The 2009 discovery of footprints (human and animal) left behind in layers of clay and silt at New Mexico’s White Sands National Park sparked a contentious debate about when, exactly, human cultures first developed in North America. Until about a decade ago, it seemed as if the first Americans arrived near the end of the last Ice Age and were part of the Clovis culture, named for the distinctive projectile points they left behind near what’s now Clovis, New Mexico. But various dating methods indicated the White Sands footprints are 10,000 years older. Now there is a fresh independent analysis that agrees with those earlier findings, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.
As previously reported, earlier archaeological evidence had suggested the Clovis people made their way southward through a corridor that opened up in the middle of the ice sheets between 13,000 and 16,000 years ago. Subsequent archaeological evidence—such as a 14,500-year-old site in Florida and stone tools dating to 16,000 years ago in western Idaho—suggested that the Clovis people were actually not the first to arrive. It also made it look much more likely that the first Americans had skirted the edge of the ice sheets along the Pacific Coast.
The White Sands footprints further muddled the narrative. In 2019, Bournemouth University archaeologist Matthew Bennett and his colleagues excavated the White Sands area and found a total of 61 human footprints east of an area called Alkali Flat, which was once the bed and shoreline of an ancient lake. Over time, as the lake’s edge expanded and contracted with shifts in climate, it left behind distinct layers of clay, silt, and sand. Seven of those layers, in the area Bennett and his colleagues excavated, held human tracks along with those of long-lost megafauna.
While COVID-19 transmission remains low in the US, health experts are anxious about the potential for a big summer wave as two factors seem set for a collision course: a lull in infection activity that suggests protective responses have likely waned in the population, and a new SARS-CoV-2 variant with an infectious advantage over other variants.
The new variant is dubbed NB.1.8.1. Like all the other currently circulating variants, it's a descendant of omicron. Specifically, NB.1.8.1 is derived from the recombinant variant XDV.1.5.1. Compared to the reigning omicron variants JN.1 and LP.8.1, the new variant has a few mutations that could help it bind to human cells more easily and evade some protective immune responses.
On May 23, the World Health Organization designated NB.1.8.1 a "variant under monitoring," meaning that early signals indicate it has an advantage over other variants, but its impact on populations is not yet clear. In recent weeks, parts of Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, have experienced increases in infections and hospitalizations linked to NB.1.8.1's spread. Fortunately, the variant does not appear to cause more severe disease, and current vaccines are expected to remain effective against it.
The White House has undertaken initiatives to crack down on immigration, suppress speech, and curtail US public health efforts. These online tools are tracking the rapidly changing US landscape.
Anne Wojcicki has been declared the winner of a bankruptcy auction for 23andMe, the genetics testing start-up she founded, prevailing over a rival bid from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
TTAM Research Institute, a non-profit public benefit company also founded by Wojcicki, won the auction with a $305 million bid for the 23andMe assets, which will not come with any company liabilities attached.
23andMe filed for bankruptcy in March after rejecting several go-private offers from Wojcicki in recent years. Regeneron was declared the winning bidder in May after the company accepted a $256 million bid in a previous auction.
The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly pitching a merger condition that would forbid advertising agencies from boycotting platforms based on political content, in a move that could benefit Elon Musk's X social network and President Trump's own Truth Social platform.
As the FTC reviews a proposed merger between Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group, two large ad agencies, The New York Times reported yesterday that a "proposed consent decree would prevent the merged company from boycotting platforms because of their political content by refusing to place their clients' advertisements on them, according to two people briefed on the matter."
This is one of several moves the FTC has reportedly made to discourage ad boycotts that have riled conservatives. The FTC currently has only Republican commissioners because President Trump fired both Democrats, who allege in a lawsuit that the firings were illegal. Trump also declared sweeping executive power over the FTC and other agencies that were created to operate independently from the White House.
The timing of Israel’s plan to attack Iran was top-secret. But Washington pizza delivery trackers guessed something was up before the first bombs fell.
About an hour before Iranian state TV first reported loud explosions in Tehran, pizza orders around the Pentagon went through the roof, according to a viral X account claiming to offer “hot intel” on “late-night activity spikes” at the US military headquarters.
The Pizza Meter Theory has been around since the 1990s, which is something new I learned today.
The Pizza Meter, also known as the Pentagon Pizza Orders Theory, is a theory proposing that upticks in pizza orders received by restaurants near the Pentagon can predict international conflicts and times of crisis in the U.S. government. The concept originated in the early 1990s after a Domino’s Pizza franchise owner in Northern Virginia near the Pentagon named Frank Meeks, told newspapers that before major national security events, he saw a noticeable uptick in business.
I guess there is some truth to the theory.
It reminds me of the Waffle House Index and Canadian pee times during a hockey game. What other unexpected indicators are there for real-time events?
Scientists compete vigorously for a slice of the more than $30 billion that the agency doles out annually; they can spend years assembling grant applications that stretch thousands of pages in hopes of convincing peer reviewers of the promise of their projects. Only 1 in 5 gets chosen.
The NIH has rarely revoked funding once it has been awarded. Out of the tens of thousands of grants overseen by the institution since 2012, it terminated fewer than five for violations of the agency’s terms and conditions.
Then Donald Trump was reelected.
Since his January inauguration, his administration has terminated more than 1,450 grants, withholding more than $750 million in funds; officials have said they are curbing wasteful spending and “unscientific” research. The Department of Government Efficiency gave the agency direction on what to cut and why, ProPublica has previously found, bypassing the NIH’s established review process.
“The decision to terminate certain grants is part of a deliberate effort to ensure taxpayer dollars prioritize high-impact, urgent science,” said Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services. He did not respond to questions about the terminated grants or how patients may be impacted, but he said, “Many discontinued projects were duplicative or misaligned with NIH’s core mission. NIH remains focused on supporting rigorous biomedical research that delivers real results — not radical ideology.”
Targeted projects, however, were seeking cures for future pandemics, examining the causes of dementia and trying to prevent HIV transmission.
The mass cancellation of grants in response to political policy shifts has no precedent, former and current NIH officials told ProPublica. It threatens the stability of the institution and the scientific enterprise of the nation at large. Hundreds of current and former NIH staffers published a declaration this week — cosigned by thousands of scientists across the world, including more than 20 Nobel laureates — decrying the politicization of science at the agency and urging its director to reinstate the canceled grants. Many researchers have appealed the terminations, and several lawsuits are underway challenging the cuts.
