Stephen Prager, Common Dreams

A poll worker in Syracuse, New York said she was left unsettled after a pair of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at her polling place to tell her to delete Instagram content calling for the indictment of the agent who shot Renee Good in January.

The worker, Paigelynne Gonyea, was in the middle of her shift during Tuesday’s elections in New York when she received a phone message from someone who identified himself as Dave Brody, a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security.

He said agents “were just by” her apartment and had spoken to her husband about a post in which she “doxxed an ICE agent back in January.”

Gonyea said the agents were referring to a post she made on January 8, 2026, the day after an ICE agent shot and killed Good, a 37-year-old mother and US citizen, in Minneapolis. The post contained an image of the masked agent, who had at that point been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune.

“The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in broad daylight has been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune,” the post read. “I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted!”

Gonyea said she could not leave her job working the polls to speak with the agents, so she told them to come to her polling place. “They knew I was a poll site worker and still came in,” she said.

Referencing what happened to Good, she said she refused to meet with the agents outside alone.

“I’ve seen the news, especially in Minnesota,” she said. “And I didn’t want anything to happen to me at all.”

Video of the encounter, shot by another employee, shows the two agents entering the polling site at Central Library on Salina Street.

The agents handed Gonyea a form letter that read, “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.”

The form, which Gonyea posted, said ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) had identified a post on Gonyea’s account that it believed “may constitute a violation” of federal law.

The notice informed her that “it is unlawful to threaten to assault, kidnap, and/or murder a federal official” and that “knowingly making restricted personal information about a covered person, or their immediate family member, publicly available with the intent to threaten, intimidate, or incite the commission of a crime” was also illegal. It said violating these laws could subject her to state and federal prosecution.

The letter directed her to “promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior.” It warned her that receipt of the notice “will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above.”

Gonyea told Syracuse.com that the agents presented her with copies of her social media posts and her driver’s license and that “they tried to scare me into signing” the document “while I was working.”

She refused to sign the notice despite continued pressure from the agents.

Gonyea was emphatic that her post—which only repeated publicly reported information—did not violate the law.

“I didn’t dox his personal information, such as address, phone number,” she said, adding that she would not remove the post.

Gonyea has discussed the case with the New York Board of Elections and the attorney general’s civil rights office, and she said she has contacted US Rep. John Mannion (D-NY), Syracuse Mayor Sharon Owens, and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

She has created a GoFundMe page to pay for potential legal expenses.

“For ICE to come to me over a social media post just feels very 1984 to me,” Gonyea said. “They definitely should have known better to not go into a polling place, even if I said it was OK.”

In a post on her GoFundMe page, Gonyea described the incident as a “pretty unsettling run-in.”

“It’s the kind of situation that makes you stop and think about free speech and how far government authority can go. Honestly, it shook me, and I don’t think it’s something that should just be brushed off,” she said. “It just doesn’t sit right with me.”

Dustin Czarny, the election commissioner for Onondaga County, emphasized that federal law only allows specific people to enter polling places during elections—including poll workers, elections inspectors, voters eligible to vote at the site, and someone a voter brought to assist them in voting

Federal law specifies that it is unlawful for anyone in federal service to send “troops or armed men” to places where elections are held.

“There’s no role for law enforcement officials to be inside a polling place unless they are responding to an emergency of some kind,” Czarny said. “There is no indication of that here.”

Despite this, Trump administration officials have indicated a desire to send ICE agents to polling places on election day during the 2026 midterms.

Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in February that her department had been “proactive to make sure we have the right people voting” in elections. In March, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche asked at a conservative political conference, “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?” adding, “Illegals can’t vote. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Trump refused to rule out the possibility when asked about it by reporters in May, saying he’d “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.”

Critics of ICE have described agents’ demands for Gonyea to remove political speech as a worrying new frontier for the agency’s encroachments on civil liberties.

“ICE agents entered a polling place to intimidate a worker about her social media posts,” said David J. Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “Wouldn’t you quit before you carried out an order to do this?”

“Americans refuse to be intimidated by these government criminals who hate the Constitution,” he added. “Normal people want accountability, not impunity for killing Americans unnecessarily.”

“But it’s not enough for ICE to disagree; they need to stamp out dissent,” he said. “I know they monitor my social media. You should know that they’re monitoring yours too.”

US President Donald Trump’s war with Iran may finally be reaching a close. But consumers and businesses around the world will continue to pay the price in the months ahead as still-elevated energy costs funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to fossil fuel giants.

That’s according to a report from the environmental group 350.org released Thursday, following Trump’s signing of a memorandum of understanding with Iran this week to begin the process of formally ending a war that has sent global oil prices skyrocketing and saddled ordinary people with record fuel prices.

The group estimated that just 110 days of war resulted in the transfer of an additional $374 billion from consumers and businesses into the coffers of oil and gas companies beyond what would have been expected had the war never been launched.

And while Trump claims his agreement to end the war this week will avert an “economic catastrophe,” there will likely still be tremendous pain even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens promptly.

Using oil and gas pricing scenarios from the International Monetary Fund’s April 2026 World Economic Outlook and data on global consumption, 350.org predicted that by the end of the year, consumers and businesses will spend an additional $199.8 billion on oil and $128.1 billion on gas above a non-war scenario, making for a grand total of more than $700 billion as a result of the war.

This, the group said, is a conservative estimate, as it does not even take into account knock-on effects. The war will ultimately end up costing much more when factoring in inflation across the rest of the economy, resulting from higher fuel costs or fertilizer shortages caused by the strait’s closure, which has affected food prices.

It also does not take into account the resulting effects on economic output or employment as rising costs and lower consumer spending force companies to tighten their belts.

“The oil and gas industry is draining billions from people and businesses on the back of a war that has killed thousands and pushed millions toward poverty and hunger,” said Andreas Sieber, head of political Strategy at 350.org.

“Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow, we should expect prices to remain above pre-crisis levels,” he said. “We witness not only a massive fossil fuel crisis but a vast upward transfer of wealth built on instability of fossil fuel markets and pain.”

While the war has brought it into starker relief, previous reports from 350.org have shown that even if the US had never attacked Iran, the continued global dependence on fossil fuels was resulting in trillions of dollars of avoidable costs each year, including $9.3 trillion to mitigate climate-related damages and air pollution-related deaths each year, costs that disproportionately fall on the world’s poorest.

In order to alleviate economic strain from the war, Sieber said, “governments should tax these excess profits now and use the revenues to protect people, cut bills, and rapidly deploy renewables that make households and small businesses less vulnerable to the next fossil fuel shock.”

Estimates of inflation also do not account for how the war has heightened global instability and poverty, which will require additional resources for humanitarian relief efforts. In late April, the United Nations Development Program estimated that even if the conflict had ended then, more than 32 million people worldwide would be pushed into economic precarity.

This is not to mention the resources that will need to be expended to address the harms caused by the war itself.

