Brad Reed, Common Dreams

President Donald Trump last year promised voters lower grocery prices “starting on Day One” of his second term, but so far, prices of staple foods have only continued to rise.

A poll released by Navigator Research on Friday found that most voters have noticed the continued increase in grocery prices, and that they pin the blame on Trump and the Republican Party.

Overall, the poll found that 54% of voters in swing congressional districts think that Trump’s policies have caused prices to go up, whereas just 31% think they’ve caused prices to go down. Focusing specifically on groceries, 54% of these voters blamed Trump’s tariffs for increasing food prices.

On Thursday, a different poll conducted by The Harris Poll and commissioned by Axios found that voters are anxious about grocery prices, with 47% of voters saying that groceries are harder to afford now than they were one year ago, while just 19% said groceries are easier to afford.

Axios noted in its report on the poll that voters have had to deal with particularly steep increases in staple goods such as ground beef, whose price has increased 13% over the last year; coffee, which has seen a price increase of 21% over the last year; and eggs, whose price has posted a year-over-year increase of 11%.

The price of coffee in particular could be a vulnerability for Trump, given that he is levying hefty 50% tariffs on Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of coffee.

John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll, told Axios that grocery prices have become “such a visible signal that life is harder today than it was even last year” and that voters “don’t feel like things are changing fast enough.”

“This is going to be a significant issue for the president,” he added.

These polls line up with an earlier Associated Press poll, which found that 53% of Americans believe the cost of groceries is a “major source of stress,” which is higher than the percentage of Americans who say the same thing about the cost of housing, healthcare, and childcare.

Anxiety about grocery prices is particularly strong among Americans earning $30,000 or less per year, as nearly two-thirds of them described paying for groceries as a “major source of stress.”

Just hours after President Donald Trump said U.S. soldiers should use America's cities as “training grounds,” federal law enforcement officials on Tuesday night descended upon an apartment complex in Chicago where witnesses say they broke down residents’ doors, smashed furniture and belongings, and dragged dozens of them — including children — into U-Haul vans.

Local resident Rodrick Johnson, who lives in the building raided by Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) agents, told the Chicago Sun-Times that federal officials broke down his door, put him in zip ties, and kept him detained outside the building for three hours before letting him go.

“I asked [agents] why they were holding me if I was an American citizen, and they said I had to wait until they looked me up,” he told the paper. “I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.”

Pertissue Fisher, who also lives in the building, backed up Johnson’s account and said that agents forcibly removed all residents from their homes regardless of their legal status.

“They just treated us like we were nothing,” she told local news station ABC 7 Chicago. “They, like, piling us all up in the back on the other side, and it wasn’t no room to move nowhere.”

Ebony Sweets Watson, who lives across the street from the raided building, told the Chicago Sun-Times that she saw children, some of whom weren’t even wearing clothes, dragged out of the building by ICE agents and then placed into U-Haul vans.

“It was heartbreaking to watch,” she said. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”

Watson also said that it appeared the federal agents had ransacked the building during the raid.

“Stuff was everywhere,” she said. “You could see people’s birth certificates, and papers thrown all over. Water was leaking into the hallway. It was wicked crazy.”

Dan Jones, a resident at the building, told the Chicago Sun-Times that he returned from work on Wednesday to find that several of his belongings, including electronics and furniture, were missing from his apartment, and that all of his clothes had been strewn across the floor. He said that he asked the Chicago Police Department for any information about what happened to his belongings in the wake of the ICE raid, but has so far received no response.

“I’m p---ed off,” Jones told the paper. “I feel defeated because the authorities aren’t doing anything.”

Darrell Ballard, who witnessed the raid, told ABC 7 Chicago that it felt more like a military operation than law enforcement.

“We’re under siege,” he said. “We’re being invaded by our own military.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that 37 people were arrested during the raid, and it claimed some of them “are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes, and immigration violators.”

American Immigration Council fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said in a Thursday social media post that the raid represented “a surreal moment for America” that was a clear violation of residents’ civil liberties.

“Needless to say, if the normal police ever pulled something like this—pulling every single person out of an apartment building and handcuffing them to run warrant checks—they would be sued into oblivion,” he observed. “Yet ICE is going to get away with it entirely.”

Reichlin-Melnick also said that, even if the agents had a valid warrant to enter the apartment complex, it was highly unlikely that warrant would extend to removing every single resident there.

