Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Listing The Obscenities

On Tuesday evening, I participated in a Zoom hosted by Indivisible of Central Indiana. It was focused on Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” and if you can stand yet another enumeration of that insult to Americans, I’m posting my comments below.

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As Heather Cox Richardson has said, the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is MAGA’s attempt to replace the government we’ve had since the 1930s with one that reflects the goals of Project 2025.

It is also an effort to rob the poor to further enrich the wealthy.

The Bill is 1000+ pages, but in this brief presentation I want to highlight the major elements—and alert you to the fact that, despite the fact that it is billed as a “budget,” it has numerous, damaging non-fiscal provisions which should be ruled non-germane in the Senate, but may not be.

Before getting to the truly horrifying fiscal mischief, let me share with you some of the most egregious non-fiscal provisions:

  • A measure to cripple the courts by prohibiting any funding from being used to carry out court orders holding executive branch officials in contempt. Passage of this measure would enable Trump and his officials to defy court orders at will.
  • The addition of billions to various parts of Trump’s deportation efforts, ramping up those efforts to the tune of an additional trillion dollars That includes $45 billion for construction of immigration jails (more than 13 times ICE’s current detention budget.) In addition, it would allow 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 be charged an “application fee” of at least $1,000.
  • The administration would be given authority to label nonprofits as “terrorist-supporting organizations,” and terminate their tax status- an open invitation to suppress the free speech and activism of climate and civil liberties organizations, among others of which Trump and MAGA disapprove.
  • The bill would eliminate the National Weather Service, making local weather reports far less accurate.
  • One provision would allow the administration to sell off national parks.
  • A particularly ugly provision repeals the $200 excise tax on the sale of gun silencers, which have no lawful purpose other than concealing shootings.

Other bits of “fine print” more directly support the major goal of the bill, which is, as I’ve noted, to protect the extremely wealthy against efforts to get them to pay their fair share of taxes–basically, the bill exempts rich people from paying their dues to the country that made their accumulation of wealth possible. (For example, the bill would basically eliminate an Estate Tax that is already massively favorable to the top 1%.)

The “guts” of the bill are the fiscal provisions. Basically, the bill is an effort to fund the extension of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich by eliminating health care for the poor and middle class.

The Congressional Budget office estimates that as many as 16 million people would lose health insurance under the House-passed version of the bill. The annual cuts to Medicaid would average over 70 billion dollars a year—the same amount millionaires and billionaires would gain in tax cuts. The media has focused on those Medicaid cuts, but a number of analysts have explained that measures that have been minimized as “technical revisions” would essentially repeal Obamacare.

Not only would millions of individuals lose their health insurance, the consequences of these cuts would close many, if not most, rural hospitals and would have a dramatically negative impact on local economies, ironically mostly in Red states like Indiana. Economists have estimated that depressed local spending under the House bill would force the loss of 850,000 jobs. (Health care is the largest employer of any sector of the economy; it employs 18 million workers.)

Republicans who claim that they’re just adding “work requirements” to Medicaid are lying—the budget cuts 715 billion from Medicaid and 335 billion from Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act). And prior experience in the states has demonstrated that work requirements do nothing but erect paperwork barriers that throw eligible people off Medicaid; as we’ve learned from those previous efforts, Medicaid recipients who are able to work are already working—most Medicaid recipients are disabled, elderly or children.

There’s much more. The bill weakens the Child Tax Credit, by lowering the eligibility income threshold, so 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 a variety of “Stealth Cuts’ to the Affordable Care Act that will increase out-of-pocket costs and make insurance more expensive for those people who are fortunate enough to retain it.

As if the assault on poor folks wasn’t mean-spirited enough, the bill also has deep cuts to SNAP. The House-passed version would cut nearly $300 billion from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. That would be by far the largest cut to SNAP in history, and it would mean that millions of low-income families would lose some or all of the food assistance they need to afford groceries and feed their children.

SNAP has been the nation’s most effective anti-hunger program, and the bill cuts it by roughly 30 percent. These extreme cuts are actually deeper than the $230 billion in cuts the original budget resolution called for because the bill adds tens of billions of dollars in new spending for farm programs, and pays for those dollars by taking more food assistance away from people with low incomes.

And despite the GOP’s purported concerns about budget deficits, the bill blows up the budget deficit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill will increase borrowing by a total of $2.4 trillion by 2034, because the $1.3 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs don’t even come close to canceling out $3.7 trillion in tax cuts for the rich. Just the tax cuts going to the richest 5 percent outstrip the cuts to Medicaid and food stamps by 300 billion. If you add in interest costs, the total debt the bill creates exceeds $3 trillion.

