Stephen Prager, Common Dreams

While the Republican and Democratic senators who passed this week’s emergency funding bill to reopen the government took heat for their failure to provide a solution to rising health insurance premiums, they also slipped other provisions under the radar that will likely harm Americans’ health.

As The Lever reported Tuesday, senators inserted language into the bill that would gut food safety regulations that prevent illness and death, as well as regulations on ultraprocessed foods.

The changes come “amid a lobbying blitz and a flood of campaign cash” from the food and restaurant industries, which have spent more than $13 million lobbying the White House, Congress, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this year.

Amid a surge of product recalls for bacteria like Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli, the number of dangerous cases of foodborne illness doubled last year, according to the Public Interest Network. These illnesses annually result in around 53,000 hospitalizations and 900 deaths, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.

Nevertheless, The Lever reports that the “new funding bill blocks federal rules designed to trace sources of outbreaks, and to prevent contamination of produce.” One provision bans the use of funds to administer or enforce the FDA’s “Requirements for Additional Traceability Records for Certain Foods,” published in November 2022.

That traceability rule, The Lever notes, is “aimed to establish new record-keeping standards for companies to track their food products across the supply chain. Those records could help regulators identify the point of origin in the event of a major disease outbreak or food contamination event. The rule applied to produce, seafood, and certain dairy products, such as cheese, and exempted small businesses from the rule.”

The rule was initially proposed by the Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic, and enacted in 2023 by the Biden administration over aggressive opposition from industry groups. But after Trump’s return to office this year, they began a multimillion-dollar effort to lobby Congress to repeal the measure.

The National Restaurant Association spent nearly $2.5 million to lobby lawmakers to eliminate the rule, while the International Foodservice Distributors Association spent more than $600,000. In August, the Trump FDA proposed a rule to delay the traceability standards until 2028.

As The Lever explains: “The line inserted on page 154 of the new funding package contains identical language as the federal rule and would enshrine it into law.”

Two groups that have lobbied aggressively for deregulation of food tracking, the National Restaurant Association and the National Grocers Association, donated more than $750,000 to both parties’ congressional candidates and more than $145,000 to the two parties’ congressional election committees in the last election.

And they gave a combined $17,000 to three of the seven Democrats who joined Republicans in backing the bill—Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

“The next time you go to a restaurant and then uncontrollably vomit and diarrhea in your pants, you should send a note of thanks to the Republican and Democratic senators who helped their campaign donors slip this language into their legislation to reopen the government,” wrote The Lever‘s founder, David Sirota, on social media.

The traceability rule is one of several regulations the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote in the House on Wednesday, would gut. It also requires that none of the bill’s funds go toward enforcing a 2015 FDA rule requiring stricter inspections of wine grapes, hops, almonds, and certain other crops.

It also axes funds for the FDA to establish new regulations to limit the public’s high intake of sodium, which is commonly found in highly processed foods. The effort to gut these regulations notably flies in the face of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s so-called “Make America Healthy” initiative.

Kennedy’s “MAHA” report, released in May, explicitly called for guidelines “that emphasize unprocessed foods while strictly limiting high-fat, high-sugar, and high-sodium processed items.”

“The most MAGA thing ever is embracing the so-called MAHA movement and then quietly gutting food safety regulations and research into ultra-processed foods,” said Neal Kwatra, the founder of the New York-based progressive group Metropolitan Public Strategies. “Just previously unseen levels of gaslighting on politics vs. actual policy.”

But Democrats allowed the measure to pass, too. For this, Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, blamed the overwhelming power of corporate money.

“As long as corporations and billionaires are legally allowed to pay off politicians, we will never have a government that works for us,” she said.

After his resounding election victory on Tuesday night, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s most prominent billionaire antagonist immediately pivoted to kiss the ring of the man he has spent the last more than half-year portraying as an existential threat to the city and the country.

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman poured over $1.75 million into the mayor’s race with a laser focus on stopping Mamdani, whom he often ambushed with several-thousand-word screeds on his X account, which boasts nearly 2 million followers. He accused Mamdani—a staunch critic of Israel—of “amplifying hate” against Jewish New Yorkers, while suggesting that his followers (which happened to include many Jewish New Yorkers) were “terror supporters.”

Meanwhile, the billionaire suggested that the democratic socialist Mamdani’s “affordability” centered agenda, which includes increasing taxes on corporations and the city’s wealthiest residents to fund universal childcare, free buses, and a rent freeze for stabilized units, would make the city “much more dangerous and economically unviable,” in part by causing an exodus of billionaires like himself.

In turn, Mamdani often invoked Ackman’s name on the campaign trail, using him as the poster boy for the cossetted New York elite that was almost uniformly arrayed against his candidacy. In one exchange, Mamdani joked that Ackman was “spending more money against me than I would even tax him.”

After Mamdani’s convincing victory Tuesday night, fueled in large part by his dominant performance among the city’s working-class voters, Ackman surprisingly did not respond with “the longest tweet in the history of tweets” to lament the result as some predicted. Instead, he came to the mayor-elect hat in hand.

“Congrats on the win,” he told Mamdani on X. “Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do.”

Many were quick to point out Ackman’s near-immediate 180-degree turn from prophecizing doom to offering his help to the incoming mayor.

“This guy went from acting like Mamdani was going to import ISIS to extending a friendly handshake… in like six hours,” noted one social media user.

But Mamdani graciously accepted the billionaire’s congratulations when asked about them on Wednesday’s “Good Morning America.”

“I appreciated his words,” Mamdani said. “I think what I find is that there is a needed commitment from leaders of the city to speak and work with anyone who is committed to lowering the cost of living in the city—and that’s something that I will fulfill.”

As Bloomberg and Forbes noted, Ackman was just one of many on Wall Street and from the broader finance world who came to kiss the ring.

Ralph Schlosstein, a co-founder of the investment fund BlackRock, Inc., pledged to work with Mamdani despite their different politics: “I do care deeply about the city, and I’m not going anywhere, whoever the mayor is. I’m going to do whatever I can to help him be successful,” he said.

Another former BlackRock executive, Mark Kronfeld, said: “Is it a dystopian, post-apocalyptic environment because Mamdani has won? No.”

Crypto billionaire Mike Novogratz even credited Mamdani with “tapping into a message that’s real: that we’ve got a tale of two cities in the Dickensian sense,” and asked if the incoming mayor could “address the affordability issue in creative ways without driving business out.”

But while Mamdani has left the door open to business, he has made it clear that he will not allow them to commandeer his work at City Hall.

After his victory, he called on his base of largely small-dollar donors to resume their financial support for him in order to fund “a transition that can meet the moment of preparing for January 1.”

He announced that this historic all-female transition team will include at least one renowned titan of economic populism, the trust-busting former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, as well as other progressive city administrators with backgrounds in expanding the social safety net and public housing.

“I’m excited for the fact that it will be funded by the very people who brought us to this point,” Mamdani said, “the working people who have been lost behind by the politics of the city.”