In exchange for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, a portion of the memorandum of understanding requires the US to work with “regional partners,” presumably other Persian Gulf allies, to scrounge up at least $300 billion to help Iran pay for reconstruction and economic development after the country was devastated by American and Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure and millions were displaced.

As a report from the International Rescue Committee detailed last week, the Iran war has also had cascading effects on other conflicts and catastrophes.

“Six months ago, the IRC warned that a New World Disorder was emerging,” said David Miliband, the humanitarian group’s president and CEO. “Since then, disorder has not only grown but accelerated. A war with Iran. A million people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon. A brewing global food security catastrophe that risks plunging millions more people into acute hunger. An expanding Ebola outbreak. Defanged diplomacy and collapsing aid budgets.”

“The Iran war couldn’t have happened at a worse time,” Miliband said in a New Yorker article published Thursday. “It set off a chain of events that’s very damaging.”

As Israel launched a new bombardment of Lebanon on Tuesday, its far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, suggested that it was trying to derail ongoing peace negotiations between US President Donald Trump and Iran.

During a press briefing on Tuesday, the influential politician railed against the possibility of a deal to end the war as it neared the three-month mark and said the whole Israeli Cabinet was in agreement.

“I know that Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and all of us members of the Cabinet... as the government of Israel, cannot allow this to happen,” Ben-Gvir said in Hebrew. “This is an agreement that can harm the state of Israel, and we will not allow this to happen.”

Ben-Gvir’s remarks came as Trump engaged in what he has suggested was another promising round of ceasefire talks with the Iranians—talks that did not include Israel.

Despite its foreign ministry condemning recent US attacks as signs of “bad faith” and “definitive violations” of the ceasefire on Tuesday, Iran has not yet pulled away from the table.

Citing Iranian state TV, Reuters reported on Wednesday that Tehran has received an unofficial framework from the US that would restore commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz to pre-war levels for a month in exchange for the US withdrawing troops from Iran’s vicinity and lifting its naval blockade. The US has disputed this account.

Trump has previously attempted to force Iran to accept major concessions on its nuclear program upfront, but nuclear-related talks appear to have been shifted to future negotiations.

While it has not been at the center of the latest round of negotiations, Iran still considers ending Israel’s assault on Lebanon to be an essential part of a durable peace.

As it has during previous peace negotiations between Iran and the US, Israel launched another major bombardment against Lebanon on Tuesday, violating the 45-day ceasefire that went into effect last month.

Israeli forces conducted more than 120 airstrikes across southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley against what they said were Hezbollah targets, according to The Guardian, as Netanyahu said Israel would “intensify” its military campaign.

According to Lebanon’s health ministry, 31 people were killed, and 40 were wounded. In the southern town of Burj ⁠al-Shamali, 14 people were killed, including two children and three women, the ministry said.

Since Israel’s offensive began in early March, more than 3,200 people have been killed and over 9,700 wounded, according to the ministry. More than 600 people have been killed since the April truce began.

Sources also told Reuters that Israel had expanded its occupation of southern Lebanon, past its so-called “security zone.” Israeli forces ordered the residents of dozens of Lebanese villages not to return to their homes in the occupation zone, which Israel is trying to expand to between 5 and 10 kilometers inside Lebanon.

In what Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has described as a renewal of its “Gaza model,” Israel had demolished or damaged more than 40,000 homes in southern Lebanon before last month’s truce went into effect, though destruction has continued since then. More than 1 million people in Lebanon have been displaced as a result of forced evacuation orders and bombardments by Israel.

Hezbollah has responded on Tuesday with drone attacks on Israel, which it had already been launching for weeks in response to what it said were persistent ceasefire violations.

Another far-right Israeli Cabinet member, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, said Israel should respond to each drone by destroying 10 buildings in Beirut. If there are no buildings left in Beirut, he said, Israel should expand the demolitions to other areas such as Tyre, Sidon, and the Bekaa Valley.

Ben-Gvir, meanwhile, said on Tuesday that Israel should “cut off the electricity in Lebanon,” “occupy” the area up to the Zahrani River, and “return to a massive war.”

The timing of Israel’s renewed assault on Lebanon has been met with accusations that it is attempting to sabotage ceasefire talks between the US and Iran.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a former diplomat with the Israeli Foreign Ministry who has since become a prominent critic of the country, said that by moving deeper into Lebanon, Israel was “moving to bury not only the supposed ceasefire in Lebanon but also talks on Iran” because its policy “is an endless and wide regional war.”

Responding to Ben-Gvir’s remarks, he said, “Israel forced the US into war and won’t let us end it.”

In what More Perfect Union described as a “new level of corruption” for the Trump administration, an investigation by the progressive news outlet revealed how members of the president’s inner circle are cashing in on the Department of Homeland Security’s purchase of warehouses for immigrant detention.

It was reported earlier this year that under then-Secretary Kristi Noem, who has since been fired, DHS was planning to spend nearly $40 billion to buy up dozens of warehouses around the US to convert them into makeshift detention camps that could each hold anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 people arrested as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort.

But when Mae Ryan, a reporter at More Perfect Union, looked into the contracts, she said she “noticed something weird.”

“Many of these warehouses had been sitting on the market for years,” she explained in a video posted Wednesday. “Now DHS was buying them at a massive markup.”

She pointed to one warehouse in Socorro, Texas, recently valued at $11 million, which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purchased from the company El Paso Logistics II LLC for $123 million—more than a 1,000% profit.

According to Michael Wriston, an ex-military analyst and investigative journalist who tracked the enormous markups for several of these warehouse purchases for his website Project Salt Box back in March, “across more than a dozen warehouse acquisitions, ICE paid prices that exceeded both prior property valuations and recent market comparables at nearly every site.”

For one warehouse in Surprise, Arizona, previously valued at just under $12 million, ICE paid over $70 million. For another in Social Circle, Georgia, valued at about $30 million, the agency paid nearly $130 million.

Many of the warehouses that raked in obscene taxpayer-funded purchases by DHS were owned by financial institutions with deep connections to the Trump administration, Ryan explained.

One warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, valued at about $54.6 million in 2025, inexplicably sold to ICE for over $129 million, more than double. Its majority owner was the investment bank Goldman Sachs, where many Trump appointees during his first term—including former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Trump financial adviser Gary Cohn—were formerly employed.

ICE paid double for another warehouse in Tremont, Pennsylvania, buying it for nearly $120 million despite a valuation of about $60 million. It was owned by the private capital firm Blue Owl, where at least 33 members of Trump’s administration have investments in its funds, including the president himself, who has about $5 million invested in the firm.

Another in Salt Lake City, valued at just $97 million, was purchased by ICE for $145 million, and the agency now plans to convert it into a 10,000-bed facility. It was owned by Deutsche Bank, which has loaned Trump about $2.5 billion over the past two decades.

Wriston told More Perfect Union that the financial payout to Trump allies was top of mind for DHS as it drew up the controversial warehouse plan.