“I am... DEEPLY skeptical that the warrant permitted them to smash down every door and arrest every person in the building,” he wrote. “My gut says they went far beyond the warrant.”

A new poll has found that a plurality of voters in swing districts support impeaching President Donald Trump, with 45% saying that they would strongly support removing him from office.

The poll, which was conducted by Lake Research Partners on behalf of progressive advocacy organization Free Speech for People, found that 49% of voters across 17 swing congressional districts supported impeaching Trump, with 44% of voters in those districts opposed.

The intensity of support for impeaching Trump was also notable, as the 45% who strongly supported removing him from office was higher than the total number of people who opposed removing him.

The poll also showed that Trump is broadly unpopular, with just 40% of voters in swing districts approving of the job he’s doing and 56% expressing opposition. Fifty-four percent of respondents in these districts said they strongly opposed Trump—nearly 20 points higher than the 35% of respondents who said they strongly supported him.

John Bonifaz, president and co-counder of Free Speech For People, said that the poll results showed that many Americans understand the grave danger posed by the president to democracy and the rule of law.

“This is an existential moment for our nation and our democracy. We either have a Constitution, or we don’t,” he said. “Donald Trump has already engaged in multiple abuses of power. We demand that our elected officials in Congress carry out the mandate of their oath to protect the Constitution at this critical time by standing up and demanding impeachment proceedings against this lawless president.”

Free Speech for People has been keeping a running tally of what it says are impeachable actions by the president, including deploying the National Guard to carry out law enforcement functions in two American cities; firing a federal prosecutor who said that there was insufficient evidence to support criminal charges against three of the president’s political opponents; encouraging Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to threaten media companies with the loss of their broadcast licenses; and his use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “violate the rights of American residents and citizens, disrupt our communities, and silence his political opponents.”

Courtney Hostetler, legal director at Free Speech For People, said that all of these actions show “Trump is actively dismantling the public institutions and constitutional protections that safeguard our democracy,” and added that the president’s “assault on the Constitution and the rule of law are purposeful, and they are impeachable.”

Free Speech for People said Wednesday that at least one million people have signed a petition the group helped organize, demanding Trump’s impeachment for “his high crimes against the state.”

Trump was impeached twice in his first presidential term, once for asking the president of Ukraine to investigate his political opponent and once for inciting the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

Hospitals and healthcare clinics across the US have been announcing layoffs, service cuts, and closures in the weeks since Republicans passed a budget law that’s estimated to slash spending on Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.

Monday reporting by CNN highlighted that Augusta Medical Group is closing three of its rural clinics in Virginia. The company said in a statement earlier this month that the closures were “part of Augusta Health’s ongoing response to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the resulting realities for healthcare delivery.”

The CNN report noted that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger recently campaigned in Buena Vista, one of the rural communities that will be losing its clinic, to make the case that the cuts in the GOP’s budget law should be reversed.

Tim Layton, an associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, told CNN that rural areas figure to be particularly vulnerable to the Medicaid cuts given their lower population densities.

“You can expect those places to be impacted by now having people who don’t even have Medicaid,” he said. “With fewer people to spread fixed costs across, it becomes harder and harder to stay open.”

Layton also dismissed Republicans’ claims to have created protections for rural hospitals with a $50 billion rural health fund, as he described it as a “short-term patch” that will “go pretty quick.” KFF earlier this year estimated that rural Medicaid spending would fall by $137 billion as a result of the GOP law, which is nearly triple the money allocated by the health fund.

Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general, seized on the CNN report and used it to tie incumbent Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares to the national Republican Party’s policy agenda under President Donald Trump.

“The Big Bill causing three rural clinics in Virginia to close is just the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote in a social media post. “And it’s happening because Jason Miyares is too scared to fight against Trump’s Medicaid cuts that will throw nearly 300,000 Virginians off their healthcare.”

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten also ripped the GOP for passing Medicaid cuts that are hurting the communities they represent.

“Hundreds of healthcare providers in rural areas depend on Medicaid funding to keep doors open and care for patients,” she wrote. “But Trump’s Big Ugly Bill cuts millions from Medicaid, leaving these healthcare providers in jeopardy.”

