the source is a Harvard economist who not too long ago was suggesting (wildly incorrectly) that unemployment would have to jump over 6% for two years to tame inflation (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22), apparently skepticism is not in order.

Leaving little room to doubt the leanings of the Times reporters, the article ended with another quote from Furman, this time on Harris’s proposal to go after price gouging:

“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” he said. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”

Hand-picked by elites

Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 2/14/24): “For media outlets owned by the wealthy, there’s obvious utility in directing the conversation away from inequality and toward other concerns.”

If one of the main functions of the media is agenda-setting—deeming certain topics, like government debt, newsworthy and others, like inequality, not so much (FAIR.org, 2/14/24)—another primary function is legitimization: letting audiences know who they should trust and who they should treat with skepticism. Over the course of the recent bout of inflation, corporate outlets have made it clear that those economists who erred on the side of far-reaching austerity were worth listening to. The ones who dissented most strongly from the austerity paradigm were, for the most part, sidelined or only tepidly consulted.

The result has been a constrained debate. Extreme pro-austerity positions have enjoyed high visibility, while progressives have been relegated to the background. This is not because of an imbalance in the evidence. If anything, the side that has been arguing for anti-austerity measures to fight inflation, like temporary price controls, has more evidence for their claims than the side that’s backed harsh monetary austerity. They, at least, haven’t been proven embarrassingly wrong by the experience of the past couple years.

What could help explain the imbalance in coverage is instead the background of different sets of economists. Before being legitimized by corporate media, extremists for austerity like Summers and Furman were legitimized by political status—Summers served in top roles under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Furman served as a key adviser to Obama. Progressives like Isabella Weber have not enjoyed similar political standing.

Thus, we can see a sort of chain of legitimization that runs from a political system dominated by economic elites to a media ecosystem owned by economic elites. If you can secure a top post in politics, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an extremist with views contradicting the consensus among academic economists. Your views should be taken seriously. For progressives, who have largely been excluded from elite politics in recent decades, serious skepticism is in order.

On the face of it, this system makes some sense. But think a little deeper and you can see an insidious chain servicing the dominant players in American society. That chain needs to be broken. Media outlets need to listen to the evidence, not the false wisdom of economists hand-picked by American elites.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Conor Smyth.

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes made this observation in 1936, in his masterwork The General Theory. Nearly a century later, readers and viewers of corporate media face the same fate.

The fundamental problem confronted by these news consumers is not that corporate news outlets consult economists in their reporting; as experts in their field, economists often have important and worthwhile contributions to make. The problem is that these outlets consistently elevate the views of specific economists who serve particular ideological interests over the views of other economists, or even the academic profession as a whole.

The austerity gospel

Simon Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/19/15): “‘Mediamacro’…prefers simple stories to more complex analysis. As part of this, it is fond of analogies between governments and individuals, even when those analogies are generally seen to be false by macroeconomists.”

Consider the case of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity mania that followed. The British economist Simon Wren-Lewis (London Review of Books, 2/9/15) has documented how media depictions of austerity diverged sharply from professional economists’ understandings and textbooks’ explanations of macroeconomics. His term for the media’s unique understanding of macroeconomics is “mediamacro,” which is characterized by an obsession with cutting the deficit over and above all other concerns.

In the wake of the banking crisis that followed the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007-08, and then the onset of the Eurozone crisis in 2010, standard textbook macroeconomics dictated a runup in the deficit to stimulate the economy out of a downturn. Corporate media, however, bought the arguments of political conservatives and a fringe of academic economists (who nonetheless held positions at prestigious universities), who maintained that austerity, specifically through spending cuts, could return the economy to health.

In the most notorious instance, corporate media outlets opportunistically promoted the findings of a 2010 paper, written by two Harvard economists, that were later famously invalidated due to an Excel error. As Paul Krugman noted in 2013 (New York Times, 4/19/13), this paper was controversial among economists from the start, but this did not stop corporate media from citing it—and its flimsy assertion that there existed a tipping-point for government debt at 90% of GDP, beyond which this debt supposedly imposed a major drag on economic growth—as gospel:

For example, a Washington Post editorial earlier this year warned against any relaxation on the deficit front, because we are “dangerously near the 90% mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.” Notice the phrasing: “economists,” not “some economists,” let alone “some economists, vigorously disputed by other economists with equally good credentials,” which was the reality.

The view from finance

As Mark Copelovitch (SSRN, 10/27/17) has noted, “The single most important factor [in elevating falsehoods about austerity] has been the media’s willingness to embrace and promote these narratives, while largely ignoring the overwhelming empirical and historical evidence that austerity is deeply contractionary and counter-productive.”

In another instance recounted by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15), after the return of some growth in 2013 in Britain following the election of a Conservative government committed to austerity in 2010, the Financial Times editorial board (9/10/13) declared the Conservatives victorious in their political argument for austerity. This despite the fact that “less than 20% of academic economists surveyed by the Financial Times thought that the recovery of 2013 vindicated austerity.”

Such false right-wing narratives about macroeconomic policy came to dominate media discourse, not merely because political elites adopted these false narratives and thus made them newsworthy, but because corporate media outlets were compliant messengers for elite views and prescriptions.

Why does the media adopt “mediamacro” as its approach to coverage of the economy? One reason proposed by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15) is the influence of City of London (or, in the US case, Wall Street) economists, whose

views tend to reflect the economic arguments of those on the right: Regulation is bad, top rates of tax should be low, the state is too large, and budget deficits are a serious and immediate concern.

Moreover, the political leanings of corporate media outlets, whether or not they are made explicit, may encourage them to seek the expertise of economists of a particular ideological bent. These economists’ views may, in turn, be out of step with the academic mainstream on topics like austerity.

The inflation oracle

The corporate media’s tendency to elevate economists of a specific type hasn’t disappeared in the 2020s. With the onset of Covid and the spike in inflation that followed, media broke out their familiar playbook of consulting prominent economists with extreme, and business-friendly, positions.