It has been difficult for scientists and journalists to convey the enormity of what has happened these past few months and what it portends for the years and decades to come. News organizations have chronicled cuts to individual projects and sought to quantify the effects of lost spending on broad fields of study. To gain a deeper understanding of the toll, ProPublica reached out to more than 500 researchers, scientists and investigators whose grants were terminated.
More than 150 responded to share their experiences, which reveal consequences that experts say run counter to scientific logic and even common sense.
They spoke of the tremendous waste generated by an effort intended to save money — years of government-funded research that may never be published, blood samples in danger of spoiling before they can be analyzed.
Work to address disparities in health, once considered so critical to medical advancement that it was mandated by Congress, is now being cut if the administration determines it has any connection to “diversity,” “equity” or “gender ideology.” Caught in this culling were projects to curb stillbirths, child suicides and infant brain damage.
Researchers catalogued many fears — about the questions they won’t get to answer, the cures they will fail to find and the colleagues they will lose to more supportive countries. But most of all, they said they worried about the people who, because of these cuts, will die.
Research Frozen
The NIH often awards funding in multiyear grants, giving scientists the time and intellectual freedom to pursue their work uninterrupted. They plan experiments, hire staff and make equipment purchases on long timelines.
Now, studies can’t be completed. Papers can’t be published. Years of research may be lost and millions of dollars wasted.
Grants Terminated:
A project to improve recruitment of participants in Alzheimer’s clinical trials.
A study to increase vaccine uptake in underserved populations.
A study investigating in-utero exposure to contaminants in public drinking water.
An examination of the consequences of abortion restrictions.
Diana Greene Foster, a reproductive health researcher and professor at the University of California, San Francisco
After the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, demographer Diana Greene Foster set out to study the outcomes of pregnant patients who showed up in emergency departments. She wanted to know whether state restrictions were causing delays in care.
“This needs to be answered for courts to consider the evidence,” said Foster, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. “Every day that goes by, people are potentially at risk.”
Less than one year into a five-year NIH grant, she had arrived at some early findings: “Abortion bans don’t stop very many people from getting abortions,” she said. “Bans actually cause people to have their abortions later in pregnancy.” For those who live in states with bans, she found, second-trimester abortions increased from 8% of procedures to 17%, requiring more complex interventions to end their pregnancies and increasing their risk of complications.
But before the data could be published, the NIH informed her on March 21 that the grant was terminated. It was no longer in line with agency priorities, a letter stated, specifying that studies on “gender identity” “ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities.”
The termination left Foster confused. “They are wrong that studying gender minority populations is not important,” she said. “But my study is not about gender identity. It is relevant to anyone who is pregnant, regardless of how they identify.”
Foster had to pause her research while she searched for other funding. “This was clearly a politically motivated cut,” she said.
ProPublica heard from more than 70 researchers who said that they were unable to continue their projects due to the terminations.
“Two and a half years into a three-year grant, and to all of a sudden stop and not fully be able to answer the original questions, it’s just a waste.”
—Ethan Moitra, associate professor at Brown University, who was researching whether brief therapy can improve mental health for LGBTQ+ people
“We are now scrambling to figure out if there are parts we can continue or salvage.”
—Julia Marcus, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who was researching whether HIV prevention medicine can be made available over the counter
“To build trust between health care providers, health researchers in communities takes decades of work, and scientists have already done the work. Now this is going to be depleted.”
—Jesus Ramirez-Valles, professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who was examining how HIV impacts the physical and mental health of gay men as they age
Patient Studies Interrupted
Thousands of studies supported by the NIH involve human subjects. Some include clinical trials, in which researchers recruit participants, often with grave conditions from cancer to HIV, to test the value of novel treatments and protocols.
In addition to jeopardizing data, terminating a grant in the middle of an active study may worsen participants’ conditions and put them at higher risk of death.
Grants Terminated:
A study to prevent sexually transmitted infections with common antibiotics.
A study to increase access to kidney transplant evaluations.
A clinical trial to understand the effectiveness of flu and COVID-19 vaccine text message reminders.
A study to test a protocol to prevent HIV transmission.
Amy Nunn and Dr. Philip Chan, behavioral and social science professors at Brown University
A single daily pill can nearly eliminate the risk of contracting HIV — but only when taken as prescribed. Black and Latino men who have sex with men have more than a 1-in-4 chance of contracting HIV but sometimes struggle to get or stay in care.
Working with community clinics across Mississippi, Washington, D.C., and Rhode Island, Brown University professors Amy Nunn and Dr. Philip Chan set out to examine what happens when people are provided wraparound clinical services before they contract the disease. “This is about preventing people from getting HIV,” Nunn said.
The study provides aggressive case management to help patients navigate the health care system and stay on the treatment, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP, which is available in both oral and injectable forms. Workers provide patients with reminders, help them get coverage and even pick up their medicine.
In 2023, the researchers received about $3.7 million in NIH funding for five years of work. Their team was just starting to gather data that showed the program’s efficacy when the grant was terminated. “This is science that had really great chances of having a huge impact, and all of a sudden, it’s cut off at the knee,” Nunn said.
Chan told ProPublica that he worries that the patients in their study could be harmed by the cut. “There’s no doubt that some of them are going to not stay on PrEP,” said Chan, “and that some of them are going to get HIV.”
At least 30 researchers told ProPublica that the termination of their grant forced them to end clinical research or a trial abruptly, leaving participants in limbo.
“We cannot assay the blood samples that we have collected and paid participants for. A total waste of the money and resources that went into collecting the data.”
—Sarah Whitton, professor at the University of Cincinnati, who was identifying risk factors for mental illness and suicidality for young LGBTQ+ women
“We have also had to quickly scramble to keep the study going unfunded to avoid having to stop the treatment and clinical trial for those already enrolled.”
—Tiffany Brown, assistant professor at Auburn University, who was developing an eating disorder treatment for LGBTQ+ patients
“With a clinical trial, if you can’t follow participants to the end, you have no information, because the whole point is to see whether there’s change from beginning to end.”
