The Trump administration is going to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado because of course it is. These people are wreckers, and they only know how to tear things down.
The plan to radically eliminate the largest federal center researching weather and climate was announced on X, because that is how the government runs now.
Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought.
Russell Vought, the Christian nationalist Project 2025 creep who runs the Office of Management and Budget, said the NCAR was “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and that weather research conducted there will be moved, while any climate research will be shuttered altogether.
As anyone who is not a climate change-denying, end-times freak like Vought knows, you can’t really separate climate and weather research.
A consortium of 129 U.S. universities oversees the facility. The head of it, Antonio Busalacchi, told NPR he thought the decision was “entirely political.”
You don’t say.
Jason Furtado, a meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma, said that NCAR was “a world-envied research center for atmospheric science” and that his work would not be possible without the center. Ken Davis, who teaches atmospheric and climate science at Penn State, said that NCAR provides researchers with resources that “no university can provide on its own.”
Shutting NCAR is yet another attack on climate research, an unsurprising move from an administration that has been committed to climate change denial. But it’s also an attack on Colorado for not bending the knee and releasing Tina Peters, a former county clerk and election denier who was convicted by a state court on seven counts related to election interference.
The administration has engaged in a full press on Colorado to release her, including President Donald Trump’s fake pardon earlier this month—and both of Colorado’s senators are well aware that dismantling NCAR is a retaliatory measure by our mob boss of a president.
Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper put a hold on the mini-bus funding package in protest and issued a joint statement saying, “President Trump is attacking Colorado because we refuse to bend to his corrupt administration. His reckless decision to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research will have lasting, devastating impacts across the country.”
Bennet also voted against the National Defense Authorization Act for the first time in 15 years because of this, saying, “My judgment is that this is very much about Tina Peters and that the president attempted to get his way through intimidation and he hasn’t gotten his way and he is trying to punish Colorado as a result.”
NCAR employs 830 people at its Boulder headquarters, so this has the added benefit of putting some effete liberal blue state scientists out of jobs, which, for the administration, is just a bonus.
The Trump regime is no longer even bothering to pretend that it isn’t attacking blue states simply for being blue. Indeed, in a court filing in a lawsuit about the energy grants that were cut during the shutdown—blue states only, natch—the administration said that “consideration of partisan politics is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”
If that wasn’t clear enough, the administration stipulated to this statement: “The selection of which DOE grant termination decisions were included in the October 2025 notice tranche was influenced by whether grantee's address was located in a State that tends to elect and/or has recently elected Democratic candidates in state and national elections (so-called "Blue States").
Well, that is definitely saying the quiet part out loud. The administration is essentially trying to end federalism, at least where blue states are concerned, and Trump and his band of nihilists aren’t going to stop until they force their views on everyone else, state sovereignty be damned.
University researchers presented Rex at this month's Linux Plumbers Conference 2025 in Tokyo. Rex is designed for "safe and usable" Rust-based kernel extensions that could serve in place of eBPF programs for extending the Linux kernel functionality...
The upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel (unless it ends up being called Linux 6.20) will drop support for the AMD NPU2 as their second-generation neural processing unit that never ended up being released into any retail products...
As day broke, so did the Red Line: At 7:04 a.m., the MBTA reported residual delays from a train that expired at, no, not Harvard Square, but Park Street.
It’s a fundamental tenet of health care in America: Generic drugs are just as safe and effective as brand-name ones. The only difference is the price.
“The same high quality, strength, purity and stability,” the Food and Drug Administration assured the public years ago as factories started to flood the market with their own, cheaper versions of commonly used drugs, from antibiotics to cancer treatments.
But the agency stakes that promise on a risky gamble.
It doesn’t routinely test generics for quality concerns or to see if they’re working as effectively as brand-name medications. Instead, the agency heavily relies on drug companies, often in countries as far away as India and China, to do their own testing and to report any problems.
In recent years, independent labs, universities and the Department of Defense have raised alarms about contaminants and other quality failures in a number of generic medications. So have doctors, who in some cases have gone on to create their own ad hoc lists of drugs they trust and those they learned to avoid.
Yet the FDA largely dismissed the warnings and has only sporadically tested a sampling of generic drugs, which now account for about 90% of prescriptions in the United States. That means the government can’t always say which ones may be compromised or how often that happens. And patients can’t make informed choices about which drugmakers to depend on.
“This ridiculous, small sample of testing that FDA does just cannot stand,” said Albinus D’Sa, a chemist who spent more than 25 years in drug safety at the FDA before retiring in 2023. “It’s not in the public interest.”
ProPublica decided to test several generic versions of three of the most widely prescribed drugs in the United States: the antidepressant bupropion XL, the generic for Wellbutrin XL; the heart medicine metoprolol succinate, the generic for Toprol XL; and the cholesterol drug atorvastatin, the generic for Lipitor. A total of 11 samples from readers, ProPublica employees and the independent testing lab Valisure were assessed, representing a cross section of manufacturers from around the world.
Some were analyzed for impurities such as lead or whether their dosage levels matched the claims on their labels. Another test scrutinized the speed at which the tablets dissolved — a critical indicator of how medication is released in the body — and compared the results to the brand-name drugs.
While most of the samples passed, the findings showed that one version of bupropion and one version of metoprolol, dispensed at least tens of thousands of times in 2024 alone, had irregularities that experts say could compromise their effectiveness.
As part of ProPublica’s testing at the Connecticut-based lab Valisure, a scientist dropped samples of generic drugs into a solution to see how quickly they dissolved.Tonje Thielesen for ProPublica
The tablets dissolved slower than their brand-name counterparts, which could leave patients without the right therapeutic levels for treatment and no way of knowing if their medication might be at fault.
Metoprolol is a beta blocker used by about 15 million people for conditions like chest pain, heart failure and high blood pressure. Bupropion is a go-to drug for the treatment of depression, prescribed to about six million people in the U.S. each year.
Oregon psychiatrist Dr. James Hancey said receiving incorrect amounts of bupropion throughout the day is a serious quality threat that puts vulnerable patients at risk.
“One of the great potential dangers here is that people become discouraged and disillusioned,” he said when told about ProPublica’s findings.
Hancey said he worries that patients taking ineffective antidepressants can feel hopeless, increasing suicide risk. “Sort of like, ‘I must really be messed up. … I’ll never get any better,’” he said. “You can only lose so much hope.”
Irregular levels of metoprolol can also pose a danger, especially for people with congestive heart failure or a history of heart attacks, said Dr. Art Kellermann, a longtime member of the National Academy of Medicine and former senior vice president for health sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“You may never get to the level your body needs to be safe,” he said.
A scientist preps samples of the antidepressant bupropion XL for ProPublica’s testing. Tonje Thielesen for ProPublica
Dozens of companies received approval from the FDA over the years to sell metoprolol and bupropion in the U.S. Yet from 2018 to 2024, the agency reported running only 2 tests on metoprolol and 7 on bupropion through its quality surveillance program — in each case, by pulling a sample from a single drugmaker. In many of those years, the drugs weren’t tested at all, FDA records show. Those that were assessed received passing results.
The FDA did not respond to questions about why the agency didn’t do more testing and how it can know that generics are safe without a more robust program. On its website, the FDA said it has relied on a “more targeted, risk-based” approach to testing since 2018, choosing samples of drugs that have safety, effectiveness or quality concerns. The agency publicly reports the results on its website and notes that a majority of the tested drugs meet its standards.
ProPublica, however, found the agency for years failed to routinely test not only the generics that have worried outside experts but also drugs coming from factories that amassed so many serious quality and safety violations they were ultimately banned from the U.S. market.
In 2023, the FDA barred two Intas Pharmaceuticals factories in India from shipping drugs to the U.S., in part because workers had manipulated drug-testing records to cover up bad results, government records show. An “egregious pattern,” regulators wrote in a letter to the company.
ProPublica’s testing, however, found the factory’s bupropion dissolved more slowly than the brand-name drug as well as versions of the medication made by other generic manufacturers.
Intas, whose U.S. subsidiary is Accord Healthcare, said in a statement that its bupropion is safe, effective and equivalent to the brand-name medication, and that the company has made improvements since the FDA’s inspections, including bringing in third-party experts focused on quality and data integrity. The company added it is no longer manufacturing bupropion for the U.S.
In recent years, the FDA’s own records show the agency has fielded thousands of complaints about generic versions of both bupropion and metoprolol. Some reports described seizures, cardiac arrest, nausea and other health problems. Others said the pills just didn’t control patients’ symptoms.
Kellermann and others said too many doctors shrug off those concerns, attributing them to bad luck or a patient’s underlying conditions without considering that the medication itself could be the problem.
“Before we blame God or biology, what are we doing with the best intentions that might be hurting this patient?” he said. “If we don’t entertain the possibility that the patient is right, then we might overlook the true cause of their problem. That’s why testing generic drugs to verify their quality and safety is so important.”
Though generic drugs have poured in from overseas factories, the FDA opted to conduct only sporadic testing for quality.Tonje Thielesen for ProPublica
“Afraid of What It Could Find”
Despite its reputation as one of the world’s toughest drug regulators, the FDA takes a decidedly hands-off approach to testing. Its position hasn’t wavered even though the drug supply chain is sprawling, with manufacturers scattered around the world. India produces about half of all generics used in the United States, and crucial ingredients are made in China.
When manufacturers from those countries send drugs to the European Union, they are required to use labs on EU soil to test every batch before releasing them to the public. There is no such requirement in the U.S.
In interviews with ProPublica, former FDA officials and others who have studied the safety of generics said the agency should have done more years ago to probe the drug supply.
Though billions of prescriptions for generic pills, tablets and vials of injectable medication are filled every year, the FDA reported conducting fewer than 650 tests under its quality surveillance program since 2018. That number includes many generic drugs, as well as some brand-name prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications like Children’s Tylenol, and various drug ingredients.
About 94% of those tests produced passing results, FDA data shows. In 2024, the most recent year with data, the agency reported the results of just over 50 tests.
The total does not include tests on hand sanitizers and supplements or any other quality testing that is not publicly reported. The FDA sometimes commissions studies about drugs, which are also not reflected in the tally.
D’Sa said the FDA’s efforts aren’t nearly enough.
Valisure tested drugs for impurities, such as lead and arsenic.Tonje Thielesen for ProPublica
As deputy director of the agency’s India office in 2009, he said he worried that inspections alone couldn’t guarantee Americans were receiving quality medication. His team was scouring facilities in every corner of the country and regularly reporting distressing results: factory after factory with no testing procedures to monitor the strength, quality or purity of drugs. Some factories weren’t being inspected at all.
In 2024, the FDA inspected a third of India’s nearly 600 manufacturing sites, agency data shows.
“Regular testing would be an objective measure of quality,” D’Sa said, noting that inspections only examine manufacturing practices at a single point in time.
Other agency insiders have also been concerned. One former official at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research still remembers a phone call almost 20 years ago from a sobbing woman in Texas who said her husband had switched to a generic version of bupropion that she said wasn’t effective. He killed himself.
“That used to keep me up at night,” said the former official, who did not want to be identified because they still have ties to the agency. The FDA needed more training at its testing labs, among other improvements, the official said, but changes were slow.
In an interview, Janet Woodcock, the longtime head of drug safety at the FDA, said the agency didn’t have the resources to do more testing and that she wasn’t overly concerned about widespread lapses in quality.
“A huge, huge majority of drugs on the U.S. market are totally fine,” said Woodcock, who retired from the agency early last year.
Woodcock did not respond to a question about how she knows that drugs are safe if the FDA hasn’t regularly tested them. Instead, she said, the best way to ensure quality is through training and improved manufacturing.
“I don’t believe random testing is an appropriate method for maintaining quality of the drug supply,” she said.
Some doctors and others said they believe the FDA decided against routine testing because it could undermine the public’s confidence in generics and raise questions about the agency’s oversight of the industry.
“The FDA doesn’t want to do the testing because it is afraid of what it could find,” said pharmacologist Joe Graedon, who for years has advocated for drug safety reforms on his website The People’s Pharmacy.
The FDA has even resisted when groups outside the agency offered to help.
At Valisure, tablets were crushed in advance of testing for heavy metals.Tonje Thielesen for ProPublica
“We Want to Find the Really, Really Horrible Ones”
Nearly every morning before dawn, a truck stocked with more than $2 million in prescription drugs arrives at the University of Kentucky’s hospital. Without fail, chemist Robert Lodder’s team of pharmacy technicians is there to greet it.
While other hospital employees ready the sterile injectables for use, Lodder’s technicians siphon off samples and whisk them off to a small lab tucked inside the pharmacy. There, they put the samples on a machine called a spectrophotometer to get a picture of each drug’s chemical composition.
If the medication is made properly, Lodder and his team would see a similar image for every batch. Too often, something doesn’t look right.
Lodder has screened hundreds of thousands of samples since 2020, representing about 350 different medications. About 10% of those drugs have failed the initial assessment and were removed from the hospital’s supply for further study. Some were cleared after Lodder looked at them a second time, but he was so concerned about 20 different drugs that he reported the problem to the FDA and urged the hospital to change suppliers if it could.
Lodder first became interested in drug quality when he was a graduate student at Indiana University in the 1980s. At the time, people were dying after someone tampered with over-the-counter pain relievers to lace them with cyanide, prompting Lodder to study the makeup of similar drugs. When he took the job at the University of Kentucky in 1988, he urged his bosses to set up a lab to screen medications.
Lodder knew the FDA assessed — and nearly always passed — samples from only a small number of drugs. For sterile injectable medication, which can be particularly dangerous if contaminated, Lodder wanted to look at every vial that came through the hospital’s doors.
“We want to find the really, really horrible ones,” he said. “There’s almost always … a few that you would not want to put out there.”
In 2023, Lodder traveled to Washington, D.C., to talk about his screening program with officials from the FDA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He had given the group a data file identifying the drugs that failed his initial screening, including chemotherapy drugs to treat leukemia and breast cancer. Lodder expected the FDA to dig into his findings.
But agency officials, he said, asked only a few questions.
“They weren’t listening to us,” he said. “People were indifferent, like, ‘Is this really necessary?’”
The way to ensure drug quality, Lodder recalled pitching the group, is to launch a large-scale testing program and publicize the results, which would force troubled manufacturers to make improvements. He suggested that academic medical centers could do the work: screening medications, pooling their data and reporting results to the FDA and to the public.
His own testing program cost less than 0.01% of the hospital pharmacy’s drug budget.
“Then the public will know who has the best,” he said. “That’s what we want out of all of this: You know who to buy from. You can judge on quality as well as price.”
The FDA did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Lodder’s proposal.
He went back to Kentucky after that 2023 meeting, convinced little change would come from Washington. Lodder didn’t know the details at the time, but another arm of the U.S. government was just as concerned about the nation’s drug supply as he was.
Valisure’s lab tests for heavy metals. Tonje Thielesen for ProPublica
A Matter of National Security
As a global supply chain commander in the Army, Col. Vic Suarez didn’t rattle easily. But he kept hearing something that, if true, could put soldiers at risk: The military’s doctors were worried that some of the generic drugs they were prescribing, particularly from India and China, weren’t working as they should.
In 2019, Suarez recalled that at least one doctor was specifically troubled by tacrolimus, an immunosuppressant medication used by organ transplant patients to prevent rejection. Some generic versions didn’t appear to deliver the right dose, risking the lives of fragile patients. Suarez started advocating for additional drug-quality testing and took the idea to top leaders.