The infamous example was the elevation of Larry Summers, who slammed Biden’s 2021 stimulus as “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years” and warned stridently of inflation (Washington Post, 5/24/21). When inflation rose to a high of just over 9% the next year, Summers was hailed by the media as “an oracle: the man who saw it all coming,” as Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman (2/13/23) sarcastically put it.

In one sense, it was true that Summers had seen inflation as a strong possibility, and he did deserve some credit for that. Other economists, notably Paul Krugman, had downplayed the possibility of a jump in inflation and had to eat their words (New York Times, 7/21/22). But the fact that Summers had gotten this one point right, after an illustrious career of getting things wrong, did not exactly justify his skyrocketing status as the go-to voice on inflation, or the heaps of at times fawning media coverage thrown his way (Wall Street Journal, 6/27/22; Fortune, 9/23/22).

Did it justify, for example, Summers garnering six times as many mentions as Krugman on top cable news channels from 2021 through 2023? A Nobel laureate and widely respected commentator, Krugman also happened to be the most prominent proponent of a more dovish, less austere approach to inflation. Though he failed to foresee the initial rise in inflation, Krugman accurately predicted, in contrast to Summers, that the US economy could achieve a “soft landing,” a fall in inflation without a substantial rise in the unemployment rate (New York Times, 5/18/23).

Meanwhile, Summers capitalized on his new status as economic prophet to insist that extreme pain was required to tame inflation. By mid-2022, he confidently proclaimed (Bloomberg, 6/20/22):

We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5% unemployment or five years of 6% unemployment or one year of 10% unemployment.

Cherry-picking expertise

Like the views of extreme austerity advocates in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Summers’ views in 2022 were acutely out of sync with the mainstream among academic economists, as becomes apparent from surveys of professional economists taken over the course of the inflationary outbreak.

Financial Times/Booth survey of macroeconomists (9/13/22)

One FT/Booth survey taken in the fall of 2022 is particularly informative. It found that most economists thought that the Federal Reserve was on track to contain inflation with its pace of interest rate hikes. Specifically, when asked to react to the statement “Futures markets now suggest the Fed will raise the federal funds rate to about 3.9% by the end of 2022,” only 36% of economists classified the Fed’s actions as “too little too late and insufficient to help keep inflation under control.” The rest either thought that this policy path was sufficient to contain inflation (55%) or thought that it was overkill (9%).

When asked about the toll Fed policy would take on the labor market, academic economists took a moderate stance. Most agreed that the unemployment rate would peak below 6% and that a recession would last for less than a year. Incidentally, only a small minority of economists seem to have foreseen the possibility of inflation returning to target without a recession and with unemployment rising no higher than 4.3%, which is what in fact has occurred. But notwithstanding their apparent excess of pessimism, economists generally agreed that inflation would come under control with nowhere near the punishment Summers was prescribing.

To be fair, these economists were not asked directly what would be sufficient to contain inflation, and if asked directly, it is likely that some segment would have been in Summers’ camp—after all, about a third of the economists surveyed thought that the Fed was doing “too little too late.” But those backing Summers’ full diagnosis would be a fraction of those taking this minority view. So the central point that Summers was in the minority, and likely in quite a small minority, among professional economists is undoubtedly true.

Yet with his quasi-divine status granted by corporate media, Summers could pontificate freely about the need for mass suffering without fear of marginalization for lack of evidence or credibility. So when he prescribed 5% unemployment for five years, all that an outlet like Bloomberg (6/20/22) did was report on his views, no skepticism necessary. And no warning label stating: This is completely out of step with the academic mainstream. In effect, corporate media decided to once again cherry-pick expertise to legitimize austerity policies.

‘Not sensible policy’

James K. Galbraith and Isabella Weber (Boston Globe, 8/22/24) : “Americans still have some common sense…. It shows that all of the efforts of free-market economists to beat it out of them have not yet worked.“

At the same time, alternatives to the dominant austerity paradigm have been treated with caution, if not outright hostility. The New York Times (8/15/24), for example, in a recent piece on Kamala Harris’s advocacy for anti-price-gouging legislation, did consult Isabella Weber, a progressive economist who has become well known for her work on profit-driven inflation. But her testimony was overshadowed in the piece by that of economists with more conservative takes on the issue.

Most notably, the Times relied heavily on the insights of Harvard economist Jason Furman, who helped lead the push for extreme austerity alongside Summers (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22). His first quote in the article had a simple Econ 101 message: “Egg prices went up last year—it’s because there weren’t as many eggs, and it caused more egg production.” In other words, egg prices went up because of supply issues, and it’s good that prices went up because that spurred more egg production.

Unfortunately, this story doesn’t fit with the facts. Responding to this Furman quote, Weber and James Galbraith observed in a separate article (Boston Globe, 8/22/24):

In fact, US egg production peaked in 2019 and then fell slightly, through last year. Egg prices spiked from early 2022 to $4.82 a dozen on average in January 2023, before falling back again, with no gain in production. High prices did not stimulate America’s hens to greater effort. On these points, Furman laid an egg.

It might be assumed that the Times would engage in this sort of basic factchecking of its sources, and not leave it to two progressive economists writing in the Boston Globe to do that for them. But when the source is a Harvard economist who not too long ago was suggesting (wildly incorrectly) that unemployment would have to jump over 6% for two years to tame inflation (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22), apparently skepticism is not in order.

Leaving little room to doubt the leanings of the Times reporters, the article ended with another quote from Furman, this time on Harris’s proposal to go after price gouging:

“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” he said. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”

Hand-picked by elites

Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 2/14/24): “For media outlets owned by the wealthy, there’s obvious utility in directing the conversation away from inequality and toward other concerns.”

If one of the main functions of the media is agenda-setting—deeming certain topics, like government debt, newsworthy and others, like inequality, not so much (FAIR.org, 2/14/24)—another primary function is legitimization: letting audiences know who they should trust and who they should treat with skepticism. Over the course of the recent bout of inflation, corporate outlets have made it clear that those economists who erred on the side of far-reaching austerity were worth listening to. The ones who dissented most strongly from the austerity paradigm were, for the most part, sidelined or only tepidly consulted.