“ICE doesn’t necessarily want to be using warehouses,” he said. “The plan came from folks very close to the White House who were sitting on properties that were causing them losses every year. And the decision was made to buy them at taxpayer expense.”

It’s part of a larger pattern of ICE contracts being distributed to companies that have given major financial support to Trump.

According to an investigation in March by OpenSecrets, the GEO Group and CoreCivic, two private prison companies that have collectively received more than $2.8 billion in ICE contracts, each donated $500,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee. The GEO Group’s employee-funded political action committee contributed $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc. during his reelection campaign in 2024.

The vast majority of those who have been detained during Trump’s second term have had no criminal records, despite claims by the administration that they are targeting “the worst of the worst” criminals for deportation.

Those who have been held in ICE detention centers—often without any due process or access to a lawyer—have consistently reported being held in horrendous conditions, denied access to basic food, sanitation, and medical care, and subject to torture and sexual assault by guards.

DHS has reportedly spent only about $1 billion of the more than $38 billion allotted for immigration detention warehouses so far. According to The New York Times, the administration is hoping to build a mass detention system that could stuff these warehouses with over 100,000 detainees at a time across more than 20 facilities.

According to Wriston’s running tracker of ICE warehouse sales, at least 13 purchases have been canceled, in many cases due to public backlash. Still, the administration has already purchased enough warehouse space to hold more than 41,500 people at once.

“What we’re seeing happen now—I never in a million years envisioned seeing this happen on US soil,” Wriston said. “Never. Never once.”

A leading billionaire right-wing donor and tech evangelist raised eyebrows during a podcast appearance this week with a blunt explanation for why he believes artificial intelligence is superior to human workers.

The past few months have seen a wave of tech industry layoffs that companies have acknowledged were driven wholly or in part by AI: From Meta, which slashed 8,000 jobs on Wednesday and reassigned thousands of other workers to AI roles; to Intuit, which announced a cut of about 17% of its workforce the same day to put more focus on the emerging technology.

The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who leads one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, declared as recently as last month that despite report after report of mass layoffs, “'AI job loss’ narratives are all fake,” and the industry would facilitate a “massive jobs boom” because it allows individual workers to be “endlessly more productive.”

But during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience on Tuesday, he seemed to suggest that he viewed the human workforce as not only inferior to AI but also an expendable nuisance that employers would be better off without.

He imagined the programmer of the future “overseeing an org chart of bots” numbering in the thousands, which would go on to exponentially increase productivity.

This, he said, is preferable to the current, inefficient model of hiring human laborers. He used the example of the graphic design work on Rogan’s set to illustrate the point.

“You hire somebody... and you tell them you want a screen display and you want it to be an animated version of the thing you got back here,” he said. “They spend, you know, two weeks doing it. It’s like, ‘Okay, that’s pretty good, but I actually want the whole thing to be whatever, purple and green.’ And they spend a week doing that. And they come back, and you’re like, ‘I actually prefer the old version.’”

“The guy gets, like, pissed at you because he’s like, ‘I just wasted my time.’ The bot’s like, ‘No problem,’ you know, no sweat, like whatever you want, and we can try it 12 more times if you want. Or you tell it, you know, this is terrible. Like, I can’t believe you came back to me with this. It has all these bugs. It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll go fix these.’”

“By the way, [it] never gets drunk, never gets sick, never gets high,” he continued.

“Never gets depressed because his girlfriend broke up with him,” Rogan interjected.

“Never files HR complaints,” Andreessen added.

Andreessen said this mass adoption of “armies” of AI workers would begin in tech fields like coding, but would quickly expand out to other fields like writing, medicine, and law.

He described artificial intelligence as technology that would grant workers a “universal basic superpower.” But while some proponents of AI expansion imagine it as a tool to liberate workers from long hours by automating menial tasks, Andreessen said it was actually doing the opposite for workers in the coding world.

He said one would assume that “if AI coding makes them four times more productive... then maybe they’re working only a fourth the time and now they’ve got a great life,” but “what’s actually happened is virtually to a person, they’re all working more hours than ever to the point where there is a new term of art that’s used in the valley called the ‘AI vampire.’”

“You’re up all night doing AI coding because you are so productive,” Andreessen said approvingly. “You’re getting so much done that you can’t turn off. The opportunity cost of going to sleep is too high because if you go to sleep, you won’t be with your 20 AI coding agents, keeping them working on all the projects that you have them working on. And so people stop sleeping.”

“They’re clearly, clearly, clearly not taking care of themselves, and they’re absolutely ecstatic,” Andreessen said, “because they are able to produce five times, 20 times more code per hour than they could in the past.”

The comments drew widespread backlash from critics across the political spectrum, who noted Andreessen’s cavalier disregard for the fate of human workers in his imagined future scenario.

His mention of “HR complaints” in particular raised red flags for those who noted that the male-dominated worlds of Silicon Valley and venture capitalism have had many high-profile sexual harassment scandals.

But more broadly, it was interpreted as an expression of contempt for workers who demand a modicum of dignity from their jobs.

One software developer, who writes the Substack blog Dialectics of Decline on Substack under the name Scarlet, described Andreessen’s comments as an encapsulation of an attitude that she recently said was “destroying the career I once loved.”

I noticed that my bosses were getting infected with the mind virus sold to them by the AI hype men. They started to believe we weren’t needed anymore, or, if we were, we were now capable of producing 10x the amount of code in the same amount of time...

Having to hire human workers who might have pesky demands for more pay, better hours, or better working conditions is but a nuisance to them. They want to streamline their businesses by—ideally—not needing to hire humans at all. They are being sold a dream of a 100% agent-operated business where they purchase tokens instead of labor hours, and at a fraction of the cost. After all, agents won’t ever try to unionize. They don’t need weekends off. They don’t get sick or fall pregnant. They can’t strike. They won’t fight back.

It’s a mindset that Andreessen—one of the most prominent fixtures of the so-called “tech right” that spent big to elect Trump in 2024—is apparently seeking to export to the entire country.

Andreessen Horowitz and its billionaire founders have dumped an unprecedented $115 million to influence elections in the 2026 midterm cycle, more than other more prominent donors like Elon Musk and George Soros.

According to a report last week from the New York Times:

Already Andreessen Horowitz has put $47.5 million into the crypto super PAC network, Fairshake, since Election Day 2024. And the firm’s interests have expanded beyond crypto. It helped found Leading the Future, a super PAC network focused on electing pro-artificial intelligence legislators, which is modeled on Fairshake, and donated $50 million to it. Fairshake and Leading the Future both back Republicans and Democrats.

Andreessen Horowitz and its co-founders have also together donated $12 million to MAGA Inc., President Trump’s super PAC, including $6 million in March. A trust linked to Mr. Andreessen donated nearly $900,000 to the Republican National Committee that same month.