—Katie Biello, professor and chair of epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health, who was trying to improve adherence to medication protocols for adolescents with HIV in Brazil
Disparities Disregarded
(Edwin Tan/Getty Images)
The Trump administration has banned the NIH from funding grants with a perceived connection to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” alleging that such projects may be discriminatory.
Caught up in the wave of terminations is work seeking to understand why some populations — including women and sexual, racial or ethnic minorities — may be more at risk of certain disorders or diseases.
Grants Terminated:
A study investigating how discrimination affects the mental health of Latino youth.
Research examining maternal behavioral health conditions of Black women.
An examination of the effects of structural racism on people at risk of kidney disease.
A study investigating why women of color disproportionately die from cervical cancer.
Adana Llanos, an epidemiologist and health equity scholar at Columbia University
Despite preventative vaccines and improved screening, more than 4,000 women die every year from cervical cancer. Black and Hispanic women are more likely than their white peers to be diagnosed, and often at later stages.
After more than a decade of studying cancer care disparities, epidemiologist Adana Llanos found that the ZIP code in which a woman received care often plays a pivotal role in how she fares. And in 2023, Llanos and her colleagues were awarded a multiyear NIH grant to further examine inequities, specifically in cervical cancer care and who survives it.
Even though their work targets the women most at risk, Llanos said their research, like most health equity research, will increase our understanding of cervical cancer more broadly. “This work has the potential to improve cancer outcomes for everyone, no matter what you identify as, no matter what your characteristics are,” she said.
Last year, her team began to recruit a cohort of 960 women who had been diagnosed with cervical cancer to track their patterns of care and outcomes. But in March, after the researchers had enrolled about 200 participants, the NIH terminated the funding. Llanos paused enrollment.
The cancellation felt like a betrayal of her study’s participants, she said. Llanos had spent years developing relationships with community groups and cancer patients, gaining their trust so they would feel comfortable sharing their treatment experiences.
“We’ve made commitments to them,” she said.
More than 550 of the terminated grants were focused on health disparities or inequities, attempting to understand why some groups have different health outcomes.
“If you cannot identify groups that are higher risk, it seems like just really bad science. That’s sort of the basics of how you try to conquer a disease.”
—Carl Latkin, professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was analyzing the comorbidities of people who have HIV and those at risk for getting it
“Health disparities are just going to get larger, and real folks are going to die.”
—Marguerita Lightfoot, professor at the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health, who was studying the value of guaranteed income and financial mentoring to Black youth
“It’s a major principle of epidemiology to target work towards the people who are being disproportionately affected. Now we’re being told that we cannot mention them in our research.”
—Dr. Matthew Spinelli, assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who was working to prevent sexually transmitted infections with common antibiotics
LGBTQ+ People Targeted
(Jason Koxvold for ProPublica)
In response to a lawsuit, a federal judge issued an injunction barring the administration from fully enforcing the orders. It canceled the grants anyway, citing agency policy and scientific priorities.
Grants Terminated:
A study to improve the delivery of behavioral health care to LGBTQ+ youth.
Research to address substance use in young men who are at risk for or living with HIV.
An evaluation of disparities in mpox vaccination rates among men who have sex with men.
An investigation of why LGBTQ+ adults are dying by suicide.
Lauren Forrest, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon
(Jason Koxvold for ProPublica)
Gay, lesbian and bisexual adults are over three times more likely to consider suicide than their heterosexual peers. Few studies have aimed to figure out how to prevent this.
Last year, Lauren Forrest, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, received a multiyear grant to do so, focusing on LGBTQ+ people who live in rural areas where access to specialized care may be more limited.
She was planning to recruit dozens of participants. But on March 21, she received a notification from the NIH that her grant was terminated because it did not “effectuate” the agency’s priorities, citing its connection to “gender identity.”
“The way they’re going about deciding which grants will or won’t be terminated, it’s not about scientific rigor,” she said. “It’s about literally actively discriminating against health-disparity populations.”
Forrest has been forced to reduce the hours of her research staff, and she now risks losing key lab personnel who may have to seek other employment due to the cuts. “There is no way to recover the lost time, research continuity or training value once disrupted,” she said.
She worries most about the deaths that could have been prevented. “People are going to be harmed because of this,” she said.
More than 300 of the grants terminated by the NIH were focused on LGBTQ+ health care. About 40 of those grants were researching ways to prevent suicide in adults and youth.
“We have a paper that’s ready to go out that shows lesbian women are almost 3 times as likely to have a stillbirth compared to their heterosexual peers. That’s such an avoidable, horrible outcome to happen, and that paper may never be published.”
—Brittany Charlton, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who was quantifying obstetrical outcomes for lesbian, gay and bisexual women
“It is devastating to have state-sanctioned dehumanization and exclusion. I am afraid for what these messages will do to the mental health of youth who are told they don’t matter or, for some, that they don’t even exist by parts of society.”
—Dr. Sarah Goff, professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was studying how to improve the delivery of mental health care to LGBTQ+ youth
“I honestly burst into tears. The evidence we would have gained from this work will not exist.”
—Kirsty Clark, assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, who was finding best practices for preventing suicide in LGBTQ+ preteens
Losing a Generation
The grant terminations and subsequent instability have created a lost generation of scientists, dozens of researchers told ProPublica — cutting off an established pipeline at all stages of researchers’ careers.
Universities are trimming the number of openings in postdoctoral and graduate programs.
Young researchers are struggling to find funding to initiate studies or open new laboratories.
And some scientists are opting to pursue opportunities abroad.
Grants Terminated:
A grant to train researchers and public health professionals on HIV science.
A program to support the development of early-career scientists and researchers.
A grant to support Ph.D. students from historically underrepresented groups.
A program to train the next generation of pediatric research scientists.
Dr. Lauren Harasymiw, a scholar in the NIH’s Pediatric Scientist Development Program
Dr. Lauren Harasymiw was a medical resident in a neonatal intensive care unit when an infant took a turn for the worse. Born at only 23 weeks gestation — the edge of viability — the baby girl experienced a hemorrhage within the ventricles of her brain.