The result has been a constrained debate. Extreme pro-austerity positions have enjoyed high visibility, while progressives have been relegated to the background. This is not because of an imbalance in the evidence. If anything, the side that has been arguing for anti-austerity measures to fight inflation, like temporary price controls, has more evidence for their claims than the side that’s backed harsh monetary austerity. They, at least, haven’t been proven embarrassingly wrong by the experience of the past couple years.

What could help explain the imbalance in coverage is instead the background of different sets of economists. Before being legitimized by corporate media, extremists for austerity like Summers and Furman were legitimized by political status—Summers served in top roles under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Furman served as a key adviser to Obama. Progressives like Isabella Weber have not enjoyed similar political standing.

Thus, we can see a sort of chain of legitimization that runs from a political system dominated by economic elites to a media ecosystem owned by economic elites. If you can secure a top post in politics, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an extremist with views contradicting the consensus among academic economists. Your views should be taken seriously. For progressives, who have largely been excluded from elite politics in recent decades, serious skepticism is in order.

On the face of it, this system makes some sense. But think a little deeper and you can see an insidious chain servicing the dominant players in American society. That chain needs to be broken. Media outlets need to listen to the evidence, not the false wisdom of economists hand-picked by American elites.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Conor Smyth.

Days before, the ministry requested a record budget of 8.5 trillion yen (US$59 billion) for the next year to boost deterrence.

The English version of the 572-page white paper, which sets out Tokyo’s defense plan, was made public on Tuesday.

In the report “Defense of Japan 2024,” Minister of Defense Minoru Kihara wrote that the international community had entered “a new era of crisis” and was facing “the greatest trial” since World War II. 

Kihara singled out China, which has been building up military strength while intensifying activities in the East China Sea and the Pacific, as one of the greatest strategic challenges to Japan, alongside North Korea and Russia.

The ministry assessed that China had been “intensifying changes to the status quo by force” in the entire region around Japan, including in the East China and South China Sea. 

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Japan fears that an armed conflict over Taiwan, which China considers a province that must be reunited with the mainland, would spill over to Japan. Tokyo has been deploying more troops and military equipment to its outlying islands close to Taiwan.

Japan’s defense policy is to continue building up capabilities, especially  so-called stand-off defense, or responding from outside the threat zone, using integrated air and missile systems,  and to strengthen cooperation with allies and partners.

“The alliance with the United States is a key pillar of Japan’s national security policy,” the ministry said in the white paper, noting that both Japan and the United States are “in agreement that the highest priority is … to prevent unilateral changes to the status quo by force,” a reference to China and Russia without naming them.

China has reacted angrily to the  white paper, saying it uses China as a pretext to mislead the Japanese public, as well as the international community, and to justify Japan’s  military expansion, according to media reports.

Record defense budget

Japan’s defense ministry on Friday requested a record  budget of nearly US$60 billion for 2025, mainly to fortify its southwestern islands against the threats from China, the Associated Press reported. 

The money would be spent on developing and acquiring new drones, missiles, satellites, cyber defense and cloud-based command and control systems. 

The budget has grown through the years. It was 6.6 trillion yen in 2023 and is projected to reach 7.7 trillion yen in 2024, according to the  defense ministry.

Tokyo is expected to double its annual military spending to about 10 trillion yen by 2027, becoming the world’s third largest military spender after the U.S. and China, AP reported.

While the request must go through the ministry of finance, which will likely reduce it before making a decision in December, China has already criticized it.

China’s Global Times quoted experts as saying that Japan’s continuous increase of military spending reflected its “militarism resurgence” and the ambition to expand its military presence in the region.

Japan’s aggression before and during World War II is deeply resented in parts of Asia, in particular China and South Korea.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

For the budget-minded types, the Olympics, and analogous monumental sporting events, continue to lose their appeal – along with the finances.  The extortionate strain on the public wallet, the bleeding of funds from budgets, has made them most unattractive propositions for the hosts.  To this can be added the disruptions to commerce, the occupation of valuable real estate along with environmental harm, the forceful displacement of residents, instances of gentrification and the redirecting of labour from vital infrastructure projects.

Even for the sports-crazed Australians, such events as the 2026 Commonwealth Games proved unappetising, with the state Victorian government cancelling the event in July 2023.  The whole matter had been grossly irresponsible on the part of the Andrews government, given its initial praise of the games leading up to their re-election.  The Victorian Auditor General was deeply unimpressed by the episode, subsequently finding that the cancellation had cost A$589 million, comprising A$150 million in terms of employee and operating costs and the A$380 million settlement.

In March this year, there were media rumblings that Brisbane, the planned host city for the 2032 Olympics, was considering a similar response.  The Queensland state government had sought advice about how much it would cost cancelling the entire effort and received an estimate lying anywhere between A$500 million and A$1 billion.  A further $3 billion in federal funding would have also been compromised.  The fractious venture was set to continue.

With six months to go, Paris was awash with the logistical disruptions that come with such an event.  Transit fares had increased.  The bouquinistes with their book stalls along the Seine, a feature made permanent by Napoleon III in 1859, were threatened by the city’s police with closure for the duration of the Games, a threat that President Emmanuel Macron eventually scotched.  Public sector employees demanded pay increases and unions got busy planning strikes.

The night before the opening of the Games saw thousands of activists gather at the Place de la République, coordinated by the activist collective La Revers de la Médaille (the Other Side of the Medal).  The event, featuring some 80 grassroot organisations, had been billed the “Counter-Opening Ceremony of the Olympics” and inspired by the statement “des Jeux, mai pour qui?” (“Games, but for whom?”)

Representing a broader coalition of groups, La Revers de la Médaille had released a statement in Libération prior to the gathering mocking official claims that Paris 2024 would leave a society more inclusive in its wake.  This could hardly be reconciled with the eviction of some 12,500 vulnerable individuals as part of an effort described as “social cleansing”.

In their “Oxford Olympics Study 2024”, co-authors Alexander Budzier and Bent Flyvbjerg conclude that the Olympics “remain costly and continue to have large cost overruns, to a degree that threatens their viability.”  All Games, “without exception”, run over budget.  “For no other type of megaproject is this the case, not even the construction of nuclear power plants or the storage of nuclear waste.”  For organisers of the event, the budget is an airy notion, “a fictitious minimum that was never sufficient” typical of the “Blank Check Syndrome”.