Andreessen’s comments on Rogan’s show inspired calls from progressive legislators, including Silicon Valley’s Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who said it was an example of why Washington should “tax agentic AI more than workers” rather than providing tax breaks to companies that invest in AI infrastructure.

But the influence of tech oligarchs like Andreessen is also starting to unnerve some on the right, like the influential conservative pundit James Lindsay, who said he was getting “really sick of anti-human tech weirdos leading anything.”

Democrats in Congress are warning that President Donald Trump is on the verge of “stealing” billions of dollars from American taxpayers in the coming days as his Department of Justice reportedly considers settling his lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the DOJ, headed by the Trump loyalist acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, was holding internal discussions about whether to settle the suit that was brought by Trump and his sons, as well as the family’s business empire, in January.

The case centers on the IRS’s leak of Trump’s tax returns during his first term, which occurred after he broke decades of precedent by refusing to release them. The lawsuit alleges that the IRS failed to prevent former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn from unlawfully disclosing tax information to media outlets, for which he pleaded guilty in 2024.

The leaks, reported by The New York Times and ProPublica, revealed that Trump had engaged in what was described as “outright fraud” and other “dubious” schemes to avoid taxation, and that he paid no federal income taxes in many of the years leading up to his presidency.

The Trumps are seeking a payout of at least $10 billion from the IRS, which is currently being headed by Trump’s handpicked Social Security Administration head, Frank J. Bisignano, who reports to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

This creates an extraordinary legal situation widely described as a blatant conflict of interest, since Trump is suing an IRS that he effectively controls, which is being represented by a DOJ he also effectively controls.

For a case to be valid, however, the parties must demonstrate that they are actually on opposite sides; otherwise, the case can be thrown out of court.

US District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida, who is overseeing the case, questioned its constitutionality last month and required the parties to file briefs by May 20 demonstrating whether there is an actual conflict between them.

According to the Times, however, the DOJ is considering settling the case with Trump before that happens, and there’d be little Williams could do to stop it.

Not only could Trump walk away with a payout of several billion dollars—if not the full $10 billion he asked for—according to the Times, the White House and DOJ have also discussed a deal for the IRS to drop all audits into Trump, his family, and his businesses.

Presidents and vice presidents are required under IRS to undergo audits of their annual tax returns, and a 2024 Times report found that if Trump failed an audit, it could cost him more than $100 million.

Trump’s presidency has been defined by him and his family profiting from their positions of influence. According to a live tracker from the Center for American Progress, Trump and his family have used the White House to rake in more than $2.6 billion worth of cash and gifts.

In addition to about $1.5 billion from their cryptocurrency ventures, which they’ve used the White House to promote, they have received direct gifts—like a $400 million luxury jet from the government of Qatar—and legal cash settlements from media and tech companies worth over $90 million. On top of the IRS lawsuit, Trump has also demanded that the DOJ pay him $230 million over past criminal investigations into him.

But if Trump received even a fraction of what he demanded in a payout from the IRS, it could make the graft from the first year and a half of his presidency look like pocket change, potentially netting him several billion more dollars and possibly even doubling his net worth.

“Trump is considering stealing billions of dollars from the American people,” said Rep. Don Beyer (Va.), the ranking House Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee. “He’s already the most corrupt president ever by a wide margin, but this would be fraud and theft on a scale even he has never attempted. The largest single act of grand larceny in American history.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the ranking member on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, added that for the DOJ to hand Trump a settlement “before a court rules” would be a “massive, unprecedented scandal.”

“Congress must stop him,” the senator added, noting that she had introduced a bill last month that would bar presidents, vice presidents, and their families from collecting settlement payments from the federal government while in office. If they file administrative claims, Warren’s bill would also require that the agencies be represented by independent counsels appointed by the court. However, her bill has gotten little traction in a Republican-controlled Congress.

Bharat Ramamurti, who served as the deputy director of the White House National Economic Council under former President Joe Biden, said the IRS lawsuit was a “massive scam” that was “much worse” than Trump’s proposal for Congress to provide $1 billion in taxpayer money to pay for his White House ballroom project.

Of the IRS lawsuit, he said, “Democrats should raise hell over it.”

As he struggles to force Iran’s capitulation, US President Donald Trump issued what seemed to be yet another threat to commit an act of mass destruction against the country through nuclear warfare.

When negotiations have faltered in recent weeks, Trump has on multiple occasions defaulted to genocidal threats—including that the “whole civilization” of Iran would “die,” and that the whole country would be “blown up“—which have only seemed to anger and galvanize his Iranian adversaries rather than make them quake with fear.

While the Trump administration has continued to insist that the ceasefire with Iran was still in effect, the two countries have exchanged significant fire this week.

On Thursday, the US launched what it said were “self-defense” strikes on military facilities it claimed were responsible for attempting to attack three US Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran called the attacks a violation of the ceasefire and said its attacks on US ships were in response to American bombings of Iranian oil tankers the previous day.

Trump told reporters on Thursday that if the ceasefire were truly over, everyone would know. “If there’s no ceasefire, you’re just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran,” he said. “They’d better sign the agreement fast… If they don’t sign, they’re going to have a lot of pain.”

To many observers, this sounded like a threat from Trump to carry out a nuclear holocaust, though it could also be a redux of Trump’s threats to attack civilian energy infrastructure, which would still be a war crime.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, the editor-in-chief of Responsible Statecraft, noted that if it were indeed a nuclear threat, it would be “ironic since the war today supposedly is to prevent Iran from getting... a nuclear weapon.”

The National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) said that “threatening to make Iran glow—with nuclear weapons or otherwise—is an almost unthinkable threat to commit a mass war crime against 92 million people. It must never be normalized.”

“It again raises urgent questions: Is this president fit to lead and make consequential decisions that impact countless lives?” the group said. “Would the chain of command refuse unlawful orders to make Iran ‘glow,’ killing millions of people?”

Trump’s pledge to wipe out Iranian civilization last month drew widespread condemnation and led dozens of Democratic members of Congress to call for his Cabinet to remove him from office using the powers of the 25th Amendment.

“Our leaders need to interrogate these questions seriously, and not write them off as the ramblings of a madman,” NIAC said. “Trump is the president, and may seek to act on these horrible, contemptible threats. This war needs to end, and so [does] Trump’s horrific threatening of war crimes.”

The architect of California’s wealth tax proposal called out The Washington Post and its multibillionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Thursday for peddling what he said is “misinformation” to readers.

Emmanuel Saez, a French economist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was tapped by California’s largest union to design the tax proposal, singled out an opinion piece by the Washington Post editorial board from earlier this week that argues the proposal would backfire and cost California billions of dollars in tax revenue each year.

Saez said the article contains glaring falsehoods and omits key information about the proposal, which aims to create a one-time tax of 5% on the total assets of California’s roughly 200 billionaire residents in order to recoup about $100 billion in revenue for healthcare, food assistance, and education stripped from the state by last year’s Republican federal budget legislation, which will hand $1 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1% of Americans over the next 10 years.

