Politics

PoliticusUSA is a strong independent media voice that relies on your support. Please consider supporting us by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now The Trump administration has shown zero curiosity about how the most deadly flood in a century was able to occur in the United States in the year 2025. The reason why the administration is not willing to do some digging and investigate is beginning to emerge, and it is all about DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. CNN reported: For example, as central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country. In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN. But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) reacted to the CNN report by calling out Noem’s deadly incompetence on Bluesky: Trump made Kristi Noem his DHS pick even though she had zero experience in any area of homeland security. Noem’s only qualification is that she has spent years as a devoted Trump cheerleader. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Lives could have been potentially saved if Senate Republicans and the seven Senate Democrats who voted to confirm her (Kim, Kaine, Slotkin, Peters, Hassan, Shaheen, and Fetterman) had said no. Kaine and Kim have already publicly regretted their votes for Noem. Those Senators of both parties who voted for an unqualified DHS nominee deserve blame as well. Trump won’t get rid of anyone who is loyal to him. Sen. Wyden was right. It is dangerous to have Kristi Noem running DHS, and it may have gotten kids killed in Texas. Was Ron Wyden right about Kristi Noem? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Dean Spears does not want to alarm you. The co-author of After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People argues that alarmist words such as crisis or urgent will just detract from the cold, hard numbers, which show that in roughly 60 years, the world population could plummet to a size not seen for centuries. Alarmism might also make people tune out, which means they won’t engage with the culturally fraught project of asking people—that is, women—to have more babies. Recently, in the United States and other Western countries, having or not having children is sometimes framed as a political affiliation: You’re either in league with conservative pronatalists, or you’re making the ultimate personal sacrifice to reduce your carbon footprint. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Spears makes the case for more people. He discusses the population spike over human history and the coming decline, and how to gingerly move the population discussion beyond politics. The following is a transcript of the episode: Hanna Rosin: There are those that would have us believe that having babies—or not having babies—is a political act, something that transmits your allegiance to one cultural movement or another. On the right, J. D. Vance wants, quote, “more babies in the United States,” while Elon Musk does his part, personally, to answer the call. Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA said this to an audience of young conservative women: Charlie Kirk: We have millions of young women that are miserable. You know, the most miserable and depressed people in America are career-driven, early-30-something women. It’s not my numbers. It’s the Pew Research numbers. They’re most likely to say that they’re upset, they’re depressed, they’re on antidepressants. Do you know who the happiest women in America are? Married women with lots of children, by far. [Applause] Rosin: On the political left and elsewhere, people agonize about whether to have children at all: for environmental reasons, or money reasons, or I just don’t want to spend my time that way reasons. Woman 1: Get ready with me while I tell you all the reasons why I don’t want to have kids. Woman 2: I want to spend my money on what I want to spend my money on. I don’t want another human life dictating what I’m going to do. Woman 3: I think you are absolutely crazy to have a baby if you’re living in America right now. Woman 4: Some of us aren’t having kids, because we can’t justify bringing them into this type of world. Woman 5: How are we going to have children if we can’t even afford ourselves? Rosin: But if you move the discussion outside politics and into just sheer demographics—how many humans, ideally, do we want on Earth?—a whole different conversation is beginning about a potential crisis coming that we are not paying attention to, at least by some people’s accounts. I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Around the world, and in wealthy countries in particular, the birth rate is dropping. Today, the birth rate in the U.S. is 1.6 babies per woman, significantly below the required replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. We’re used to hearing conservatives talk about the need for “lots of children.” But today we are hearing from someone outside this political debate about why everyone—liberals in particular—should care about depopulation. Dean Spears: A lot of the traditionalists out there are saying, Low birth rates? Well, what we need is a return to rigid, unequal gender roles, and they want to roll things backwards and think that’ll fix the birth rate. But that’s the wrong response. Rosin: That is Dean Spears, an economist at UT Austin and co-author of a new book, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People. I talked to Dean about why we should care about depopulation. [Music] Rosin: I grew up in the shadow of the Paul Ehrlich book The Population Bomb. I was actually a high-school debater, and we were always making the argument, Oh, we’re headed towards a degree of overpopulation that’s going to explode the Earth. Like, that was so much in the consciousness. The idea that more people equals bad, it was just deeply ingrained, and it still kind of is for young people. So what’s incorrect about that argument? Spears: So I think the most important part of that is the environment. And there’s something importantly right there. We do have big environmental challenges, and people cause them. Human activity causes greenhouse-gas emissions and has other destructive consequences. And so it’s really natural to think that the way to protect the environment is to have fewer humans. And maybe we would be in a different position right now with the environment if the population trajectory had been different in decades and centuries past. But that’s not really the question we face right now. The question we face right now is: Given our urgent environmental problems, are fewer people the solution? And fewer people aren’t the solution now. And so here’s one way to think about it. Consider the story of particle air pollution in China. [Music] Spears: In 2013, China faced a smog crisis. Particulate air pollution from fires, coal plants, and vehicle exhaust darkened the sky. Newspapers around the world called it the airpocalypse.” The United States’ embassy in Beijing rated the air pollution a reading of 755 on a scale of zero to 500. This stuff is terrible for children’s health and survival, and older adult mortality too. So what happened next? In the decade that followed this airpocalypse, China grew by 50 million people. That’s an addition larger than the entire population of Canada or Argentina. And so if the story is right that population growth always makes environmental problems worse, we might wonder: How much worse did the air pollution in China get? But the answer is that over that same decade, particulate