“What does this mean for her?” Harasymiw recalls asking her attending physician. The supervisor didn’t know. “The field of neonatology has made incredible strides over the last decades in helping our babies survive,” Harasymiw said. “But we’ve made less progress in protecting their neurodevelopmental outcomes.”
If doctors could better assess infants’ outcomes after a brain injury, they could target interventions sooner and provide families with better resources. To advance this area of medicine, Harasymiw pursued NIH-funded training to become a pediatric scientist.
But in March, the NIH terminated funding for the Pediatric Scientist Development Program, which funded Harasymiw’s salary and research, claiming that the program was connected to “DEI.”
“This is just ripping out the foundation of my career,” Harasymiw said.
In a statement about the grant terminations, Nixon, the HHS spokesperson, said that the NIH “continues to invest robustly in training and career development opportunities that produce measurable contributions to biomedical science and patient care.” However, he added that “while fostering the next generation of scientists is essential, effective leadership requires clear focus: prioritizing research that is impactful and results-driven over duplicative or low-yield programs.”
Dr. Sallie Permar, who runs the program and is chair of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, was perplexed by the cut; the program seemed to be in line with the administration’s focus on combating chronic disease in children.
“That’s exactly what we’re training these scholars to do,” she said.
More than 50 researchers told ProPublica that the funding cuts would harm the next generation of scholars, discouraging them from practicing in the United States.
“We have a generation of researchers that were planning to focus on these questions that are now either scared or don’t have funding to continue their training, or both.”
—Mandi Pratt-Chapman, associate center director for community outreach, engagement and equity at the George Washington Cancer Center, who was identifying best practices for collecting data about LGBTQ+ people at small and rural cancer centers
“Admissions for graduate school have been downsized to a point where prospective students are giving up on pursuing a Ph.D.”
—Tigist Tamir, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who received a career development grant and was studying how oxidative stress is regulated in breast cancer and obesity
“I already know several researchers on the job search who ended up taking faculty positions in Canada instead of the U.S.”
—Dr. Benjamin Solomon, instructor of immunology and allergy in the department of pediatrics at Stanford Medical School, who received a career development grant and was examining rare genetic immune diseases in children
How We Reported the Story
Shortly after the public became aware of the termination of hundreds of grants at the National Institutes of Health, ProPublica published a call for tips in March, requesting that researchers with canceled grants share their experiences. ProPublica heard from more than 150 researchers and scientists and interviewed more than 70 about how the grant terminations were affecting their projects, their careers and the field of biomedical science at large. The story relies on the personal opinions of the researchers and does not reflect the views of their institutions. To understand the universe of NIH grant terminations, ProPublica relied on two main data sources: spreadsheets of terminated health grants released by the federal government to comply with Trump’s “Radical Transparency About Wasteful Spending” order, and data from Grant Watch, a private initiative tracking the terminations, led by researchers Noam Ross, Scott Delaney, Anthony Barente and Emma Mairson. They have used crowdsourcing and federal sources to create their dataset.
Were you involved in a clinical trial, participating in research or receiving services that have ended, been paused or been delayed because of canceled federal funding? Our reporters want to hear from you.
We’ve noted many times that there are two major reasons the U.S. doesn’t have a functional privacy law for the modern internet era. One, we’re too corrupt and greedy to do the right thing, causing us to prioritize making money over literally everything else — including public safety. And two, the government long ago realized it can bypass the need for a warrant by simply buying surveillance data from U.S. companies.
There have been some new revelations on that second point. A new report by 404 Media this week revealed that U.S. airlines have created a data broker whose primary purpose is to covertly sell user flight and other information to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). As part of the airlines’ contract with the government, it was demanded they not tell anybody about the program:
“The documents reveal for the first time in detail why at least one part of DHS purchased such information, and comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detailed its own purchase of the data. The documents also show for the first time that the data broker, called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), tells government agencies not to mention where it sourced the flight data from.”
ARC is owned and operated by at least eight major US airlines, according to public documents reviewed by 404 Media. ARC’s Travel Intelligence Program (TIP) also monetizes your data in other nontransparent ways, including partnerships with travel agencies and air travel trend reporting. In a functional government with meaningful rules, authorities are supposed to get warrants for this data:
“While obtaining domestic airline data—like many other transaction and purchase records—generally doesn’t require a warrant, there’s still supposed to go through a legal process that ensures independent oversight and limits data collection to records that will support an investigation,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, told 404 Media in an email. “As with many other types of sensitive and revealing data, the government seems intent on using data brokers to buy their way around important guardrails and limits.”
The corporate monetization of your every behavior and location metric has resulted in a vast sea of nontransparent hyper-surveillance the government has zero interest in fixing. And should a U.S. regulator actually try — like the FCC’s recent attempt to fine AT&T for selling sensitive wireless user location data — the Trump-stocked courts are there to invalidate the efforts to the benefit of corporate power.
Documents indicate the government ambiguously claims to use this data “to support federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to identify persons of interest’s U.S. domestic air travel ticketing information.” Airlines understandably didn’t want to comment on the new report.
Without reforms this sort of hyper-surveillance just gets consistently worse, more dangerous, and more secretive which is is extra problematic in an era where the U.S. government has fallen into historically corrupt authoritarian kakistocracy. The warnings have been relentless that we’re on an extremely dangerous path, but Congress, as always, remains too corrupt to function in the public interest.
On the latest episode of the always excellent “The Bugle” podcast, comedian Alice Fraser amusingly describes the horror of what’s happening in Los Angeles the following way:
So let’s just clarify: this is arguably unlawful deployment of military force to enforce peace on peaceful protests over illegal arrests of illegal immigrants.
Here’s what actually happening in LA: Trump’s racist advisor Stephen Miller deliberately manufactured this controversy, directing ICE officials to raid Home Depots where migrant workers pick up day labor jobs, knowing it would provoke protests.
Direct orders from Stephen Miller ignited the Los Angeles protests, leading to the precarious, highly militarized situation the city is currently facing.
The plan from the beginning was to create confrontations that could justify crushing dissent with military force—even though the LAPD itself has repeatedly said the protests are peaceful and they don’t need military backup. But hey, why let reality get in the way of a good authoritarian power fantasy? Trump and his cronies are gonna fabricate “riots” whether they exist or not because they’ve been dreaming of using the military on Americans for years.