The piece, published on Monday with the headline “California already losing with billionaire tax referendum,” argues that even if California voters don’t ultimately approve the measure, “the specter of such a wealth tax has already cost the state more in lost future revenue from income taxes than it would raise” due to an exodus of wealthy people from the state—an oft-used but weakly substantiated talking point by opponents of the measure.

The Post cited a paper by Jared Walczak, a visiting fellow at the California Tax Foundation, which it said demonstrates that billionaire flight “will cost California’s state government somewhere between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion every year in other tax collections, and up to $19 billion in lost [gross domestic product].”

But Saez argued that his study makes a “basic mistake” by “modeling a mobility response of billionaires to a permanent annual and recurrent 5% wealth tax.” In reality, though, the tax would be imposed only once and would apply to any billionaires who resided in the state after January 1, 2026, which has already passed, so it no longer creates an incentive to move.

Saez argued that in any case, “Walczak’s estimation of the California income tax paid by billionaires who have threatened to leave is also wildly exaggerated.”

Walczak’s figure for lost tax revenue, he said, hinges on the idea that the three richest men who’ve threatened to leave the state, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, pay $1.7 billion in California income taxes each year.

“If only they paid so much!” Saez quipped.

“In reality, using Securities and Exchange Commission data on stock sales, stock donations, dividends, and executive compensation, we can directly estimate that they paid only [$269 million] in California income tax in 2025, 6.3 times less than Walczak’s assumption,” he said, citing a paper he co-wrote in March responding to a similar argument by a conservative think tank.

He cited tax data showing that the tech tycoons—who own a combined $810 billion according to Forbes—only collectively paid about [$22 million] per year on average between 2019-25, with Brin and Page paying no taxes on their wealth from stock in Google’s parent company Alphabet during three of those years because they didn’t sell stock, get dividends, or receive executive compensation. This is despite 90% of their wealth coming from those holdings.

“The one-time wealth tax finally makes them contribute in proportion to their enormous wealth gains,” Saez said.

The Post also claimed that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers West, the union leading the charge in support of the referendum, is “pretend[ing] that the tax is needed to save California’s health system from ‘collapse’” and is instead dishonestly using that framing to covertly pursue the “redistribution of wealth.”

But Saez said that the federal cuts of roughly $20 billion annually are already having devastating effects on Californians that could be alleviated with more tax revenue.

As a result of the cuts, “more than 400 California hospitals have already laid off more than 3,400 healthcare workers as of mid-March, with a second wave of layoffs expected as funding cuts tied to recent federal policy changes are phased in over the next several years,” he said. “Statewide, projections show the cuts could result in the loss of up to 145,000 healthcare jobs, impacting hospitals, clinics, and home care providers alike.”

Eighty-three more hospitals in California may be at risk of closing due to the federal funding cuts, according to a recent nationwide analysis by Public Citizen. But Saez said the billionaire’s tax would go a long way toward closing the gap.

“Right now, California’s billionaires pay much lower tax rates than what working families pay out of every paycheck,” Saez said.

Despite claims otherwise by the Post editorial board—which last month ran another piece arguing that due to progressive taxation, “the rich already pay more than their fair share”—according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, at all levels of government from 2018-20, billionaires paid just 24% of their total income in taxes, while the US-wide average was 30%. This disparity arises largely due to loopholes that allow the rich to avoid taxes on business and investment gains that are not sold.

“Local hospitals and emergency rooms could shut their doors forever because billionaires insist on paying less than the rest of us,” Saez said.

Debru Carthan, the executive vice president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, said it was not surprising that the Post “completely ignores that the billionaire tax would keep hospitals from closing and healthcare costs from skyrocketing for millions of Californians” because it is “a crisis that comes as a direct result of the tax breaks handed out to Jeff Bezos and his buddies.”

Since the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, the Amazon founder has taken a much heavier hand over the content of his flagship paper, including its opinion section, which he last year mandated to exclusively publish pieces on economics that promote “personal liberties and free markets,” leading to the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley.

But Saez marveled at how blatant Bezos’ thumb on the scale has appeared in his paper’s coverage of California’s billionaire wealth tax and similar proposals, which it has denounced on several other occasions.

“Are readers meant to take this seriously?” Saez asked. “'Board of billionaire-owned paper comes out against tax on billionaires’? Everyone knows this board makes political decisions at the behest of Jeff Bezos, but this one is the most transparent of them all.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders is leading a coalition of Democratic senators pushing for the party’s leaders to require candidates to swear off billionaire- and corporate-backed super PACs, or political action committees, in this year’s primary elections.

Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) joined the independent senator from Vermont to send a letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Ken Martin on Sunday.

Five of the senators are members of a group of Senate Democrats known as the “Fight Club” that has formed to oppose Schumer’s preferred candidates in contested Democratic primaries, many of whom are closely aligned with the party’s traditional corporate backers.

While the senators applauded the DNC’s resolution last month broadly condemning the influence of dark money in party elections, calling it an “important first step,” they said Democratic leaders needed to take more “concrete steps to curb the influence of dark money,” particularly the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

“Corporate-funded super PACs are shaping the 2026 elections as we speak, and the scale of their resources is unprecedented,” the senators said. “Crypto-aligned groups are preparing to spend $200 million, and AIPAC-affiliated groups already control more than $90 million. The AI industry has already spent over $185 million this year alone. These sums are being deployed to influence Democratic primaries and overwhelm candidates who rely on grassroots support.”

April’s broad anti-dark money resolution was passed by the DNC in lieu of one that directly singled out “the growing influence” of AIPAC, specifically over its more than $100 million spending blitz in 2024 to oust progressive candidates. Despite a dramatic shift toward opposition to Israel among Democratic voters over the past three years, that resolution was voted down by a DNC panel.

AIPAC continues to dump massive amounts of money behind its preferred candidates. The senators’ letter notes that “in Illinois alone, outside groups spent over $50 million in recent Democratic primaries.” Nearly half of that money was spent by AIPAC, which secretly funneled money to support its candidates using shell groups that appeared to be unaffiliated.

The group has used similar tactics in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Ala Stanford, a candidate for Pennsylvania’s 3rd District in Philadelphia, was recently revealed to have received $500,000 worth of backing from AIPAC through a super PAC despite claiming to have received no support from the Israel lobby.

Meanwhile, in Maine, a clique of Republican billionaires who back Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine)—including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Palantir CEO Alex Karp—also recently dropped $2 million to fund an ad campaign seeking to hamper the chances of the Democratic Senate primary front-runner Graham Platner.

“We cannot allow unlimited outside spending to distort our elections or drown out the voices of working people,” the senators said in Sunday’s letter.

The senators noted Schumer’s past statement that overturning the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the door for the flood of corporate money into elections by allowing individuals to independently spend unlimited amounts in support of candidates, was “probably more important than any other single thing we could do to preserve this great and grand democracy.”