In 2023, the Defense Department decided to investigate generic medications commonly used by U.S. service members and veterans.
“We saw it as our responsibility to protect our own service members and their families,” Suarez said.
Suarez hoped to explore a collaboration with the FDA, an effort previously reported by Bloomberg. In June of that year, he and a group of officers met with the leaders of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
At the meeting, which has not been previously reported, FDA officials pushed back on the plan. They questioned the kind of testing the Defense Department was planning and the independent lab that would do it, according to a transcript obtained by ProPublica. One said the Defense Department’s concerns about drug quality could damage public trust and “undermine confidence in the drug supply.”
After the meeting, the agency summarized the discussion in a confidential memo, noting that a majority of drugs tested by the agency over the years had met quality standards. The memo pointed to a 2020 FDA study that tested more than 250 so-called “difficult-to-make prescription” drugs and didn’t surface any problems.
The Department of Defense is also using Valisure to test generic drugs. “We saw it as our responsibility,” said Col. Vic Suarez. Tonje Thielesen for ProPublica
“As the agency with jurisdiction over the pharmaceutical industry due to our extensive experience with manufacturing and testing … FDA has substantial concerns about the proposed pilot,” the agency said in the unsigned memo, which was obtained by ProPublica.
The FDA did not respond to questions about the Defense Department’s initiative or the meeting.
The DOD is using the independent lab Valisure to test more than 40 drugs that officials consider the most essential in the military health system, representing roughly 2,000 versions of the medications. The vast majority are generic. Early results show about 10-15% of those drugs are high risk, meaning they were found with elevated levels of contaminants, didn’t have the right dosage or dissolved differently than higher-quality generic or brand versions.
“Ultimately, the people that are disproportionately affected are the most vulnerable,” Suarez said. “There is no other protection for them other than people trying to do the right thing … to literally fill the gap by basically testing and comparing.”
ProPublica also engaged Valisure to conduct drug testing. As part of that testing, the lab earlier this year tested generic tacrolimus made by Intas and found that the capsules dissolved up to three times faster than the name brand, which experts say could introduce too much of the drug too quickly and potentially cause tremors, headaches and kidney failure.
The FDA in 2023 said Intas’ tacrolimus may not provide the same therapeutic effect as the brand name but that the drug could still be prescribed.
In a previous statement, Intas said its tacrolimus is safe and effective and that the FDA had determined the drug was equivalent to the brand-name version when it was first approved for the U.S. market. The company said it “is dedicated to patient safety, product quality, and regulatory compliance.”
Valisure is testing more than 40 drugs that officials consider the most essential in the military health system.Tonje Thielesen for ProPublica
“You Don’t Want a Bad Batch”
Long before ProPublica launched its own testing, Graedon, the drug safety advocate at The People’s Pharmacy, asked another testing provider to assess a generic version of bupropion by Teva Pharmaceuticals, which is headquartered in Israel.
That testing showed the pills were dissolving more rapidly than branded ones. Patients with depression who had once found relief in Wellbutrin had described headaches, anxiety and, in some cases, suicidal thoughts. In 2007, Graedon urged the FDA to investigate, even sending dozens of pill bottles to agency headquarters in Maryland.
In 2012, after sponsoring its own study, the FDA announced that Teva’s version, which was made by Impax Laboratories, was not equivalent to the brand and Teva removed it from the U.S. market.
Teva did not respond to requests for comment. At the time, the company said the medication posed no safety concerns. In 2017, Impax announced it was merging with another company.
Since then, the FDA has only sporadically tested generic versions of bupropion, government data shows, even when drug companies appeared to have manufacturing issues.
India’s Sun Pharma has recalled its bupropion at least six times since 2016 because it wasn’t dissolving correctly, government records show. FDA inspectors have gone back to the Sun factory that made the drug time and again, reporting dirty equipment, fungus in areas that were supposed to be sterile, and bacteria and metal particles in injectable medication.
Still, the agency didn’t test Sun’s bupropion, according to the FDA’s publicly reported results. The FDA ultimately banned the factory from shipping most of its drugs to the U.S. in December 2022, including bupropion, more than a decade after the agency approved Sun’s version of the medication for the market. The factory is still banned.
The company has “acted responsibly and in accordance with good manufacturing practices,” Sun spokesperson James Freeman said about recalls in a statement. He added that the company has made significant investments in manufacturing capabilities in the past five years and is working with third-party experts to meet regulatory standards.
“All of our products remain subject to rigorous quality controls,” he said.
Dr. Douglas Throckmorton, a former deputy director at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said the recalls suggest the agency’s reliance on manufacturers appears to be working.
“You could look at that result and say that’s a manufacturing culture that is doing the needed monitoring,” he said.
Graedon said he still hears from bupropion users, who have continued to post complaints and questions about the quality of various versions of the drug on social media.
“The FDA should be absolutely testing on a regular basis,” he said.
The testing at Valisure ultimately found that one version of the antidepressant bupropion and one version of the heart medication metoprolol dissolved more slowly than their brand-name counterparts, which could leave patients without the right therapeutic levels for treatment.Tonje Thielesen for ProPublica
Consumers have also described concerns about generic versions of metoprolol, the heart medication, but the FDA has not routinely tested that drug for quality problems, either, government records show.
ProPublica’s testing of metoprolol succinate found that a version by Teva, the company that pulled its bupropion from the market, dissolved three times more slowly over a period of six hours than the brand-name drug. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
To Dr. Harry Lever, a retired Cleveland Clinic cardiologist who raised alarms about metoprolol succinate more than a decade ago, the agency’s testing policy dramatically diminishes oversight of America’s drug supply.
“It comes down to the fact that the FDA is not doing its job. Everything you are swallowing should be tested — there should be no question about it,” Lever said. “You don’t want a bad batch coming to the drugstore. People won’t do well. And that’s the problem.”
Six days after a senior FDA official sent asweeping internal emailclaiming that COVID vaccines had caused the deaths of “at least 10 children,” 12 former FDA commissioners released anextraordinary warningin the Dec. 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
They wrote that the claims and policy changes in the memo from Vinay Prasad, the head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, pose “a threat to evidence-based vaccine policy and public health security” and break sharply from long-standing scientific norms.
What is unfolding inside the FDA is not a narrow dispute over COVID vaccines. It is an attempt, according to critics and vaccine scientists, to rewrite the rules governing the entire U.S. vaccine system — how risks are weighed, how benefits are proved, and how quickly lifesaving shots reach the public. Former agency leaders warn that if these changes take hold, the consequences could be lasting: fewer vaccines, slower updates, weakened public trust, and more preventable outbreaks.
Prasad made clear he sees the moment as corrective. “Never again will the US FDA commissioner have to himself find deaths in children for staff to identify it,” he wrote, telling employees the agency’s mission, and its “worldview,” would change.
Prasad’s email reopened old arguments about COVID vaccines, using what is generally considered weak and misleading science in the peer-reviewed research community. He claimed that FDA staff had found “at least 10” deaths in children that happened “after and because of” COVID vaccination, using reports from theVaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
The VAERS system is notoriously crowdsourced, meaning anyone can contribute, and scientists say it serves only as a clearinghouse for reports. For example, a person could file a report saying that after getting a flu shot, their hair turned purple. Though that report would remain in the database until it was reviewed, it cannot prove the cause of medical events. But Prasad argued that the true number of deaths was likely higher because many cases go unreported.
On Substack,Inside Medicinereported Dec. 11that Prasad used incomplete information and that a Dec. 5 internal FDA memo set the pediatric death toll from COVID shots somewhere between zero and seven. Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard wrote, “The FDA’s investigation into deaths caused by COVID vaccines is still ongoing and there’s no final count yet of those deaths.”
Prasad also accused the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of downplaying the risk of heart inflammation, called myocarditis, in young men; criticized the agency for approving shots for teenagers; and suggested that school and workplace vaccine mandates may have “harmed more children than we saved,” adding that “we do not know if we saved lives on balance.”
Based on his erroneous and misleading claims about COVID vaccines, Prasad proposed a major overhaul of how vaccines are approved. He said the FDA should stop relying on immune markers to establish the efficacy of shots, such as antibody levels, and instead require large placebo-controlled randomized trials that track hospitalizations and deaths before approving most new vaccines.
Many immunologists and vaccine experts say it’s unethical to test vaccines known to be effective against disease with a control group that would receive a placebo, exposing them to infection.
“There is a rock-solid principle in bioethics that it is unethical to test any drug or vaccine against a placebo if it is known to be safe and effective. The reason is that such placebo-controlled trials would effectively deny patients access to a vaccine that could prevent a dangerous infectious disease,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University.
Vinay Prasad heads the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
Prasad called the current flu vaccine system an “evidence-based catastrophe,” questioned the approval of vaccines for pregnant women based on immune response alone, and raised concerns about giving multiple vaccines at once. He told staff to rewrite FDA guidelines to match his new “worldview” and said anyone who disagreed with his “core principles” should resign.
The former FDA leaders expressed alarm in the NEJM article. They said Prasad is exploiting public frustration over the federal response to COVID to spark doubt about the entire childhood vaccine system, which could undo decades of success in protecting children from deadly diseases.
“This is really different. And it’s really dangerous. And people will be hurt, particularly by the vaccine decisions,” former FDA commissioner Robert Califf said in an interview. He also warned that Prasad’s proposed policies — which he noted echo positions on vaccines held by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist — could shake the entire vaccine market.
“The goal of RFK seems to be to make it impossible for vaccines to be available in the U.S.,” he said. If the proposals advance, he added, “it won’t be a viable business.”
Hilliard pushed back sharply on those concerns, writing: “The American people deserve evidence-based science. Prasad’s email lays out a philosophical framework that points us toward that higher standard. We will soon release documents laying out that framework and data confirming how the COVID vaccine resulted in children’s deaths that previous leadership failed to properly investigate.”
For generations, the childhood vaccine program has depended on clear rules, strong safety systems, and public trust. Experts say Prasad’s ideas, based on claims they argue are not supported by real evidence, could make it much harder to test, approve, and deliver vaccines to families.
Fueling Parental Doubt
Prasad’s memo indicates he considers VAERS reports as proof that vaccines caused children’s deaths. The system, though, is designed to be only an “early warning system” for potential safety issues with vaccines that can be investigated further.
“VAERS signals should never be taken as proof of true vaccine risks without careful, confirmatory studies,” said Katherine Yih, an epidemiologist and longtime investigator with the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a CDC program.
Doing so, scientists say, directly feeds public fear at a time when many parents are already unsure whom to trust.
“Causation requires converging evidence, not just one report or coincidence,” said Robert Hopkins, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.
Prasad’s framework, however, treats uncertainty as a reason to halt development entirely.
Experts fear this doubt won’t stay limited to COVID vaccines. Once parents start to question the FDA’s honesty, they may begin doubting long-standing vaccines for measles, polio, or whooping cough — shots that have protected children for decades.
“Science must be transparent,” Gostin said. If families believe the FDA is misusing data or silencing experts, confidence in the entire vaccine system can collapse, he said. “There’s a public narrative that people have lost trust in science, but that’s not true. The vast majority want the FDA to make decisions based on the best scientific evidence. Once they believe that the agency is marginalizing scientists and cherry-picking evidence, their trust will plummet.”
Delicate Vaccine Pipeline
Prasad’s new framework will likely make it far harder for companies to produce or update vaccines. The 12 former FDA commissioners warned that requiring clinical trials for all new or updated shots would slow vaccine improvements and leave people unprotected. His plan, they wrote, “would impede the ability to update vaccines in a timely fashion, especially for respiratory viruses.”
For fast-changing viruses like flu and COVID, this could be disastrous. There’s simply not enough time to run full clinical trials every time a virus mutates.
There are also major business effects. Vaccine development is costly, and companies may decide the U.S. is no longer worth the risk. If companies slow down or leave the market, families could face shortages, fewer innovations, and fewer protections for their kids.
‘Checks and Balances’
Science depends on open and public debate. Prasad’s memo warned his employees against it. In addition to demanding that FDA staff members who disagree with him resign, he said their disputes should stay private and called leaks “unethical” and “illegal.”
Susan Ellenberg, a former director of the FDA’s Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, warned that Prasad risks destroying the process that makes science credible. “If disagreement is treated as disloyalty, you lose the only mechanism that keeps science honest,” she said.
Without strong internal debate, safety reviews become weaker. “You lose the checks and balances that make vaccine safety science credible,” said Kathryn Edwards, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who served on the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Network during the COVID pandemic.