The authors acknowledge the efforts made by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to reform the games through such efforts as Agenda 2020 and Agenda 2020+5 but find their overall efforts patchy and unsuccessful.  Despite these programs, the cost of the Games were “statistically significantly increasing.”  Admittedly, the instances of cost overruns had significantly decreased until 2008, after which the trend was reversed.  The costs for Paris 2024, based on estimates available at the study’s publication, came to $US8.7 billion, a cost overrun of 115% in real terms.  “Cost overruns are the norm for the Games, past, present and future.  The Iron Law applies: ‘Over budget, over and over again.’”

Such events are, however, always attractive to the political classes willing to find some placing in posterity’s shiny ranks.  As the money they play with is almost never their own, expense is less significant than the pyrotechnics, the noisy show, the effort, the collective will that figures such as Albert Speer understood so well when planning the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  Give the public, and the sporting fraternity, flags, standards, pageantry.  Let them perform in large stadia, on pitches, and in water.  The world will soon forget the killjoys worried about money or weepy about the displaced.

It pays remembering those words of lamentation from US foreign correspondent William Shirer in his diary, penned on August 16, 1936: “I’m afraid the Nazis have succeeded with their propaganda.  First, the Nazis have run the Games on a lavish scale never before experienced, and this has appealed to the athletes.  Second, the Nazis have put up a very good front for the general visitors, especially the big businessmen.”

Such a formula has, for the most part, worked for decades, despite the odd hiccup of dissent and forensic critiques of the Blank Check Syndrome.  Be they despotic, authoritarian or democratically elected, if corrupt representatives, this is a show that is bound to go on with profligate persistence.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In 2022, Arizona pioneered the largest school voucher program in the history of education. Under a new law, any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.

In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.

Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million, the Grand Canyon analysis found; another $429 million in costs is expected this year.

As a result of all this unexpected spending, alongside some recent revenue losses, Arizona is now having to make deep cuts to a wide swath of critical state programs and projects, the pain of which will be felt by average Arizonans who may or may not have school-aged children.

Among the funding slashed: $333 million for water infrastructure projects, in a state where water scarcity will shape the future, and tens of millions of dollars for highway expansions and repairs in congested areas of one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolises — Phoenix and its suburbs. Also nixed were improvements to the air conditioning in state prisons, where temperatures can soar above 100 degrees. Arizona’s community colleges, too, are seeing their budgets cut by $54 million.

Still, Arizona-style universal school voucher programs — available to all, including the wealthiest parents — continue to sweep the nation, from Florida to Utah.

In Florida, one lawmaker pointed out last year that Arizona’s program seemed to be having a negative budgetary impact. “This is what Arizona did not anticipate,” said Florida Democratic Rep. Robin Bartleman, during a floor debate. “What is our backup plan to fill that budget hole?”

Her concern was minimized by her Republican colleagues, and Florida’s transformational voucher legislation soon passed.

Advocates for Arizona’s universal voucher initiative had originally said that it wouldn’t cost the public — and might even save taxpayers money. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank that helped craft the state’s 2022 voucher bill, claimed in its promotional materials at the time that the vouchers would “save taxpayers thousands per student, millions statewide.” Families that received the new cash, the institute said, would be educating their kids “for less than it would cost taxpayers if they were in the public school system.”

But as it turns out, the parents most likely to apply for these vouchers are the ones who were already sending their kids to private school or homeschooling. They use the dollars to subsidize what they were already paying for.

The result is new money coming out of the state budget. After all, the public wasn’t paying for private school kids’ tuition before.

Chris Kotterman, director of governmental relations for the Arizona School Boards Association, says that Arizona making vouchers available to children who had never gone to public school before wasn’t realistically going to save the state money.

“Say that my parents had been gladly paying my private school tuition, because that’s what was important to them — that I get a religious education. That’s completely fine,” Kotterman said. “But then the state said, ‘Oh, we’ll help you pay for that.’”

“There’s just no disputing that that costs the state more money,” he said, critiquing the claims of the Goldwater Institute and others who’d averred that this program and ones like it around the country would not be costly. “That’s not how a budget works.”

Heading into this fall, which will bring both a new school year and an election that stands to remake American education, ProPublica is going to be examining the complexities, lessons and failures of the nation’s first universal school voucher program as a model for where the whole system seems headed. Arizona’s program “set the standard nationally” and “inspired a national movement,” according to leading voucher advocacy groups; it is “the nation’s school-choice leader,” per the longtime conservative columnist George Will.

For decades, voucher initiatives, including in Arizona, had only served small subsets of students. Often, eligibility was limited to certain poor students from failing public schools, whose families could use a voucher to switch them into a potentially better private school.

In Arizona, for example, vouchers as of 2011 were available solely to students with disabilities, to make sure that their families could afford a range of personalized education options. The program was then expanded to students who had lived in foster care and to Native American students before, gradually, the money started going disproportionately to wealthier households.

Because these measures were initially narrow in scope, some studies found that they had no negative impact on state and local budgets — studies that voucher advocates continued to cite even as states started considering providing vouchers to every parent who wanted one, which is a far more costly undertaking.

Universal voucher efforts, beginning with Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account program in 2022, allow parents to spend public money not just on private school tuition but also on recreational programs for their kids like ninja warrior training, trampoline park outings and ski passes, or on toys and home goods that they say they need for homeschooling purposes. (The average ESA award is roughly $7,000.)

In a statement to ProPublica, a spokesperson for Arizona’s former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who signed the universal voucher program into law, said that “not only does Gov. Ducey have no regrets about ESA expansion, he considers it one of his finest achievements and a legacy accomplishment. And what he’s most thrilled about is that Arizona’s ESA expansion was followed by 11 other states doing essentially the same thing. Arizona helped set off an earthquake.”

Voucher proponents have long pointed out that private school parents have a right to and could be sending their children to public school at taxpayers’ expense. So providing them with what is often a smaller amount of taxpayer money in the form of a voucher to help them pay their private school tuition is, the argument goes, a net savings for the public.