Republican Party officials are now using their “connections” to the Trump administration to threaten journalists into dropping critical coverage.

That’s what Doug Bock Clark, a reporter for ProPublica, recently discovered as he worked on a feature-length story on the rise of Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, who has become one of the most quietly influential jurists in the nation.

The piece published Thursday examines how Newby, a born-again Christian who was elected to the bench in 2004, believes he was called by God to exact what he calls “biblical justice.”

Over the past two decades, Clark wrote that Newby has “turned his perch atop North Carolina’s Supreme Court into an instrument of political power” and “driven changes that have reverberated well beyond the borders of his state.”

Newby’s most significant contribution has been the landmark decision that legalized partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina, a state that had long had some of the strongest laws in the country against partisan redistricting.

The change led the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to draw up wildly slanted maps that netted the GOP an additional six seats in the US House of Representatives in 2024, handing the party a national trifecta at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, which has allowed him to wield extraordinary power almost totally free of oversight from Congress.

It’s just one of the ways, Clark said, that “Newby has provided a blueprint for conservatives to seize most of the nation’s state supreme courts, which have increasingly become the final word on abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights and voting rights.”

The report drew from more than 70 interviews with those who know Newby professionally and personally. But he was unable to get in contact with Newby himself.

“I reached out to Newby multiple times during the course of my reporting and was even escorted out of a judicial conference while trying to interview him,” Clark wrote on social media. “The court’s communications director and media team also didn’t respond to detailed questions.”

When Clark attempted to contact Newby’s daughter for comment, he instead received an ominous message from that aforementioned communications director, Matt Mercer.

Mercer ranted that ProPublica was waging a “jihad” against “NC Republicans,” which would “not be met with dignifying any comments whatsoever.”

He continued: “I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump administration, and I’m sure they would be interested in this matter. I would strongly suggest dropping this story.”

As Clark pointed out, “He bolded and underlined ‘strongly,’ in case we missed his point.”

After the story, which made note of Mercer’s threat, was published, Mercer then doubled down on social media, urging Trump to “feed ProPublica to the USAID wood chipper,” referencing the president’s near-total stripping of funds from the foreign aid agency.

Trump has issued an executive order slashing federal funds for media organizations supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, like NPR and PBS, in response to critical coverage of his administration. But it’s not entirely clear how he would actually go about doing such a thing to ProPublica, which does not receive government dollars but instead subsists on private grants and donations.

At any rate, Mercer’s messages were widely perceived as a not-so-veiled attempt to coerce ProPublica into ceasing its inquiries.

Travis Fain, a freelance reporter who previously worked for Raleigh’s NBC News affiliate, WRAL, expressed disbelief at Mercer’s belligerence on social media: “Well, there you go,” he said. “The North Carolina Republican Party officially threatens journalists now.”

Wiley Nickel, the former Democratic US House representative for North Carolina’s 13th District, lamented that it was “not normal” for a party official to “threaten ProPublica with retaliation from Trump” for writing a profile about another GOP official.

Despite the threats, Clark says “ProPublica persisted” with the story that Mercer “warned [it] not to tell.”

“I’m always amazed when grown-ups with jobs say things like this to journalists,” said Jessica Huseman, a former ProPublica reporter. “Like, do you think that’s gonna do anything but make us more eager to publish the story?”

A pair of extreme new Trump administration rules aimed at functionally banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth could force even more hospitals to close down.

NPR reported Thursday that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) drafted a proposed rule that would prohibit federal Medicaid reimbursement for medical care provided to transgender patients younger than 18 and prohibit the same from the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for patients under 19.

Another proposed rule goes even further, blocking all Medicaid and Medicare funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to youth.

As Erin Reed, an independent journalist who reports on LGBTQ+ rights, explained, this “would effectively eliminate access to such care nationwide, except at the few private clinics able to forgo Medicaid entirely, a rarity in transgender youth medicine.”

The policies are of a piece with the Trump administration and the broader Republican Party’s efforts to eliminate transgender healthcare for youth across the country.

Bans on gender-affirming care for those under 18 have already been passed in 27 states, despite evidence that early access to treatments like puberty blockers and hormones can save lives.

As Reed pointed out, a Cornell University review of more than 51 studies shows that access to such care dramatically reduces the risk of suicide and the rates of anxiety and depression among transgender adolescents.

The new HHS rules are being prepared for public release in November and would not be finalized for several more months.

But if passed, the ramifications could extend far beyond transgender people, impacting the entire healthcare system, for which federal funding from Medicare and Medicaid is a load-bearing piece. According to a report last year from the American Hospital Association, 96% of hospitals in the US have more than half their inpatient days paid for by Medicare and Medicaid.

It is already becoming apparent what happens when even some of that funding is taken away. As a result of the massive GOP budget law passed in July, an estimated $1 trillion is expected to be cut from Medicaid over the next decade. According to an analysis released Thursday by Protect Our Care, which maintains a Hospital Crisis Watch database, more than 500 healthcare providers across the country are already at risk of shutting down due to the budget cuts.

Tyler Hack, the executive director of the Christopher Street Project, a transgender rights organization, said that the newly proposed HHS rule would be “forcing hospitals to choose between providing lifesaving care for trans people or maintaining the ability to serve patients through Medicare and Medicaid.”

“Today’s news marks a dangerous overreach by the executive branch, pitting trans people, low-income families, disabled people, and seniors against each other and making hospitals choose which vulnerable populations to serve,” Hack said. “If these rules become law, it will kill people.”

One of the co-founders of Ben & Jerry’s is asking fans to help design a new ice cream flavor to show support for the people of Palestine, after the company’s corporate owners refused.

The ice cream brand’s founders, lifelong political activists Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, have long been at odds with the company that now owns their product, Unilever/Magnum, which they say has stifled efforts to use their platform to advocate against Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its genocidal war in Gaza.

In a video posted to social media on Tuesday, Cohen—armed with a masher and a plate of watermelons, an international symbol of Palestinian solidarity—said he was taking matters into his own hands.

“A while back, Ben & Jerry’s tried to make a flavor to call for peace in Palestine, to stand for justice and dignity for everyone, like Ben & Jerry’s always has,” Cohen said. “But they weren’t allowed to. They were stopped by Unilever/Magnum, the company that owns Ben & Jerry’s. Just like when Ben & Jerry’s tried to stop selling ice cream in the occupied territories, they were blocked again by their parent company.”

“So I’m doing what they couldn’t,” he continued. “I’m making a watermelon-flavored ice cream that calls for permanent peace in Palestine and calls for repairing all the damage that was done there.”

Since October 2023, more than two years of genocidal war and siege have left at least 248,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, hundreds of thousands of others starving, and the vast majority of Gaza’s more than 2 million people forcibly displaced. As a result of Israel’s punishing bombing campaign, 92% of residential buildings have been destroyed, according to the United Nations.

Despite the ceasefire agreement signed between Israel and Hamas earlier this month, the violence in Gaza has continued. On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced new “powerful strikes” on Gaza after alleging that Hamas violated the ceasefire. Gaza officials have alleged that Israel has violated the truce 125 times.