Leor Tal, campaign director for Unrig Our Economy, said that the cuts to Medicaid looked particularly bad politically for Republicans when contrasted to the tax cuts that disproportionately benefit high-income Americans.

“These closures are the congressional Republican agenda in action: cuts to healthcare for rural moms and families, tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires,” Tal said. “These closures are not an accident—they are the direct result of a law written to serve the wealthy and leave working people behind, and unless Republicans in Congress reverse course, more working-class Americans will be left behind while the rich get even richer.”

Multiple legal experts are expressing alarm at a new report that US President Donald Trump is planning to fire a federal prosecutor for failing to bring criminal charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

ABC News reported on Thursday night that Trump planned to fire Erik Siebert, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, because he could not find sufficient evidence to conclude that James had committed mortgage fraud when she bought a home in the state in 2023.

Siebert was appointed by Trump as US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia just four months ago, and ABC News’ source said that “the administration now plans to install a US attorney who would more aggressively investigate James.”

James successfully sued Trump for serial financial fraud committed by the Trump Organization back in 2023, and ultimately won a $354 million verdict against him and his business.

Trump has reportedly been pressing the Department of Justice to file charges against James in an apparent retribution campaign, and many legal experts said that going so far as to fire the US attorney investigating her would be a dangerous new step.

Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and current professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, outlined why Trump firing Siebert would be damaging to the rule of law.

“This would be another red line crossed: Career prosecutors aren’t political people,” she wrote on X. “They’re trained to look at the facts and the law and determine whether admissible evidence is sufficient to prove a crime. But Trump wants revenge prosecutions, whether there is evidence or not.”

Anthony Foley, former head of public affairs at the US Department of Justice under President Barack Obama, marveled that Trump would fire the man whom he’d appointed simply because he came up empty trying to prosecute a political foe.

“When even the people you appoint say there’s no there there,” he wrote. “Good prosecutors are trained to follow the facts... to go where the facts tell them to go. Good prosecutors don’t start investigations with a pre-determined outcome in mind.”

Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and vice-chairman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, also expressed alarm and compared Trump’s reported plan to “the way prosecutors are used in dictatorships—to pursue political enemies.”

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, wrote on Bluesky that Trump “should be impeached and removed from office for this alone” if he goes through with firing Siebert.

Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY), a former federal prosecutor, pointed the finger at his Republican colleagues whom he accused of providing cover for the president.

Joining numerous genocide and Holocaust experts, human rights groups in Israel and around the world, and a United Nations commission, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday accused the Israeli government of engaging in a genocide against the Palestinian people.

In an editorial titled “It Is Genocide,” the independent Vermont senator leveled his harshest criticism yet of the far-right Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Picking up on the findings of a report from the United Nations’ (UN) commission of inquiry released on Tuesday, Sanders recounted the massive human suffering that Israel has inflicted on Gaza in the 23 months since Hamas launched a surprise attack that killed 1,200 Israelis.

“Out of a population of 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has now killed some 65,000 people and wounded roughly 164,000,” he wrote. “The full toll is likely much higher, with many thousands of bodies buried under the rubble. A leaked classified Israeli military database indicates that 83% of those killed have been civilians. More than 18,000 children have been killed, including 12,000 aged 12 or younger.”

The raw death toll doesn’t capture the extent of Israel’s genocidal actions, Sanders continued, and he pointed to the systematic destruction of infrastructure in Gaza that has made the exclave unlivable.

“Satellite imagery shows that the Israeli bombardment has destroyed 70% of all structures in Gaza,” he said. “The UN estimates that 92% of housing units have been damaged or destroyed. At this very moment, Israel is demolishing what’s left of Gaza City. Most hospitals have been destroyed, and almost 1,600 healthcare workers have been killed. Almost 90% of water and sanitation facilities are now inoperable.”

Sanders went on to accuse Israel of “openly pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank” with the full support of the US government. He also noted the consistently dehumanizing rhetoric that high-level Israeli officials have used against Palestinians, including statements labeling them “animals,” as well as a desire to erase “all of Gaza from the face of the earth.”

In response to this genocide, Sanders said, “we must use every ounce of our leverage to demand an immediate ceasefire, a massive surge of humanitarian aid facilitated by the UN, and initial steps to provide Palestinians with a state of their own.”

Pro-Palestinian activists have pushed Sanders for nearly two years to label Israel’s actions a genocide. While he has consistently condemned the Israeli military’s mass killings of Palestinian civilians, Wednesday marked the first time he described them as a genocide.