Now we have the manufactured result: Trump has sent both the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles in what California is correctly suing over as illegal federal seizure of state resources. Make no mistake about what’s happening: MAGA Republicans are declaring war on anyone who disagrees with them, and they’ll use military force against Americans to silence dissent.
And on Tuesday, Senator Tom Cotton underscored the point, rehashing his controversial, horrifying New York Times op-ed from five years ago for the Wall Street Journal, advocating for the use of the US military on American protesters. Cotton has literally recycled the same authoritarian playbook, using nearly identical language to justify military force against protesters—proving this has nothing to do with the specific circumstances in LA and everything to do with a long-standing terrifying authoritarian desire to illegally use the US military to crush dissent coming from the American citizenry.
Some of you will likely recall that almost exactly five years ago, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, the warmongering, hate-filled Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas took to the pages of the NY Times to advocate for bringing in the US military to shoot at American protesters and to silence them for their speech.
That 2020 op-ed caused a massive controversy when the NY Times published advocacy for using the US military against US citizens. Some very stupid people tried to turn it into a “censorship” debate when people criticized the Times for platforming such dangerous ideas. But as we pointed out then, the Times’ editorial decisions are their own free speech, not censorship.
The real issue that got lost in that debate was why bloodthirsty MAGA leaders are so eager to turn the US military on American protesters. Then, as now, Cotton’s justification was based on wildly exaggerating isolated incidents amid largely peaceful demonstrations to justify military intervention.
But Cotton obviously kept that op-ed in his pocket all these years, just waiting until he could run it again, this time with an assist from Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. And it’s just as horrific as last time.
Violent insurrectionists turned areas of Los Angeles into lawless hellscapes over the weekend, withanarchistssetting fire to vehicles, throwing scooters and debris at police, and looting businesses—all while waving foreign flags.
Here’s where Cotton’s entire argument immediately falls apart: the LAPD itself—historically no friend to protesters—has directly contradicted his claims. The department issued an official statement calling the protests peaceful, and LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell explicitly said they didn’t need military assistance and that deploying Marines would likely make the situation worse.
When even the LAPD—an agency with a long history of aggressive tactics—says military intervention is unnecessary and counterproductive, Cotton’s premise is exposed as pure fiction.
What we’re seeing from Cotton is textbook fascist authoritarian rhetoric: take isolated incidents from largely peaceful protests and paint them as citywide chaos. The reality is that protests were confined to a few blocks of downtown LA, with the most significant “violence” being some Waymo cars set on fire (which were likely as much about protesting “big tech” as about protesting ICE). Cotton transforms this into “lawless hellscapes” by non-existent “anarchists” (MAGAs’ favorite imaginary boogeyman) to justify military deployment.
The protests all began and remained mostly peaceful, with music playing, people dancing, vendors selling food and more. The only “violence” tended to come when law enforcement showed up in threatening military gear and provoked responses.
Again, this was entirely part of the plan. And Stephen Miller and Tom Cotton know that this is nonsense, and they don’t care. Their entire goal is to provoke and incite violence in order to justify much worse violence that they’ve wanted to inflict for years. The fact that Cotton is recycling nearly identical language from 2020 proves this isn’t about current circumstances—it’s a pre-written template for justifying military force against any protest he dislikes.
Despite the rising chaos, Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose officelikenedthe riots to a Philadelphia Eagles playoff victory celebration, and Mayor Karen Bass, whorefusesto support federal law enforcement, haven’t taken sufficient action to restore law and order.
Oh, fuck all the way off on that. There’s a very, very simple way to “restore law and order” which is to stop sending militarized federal cops into LA and provoking confrontations. Again, Los Angeles didn’t have any problems (or even protests) before Miller sent these goons into a Home Depot parking lot.
Meanwhile, incredibly, Democrats and the liberal media have again called this outbreak of violence “mostly peaceful protests,” while in the same breath blaming the riots, arson, and looting on President Trump for enforcing immigration law. The New York Timesdescribed“largely peaceful” riots with fireworks fired at police, cars set on fire, and more than 150 arrests.
Yes, because they have been mostly peaceful.
The threat from the radical left is clear: Don’t enforce immigration laws. If you do, left-wing street militias will burn down cities, and Democratic politicians will back the rioters. The president is absolutely right to reject this threat, enforce immigration laws, and restore civil order.
No, that’s not what is being said. Tom Cotton is stoking fear and nonsense because he’s trying to provoke outrage to get what he wants: the chance to use the US military on the American public. No city is being burnt down. There are no riots. No one is backing “rioters.” What they want is for the US government to stop grabbing people off the street for no reason other than the color of their skin.
From there, Cotton continues the myth-making, pretending that because these sweeps picked up a small number of actual criminals it means that everyone they’re arresting are murderers and child beaters.
Again, Cotton is playing the typical MAGA game of fearmongering by using the rare example to pretend it’s representative, just like I could point to the fact that the leader of Cotton’s party is a convicted criminal (on 34 counts!). Should we thus assume that everyone in the Republican party is a felon who should be sent to jail? It’s one or the other. Either Cotton thinks it’s okay to cherry pick a few people with criminal records and tar everyone associated with them with a broad brush, or he doesn’t.
But, of course, Tom Cotton lives by the motto “it’s okay for Republicans to do this, not anyone else.” Indeed, it’s even worse, because for everyone else he doesn’t even want basic rights or constitutional protections. He wants to send in the military:
The solution now is the same as I said then: an overwhelming show of force to end the riots.
THERE ARE NO RIOTS.
This is just blatant propaganda used to justify the force Cotton has always wanted to use against Americans he doesn’t like. They manufactured every bit of this. They provoked unnecessary confrontations, sending in heavily armed, militarized law enforcement where none was needed, following months of extreme policies and attacks on due process.
Once there, once people started to protest, they ramped up the provocation. And when there were a few rare examples of violence, they falsely labeled them as riots and used them as justification to ramp up the provocation even further.
It’s the “why are you hitting yourself?” school of governance, except with Marines.
There are no riots. No cities are burning. And sending in the military won’t stop the protests, because the protests are about this horrific and dangerous abuse of power.
As always, local police are the first line of defense, but when the police can’t restore order—or aren’t allowed to by Democratic mayors—the National Guard must be called out.