“The scale of suffering of the Palestinian people over the last two years has been unimaginable,” Cohen said. “They deserve dignity, safety, and the same rights that every human being should have.”

Unilever purchased Ben & Jerry’s from Cohen and Greenfield in 2000, but allowed Cohen and Greenfield to remain on as brand ambassadors and members of its board, with what the pair said was a commitment that the company would give them the “independence to pursue our values.”

However, in September, Greenfield stepped down from the board of Ben & Jerry’s, alleging that Unilever had routinely used threats and intimidation to stop the pair from calling for “peace” and a “ceasefire” in Gaza.

Cohen said that he is producing his new product—a watermelon sorbet—independently from the company’s owners.

“I’m doing this to shine a light on the experience of Palestinian people and children in particular. So the world does not look the other way,” he said.

He asked viewers for suggestions to help determine what other ingredients should be included, a name for the flavor, and to create a design for the container.

Many viewers have already offered their ideas: One suggested naming the flavor “From the River to the Seed.” Others suggested using components of Palestinian desserts like pistachios and pomegranates.

“Revolutions are creative,” Cohen said. “Let’s see some of that creativity!”

In an effort to fulfill President Donald Trump’s executive order on homelessness, Utah is building a massive facility that housing advocates warn will function as an “internment camp” where the unhoused will be subject to forced labor.

Last month, Utah’s homeless services agencies came to an agreement for the state to acquire a nearly 16-acre parcel of rural land in the Northpoint area of northwest Salt Lake City to construct the first-of-its-kind facility, which is slated to have 1,300 beds.

The genesis of the project began in July, following Trump’s “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” executive order, which threatened to withhold funding from states and cities unless they criminalized homeless people camping on streets and ordered the attorney general to expand the use of involuntary civil commitment for adults experiencing homelessness.

Despite a large body of evidence showing their effectiveness at curbing crime while keeping people off the street, the order also required the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to end its support of “Housing First” policies that provide unhoused people with homes without the requirement of behavioral health treatment or sobriety.

Less than a week after Trump’s homelessness order, Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, as well as the state Senate president and House speaker—both Republicans—sent a letter to the state’s Homeless Services Board, which was created last year following a legislative push by the Cicero Insitute—a far-right think tank that has proposed aggressive measures to criminalize homelessness and which has had major influence over Trump’s crackdown on the homeless during his second term.

In the letter, the leaders agreed with the Trump administration that they “do not support ‘Housing First’ policies that lack accountability.” They directed the Board to “accelerate progress on a transformative, services-based homeless campus that prioritizes recovery, treatment, and long-term outcomes, not just emergency shelter.”

As far back as 2023, Trump has proposed using “large parcels of inexpensive land” to set up “tent cities” or camps for homeless people, coupled with a pledge to use “every tool, lever, and authority” to clear encampments from city streets. On the podcast Invisible People, which focuses on homelessness in America, Eric Tars of the National Homelessness Law Center said Utah’s new facility could be a “pilot program” for that effort around the country.

“Their end goal is not just jail,” Tars said. “They want to put up more of these Alligator Alcatraz sprung structure type facilities,” referring to the ramshackle immigration detention facility constructed in a remote part of Florida’s Everglades earlier this year, where detainees have been cut off from access to their lawyers and are widely reported to suffer from inhumane treatment.

He noted that, under a proposal drafted by the chair of Utah’s Homeless Services Board, Randy Shumway, more than 300 of the beds in the facility are slated for involuntary commitment. Other homeless people will be sent there for substance abuse treatment “as an alternative to jail” and will “receive care in a supervised environment where entry and exit are not voluntary.” Shumway referred to the facility as an “accountability center.”

“An individual would be sanctioned to go there. It would not be voluntary," Shumway said during a presentation, according to the Standard-Examiner. ”They would be there for a period of probably 90 days with the opportunity to detox in order to get mental and behavioral health care, to get substance use disorder support, to get physical health care, and to be surrounded by a community that’s helping them in healing.“

According to the proposal, the beds not slated for civil commitment will include “work-conditioned housing.” Tars said that this is “the thing that scares me the most,” because it “means forced labor.”

He noted that other anti-homeless bills recently proposed in Republican states have a “forced labor element” to them. In Louisiana, a bill punishing outdoor camping introduced earlier this year proposes requiring those convicted to serve up to two years of “hard labor.” Another bill introduced in West Virginia would have required those arrested for camping to take part in “facility upkeep” and other forms of vocational training.

Tars said that at the Utah facility, “even though theoretically you could come and go, they’re going to be actively enforcing anti-camping, anti-loitering, all these other laws... if you step foot off the campus,” which he noted is over seven miles away from downtown Salt Lake City and “in the middle of nowhere,” with “no public transportation.”

State officials have said they expect the facility to cost $75 million to construct, plus more than $30 million per year for ongoing operations. Bill Tibbitts, deputy executive director of Crossroads Urban Center, a low-income advocacy nonprofit based in Utah, has said that for a facility to treat such a large number of people adequately, the cost “will be much higher than $75 million.”

Tibbitts also warned that the construction of a homeless shelter in such close proximity to a facility for involuntary commitment would create an atmosphere of fear that would deter homeless people from seeking help.

“A 300-400-bed mental and behavioral health facility that people are not allowed to leave is not a shelter but an incarceration option,” Tibbitts wrote in an email to the Utah News Dispatch. “Having such a facility colocated with a shelter would probably lead to a sense that if you do not follow the rules in one facility, you could be moved into the other.”

Although the Trump administration has portrayed homelessness as primarily the result of addiction or mental illness, Tibbitts noted that “the majority of the people who visit a shelter are not chronically homeless—they just need a place to stay following a short-term period of financial hardship.”

“A senior citizen who had their rent increased beyond what they could afford,” he said, “is not going to want to go to a quasi-correctional facility to get help finding a place to live that they can afford.”

A legal advocacy group requested on Monday that Illinois officials open criminal investigations into the “unlawful” conduct of federal agents deployed to Chicago by President Donald Trump.

Free Speech For People, a national pro-democracy nonprofit, called on state Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, and Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling to probe what it called “an escalating pattern of criminal activity by federal agents” over the past two months of Trump’s "Operation Midway Blitz," which was launched in early September, and which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says has resulted in the arrests of more than 1,500 people.

The group highlights several incidents of what they called “military-style operations” carried out across the Chicago area by agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and others.

Agents have shot at least two Chicago residents—a 38-year-old Mexican father of two, Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, and a 30-year-old anti-ICE protester and US citizen, Marimar Martinez—with DHS accusing each of ramming their car into officers. In both cases, those accounts would later be called into question by body camera and other footage.

Elsewhere, agents who rappelled from military helicopters would conduct an overnight raid on a South Shore apartment building, where they indiscriminately broke down residents’ doors, smashed furniture and belongings, and dragged dozens of them, including children, into U-Haul vans, where some were detained for hours.