This is similar to arguing that the public should help pay for car drivers’ gas because if they didn’t drive, they might use public transportation instead, which would be a cost to taxpayers.

Ducey’s spokesperson, Daniel Scarpinato, did not acknowledge that the net cost of universal vouchers has been far higher than voucher supporters originally promised. Instead, he reiterated that “universal ESA costs are basically revenue neutral.” The reasoning: Overall enrollment in Arizona public schools has been slightly down — ever since many parents withdrew their kids during the pandemic — creating some savings in the education budget that could be seen as offsetting the new voucher spending.

Ducey, as well as Matt Beienburg, the Goldwater Institute’s director of education policy, blamed Arizona’s budget crisis on current Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, pointing out that she signed a 2023 budget that spent down what was then a surplus instead of keeping the money in reserve for a possible moment like this. (The 2023 budget was passed with bipartisan support.) Ducey did not answer a question about whether he’d had a long-term plan to pay for ballooning voucher spending, beyond relying on that one-time surplus.

In an email, Beienburg maintained that Arizona’s current budget mess wasn’t caused by vouchers; he blamed, among other issues, state revenue recently being lower than anticipated. (The Goldwater Institute in 2021 collaborated with Ducey to write and pass a tax cut that reduced income taxes on the wealthiest Arizonans to 2.5%, the same rate that the poorest people in the state pay, which is the leading cause of the decline in revenue.)

Dave Wells, research director at the Grand Canyon Institute, said that none of the competing budget trends that Ducey and the Goldwater Institute pointed to mean that Arizona can actually afford universal vouchers, at least not without making severe, harmful budget cuts.

“They chose to make ESAs universal and that has made the budget situation much worse,” he said. “We still had a budget shortfall and budget cuts. The cost is still the cost.”

Now that vouchers in Arizona are available even to private school kids who have never attended a public school, there are no longer any constraints on the size of the program. What’s more, as the initiative enters its third year, there are no legislative fixes on the table to contain costs, despite Hobbs’ efforts to implement some reforms. “I have not heard them agree to anything that is a financial reform of the program at all,” said Sen. Mitzi Epstein, the Democratic minority leader of the state Senate, referring to her Republican colleagues.

Arizona doesn’t have a comprehensive tally of how many private schoolers and homeschoolers are out there, so it remains an open question how much higher the cost of vouchers could go and therefore how much cash should be kept on hand to fund them. The director of the state’s nonpartisan Joint Legislative Budget Committee told lawmakers that “we’ve never really faced that circumstance before where you’ve got this requirement” — that anyone can get a voucher — “but it isn’t funded.”

Most importantly, said Beth Lewis, executive director of the public-school-advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona, only a small amount of the new spending on private schools and homeschooling is going toward poor children, which means that already-extreme educational inequality in Arizona is being exacerbated. The state is 49th in the country in per-pupil public school funding, and as a result, year after year, district schools in lower-income areas are plagued by some of the nation’s worst staffing ratios and largest class sizes.

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on vouchers to help kids who are already going to private school keep going to private school won’t just sink the budget, Lewis said. It’s funding that’s not going to the public schools, keeping them from becoming what they could and should be.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

Türk made the comments following a brief visit to the Lao capital Vientiane – the first by a U.N. rights czar – where he met with Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone and other senior officials to discuss the state of human rights in the impoverished nation, which is also this year’s chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN.

Public debt is a “key challenge” facing Laos, he said, but cautioned that debt repayment “should not interfere with States’ human rights obligations to allocate the maximum available resources to the realization of economic and social rights.”

“It is against this background that I regret the declining public spending on social services, including social protection, health and education,” he said. 

“Human rights need to be reflected in budget allocations. If a country does not invest sufficiently in education, health, equality and other essentials, this will result in a cascade of problems in society – scuppering development and increasing inequalities.”

Türk applauded the Lao government’s emphasis on developing the country, but urged leaders to integrate human rights to ensure it is sustainable.

“Human rights are not an à la carte menu to select from,” he said. “Sustainable development is intertwined with economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights, as well as the right to a healthy environment.”

Civil society key to addressing issues

Among the issues he called on Laos to address were child marriage, gender inequality and the impact of infrastructure projects on local communities, adding that the government’s ability to tackles such issues “depends profoundly on the meaningful participation of those most affected, and of civil society in all its diversity.”

“In the absence of a vibrant civic space, stagnation sets in, and corruption remains hidden,” he said. “Policies to address environmental concerns, development goals, human rights violations resulting from business and land projects – indeed, any issue – are intrinsically weakened.”

To that end, Türk highlighted the need for those who express their views on issues of public interest “to do so without fear.” He said the government must do more to protect those in civil society from intimidation, violence or judicial harassment.

He urged authorities to continue investigations into cases of forced disappearance, including that of Lao rural development expert and activist Sombath Somphone.

Sombath has not been seen or heard from since he was stopped in his jeep at a police checkpoint outside Vientiane on Dec. 15, 2012, forced into a white truck and driven away. 

The Lao government has remained silent about the fate of the then 60-year-old Sombath, who had challenged massive land deals negotiated by the state that had left thousands of rural Lao villagers homeless with little compensation. 

Among the improvements on human rights Türk observed during his visit were legislative reforms, including a ban on corporal punishment of children, and progress in addressing poverty, which he said had led to improvements in the living conditions of some segments of the population.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Joshua Lipes.

“Today, we celebrate the end of that project,” Kemp told the crowd of state officials and utility executives. “And now, let’s start planning for Vogtle Five.”

That could be a tough sell to Georgians who have seen their bills go up multiple times to pay for the new reactors and for shareholders of the power plant’s largest owner, who had to absorb some of the costs. Originally billed as the dawn of a new nuclear era and priced at $14 billion, the Plant Vogtle project was plagued by repeated delays and ultimately cost an estimated total of more than $31 billion. 

When lead contractor Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy in 2017, prompting South Carolina to abandon its own nuclear project, Vogtle became the only new nuclear construction in the country. It still is. 