Again, the police have said everything’s fine. The protests have been mostly peaceful. They don’t need to “restore” order, because there is order. They’re not being held back by the mayor or the governor. The only parts of the government they’ve complained about are the federal government sending unnecessary military personnel without any attempt at coordination.
Ask yourself this: to whose benefit is it to pretend that the LAPD has lost control and to blame it on Democratic politicians? Is it to the people of LA? Not at all. It is to Tom Cotton and his fascist buddies.
Cotton wastes no opportunity to further lie:
Mr. Newsom—incompetent and ideological all at once—refused to mobilize the National Guard, leaving Mr. Trump little choice but to federalize the California Guard to protect federal law-enforcement agents and restore order.
This is another outright lie. Reports indicate that Trump called Newsom late Friday night/early Saturday morning, and when Newsom asked about the National Guard, Trump changed the subject. Newsom was never formally asked to mobilize state forces. Trump simply seized control of California’s National Guard without going through proper channels—hence California’s lawsuit over the illegal federal takeover.
So again, you have to ask, why is Cotton lying, other than to get what he wants: the US military to conduct operations on American protestors? It’s pure blood lust against people calling out his bloodthirsty campaign of vengeance.
This is the fascist playbook. Lie, generate controversy, provoke people to protest, insist that their protests are “violent riots,” use that to justify an overly aggressive violent response completely out of proportion to what’s happening.
The end goal is not peace. It’s subjugation and suppression of speech—turning America into the kind of place where questioning Dear Leader gets you a visit from the 82nd Airborne (who, coincidentally, Trump addressed today, an event he used to mock California and cheer on military occupation of an American city).
And the worst part? They’re doing this while wrapping themselves in the flag and calling themselves patriots. Real patriots don’t send Marines after Americans holding signs. But these aren’t patriots—they’re just fascists who figured out red, white, and blue makes better branding than brown shirts.
This weekend, Donald Trump pulled off something that’s happened exactly once before in US history: federalizing a state’s National Guard over the state governor’s objections without invoking the Insurrection Act. And he did it to deal with what the LAPD itself described as peaceful protests that were “under control.”
The constitutional implications here are important. Trump bypassed California Governor Gavin Newsom entirely, ordering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to directly command 2,000—then another 2,000—California National Guard members under 10 USC 12406, a statute that explicitly requires such orders to go “through the governors of the States.”
This isn’t just another Trump tantrum. It’s a fundamental violation of the constitutional balance between federal and state authority that the Founders specifically designed to prevent military rule. In the last few months we’ve seen so many attacks on the basic constitutional underpinnings of America that it’s easy to brush this off as just another one. But this attack on the American way is the most serious one yet.
It’s fundamentally removing some of the most basic freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, and making the US into a full-on authoritarian police state.
On Monday, Gavin Newsom officially sued Donald Trump and the US government over the National Guard deployment, likely the first of multiple attempts to fight this egregiously unnecessary authoritarian attack on the people of California:
The Governor of the State of California and the State of California bring this action to protect the State against the illegal actions of the President, Secretary of Defense, and Department of Defense to deploy members of the California National Guard, without lawful authority, and in violation of the Constitution.
One of the cornerstones of our Nation and our democracy is that our people are governed by civil, not military, rule. The Founders enshrined these principles in our Constitution— that a government should be accountable to its people, guided by the rule of law, and one of civil authority, not military rule.
President Trump has repeatedly invoked emergency powers to exceed the bounds of lawful executive authority. On Saturday, June 7, he used a protest that local authorities had under control to make another unprecedented power grab, this time at the cost of the sovereignty of the State of California and in disregard of the authority and role of the Governor as commander-in-chief of the State’s National Guard.
The lawsuit gets to the heart of what makes this so dangerous: Trump manufacturing a crisis to justify expanding executive power. The protests in Los Angeles were, by all accounts—including from the LAPD—under control. The few incidents that did occur (some Waymo cars getting tagged and burned, apparently in response to ICE agents arriving in Waymos) hardly constitute the kind of emergency that would justify federal military intervention.
The complaint also details how the mechanism Trump used for this, 10 USC 12406, is entirely inappropriate for this situation:
The vehicle the President has sought to invoke for this unprecedented usurpation of state authority and resources is a statute, 10 U.S.C. § 12406, that has been invoked on its own only once before and for highly unusual circumstances not presented here. Invoking this statute, the President issued a Memorandum on June 7, 2025 (Trump Memo), “call[ing] into Federal service members and units of the National Guard.” Secretary of Defense Hegseth, in turn, issued a Memorandum (DOD Order) that same day to the Adjutant General of California, ordering 2,000 California National Guard members into federal service. And on June 9, 2025, Secretary Hegseth issued another Memorandum (June 9 DOD Order) ordering an additional 2,000 California National Guard members into federal service.
These orders were issued despite the text of section 12406, which, among other things, requires that when the President calls members of a State National Guard into federal service pursuant to that statute, those orders “shall be issued through the governors of the States.” 10 U.S.C. § 12406. Instead, Secretary Hegseth unlawfully bypassed the Governor of California, issuing an order that by statute must go through him.
This isn’t some arcane procedural rule Trump’s team missed. The requirement that federal activation orders go through governors exists precisely to prevent exactly this kind of federal overreach:
The Constitution reserves to the States power over their respective state militias— now the National Guard— unless the State requests or consents to federal control. Only under the most exigent of circumstances can the President, over the objections of a State, call the National Guard into federal service. The balance the Framers struck between the State’s power to control its own militia and the very narrow circumstances in which the federal government may take command and control of the militia serves as a vital check against federal overreach. Section 12406 does not provide the authority Defendants have claimed and cannot be the vehicle for their actions.
The Constitution grants the States—not the federal Executive—the authority to conduct ordinary law enforcement activities and to determine how their own state laws should be enforced.