They said that while reversing the ruling remained a “critical long-term goal,” the party “has the authority—and the responsibility—to act now with clear, enforceable rules.”

“National and state parties should require all Democratic candidates to sign a pledge opposing billionaire- and corporate-backed super PAC spending on their behalf in Democratic primaries,” they said. “The DNC, state parties, and committees working to elect Democrats to the House and Senate have many potential tools at their disposal to enforce that pledge, including withholding endorsements for those who make endorsements in the primary, and they should use whatever tools necessary to do so.”

Sanders has said that simply requiring candidates to take a pledge is not enough and that party leaders need to be diligent about holding them to it.

“If the Democrats are going to be honest and consistent in terms of their concerns about money and politics, they’ve got to clean up, in my view, their own house immediately,” he said in an interview on Saturday. “That means getting super PACs out of Democratic primaries, congressional as well as presidential.”

A Republican US senator proudly declared that President Donald Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports is “starving” Iranians on Wednesday, in yet another piece of counterevidence to the idea that the president’s war there is meant to “liberate” the people.

“We have this embargo working, this blockade, and we’re literally starving them,” said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) during an interview on Newsmax. “Both financially, and they can’t feed themselves either, very long.”

During the same interview, Marshall said Trump must “take everything into consideration” to finish the war against Iran and compared the decision Trump must make to “President [Harry] Truman’s decision on dropping the bomb, and D-Day for President [then-Gen. Dwight] Eisenhower.”

The comments came after Trump announced that he would extend a two-week ceasefire while continuing his naval blockade of Iranian ports, enacted as a counter to Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused chaos and inflation across the global economy.

It was yet another 180-degree spin from Trump, who just days before had issued another genocidal threat to “blow up” the “whole country” of Iran, including civilian infrastructure, if it did not capitulate to his demands in a ceasefire agreement, which was roundly condemned by international organizations as a pledge to commit war crimes.

The Iranian population suffered tremendously under Trump’s “maximum pressure sanctions” before the war, which fueled 58% food inflation year over year in September 2025.

The war launched by the US and Israel in February has only heightened the pain: Last month, Iran’s inflation rate hit a record 72%, and the cost of its staple food basket soared to 134% compared with the previous year.

More than 750,000 jobs had been lost as of last week, and the United Nations Development Program predicted that Iran’s economy could contract by as much as 10% as a result of the war. In just 40 days of war, the UNDP found that 3.5-4.1 million Iranians have fallen below the poverty line.

Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports has tightened the noose even more, cutting off about 90% of the nation’s maritime trade.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the blockade immediately affected nearly a million tons of grain and oilseeds. Prices for commodities like rice, which have already increased sevenfold in recent months, are expected to soar even further.

While Iran is much larger and more self-sufficient than Cuba, the blockade mirrors the economic warfare Trump has waged against the island in what he has said is an effort to force its leadership from power or outright “take” it for the US.

The blockade of fuel shipments to the island enacted through tariff threats has paralyzed its economy and resulted in rolling blackouts that have disrupted hospital care, agriculture, and every other facet of daily life for the Cuban people, drawing condemnation from United Nations human rights experts, who have called it a “serious violation of international law” and an act of “extreme unilateral economic coercion.”

The Trump administration and its cheerleaders in Congress have not been shy about their goal for sanctions in Iran—to inflict suffering upon the people of Iran in hopes that they will rise up and overthrow their governmen. But Marshall’s declaration that Trump was trying to “starve” Iran was seen by critics as an even more explicit endorsement of collective punishment than most.

Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, said it confirmed that Trump was pitching “genocide as a tactic in Iran.”

In less than two months, at least 1,700 civilians have been killed, including more than 250 children, according to the US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency. More than 26,000 people have been injured, according to the Iranian Health Ministry.

The international affairs researcher Derek Davison wrote that by cheering a policy he said was “literally starving” Iran, Marshall was basically saying: “We’re literally committing crimes against humanity. It’s awesome.”

US President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is costing nearly $2 billion per day, according to a Harvard analysis based on estimates from the Pentagon. The head of the United Nations’ humanitarian agency said the money could instead be used to save more than 87 million lives around the world.

Tom Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), spoke at Chatham House on Monday about a “cataclysmic” funding crisis for the UN, in large part due to the termination of billions of dollars in funding from the US and other major powers such as the UK. Fletcher said his agency has seen its budget cut by around 50%.

“We’re already overstretched, underresourced, and literally under attack,” Fletcher said, citing the more than 1,000 humanitarians who have been killed in conflicts around the world over the past three years.

The Iran war, launched at the end of February by the US and Israel, Fletcher said, has stretched UN budgets even further, both by causing chaos within Iran and Lebanon—where more than 5,000 people in total have been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 4 million displaced collectively—but also by creating economic upheaval that has exacerbated crises elsewhere.

“You have the [Strait] of Hormuz—fuel prices up 20%, food prices up almost 20%, our humanitarian convoys blocked,” Fletcher said. “We’ve had to take those convoys by air and by land. And the impact, which I think we’ll be feeling for years, of those price rises on Sub-Saharan and East Africa, pushing way more people into poverty.”

Fletcher said that just a fraction of what the US has spent waging the war could have been used to provide a full year of funding for a plan he laid out in January to provide lifesaving food, water, medicine, and shelter to those in dozens of countries facing war and poverty.

“For every day of this conflict, $2 billion is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritized plan to save 87 million lives is $23 billion,” he said. “We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”

Beyond the financial toll, he said, US actions may have done irreparable damage to the authority of international humanitarian law and to UN bodies tasked with enforcing it.

He noted the dramatic increase in the number of humanitarian workers killed around the world over the past three years. According to a UN report earlier this month, of the more than 1,010 of them who were killed in the line of duty, over half were killed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza and escalating attacks in the West Bank.

“A thousand dead humanitarians in three years,” Fletcher said. “When did that become normal?”

He called out the UN Security Council, where the US is one of the permanent members with veto power, for its weak responses to the killing of humanitarians and other flagrant violations of the laws of war.

“Don’t just give us a generic statement where you say humanitarian workers should be protected,” he said. “Make the phone call, call out the people killing us, stop arming those who are doing it.”

He said “big powers” view geopolitics in a highly “transactional” way and do not use the Security Council as a mechanism for defending international humanitarian law.

“I wouldn’t have thought I’d need to say that a couple of years ago, that the Security Council should be defending international humanitarian law, and yet here we are,” he said.

He said that Trump’s recent violent rhetoric toward Iran—which again verged into outright genocidal territory over the weekend when he pledged to “blow up the entire country” with overwhelming attacks on civilian infrastructure—has only further corroded international law.

“The idea that suddenly it’s okay to say, ‘We’re going to blow stuff up,’ ‘We’re going to bomb you back to the Stone Age,’ ‘We’re going to destroy your civilization,’ that kind of language is really dangerous,” Fletcher said. “It gives more freedom to all the other wannabe autocrats around the world to use that sort of language.”

