Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

The Fine Print

As Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (more accurately called the MAGA Murder Bill) is winding its way through the compliant and spineless “public servants” (note quotation marks) in the House and Senate, a great deal of the public’s attention will be focused on the bill’s main thrust, which is to rob the poor to further enrich the obscenely wealthy. In order to achieve that goal, the GOP–which used to portray itself as the party of “fiscal sanity”–proposes to add 3.6 trillion dollars to the deficit over the next ten years.

But the overall cruelty of the measure shouldn’t preclude a look at the fine print–the nasty culture-war provisions that Republicans in Congress slipped in, in hopes that discussions of the major elements would shield them from view. Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect recently listed several of them. 

Perhaps the most egregious is an effort to cripple the courts. A provision would prohibit any funding from being used to carry out court orders holding executive branch officials in contempt. It would enable Trump and his officials to defy court orders at will. It is almost certainly unconstitutional—but then, so are most of the actions of this appalling administration.

The bill protects the tax preparation industry by repealing the Direct File measure sponsored by the Biden administration. That program allowed taxpayers to save money by using a free IRS tool to file their tax returns, relieving them of the need to pay commercial tax preparers.

The bill also adds to MAGA’s savage attacks on migrants, adding $45 billion for construction of immigration jails. (This is more than 13 times ICE’s current detention budget.) In addition to the money, the provision would allow for the indefinite detention of immigrant children, and would charge families $3,500 to reunite with a child who arrived alone at the border. Asylum seekers will have to pay an “application fee” of at least $1,000. (Because people fleeing horrific circumstances are presumably flush?)

Just in case some non-profit organizations in civil society have the nerve to criticise our would-be king, the reconciliation bill gives the administration the power to label nonprofits as “terrorist-supporting organizations,” a designation that can be used to terminate their tax status. Giving the administration such authority would be an open invitation to our demented autocrat to suppress the free speech and activism of climate and civil liberties organizations, among others.

Other bits of “fine print” more directly support the major goal of the bill: protecting the extremely wealthy against efforts to get them to pay their fair share of taxes–basically, exempting the rich from paying their dues to the country that made their accumulation of wealth possible. As Kuttner reports, the bill would gut an Estate Tax that is already massively favorable to the top 1%..

As if the current exemptions were not enough, the bill raises the no-tax floor to a staggering $15 million for single people and $30 million for couples in 2026. So a couple could leave $29.99 million to their heirs, tax-free. As recently as 2001, 2.1 percent of estates paid some tax. With this change, the percentage falls to less than 0.08 percent.

There’s much more. The bill weakens the Child Tax Credit, by lowering the eligibility income threshold. Millions of children will suddenly become ineligible. It expands school vouchers–continuing the GOP effort to destroy public education and shift tax dollars to religious institutions, in violation of the First Amendment. It includes what Kuttner calls “Stealth Cuts’ to the Affordable Care Act, with a provision that will increase out-of-pocket costs and make insurance more expensive.

And speaking of despicable: One bit of fine print supports gun silencers. “Buried deep in the bill is a provision that repeals the $200 excise tax on the sale of gun silencers, which have no lawful purpose other than concealing shootings.”

Several of these measures ought not survive the rules governing the budget reconciliation progress, which require that measures in a reconciliation bill be limited to budget and spending. Under those rules, ordinary legislation is not permissible. Kuttner notes that the Senate rules on germaneness are tighter than those in the House, “thanks to the Byrd Rule, which holds that “extraneous” matters may not be included in a budget bill.” Given the cravenness of the Republican Senators, those rules are a thin reed, but we can hope…

The real merit of the “Big Beautiful Bill” is educational. It is a road-map, an “up-front” admission of where MAGA Republicans want to take America. Like Project 2025, it is a candid statement of purpose, an acknowledgement of their determination to remake the United States into a medieval  country characterized by corruption, chaos and cruelty.

We can’t let that happen.

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The “Naughty” List

Santa Claus isn’t the only one who is keeping a list of “who is naughty and who is nice.” Charlie Sykes recently brought some limited order out of the chaos of Trump’s first months–a real service, since most of us have been beaten down by the daily firehose of assaults on decency, the Constitution and the rule of law–the tactic Steve Bannon has called “flooding the zone with shit.”

Sykes assembled his list in order to criticize Chuck Schumer, who has finally graduated from sending “stern letters” and moved to block Trump appointees. Sykes asks “What took you so long? Why didn’t you act when”…and then he provides his list of Trumpian assaults that should have prompted active blowback when they occurred.