“If building more nuclear were a good idea, other states would be jumping on the bandwagon now,” said Liz Coyle, executive director of the consumer advocacy group Georgia Watch. “The fact that they’re not, I think, speaks volumes.”

Coyle said her group is preparing to fight any proposal for another reactor. 

For their part, the elected officials and utility executives at Wednesday’s event spoke of Plant Vogtle as a success story.

“Vogtle 3 and 4 don’t just represent an incredible economic development asset for our state and … a milestone for our entire country,” Kemp said. “They also stand as physical examples of something that I remind myself of every day: Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.”

Triumphal arrangements of the national anthem, “God Bless America,” and “Georgia On My Mind” backed by a gospel choir bookended the celebratory speeches. Attendees could snack on a sheet cake model of the power plant rendered in fondant.

Speakers touted Plant Vogtle as a win for clean energy, since it can produce enough electricity to power a million homes and businesses without the greenhouse gas emissions produced by coal or gas, according to Georgia Power, which owns the largest stake in the new reactors. That carbon-free energy is key to attracting new businesses to the state, Kemp and others said.

All five members of the Georgia Public Service Commission, or PSC — which oversees Georgia Power’s planning and rates, including the Vogtle project — addressed the crowd. 

“I just hope that we keep it up. We really should,” said commissioner Tricia Pridemore. “If we want to continue clean energy for our nation, it’s gonna take more than four.”  

In December, the PSC approved a deal that hikes Georgia Power customers’ rates now that Vogtle Unit 4 is online.

After the Wednesday event, commissioner Tim Echols said he supports more nuclear power in Georgia, but said a further Vogtle expansion would need to come with protections against runaway costs and other problems that plagued the last project.

“I really need some protection against a bankruptcy,” he said. “I just can’t do it on the same basis again.”

Echols suggested a federal “backstop” and a mechanism to ensure large customers like factories and data centers would pay for the bulk of nuclear construction.

Under current Georgia law, a further expansion of Plant Vogtle would need to be financed differently than the project that just wrapped up, Coyle said. In 2018, state lawmakers approved a sunset provision for the state law that had allowed Georgia Power to pass Vogtle’s financing costs on to customers during construction. Barring another change, that would mean Southern Company and its shareholders would shoulder those costs. 

Coyle said she’ll be urging lawmakers to keep it that way.

“Georgians are struggling, really, really struggling already to pay their power bills,” she said. “I hope we don’t have to go down this path again.”

On Friday,  U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and national climate advisor Ali Zaidi are visiting Vogtle for another event at the power plant. According to the Department of Energy, they plan to meet with local officials, as well as industry and labor leaders. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Georgia governor calls for even more nuclear power despite budget woes on May 31, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Jones.

Pacific island countries are getting an increased share of Australian foreign aid, budget documents show, as it shifts into funding infrastructure such as undersea cables and ports in response to China’s inroads in the region.

Overall, Australia’s foreign aid budget is flat and it remains one of the least generous donors in the OECD club of wealthy nations, ranking 26th out of 31 countries. The increased focus on infrastructure also means that proportionately less of the aid budget will be spent on health.

In the Pacific, the largest aid increases in Australia’s 2024-2025 government budget are directed at Fiji, where Australia will help fund a port upgrade, and Tuvalu. The atoll nation of 12,000 people last year ceded a partial veto of its foreign policy and security relationships to Australia under the Falepili Union agreement.

“If we look at this reduction in health -- is this because our partners have told us they’re not that interested in health -- I don’t think so,” said Stephen Howes, director of the Australian National University’s Development Policy Center.

“If we’re going to go into Fiji and tell them we are using our aid to help them expand their port, that’s because we don’t want China to do it, and that’s going to mean less funding for health,” he said at a panel Wednesday on the budget’s aid component.

China’s government has courted Pacific island nations for several decades as it seeks to isolate Taiwan diplomatically, gain allies in international institutions and erode U.S. military dominance. 

Its inroads with Pacific island nations, including a security pact with the Solomon Islands in 2022, have galvanized renewed U.S. attention to the region.

The budget released Tuesday shows the government has allocated A$4.96 billion [US$3.29 billion] to aid, an increase of 4.0% from the previous year.

“Australia is delivering a record $2 billion in development assistance to the Pacific, maintaining Australia's position as the region's largest and most comprehensive development partner,” the budget papers said.

In real terms, the spending is flat at 0.19% of Australia’s national income, according to the Australian Council for International Development, and less than half of its level in the 1980s.

“This budget provided the government with an opportunity to show real humanitarian leadership in responding to human suffering across the world,” the council said in a statement. 

“Australians see what is happening on their screens in all corners of the globe and expect their government to do more. This budget barely touches the surface,” it said.

Howes said the budget documents project aid spending to be unchanged for the next decade and beyond.

Pacific island countries now account for more than 40% of the aid budget, almost doubling from a decade earlier, at least partly reflecting government concerns about China’s role in a region that Australia has regarded as its sphere of influence.

Australia remains the single largest donor to Pacific island countries despite China’s enlarged presence in the region. At least a fifth of the Australian aid budget is spent on what Australia calls governance programs that aim to bolster democracy, anti-corruption efforts and transparency of public institutions.

For Tuvalu, Australia will provide additional funds for its land reclamation projects that aim to protect against king tides and projected sea-level rise and also contribute the lion’s share of the country’s first undersea telecommunications cable.

Tuvalu, one of the dwindling number of nations that have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, last year signed a treaty with Australia that requires it to have Australia’s agreement for “any partnership, arrangement or engagement with any other state or entity on security and defence-related matters.”

In Fiji, Australia is providing budget support to the government as the tourism-dependent economy continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. It also is supporting an upgrade to Fiji’s largest bulk cargo port and its shipbuilding industry. 

Papua New Guinea, with its estimated 12 million people, remains the single largest recipient of Australian aid in the Pacific at A$637.4 million. The Solomon Islands, where Australia has a security force stationed after riots in 2021, is the second largest with A$171.2 million.

The budget documents also revealed that Australia’s government agreed in December to provide an A$600 million loan to Papua New Guinea, a day after the two countries signed a defense cooperation agreement.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Stephen Wright for BenarNews.