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REPORT CARD: Most Metro Nashville Public Schools received a passing grade from the Tennessee Department of Education’s state report card for 2024-25. The A-F letter grades evaluate public schools’ performance based on four components: student achievement, student academic growth, growth among the highest-need students, and college and career readiness for high schools. At MNPS, 14 schools received an A, 23 a B, 57 a C, 39 a D, and 10 an F. The calculation of letter grades is heavily weighted toward achievement, which some education advocates argue disadvantages students from low-income backgrounds and overlooks students’ improvement over time. The following MNPS schools received an A: Crieve Hall Elementary, Eakin Elementary, Early College High, Head Middle, Hume-Fogg High, Julia Green Elementary, KIPP Nashville College Prep Elementary, KIPP Nashville Collegiate High, Lockeland Elementary, Martin Luther King Jr. High, Meigs Middle, Strive Collegiate Academy, Valor Flagship Academy and Valor Voyager Academy. The following MNPS schools received an F: Antioch Middle, Brick Church Middle, Cane Ridge High, Chadwell Elementary, Donelson Middle, Glenview Elementary, Haynes Middle, Nashville Prep, Paragon Mills Elementary and Whites Creek High. — Lillian Avedian
TEMPORARY RELIEF: On Friday afternoon, a judge granted a preliminary injunction against proposed federal cuts to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Continuum of Care funding. The cuts would’ve slashed permanent housing funds by approximately two-thirds and would’ve affected approximately 1,000 people in Nashville and 170,000 people nationwide. Nashville joined the lawsuit challenging the cuts on Dec. 1, joining several nonprofits and governments in Boston and San Francisco, among other cities. After the injunction, the legal battle will continue in federal court. “Today’s order gives temporary relief for Nashville, our partners, and the hundreds of Nashvillians…who are currently housed and supported through Continuum of Care funding,” Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell said in a statement. “However, the Trump-Vance administration has made clear their intention to continue efforts to upend the funding that underpins this important housing work, so we will continue to pursue this case to protect the hundreds of Nashvillians who rely on this housing support.” — Mikeie Honda Reiland
GONE, NOT FORGOTTEN
Mourners toss flowers into the Cumberland River in remembrance of the 169 homeless Nashvillians who died this year. Nearly 100 people participated in the 2025 Annual Homeless Memorial at Riverfront Park on Saturday morning. According to the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, people who experience homelessness have an average life expectancy as low as 41 years and are three-to-four times more likely to die prematurely than those with suitable housing. Credit: Martin B. Cherry/Nashville Banner Credit: Martin B. Cherry / Nashville Banner
HOLIDAY FORECAST: It was not that long ago that Nashville experienced its warmest Christmas on record. This one could top it. Warm, dry air will move into Middle Tennessee as the week progresses, creating midweek temperatures more than 20 degrees above normal. The National Weather Service has forecast a high of 74 degrees on Christmas Day (Thursday), just short of the record of 76 degrees set in 2016 and matched in 2021. Overnight temperatures are expected to drop only into the 50s beginning tonight. By comparison, Nashville’s average high temperature on Christmas is 47 degrees, and the last time the area experienced a colder-than-normal Christmas was 2022, when the high was 31 degrees. Historically, there is a seven percent chance of snow in Middle Tennessee on Dec. 25, but that is not a concern this year. — David Boclair
ABREGO GARCÍA UPDATE: Kilmar Abrego García’s lawyers filed two motions in federal court on Friday. The first sought sanctions against the government for comments made by Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino on Fox News in which he referred to Abrego García as an “alien smuggler” and “wife beater.” The defense argued that these statements violated an Oct. 27 court order preventing Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security employees from making statements “materially prejudicing” the case. The second motion, which included several redactions, once again requested that the court dismiss Abrego García’s indictment due to vindictive prosecution — and in the absence of dismissal, to at least allow the defense to subpoena three DOJ witnesses, a move the government is trying to block. Judge Waverly Crenshaw previously found some likelihood of vindictiveness, but an early December hearing on the defense’s motion to dismiss was cancelled. Abrego García’s trial is currently scheduled for Jan. 27, 2026. — Mikeie Honda Reiland
AT LAST, AT HOME: The Tennessee Titans snapped an 11-game home losing streak with a 26-9 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday. The Titans started the day as the only NFL team without a home win this season, having gone 0-7 and having been outscored by an average of 13 points per contest. Their last home win before this one was Nov. 3, 2024, against the New England Patriots (20-17). The Chiefs were without quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who was injured last week, and lost his replacement, Gardner Minshew, to an injury in the second quarter. Facing a third-string quarterback for much of the day, Tennessee’s defense held Kansas City to one third-down conversion, 133 total yards and started the scoring with a safety. “What a great Christmas gift for everybody involved, everybody in the organization, all our fans to be able to enjoy Christmas after a win,” interim coach Mike McCoy said. “It’s great. It’s an unbelievable feeling…. The entire team deserves it.” The season’s final home game is Sunday against the New Orleans Saints (noon, CBS). — David Boclair
WELL TRAVELED: Montana State University has to travel much farther for the NCAA FCS Championship on Jan. 5 at Vanderbilt’s FirstBank Stadium, the first time Nashville will host the final. But Illinois State University took the long road to get there, so to speak. ISU is the first team to win four road games in order to advance to the FCS Championship, the last a 30-14 victory at Villanova on Saturday. The unseeded Redbirds (12-4) also won at Southeastern Louisiana, North Dakota State and UC Davis. Montana State (13-2), the No. 2 seed, had a first-round bye and then won three straight home games capped by a 48-23 triumph over rival Montana in the semifinals. Tickets for the game are available at seatgeek.com. “The city, Nashville Sports Council, the Ohio Valley Conference and Vanderbilt have worked extremely hard to plan for an incredible weekend of events. We look forward to providing our finalists, Illinois State and Montana State, a uniquely Nashville experience, culminating with the crowning of our national champion,” Ty Halpin, director of championships for the NCAA, said in a release. Montana State, in Bozeman, Mont., is 1,700 miles from Nashville, four times as far as Illinois State’s home in Normal, Ill. (424 miles). — David Boclair
Earlier this fall, A.B. Eastwood paused mid-session when another producer proposed something he never thought he’d encounter in a professional recording studio.
Eastwood, a Nashville native producer and songwriter who now splits his time between home and Los Angeles, said that he and a group of collaborators were midway through writing a song when the co-producer suggested they run the track through Suno, an AI platform that specializes in generating music, to see how it would sound filtered through a different genre, like ‘90s R&B.
Eastwood was shocked.
“It was the first time I had come face to face with somebody jumping to AI in a session,” he told the Banner, catching up over the phone while working in Los Angeles. “I’ve seen people do AI post-production for, you know, ornamental additions. I understand that as a tool, and [a way to] pull some cool ideas to finish a project. I get that. I’m not too upset. But we weren’t even done with the song. It was weird.”
Though it was a first for Eastwood, it almost certainly won’t be the last time he and other musicians like him will have to reckon with artificial intelligence and its effects on their careers, creativity and livelihoods. AI-generated music is gaining popularity at a rapid clip, and songs by AI avatars have started charting on streaming services and on Billboard.
Like the launch of Napster at the turn of the millennium and the introduction of the drum machine two decades earlier, the infiltration of generative AI into music making marks another watershed moment for an industry still recovering from the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and still struggling to compensate artists fairly in an ecosystem dominated by on-demand streaming and lagging record sales.
Even as some major labels and artists experiment with licensed AI tools (in late November, Warner Music Group announced a partnership with Suno, for example), many musicians in Nashville see the technology less as a collaborator than as an existential threat.
While he knows he needs to make a living, Eastwood said he is primarily concerned with AI’s potential as a creativity killer. Getting “stuck” while writing a song or working in the studio can be frustrating, he said, but working through those moments often yields serendipitous results, whether leading a song down an unexpected path or challenging him to branch out from preconceived ideas about the project he’s making.
“I know for a fact I didn’t like it,” he said of bringing AI into the studio. “I was trying to find my peace with it in the session, but I’m an explorer and a searcher when it comes to music. I don’t mind trying another idea and trying to find the thing that really sits well. But we didn’t give ourselves a chance to rack our brains about it before we put [AI] in there. … It just didn’t feel good. It felt like cheating.”
That “cheating” comes at the expense not just of human creativity, but also the actual livelihoods of the artists whose music is used to train algorithms for platforms like Suno. These platforms are not “creating” music in a vacuum; instead, they pull from millions of existing songs to approximate a particular sound or style, with no recognition or compensation for the creators whose work is being mined for data.
Eastwood said he already sees colleagues losing money to generative AI, particularly behind-the-scenes players like mastering engineers and others in post-production roles.
“There are already people not working as much,” he said. “It’s Pandora’s box. It’s open, and it’s not going to close.”
Certified human
Lili McGrady knows she can’t close that box, but she and her company Humanable are doing their best to protect the work and income of human creators anyway.
Humanable, launched by McGrady and co-founder Tim Wipperman in September 2024, offers artists a way to certify their music as human-made. She likens a Humanable certification to a “certified organic” designation on a piece of produce and sees Humanable as valuable not just to artists seeking to distinguish themselves from AI avatars but also to listeners who wish to support music made by human beings.
McGrady, a Nashville transplant with a background in theater and trademarking, told the Banner that upon landing in town and getting involved in the local music scene, she noticed similar AI-related fears among artists and industry folks alike.
“They were afraid of generative AI eating their lunch, their minimal lunch,” McGrady told the Banner. “I was especially hearing things from kids who had just gotten their first publishing deals, after working years and years to get that first pub deal. They’re just terrified, like, ‘I finally have a pub deal. Is this going to go away?’”
She and her team dreamt up Humanable in February 2024, hired software developers within weeks and had a functioning platform within the year. She connects the speed of Humanable’s launch to the urgency of the situation facing the music industry, saying that at the end of the day, “it all comes down to money.”
“A conservative estimate, right now, is that in two years at least 24 percent of royalties from actual human music creators is going to be gone due to AI music and streaming fraud,” she explained. “That is a loss of over $5 billion a year for the music industry. … It’s a crisis financially to the music industry, and it’s a crisis to actual human art and expression. And it’s also, frankly, a crisis to the city of Nashville, because this is a big chunk of what makes us who we are.”
Any artist can sign up with Humanable, regardless of whether they are affiliated with a label, publishing company, or other industry entity. McGrady said their vetting process is rigorous, and half-joked that they know which attorneys general to alert should an artist lie about a song’s provenance.
“The first step is we verify your ID,” she said. “When creators certify a piece of work with us, they sign an affidavit for each song going forward that says, ‘This was created without generative AI, and to the best of my knowledge, if I had co-writers, they did not [use generative AI, either].’”
Jennie Hayes Kurtz is one half of the Americana duo Brother and the Hayes, performing alongside her brother David Bingham. Brother and the Hayes is an official Humanable artist, and Hayes told the Banner that protecting the pair’s work from the growing threat of generative AI feels imperative in today’s rapidly shifting landscape.
Asked when that threat first appeared on her radar, Hayes shared an anecdote from her work leading songwriting workshops at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum as part of the Words and Music Program for schools. As large language model chatbots like ChatGPT grew in popularity, teachers and songwriters involved in the program began to notice that some tech-savvy students were using AI to write their songs, something that goes against the ethos of the educational workshop.
“It’s kind of like using a calculator to do your math homework,” she told the Banner. “Or, at least, the kids probably thought of it that way. It might seem harmless, but the point of that program is to think through your lyrics, think through your meaning, think through what you’re trying to convey.”
Like Eastwood, Hayes said she feels something essential is lost when human ingenuity is outsourced to AI. While she ultimately blames AI companies for creating products that discourage creativity and critical thinking and enable intellectual property theft, she understands that the toothpaste is out of the tube, so to speak, and that the burden of protecting creative industries like music from being cannibalized by generative AI ultimately, unfortunately, falls on the very people it endangers.
“The question [people ask most] is, ‘Hey, why does the onus have to be on the artist, on the human? Why can’t it be the people that are making the AI songs?’ … That takes legislation, for there to be a law that says if you’re publishing an AI product, you have to pay an extra $5 for a label that says, ‘This was made with AI.’”
That kind of hypothetical legislation feels unlikely. In December, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence” that aims to create a uniform federal approach to AI and discourage individual states from enacting their own AI regulations. The order directs federal agencies to review and, in some cases, challenge state laws that conflict with its policy goals, a move that has drawn criticism from leaders in some states —including Trump allies like Florida governor Ron DeSantis — who say they will continue enforcing local AI protections. Without regulation, it will be incumbent upon artists and fans to protect creative industries.
Is regulation impossible? No. And a split among Republicans on tech issues shows how this might not be a traditional red/blue issue. Tennessee, for instance, signed the ELVIS Act into law in 2024 to go after the proliferation of deepfakes and AI-driven impersonations. California passed an AI guardrails law in September and most states have considered some form of legislation this year. But Trump’s executive order may put a chill on some efforts.
“We all would prefer to eat organic food, right?” Hayes said. “But the non-organic stuff is going to seep into our world one way or the other. [It’s about] informing the consumer, like with a product label. I believe the consumer has a right to know, and then the consumer has a right to decide.”
McGrady also said she sees consumer education as essential to protecting human-made music, pointing to the unexpected success of the Velvet Sundown, an AI-generated psych-rock band that went viral on Spotify over the summer. That incident quashed hopes that listeners could easily delineate between human and AI-generated music, not to mention the belief that the average consumer would outright reject non-human music.
“It’s very clear that the retraining of music consumers has already started,” she said. “An AI song is topping the country charts, and the Velvet Sundown happened. Human beings can absolutely be retrained, and I think artists should do whatever they can to prevent that before it’s too late.”
Climbing the charts
An AI-generated song climbing the country charts sounds sacrilegious in a town built on the bedrock of three chords and the truth, but in November, an AI avatar called Breaking Rust found streaming success with “Walk My Walk.” With a soulful vocal and moody production, “Walk My Walk” sounds like it was trained on artists like Chris Stapleton and Luke Combs, with prickly, outsider lyrics that recall the outlaw country subgenre.
A quick scroll through the rest of Breaking Rust’s catalog reveals that all of the avatar’s music seems to come from similar prompts. Most Breaking Rust tracks open with a moody vocalization and employ similar chord structures, with lyrical narratives that focus on individualism and vaguely patriotic song titles. Another popular AI-generated country artist, Cain Walker, employs a similar tactic, suggesting that generative AI models may be prone to homogeneity.
Eastwood balked at the idea of an AI-generated artist finding success in country music, a genre that historically has used concepts of authenticity and purity as a means for gatekeeping, particularly against minority artists.
“Country is so protective over its genre, and if AI isn’t creating anything new and is only pulling from what exists, I’m so surprised that country isn’t upset that somebody’s stealing from them,” he said. “That blows my mind more than anything. You’re so gatekeep-y about how country is made and who makes it, but you’re letting a computer take your money from you? That’s just interesting for me.”
McGrady hopes that Humanable and other generative AI-focused efforts will help prevent “success” stories like those of Breaking Rust and Cain Walker. She notes that getting major streaming services on board with the effort will be crucial, particularly to help consumers distinguish between what’s real and what’s fake.
“We would love to have a Humanable toggle, in the same way that streaming services have a toggle to filter out explicit music,” she said. “That is what we would eventually love, so that consumers always know what they’re getting, and they know that [the royalties from] their streams are not going into the pockets of fake artists.”
In the meantime, Hayes said there are plenty of ways to help musicians weather the rising threat of AI, and that fans intentionally engaging with their favorite artists is more important than ever.
“Buying physical music from the artist is huge,” she said. “Collecting vinyl is a great way to support artists that you like, and buying merch, all that stuff. … If you’re like, ‘Wow, I really like this artist, but I only find out about the new music if it comes out on a Spotify playlist,’ get on their email list. Get on their Patreon.”
Eastwood agrees and points out that artists have to meet fans halfway by regularly releasing quality music and finding ways to engage and connect with listeners meaningfully.
“There’s a responsibility on us to create a world and show our face more, so people know, ‘Oh, this is who this is, and this is their music,’” he said. “The scale doesn’t have to change. We just have to be more intentional about the investment into the people who listen. They’ll follow, and they’ll care, and they’ll still be there.”
For musicians like Eastwood and Hayes, the threat of generative AI isn’t theoretical — it’s already present in writing rooms, in classrooms and on streaming charts. While it’s hard to sum up all that generative AI can do, Hayes is crystal clear on what it can’t.
“What’s so cool is the human relationship that music creates, and the community that it creates,” she said. “AI cannot do that.”
NVIDIA engineer Igor Stoppa presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) earlier this month around using Linux in safety-critical environments like automobiles and the current shortcomings of the upstream Linux kernel and the challenges on achieving Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) certifications around the Linux kernel. It's an interesting read/watch around the safety of Linux (or not) for such strict safety environments...
After being delayed by three months to allow additional time for new features to land, Weston 15.0 Alpha 1 is out today as a big feature release for this reference Wayland compositor...
Intel engineers as part of the OPEA Project today released the Generative AI Examples v1.5 update. This "GenAIExamples" open-source project is a collection of GenAI examples as part of showing the capabilities of the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA) and also highlighting Intel's hardware strengths for generative AI...
Intel today released libva 2.23 as the newest feature release for this Video Acceleration API "VA-API" reference library implementation. Most significant with libva 2.23 is adding AV1 Profile 2 support...
In November 2024, Democrat Josh Stein scored an emphatic victory in the race to become North Carolina’s governor, drubbing his Republican opponent by almost 15 percentage points.
His honeymoon didn’t last long, however.
Two weeks after his win, the North Carolina legislature’s Republican supermajority fast-tracked a bill that would transform the balance of power in the state.
Its authors portrayed the 131-page proposal, released publicly only an hour before debate began, as a disaster relief measure for victims of Hurricane Helene. But much of it stripped powers from the state’s governor, taking away authority over everything from the highway patrol to the utilities commission. Most importantly, the bill eliminated the governor’s control over appointments to the state elections board, which sets voting rules and settles disputes in the swing state’s often close elections.
Ignoring protesters who labeled the bill a “legislative coup,” Republicans in the General Assembly easily outvoted Democrats, then overrode the outgoing Democratic governor’s veto.