Reflecting the Founders’ distrust of military rule, the U.S. Constitution and the laws of our Nation strictly limit the domestic use of the military, including the federalized National Guard. The Posse Comitatus Act codifies these strict rules, prohibiting the military from engaging in civil law enforcement unless explicitly authorized by law. The authority to use the military domestically for civil law enforcement is reserved for dire, narrow circumstances, none of which is present here. Defendants have overstepped the bounds of law and are intent on going as far as they can to use the military in unprecedented, unlawful ways
What we’re seeing here is the classic authoritarian escalation pattern: manufacture a crisis, claim existing authorities are insufficient, then grab unprecedented power to “solve” the manufactured problem. Stephen Miller, who’s been openly fantasizing about using military force against domestic protests, has found his test case—and the fact that it’s so obviously a manufactured crisis shows just how desperate they are to normalize military intervention in civilian law enforcement.
Multiple videos show people dancing in the streets, rather than anything resembling a “riot.” This is what Trump claims requires 4,000 National Guard troops:
This is the spirit of Los Angeles.This is California.Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.#FreeDavidEndRaids
This isn’t a riot. It’s certainly not an insurrection. It’s a protest in the grand tradition of American protests: calling out authoritarian abuse of power and showing solidarity those victimized by it. It’s American as apple pie.
The whole goal here is normalizing military intervention in civilian law enforcement while establishing precedent for bypassing state authority entirely. If Trump can federalize California’s National Guard over peaceful protests that local authorities had under control, what else will he demand the military do for him?
The most damning part of all this? For years, we’ve heard MAGA world shriek about hypothetical martial law and federal tyranny. Now, faced with actual federal seizure of state military assets over manufactured emergencies, they’re cheering it on. Turns out their “principled” opposition to government overreach only applied when it wasn’t their guy doing the overreaching.
And yes, MAGA Trump fans will still try to justify this, posting pictures of a couple of Waymos on fire, screaming about how LA is violent (it’s not) and needs “order” restored (again, even the cops say that’s nonsense). They all know that’s bullshit. Yes, your dumb uncle with a brain pickled by Fox News propaganda may believe some of it, but everyone who matters knows that this is all for show.
California’s lawsuit represents more than just pushback against Trump’s latest power grab. It’s a test of whether our constitutional system still has any teeth left when it comes to checking such extreme executive overreach. If Trump can get away with this—federalizing state National Guard units over the objections of governors for non-emergencies—then the balance of power between federal and state authority that’s existed since the founding is effectively dead.
As is the entirety of the American experiment.
That should terrify anyone who gives a damn about constitutional government and the concept of the United States of America, regardless of what they think about ICE or immigration protests.
So-called “less-lethal” weapons like those that have been used against demonstrators in Los Angeles can cause severe, lasting harm like nerve or brain damage or blindness. They can also kill.
The Supreme Court allowed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to access Social Security Administration (SSA) records on Friday, overturning lower-court decisions that imposed some limits on DOGE's data access.
"We conclude that, under the present circumstances, SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work," the Supreme Court order said. The court also sided with the Trump administration in a different DOGE case, finding that a lower court's discovery order requiring DOGE to provide information about its government cost-cutting operations was too broad (more on that ruling later in this article).
The data-access ruling was in a case filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Alliance for Retired Americans; and American Federation of Teachers. US District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander previously issued a preliminary injunction, writing that DOGE "is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion." The District of Maryland judge found that plaintiffs are likely to win their case alleging that the government violated the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.
YouTube videos may be getting a bit more pernicious soon. Google's dominant video platform has spent years removing discriminatory and conspiracy content from its platform in accordance with its usage guidelines, but the site is now reportedly adopting a lighter-touch approach to moderation. A higher bar for content removal will allow more potentially inflammatory content to remain up in the "public interest."
YouTube has previously attracted the ire of conservatives for its removal of QAnon and anti-vaccine content. According to The New York Times, YouTube's content moderators have been provided with new guidelines and training on how to handle the deluge of provocative content on the platform. The changes urge reviewers to pull back on removing certain videos, a continuation of a trend not just at YouTube, but on numerous platforms that host user-created content.
Beginning late last year, YouTube began informing moderators they should err on the side of caution when removing videos that are in the public interest. That includes user uploads that discuss issues like elections, race, gender, sexuality, abortion, immigration, and censorship. Previously, YouTube's policy told moderators to remove videos if one-quarter or more of the content violated policies. Now, the exception cutoff has been increased to half. In addition, staff are now told to bring issues to managers if they are uncertain rather than removing the content themselves.
Anti-vaccine advocate and current US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken the extraordinary action of firing all 17 vaccine experts on a federal committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on immunization practices.
In an opinion piece published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy announced that he had cleared out the committee, accusing them of being "plagued with persistent conflicts of interest" and a group that has "become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine."
"Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028," Kennedy added.
The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn’t what the DOJ is claiming — it’s what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump administration cobbled together to justify their illegal deportation of a man courts had barred the US from sending to El Salvador.
That should tell you everything about the quality of this “case.” But let’s walk through exactly how the DOJ manufactured criminal charges to cover up their own constitutional violation.
After months of claiming it was “impossible” to bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador — where they illegally shipped him, despite a court order, due to an “administrative error” — they have now brought him back.
For months they resisted doing so, as everyone realized it would mean admitting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration program made mistakes. So the administration pivoted: they fired the DOJ lawyer who had initially admitted that it was a mistake to deport him, and began claiming that Abrego Garcia was obviously a terrible criminal, a “leader” of the MS-13 gang, and a “human trafficker.” The US government then began searching high and low for literally anything they could use to try to justify those claims about him, so they could falsely pretend that they were correct in shipping him out of the country.
In that stop, Abrego Garcia was driving a van with eight passengers from Texas to Maryland — construction workers, he said, being transported between job sites. The officers at the time found nothing worth charging. They didn’t even cite him for speeding.
Difficult to see that as evidence of anything horrible.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. And the Trump administration desperately needed something. So it appears the DOJ used that non-incident to secretly indict Abrego Garcia on two counts of “transporting” undocumented workers. That indictment was unsealed today, along with the announcement that Abrego Garcia was being brought back to the US to face those criminal charges.
Oh, so they could bring him back…
This proves that the administration has been lying, repeatedly, in claiming that they had no control over him and couldn’t bring him back.
Remember: Trump himself admitted multiple times that he could get Abrego Garcia back. Meanwhile, AG Pam Bondi was insisting in public that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was even more definitive: “there is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again.”