The letter details cases of what appears to be overt racial profiling. It notes that Gregory Bovino, the commander of the border patrol operation in Chicago, had suggested that people were being detained based on “how they look” and seemed to hint that the white reporter he spoke to would be less likely to be arrested than others.

In one case, a Latina US citizen, 44-year-old Maria Greeley, was detained at her workplace and held with zip ties for an hour, while officers insisted her passport—which she always carries with her in case of arrest by immigration authorities—was “fake,” because she “doesn’t look like” her last name was Greeley.

Others have been attacked for protesting or attempting to document ICE raids. Outside the ICE detention facility in the suburb of Broadview, the group said officers’ conduct has been “especially brazen.”

The facility, where hundreds of detainees are held in reportedly squalid conditions, has been the flashpoint for protests across the city. Many have been met with violence from federal officers, including Pastor David Black, who was shot in the head with a pepper ball while praying outside the facility.

And after being told by Kristi Noem that she and Trump were “sick” of the way protesters were “speaking” about federal law enforcement and that there should be “consequences,” Bovino led a force that fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters and journalists in the state’s designated free speech area outside the ICE facility.

Others have been arrested simply for attempting to document and question ICE’s actions during arrest. Alderwoman Jessie Fuentes, who is Puerto Rican, was handcuffed by officers after demanding to know if officers had a warrant for a man they were attempting to detain in a hospital emergency room. In another case, officers broke through the gate of a cemetery to detain two US citizens who were filming their activity, which is protected under the First Amendment.

“These are not law-enforcement operations; they are acts of political violence,” said Courtney Hostetler, Free Speech For People’s legal director. “President Trump and his agents are using the power of the federal government to kidnap residents, terrorize communities, and attack people for exercising their First Amendment rights. State officials have both the power and the duty to act.”

Though the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution limits the ability of states to impede federal law enforcement, Ben Clements, the group’s chairman and senior legal adviser, said “federal agents do not have a license to commit crimes.”

The group noted that the police chief of Broadview, Thomas Mills, has already initiated three criminal investigations into ICE officers for making false 911 calls to his office, striking protesters with their cars, and shooting a pepper ball at CBS News Chicago reporter Asal Rezaei’s vehicle outside the facility.

“When federal officials become the perpetrators of violence and illegality, it falls to the states to defend the rule of law,” said Ben Horton, counsel at Free Speech For People. “Illinois must not wait for and, with this lawless administration, cannot rely on Washington to police itself.”

The group argued that not only should agents accused of crimes be charged, but that criminal liability extends to Trump and his senior officials who have ordered agents to detain as many people as possible.

“The brutality and illegality of these operations are a feature, not a bug,” the letter says. “They are designed to crush dissent and spread fear among President Trump’s perceived political enemies and marginalized communities.”

A merger between two of America’s biggest railroad companies could have “disastrous consequences” for workers and consumers, according to a report out Monday.

In late July, labor unions raised alarm as Union Pacific Railroad announced a $72 billion deal to acquire Norfolk Southern Railway, which, if approved by the US Surface Transportation Board (STB), would make the new entity the largest railroad company in American history, controlling over 50,000 total miles of interstate rail.

The American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), an anti-monopoly think tank, provided more evidence for those concerns with its new analysis.

“A combined Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern will have disastrous consequences: less safe workers and communities, less competition, higher costs, and service disruptions,” said one of the report’s authors, AELP senior fellow Erik Peinert. “For good reason, there has never been an attempt at a consolidated transcontinental railroad system until now—a scale of railroad consolidation not even met by the railroad barons of the Gilded Age.”

As the report explains, America’s interstate rail system is dominated by four companies that operate as a pair of “regional duopolies.” Norfolk Southern lines stretch across the Eastern US, along with those owned by CSX, while areas west of the Mississippi River are covered by Union Pacific and BNSF.

This already heavily consolidated system is the product of Congress's deregulation of railroads during the 1980s and 1990s, most notably through the replacement in 1995 of the more powerful Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) with the STB, which has more limited authority to regulate mergers.

“Even by the very lax merger standards of the late 1990s and early 2000s, these combinations were recognized as mistakes with devastating outcomes,” the report says. “Shippers reported a deterioration in service, fewer options with higher prices, and the loss of jobs, while workers lost jobs and those who didn’t face strenuous working conditions.”

Though STB’s rules tightened in 2001, requiring mergers to “enhance” competition instead of simply not harming it, the damage was already done. Over the next two decades, the report noted that the top four major railroads came to haul 7% fewer loads while hiking freight rates twice as fast as inflation. This was due in large part to the fact that 50% of customers were now “captive,” that is, they had access to only one rail line, compared to just 27% two decades prior.

Another megamerger, the report warns, would cause a “likely permanent loss of competitive rail services for shippers” in large sections of the country, specifically the Midwest, where Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern have overlapping lines.

The deal has been opposed by a consortium of shipping associations, including the Freight Rail Customer Alliance, the American Chemistry Council, and the National Industrial Transport League (NITL), which warned that it would slow down service and lead to price hikes.

Labor unions—including the Teamsters, the Transport Workers Union of America, and the Railroad Workers United—have also opposed the merger, citing the companies’ histories of cutting costs by laying off employees and flouting safety standards.

“Historically, rail consolidation results in job loss, diminishing labor power in negotiating better working conditions and pay, resulting in staffing shortages that lead to burnout and increased safety risks for workers and the public,” the report says. “And in general, consolidation results in stagnant and reduced wages for workers, as there are fewer buyers for labor and greater leverage for the consolidated companies.”

There is also a risk that if the STB approves the merger, it could embolden the other half of the duopoly, CSX and BNSF, to merge as well, creating a national duopoly where “choice and competition would be lost.”

In part due to the STB’s more stringent rules, no interstate railroads have attempted to merge in the 21st century. However, the Trump administration seemed to give Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern a green light when—just as proceedings for the merger were beginning in late August—President Donald Trump fired Robert Primus, a Democratic member of the STB who had been an outspoken critic of railroad consolidation, which broke a 2-2 tie on the board between Democrats and Republicans.

At the beginning of October, Primus sued the Trump administration, which had not explained his firing other than that he “did not align with the president’s America First agenda.” After meeting with the CEO of Union Pacific in September, Trump said that the merger “sounds good.”

“Our country’s supply chain demands that the board be independent and transparent. Congress mandated it 138 years ago,” Primus said upon filing the lawsuit. “Failure to do so will negatively affect the network: railroads, shippers, and rail labor alike, disrupting the supply chain and ultimately injecting instability into our nation’s economy. This is dangerous, and wrong, and cannot be allowed to happen.”

Railroad Workers United said that Primus “was removed not for inefficiency or malfeasance, but for daring to stand for fair competition and consumer interests, a principle too radical for the ’America First’ cabal.”

Ashley Nowicki, the report’s other author and a policy analyst at the AELP, said that the firing of Primus, “who questioned rail consolidation and the railroad’s substantial lobbying efforts, raises serious concerns about political interference.”