The maneuver culminated a nearly decade-long effort by Republican legislators, who have pushed through law after law shrinking the powers of North Carolina’s chief executive — always a Democrat during that time frame — as well as the portfolios of other executive branch officials who are Democrats.
Over that period, lawmakers have attempted to transfer control or partial control of at least 29 boards, entities or important executive powers. In most cases, they succeeded.
As a result, Republicans now hold increased sway not only over North Carolina’s election board, but also over its schools, building codes, environmental regulations, coastal development, wildlife management, utilities, cabinet appointments and more. All had previously been under control of the governor.
“This is not what people voted for,” said Derek Clinger, a senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative, an institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School, who has studied the events in North Carolina.
“You should not be able to make the laws and then control who enforces them — just ask any fourth grader about the three branches of government,” Stein said in a statement to ProPublica. Lawmakers’ actions “throw the will of the voters into the trash can,” he added.
Initially, governors had some success using separation-of-powers arguments in lawsuits filed to challenge efforts to strip their powers. Even majority-Republican courts ruled in their favor, declaring laws that shifted authority directly from the governor to the legislature were unconstitutional.
More recently, though, legislators have found a loophole, writing laws that move traditional gubernatorial powers to elected executive branch officials who are Republicans. Since 2023, when the GOP won majorities on the state’s appellate courts, judges have increasingly rejected lawsuits aimed at blocking such legislation.
The North Carolina GOP’s effort to rein in executive power at the state level stands in sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s efforts to expand such power federally. Before the Supreme Court, for example, the administration has argued for a “unitary executive” theory that would allow the president near-total control over personnel.
North Carolina Republican legislative leaders didn’t respond to interview requests or detailed emailed questions from ProPublica about the power shifts. In the past, Republicans have defended whittling down Democratic governors’ authority by pointing to similarly partisan moves by Democrats decades ago, though these were on a much smaller scale.
Current and former lawmakers also say the power shifts reflect the vision of North Carolina’s founders, who deliberately made the state’s governor weak and its legislature strong to prevent abuses suffered under British rule.
“It’s never been co-equal, never will be, never intended to be,” said Paul Stam, who was the lame-duck Republican speaker pro tempore of the House when the General Assembly began its push to weaken the governor in 2016.
Republicans also dispute the notion that voters oppose reducing governors’ authorities.
“The people voted for a strong Republican majority in the legislature,” Sam Hayes, the former general counsel for North Carolina’s speaker of the House, said in an interview. “That role can involve reassigning the powers of the executive branch.”
After lawmakers took away the governor’s power to appoint the election board’s members, Hayes became its director. The board’s new Republican majority has handed control over North Carolina’s county election boards to conservatives, some of whom have moved to eliminate early voting sites favored by Democrats.
In recent years, states including Wisconsin, Michigan and Kentucky have waged similar battles over separation of powers. In almost all cases, Republican-dominated legislatures have stripped powers from Democrats elected to statewide offices.
Still, North Carolina’s example has been particularly notable, critics say. According to a scholarly review by Clinger, the General Assembly’s power grabs in 2016 and 2024 are the most expansive in recent American history.
How North Carolina’s Governor Got Weaker Over the Past Decade
ProPublica tracked 29 executive powers and prerogatives traditionally held by North Carolina’s governor and other Democrats that have been targeted by its Republican-majority legislature since the end of 2016. We found many have been stripped away, leaving the governor the nation’s weakest.
Note: Data covers December 2016 to December 2025. Sources: ProPublica review of North Carolina legislation and court cases; expert interviews.Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
Collectively, lawmakers have brought the powers of the state’s chief executive to a low ebb, said Christopher Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. In 2010, the textbook “Politics in the American States” ranked the institutional powers of North Carolina’s governor the third-weakest in the nation. By 2024, they ranked dead last.
“Soon,” Cooper said of the legislature, “they’re not going to have anything left to take.”
When the battles over the election board began in 2016, the joke among Republican lawmakers was that to get things done on elections policy, “you either need the Northern Hammer or the Sweet Southern Stammer.”
The Northern Hammer was Bob Rucho, a famously blunt senator originally from Massachusetts. The Sweet Southern Stammer was David Lewis, a genial Republican House member from rural North Carolina with a speech impediment and an uncommon mastery of election law.
The self-deprecating Lewis, a farmer and tractor salesman by trade, had helped design the gerrymandering strategies that, starting in 2010, handed Republicans long-term control of the legislature even in election cycles when Democrats won a majority of statewide offices.
The importance of controlling the election board — and the potential disastrousness of not controlling it — was clear in the 2016 gubernatorial race, a close contest between Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and his Democratic challenger, Roy Cooper.
The board makes decisions that can affect election outcomes in myriad ways, such as deciding where and for how long early voting takes place. It picks the state’s election director and members of county election boards, which maintain voter registration lists and operate voting sites. It arbitrates postelection challenges from losing candidates.
As governors historically had, McCrory had appointed the five board members who oversaw the 2016 race, choosing three from his party and two from the opposing party as state law directed.
When Republican legislators launched their first effort to seize control of the board soon after, senior staffers figured it was payback for not helping McCrory.
“I viewed it as retaliation for the board not having played a partisan enough role,” said Katelyn Love, who was then an attorney for the board and went on to become its general counsel.
Lewis, who left the legislature in 2020, said he and other lawmakers were convinced that once appointment power passed to Cooper, he’d “stack the board” against Republicans. “In certain parts of the state,” he said, “elections really do come down to two or three votes, or a small percentage of votes, and we had no confidence” that Cooper’s appointees “would just treat us fairly.”
Republican legislative leaders called a special session, proposing multiple bills that redirected powers from the governor, often to the legislature itself.
“We said, ‘You know what: We’re the legislature and we decide who appoints who,’” Lewis recalled. “Instead of letting Roy do it, why don’t we put folks in place that kind of support the way we see things?”
Lawmakers targeted not only the elections board, but also Cooper’s ability to hire and fire more than 1,000 political appointees in state government and to choose members of the state’s Industrial Commission, which handles matters such as worker safety claims. They took aim at some positions in part because they came with big paychecks, Lewis acknowledged; a seat on the Industrial Commission pays more than $160,000, for example.
“The truth is, a lot of the importance of some of these positions is who gets to appoint whose friends to the board,” Lewis said. “It’s kind of considered a plum job.”
The election board measure was framed as making oversight more bipartisan. Indeed, it increased the number of board members to eight and required even numbers of Republican and Democratic appointees.
But the governor controlled only four of those seats. The legislature appointed the other four. Also, in even-numbered years — those when federal elections are held — the law required the board’s chair to be “a member of the political party with the second-highest number of registered affiliates.” At the time, that meant a Republican. Since the chair shaped what matters were taken up and had other bureaucratic influence, this gave the party an edge.
Lewis insisted the restructured board was designed to even the scales — between the parties and between the governor and the legislature. “If one side can block the other, then bad things don’t happen,” he said. “And if both sides can work together, you can get a more positive resolution.”
Less than two weeks after McCrory conceded, the legislature quickly forced through the changes, despite protests so intense they led to numerous arrests.
Cooper quickly filed a court challenge, arguing that the law violated the state’s constitution and stymied his ability to enact his policies. The separation of powers is explicitly enshrined in North Carolina’s constitution, which declares, “The legislative, executive, and supreme judicial powers of the State government shall be forever separate and distinct from each other.”
Democrats also made the case that the new, evenly split election board was intended to produce gridlock that effectively favored Republicans, keeping in place the election director chosen by McCrory’s board and blocking steps that required majority approval, such as establishing early voting sites.
In March 2017, a trial court struck down most of the legislative changes, including those affecting the elections board, ruling they illegally robbed the governor of executive authority.
Lewis and other Republican leaders went back to the drawing board. Small groups of election specialists and legislative aides met early in the morning or late at night, surviving on food from Bojangles, the much-loved fried-chicken-and-biscuits chain. They sketched out priorities and drafted legislative language on whiteboards, then waited for the opportune moment to introduce a bill.
According to Lewis and other Republicans, they were determined to find a winning formula, no matter how many shots it took. “We felt like we had every right to do that because the constitution invested the legislature with defining the responsibilities” of the governor, Lewis said.
A month after the trial court rejected lawmakers’ first stab at breaking the governor’s grip on the elections board, the legislature tried again. It passed another law that altered the board in much the same ways as the first, expanding it to eight members, for example. But this time, instead of giving the legislature half the appointments, the law directed the governor to make all of them — from lists provided by the chairs of the state’s Democratic and Republican parties.
Cooper, calling the measure the “the same unconstitutional legislation in another package,” swiftly filed another legal challenge. For almost a year, as the case wound through the courts, he refused to make appointments under the proposed rules. The board’s professional staff kept up with administrative tasks but struggled to find workarounds for responsibilities handled by board members. They went to court on multiple occasions to get judges to rule on election protests and challenges in the board’s absence.
“It was very disruptive and chaotic, and a drain on the agency’s limited resources,” Love said.
The third came two months later, when lawmakers passed a bill that resurrected many elements of the previous one, but with a few new tweaks. In this version, the governor chose the board’s eight members — four Republicans and four Democrats — from lists submitted by each party, plus an additional tie-breaking member, unaffiliated with either party, from nominees provided by the new board.
Despite these differences, the outcome was much the same: another lawsuit from Cooper and, eventually, another loss in court.
Republican legislators realized they were likely to lose the case, so they also decided to try a strategy that took the issue out of the hands of the court system, Lewis said. They put a constitutional amendment on the November 2018 ballot that proposed removing the governor’s power to choose election board members and giving that authority to the legislature.
“You put your idea out for the people,” Lewis said. If “they vote for it, then it’s no longer unconstitutional.”
Of the six constitutional changes on the ballot that year, the election board proposal and one other — an amendment altering who picked judges to fill empty or added court seats — targeted traditional gubernatorial powers.
The measures were hotly contested, attracting about $18 million in spending by groups for and against them. Lewis said that Republican internal polling showed clear support for the amendments, but the final tallies showed a notable divide: Voters passed four of the measures but rejected the two that stripped powers from the governor by roughly 2 to 1.
At the end of 2018, Republicans temporarily waved the white flag, passing a law that returned the governor’s control over the election board. In 2020, Lewis relinquished his longtime role as the House’s election policy point man after pleading guilty to charges related to using campaign funds for personal expenses, including rent. He then resigned.
Today, Lewis sells cars in a small town on North Carolina’s swampy southeastern coast and does occasional political consulting. Looking back, he still believes he did the right thing. “I was following the will of the voters that gave us the majority in the legislature to do these things.”
Over the next few years, the elections board made one critical decision after another in close or disputed elections, underscoring its importance. In one instance, it called a new election in a congressional race tainted by an illegal scheme to fraudulently collect and fill out mail-in ballots.
Republican legislative leaders bided their time, waiting for another opportunity to launch a takeover. Karen Brinson Bell, chosen as the state’s election director in May 2019 by Cooper’s appointees, said lawmakers never let her forget the tenuousness of her position.
“I knew from the day I started that my days were numbered,” she said. “I was never naive to the fact that there would likely be other attempts to change the makeup of the board.”
Bell said that at a December 2022 meeting held by the National Conference of State Legislatures in West Virginia, Warren Daniel, a Senate Republican who worked on election matters, told her that he and his colleagues planned to take over the board and to reduce early voting. (Daniel didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident.)
In October 2023, the moment Bell had long expected finally arrived. The legislature’s Republican supermajority introduced a new bill to remake the election board. It shifted control over appointments to the General Assembly’s majority and minority leaders and put some of the board’s administrative functions under the secretary of state.
On decisions where the board’s four Republicans and four Democrats deadlocked, the law gave Republicans a decided advantage. If members couldn’t agree on an executive director, for example, the legislature’s majority leaders would choose one. If the board couldn’t agree on a plan for expanded early voting (championed by Democrats), then each county would have just one early voting site, the minimum required by law.
The measure was similar to its predecessors, but the courts that would decide its legality were vastly different.
Since the demise of the previous election board law, Republicans had won 14 appellate court races in a row and held majorities on the state’s higher courts. The Supreme Court’s chief justice, Paul Newby, had made it clear he saw no legal impediment to whittling down the governor’s portfolio, writing a sharp dissent to a ruling that struck down an earlier attempt to limit gubernatorial power.
In February 2024, a trial court issued a decision that reframed the debate over the constitutionality of gubernatorial power transfers. This time, the case didn’t involve the election board. It dealt instead with a law that used a variety of mechanisms to strip away Gov. Roy Cooper’s control over seven other entities that managed everything from coastal resources to building codes.
A three-judge panel found three of the seven transfer schemes legal because power passed from the governor to another elected executive branch member. “While the Governor is the chief executive, other elected officers who are members of the Council of State are also vested with executive power,” the judges wrote.
Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies issues related to separation of powers, was aghast, saying the decision reflected partisanship rather than sound legal analysis. The court was “ignoring the fact that the governor was actually elected” and “allowing the state legislature to transfer some of his authority to Republican officials,” he said.
Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the conservative John Locke Foundation, argued the panel’s finding was consistent with North Carolina’s history of splitting executive power among multiple executive branch officials. He dismissed Gerhardt’s comments as partisan “sour grapes.”
“The Democrats are losing, and they don’t like the fact that the Republicans are winning, so they’re casting doubt on what the conservative courts are saying,” he said.
The ruling didn’t affect the October 2023 election board measure, which hadn’t been implemented, blocked by a separate trial court decision. But after Stein’s double-digit win in the 2024 governor’s race, Republican lawmakers again used a legislative session ostensibly about hurricane relief to introduce a new, superseding measure that would finally put the election board under their party’s control.
It used a power transfer strategy similar to the ones that had won court approval the previous February, placing election board appointments in the hands of Dave Boliek, a Republican newly elected to the executive branch office of state auditor. Boliek could choose three of the board’s five members from his own party, giving Republicans their long-sought majority.
No other state auditor in America manages elections and Boliek had no experience doing so, but he expressed enthusiasm about taking on the job.
“Governor Josh Stein doesn’t have any experience supervising elections either,” Boliek told ProPublica in an email exchange. “Leading a public office requires a willingness to learn and serve — and I’m a quick study.”
In the same law, legislators also redirected Stein’s authority to make appointments to an array of other boards and entities and stripped powers from other newly elected Democrats, including the lieutenant governor, attorney general and superintendent of public instruction.
Stein sued to prevent the changes from taking effect, but in May, the Newby-led Supreme Court declined to block Boliek’s takeover of the election board. Although litigation continues, he has started transforming election oversight, both statewide and locally, in ways that would be hard to undo.
Some of Boliek’s board members have long histories in Republican politics and efforts to tilt state elections in the party’s favor. The new chair, Francis De Luca, had led a conservative institute that sued to contest McCrory’s loss in the 2016 race for governor. (De Luca didn’t respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)
Another new Republican member was Rucho, the so-called Northern Hammer who’d worked on election policy with Lewis. The new board will be fair, he promised. “My goal is to level the playing field so that everyone is playing by the same rules,” he said.
Bell’s replacement as election director, Hayes, has overhauled the board’s 60-member staff, though historically it’s been nonpartisan and largely remained when new leadership took over. Since Hayes took charge, at least nine staffers have left or been placed on leave, according to interviews and published reports. At the same time, the board has added seven new political appointees, many of whom have close ties to Republican politicians.