Twenty members of Congress have now described Israel’s assault as a genocide, according to Prem Thakker of Zeteo. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) also said Wednesday that she believes “Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people.” She and Sanders are the first Jewish members of Congress to say so.

“I feel compelled to speak out,” said Balint, “because I know there are so many others like me who are horrified by what they see.”

The New York Times on Monday published a blockbuster report detailing how US President Donald Trump’s administration gave the United Arab Emirates access to high-powered artificial intelligence chips just days after receiving a massive investment in Trump’s cryptocurrency startup.

As the Times report documented, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) ruling family, had one of his investment firms deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, the startup founded by members of the Trump family and the family of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

Just two weeks later, wrote the Times, “the White House agreed to allow the UAE access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence,” despite national security concerns about these chips being shared with China.

The Times, which interviewed more than 75 people in its investigation of the deals, did not present direct evidence that the two deals were explicitly linked, and the White House denied any connection between the massive investment in the Trump family’s crypto firm and the decision to grant UAE access to the chips.

However, the paper interviewed three ethics lawyers who said that “the back-to-back deals violate longstanding norms in the United States for political, diplomatic, and private dealmaking among senior officials and their children.”

Other political observers were stunned by the Times’ report.

“If this is true, this is the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the United States and it’s not even close,” commented Ryan Cummings, chief of staff at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

US foreign policy journalist Laura Rozen questioned whether Witkoff’s dealings with the UAE and other countries were impacting his ability to do his job in other areas.

“Maybe Witkoff is too busy pushing deals to enrich his and Trump’s families to focus on getting an Israel-Gaza hostage deal over the line, recognizing the Russians are not interested in ending the war on Ukraine, etc.,” she speculated.

Alasdair Phillips-Robins, a fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, marveled at the reporting that Trump’s negotiation team appeared to be willing to grant UAE access to the chips without forcing any major geopolitical tradeoffs.

“This sounds like the world’s weakest negotiation: telling the UAE they’ll get unlimited chips before they’ve agreed to a single concession in return,” he wrote.

Independent journalist Jacob Silverman, who has written extensively on the politics of the US tech industry, remarked that the Trump administration’s actions exposed in the Times report were “impeachable” and smacked of “incredible corruption.”

In addition to his cryptocurrency-related dealings with UAE, Trump has also come under scrutiny for accepting a luxury jet from the government of Qatar that he plans to use for the remainder of his term in office and that will be given to his official presidential library after he leaves the White House.

A Democratic US senator over the weekend issued an ominous warning about Republicans using the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to clamp down on political speech.

In a lengthy social media post on Sunday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) outlined how President Donald Trump and his allies look set to wage a campaign of retribution against political adversaries by framing them as accomplices in Kirk’s murder.

“Pay attention,” he began. “Something dark might be coming. The murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence. Instead, Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.”

Murphy then contrasted the recent statements by Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who accurately stated that political violence is not confined to a single political ideology, with those of Trump and his allies, who have said such violence is only a problem on the left.

Murphy highlighted a statement from Trump ally and informal adviser Laura Loomer, who said that she wanted “Trump to be the ‘dictator’ the left thinks he is” and that she wanted “the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are.”

He then pointed to Trump, saying that progressive billionaire financier George Soros should face racketeering charges even though there is no evidence linking Soros to Kirk’s murder or any other kind of political violence.

“The Trump/Loomer/Miller narrative that Dems are cheering Kirk’s murder or that left groups are fomenting violence is also made up,” he added. “There are always going to be online trolls, but Dem leaders are united (as opposed to Trump who continues to cheer the January 6 violence).”

Murphy claimed that the president and his allies have long been seeking a “pretext to destroy their opposition” and that Kirk’s murder gave them an opening.

“That’s why it was so important for Trump sycophants to take over the DoJ and FBI, so that if a pretext arose, Trump could orchestrate a dizzying campaign to shut down political opposition groups and lock up or harass its leaders,” he said. “This is what could be coming—now.”

Early in his second term, the president fired FBI prosecutors who were involved in an earlier political violence case—the prosecution of people involved in the violent attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 by Trump supporters who aimed to stop the certification of the 2020 election.