“The last 40 years of railroad consolidation clearly demonstrate how this merger could threaten public safety and harm shippers, workers, consumers, and the broader economy,” she continued. “The Surface Transportation Board must show it can operate independently and protect the public interest over Wall Street.”

Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, announced Friday that he would cut another $11 billion from federal projects in blue cities.

“The Democrat shutdown has drained the Army Corps of Engineers’ ability to manage billions of dollars in projects,” Vought wrote on social media. “The Corps will be immediately pausing over $11 billion in lower-priority projects and considering them for cancellation, including projects in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore.”

Vought’s post did not specify which projects would be halted, stating that more information would be “soon to come” from the Army Corps of Engineers. Many of the Corps’ major projects involve infrastructure and water maintenance, as well as environmental restoration and cleanup efforts.

As the government shutdown enters its third week, the Trump administration has plainly stated its goal of using it to punish Democrats and liberal cities. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that of the more than $28 billion worth of projects frozen during the shutdown, $27.24 billion of it has come from Democratic-leaning congressional districts.

Among those frozen funds are $18 billion for infrastructure projects in New York City, including the Hudson River Tunnel and Second Avenue Subway, and $8 billion slated for climate-related projects exclusively in blue states.

Vought, an architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, has also been in charge of President Donald Trump’s efforts to use the shutdown to carry out mass layoffs of federal workers. A federal judge halted that effort Wednesday, describing it as “both illegal and in excess of authority and... arbitrary and capricious.” Prior to the ruling, Trump had said that those laid off by his administration were “gonna be Democrats.”

This is not the first time the administration has used the Army Corps of Engineers as a political tool. As Aidan Quigley, a reporter for Roll Call, noted on social media, it “has been prioritizing red states over blue states for Army Corps of Engineers projects under the current continuing resolution.”

He reported that in the 2025 full-fiscal year stopgap spending law signed in March, “nearly two-thirds of Army Corps of Engineers construction funding is going to red states, a sizable shift from former President Joe Biden’s final budget request and the initial fiscal 2025 House and Senate Energy-Water appropriations bills, which were all closer to an even split.”

The report noted that “funding for projects in California, which would have received over $125 million in Biden’s budget request and both chambers’ appropriations bills, has been zeroed out under the new corps work plan.”

Brendan Duke, the senior director for federal budget policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, pointed out that the Trump administration’s shutdown plan, published last month, stated that the Corps’ projects would not be affected by the shutdown because 97% of their funding does not come from annual appropriations.

“Why on Earth would any projects need to be paused, much less considered for cancellation?” he asked.

Federal regulators have rescinded a set of guidelines for large banking institutions to consider the financial dangers of the climate crisis when making decisions about business strategy, risk management, and strategic planning.

On Thursday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Reserve Board announced that they would immediately withdraw their interagency Principles for Climate-Related Financial Risk Management for Large Financial Institutions, a framework that required financial institutions with $100 billion or more in assets to consider climate risks.

The guidelines were first issued in 2023, which was, at the time, the hottest year on record. That year, the US experienced a record number of weather and climate-related disasters—including a massive drought across the south and Midwest, historic wildfires in Hawaii, and major flooding events across the country—that caused at least $92 billion worth of damage.

In October of that year, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said: “Banks need to understand, and appropriately manage, their material risks, including the financial risks of climate change.”

The OCC, meanwhile, explained that “financial institutions are likely to be affected by both the physical risks and transition risks associated with climate change.” This included both the risks to the safety of people and property “from acute, climate-related events, such as hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and heatwaves, and chronic shifts in climate,” as well as changes due to “shifts in policy... that would be part of a transition to a lower carbon economy.”

But these concerns have not carried over to the administration of President Donald Trump, who recently referred to climate change as a “con” and has sought to purge the federal government of any acknowledgement of the scientific consensus that it is being caused by human fossil fuel usage, which he has moved to aggressively expand.

In a joint release Thursday, the agencies said they “do not believe principles for managing climate-related financial risk are necessary because the agencies’ existing safety and soundness standards require all supervised institutions to have effective risk management commensurate with their size, complexity, and activities,” adding that “all supervised institutions are expected to consider and appropriately address all material financial risks and should be resilient to a range of risks, including emerging risks.”

Elyse Schupak, policy advocate with Public Citizen’s climate program, criticized the withdrawal of the guidelines, calling it “an irresponsible and politically motivated move in the wrong direction.”

“The increase in the frequency and severity of climate disasters and the rapidly escalating property insurance crisis mean the agencies should be working harder to understand and mitigate climate-related financial risks faced by banks and the financial system—not backtracking,” she said. “Effective bank regulation requires looking squarely at all risks to supervised institutions, including climate risks, and addressing them before they have destabilizing effects. This approach, rather than politics, should guide regulator action.”

The move comes as the globe is reaching the point of no return for the climate crisis. Global temperatures have already soared to between 1.3°C and 1.4°C above preindustrial levels and are expected to pass the 1.5°C threshold within the next five years, at which point many of the worst effects will become unavoidable. These effects include more frequent heatwaves, sea level increases, more frequent severe storms, and aggressive droughts.

In addition to the human toll, these entail considerable financial damage. In December 2024, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that if the Earth continues to warm at current rates, the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) will be 4% lower than if temperatures had remained stable.

It predicted that sea level rise—projected 1 to 4 feet by the turn of the century—would cause anywhere from $250 billion to $930 billion worth of losses to property owners, mortgage lenders, insurance companies, and the federal government. Other untold costs, it said, would be borne as a result of heightened mortality from heat, declines in available food and water, increased rates of illness, and forced migration due to unlivable conditions.

Testifying before Congress earlier this year, Powell noted that banks and insurance companies have been pulling out of coastal areas at risk of flooding and places prone to wildfires due to the financial risk.

State Farm had recently canceled thousands of policies in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles shortly before it was hit with massive wildfires in January. He warned that as climate change worsens, financial institutions will deem it too risky to serve large portions of the country.

“If you fast forward 10 or 15 years,” Powell said, “there will be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage, there won’t be ATMs, banks won’t have branches, and things like that.”

Schupak said: “For the Federal Reserve, capitulation to the politics of climate denial championed by the Trump administration is a threat to both its legitimacy and efficacy, which will be hard to repair.”

“Powell has admitted that the Federal Reserve has done the ‘bare minimum’ on climate,” she continued. “Now it will do even less, putting the banks it supervises and the broader financial system at risk.”

After reports that the Trump administration has gutted its enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, civil rights and housing advocates are warning that the president’s newly confirmed appointee to lead the office responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws will seek to further erode civil rights protections.

On Tuesday, the US Senate confirmed Craig Trainor—as part of a group of 107 nominees to various executive posts—to be assistant secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The office is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws, including laws that prohibit housing discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, and sex.

Upon his confirmation, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) described Trainor as someone “with a history of discriminatory practices.”