But he said the aggression of the US and its allies has also made the world more warlike and less “generous,” leading countries to put more money into defense that could otherwise go toward alleviating global suffering.

“Whether you’re making the cuts [to UN funding] for ideological reasons or because you’re too busy bombing someone else or because now you feel more insecure at home and so you have to invest more of your money in defense and less in generosity,” he said, “all of that ultimately has an impact on the over 300 million people that we’re here to serve.”

The global climate crisis is causing a critical Atlantic Ocean current system to weaken much sooner than previously predicted, according to a study published on Thursday. If it stops, scientists say it could pose catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is one of the most important current systems in the world for maintaining the delicate balance of the global climate. It helps to keep colder regions like Europe and the Arctic mild by moving warm water northward and pushes large amounts of carbon deep into the ocean, keeping it out of the atmosphere.

Scientists have feared AMOC’s decline for some time. Previous studies have shown it to be at its weakest point in 1,600 years. But research published this month suggests that a collapse may come much sooner than anticipated.

One study, published Thursday in the journal Science Advances, used climate models and current data to predict the decline in the coming decades.

Researchers found that the system is on course to slow by more than 50% by the end of the century and could pass a significant tipping point by mid-century, at which point its decline would become irreversible.

“We found that the AMOC is declining faster than predicted by the average of all climate models,” said lead researcher Valentin Portmann, of the Inria Research Center of Bordeaux South-West. “This means we are closer to a tipping point than previously thought.”

A major driver of its slowdown has been the rapid melting of Greenland’s freshwater ice sheet into the Atlantic, which has diluted denser saltwater, making it harder to transfer northward.

He explained: “The more rapidly Greenland melts, the more freshwater floods the North Atlantic. This disrupts the sinking process, effectively applying the brakes to the entire system.”

This research followed another study published last week by scientists at the University of Miami, which found that AMOC has been weakening at four latitudes in the Atlantic.

Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, a leading AMOC researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who was not involved in either study, called it “an important and deeply concerning result” that “confirms that the ‘pessimistic’ climate models—those projecting a severe weakening of the AMOC by 2100—are the most accurate.”

“The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the AMOC switched to a different state,” Rahmstorf explained.

A shutdown of the current system poses what Canadian climate activist and marine conservationist Paul Watson described as a “domino effect of climatic upheavals.”

Scientists have projected that temperatures in northern Europe could plummet dramatically, with winters in London sometimes reaching below -20°C (-4°F) and those in Norway reaching -48°C (-54°F). It also threatens to dramatically shorten growing seasons, putting food security in peril for hundreds of millions of people.

Tropical storms in the North Atlantic would also become more severe. As the current slows, sea levels are expected to rise, and the greater temperature difference between cooling Europe and the warming tropics can fuel more intense hurricanes and increase the risk of flooding in major coastal cities.

“We must avoid this collapse at all costs,” Rahmstorf said. “The stakes are too high; this isn’t just about Europe’s climate, but the stability of the entire planet.”

Such a dramatic change in the flow of global heat could scramble temperature and rainfall patterns worldwide, putting some areas at greater risk of drought and disrupting the monsoon season that fuels agriculture in many regions.

It also risks becoming self-perpetuating, as the large amounts of carbon released from the ocean could further accelerate AMOC’s collapse. Research published last week found that carbon emissions from the Southern Ocean alone could increase global temperature by about 0.2°C.

“The science is clear: The AMOC is teetering on the edge of collapse, and the window to act is closing,” Watson said. “Yet global leaders remain paralyzed by short-term politics and denial.”

The conclusion of the most recent United Nations climate summit, COP30, has been described as woefully insufficient to address the mounting climate emergency. The roadmap for action released by the host nation, Brazil, excluded any mention of the phrase “fossil fuels” after the conference was overrun by industry lobbyists.

“The time for half-measures is over,” Watson said. “The choices we make in the next decade will determine whether future generations inherit a manageable climate or a world plunged into chaos.”

President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser boasted on Fox Business Thursday that the government had slashed more than 300,000 “high-paying” jobs from the federal payroll during the president’s first year back in office.

Asked by anchor Maria Bartiromo about the administration’s efforts to cut government spending, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said it had made “a huge amount of progress.”

“I think the biggest thing that we can point to is that we’ve cut government employment by 300,000 workers,” he said. “Those are jobs that are very high-paying that are gone forever.”

He claimed the cuts reduced government spending by “an unthinkable amount of money,” perhaps $1 trillion over the next ten years.

He also said that the administration “reduced the deficit last year by $600 billion” through a combination of higher-than-expected economic growth, tariff revenues, and “supply side effects” of Trump’s massive tax cut, which mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans while gutting the social safety net.

Dean Baker, a longtime collaborator of Hassett’s despite their opposing political beliefs, wrote on social media that Trump’s economic adviser was dramatically exaggerating the deficit reduction that occurred during the administration’s first year.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the deficit was about $1.8 trillion for fiscal year 2025, just $41 billion less than the previous year and $56 billion lower than the $1.9 trillion deficit CBO projected in its most recent baseline.

“In the real world, the deficit fell... less than one-tenth of what Kevin claims,” Baker said.

Trump has touted the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of government employees from their “boring federal jobs” as one of his crowning achievements.

Among the agencies hit by mass layoffs were the Department of Veterans Affairs, where more than 12,700 employees got the axe; the Department of Health and Human Services, which lost more than 14,400 workers; the Social Security Administration, whose staff shrank by more than 6,600; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which lost more than 4,000 employees.

Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest labor union representing federal workers, told Common Dreams that even if slashing jobs did reduce the deficit as Hassett claimed, the harm far outweighs any such benefit—not only for the fired employees, but for the millions of Americans who depend on services they provide.

“When you say 300,000 jobs, it is a nice round number, and you link it to deficit reduction, which he was lying about,” Simon said. “The fact of the matter is, the disappearance of those 300,000 jobs means degraded healthcare for our veterans; slower or nonexistent service at the Social Security Administration for the elderly and disabled who rely on Social Security for their income; and the elimination of huge swaths of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that help ensure we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink.”

“You have federal prisons absolutely overwhelmed by too many inmates and too few corrections officers, endangering public safety,” she continued. “Consumer product safety has been eviscerated. There are also serious public health concerns involving substance abuse, childhood nutrition, and vaccinations.”

She decried Hassett’s comments as “ignorant” in light of his false claims about deficit reduction, but also “just demonstrably pretty cruel and disdainful” given the impact these job losses have on individuals, families, communities, and society as a whole.

“It’s cruel,” Simon said, “not only on the people who held those jobs—about 100,000 of whom are military veterans—but the impact of the disappearance of those jobs also falls on children, the elderly, anybody who consumes agricultural products, breathes air, or relies on clean water.”

“Everybody is hurt by what he’s celebrating,” she added. “I guess it’s just par for the course from this administration, but it’s still a disgusting thing to hear.”