Kristi Noem less than a month ago: "There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again."(No matter what happens, bringing him back to the US is a climbdown for the administration)
All proven false. Today, Bondi tried to claim this was different because they “presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant.” But that only proves the lie — there was never anything stopping them from making that request. They just chose not to, while claiming it was impossible.
El Salvador readily agreed to the request — exactly as everyone knew they would, despite Salvadoran President Bukele’s claims that it was “preposterous” to even think of returning him as he would have to “smuggle a terrorist” into the US.
Turns out all of that was theater.
We’ve seen this playbook trotted out multiple times: whenever someone is denied due process, we hear about how awful they are, how violent, how dangerous, as if that means they don’t deserve due process. But that’s garbage: everyone deserves due process, because without it, there’s simply no way to know for sure that they are all those things anyone is claiming.
The new criminal indictment
It’s now clear that the DOJ went on a fishing expedition to find anything they could possibly dig up to pin on Abrego Garcia. The evidence was so weak that, according to ABC News, the local DOJ prosecutor resigned rather than put his name on the filings:
The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
When experienced federal prosecutors walk away from cases because they believe they’re politically motivated, that tells you everything about the integrity of the charges.
But the DOJ pressed forward anyway, transforming a routine traffic stop into something much grander. In their detention motion, two years after police found nothing worth citing, the government now claims:
Over the past nine years, the defendant has played a significant role in an undocumented alien smuggling ring that has resulted in thousands of undocumented aliens being illegally transported into and throughout the United States, including members and associates of La Mara Salvatrucha (“MS-13”), a recently designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, as well as unaccompanied minor children
This represents a remarkable evolution in the government’s case. In 2022: not worth a speeding ticket. In 2025: international human trafficking kingpin.
At today’s press conference about this, Pam Bondi also appeared to accuse Abrego Garcia of being a “child-groomer” and a murderer. When reporters pointed out that the indictment says nothing about such things, she got angry, insisted he’s really bad, and then ended the press conference abruptly.
Everything is backwards
Here, the entire process has been backwards:
The Promise: Rigorous deportation processes targeting only dangerous criminals. Once deported, impossible to bring anyone back.
The Reality: They accidentally shipped someone with no criminal record to El Salvador against a court order barring him from being shipped there. Then, they were able to easily bring him back two and a half months later, as soon as they asked, but only after they scraped together a very weak looking indictment to try to turn him into a criminal.
That’s not protecting Americans from violent criminals. It’s turning people into criminals to justify a monumental fuckup and human rights violation.
A remarkable schoolyard brawl erupted online Thursday between President Donald Trump and his former "First Buddy" Elon Musk during which the pair traded insults and barbs. The war of words reached a crescendo during the afternoon when Trump threatened Musk's federal contracts.
"The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!" Trump wrote on his social media network, Truth Social, at 2:37 pm ET.
Anyone with a reasonable grasp of reality understood that the "bromance" between the president of the United States and the most wealthy person in the world was going to blow up at some point, but even so, the online brouhaha that has played out Thursday is spectacular—at one point Musk suggested that Trump was in the Epstein files, for goodness' sake.
Google wasn't around for the advent of the World Wide Web, but it successfully remade the web on its own terms. Today, any website that wants to be findable has to play by Google's rules, and after years of search dominance, the company has lost a major antitrust case that could reshape both it and the web.
The closing arguments in the case just wrapped up last week, and Google could be facing serious consequences when the ruling comes down in August. Losing Chrome would certainly change things for Google, but the Department of Justice is pursuing other remedies that could have even more lasting impacts. During his testimony, Google CEO Sundar Pichai seemed genuinely alarmed at the prospect of being forced to license Google's search index and algorithm, the so-called data remedies in the case. He claimed this would be no better than a spinoff of Google Search. The company's statements have sometimes derisively referred to this process as "white labeling" Google Search.
But does a white label Google Search sound so bad? Google has built an unrivaled index of the web, but the way it shows results has become increasingly frustrating. A handful of smaller players in search have tried to offer alternatives to Google's search tools. They all have different approaches to retrieving information for you, but they agree that spinning off Google Search could change the web again. Whether or not those changes are positive depends on who you ask.
This week, Republicans in Congress and the executive branch stepped up their efforts to roll back clean vehicle legislation and regulations. Antipathy toward environmental protections was a hallmark of the first Trump administration, but in his second term, the president and his congressional allies are redoubling their efforts to allow cars to pollute more and limit the adoption of electric vehicles.
Congressional republicans have been working on a budget bill that would radically transform many aspects of American life. Among the environmental protections being stripped away in the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" (yes, that's what it's called) is a repeal of the US Environmental Protection Agency's rules on "greenhouse gas and multi-pollutant emissions standards."
These regulations are meant to limit the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the US vehicle fleet, a major driver of climate change, as well as the noxious pollutants containing sulfur and nitrogen compounds that have more immediate and deleterious effects on human health. And if the budget bill is sent to Trump to sign, the existing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules, implemented in 2022, and the future rules meant to take effect next year will be no more.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wants to enforce a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation by making states ineligible for broadband funding if they try to impose any limits on development of artificial intelligence.
The House previously approved a budget bill that contained a fairly straightforward provision to ban state AI regulation for 10 years. Cruz, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, yesterday released budget reconciliation text that takes a different approach to preventing states from regulating AI.
Cruz's approach may be an attempt to get around the Senate's Byrd Rule, which limits the inclusion of "extraneous matter" in budget reconciliation legislation. He wants to make it impossible for states to receive money from the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program if they try to regulate AI. Cruz released a summary that says his bill "forbids states collecting BEAD money from strangling AI deployment with EU-style regulation."
Senate Democrats are pleading with the Trump administration to stop delaying distribution of $42 billion in grants for construction of broadband networks in areas with poor Internet access.
The Biden administration spent about three years developing rules and procedures for the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) fund and then evaluating plans submitted by each US state and territory. Republicans repeatedly alleged that Democrats should have distributed the grants more quickly, but the Trump administration halted progress after taking over.
"States are ready to put shovels in the ground and have been waiting for months to get started... Additional delays and onerous changes to the program at this stage threaten to further stall urgently needed deployment and leave communities behind," Senate Democrats wrote in a May 30 letter to President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The letter was sent by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.).