In 2022, the state of California celebrated a record budget surplus of $97.5 billion. Two years later, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, this surplus has plummeted to a record budget deficit of $73 billion. Balancing the budget will be challenging. Unlike the federal government, the state cannot just drive up debt and roll it over year after year. The California Balanced Budget Act, passed in 2004, requires the state legislature to pass a balanced budget every year.

The usual solutions are to cut programs or raise taxes, but both approaches are facing an uphill battle. Raising taxes would require a two-thirds vote of the legislature, which would be very challenging, and worthy public programs are in danger of getting axed, including homelessness prevention and funding for low-income housing.

A third possibility might be to increase the income tax base and state income by stimulating the economy with a state-owned depository bank. The state-owned Bank of North Dakota, which has raised record profits for its state, is a stellar example. In a review of states with the healthiest budgets based on data from the PEW Charitable Trusts, U.S. News & World Report puts North Dakota at No. 1 in Budget Balancing and #1 in Short-term Fiscal Stability.

California has an Infrastructure and Development Bank, which is already capitalized and has an established track record of prudent and productive lending, but it is not a depository bank and its reach is small. Transforming it into a depository bank would be fairly uncomplicated and could substantially increase its reach.

But first a look at what happened to the state’s copious revenues.

Saga of a Budget Crisis

California’s record surplus was largely due to tax windfalls and to $43.5 billion received in American Rescue Plan money during the COVID crisis. Anticipating that these inflows would continue, the governor and legislature enacted a record budget for 2024-25 of nearly $300 billion, the largest of any state. Much of the surplus was committed to expanding an array of social and educational services, including extending universal health care coverage to undocumented immigrants. When taxes came in, the tally showed a revenue shortfall of $26 billion.

Tech industry woes were a major contributor. The top 1% of earners pay nearly half of California’s  income taxes, and 20% of its GDP comes from the tech industry. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which financed startups and attracted venture capital, speeded the sector’s decline. Massive Silicon Valley layoffs occurred and tech stock lost value, cutting capital gains taxes. And there has been a notable exodus from the state not just among the ultra-wealthy but by businesses, due to the combination of high taxes, stringent regulations, and elevated costs for labor, utilities, and energy.

Another contributor to the budget deficit were huge payouts for unemployment benefits, which skyrocketed during the COVID lockdown and business shutdowns. The state’s unemployment fund was exhausted, requiring a loan from the federal government. Twenty-one billion dollars remains to be repaid, and the interest rate on the debt has gone up. To meet the unemployment burden, California legislators are considering quintupling unemployment taxes and nearly doubling benefits, but the result could be more layoffs and more businesses leaving the state.

Plagued by Homelessness and Unemployment

Meanwhile, the wealth divide in California is enormous, with the highest unemployment rate and homeless rate in the country. This is despite $24 billion being spent on the unhoused over the last five years. Thirty percent of the nation’s homeless live in California, and nearly nine million Californians are on the brink of being homeless. Housing is too expensive for low-wage earners and there is a lack of available low-cost housing. But well-meaning legislation to help low-wage earners has had unintended consequences.

As of April 1, the minimum wage for fast food restaurant workers was raised by 25% to $20 an hour triggered by a strike by their union. But the move has negatively impacted many of the workers. Fast food restaurant owners operate on thin profit margins; and to cover these new costs, they have had to reduce workers’ hours, raise customer prices, engage in massive worker layoffs, move out of state, or close their businesses altogether. Almost 10,000 fast food jobs have been lost in California just since the $20 minimum wage law was signed.

As a result of these and other efforts to help low-wage earners, many vulnerable workers are suddenly finding or will find themselves out of a job.

Compare North Dakota

At the other end of the employment spectrum is North Dakota, which has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. As noted above, in a review of states with the healthiest budgets, U.S. News & World Report puts it at No. 1 in Budget Balancing and #1 in Short-term Fiscal Stability.  North Dakota’s budget for 2024-25 includes cuts in individual income taxes, including eliminating the state individual income tax for 60% of the population and a reduction in that tax for the other 40%. The result is projected to be a 1.5% flat rate income tax, the lowest in the nation. Again compare that to California, where the top state income tax is 14.4%, higher even than other states known for their tax burdens.

North Dakota was the only state to fully escape the 2008-09 credit crisis, never slipping into the red. When the state did go over budget in 2001-02 due to the dot-com bust, the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned bank, acted as a rainy day fund. To make up the budget shortfall, the bank declared an extra dividend for its state owner, and the next year the budget was back on track.

The BND is more profitable than some of the largest Wall Street banks. Its latest Annual Report (for 2022) states that it had a record net income of $191.2 million that year, up $47 million from 2021. Its asset size also set a record, at $10.2 billion. The return on investment was a healthy 19%. As the BND’s principal depositor, the state must keep its funds in the bank by law, thus protecting the bank from a run on its deposits. The Standard & Poor’s credit rating for the BND is A+/stable. The S&P report states, “BND has one of the highest risk-adjusted capital (RAC) ratios for rated U.S. banks.”

BND’s profitability has helped strengthen community banks and credit unions in North Dakota by making loans in partnership rather than in competition with them. In the Great Recession, it also bought loans from stressed local banks to prevent bank failures and keep the economy running smoothly. BND operates with very low overhead and stresses productive and local lending rather than lending to buy existing assets, the sort of speculative lending that leads to bubbles and busts.

The State’s Deposits Are Safer in Its Own Bank

The Bank of North Dakota was established in 1919 by a populist party of farmers who felt their farms were being foreclosed on unfairly by out-of-state bankers. They succeeded in bringing their state revenues back into their own bank, serving their own communities.

North Dakota’s revenues are safer in its own bank than in the largest Wall Street banks, which “insure” their capital with interconnected derivatives backed by rehypothecated collateral. The Financial Stability Board has declared that practice to be risky, “as highlighted during the 2007-09 global financial crisis.” The five largest Wall Street depository banks hold $223 trillion in derivatives, or 83 percent of all the derivatives at 4,600 banks; and they have a combined half trillion dollars in commercial real estate loans, also very risky in the current financial environment.