“It’s a nonpartisan shop shifting to a partisan shop,” said one staff member who asked not to be identified, fearing retaliation.
Hayes insisted the board remains nonpartisan and described the changes in staff as “nothing out of the ordinary.” He described his goals as “repairing relationships with the General Assembly” and working to “honor the letter and spirit of the law.”
“If we do that,” he said, “I believe that we will rebuild trust in elections here.”
Under Hayes’ leadership, the board also moved swiftly to settle a lawsuit filed against it earlier this year by the U.S. Justice Department, agreeing to require tens of thousands of voters to provide missing registration information or risk not having their ballots count in state races, voter advocacy groups say. Bell had opposed taking such steps.
Hayes said he settled the suit with the “intent of honoring federal law” and to clean up the state’s voter rolls, which Republicans argue have been badly mismanaged.
The new leadership has also taken steps that could limit early voting locations in the state, especially those in Democratic strongholds.
Boliek hired longtime Republican operative Dallas Woodhouse, who has advocated for restricting early voting, to fill a newly created role partly focused on early voting. In October, Woodhouse emailed Republican board chairs directing them to consider moving polling sites out of urban areas, where there are more Democrats, to “areas that are outside of urban cores,” where Republicans tend to hold the majority.
So far, conservative majorities in at least eight counties have moved to limit early voting sites or weekend hours sought by Democrats. At least two have rejected sites near universities, including a site near a historically Black college.
In an interview, Boliek told ProPublica there was no plan to reduce early voting sites in areas that lean Democratic. He later explained in an email that Woodhouse “simply answered inquiries from board chairs.”
Hayes communicates with Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, and Woodhouse regularly attends video calls held by the North Carolina chapter of Mitchell’s national organization, the Election Integrity Network.
Boliek said Woodhouse talks to a variety of organizations from across the political spectrum, adding,“I don’t think people should be concerned.” He said the board was dedicated to making “it easy to vote and hard to cheat in North Carolina.”
Hayes said Mitchell and other network leaders aren’t “receiving special access to me or treatment from this office” and that he talks to people on both sides of the aisle.
All told, Republican legislators have successfully transferred power over 17 of the 29 boards, entities and important executive prerogatives they’ve targeted since 2016, a ProPublica review showed. In addition to the election board, the governor has lost control or partial control over a dozen entities, including the state’s Environmental Management Commission and its Utilities Commission.
Stein told ProPublica that state residents have suffered, in the form of weakened environmental protections and rising energy costs.
Rucho, the Northern Hammer, argues the power transfers have actually improved life in the state.
“You have to change the way the system works, if the system is not working,” he said. “This was a real good remedy to make these boards work on behalf of the people.”
Longtime observers say they have deepening concerns about the erosion of the separation of powers in North Carolina.
Bob Orr, a former Republican state Supreme Court justice, said that if power grabs by Republican legislators continue to be upheld by the state’s Republican-majority courts, it will threaten democracy in the state.
“Really, what can people do?” said Orr, who left the Republican Party because of how it changed under Trump. “A legislature that is literally unchecked with gerrymandered districts and a presumption of constitutionality for everything they do in the courts — that is a danger to democracy because they can change the system regardless of the will of the people.”
To prevent possible violations of the federal conflicts of interest statute, Blanche promised to dump his digital assets no later than 90 days after his Senate confirmation in March, according to his government ethics agreement. He also pledged not to participate in any matter that could have a “direct and predictable effect on my financial interests in the virtual currency” until his Bitcoin and other crypto-related products were sold.
But about a month into the job — before divesting — Blanche issued a memo that ordered an end to investigations into crypto companies, dealers and exchanges launched during President Joe Biden’s term. He also eliminated an enforcement team dedicated to looking for crypto-related fraud and money-laundering schemes. And his memo said the Justice Department would assist Trump’s crypto working group of experts and Cabinet members that went on to issue a list of recommendations aimed at making the United States the global leader in digital coins.
Blanche’s directives, while he still owned significant crypto investments, violated the conflicts of interest law and his ethics agreement, legal experts and former federal ethics officials told ProPublica.
“If you are invested in that industry and now making a decision that could affect whether or not the DOJ is gonna pursue prosecutions, that’s an obvious conflict of interest,” said Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Even when he did ultimately divest his crypto interests, Blanche’s ethics records show he did so by transferring them to his adult children and a grandchild, a move the experts said is technically legal but at odds with the spirit and intent of the law.
Blanche’s actions illustrate the ethical problems posed as the Trump administration relaxes regulation of digital money to make good on the president’s vow to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the world.” In less than a year, Trump has nominated at least 216 political appointees who owned — either by themselves or with their spouses — cryptocurrency investments worth between $175 million and $340 million at the time of their nomination, a ProPublica review of federal financial disclosure records found. By contrast, in the first two years of his presidency, Biden appointed about two dozen people who, combined, held less than $7 million in crypto investments.
Trump’s crypto-friendly appointees include several who head agencies with regulatory authority over the industry.
Among them is Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Until this year, Lutnick was CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm with billions in crypto investments. The firm is also the primary banker for Tether, among the world’s largest issuers of stablecoins — a type of crypto pegged to the dollar or another asset to avoid wild swings in value.
After signing an ethics agreement, Lutnick transferred his stake in Cantor Fitzgerald to his children, including his two adult sons who now run the firm. The transfer was completed in October. By then, Lutnick had taken several pro-crypto steps — announcing that Trump would create a bitcoin strategic reserve, having his department take part in the president’s crypto working group and publishing economic data on nine key blockchains, a move designed to foster more trust in the digital market. (The blockchain is a digital ledger that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.)
A Commerce Department spokesperson noted that Lutnick was given a limited waiver from the White House allowing him to work on general issues that could affect Cantor Fitzgerald while the transfer of his stake in the firm was pending. The waiver was dated July 8, nearly five months after he was sworn in. The spokesperson said Lutnick “fully complied with the terms of his ethics agreement” and did not have any “economic gains or losses associated” with the transfer of his stake in the firm.
Another crypto-friendly appointee is Paul Atkins, chair of the SEC, whose ethics records show he owned stakes of up to $6 million in crypto-related businesses before his confirmation in April. Since Trump took office, Atkins’ agency has dropped or settled enforcement cases with crypto companies.
Atkins signed an ethics agreement promising to sell a crypto investment fund and equity in two crypto companies. He has since filed paperwork saying he complied with the agreement and listed millions of dollars worth of investments he sold, but those do not mention any crypto-related sales. An SEC spokesman said Atkins complied with his ethics obligations but would not say when he sold his crypto-related assets.
A staffer for Blanche said he and the Justice Department would not comment.
Trump has led the way on ethical conflicts connected to crypto. During last year’s election campaign, he pledged to the crypto industry he would end Biden’s strict approach toward regulation. In turn, the industry heavily bet on Trump, spending millions to support his election and those of other Republican candidates.
On the eve of the election, Trump promised he would be America’s “crypto president” if he won a second term. He and his sons launched their own cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial, and after his election victory, Trump and his wife, Melania, issued a pair of meme coins, allowing anyone to use crypto to enrich the incoming president. Within days of taking office in January, Trump signed a presidential action promoting the growth of digital assets and started nominating government officials to fulfill his goal.
James Thurber, a former congressional staffer who worked on federal ethics reforms and is now professor emeritus at American University, characterized the Trump administration’s disregard of traditional government ethics as unprecedented. He contrasted Trump’s sale of crypto coins to the example set by President Jimmy Carter, who announced he was putting his peanut farm into a blind trust when he took office.
“The conflicts of interest in this administration are blatant and hugely against the public interest.” Thurber said.
Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement to ProPublica that the “administration is fulfilling the President’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world by driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans.”
“Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest,” she added.
Tonya Evans, a former professor at Penn State Dickinson Law who now consults on the digital economy, said the increase in crypto investors serving in the executive branch under Trump is a measure of the industry’s success in taking over regulatory bodies that were previously hostile to them. She compared the industry’s newfound power to how Goldman Sachs alums — such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during Trump’s first term or Biden’s SEC chair, Gary Gensler — held prominent government positions and were able to exert outsized influence on shaping financial policy.
“My concern is not so much that people who understand crypto are in leadership positions,” she wrote in an email to ProPublica, “but that ethics frameworks may not yet meet this critical fork in the road of development, especially if ‘divestiture’ takes the form of passing to family. We are a long way from President Carter’s peanut farm!”
Crypto Conflicts
Blanche rose to prominence in recent years as Trump’s main defender in criminal court.
A former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, Blanche, 51, was his lead attorney in the Manhattan trial that resulted in Trump being convicted of 34 felonies stemming from his hush-money payment to a pornographic actress, Stormy Daniels. Blanche also defended Trump against criminal charges accusing him of conspiring to subvert the 2020 election and retaining highly classified documents. (Those two cases were dropped after Trump was elected president.)
Since gaining Senate confirmation on March 5, Blanche has helped lead a massive remaking of the Department of Justice, shifting the emphasis from long-standing priorities, like the protection of civil rights. Thousands of employees have been terminated or resigned as the new administration ended police misconduct prosecutions, environmental abuse lawsuits and abortion access cases. Blanche has pushed for tougher border control enforcement and the use of fraud statutes to prosecute institutions with diversity-and-inclusion-related policies. As news of Trump’s ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein gained momentum this year, it was Blanche who personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime confidante now serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping him sexually abuse underage girls.
When Blanche issued the sweeping memo ending the department’s Biden-era crypto enforcement approach, he effectively ended a three-year effort aimed at penetrating the shadowy world of transnational criminals.
The team also assisted a multiagency probe of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The investigation found, among other things, that Binance failed to report and prevent suspicious financial transactions for Hamas, al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. Federal prosecutors charged the company’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, with violating U.S. anti-money-laundering laws, and to settle the case, Zhao pleaded guilty, resigned as company chief executive and served a four-month prison sentence. He also agreed to pay the U.S. $4.3 billion in penalties. (Trump pardoned Zhao in October. Months earlier, Binance had used a stablecoin developed by the Trump-owned World Liberty Financial to fund a $2 billion deal.)
In his April 7 memo titled “Ending Regulation by Prosecution,” Blanche scoffed at the Biden Justice Department’s approach toward crypto, calling it “a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution, which was ill conceived and poorly executed.” He said the agency would now target only the terrorists and drug traffickers who illicitly used crypto, not the platforms that hosted them. He announced the disbanding of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.
“The digital assets industry is critical to the Nation’s economic development and innovation,” Blanche wrote. “President Trump has also made clear that ‘[w]e are going to end the regulatory weaponization against digital assets.’”
The market reacted favorably; crypto trading spiked.
At the time, Blanche hadn’t relinquished his Bitcoin worth between $100,000 and $250,000, nor his investments in the cryptocurrencies Solana and Ethereum or his stock holdings in Coinbase. Blanche should have recused himself from the decision, experts told ProPublica.
Under the federal conflicts of interest statute, government officials are forbidden from taking part in a “particular matter” that can financially benefit them or their immediate family, unless they have a special waiver from the government. The penalties range from up to one year in jail or a civil fine of up to $50,000 all the way to as much as five years in prison if someone willfully violates the law.
Blanche’s wide-ranging memo benefited the industry broadly, including his own investments, ethics experts said.
In an ethics filing he electronically signed in June, Blanche said his Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency investments — including Solana, Cardano and Ethereum — “were gifted in their entirety to my grandchild and adult children.” Financial disclosure records don’t provide exact amounts but instead a broad range for the worth of a government official’s investment. At that point, Blanche’s records show his transfers to his family members were worth between $116,000 and $315,000. He said he sold additional crypto-related investments worth between $5,000 and $75,000. The divestment took place in late May and early June, the ethics filing said.
Legal experts noted that the federal conflict-of-interest law prohibits government officials from using their position in a way that would financially benefit a spouse or a minor child; it does not mention adult children or grandchildren.
Still, even if legal, giving assets like these to a relative doesn’t satisfy the ethical concern that a government official could act in a way that helps their family financially, they said.
“The purpose of the law is to eliminate even the appearance that an official’s decisions are influenced by their financial interests,” said Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel for the Office of Congressional Ethics who is senior ethics director at the Campaign Legal Center. “That purpose is defeated when an official simply gives conflicted assets to adult children.”
The FAQ entry about renaming a journal is very helpful to understand what happens and the options when renaming, but I'm not sure what happens to the image links?
Do image links also get redirected automatically ? Or do you need to update your old posts referencing those images, since the username is in the URL too??
The MBTA reported at 8:28 p.m. that yet another Red Line train died at Harvard Square, the latest in a series of trains this month that have chosen the station to meet their maker. The train was taken out of service and "riders were accommodated." The T didn't specify how they were accommodated, although we're thinking nice warm mugs of hot chocolate were not part of the accommodation.
The police chief of the northern New Jersey borough of Totowa was arrested Friday on charges he confined a woman he knew in a Back Bay hotel room and then physically attacked her at least three times between 3:30 and 5 a.m. on Sept. 4, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.
Carmen Veneziano, 47, was arrested by officers assigned to the Passaic County prosecutor's office and is scheduled for arraignment in Suffolk Superior Court on Monday on one count of kidnapping and three counts of domestic assault and battery, the Suffolk DA's office reports.
John Coiro, mayor of the small town, with a population of roughly 11,000, announced today he had suspended Veneziano from his job, for which nj.com reports he makes $260,780 a year, while the charges are pending.
The news site also reports that Veneziano's attorney denounced the charges as being based on the rantings of an ex-girlfriend who was "extremely intoxicated" at the time.
Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture.
With the winter holidays approaching—and with this marking the last formal edition ofSurvey Says for the year—it’s a natural moment to take stock. New polling offers a revealing snapshot of how Americans are closing out 2025 and what kind of mood they’re carrying into 2026.
The toplines are not encouraging.
A new survey fromYouGov asked Americans to assess this past year both personally and nationally, and what emerges is a country that feels worn down, uneasy, and distinctly unconfident about what comes next.
Let’s start with the personal assessments. Just 9% of Americans said 2025 was “great” for them, and 29% called it “good.” The largest share—37%—landed in the middle, describing the year as being only “OK.” But the distribution’s darker edge was hard to ignore: 15% said the year was “bad,” and another 10% called it “terrible.”
In other words, roughly 1 in 4 Americans said their experience of 2025 was actively negative.
If Americans’ personal experience of the year is lukewarm at best, they’re even more downbeat about the country’s performance in 2025. Only 24% rated the year as “good” or “great” for the United States. Another 24% called it just “OK.” But nearly half—48%—said the year was “bad” or “terrible” for the country as a whole.
That dissatisfaction shows up clearly when Americans were asked to rate how things are going nationally on a 1-to-10 scale. Forty-seven percent placed their answer between one and four. But just 30% gave the year an seven or higher.
Other polling points in the same direction. The latest Economist/YouGov survey found that 56% of Americans said the country was “off on the wrong track,” compared with just 35% who said it was headed in the right direction.
“It’s not surprising that, overall, the results indicate the level of ambivalence and negativity that they do,” Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, told Daily Kos. “The country has been in deep, polarized political and social conflict, and that usually doesn’t feel like a good thing to most people.”
Reeher cautioned against reading these kinds of questions too literally, though. Assessments of “how the year was” often act as proxies for a tangle of other forces: personal psychology, financial stress, perceptions of national decline, and what social scientists call expressive bias.