A top ethics official and a lawyer who spoke out against the president’s anti-immigration policy are among those who have been fired from the DOJ.

Murphy ended his post with a call for action from supporters.

“I hope I’m wrong. But we need to be prepared if I’m right,” he said. “That means everyone who cares about democracy has to join the fight—right now. Join a mobilization or protest group. Start showing up to actions more. Write a check to a progressive media operation.”

One day after Murphy’s warning, columnist Karen Attiah announced that she had been fired from The Washington Post over social media posts in the wake of Kirk’s death that were critical of his legacy but in no way endorsed or celebrated any form of political violence.

“The Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being ‘unacceptable,’ ‘gross misconduct,’ and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues—charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false,” she explained. “They rushed to fire me without even a conversation. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”

Attiah only directly referenced Kirk once in her posts and said she had condemned the deadly attack on him “without engaging in excessive, false mourning for a man who routinely attacked Black women as a group, put academics in danger by putting them on watch lists, claimed falsely that Black people were better off in the era of Jim Crow, said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, and favorably reviewed a book that called liberals ‘Unhumans.‘”

Critics over the weekend heaped scorn on the US Department of Energy after it made demonstrably false claims about renewable energy.

In a post on X late last week, the Department of Energy (DOE) argued that "wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing," even though batteries allow the storage of energy from both sources that can be used long after their initial generation.

The post drew immediate ridicule from social media users who expressed astonishment that the people running America's energy policy seem to be woefully ignorant about renewable energy storage.

"We are governed by some of the dumbest people in the history of this country, proudly, unashamedly, openly moronic and ignorant, and I am genuinely not sure how the US ever recovers from this," commented Zeteo editor-in-chief Medhi Hassan. "These people make George W. Bush and Sarah Palin look like savants."

The press office for Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) sarcastically tried to educate the president's team about how energy storage works.

"We're excited for the Trump administration to learn about BATTERIES (we have them here in California, and they've helped the Golden State shift to green, clean energy AND keep the lights on)," they wrote.

Alex Stapp, the cofounder of the Institute for Progress, also touted California's embrace of renewable energy, and he pointed out that batteries on a given day provide more than a quarter of all energy in the state at peak hours.

Fossil fuel industry watchdog Oil PAC Tracker argued that this kind of ignorant rhetoric about renewable energy was part of a pattern from US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who is the former CEO of onshore oilfield services company Liberty Energy.

"Secretary Wright should be fired for lying to American people," they wrote. "He profits off this kind of misinformation because he is a fossil fuel executive. Killing clean energy deployment also hurts our economy, makes electricity expensive and increases our power sector emissions."

Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci also leveled the administration for pushing misinformation about renewable energy.

"The fact that such an obviously false and, frankly, asinine tweet was just issued by a federal government account is an insult to the American people," he argued. "Renewables could make up the majority of our energy in a multi-layered system with better energy storage if we actually tried."

The DOE's post came at a time when the Trump administration is shutting down wind and solar power projects across the country, and when Americans' energy bills are rising due in part to increased demands being placed on the electric grid by artificial intelligence data centers.

A report released earlier this month by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis declared that Trump's energy agenda "will fail... unless the White House stops issuing stop-work orders for offshore wind."

The report further added that "renewable energy and dispatchable storage are the only option for adding significant amounts of new generation capacity to the US grid for at least the next five years," while also detailing that there are simply no short-term alternatives for rapidly building up capacity.

Susan Muller, a senior energy analyst, similarly took aim late last month at the administration's order to stop work on the Revolution Wind project off the coast of New England, which she argued would have provided fast relief to people in the region struggling to pay their utility bills.

"This stop-work order from the Trump administration is a lose-lose for pretty much everyone except fossil gas corporations," she said. "Stopping the project could not only cost thousands of jobs and ratepayers real money but have life or death consequences if we lose power in the middle of a cold snap. New England needs homegrown offshore wind energy to keep the lights on and our electricity affordable."

President Donald Trump on Friday angrily lashed out after the European Commission slapped tech giant Google with a $3.45 billion fine for violating antitrust laws.

The European Commission ordered Google to end its anticompetitive practices, such as its payments to ensure its search engine receives preferential treatment on internet browsers and mobile phones. The commission also demanded that Google "implement measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest along the adtech supply chain."

EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said that the decision demonstrated that "Google abused its dominant position in adtech harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers" and that it must "must now come forward with a serious remedy to address its conflicts of interest, and if it fails to do so, we will not hesitate to impose strong remedies."

Shortly after the ruling, Trump took to Truth Social to blast Europe for enforcing its antitrust laws.

"Europe today 'hit' another great American company, Google, with a $3.5 billion fine, effectively taking money that would otherwise go to American investments and jobs," Trump wrote. "Very unfair, and the American taxpayer will not stand for it! As I have said before, my administration will NOT allow these discriminatory actions to stand. Apple, as an example, was forced to pay $17 billion in a fine that, in my opinion, should not have been charged—they should get their money back!"

Trump added that "we cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceeding to nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these taxpaying American companies."

Max von Thun, Europe director for anti-monopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, had a decidedly different take from the president, and praised the European Commission for taking an "important first step in breaking Google's chokehold over the underlying architecture not merely of the internet, but of the free press in the 21st century."

"It is only right that Google pays the price for its blatant and long-standing lawbreaking," he added. "More importantly however, the commission has given Google two months to end its illegal practices and resolve the profound conflicts of interest which arise from its control of every layer of the adtech stack."

The European Commission's decision stood in stark contrast to a decision issued earlier this week from Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, who declined to force Google to sell off its Chrome web browser or share all requested data with its competitors despite finding that the company had violated American antitrust laws.

President Donald Trump's second term has taken a massive toll on the American civil service, according to a new report by a government watchdog.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on Wednesday released a report documenting dozens of instances in which government officials "have publicly resigned in protest after being asked to do something they believed to be illegal or in violation of their oath of office."

CREW noted that the resignations have so far impacted eight executive agencies and five independent agencies, and added that some of those who have resigned have served across as many as six presidential administrations.

"At least 19 of those who have resigned in protest have a decade or longer tenure at their agencies, with some nearing 40 years," said CREW. "Every administration sees resignations, but this level of resignations in protest is without known precedent."

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been hit particularly hard by resignations and has already blown through four different commissioners in less than a year. This includes two acting IRS commissioners, Doug O'Donnell and Melanie Krause, who both resigned rather than comply with demands to hand over data on undocumented immigrants to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The report also examined the wave of resignations that has occurred at the US Department of Justice, beginning with Danielle Sassoon, the former interim US attorney for the Southern District of New York who stepped down after being asked to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Sassoon was followed out the door by six other attorneys who worked on the case, including its lead prosecutor.

Taken together, CREW has tallied 72 different government officials who have resigned in protest in just the first eight months of Trump's second term.

"The second Trump administration is sending a clear message to get in line or get out," commented CREW. "This approach to dissenters who refuse to obey orders that are illegal, unconstitutional, or unethical has chilling authoritarian characteristics, and stands to reshape the federal government in dangerous ways."

The most recent wave of resignations occurred last week when several top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stepped down over the firing of former CDC Director Susan Monarez, who clashed with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaccination policies in the US.

The Republican Party's massive budget law has shown itself to be decidedly unpopular with voters, as polls consistently show Americans opposed to its $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid.

Because of this, reported Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman, US President Donald Trump met with GOP members of Congress on Wednesday morning to discuss how to boost the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act's popularity.

According to Sherman, Trump's message to the GOP is that the bill will become popular if "they completely rebrand it and talk about it differently."

Politico similarly reported that Republicans in Congress have been eager to rebrand the bill after enduring "a spate of angry crowds at... town halls and alarming polling that shows dismal views of the bill's safety-net cuts and deficit impact."

As Common Dreams reported last month, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) faced angry constituents who yelled, "You cut our healthcare!" and called him a liar when he claimed the Medicaid cuts would improve healthcare services. Other Republicans have been confronted with similar outrage at town halls.

Republican pollsters are reportedly recommending that GOP lawmakers tout provisions in the bill such as eliminating taxes on some tips, although worker advocacy organization One Fair Wage has found that this provision won't benefit most tipped workers since two-thirds of them don't earn enough money to file federal income taxes.

In fact, New York Times congressional correspondent Annie Karni noted that Republicans started referring to the package as the "working families tax plan" after getting out of their Tuesday morning meeting.

But critics in the Democratic Party argued that a simple rebrand of the legislation is unlikely to be enough to rescue it in the court of public opinion, with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) emphasizing that the problems with the law stem not from marketing, but from its substance.