Today most government funds are deposited in these SIFIs (Systemically Important Financial Institutions), putting the deposits at risk. Under the Dodd Frank Act of 2010, a SIFI that goes bankrupt will not be bailed out by the government but will be recapitalized by “bail ins” – confiscating the funds of the bank’s creditors, including “secured” depositors such as state and local governments. Under the Bankruptcy Act of 2005, derivative and repo claims have seniority and could easily wipe out all of the capital of a SIFI. The details are complicated, but the threat is real and imminent. See my earlier articles here and here, David Rodgers Webb’s The Great Taking, and Chris Martenson’s excellent series drilling down into the obscure legalese of the enabling legislation, concluding here.

Even if the SIFIs remain solvent, they are not using state deposits and investments for the benefit of the people; and often they are betting against us. The BND, by contrast, is mandated to use its revenues for the benefit of the North Dakota public.

California Could Replicate the BND Model with Its Infrastructure and Development Bank

California already has an Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (I-Bank), but it is not a true depository bank able to take deposits and leverage its capital. According to its website:

IBank was created in 1994 to finance public infrastructure and private development that promote a healthy climate for jobs, contribute to a strong economy, and improve the quality of life in California communities. IBank is located within the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development and is governed by a five-member Board of Directors. IBank has broad authority to issue tax-exempt and taxable revenue bonds, provide financing to public agencies, provide credit enhancements, acquire or lease facilities, leverage state and federal funds and provide loan guarantees and other credit enhancements to small businesses.

Its Infrastructure State Revolving Fund (ISRF) Program provides loans only to public entities (municipalities, counties, Joint Power Authorities, pension funds), but it also has a Small Business Financing Center (SBFC) that provides loan guarantees through independent agencies for businesses and farms having trouble accessing loans, among other outreach services. The ISRF is a revolving fund, limited to lending its base capital. It engages to some extent in leverage, but it’s the riskier version called “rehypothecation” (relending of existing collateral). As explained by Stan I-Bank’s first Executive Director Stan Hazelroth in a 2013 article:

When you loan $100 to an electric utility, say, to build new infrastructure, they take money from ratepayers and pay that loan back over time. These payments, based on the history of utility ratepayers over decades, are very reliable—so reliable, in fact, that bond buyers will loan money secured by the promise of those ratepayers to pay the utilities back over time.

The utility with the right to be paid back $100 can pledge those aggregate payments and secure an additional loan of, say, $80. When that loan begins to be paid back, bond buyers will loan you another, say, $60, which can also be loaned out. With just $100 in cash, in other words, you can loan out $240.

Thus a contract becomes a security, which can act as collateral for another loan and another for the lender. But reuse of the same asset for multiple loans can go only so far. Chartered at a 10% capital requirement, depository banks can issue up to ten times their capital in loans. (In 2020 the Fed lifted the capital requirement altogether, but 10% is still considered a prudent ratio.)

Banks do need to back withdrawals with reserves, which they acquire from their incoming deposits or by borrowing from other banks or the Federal Reserve; but the state has plenty of deposits to serve that function. Any bank in which the state deposits its revenues will back its loans with those deposits, and the I-Bank’s loans are actually safer and better for the public interest than those of the big Wall Street banks. If the I-Bank were to become the state’s banker and its reserve account were overdrawn, it would have the same protections afforded by the Federal Reserve system to all chartered banks: it could borrow reserves from other banks, the repo market, or the Fed itself. The BND is not a member of the Federal Reserve but has a master account with it, allowing the bank to transfer funds with other banks in the system and to act as a “mini- Fed” for the state, providing correspondent banking services to North Dakota’s many community banks.

One thing California and North Dakota have in common is that they are both big agricultural states. The BND helps its farmers with a variety of low-interest loans. Although most of its loans are in collaboration with local banks, two loans it makes directly are the Beginning Farmer Real Estate Loan and Established Farmer Real Estate Loan. California’s struggling farmers could benefit from that sort of direct aid as well.

The state itself could also realize significant savings from its I-Bank if the bank’s loan capacity were expanded. I was unable to nail down the current comparative figures for loans, but here is an example from an article I wrote in Yes Magazine in 2018:

Financing infrastructure through the municipal bond market accounts for half the cost of infrastructure due to the debt load involved. One example where this is made clear is with Proposition 68, a statewide ballot measure that voters approved in the June 5 primary election which authorizes $4.1 billion in bonds for parks, environmental, and flood protection programs. The true cost of the measure is $200 million per year over 40 years in additional interest, bringing the total to $8 billion. California’s IBank, which funds infrastructure at 3 percent, could finance the same bill over 30 years for $2.1 billion—a nearly 50 percent reduction.

The Golden State as Trendsetter: Time to Form a Bank

In 2019, two bills were brought to convert California’s I-Bank into a depository bank, one in the Senate, SB 528 (Hueso), and one in the Assembly, AB 310 (Santiago). SB 528 sought simply to convert the I-Bank to a depository ban. It passed the first two committees but was “suspended” in Appropriations. The second bill, AB 310, sought to extend the I-Bank’s services directly to underserved individuals and businesses. It was opposed by the state treasurer and the state controller on grounds that it was too risky, and it failed. But California State Treasurer Fiona Ma said in her opposition letter to AB 310 that she was sympathetic to its goals, and that “I respectfully propose AB 310 be amended, replacing the current language with a mandate to develop a feasibility study to be conducted by an independent, apolitical expert source. The technical experts in my office can assist to build the framework of the study as the state’s banker.”

There is actually no need to change the I-Bank’s existing programs, since it already has a variety of programs that help the underserved indirectly. Simply converting it to a depository bank would extend the reach of its existing services (for which there is currently excess demand), expand its profitability, reduce the cost of infrastructure and development for state and local government agencies, and protect any revenues deposited in it from a sudden crisis in the conventional banking system.

The remedy for unemployment is employment, and the remedy for the unhoused is affordable housing. An I-Bank expanded into a state-owned depository bank could provide both.

• This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ellen Brown.