“There’s so much noise in these kinds of questions,” he said. “Respondents are often signaling something else that they want others to know about them,” adding that, in this case, that could be views about the president himself or about politics more generally.
“It’s simply impossible to unwind all these threads,” Reeher said.
President Donald Trump, shown on Dec. 17.
Still, the broader gloom didn’t materialize out of thin air. Polling throughout the second half of 2025 has shownrising economic anxiety—particularlyaround the holidays—alongsidesagging approval ratings for President Donald Trump. Those pressures appear to be shaping how people look back on the year, even if they don’t fully explain it.
At the same time, Reeher is quick to note that pessimism about the future long predates Trump.
“The polarization we are experiencing is not new or a product of Trump, and neither is the pessimism about the future,” he said. “That’s been a growing feature since the mid-2000s, with some temporary exceptions.”
Even so, the political undercurrent in the YouGov data is unmistakable. Forty-three percent of Americans describe 2025 as “one of the worst” years in American history. Some of that is almost certainly recency bias, or overemphasizing the effects of recent events. But the willingness to apply such language to the year is striking.
Notably, YouGov didn’t ask respondents whythey felt this way. But the answers to questions about New Year’s resolutions offer some clues. The most common goals were modest and familiar: exercising more (25%), being happy (23%), eating healthier (22%), and saving money (21%).
More forward-looking ambitions were far less common. Just 9% said they planned to pursue a career goal in 2026, and only 12% hoped to pay down debt. Even saving money—named by 21% of Americans—comes across less as optimism than as self-protection, a reflection of how many households are still feeling financially boxed in.
Looking ahead provides little reassurance about the country’s trajectory.
While 48% of Americans believed 2026 would be good or great for them personally, only 31% said it would be great for the country. Worse, 27% predicted it would be one of the worst years in American history.
Those are dramatic numbers, but they likely reflect generalized pessimism rather than a literal comparison to historical calamities. The question asked about “one of the best years,” not whether the country would improve. Still, the pattern is clear: Far more Americans expect trouble for the country than for themselves.
It’s a familiar dynamic in polling. People often believe they’ll manage personally—even as they conclude that the broader system is failing.
So how seriously should we take these responses? Reeher urged some caution in reading too much into polls like YouGov’s.
“Those who are saying the past year has been great are probably trying to signal that they support the president,” he said. “Those who are saying that the past year has been one of the worst are probably trying to tell the surveyor that they really, really don’t like the president. The people more in the political middle are probably reacting to all the conflict and political chaos, and are either ambivalent or negative.”
That doesn’t make the data meaningless. But it does limit how much can be drawn from it.
At best, polls like this offer a reading of national mood—an emotional barometer rather than a precise diagnosis. Anyone trying to extract more than that does so at their own peril, politically or otherwise.
Any updates?
Daily Kos has reported extensively on the cracks forming in Trump’s coalition—first amongLatinos, thenyoung voters. Now, new data from NBC News Decision Desk and SurveyMonkey confirms the trend. The largest declines in strong support since April are among Republicans overall, particularly those who identify with Trump’s MAGA movement. MAGA Republicans continue to widely approve of Trump, with 70% saying they strongly approve of him, but that represents an 8-percentage-point drop from earlier this year. Meanwhile, fewer Republicans report being part of the MAGA movement compared with earlier in 2025, highlightingearly signs of fraying in Trump’s base.
Americansremain deeply ambivalent about the rapid spread of artificial intelligence, even as they’re increasingly using it on the job. Gallup reports that the share of U.S. employees using AI at least a few times a year increased from 40% to 45% between the second and third quarters of 2025. Frequent use also increased from 19% to 23%. So, while Americans may not love AI, more of them are learning to live with it.
Vibe check
It’s easy enough to freeze up over holiday gifts, especially with people you don’t see often. Wanting to give something that signals your thought and care doesn’t always come with the clarity about what that something should be.
New polling fromthe Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research offers some reassurance. Nearly 9 in 10 say it’s acceptable to give cash (88%) or gift cards (87%). Even regifting or giving secondhand items—long treated as a social faux pas—now clears the bar for a solid majority: 64% say it’s fine.
Age, unsurprisingly, shapes those views. Adults ages 18 to 45 are significantly more open to secondhand gifts than those 45 and older (73% vs. 58%), reflectingthe growing normalization of thrift and resale culture. The flip side is that enthusiasm for cash and gift cards declines with age, suggesting older Americans still place more weight on presentation—or at least pretense.
The poll looks beyond presents as well, examining how people are spending the holidays. Nearly half of adults (44%) plan to be in bed before midnight on New Year’s Eve—an understated way to close out a year many seem ready to move on from.
Still, signs of seasonal enthusiasm remain. About a third of Americans say they’ve worn or plan to wear a holiday sweater or accessories this month. And 30% are getting into the spirit by buying gifts for their pets—present company included. This year, we got our shelter pooch a DNA test, and I’m really excited to learn more about him.
As for Christmas Day itself, traditions vary. Nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) say they’ll watch sports, while 5% plan to head to a movie theater.
Please sound off in the comments and tell us how you’re spending the holidays. Are you keeping things low-key? Sticking to old traditions? Spoiling your pets? However you’re marking the season, we want to hear it—and happy holidays!
When Ravina Turner,53, started working for Michigan’s Home Help Program around 2015, she was just grateful to get paid. For years, she’d missed work to care for her daughter, Davina, who has Crohn’s disease and colitis.
At first, the Home Help Program, run by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, paid her about $300 a month for her work, allowing her to scale back her hours as a nursing assistant. By last year, she had become a full-time caregiver for Davina, and her wages had risen to $15.88 an hour. That is still well below the$35.59per hour living wage for a single parent in Dearborn Heights, outside Detroit, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator.
“This is a job and we deserve benefits,” said Turner, who’s picked up a gig as a personal care assistant at a nearby assisted living facility. “We deserve health insurance as well as life insurance. We deserve vacation … because if I was punching a clock, I would get all those perks.”
Turner thought she just had to endure low wages, no benefits and no paid time off, she said, until a canvasser knocked on her door and talked to her about how much less Michigan home health aides made compared to aides in states such as Washington, where in 2023starting rates were set at $21 per hour.She suggested Turner join theMichigan Home Care Workers Unitedcampaign, an effort from the Service Employees International Union to get union recognition for home care workers paid through Medicaid. Turner decided to join. (Disclosure: SEIU is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)
Ravina Turner at her home in Dearborn Heights.
This October, Turner was among 32,000 Michigan home care aides who became union members after73% of voting home care workersvoted to join the union. They are currently working towards negotiating a contract with the state. And their victory, say observers, achieved something politicians increasingly need to pull off: building coalitions across political divides by speaking to material concerns.
***
Michigan Home CareWorkers United launched in March 2024, around the time that the canvasser came to Turner’s door. Their efforts were aimed, initially, at getting care workers the right to form a union — which was successful, with Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signing a bill granting Home Help workers stateemployee statusfor the purposes of collective bargaining last October.
Then they turned to the difficult work of organizing a union vote across the state. Currently, at least 11 other states, most of them Democratic strongholds like California and New York, have laws that recognize home care workers as public employees for the purposes of forming a union. The Michigan home care worker election was the first under President Donald Trump’s second administration. It was also only the second success in a state that went twice for Trump.
Kevin Reuning, a political science professor at Miami University of Ohio who tracks nationwide union elections, said the Michigan home care worker win was a “rare” victory given the feat of workers at that scale.
“It is statewide … that poses such an incredible difficulty because you don’t have all your workers in a single location. It just makes the actual organizing hard,” said Reuning, who is also the creator of UnionElections.org.
As activists began to talk with care workers across the state, demands emerged: higher wages and benefits, access to training, and a registry to connect workers with clients in need of care.
“Hundreds of home care workers have had boots on the ground for a very long time,” said Gabriella Jones-Casey, executive vice president of home care and staff development for SEIU Healthcare Michigan.
Turner decorates her home for Christmas in anticipation of her daughter’s return from the hospital. “I’m preparing for her to come home. It’ll be a cheerful holiday setting.”
Home care workers are predominantly female, older and racially diverse, and they have long experienced stagnant wages, no benefits and limited access to training. At the federal level, workers are embattled; in July, theTrump administration issued a proposalrolling back federal minimum wage and overtime protections for home care workers.
“This is a serious rollback, and it’s going to exacerbate shortages,” said Catherine Ruckelshaus, legal director at the National Employment Law Project. “It’s pretty much a disaster.” Locally, home care workers are facingcuts to Medicaid, which funds Michigan’s Home Help Program.
The rapidly growing profession already battles significant issues with retention. Although long-term home health care isexpected to grow by 17%over the next decade, rates of turnover were nearly75%nationally in 2024.
When the election results came in, those were the issues on workers’ minds — wherever they were. That included Michigan’s cities and suburbs, where most of the state’s Black and brownworkers liveand wherevoters lean Democratic, as well as its rural areas, which are generally white andvoters are heavily Republican.
The organizers’ success came from the unit’s ability to speak to broad concerns about wages, working conditions, and respect, said Jones-Casey.
“We represent workers all across the state from the UP [Upper Peninsula] down,” said Jones-Casey. “The challenges that arise might be different across the urban areas versus the rural versus suburban, but that’s kind of the beauty of this unit. They are representative of the entirety of Michigan.”
***
Workers say there ispower in finding common ground between disparate places and political landscapes.
Erika LaFountain, a home care worker involved with the union, lives in Jackson County, a conservative stronghold about an hour west of Detroit. It is82% white, and Trump won it by more than a 20-point margin in 2024. It is just the sort of place SEIU needed to win over.
Home care worker Erika LaFountain helps Ricky Johnson into his wheelchair during a visit to the local shopping mall.
LaFountain said she’d never thought of herself as an activist. When a canvasser came to her door, she said, “I’m like, I don’t think that’s me,” said LaFountain. “I think you’re talking about nurses and, like, people with degrees.”
LaFountain started in home health care after she helped a wheelchair-bound neighbor, Ricky Johnson, get into his home without a ramp. At first, LaFountain cared for Johnson in her free time, unpaid. When his family said they needed more help, LaFountain joined the Home Help Program. As had been true for Turner, the little bit of state money helped LaFountain — but it wasn’t enough to live on.
It’s been powerful, said LaFountain, to share her story.
“I started just telling Ricky’s struggles,” LaFountain said, as well as “our story and our struggles, and how if there was health insurance, that I wouldn’t have to be on Medicaid.”
LaFountain poses for a portrait taken by Ricky Johnson, with some support holding the camera.
Turner, who lives in deep-blue Wayne County, which Kamala Harris won by almost 30 points in 2024, agreed completely. “I learned that there’s power in numbers … strength in numbers,” she said.
Overall, Turner said, she felt lucky. “I take care of my daughter, and she does have good moments when I’m able to leave for a couple of hours.” But she knows not every caregiver has that freedom. “The ones that can’t leave … those are the ones that I was really fighting for,” she said.
Congressional Cowards is a weekly series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, who refuse to criticize him—no matter how disgraceful or lawless his actions.
In yet another sign that Donald Trump is the lamest of lame duck presidents, this week GOP lawmakers not only refused to defend his despicable comments about the murder of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner, but they actually called Trump out.
Rob Reiner arrives at the premiere of "Spinal Tap II: The End Continues" on Sept. 9 at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood in Los Angeles.
From vulnerable House Republicans—likely looking for an acceptable place to distance themselves from Trump as they seek to survive in what's expected to be a blue wave in 2026—to Republicans in safe seats, almost all said that Trump blaming Reiner and his wife Michelle’s brutal murder on Reiner's anti-Trump activism was unacceptable.
Even more shocking is that a number of the Republicans who commented did it without being prompted, deciding on their own that they had to call out Trump’s deranged Truth Social post.
"A father and mother were murdered at the hands of their troubled son. We should be lifting the family up in prayer, not making this about politics," Rep. Stephanie Bice, who represents an Oklahoma district Trump carried by nearly 18 points, wrote in a post on X in response to Trump’s comment. "Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them."
"This statement is wrong," Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) wrote in a post on X in response to a tweet from Trump’s own White House, which amplified Trump’s remarks. "Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period."
Now-frequent Trump critic Rep. Thomas Massie also said Trump’s comment went too far.
“Regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered,” the Kentucky Republican wrote in a post on X. “I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid? I challenge anyone to defend it.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) also said Trump's post was wrong.
“A wise man sometimes says nothing, because he's a wise man. I think the president should have said nothing," Kennedy told reporters. "I think when he makes comments like that, it distracts from his policy achievements and his agenda, and just speaking personally, in America, you can say what you want, but just speaking personally, when another human being is murdered or was the case with Mr. Kirk, assassinated, I think all of us should show them, regardless of their political beliefs, and their families respect.”
Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who seems to have no more fucks to give now that he's retiring from the House, also slammed Trump.
"I’d expect to hear something like this from a drunk guy at a bar, not the President of the United States. Can the President be presidential?” Bacon told CNN's Jake Tapper, the answer to that rhetorical question of course being no.
Sen. Ted Cruz also refused to defend Trump's comments. The Texas Republican told reporters, "Mental health is an issue that doesn't know partisan lines. I think every family in America has dealt with mental health and dealt with addiction, and I grieve that in this instance, it appears to have cost Rob Reiner and his wife their life.”
“I thought that statement was absolutely completely below the office of the president of the United States, classless, and it was just wrong,” Greene told CNN.
Of course, there was still one Republican who was willing to debase himself in the name of Dear Leader: Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, who appears frequently in Congressional Cowards.
“He was respectful to him, said he was once a really good actor and all that, and pointed out the fact that he didn't like him at all … I don’t think it was distasteful at all," Mullin said, without a hint of shame. “The guy does not like Trump and President Trump went out and still ended it in a very nice way.”
But aside from Mullin's morally bankrupt defense of Trump, Republicans couldn't bring themselves to defend Dear Leader this time—a telling sign that as Trump’s popularity continues to sink, threatening the GOP’s congressional majorities, Republicans may now be looking for ways to distance themselves from their orange messiah.
Still, we won't hold our breath for the GOP to defy Trump in legislative battles when it actually matters.
MPV 0.41 is out today as the newest feature release for this MPlayer/mplayer2-derived open-source video player. With MPV 0.41 there is a big focus on improving Wayland support as well as now preferring Vulkan Video acceleration over alternative video decode APIs...
Ah I see. They had to remove picture of Trump with his victims to protect the victims. Makes sense.
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE:
You can see in that photo, there's photographs of women. And so we learned after releasing that photograph that there were concerns about those women and the fact that we had put that photo up. So we pulled that photo down. It has nothing to do with President Trump. There are dozens of photos of President Trump already released to the public seeing him with Mr. Epstein. He has said that in the '90s and early 2000s he socialized with him. So the absurdity of us pulling down a photo, a single photo because President Trump was in it is laughable. And the fact that everybody's trying to act like that's the case is a reflection of their true motivation. But the reality is anybody, any victim, any victim's lawyers, any victims’ rights group can reach out to us and say, "Hey, Department of Justice, there's a document, there's a photo, there's something within the Epstein files that identifies me." And we will then of course pull that off and investigate it.
KRISTEN WELKER:
Are you saying that one or more of the women in one of the photos or several of the photos is a victim or a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein, and that's why you took those files down? And will they be put back up?