Since February, Trainor has worked as the acting assistant secretary of the Department of Education’s (DOE) Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The National Fair Housing Alliance said that during his tenure in the Education Department, Trainor “has overseen the illegal weaponization of the Department’s civil rights authorities for purposes contrary to the advancement of civil rights.”

Demetria McCain, the director of policy at the LDF, says “Trainor advanced a radical and inaccurate view of civil rights law that was blocked by federal courts.”

In February, Trainor sent a “Dear Colleague” letter describing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives pursued by colleges and K-12 schools as “illegal” forms of discrimination against white and Asian students and threatened federal funding for those that did not comply and reverse the policies.

The LDF sued the DOE in April, calling the effort an attempt “to prohibit and chill lawful efforts to ensure that Black students are afforded equal educational opportunities,” and arguing that the DOE was “intentionally discriminating against Black students through its efforts to defund federal grantees based on erroneous facts and interpretations of law.” Three federal courts sided with the LDF later that month and blocked Trainor’s office from enforcing the demands in the letter.

In the meantime, the OCR also paused thousands of civil rights investigations into discrimination based on race, gender, national origin, and disability. Employees told ProPublica that they declined to open new investigations and were told to stop communicating with students, families, and schools involved in cases launched during previous administrations. One attorney said he and his colleagues had “been essentially muzzled.”

Trainor would later unpause some investigations related to disabilities, but others remained on hold. Meanwhile, he launched new “discrimination” investigations, including one highly publicized case against Denver Public Schools for installing an all-gender restroom, which Trainor argued “appears to directly violate the civil rights of the district’s female students.”

In March and April of 2025, the OCR dismissed civil rights cases at an unprecedented rate of 89-91%, compared to the historic average of around 70%. Meanwhile, the number of cases in which violations were found dropped precipitously, from 200 per month during the Biden years to around 50-60 in April.

“Under the Trump administration, the OCR moved away from addressing systemic discrimination toward a narrower enforcement agenda aligned with the administration’s political priorities,” read an August report from the human rights group ImpACT International. “For instance, investigations into racial disparities in school discipline—which disproportionately affected Black students and those with disabilities—were deprioritized or outright abandoned. Simultaneously, the OCR shifted intense focus toward investigating transgender students, particularly targeting their participation in girls’ and women’s sports.”

Mike Pillera, a former OCR attorney, said that under the new administration, “OCR is the most useless it’s ever been, and it’s the most dangerous it’s ever been. And by useless, I mean unavailable. Unable to do the work.”

In June, following Trainor’s nomination for the Fair Housing Office, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) grilled the official, noting that in 2021, he wrote an article titled “George Floyd and the Rise of the Rival Constitution,” in which he described the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the catalyst for an “all-embracing ideology of diversity” that threatens the “actual Constitution,” which he said he preferred.

Warren also noted that while serving on the New York Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, Trainor dismissed well-documented evidence of discriminatory evictions of minority tenants by New York landlords, suggesting that while it may have occurred “many decades in the past,” it was not a problem today.

“It is deeply concerning that the Senate confirmed Craig Trainor to be the administration’s top fair housing official without even holding an individualized vote, much less scrutinizing his troubling record,” said NFHA Executive Vice President Nikitra Bailey. “This administration has already attacked fair housing enforcement in many ways.”

The appointment of Trainor to oversee the Office of Fair Housing comes just weeks after half a dozen whistleblowers told the New York Times that “Trump’s political appointees had made it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs.”

The majority of staff were axed or reassigned by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the early months of Trump’s administration, leaving a skeleton crew to pursue fair housing cases. Staff, meanwhile, brought forward emails showing that Trump appointees systematically obstructed investigations.

Like in the DOE’s civil rights office, hundreds of housing discrimination investigations were frozen, and employees were cut off from communication with clients who alleged mistreatment by landlords and banks. Meanwhile, senior officials pressured employees to stop pursuing cases related to decades-old discrimination precedents, such as appraisal bias and redlining that impact the ability of nonwhite families to sell and purchase homes.

Two of the whistleblowers, attorneys Palmer Heenan and Paul Osedebe, reported being fired shortly after the Times report and their complaint to Warren were made public.

Warren joined in criticizing the confirmation of Trainor, whom she noted “is currently being sued by the NAACP for civil rights violations at the Department of Education.” His confirmation, she said, “comes just one week after the Trump administration fired and suspended whistleblowers who shared documents with my office describing the administration’s systematic attack on civil rights protections in housing in the office Trainor will now lead.”

The American labor movement erupted in outrage Tuesday after President Donald Trump appeared to go back on the government’s promises to provide back pay to all of the estimated 750,000 furloughed federal workers when the government shutdown ends.

Last month, as a shutdown loomed, the US Office of Personnel Management, an independent government agency that oversees the country’s civil service, published guidance for federal agencies stating definitively that “after the lapse in appropriations has ended, employees who were furloughed as a result of the lapse will receive retroactive pay for those furlough periods.”

This follows a federal law, the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act signed by Trump during the last shutdown in 2019, which requires that furloughed employees “shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations.”

But the Trump administration has begun to walk back that promise. A memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) obtained by Axios on Tuesday stated that the administration’s position was that employees were not all entitled to back pay, and that the money would have to be specifically appropriated by Congress.

”Does this law cover all these furloughed employees automatically? The conventional wisdom is: Yes, it does. Our view is: No, it doesn’t,“ a senior White House official said, adding that despite what guidance other agencies may have given, ”OMB is in charge.“

When asked by reporters Tuesday if furloughed employees would all be paid, Trump seemed to confirm the OMB position, saying that ”it depends on who we’re talking about.”

“For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people,“ he said. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”

When asked why some workers would not get back pay, Trump told reporters to “ask the Democrats that question.”

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union representing over 820,000 federal workers, argued that by denying back pay to furloughed employees, the Trump administration was contradicting both the law and its own assurances to employees.

“The frivolous argument that federal employees are not guaranteed backpay under the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act is an obvious misinterpretation of the law,“ said Everett Kelley, the AFGE’s national president. ”It is also inconsistent with the Trump administration’s own guidance from mere days ago, which clearly and correctly states that furloughed employees will receive retroactive pay for the time they were out of work as quickly as possible once the shutdown is over.“

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the chamber’s Appropriations Committee, said on social media that the White House memo was “another baseless attempt to try and scare and intimidate workers by an administration run by crooks and cowards.”

“The letter of the law is as plain as can be,“ Murray said. ”Federal workers, including furloughed workers, are entitled to their back pay following a shutdown.“

The National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), which represents about 110,000 employees, also chimed in with outrage over the decision by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to send members of Congress home last week as shutdown negotiations stalled. Johnson has maintained that he will not negotiate on Democrats’ demands to reverse cuts to a critical health insurance subsidy unless they agree to fund the government first.