"The poorest 25% of workers lose money under this bill while the richest Americans get a $270,000 tax cut," he wrote while sharing a chart of Congressional Budget Office estimates of the impact the law will have on different income groups. "They can rebrand all they want. The facts are the facts. They screwed working people to help their billionaire and corporate donors."

Several other Democratic lawmakers similarly pounced to mock the GOP's attempted rebrand.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) sardonically offered advice to her Republican colleagues, writing: "Hey, so changing what you call this bill actually doesn’t change the harm that’s in it. Hope this helps!"

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) suggested a more accurate renaming of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would be the “Tax on Working Families” plan.

"Under the GOP tax law, billionaires got the big tax cuts. In fact, thanks to Republicans, many working families will actually see their taxes go up," said Beyer. "And Trump's tariffs are a huge tax hike on working Americans."

"Under the GOP tax law, billionaires got the big tax cuts. In fact, thanks to Republicans, many working families will actually see their taxes go up," said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). "And Trump's tariffs are a huge tax hike on working Americans."

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Penn.) ridiculed the White House for "desperately" trying to rebrand the package because "working families think the GOP's plan to sacrifice their healthcare and SNAP benefits to give billionaires a tax cut is a bad idea."

Although President Donald Trump's administration likes to boast that it puts "American workers first," several news reports published on Monday document the president's attacks on the rights of working people and labor unions.

As longtime labor reporter Steven Greenhouse explained in The Guardian, Trump, throughout his second term, has "taken dozens of actions that hurt workers, often by cutting their pay or making their jobs more dangerous."

Among other things, Greenhouse cited Trump's decision to halt a regulation intended to protect coal miners from lung disease, as well as his decision to strip a million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.

Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, told Greenhouse that Trump's actions amount to a "big betrayal" of his promises to look out for US workers during the 2024 presidential campaign.

"His attacks on unions are coming fast and furious," she said. "He talks a good game of being for working people, but he's doing the absolute opposite. This is a government that is by, and for, the CEOs and billionaires."

Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, similarly told Greenhouse that Trump has been "absolutely, brazenly anti-worker," and she cited him ripping away an increase in the minimum wage for federal contractors that had been enacted by former President Joe Biden as a prime example.

"The minimum wage is incredibly popular," she said. "He just took away the minimum wage from hundreds of thousands of workers. That blew my mind."

NPR published its own Labor Day report that zeroed in on how the president is "decimating" federal employee unions by issuing March and August executive orders stripping them of the power to collectively bargain for better working conditions.

So far, nine federal agencies have canceled their union contracts as a result of the orders, which are based on a provision in federal law that gives the president the power to terminate collective bargaining at agencies that are primarily involved with national security.

The Trump administration has embraced a maximalist interpretation of this power and has demanded the end of collective bargaining at departments that aren't primarily known as national security agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Weather Service.

However, Trump's attacks on organized labor haven't completely intimidated government workers from joining unions. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the Trump administration's cuts to the National Park Service earlier this year inspired hundreds of workers at the California-based Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon national parks to unionize.

Although labor organizers had been trying unsuccessfully for years to get park workers to sign on, that changed when the Trump administration took a hatchet to parks' budgets and enacted mass layoffs.

"More than 97% of employees at Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks who cast ballots voted to unionize, with results certified last week," wrote the Los Angeles Times. "More than 600 staffers—including interpretive park rangers, biologists, firefighters, and fee collectors—are now represented by the National Federation of Federal Employees."

Even so, many workers who succeed in forming unions may no longer get their grievances heard, given the state of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

As documented by Timothy Noah in The New Republic, the NLRB is now "hanging by a thread" in the wake of a court ruling that declared the board's structure to be unconstitutional because it barred the president from being able to fire NLRB administrative judges at will.

"The ruling doesn't shut down the NLRB entirely because it applies only to cases in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, where the 5th Circuit has jurisdiction," Noah explained. "But Jennifer Abruzzo, who was President Joe Biden's NLRB general counsel, told me that the decision will 'open the floodgates for employers to forum-shop and seek to get injunctions' in those three states."

Noah noted that this lawsuit was brought in part by SpaceX owner and one-time Trump ally Elon Musk, and he accused the Trump NLRB of waging a "half-hearted" fight against Musk's attack on workers' rights.