Granted, Sykes’ list isn’t comprehensive, so intensely has the zone been flooded, but here are the acts that he says should have triggered action from Schumer when they occurred:

  •  blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, including those who assaulted police officers.
  • his purge of the FBI, targeting agents who had investigated his own misconduct.
  • suspending enforcement of the foreign bribery ban.
  • calling for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him.
  • firing the head of the Office of Special Counsel who protects whistleblowers.
  • firing the head of the Office of Government Ethics.
  • firing the prosecutors who worked on Capitol riot investigations.
  • slashing the office that prosecutes misconduct by public officials.
  • dropping charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams agreement to work with ICE — a move that led to the resignation of the acting SDNY U.S. attorney and several other federal prosecutors.
  • Trump’s refusal to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. — stating that he could, but wasn’t going to.
  • Trump’s suggestion to the president of El Salvador that he would send “homegrown” criminals — American citizens — to his notorious prison.
  •  Trump’s executive orders targeting individuals who had criticized him — including Chris Krebs, who had challenged his 2020 election lies.
  • stripping the security clearances of law firms who had challenged him. 
  • Trump’s threats to strip licenses from media critics.
  • allowing Elon Musk’s team to access sensitive and protected taxpayer information.
  • when his top aides were caught chatting about military action on Signal.
  • firing six National Security Council officials on advice from far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.
  • refusing to rule out the use of military force to seize Greenland. 
  • Trump’s purge of top generals, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
  • sending masked agents to seize people on the streets.
  • arresting international students for little more than for writing op-eds.
  • when White House aide Stephen Miller said that administration was considering suspending habeas corpus.

Sykes list–which I would emphasize is far from comprehensive–was generated as Americans learned of Qatar’s offer of a “gift”–a plane described as a “palace in the sky.”  The offer was, as Sykes says, “a very visible symbol of Trump’s susceptibility to corruption.” But–as he also reminds us– we have seen countless other examples.

Sen. Chris Murphy, for example, has been banging the drum about Trump’s potential $TRUMP crypto conflict of interest for months. “My hair has been on fire about the meme coin from day one,” Murphy told The Washington Post. “That is a level of corruption that is just absolutely stunning. It was already the most corrupt thing a president has ever done in the history of the United States.”

What didn’t make Syke’s list is the Trump administration’s effort to neuter the other two branches of government.

Under the Constitution, Congress and the courts are “co-equal” with the Executive branch, but Trump and MAGA have bullied the Republicans in Congress into submission. (Given that the GOP is currently in the majority, Democrats have been left with limited options for resistance–a good reason to put those options to maximum use.)

Unlike Congress, the courts–at least, the lower federal courts–have fulfilled their Constitutional role. They have ruled for the plaintiffs in virtually every case challenging Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional actions–but while Trump has given lip service to obeying those rulings, he continues to ignore a number of them. At the same time, he has increased his threats against judges who dare to rule against him, and MAGA thugs (Trump’s “brownshirts”) have taken to issuing threats against the judiciary and their families.

We the People need to leave a large civic lump of coal in the Trump stocking. Sooner rather than later.

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One More Time

Yesterday, I posted about Trump’s attacks on the basic research that generates medical breakthroughs, and the critical importance of the government grants that fund that research. Medical advances are obviously salient to the general public; we care about cures for the diseases that cause death and suffering, and when we understand the significance of assaults on the research that makes those breakthroughs possible, we oppose them.

What is less well understood is that basic research funded by government has given America its global dominance in technology and innovation.

A recent essay from the Washington Post reminds readers what is at stake as Musk and Trump wreak havoc with those research grants.  reminding us that “we are the nation that spawned the internet and GPS, and has the most Nobel laureates curing deadly diseases, making intelligent machines and shedding light on the dark secrets of the universe.”

Whether they are geeks in garages or eggheads in university labs, American entrepreneurs have built their ideas and fortunes on the back of basic research supported by taxpayers, who then reap the rewards. It’s not an accident of geography or artifact of culture that the United States has bred some of the best inventors of the 20th and 21st century. The hidden engine of the country’s illustrious track record has been the grants given to academic researchers by federal agencies that the U.S. DOGE Service has been decimating and that President Donald Trump proposes to shrink catastrophically in the next budget.