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE:
No, that's not what I'm saying. Of course, if we knew that, if we believed that that photograph contained a survivor, we wouldn't have put it up in the first place without redacting the faces. But notwithstanding what we believe, we don't have perfect information. And so when we hear from victims' rights groups about this type of photograph, we pull it down and investigate. We're still investigating that photo. The photo will go back up. And the only question is whether there will be redactions on the photo. And, of course, if there are survivors in any of the photos, we will redact them as Congress expects us to do, as President Trump expects us to do, and as the attorney general and Director Patel have directed the department to do.
I adapted these muffins from a recipe in Katarina Cermelj's The Elements of Baking, making them dairy free and reducing the sugar. The result is a tender muffin with a domed top and a fluffy crumb, similar to a bakery muffin, but not as sticky or sweet.
Ingredients:
145 g tapioca starch 72 g sorghum flour 72 g millet flour 170 g granulated sugar 2 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp xanthan gum 1/4 tsp fine salt
160 g non-dairy milk (175 ml) 150 g non-dairy yogurt (5.3 oz) 100 g neutral oil (1/2 cup) 2 large eggs (~100 g out of shell) 1/4 tsp almond extract
Bekki Holzkamm has been trying to hire a lab technician at a hospital in rural North Dakota since late summer.
Not one U.S. citizen has applied.
West River Health Services in Hettinger, a town of about 1,000 residents in the southwestern part of the state, has four options, and none is good.
The hospital could fork over $100,000 for the Trump administration’s new H-1B visa fee and hire one of the more than 30 applicants from the Philippines or Nigeria. The fee is the equivalent of what some rural hospitals would pay two lab techs in a year, said Holzkamm, who is West River’s lab manager.
West River could ask the Department of Homeland Security to waive the fee. But it’s unclear how long the waiver process would take and if the government would grant one. The hospital could continue trying to recruit someone inside the U.S. for the job. Or, Holzkamm said, it could leave the position unfilled, adding to the workload of the current “skeleton crew.”
The U.S. health care system depends on foreign-born professionals to fill its ranks of doctors, nurses, technicians, and other health providers, particularly in chronically understaffed facilities in rural America.
But a new presidential proclamation aimed at the tech industry’s use of H-1B visas is making it harder for West River and other rural providers to hire those staffers.
“The health care industry wasn’t even considered. They’re going to be collateral damage, and to such an extreme degree that it was clearly not thought about at all,” said Eram Alam, a Harvard associate professor whose new book examines the history of foreign doctors in the U.S.
Elissa Taub, a Memphis, Tennessee-based attorney who assists hospitals with the H-1B application process, has been hearing concerns from her clients.
“It’s not like there’s a surplus of American physicians or nurses waiting in the wings to fill in those positions,” she said.
“It’s not like there’s a surplus of American physicians or nurses waiting in the wings to fill in those positions,” said a Tennessee-based attorney who assists hospitals with the H-1B application process.
Until recently, West River and other employers paid up to $5,000 each time they applied to sponsor an H-1B worker. The visas are reserved for highly skilled foreign workers.
The new $100,000 fee — part of a September proclamation by President Donald Trump — applies to workers living outside the U.S. but not those who were already in the U.S. on a visa.
West River lab tech Kathrine Abelita is one of nine employees — six technicians and three nurses — at the hospital who are current or former H-1B visa holders. Abelita is from the Philippines and has worked at West River since 2018. She’s now a permanent U.S. resident.
"It’s going to be a big problem for rural health care," she said of the new fee. She said most younger American workers want to live in urban areas.
Sixteen percent of registered nurses, 14% of physician assistants, and 14% of nurse practitioners and midwives who work in U.S. hospitals are immigrants, according to a 2023 government survey. Nearly a quarter of physicians in the U.S. went to medical school outside the U.S. or Canada, according to 2024 licensing data.
“A blanket exception for healthcare providers is the simplest path forward,” the National Rural Health Association and National Association of Rural Health Clinics wrote in a joint letter.
The proclamation allows fee exemptions for individuals, workers at specific companies, and those in entire industries when “in the national interest.” New guidance says the fee will be waived only in an “extraordinarily rare circumstance.” That includes showing that there is “no American worker” available for the position and that requiring a company to spend $100,000 would “significantly undermine” U.S. interests.
Taub called those standards “exceptionally high.”
Representatives of the NRHA and the American Medical Association, which organized a letter from the medical societies, said they’ve received no response after sending requests to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in late September and early October. The AHA declined to say whether it had heard back.
Homeland Security officials directed KFF Health News’ inquiries to the White House, which did not answer questions about individual waiver timelines or the possibility of a categorical exemption for the health care industry.
Instead, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers sent a statement defending the new fee, saying it will “put American workers first.” Her comments echo Trump’s proclamation, which focuses on accusations that the tech industry is abusing the H-1B program by replacing American workers with lower-paid foreign ones. But the order applies to all trades.
Alam, the Harvard professor, said the U.S.’ reliance on international providers does raise legitimate concerns, such as about how it takes professionals away from lower-income countries facing even greater health concerns and staffing shortages than the U.S.
This decades-long dependency, she said, stems from population booms, medical schools’ historical exclusion of nonwhite men, and the “much, much cheaper” cost of importing providers trained abroad than expanding health education in the U.S.
Internationally trained doctors tend to work in rural and urban areas that are poor and underserved, according to a survey and research review.
Nearly 1,000 H-1B providers were employed in rural areas this year, the two rural health organizations wrote in their letter to the Trump administration.
Workers walk through the hallway of a newly opened field hospital.
J-1 visas, the most common type held by foreign doctors during their residencies and other postgraduate training in the U.S., require them to return to their home country for two years before applying for an H-1B.
But a government program called the Conrad 30 Waiver Program allows up to 1,500 J-1 holders a year to remain in the U.S. and apply for an H-1B in exchange for working for three years in a provider shortage area, which includes many rural communities.
Trump’s proclamation says employers that sponsor H-1B workers already inside the U.S., such as doctors with these waivers, won’t have to pay the six-figure fee, a nuance clarified in guidance released about a month later.
But employers will have to pay the new fee when hiring doctors and others who apply while living outside the U.S.
Alyson Kornele, CEO of West River Health Services, said most of the foreign nurses and lab techs it hires are outside the U.S. when they apply.
Ivan Mitchell, CEO of Great Plains Health in North Platte, Nebraska, said most of his hospital’s H-1B physicians were inside the U.S. on other visas when they applied. But he said physical therapists, nurses, and lab techs typically apply from abroad.
Holzkamm said it took five to eight months to hire H-1B applicants at her lab before the new fee was introduced.
Bobby Mukkamala, a surgeon and the president of the American Medical Association, said Republican and Democratic lawmakers are concerned about the ramifications for rural health care.
They include Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who said he planned to reach out about possible exemptions.
“We want to make it easier, not harder, and less expensive, not more expensive, for people who need the workforce,” the Republican told KFF Health News in September.
Thune’s office did not respond to questions about whether the senator has heard from the administration regarding potential waivers for health workers.
The Trump administration is facing at least two lawsuits attempting to block the new fee. One group of plaintiffs includes a company that recruits foreign nurses and a union that represents medical graduates. Another lawsuit, by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, mentions concerns about the physician shortage and health systems’ ability to afford the new fee.
Kornele said West River won’t be able to afford a $100,000 fee so it’s doubling down on local recruiting and retention.
But Holzkamm said she hasn’t been successful in finding lab techs from North Dakota colleges, even those who intern at the hospital. She said West River can’t compete with the salaries offered in bigger cities.
“It’s a bad cycle right now. We’re in a lot of trouble,” she said.
One of the features that sadly didn't make it into the recent Linux 6.19 merge window was the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver for supporting the web camera found with the high-end HP ZBook Ultra G1a and also expected to be used by future flagship AMD Ryzen laptops...
At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related toJeffrey Epstein— including a photograph showing President Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.
The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein's longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
The Justice Department didn’t answer questions Saturday about why the files disappeared but said in a post on X that “photos and other materials will continue being reviewed and redacted consistent with the law in an abundance of caution as we receive additional information.”
x
Photos and other materials will continue being reviewed and redacted consistent with the law in an abundance of caution as we receive additional information. https://t.co/xXngYQ4Qaw
Online, the unexplained missing files fueled speculation about what was taken down and why the public was not notified, compounding long-standing intrigue about Epstein and the powerful figures who surrounded him. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee pointed to the missing image featuring a Trump photo in a post on X, writing: “What else is being covered up? We need transparency for the American public.”
The episode deepened concerns that had already emerged from the Justice Department’s much-anticipated document release. The tens of thousands of pages made public offered little new insight into Epstein’s crimes or the prosecutorial decisions that allowed him to avoid serious federal charges for years, while omitting some of the most closely watched materials, including FBI interviews with victims and internal Justice Department memos on charging decisions.
Scant new insight in the initial disclosures
Some of the most consequential records expected about Epstein are nowhere to be found in the Justice Department's initial disclosures, which span tens of thousands of pages.
This photo released by the U.S. Department of Justice shows a room in Jeffrey Epstein's home in July 2019, in New York.
Missing are FBI interviews with survivors and internal Justice Department memos examining charging decisions — records that could have helped explain how investigators viewed the case and why Epstein was allowed in 2008 to plead guilty to a relatively minor state-level prostitution charge.
The gaps go further.
The records, required to be released under a recent law passed by Congress, hardly reference several powerful figures long associated with Epstein, including Britain’s former Prince Andrew, renewing questions about who was scrutinized, who was not, and how much the disclosures truly advance public accountability
Among the fresh nuggets: insight into the Justice Department’s decision to abandon an investigation into Epstein in the 2000s, which enabled him to plead guilty to that state-level charge, and apreviously unseen 1996 complaintaccusing Epstein of stealing photographs of children.
The releases so far have been heavy on images of Epstein’s homes in New York City and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with some photos of celebrities and politicians.
There was a series of never-before-seenphotos of former President Bill Clintonbut fleetingly few of Trump. Both have been associated with Epstein, but both have since disowned those friendships. Neither has been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and there was no indication the photos played a role in the criminal cases brought against him.
Despite a Friday deadline set by Congress to make everything public, the Justice Department said it plans to release records on a rolling basis. It blamed the delay on the time-consuming process of obscuring survivors' names and other identifying information. The department has not given any notice when more records might arrive.
That approach angered some Epstein accusers andmembers of Congresswho fought to pass the law forced the department to act. Instead of marking the end of a yearslong battle for transparency, the document release Friday was merely the beginning of an indefinite wait for a complete picture of Epstein’s crimes and the steps taken to investigate them.
“I feel like again the DOJ, the justice system is failing us,” said Marina Lacerda, who alleges Epstein started sexually abusing her at his New York City mansion when she was 14.
Many of the long-anticipated records were redacted or lacked context
Federal prosecutors in New York brought sex trafficking charges against Epstein in 2019, buthe killed himself in jailafter his arrest.
The documents just made public were a sliver of potentially millions of pages records in the department’s possession. In one example, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Manhattan federal prosecutors had more than 3.6 million records from sex trafficking investigations into Epstein and Maxwell, though many duplicated material already turned over by the FBI.
This photo released by the U.S. Department of Justice shows a room in Jeffrey Epstein's home in July 2019, in New York.
Many of the records released so far had been made public in court filings, congressional releases or freedom of information requests, though, for the first time, they wereall in one placeand available for the public to search for free.
Ones that were new were often lacking necessary context or heavily blacked out. A 119-page document marked “Grand Jury-NY," likely from one of the federal sex trafficking investigations that led to the charges against Epstein in 2019 or Maxwell in 2021, was entirely blacked out.
Trump’s Republican allies seized on the Clinton images, including photos of the Democrat with singers Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. There were also photos of Epstein with actors Chris Tucker and Kevin Spacey, and even Epstein with TV newscaster Walter Cronkite. But none of the photos had captions and was no explanation given for why any of them were together.
The meatiest records released so far showed that federal prosecutors had what appeared to be a strong case against Epstein in 2007 yet never charged him.
Transcripts of grand jury proceedings, released publicly for the first time, included testimony from FBI agents who described interviews they had with several girls and young women who described being paid to perform sex acts for Epstein. The youngest was 14 and in ninth grade.
One had told investigators about being sexually assaulted by Epstein when she initially resisted his advances during a massage.
Another, then 21, testified before the grand jury about how Epstein had hired her when she was 16 to perform a sexual massage and how she had gone on to recruit other girls to do the same.
“For every girl that I brought to the table he would give me $200,” she said. They were mostly people she knew from high school, she said. “I also told them that if they are under age, just lie about it and tell him that you are 18.”
The documents also contain a transcript of an interview Justice Department lawyers did more than a decade later with the U.S. attorney who oversaw the case, Alexander Acosta, about his ultimate decision not to bring federal charges.
Acosta, who was labor secretary during Trump’s first term, cited concerns about whether a jury would believe Epstein’s accusers.
He also said the Justice Department might have been more reluctant to make a federal prosecution out of a case that straddled the legal border between sex trafficking and soliciting prostitution, something more commonly handled by state prosecutors.
“I’m not saying it was the right view,” Acosta added. He also said that the public today would likely view the survivors differently.
“There’s been a lot of changes in victim shaming,” Acosta said.
Jennifer Freeman, an attorney representing Epstein accuser Maria Farmer and other survivors, said Saturday that her client feels vindicated after the document release. Farmer sought for years documents backing up her claim that Epstein and Maxwell were in possession of child sexual abuse images.
“It’s a triumph and a tragedy,” she said. “It looks like the government did absolutely nothing. Horrible things have happened and if they investigated in even the smallest way, they could have stopped him.”
Yeah, right. The Scope takes a look at who's filling the immigrant beds at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility - the only jail in Massachusetts that still houses ICE grabees: 87.3% are occupied by men with no criminal records at all. And as we learned Friday, many of those are being denied their Constitutional rights, unless they're lucky/smart enough to get a lawyer to fight for them in federal court.
I think "your road system gets completely clogged by stranded robotaxis" is actually a problem requiring a solution.
Waymo halted service in San Francisco as of Saturday at 8 p.m., following a power outage that left approximately 30% of the city without power. The autonomous cars have been causing traffic jams throughout the city, as the vehicles seem unable to function without traffic signals.
Many reasons, but one is that power outages might correspond to times when emergency vehicle need to move around.
On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President Donald Trump’s top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city’s diplomatic quarter, for a private dinner.
The visitors from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent known for a series of public lawsuits against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil executive who had done a stint in government under the first Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d previously managed communications for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. This year, all had been appointed to leadership roles in the U.S. Agency for International Development, the premier government humanitarian agency in the world.
Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides hadcelebrated USAID’s destructionover cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital. They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.
When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain, face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.
A top concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Food Program’s operation in Kenya, where about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable people on earth, relied on the organization to survive. After providing$112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly cut off money in January without warning, leaving the program with no time to find adequate support or import the food needed for the rest of the year.
For months afterward, U.S. government and humanitarian officials warned Washington that the cutoff had led to increasingly dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, including Thornton, to renew WFP’s grant and give the money it needed to avert disaster. The embassy in Nairobi sent at least eight cables to the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the situation on the ground and projecting mass hunger, violence and regional instability.