This is just a horrible bill, and it needs to be defeated.

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Journalism In The Age Of Trump

History confirms the existence of what we might call “fringe folks” in every society–people who, for whatever reason, have embraced conspiracy theories and/or rejected credible evidence of reality. The question for our age is: how did we get to a point where these deluded and arguably dangerous individuals have assumed authority? What has enabled a certified nutcase like RFK, Jr. to hold sway over the health of Americans, or a man seemingly devoid of contact with either knowledge or reality to become President of the United States?

As regular readers of this blog know, I attribute much of this state of affairs to our current information environment–a fragmented environment that allows Individuals to “curate” their preferred realities. (I used to tell the students in my Media and Public Affairs classes that if they really believed aliens had landed in Roswell, I could find them five internet sites with pictures of the aliens…)

I think it is fair to say that one of the reasons for the proliferation of alternate media sources, including widespread propaganda outlets, has been the inadequacy of mainstream, “legacy” journalism. There’s a reason that so many of the most professional journalists have abandoned their positions with those legacy outlets and decamped to places like Substack–a reason why so many of us depend upon the daily reports from reputable scholars like Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman, and look askance at news reporting that continues to “sanewash” and normalize behaviors that are objectively insane and abnormal.

A recent example: my husband and I were watching an NBC national news report on the shocking assault by administration goons on California Senator Alex Padilla, when he tried to ask a question of Secretary Kristi Noem. The report repeated Noem’s assertion that the Senator had failed to identify himself. It didn’t call that assertion a lie, despite the fact that widely available video of the incident showed that Padilla had done so. 

Shouldn’t we be able to rely on journalists to highlight lies being told by Trump’s collection of clowns and ideologues? Why has it been so difficult for legacy media to call a lie a lie?

Recently, a reader shared with me an article from the Columbia Journalism Review, exploring that question. It began,

Perhaps the most basic task of journalism is to distinguish truth from falsity. To identify the facts, and to present those facts to a readership eager for information. Journalists may once have believed that their responsibility stopped there—but in today’s media environment, it’s become clear that delivering facts to the public is not so straightforward. Distinguishing true from false, which often entails calling attention to false information, risks amplifying and even legitimizing that information. There is no better contemporary example of this problem than the media coverage of Donald Trump.

Trump’s brazen dishonesty in his public comments is without political precedent in this country. During his first term, the Washington Post’s fact-checking database clocked 30,573 untruths. That rate shows no sign of slowing during his second term, and now he seems to be combating accusations of lying by simply manipulating who is allowed in the press pool.

Granted, as the article notes, journalistic norms weren’t created for a President like Trump. The belief that “both sides” of a situation should be covered ignores the reality that both sides often don’t deserve equal weight. (It also ignores the fact that many issues have more than two sides, but that’s a different problem..)

The article argues that legacy journalists need to find new ways to talk about false information–for example, not describing a tweet or statement as “racially charged,” but as racist; calling a lie a lie, not a “misleading statement.”

The Columbia Journalism Review is a respected journal, and I was happy to see that it was taking on what has proved to be a hugely consequential problem, although its discussion is arguably too little and too late. Thousands–probably millions–of citizens now get their information (or misinformation/lies) from non-legacy sources, from the Internet’s wild west of sources peddling everything from informed analyses to ideological claptrap.

Journalists used to be gatekeepers, deciding what news was needed to keep the citizenry informed. There were certainly problems with that role, but I would argue that the information world we inhabit today–where each of us must be our own gatekeeper–is no improvement. Quite the contrary.

I wonder: If mainstream journalists had been doing their jobs these past couple of decades, would we now have a federal government composed of racist cranks and misfits and conspiracy theorists? I doubt it.

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The Greeks Were Right

The early Greeks are said to have invented the idea of democracy, but that wasn’t their only contribution to the philosophy of governance. They also pioneered the importance of the “golden mean,” the mean between extremes. 

Right now, we are experiencing an assault on both of those critically important concepts.

The assault on democracy is well-understood; indeed, it preoccupies the political discourse. The importance of the “Golden Mean” is less understood. The Golden Mean was a core concept in Aristotelian ethics; Aristotle argued that virtue consists of finding the right balance in our behaviors and emotions.  (For example, courage is a virtue that lies between the extremes of recklessness and cowardice. Generosity is a virtue that lies between stinginess and prodigality.)  