The White House has seen its share of shady deals. Ulysses S. Grant’s brother-in-law used his family ties to engineer an insider-trading scheme that tanked the gold market. Warren Harding’s secretary of the interior secretly leased land to oil barons, who paid a fortune for his troubles. To bankroll Richard Nixon’s reelection, corporate executives sneaked suitcases full of cash into the capital. But Americans have never witnessed anything like the corruption that President Donald Trump and his inner circle have perpetrated in recent months. Its brazenness, volume, and variety defy historical comparison, even in a country with a centuries-long history of graft—including, notably, Trump’s first four years in office. Indeed, his second term makes the financial scandals of his first—foreign regimes staying at Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C.; the (aborted) plan to host the G7 at Trump’s hotel in Florida—seem quaint. Trump 2.0 is just getting started, yet it already represents the high-water mark of American kleptocracy. There are good reasons to think it will get much worse. Virtually every week, the Trump family seems to find a new way to profit from the presidency. The Trump Organization has brokered a growing catalog of real-estate projects with autocratic regimes, including a Trump tower in Saudi Arabia, a Trump hotel in Oman, and a Trump golf club in Vietnam. “We’re the hottest brand in the world right now,” Eric Trump recently proclaimed. In May, Qatar gave the White House a $400 million jet—a gift that looked a lot like a bribe but that Trump had no qualms accepting. [David Frum: The Trump presidency’s world-historical heist] And that’s just the foreign front. Domestically, Trump has used flimsy complaints to go after media organizations, resulting in settlements that resemble shakedowns. Last year, he accused 60 Minutes of deceptively editing an interview with his Democratic presidential opponent, Kamala Harris. Legal experts saw the claim as weak. Rather than fighting it in court, however, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million, which will subsidize Trump’s future presidential library and cover his legal fees. Following a similarly dubious lawsuit, ABC sent $15 million to Trump’s library fund and issued a “statement of regret.” Beyond the court, the president has peddled Trump perfumes, Trump sneakers, and Trump phones, shamelessly using the prestige of the presidency to boost his family’s income. And then there’s crypto: the $TRUMP meme coin, the pay-to-play dinners with investors, the paused prosecution of a crypto kingpin who had purchased $30 million in Trump-backed tokens. “The law is totally on my side,” Trump said after his election in 2016, when he was asked about mixing his financial affairs with his new office. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest.” That statement is now alarmingly close to the truth. Thanks to last year’s Supreme Court ruling, Trump has presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for any “official act.” He has appointed an attorney general, Pam Bondi, who appears willing to do his bidding no matter the cost to the Department of Justice. He has gutted independent bodies that went after white-collar criminal networks, task forces that investigated kleptocracy, public prosecutors that chased public corruption, and regulation that targeted transnational money laundering. The list goes on. Trump’s Treasury Department effectively terminated America’s new shell-company registry. His DOJ dissolved task forces that seized stolen assets. The administration froze the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the bedrock of America’s antibribery regime. In sum, Trump has dismantled a network of agencies, laws, and norms that thwarted all kinds of kleptocracy, including the kind that enriches a sitting president. Foreign agents are watching as America’s anti-corruption regime crumbles. They see an extraordinary window of opportunity, and they know they’ll have to act quickly to take full advantage. Succoring Trump and his family has already proved one of the fastest ways to guarantee favorable policy. Are U.S. sanctions hurting your economy? Consider building a Trump resort. Want to stay in America’s good graces? Invest in Trump-backed crypto. All of this grafting is likely to accelerate. Consider the Qatari jet. The gift prompted plenty of hand-wringing in the United States, but also in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which saw their regional foe gain leverage over them by charming Trump. Don’t think of the jet as the culmination of the president’s greed; think of it as the new bar for bids to come. Any Middle Eastern dictator who wants to surpass Qatar in America’s estimation now knows his price. [Read: The MAGA-world rift over Trump’s Qatari jet] In India, oligarchs and other government allies are opening Trump properties in rapid succession, while Pakistan recently announced a new national crypto reserve, signing a “letter of intent” to work with a Trump-backed group. Serbia and Albania have both recently vied for Trump’s affections, each signing deals for luxury properties with his family. The incentive to out-bribe one’s competition could soon take hold in geopolitical rivalries around the world. Perhaps most worrisome is the tacit permission that Trump granted foreign powers to directly bankroll U.S. politicians. This was the precedent he set when he strong-armed prosecutors into dropping the case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was accused of soliciting campaign funds from Turkey. “You win the race by raising money,” Adams said. “Everything else is fluff.” One could imagine the president saying the same. Foreign regimes are beginning to see just how far their money can go in Trump’s America. The highest bidder has never had so much to gain.