Lithium-ion batteries that power your smartphone and computer, weather forecasts that help you figure out what to wear, wings of airplanes that take you on vacation and all the messaging you do online can be traced to the symbiosis between research funded by government and private industry, the scaffolding for mind-melds of scholars and entrepreneurs. Moderna’s multibillion-dollar coronavirus vaccine that saved millions of lives owes its origins to decades of research on mRNA, viruses and vaccines that was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Google arose from a National Science Foundation digital libraries grant that supported then-Stanford University graduate student Larry Page. We have QR codes, barcodes and MRIs today because of basic research investments in mathematics and physics.

The essay explains why the free market will not fill the gap. Corporate and business research understandably has a narrower focus and shorter time horizon than the basic research funded by government. Its timelines are adequate for building a somewhat better gadget, but there is no business purpose to be served for funding open-ended questions with no immediate, obvious payoff–questions that, over time, have yielded the big breakthroughs.

Giving out grants for what might look frivolous or wasteful on the surface is a feature, not a bug, of publicly funded research. Consider that Agriculture Department and NIH grants to study chemicals in wild yams led to cortisone and medical steroids becoming widely affordable. Or that knowing more about the fruit fly has aided discoveries related to human aging, Parkinson’s disease and cancer.

We all benefit greatly from what the author calls “America’s innovation engine.” Yet Congress is about to allow the Trump administration to break it, because most of the general public doesn’t yet see–or understand– what’s being lost.

The most profitable companies in the country continue to trade on investments in research made decades ago, while political leaders strip the next generation of the chance to become groundbreaking inventors and innovators. Preventing such entrepreneurs from rising might even protect the big companies’ profits. Little wonder, then, that many of the richest men in the world — men who call themselves innovators — have done little to protect the invention engine from Trump’s havoc. Or that the richest of them, Elon Musk, has even been an architect of its destruction. Meanwhile, Musk keeps boosting his own companies with public funds, proving that at least his private-sector innovation depends on the government he is stripping for parts.

In the late 20th century, the United States invested in knowledge while other countries invested  in infrastructure projects that were more visible and politically palatable. As a result, their growth stagnated while America’s thrived. America’s investments in research built great universities that became magnets for the world’s brightest minds– and for the immigrants who founded major companies in the United States.

As the author concluded,

There is no plainer betrayal of the MAGA promise to restore the nation’s storied past than to destroy this legacy of invention. What we’re losing is far more important, however, than the pride one felt being part of that America. We’re losing the country’s future.­

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Science Isn’t Waste Or Fraud

The daily damage being done by the Trump administration has given rise to a grim debate: how much of the wreckage can be remedied, or at least ameliorated, and how much is irremediable? How many of the attacks on purportedly “wasteful” and/or “fraudulent” expenditures are really based upon the appalling ignorance of those leveling the attacks–their profound lack of understanding of how things work?

Example: The sudden and draconian cuts to scientific and medical research don’t just threaten to cripple US global research prominence. They’ve thrown a wrench into promising research into cures for diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinson’s and Cancer. 

Last week, the news media reported on two breakthroughs: the use of advances in gene editing to cure a baby born with a rare genetic disorder; and a new blood test to detect Alzheimers. The exciting aspect of the technique used to cure the 9½-month-old baby is its potential to help people suffering with thousands of other uncommon genetic diseases. The blood test makes it possible to detect Alzheimer’s disease much earlier. As one doctor pointed out, the test will allow primary care physicians to order a blood test and, if that test is positive, immediately refer a patient to a neurologist. He predicted that the test will “dramatically change clinical care.”

These advances and others like them didn’t emerge from a few weeks experiments in a laboratory. They built on years of scientific research, much of which had no immediate relevance to the reported advancements.

Most Americans don’t recognize the importance of basic research–it simply isn’t salient to citizens the way cuts in Medicaid or attacks on Social Security are. And very few Americans understand the long-term and disastrous effects of abrupt terminations of multi-year grants.

As Josh Marshall has argued at Talking Points Memo,

Basic and applied research generates huge dividends for a society. But its immediate and salient relevance to the average voter varies greatly. Theoretical physics is very worth funding and has many real world applications. But its relevance to — and just as importantly, its political traction with — a middle income couple in your average community where he’s a bus driver and she’s a nurse may not be crystal clear. Yet everyone knows a family member or loved one or friend stricken with cancer, or conditions tied to aging and dementia, heart disease, or any number of other conditions against which medical science is making steady progress. The point is so obvious it barely merits arguing: People fear death and disease. They look to science for hope of cures and some promise of long and robust lives. For two or three generations, that hope has been tied to researchers, somewhere, perhaps operating with something akin to magic but consistently producing new and wonderful things….