Those warnings went unheeded. Rubio, facing pressure from lawmakers and humanitarian groups, nevertheless publicly asserted that the agency’s mass cuts had spared food programs — even as the administration failed to fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”
By the spring, WFP still had not received funding, ran low on supplies and would be forced to stop feeding many of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp in the world, WFP cut rations to their lowest in history, trapping most of the 308,000 people in the camp with almost nothing to eat.
They began to starve, and many — mostly children — died because their malnourished bodies couldn’t fight off infections, ProPublica found while reporting in the camp. Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped cars, threatening a new migration crisis on the continent. They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving in Kakuma.
To press the urgency of the situation in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officials enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of more than two decades. Pajevic arrived at the Tribe Hotel early. She brought props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a collection of Tupperware containers with different amounts of dry rice, lentils and oil.
As they ate, she placed each container on the table. The largest represented 2,100 daily calories, what humanitarians like her consider the minimum daily intake for an adult. The next container showed 840 calories. That is what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma were set to receive come August. Another third would get just over 400 calories. Then she showed an empty container. The rest — almost half of the people in Kakuma — would get nothing at all.
Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she said a government official in Liberia had once told her: The only difference between life and death during a famine is WFP and the U.S. government, its largest donor.
“The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic said, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”
The response was muted, according to other people familiar with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for management and resources, said the decision to renew WFP’s grant was now with the State Department, and gave no indication he would appeal on the organization’s behalf. Thornton, a foreign service officer who ascended to a leadership post under Trump, did not speak. Instead, he spent much of the meal looking at his cellphone.
Over a dinner at the luxury Tribe Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, World Food Program staff demonstrated the impact of Trump administration funding cuts.
The dinner plates were cleared and the visitors headed to the airport. “They just took zero responsibility for this,” one of the attendees said, “and zero responsibility for what’s going to happen.”
The details of this episode are drawn from accounts by six people familiar with the trip, as well as internal government records. Most people in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. This year,ProPublica,The New Yorkerand other outlets have documented violence and hunger due to the aid cuts in Kenya’s camps. But the scale of suffering throughout Kakuma — and the string of decisions by American officials that contributed to it — have not been previously reported.
The camp had seen similar spikes in pediatric malnutrition in recent years, but they were tied to natural causes, such as malaria outbreaks, extreme drought or COVID-19, according to staff of the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s only hospital.
This was something different: an American-made hunger crisis. So far this year, community health workers have referred almost 12,000 malnourished children for immediate medical attention.
“What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said one aid worker who has been in Kakuma for decades. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official insisted that no one had died as a result of foreign aid cuts. The official also said that the U.S. still gives WFP hundreds of millions a year and the administration is shifting to investments that will better serve both the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We just signed a landmark health agreement with Kenya,” the official said, pointing torecent endorsementsby government officials there. “That’s going to transform their ability to build their domestic capacity, to take care of their populations, to improve the quality of health care in Kenya.”
***
The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Hotel, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl bed in the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old baby, Santina. The name means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary could only pray that God would save her baby’s life.
Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital four days earlier after the infant developed severe diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for their 2-year-old, Grace.
Mary Sunday and Juma Lotunya at their home in Kakuma
Devout Christians in their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma together from South Sudan. They considered parenthood a sacred responsibility — especially Sunday, whose own mother died when she was young. As their family grew, Lotunya had hoped to start a small shop so he could afford to send their daughters to school. “I had that simple dream,” he said.
But in June, when Santina was 6 months old, WFP cut the camp’s food rations. Families like theirs were allotted just a small amount of rice and lentils — 630 daily calories per person — which they were expected to make last until August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it as long as they could, eating one small meal per day. But the food ran out before the end of June. Sunday stopped producing enough breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby baby began to waste away. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Santina weighed only 11 pounds. Staff noted in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.
Sunday watched helplessly under the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital staff pumped her baby with medicine and tried to reintroduce more calories.
On the clinic’s walls, next to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of data tracking how many children and babies had died in the room this year. Sunday spoke no English, but she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 per month on average, including the highest number of edema cases, a key marker of severity, in years.
Another row on the whiteboards tallied those who never left the clinic: At least 54 children have died in the hospital with complications brought on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, including a surge in the spring when families first began rationing their food because of the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this year is the first in decades that early childhood deaths will increase, theGates Foundationrecently reported. Researchers said a key factor is the cuts to foreign aid.
In the hospital’s courtyard, another mother, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned against a tree with her two children at her feet and said she was considering an extreme solution. “The thing I think about is committing suicide,” she told ProPublica, “because I heard the U.N. takes care of the kids when the parents are gone.”
Women line up to receive nutritional food for their babies, who are suffering from malnutrition, at the only hospital in Kakuma.
Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa since the United Nations and Kenyan government began accepting refugees there in 1992. People have come fleeing deadly violence in some two dozen countries — mainly from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but also as far away as Afghanistan. Covering an area about half the size of Manhattan, Kakuma is a loose constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metal slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched together by rutted motorcycle trails.
Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Movies have been made, including a documentary about the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of unaccompanied minors escaping war and conflict. Angelina Jolie opened a school there.
A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. once called Kakuma the hottest, driest land on earth, “a place that is very close to the edge of Hades.”
“We are sustaining life,” she said, “by helping fund the World Food Program.”
Women carry jerricans of water in the Kakuma Refugee Camp. Access to clean water remains a daily challenge for many residents.
In the past, USAID gave WFP’s global operations billions every year, including the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The aid is one end of a bargain to bring stability to the region. Countries like Kenya take in refugees from a host of other countries fleeing violence, famine or natural disasters. In exchange, the U.S., along with other wealthy nations vested in saving lives, help foot the bill for essential services. Without food, experts say, refugees would likely spill out of Kenya into other countries. Conflicts may last longer, claim more lives and create new refugees.
USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for so long that it’s a literal building block in the camp; millions of old cans of cooking oil bearing the agency’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.
Newcomers are meant to stay at this reception center for only two weeks, but with no space for them in the camp, many have been living here for months or years.
When the Trump administration froze thousands of USAID programs during a putative review of the agency’s operations in January, Rubio insisted food programs would be spared.
But then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to extend WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the typical timetable the organization needed in order to ship food to Kakuma by summer.
WFP was blindsided. The organization’s leaders had received no notice ahead of the cuts and no communication about whether the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, except causing pain,” said one U.N. official. “And that is not forgivable.”
Even before the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls in recent years had forced the organization to drop rations by around 20% to 40% throughout the camp. To adjust for the long term, WFP was planning to reform its model in Kenya to make sure the small minority of people with some income, like small-business owners, didn’t receive food.
Thousands of Refugee Families in Northwest Kenya Starved After USAID Funding Cuts
In August, food rations were cut to historic lows. Almost half the Kakuma camp got nothing at all.
But this year, WFP’s leaders were forced to stretch their remaining supplies from last year. They made the drastic decision to cut rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s history. They also reduced distributions to once every other month instead of monthly.
In August, the handouts would become even more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize families based on need. They determined only half the population would receive food. Most people learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.
Across the world in Washington, the fate of places like Kakuma was in the hands of a select few political appointees, including Thornton, who wasnamed the agency’s deputy chief of staffon March 18. Thornton first worked beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of foreign assistance, and later under Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk hire. Besides Rubio, none of them were subject to Senate confirmation.
Kakuma, in northern Kenya, is the third-largest refugee camp in the world.
As pleas poured in from government officials in Washington and abroad to restart aid operations in Africa, including WFP in Kenya, the appointees often failed to act, records and interviews show.
On March 18, USAID’s political leadership invited career government aid officials from the agency’s major bureaus to pitch the handful of programs they thought were most critical. It was the only time the agency’s Africa bureau had an opportunity to make a full-throated case for its development programs across the continent. They had just 45 minutes to do it.
In the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship,an organizationthat champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton said in podcast appearances that his campaign against President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers introduced him to a government bureaucracy “that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves” and requires “fear and accountability” to come to heel,Mother Jones reported.
As part of the meeting, Brian Frantz, acting head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with nearly 25 years of experience, pitched Kenya as an important trade and national security partner. At one point when discussing another country, Frantz mentioned the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, using the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, according to two attendees. Then he asked: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua?
The USAID officials were stunned. “That was the one thing he said in that meeting,” one of the attendees recalled. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter.”
In a blistering memo circulated around the agency before he was laid off in late summer, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how they had prevented lifesaving programs from coming back online by refusing to pay for services already rendered and restricting access to USAID’s payment systems. He said they had frequently changed the process for how to appeal program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.
“We were given make-work to keep us spinning our wheels,” another former official recalled.
Refugees prepare to leave the Kalobeyei settlement, an extension of the Kakuma camp, in August after running out of food.
Months before the last-ditch appeal at the Tribe dinner, embassy staff in Nairobi had also tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the acting U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital where Sunday and Santina would later check in.
After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a series of cables to Washington documenting thechaos and death in Kakumaand other camps caused by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On May 6, the embassy wrote that declining food assistance had “already contributed to several deaths and could result in escalating instability in Kenya.”
At one point, a group of teenagers and young men in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set fire to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by shooting at them, wounding at least two, including a teenager who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head. Ordinarily considered among the most peaceful refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Aid workers hid inside their compounds.
Sexual assault, violent protests and other crimes would only increase without aid, Kenyan government officials warned the embassy, according to another cable. They predicted the cuts could destabilize one of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host thousands of refugees, many of whom would likely otherwise join the illegal migration flows bound for Europe and the United States.”
Many people, particularly those from South Sudan, returned home to the threat of violence.
At a roadside staging area, some of those fleeing Kakuma hired smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the same country where they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen women, children and babies contorted inside cars with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s hunger that chased us,” one woman said through the cracked window of a car about to depart. “It’s hunger that’s making us leave.”
In mid-May, USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau in Washington delivered a memo again requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “Without this additional assistance,” the appeal stated, “the WFP-provided food rations will reduce from normal levels of 60% to 20%, putting nearly 1 million people at risk of starvation and death and likely triggering additional insecurity within the refugee camps.”
Records show seven advisers in the chain of command signed off on more funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request got to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of staff, he did not. No money went through at that time. “Thornton became a real road block,” a former USAID official said.
Thornton did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions about episodes like this, the senior State Department official said the Office of Management and Budget, not USAID or the State Department, has ultimate authority to approve new foreign aid money. They said they worked closely with OMB to review all of the funding requests. “In order to make an obligation like that,” the official said, “you need to have apportioned funds from OMB.”
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB’s communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false.
***
Santina declined rapidly in the days after arriving at the clinic. Hospital staff tried everything. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen support and updated the diagnosis to marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition where the body starts to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s color faded and she struggled to breathe. She became unresponsive to pain.
The family’s only picture of Santina is on their refugee registration. (ID number blurred by ProPublica.)
Cradling her baby, Sunday thought about her oldest daughter back at home. Two-year-old Grace wore a little bell around her ankle because she was prone to wandering off. Sunday thought: What will Grace eat today? Tomorrow? Will she end up here too?
Just after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital staff pronounced Santina dead.
A doctor and nutrition specialist with the International Rescue Committee said Santina almost certainly would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the cause was clear: After starving for weeks, his wife could no longer breastfeed, which is why Santina had become so tiny and weak. “That is why she died,” he said.
Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete building at the edge of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, just on the other side of the hospital fence.
Once proud to be the mother she’d grown up missing, shame washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mother enough,” she said later, nearly in a whisper.
***
In early August, Sunday came home after helping to harvest the sallow greens a neighbor was growing out of dry, cracked earth. In exchange, they had given her a few handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in fabric. It was the family’s only food.
The August food distribution was supposed to come any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings determined that only half of Kakuma would receive food, a decision most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace were among those who would get nothing.
Someone had stolen the roof off the family’s single-room mud house, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cover, which was disintegrating in the hot sun. Grace played on the dirt patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her parents, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.
Doting on her, they said, was the only way to cope with losing Santina. They have just one picture of their youngest child: a fuzzy, black-and-white image on the family’s refugee registration. “But,” Sunday said, looking at her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I have Grace.”
***
In late September, the State Department signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This year, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% less than it received last year and, critically, the funds arrived nine months into the year.
WFP has told refugees it plans to provide food through at least March. Even then, most families are set to receive between one-fifth and three-fifths of the recommended minimum daily calories.
Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would each get the equivalent of 420 calories a day.
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 290 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
As we move through the month of December, we are now entering the official U.S. winter, thewinter solstice.
I decided to listen to December and solstice tunes in multiple genres, rather than post a Christmas or Hanukkah collection which I’ve done here in the past, like last year’s Black Music Sunday from this time of year.
For many of us who live or have lived in New York City or visited during the holiday season, thewinter solstice celebrations at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, spearheaded by saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Paul Winter, have been a not-to-miss event:
In 1980, Paul Winter and the Consort were invited to be artists-in-residence at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Paul Winter explains: “The dean had a personal mission to create a bridge between spirituality and ecology. … The premise of the invitation was entirely secular; it was not to have us play liturgical music. We could present any events we wanted, as long as we produced them ourselves.”
Since that time, the Winter Solstice Celebration has become a beloved annual tradition in New York City and for millions around the country, broadcast live on NPR. […]
The Winter Solstice Celebration is a contemporary take on ancient solstice rituals, when people felt a calling to come together on the longest night of the year, to welcome the return of the Sun and birth of the new year.
“Central to all the traditions of solstice is the renewal of spirit,” Paul notes, “symbolized by the rebirth of the sun. Winter solstice is a time for healing and hope; it is a time to celebrate community and relatedness; and a time to honor the diversity and the unity of the great cornucopia of life on Earth. Remembering the solstice, we resonate once again with the rhythm of the cosmos and allow our hearts to embrace the optimism of our ancient knowledge that the light will overcome the darkness.”
The film “Solstice Saga Celebration” is a retrospective three-hour video odyssey that interweaves iconic performances from our first forty years of celebrations at the Cathedral”:
I particularly appreciated the performances by gospel artist Theresa Thomason and Brazilian singer Fabiana Cozza. Here’s a link to the detailed notes written by Winter about the music and the performers.
When referencing December, the late greatCount Basiejoined up withThe Mills Brothers to record their “The Board of Directors” album which was released in 1968, and it included a tune simply named “December.”
Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by Stevie’s fascination with the seasons. When he writes, “I bet that you can’t even see the sun / Although the sun is shining right before your eyes,” it’s as though he’s telling us to appreciate what we have. On a personal level, it’s a blind man telling the rest of us to appreciate the valuable gift of sight. On a general or metaphorical level, it’s a gifted songwriter showing us that beauty is all around us and yet, we don’t even notice it, let alone appreciate it.
Laura Nyro is one of my all-time favorites (I’m biased—she went to the High School of Music & Art with me). I featured her here in 2014 in a December Christmas post.Diane Garisto’s tribute website does a deep dive into her life and music.
I’ll close with music from Maurice White, Allee Willis, and Al Mckay, who wrote an update to Earth, Wind & Fire’s famed tune “September” for the month of December:
Since Linux 6.16 the Intel APX support has been ready for the kernel infrastructure and goes along with the compiler toolchain support for Advanced Performance Extensions with the likes of GCC and LLVM/Clang. The latest element being worked on for APX enablement in the open-source/Linux world is for allowing KVM guest virtual machines (VMs) to make use of APX...
Most notable with the input subsystem updates sent out today ahead of the Linux 6.19-rc2 release is some new hardware support. New this week is adding support for CRKD Guitars for those into musical gaming/apps...
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