American politics constantly wrestles with the proper balance between individualism and communitarianism. The country was founded on the principle that individuals are entitled to a generous zone of liberty–a zone that government should not invade until or unless that individual is harming the person or property of another, That principle gave rise to a very American, almost religious belief in individualism, and a corresponding suspicion of social programs and laws for the common good, which are inevitably opposed as unAmerican “socialism” or “communism.”

In the real world, of course, we are faced with finding a proper balance: what sorts of things really must be done communally, and when do government programs unnecessarily breach individual liberties? (I will ignore, for purposes of this discussion, the hypocrisy of MAGA folks who disdain “socialism” only when it benefits poor folks, and who have no problem with a corporatism that translates into socialism for the rich and a brutal capitalism for everyone else…)

What triggered the foregoing discussion was an article from the Guardian about–of all things–diet and exercise and long life. The article noted a decline in public health and life expectancies in rich countries, and posed the obvious question: what explains the gap between the public’s growing knowledge about living longer and its collective health going backwards?

The author of the essay is a public health scientist in Great Britain, whose job is looking into the factors that affect how long we will live. As she wrote, 

Most of these are out of individual control and have to do with the country and community we live in. The truth is, this “self-help” narrative doesn’t reflect the reality of how health works. In fact, the focus on personal responsibility and self-improvement has distracted us from the real issue –the impact that public policy, infrastructure and community make in affecting our health chances and longevity.

After citing the far better health and longevity outcomes in places like Japan, she writes that “What stands out about these places is that the people living there don’t just make individual choices that lead to better health – they live in places where healthy lives are normalised by government and culture.”

As I talk about in my new book, if I’m going to live to 100, I need more than fastidiously counting my calories and posting pictures of myself exercising on Instagram (which I am guilty of). I need to live in a world where health is a collective responsibility, not an individual one. This means supporting policies that make us all healthier – and politicians who prioritise the conditions for good health such as nutritious food especially for children, active cities, clean air policies, preventive healthcare and public provision of water, which should be at the core of what a government provides its citizens. There are lessons in how to improve life in all of these areas across the world: these are places where good health is built into daily life.

I confess that I have a strong libertarian streak, and a corresponding belief in the importance of the individual values of diligence, honesty, and hard work. But common sense requires recognition of the importance of the communities in which we live–the societies within which we are, in communitarian jargon–“embedded.” People cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they don’t have boots. They cannot simply choose to breathe clean air and drink uncontaminated water. Poor people without health insurance cannot simply decide not to need medical care.

Whether politicians want to acknowledge it or not, there are major elements of our lives that can only be addressed communally, and most of those can only be accomplished through government. Our job is to craft a social infrastructure that is adequate, that supports without intruding–to find that elusive “Golden Mean.”

I don’t think MAGA is interested…..

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The Brain Drain

Yesterday, I warned about the ferocity of the administration’s war on knowledge, and the incredible damage Trump and MAGA are doing to America’s long dominance in science and technology.

Lest you think I was over-reacting, allow me to share some recent headlines.

Foreign universities hope to lure scientists from the US after Trump research cuts | AP News
The World Is Wooing U.S. Researchers Shunned by Trump – The New York Times
International students see fewer pathways to US careers under Trump
“‘A fear campaign.’ Students around the world are shocked, scared and saddened by US visa pause” — CNN
“America’s Coming Brain Drain: Trump’s War on Universities Could Kill U.S. Innovation” — Foreign Affairs
‘Major brain drain’: Researchers eye exit from Trump’s America; “In the halls of US universities and research labs, one question has become increasingly common as President Donald Trump tightens his grip on the field: whether to move abroad.” — AFP
“US brain drain: the scientists seeking jobs abroad amid Trump’s assault on research: Five US-based researchers tell Nature why they are exploring career opportunities overseas.” — Nature
The Economist warns: “America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain”.

(Links to each of these reports is available at the primary link.)

According to the Economist,

Springer Nature publishes Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. It also runs a much-used jobs board for academics. In the first three months of the year applications by researchers based in America for jobs in other countries were up by 32% compared with the same period in 2024.

In March Nature itself conducted a poll of more than 1,200 researchers at American institutions, of whom 75% said they were thinking of leaving (though disgruntled academics were probably more likely to respond to the poll than satisfied ones).

And just as American researchers eye the exit, foreigners are becoming more reluctant to move in. Springer Nature’s data suggests applications by non-American candidates for American research jobs have fallen by around 25% compared with the same period last year.

As any sentient observer might have predicted, MAGA’s war on knowledge is a win for China, which is offering big salaries to entice disaffected knowledge-workers to relocate there.