The challenge is that the world of biomedical research is insular. It operates with a system of internal governance and mores that are broadly understandable to people who’ve been exposed to university life, especially in the sciences. But that’s a very, very rarified discourse — peer review, study sections, fundamental vs. applied research, pipelines of new researchers, etc. Let’s start with just the foundational point that almost no one has any fucking idea what any of those terms and concepts mean. And for most things, that’s fine. Society should be well-run and knowledgeable enough to keep its scientists and researchers funded so that they don’t need to focus on the song and dance of making the case for what they do in the public square. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we’re living in right now.

Researchers have an additional and under-ordinary-circumstances very understandable desire not to overpromise or give false hope. This is rooted both in ethical imperatives and the uncertainty-driven empiricism that is the hallmark of any good scientist. But at the moment, it is a big problem because it is providing an unmerited advantage to those who are using lies to shut down medical research in the U.S. 

Marshall’s essay is worth reading in its entirety, but his essential point is that people with big megaphones–those in the various “disease communities”– should inform the general public about what is happening. Loudly. As he says, “The more widely known this becomes, the more salient it becomes, the worse it will get for those people who are pushing these cuts, or at least trying to make them permanent through the 2026 budget process.”

Trump and Musk gave carte blanche to know-it-all interns who have no comprehension of how science or government works. Millions of Americans will suffer unnecessarily as a result.

Welcome to MAGA (Morons Are Governing America) world.

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Taxes And Spending

I am not an economist, nor do I play one on this blog. But let’s talk about economics and Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” 

As Heather Cox Richardson recently reported, despite the GOP’s pious (and entirely bogus) expressed concerns about the deficit, the speed with which Congressional Republicans are trying to pass this monstrosity is rooted in their effort to avoid widespread recognition of what it actually does. The bill blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and connected, and it does so by sticking it to the needy, via draconian cuts to Medicaid.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that extending the tax cuts for the already-rich will cost at least $4.6 trillion over the next ten years. (And in an especially despicable twist, the tax cuts would go into effect immediately but the cuts to Medicaid wouldn’t hit until 2029, after both the midterms and the 2028 election.)

The prospect of that debt explosion led Moody’s on Friday to downgrade U.S. credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011. “If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case,” Moody’s explained, “it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”

The difficulty in passing this monstrosity has been the insistence of hardline Republicans that the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP weren’t draconian enough.

It’s a standard Republican accusation that federal spending is out of control, but as Richardson notes, discretionary spending has actually fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has really caused rising deficits were the Bush and Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

But rather than permit those tax cuts to expire— or even to roll them back— the Republicans continue to insist Americans are overtaxed. In fact, the U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in its tax levies. According to a report by the Center for American Progress in 2023, if the U.S. taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years it would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If the U.S. taxed at the average of European Union nations, it would have an additional $36 trillion.

In a recent Substack, Paul Krugman described the Big Beautiful Bill as a “big tax giveaway to the wealthy combined with cruel cuts in programs that serve lower-income Americans,” writing that the measure’s cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards, and noting that it relies on

claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas. And it’s hard to avoid the sense that the counterproductive viciousness is actually the point. Think of what we’re seeing as the attack of the sadistic zombies.

Krugman writes that this slashing of Medicaid will cause almost inconceivable hardship to the bottom 40 percent of Americans, especially to the poorest fifth. (Medicaid actually covers far more Americans than Medicare, including 39 percent of the nation’s children.)

Among the ways Republicans will slash Medicaid is by requiring that adult Medicaid recipients be gainfully employed — or, as Krugman points out, “more accurately, that they demonstrate to the satisfaction of government bureaucrats that they are gainfully employed, which is not at all the same thing.”

The belief that many Americans receiving government support are malingering, that they could and should be working but are choosing to be lazy, is a classic zombie idea. That is, like the claim that cutting taxes on the rich will unleash an economic miracle, it’s a doctrine that should be long dead. It has, after all, been proved wrong by experience again and again.

But right-wingers simply refuse to accept the reality that almost everyone on Medicaid is either a child, a senior, disabled or between jobs.

The evidence from state efforts to impose work requirements shows that–while such rules don’t get presumably “lazy” people to work–they do  take benefits away from people who are legally entitled to them through onerous paperwork and administrative barriers. 

If Republicans really cared about deficits, they’d tax the rich, not screw over the poor. They could begin by simply enforcing current tax rates, which our plutocrats evade to the tune of 150 billion dollars a year.

Your GOP at work…..

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