Thanks to Trump and Musk's actions, Noah concluded, American oligarchs "can toast the NLRB's imminent destruction."

Economists are warning that President Donald Trump's efforts to meddle with the Federal Reserve are going to wind up raising prices even further for working families.

Michael Madowitz, principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute, said on Wednesday that the president's efforts to strong-arm the US central bank into lowering interest rates by firing Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook would backfire by accelerating inflation.

"The administration's efforts to politicize interest rates—an authoritarian tactic—will ultimately hurt American families by driving up costs," he said. "That helps explain why Fed independence has helped keep inflation under 3%, while, after years of political interference in their central bank, Turkey's inflation rate is over 33%."

Heidi Shierholz, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, said that the president's move to fire Cook "radically undermines what Trump says his own goal is: lowering U.S. interest rates to spur faster economic growth."

She then gave a detailed explanation for why Trump imposing his will on the Federal Reserve would likely bring economic pain.

"Presidential capture of the Fed would signal to decision-makers throughout the economy that interest rates will no longer be set on the basis of sound data or economic conditions—but instead on the whims of the president," she argued. "Confidence that the Fed will respond wisely to future periods of macroeconomic stress—either excess inflation or unemployment—will evaporate."

This lack of confidence, she continued, would manifest in investors in US Treasury bonds demanding higher premiums due to the higher risks they will feel they are taking when buying US debt, which would only further drive up the nation's borrowing costs.

"These higher long-term rates will ripple through the economy—making mortgages, auto loans, and credit card payments higher for working people—and require that rates be held higher for longer to tamp down any future outbreak of inflation," she said. "In the first hours after Trump's announcement, all of these worries seemed to be coming to pass."

Economist Paul Krugman, a former columnist for The New York Times, wrote on his personal Substack page Thursday that Trump's moves to take control of the Federal Reserve were "shocking and terrifying."

"Trump's campaign to take over monetary policy has shifted from a public pressure to personal intimidation of Fed officials: the attack on Cook signals that Trump and his people will try to ruin the life of anyone who stands in his way," he argued. "There is now a substantial chance that the Fed's independence, its ability to manage the nation's monetary policy on an objective, technocratic basis rather than as an instrument of the president's political interests and personal whims, will soon be gone."

The economists' warnings come as economic data released on Friday revealed that core inflation rose to 2.9% in August, which is the highest annual rate recorded since February. Earlier this month, the Producer Price Index, which is considered a leading indicator of future inflation, came in at 3.3%, which was significantly higher than economists' consensus estimate of 2.5%.

Data aggregated by polling analyst G. Elliott Morris shows that inflation is far and away Trump's biggest vulnerability, as American voters give him a net approval of -23% on that issue.

Staff members at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday staged a mass walkout in a show of support for three top officials who resigned in protest this week.

The three officials in question—Demetre Daskalakis, Daniel Jernigan, and Debra Houry—resigned on Wednesday night to protest the ouster of former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez, who had just been confirmed weeks ago by the U.S. Senate.

All three officials came to the CDC headquarters to clear out their offices and, as they left the building on Thursday afternoon, were followed out by hundreds of workers who cheered them and thanked them for their work at the agency.

Marissa Sarbak, a reporter with NBC Atlanta, posted a video showing the crowds that had gathered to support the departing officials.

Sam Stein, a journalist at The Bulwark, reported that Houry gave a short speech outside the building in which she warned that the agency was in danger of falling apart and that more resignations would be coming soon unless drastic changes were made.

"We need Congress to intervene," she emphasized.

Jernigan, who until Wednesday has served as the director of the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told The Washington Post that his "last straw" was being forced to work with David Geier, who has long pushed false theories linking childhood vaccinations to autism.

"The current administration has made it very difficult for me to stay," said Jernigan, who has nearly two decades of experience working at the CDC. "We have been asked to revise and to review and change studies that have been settled in the past, scientific findings that were there to help guide vaccine decisions."

Monarez was reportedly pushed out by Health Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, like Geier, has also in the past pushed conspiracy theories linking vaccines to autism.

Kennedy's decision to oust Monarez has drawn bipartisan concern. Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) have both called on President Donald Trump to fire Kennedy, while Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) called for HHS to postpone its scheduled Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting, given what he described as "serious allegations" that have been made by the resigned CDC officials.