According to an essay in the Washington Post, the administration’s inability to understand the consequences of its actions is based in large part on its lack of historical knowledge.  In “Houston, J.D. Vance has a problem,” Mark Lasswell reports that Vance “barely grasps the history of the U.S. space program.”

Last week, Newsmax interviewer Greg Kelly took a break from slathering Vance with praise to delicately broach the possibility of a “brain drain” from American universities if researchers decamp for more hospitable institutions overseas. The White House, as you might have heard, is working energetically to dissolve arrangements between several research universities and the government that for the past century helped make the United States the most powerful and innovative country in the world.

“I’ve heard a lot of the criticisms, the fear, that we’re going to have a brain drain,” the voluble vice president told Kelly. “If you go back to the ’50s and ’60s, the American space program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens, some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who had built an incredible space program with American talent. This idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject that.”

As Lasswell sardonically notes, “Vance seems to think a defunded brainiac who happens to be an American citizen is going to tell a recruiter from Aix-Marseille University, “You can keep Provence. I’d rather work on nanotechnology in my garage. U-S-A!”

The actual history of America’s space program–and scientific dominance–is rather different from Vance’s version. After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union recruited German and Austrian scientists, engineers and technicians. (Without, as the essay notes, being too picky about their Nazi connections. I enthusiastically recommend Tom Lehrer’s “take” on Von Braun...) In the mid-1950s, they created the U.S. space program. “Von Braun and his many, many colleagues were instrumental to U.S. space supremacy — and, according to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, most of them became naturalized citizens in 1954 or 1955.” 

We may not have been picky about their politics, but we did understand–once upon a time–that a nation’s health and wealth depend upon its respect–and support– for empirical knowledge. 

MAGA=Morons Are Gutting America….. 

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The War On Knowledge

When citizens are subjected to a “flooding of the zone”–daily assaults on a wide variety of systems, beliefs and values that have long been an accepted part of our governing environment–we can be forgiven for a lack of focus. It’s hard enough just to keep track of what is happening, let alone to decide which attacks are most worrisome. But Adam Serwer makes a good case for putting the war on knowledge at the top of the list.

In The New Dark Age, Serwer writes

The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Serwer enumerates the Trump assaults: threats to withhold funding from colleges and universities that don’t submit to MAGA demands. Sustained attacks on the engines of American scientific inquiry– the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health–and on repositories of America’s history, including the Smithsonian.  Arts organizations and libraries are losing funding. Large numbers of government scientists have lost  their jobs and remaining researchers prevented from broaching forbidden subjects. “Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.”

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

Serwer describes the attacks on universities. He uses the example of West Point, and the administration’s purge of forbidden texts to reveal what MAGA’s “ideal university” might look like.

West Point initiated a schoolwide push to remove any readings that focused on race, gender or the darker moments of American history.” A professor who “leads a course on genocide was instructed not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans, according to several academy officials. The English department purged works by well-known Black authors, such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Trump administration’s attack on knowledge is broad-based; it isn’t limited to academia. The administration has also singled out and fired government employees involved in research of multiple kinds.

These are people who do the crucial work of informing Americans about and protecting them from diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to their health. Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been let go, including most of those whose job it is to maintain workplace safety standards. Experts at the Food and Drug Administration including, according to the Times, “lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists investigating bird flu transmission; and researchers who monitored televised ads for false claims about prescription drugs” have been purged. Workers in the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service research team, who develop “tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water,” have been targeted for layoffs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire research arm is being “eliminated.” The administration has made “deep cuts” to the Department of Education’s research division.

Serwer enumerates the nature of the cuts and their foreseeable consequences, especially for public health. As he notes, modern agriculture and medicine, and advances in information technology like the internet and GPS were built on the foundation of federally funded research.

For the past century, state-funded advances have been the rule rather than the exception. Private-sector innovation can take off after an invention becomes profitable, but the research that leads to that invention tends to be a costly gamble—for this reason, the government often takes on the initial risk that private firms cannot. Commercial flight, radar, microchips, spaceflight, advanced prosthetics, lactose-free milk, MRI machines—the list of government-supported research triumphs is practically endless.

MAGA’s racist fight against “wokeness” requires destroying huge swaths of scholarship and research, and distorting any American history that undercuts the administration’s goal: destroying the “ability to discover, accumulate, or present any knowledge that could be used to oppose Trumpism.”

You really need to click through and read the entire essay–and weep.

Welcome to a new Dark Ages.

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