”Congressional leaders should come back to Washington to negotiate an end to this shutdown immediately. Federal employees, our men and women in uniform, and the American people are all suffering. Skipping town in the middle of a crisis is unconscionable,“ said NFFE’s national president Randy Erwin. ”At this point, House Republicans have refused any meaningful negotiations. It appears to me that Speaker Johnson and his colleagues have no intention of ending this shutdown anytime soon. It seems they would rather sit back and play the blame game than undertake the necessary work to pass bipartisan spending legislation.“

Last week, Trump suggested that, alongside OMB Director Russell Vought, he would use the government shutdown to set about ”laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected, and they’re Democrats. They’re gonna be Democrats.”

Trump added Tuesday that if the shutdown continues much longer, many government jobs would be on the chopping block “in four or five days“ and that ”a lot of those jobs will never come back.“

On NBC‘s ”Meet the Press“ Sunday, Johnson has described the potential layoffs of thousands of workers as ”regrettable,“ adding that it was ”not a job that [Vought] relishes... But he’s being required to do it by [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer (D-NY).”

On Thursday, however, Trump had described the shutdown as an “unprecedented opportunity” to carry out Vought’s proposals for cuts to programs and employees across federal agencies.

“The livelihoods of the patriotic Americans serving their country in the federal government are not bargaining chips in a political game,” Kelley said. “It’s long past time for these attacks on federal employees to stop and for Congress to come together, resolve their differences, and end this shutdown.”

A group of House Democrats is demanding that the departments of Homeland Security and Education provide answers for the deportation of K-12 students by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

According to an investigation published last week by The Guardian, since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, “nearly 2,350 kids under the age of 18, including 36 infants, have been booked into immigration detention centers around the country.”

In a letter sent Friday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and 10 other New York lawmakers wrote that “ICE’s targeting of not only adults without criminal convictions, but also children and families, negates the administration’s stated policy of going after the ‘worst of the worst’ for deportation proceedings.”

They added that many of the individuals targeted “do not even have open orders of removal in their family’s immigration proceedings.”

The lawmakers highlighted five K-12 students in New York City who have been arrested by ICE over the past year.

These include Dylan Lopez Contreras, a Bronx high school student who was arrested in May while showing up for a legal asylum court hearing. Chalkbeat reported that Lopez Contreras had arrived in the US last year after making a perilous journey from Venezuela and was allowed to remain in the country while he awaited his court date.

At that court appearance, he was detained without the ability to consult a lawyer and was then shuttled in and out of several detention facilities in at least five different states. According to the lawmakers, he is currently being held in Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, where the ACLU says “those in detention have endured insufficient medical and mental healthcare, grossly inadequate access to non-English language services, and rampant discrimination.”

The lawmakers also highlighted the arrest of a 6-year-old named Dayra, who was arrested in August alongside her mother, Martha, and deported back to Ecuador. Martha’s 19-year-old daughter was also taken into ICE custody, but not deported with her family. Meanwhile, her 16-year-old public high school student was left in the care of her 21-year-old brother.

Other students mentioned by the lawmakers include Mamadou Mouctar Diallo, a 20-year-old legal asylum-seeker from Guinea, and Derlis Chusen, a 19-year-old high school student from Ecuador, who was arrested outside a court hearing and taken to an immigration facility in Texas, where he was released on what the lawmakers called an “exorbitant” $20,000 bond.

As the lawmakers noted, “Not only did these students have no criminal convictions, they made every attempt to comply with their immigration hearings and ICE check-ins. Despite that, they were held in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and were transported far away from their families, lawyers, and school communities.”

Joselyn Chipantiza-Sisalema, a 20-year-old student from Ecuador, told The City that while she was held for 10 days at the notorious detention center at 26 Federal Plaza: “We had to beg the people working there that they gave us something to eat, they didn’t even give us water. Sometimes a few cookies they’d throw in there. A human being doesn’t deserve to be treated that way… it was a horrible thing I wouldn’t wish on anyone. They had us in there like animals.”

These are just a few of the dozens of students in New York City who have been deported under the Trump administration. According to numbers from the Deportation Data Project reported on by The City, ICE’s New York City field office, which also covers Long Island and some areas north of the city, arrested 48 children in June and July alone, with 32 of them deported as of August 19.

“Poor conditions and inadequate care in immigration detention not only cause immediate harm to a child’s health, they can have long-term physical and mental consequences, impacting their studies and their adult life,” the lawmakers wrote. “There is no doubt that these experiences are deeply traumatic for the children and young people detained, but also for their classmates and educators, regardless of immigration status. Exposing K-12 students to the trauma of immigration enforcement is certain to have social and economic consequences for their entire communities.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that states cannot constitutionally deny children access to a free K-12 public education based on their immigration status, including if they are undocumented.

The lawmakers demanded that DHS provide a list of all the students it has arrested since January 20, 2025, and information about how students in immigration detention are receiving education.

“It is impossible to reconcile ICE’s narrative of making communities safer by going after ‘the worst of the worst’ when the majority of those currently in ICE detention, almost 70%, have no criminal convictions, according to data published by the agency,” the lawmakers said. “Students like Dylan and Dayra represent the very best of this country. Their cases remind us of the irreparable harm that this administration’s reckless mass deportation policies cause our students and communities.”

A US senator is warning that acts of unprovoked violence against protesters from troops deployed to American cities by President Donald Trump are part of a “deliberate” strategy to provoke backlash and justify further crackdowns on civil liberties.

“Trump’s troops are deliberately attacking peaceful protesters to incite violence,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who has watched as the city of Portland in his home state has been swarmed by federal police in recent days as part of an effort by the Trump administration to crack down on protests at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers.

“The goal is to generate riots to justify the expansion of authoritarian measures and to strengthen the case for the troop deployments,” Merkley continued. “Let me be emphatically clear: There is no ‘invasion’ or ‘rebellion’ that justifies the federalization of the National Guard.”

“Unlike former deployments in support of citizens’ rights like attending school—this is about attacking citizens’ right to peacefully protest,” he said. “Our republic is in big trouble.”

Last week, Trump ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “provide all necessary troops” to Portland, which he described as “war-ravaged” and “under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” Trump authorized the military to use “full force, if necessary.”

Portland residents and police have found Trump’s description of their city laughable. As Portland police official Craig Dobson testified last week, “For the most part, nightly ICE-Facility protests since July 18, 2025, have been limited to fewer than thirty participants. The protests have been largely sedate during this time.”

On Saturday, Trump made the similarly fanciful claim that “Portland is burning to the ground” at the hands of “paid insurrectionists,” and said he was deploying 200 Oregon National Guard troops to the city to patrol the protests.

In a ruling Saturday night, a federal judge agreed that Trump’s descriptions of Portland were “untethered to facts,” ruling that the protests outside ICE facilities there did not meet the high legal standard for Trump to deploy the National Guard.