US Senate hopeful Graham Platner wants Democrats to “deal with” the Supreme Court if they retake power in November and launch oversight and possible impeachments to remove justices from office.

Amid President Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity, Democrats are heavily favored to retake the House of Representatives and have gained momentum in the Senate, where Platner’s bid to unseat five-term incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) could prove decisive.

But the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority has the potential to effectively veto any significant actions a future Democratic Congress or president may seek to take, despite increasing doubts among the American public about its legitimacy and impartiality.

Its image as an independent arbiter of justice has come under further scrutiny as multiple justices have been embroiled in corruption scandals. This is where Platner believes Democrats could have options.

“There is structural power in the Senate to deal with the Supreme Court,” the 41-year-old Marine-turned-oyster farmer told a crowd of supporters during an event this weekend.

He said that if Democrats get a majority, “at that point, I very much think that we need to be exercising ethics oversight over the court.”

Unlike lower court judges, who must comply with a binding ethics code by avoiding partisan campaigning, disclosing conflicts of interest, and recusing themselves in cases where impartiality may be called into question, Supreme Court justices do not have to adhere to these rules.

Although the Supreme Court did adopt an ethics code for the first time in 2023, it is voluntary, and legal groups like the New York City Bar have described it as unenforceable and far short of what is necessary.

Platner said that “if we held Supreme Court justices to the same standards that we held federal judges, there is a compelling case for the impeachment and removal of at least two.”

While he did not specify which two justices he believed could be impeached, it is highly likely that he was referring to Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two of the furthest right justices, whom he has said have helped transform the court into a “political action wing... of conservatism.”

In 2023, ProPublica published an investigation exposing that Thomas had, for years, accepted gifts from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, including trips on his private jet and superyacht, as well as $6,000-per-month tuition for his grandnephew. None of these were reported on the justice’s ethics disclosures.

It was also revealed that his wife, Ginni Thomas, was heavily involved with right-wing activist groups with business before the Supreme Court, including those that pushed discredited voter fraud claims to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

Alito, meanwhile, was revealed to have taken a luxury fishing trip to Alaska with the billionaire hedge fund tycoon Paul Singer, who was directly involved or had financial ties to several entities with business before the court, including a right-wing pro-business group that was pushing to have the court block then-President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness policy.

The justice has also been accused of expressing support for Christian nationalism after a flag was seen flying outside his residence that appeared to express solidarity with the movement and with those who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. A documentarian has also published recordings of the justice speaking about how America must be returned to a “place of Godliness.”

Some Democrats have also raised the possibility of impeaching Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of lying during his confirmation hearings in 2018 when he was faced with allegations of sexual assault from a former classmate.

Right-wing control of the Supreme Court over the past decade has fundamentally altered the American political landscape by rolling back advancements to reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, gutting the Voting Rights Act, and hindering environmental regulation.

And as Trump has expressed open contempt for constitutional limits on his power, the court has often indulged him, siding with his administration more than 80% of the time in emergency docket rulings during his second term while granting him broad “immunity” from prosecution for crimes committed while in office.

In addition to impeaching justices, Platner has called for Congress to expand the Supreme Court’s size the next time a Democrat is in the White House, which can be done with a simple majority vote provided the filibuster is suspended.

“But to make that happen,” Platner said, “we need to elect people to the Senate who want to wield power like that, who understand that power matters, that it’s real and you can use it.”

As President Donald Trump’s war in Iran goes further off the rails, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth carried out a “purge” of US Army leadership on Thursday, ousting its most senior general and two other top officers and reportedly leaving many senior officials stunned.

The Pentagon has not provided an official explanation for the sudden firing of Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, who was jettisoned along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain. But speculation was rampant Thursday as the White House continued to insist its war on Iran is going as planned.

Tom Nichols wrote for The Atlantic on Thursday that those dismissed were likely casualties of “Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army... as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.”

Nichols suggested the latest firings were part of an effort to eliminate allies of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who has reportedly pushed back against Hegseth’s attempt to enforce rigid ideological conformity and excise what he views as “wokeness” from the military.

Most recently, Driscoll reportedly objected to Hegseth’s demands that he remove four Army officers—two Black men and two women—from a list of those to be promoted to brigadier general, while allowing the other mostly white male officers to be promoted.

NBC reported on Thursday that they were among more than a dozen Black and female officers that Hegseth has attempted to block from advancement across the four branches of the military.

Just before his firing, George—once an aide to former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin—had reportedly asked to meet with Hegseth about his demotions of the four Army officers, but Hegseth refused.

The Atlantic reported that Driscoll, who has been rumored as a possible replacement for Hegseth amid embarrassing bungles like last year’s “Signalgate” scandal, could be shown the door next.

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), a US Army combat veteran who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, described George as “a Patriot who has served our nation honorably and bravely for decades” and said his firing was “a huge loss for our Army and our country.”

He added that “Hegseth and Trump firing the highest ranking Army officer, in the middle of a war they started, shows you exactly where their priorities are.”

While these sorts of petty grudge matches and power struggles have been a hallmark of Hegseth’s term at Defense, Nichols remarked that “dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, theorizes that Hegseth’s purge—which is one of the biggest wartime leadership shakeups in recent memory—did not happen in spite of the Iran war, but because of it.

According to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who was quoted by TIME on Thursday, Trump’s inner circle—including Hegseth and other military and foreign policy officials—has formed a sort of information bubble around the president, giving him a “rose-colored view” of the war, even as it grows more unpopular by the day with the American public.

The high-level firings come as Trump and Hegseth are beginning what they said would be a multi-week campaign of bombing Iran “back to the Stone Ages.”

Hegseth has also continued to float the possible deployment of ground troops, potentially to invade and occupy critical strategic areas, like Iran’s oil export hub Kharg Island, which analysts have warned would be unworkable and put thousands of US troops in harm’s way.

“It’s likely that experienced generals are telling Hegseth his Iran war plans are unworkable, disastrous, and deadly,” Murphy said.
“Also, Hegseth is firing a ton of experienced generals right now.”

According to Jennifer Griffin, the Chief National Security Correspondent for Fox News, Hegseth’s most recent firings “[add] to a long list of Secretary Hegseth asking senior military officers to step down with no reason given,” including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., and Adm. Alvin Holsey, the commander of US Southern Command, both of whom were also Black men.

Dan Lamothe, a military affairs correspondent for The Washington Post, added that Hegseth has now almost totally remade the Joint Chiefs of Staff since taking over as defense secretary and that only two original members, Gen. Eric Smith of the Marine Corps and Gen. Chance Saltzman of the Space Force, remain from the original team.

“The American people deserve to know why so many of their top officers are being tossed out of their jobs,” Nichols said.

Noting the defense secretary’s penchant for secrecy, he suggested that now that George and other senior officers pushed out by Hegseth are considered civilians, “maybe they can step forward and tell their fellow citizens what on Earth is going on in Hegseth’s Pentagon.”