As The Oregonian pointed out, his description of Saturday’s protests “contrasted sharply with scenes unfolding simultaneously outside the city’s ICE facility and ignored decisions by the federal government to promote and, in fact, create images of disorder around the ICE building.” The report continued:

At protests on Saturday, it was federal law enforcement agents who escalated tensions in South Portland, according to Portland residents, reporters on the ground and videos on social media.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the ICE facility on Saturday afternoon to protest immigration enforcement and Trump’s planned deployment of Oregon National Guard troops to monitor the Portland protests. They heckled agents, shouted and carried signs.

They also formed a line in front of the building on a public sidewalk, so every time a car left the building’s garage, dozens of federal agents walked out of the building and moved protesters away from the driveway.

But by mid-afternoon, federal agents began using chemical crowd control on the protesters, pointing less-lethal guns that sprayed pepper balls into the crowd and throwing tear gas canisters.

Merkley highlighted one particularly egregious case in which a 19-year-old protester, identified as Leilani, was shown arguing with a federal police officer in riot gear.

After being ordered to move away from the building to allow a car to exit the garage, The Oregonian reports that “she complied but was hurling curse words and insults at the two officers in front of her when a third agent wearing a gas mask approached her. Within 10 seconds, the officer directed a canister at the 19-year-old’s face and doused her with chemical spray.”

Other similar cases were documented at protests over the past month in which federal police have responded with violence to protesters who posed no clear threat.

Another video from Portland Friday night shows federal officers pushing protesters who blocked the building’s driveway into an intersection before hitting them with volleys of tear gas, smoke, and pepper balls.

Troy Brynelson, a reporter on the scene from Oregon Public Broadcasting, said: “You can see what almost looked like fireworks, those are flash bangs from federal officers. It wasn’t clear what the crowd did to provoke this. OPB reporters didn’t observe anything before the officers started using the gas.”

(Video: Oregon Public Media)

“You’re gassing an entire neighborhood for nothing!” one protester is heard shouting.

In another video from Friday, an agent is shown shooting pepper spray into the air intake vent of an inflatable frog costume worn by a protester, which activist Joe Gallina pointed out was “a major health risk.” A video from the next night shows the same frog alongside dozens of other protesters standing across from a line of riot police several yards away. As they heckled police, they were blasted with another round of pepper balls.

These sorts of scenes have played out in other places where Trump has launched militarized crackdowns. Last week, in Chicago, a man on a bicycle was chased by several federal agents after shouting, “Fuck Trump” to them at an intersection.

At protests outside Chicago’s Broadview facility last weekend, peaceful protesters and journalists were hit with pepper spray and rubber bullets, while one reporter was briefly taken into custody. Another journalist for Chicago’s CBS News affiliate was blasted with a pepper ball as she was driving with the window down outside the facility on Sunday, with no protesters in the area.

On Monday, attorneys representing journalists and protesters who were attacked filed a lawsuit alleging that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was committing the “illegal and brutal suppression of First Amendment rights.”

“Never in modern times has the federal government undermined bedrock constitutional protections on this scale, or usurped states’ police power by directing federal agents to carry out an illegal mission against the people for the government’s own benefit,” the complaint states.

As President Donald Trump openly embraces Project 2025, mainstream media outlets are facing criticism for their role in helping him downplay his ties to the wildly unpopular far-right governing playbook in the lead-up to his reelection last year.

After she became the Democratic nominee in July, former Vice President Kamala Harris made the Heritage Foundation’s over 900-page manifesto for “the next conservative president” central to her case against Trump during the 2024 election, often referring to it as “Trump’s Project 2025.”

She and other Democrats warned that if he retook power, he would swiftly enact many of its most extreme and unpopular proposals and dramatically expand executive power while doing it.

Among those proposals were steep cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the “mass deportations” of millions of immigrants, the elimination of the Department of Education, new restrictions on abortions, the gutting of climate protections, and the replacement of career civil servants with political appointees, among many others.

Democrats amplified the plan’s danger at the Democratic National Convention and in campaign ads, and Trump began to distance himself from the platform. Despite the fact that as many as 140 people who’d worked in his first administration—including Paul Dans, Heritage’s director of Project 2025—had a hand in its creation, Trump said: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”

This was demonstrably untrue, even at the time. Media Matters for America dug up a clip from as far back as May 2023 of Dans stating that “President Trump’s very bought in with this,” speaking of the program.

Project 2025 was almost inconceivably unpopular. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that while 57% of registered voters viewed the plan negatively, just 4% viewed it positively.

But in the critical months leading up to the election, many media outlets took Trump’s denial at face value, publishing fact checks and other commentary that painted Democrats’ warnings about his connection to the plan as alarmist or misleading.

Responding to a social media post in July stating that “Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan,” a fact check by USA Today rated the statement “false,” because, as the headline said, “Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump.”

In September, after Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 at the first and only debate between the two, the paper published another fact-check with the headline: “Harris repeats claim that Project 2025 is Trump’s plan. That’s still not right.”

In response to Harris’ claim during the debate that Project 2025 was “a detailed and dangerous plan... that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected,” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, whose coverage received a fair bit of criticism during the 2024 cycle, reported in bold text that “Project 2025 is not an official campaign document.”

A CNN fact check of the Harris campaign’s social media in September remarked that one account “frequently invokes Project 2025,” before caveating that “Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative, and he has said he disagrees with some of its proposals.”

In an October interview on CBS‘s “Face the Nation,” anchor Norah O’Donnell, Harris attempted to warn about Project 2025, before O’Donnell responded: “You know that Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025. He says that is not his campaign plan.”

After nine months back in power, the website Project 2025 Tracker estimates that Trump has already implemented approximately 48% of the objectives outlined in the policy document.

In addition to his key campaign promises many of his second administration’s policies are highly specific to Project 2025, such as his pledge to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), his efforts to privatize the National Weather Service (NWS), his reconfiguration of Title X funding to promote pregnancy, and his elimination of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Trump is no longer hiding his connection to Project 2025, having brought in many of its hiring picks and authors to staff his administration almost immediately after his victory last November.

This week, he began to boast about it openly. As his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, Russ Vought, one of Project 2025’s architects, began using the current government shutdown to unilaterally cut off funding to infrastructure projects in blue states and cities, Trump lauded him as “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame.”

“This was always the plan,” Harris responded on social media.

While many commentators expressed outrage that Trump blatantly lied about his connections to Project 2025, others dredged up old clips of newspapers and anchors taking him at his word.

“All those 2024 media fact checks that said, ‘Donald Trump and the Trump campaign deny any connection to Project 2025’ look pretty ridiculous right now,” said MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski. “A Trump denial is not a fact. You just used his lies to ‘debunk’ a reality that was obvious to anyone paying attention.”

Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the independent media company Zeteo, highlighted the CBS interview, saying Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 was “embarrassing not just for Norah O’Donnell but a whole host of leading American anchors and reporters who echoed Trump’s false denials.”

“Nothing showed the difference between mainstream and independent media better than the response to Trump’s obvious lie about not knowing anything about Project 2025,” said David Pepper, author of the book Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual. “Most mainstream media started fact-checking those who claimed a connection to be somehow false. Others ‘both sides’ed’ it. Far more in independent media called it out as a whopping lie.”