The One Big Beautiful Bill is law. Now what? Not quite six months into his new term, President Donald Trump has fulfilled many of his campaign promises. He has cut taxes, launched trade wars, frustrated longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and slashed the federal government. He steamrolled the opposition, including members of his own party, to push through Congress a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation that contains nearly his entire domestic agenda. Now the next phase of his presidency—as well as next year’s midterms—could be defined by his bet that the Republican bill, and other Trump policies, will usher in a booming economy. If that wager pays off, it would reinforce one of Trump’s strongest issues—but Democrats see an opening to hit the president for disproportionately helping the wealthy at the expense of the poor. The White House won’t push for another big legislative package between now and next November, five White House aides and outside advisers told us. Instead, Trump will turn to selling and defending what his party just passed, in addition to focusing on what he believes are his core political strengths: high-stakes trade deals and high-profile immigration clashes. Oh, and he wouldn’t mind winning a Nobel Peace Prize too. Trump and his team spent the four years after his first term drafting a sweeping plan to overwhelm Washington—and, in particular, the Democrats—with a flurry of action. In his first months back in office, he signed one executive order after another. Elon Musk’s DOGE haphazardly chopped its way through government agencies. Law firms, universities, and media companies acceded to the administration’s demands. Its lawyers kept pushing the bounds of executive power in the courts. The point was to punish and confuse. And, although the administration stumbled along the way, the strategy allowed Trump to seize perhaps more power than he’d ever had in Washington. [From the June 2025 issue: “I run the country and the world”] Then, the past three weeks yielded what White House aides believe are a pair of monumental triumphs: the air strikes that Trump authorized on Iran’s nuclear program, and the passage of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill in time for Trump to sign it on July 4. White House officials believe they are entering the second phase of Trump’s second term with momentum. At the same time, the West Wing recognizes that, more than any other issue, the economy will dictate the outcome of next year’s midterms. The Republican legislation instituted a set of tax cuts that Trump believes to be the formula for rapid economic expansion. But they will primarily benefit the wealthy, and the bill was financed by cuts to federal safety-net programs, while adding more than $3 trillion to the national debt. Democratic groups plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars arguing that the bill rewarded wealthy donors and failed to address inflation, whereas Republicans hope that it will lead to real wage increases and a surging stock market deep into next year. “It’s going to be: How is the economy doing in a year and three months from now?” a GOP House strategist told us. (This person, like others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations and internal strategy.) “If the economy continues to improve, we are going to have a great message to sell to voters.” Trump and his Cabinet plan to barnstorm the country in support of the bill. “We also have to sell it, right? Just because it passed doesn’t mean it goes away,” a White House official told us. Ads slamming Republicans for the bill are now running in swing districts across the country. At the core of the emerging Democratic message is a simple argument about the issue that still ranks as the most important for voters: affordability. A private polling memo from the Democratic group Future Forward USA Action that we obtained advises Democrats that voters tend to pin the blame for high prices on “elites in leadership positions in government and business,” who have “no idea what life is like for regular people.” The group argues that Democrats should tie Trump’s tax bill to these concerns. “When asked to choose who has benefitted more because of Trump’s policies, the most chosen actors are: billionaires (chosen 72% of the time); wealthy Americans (70%) and corporate CEOs (67%),” the memo, dated June 5, explains. “These rank much higher than middle class Americans and working people, each chosen just 43% of the time.” Trump’s approval on the economy is now lower than at any time in his first term, having dropped about 20 percentage points since January. So, for the first time since the presidential election, Democrats feel that they can go on the offensive regarding what has been a weak issue for their party. “The combination of what Trump did in the megabill and what he did with the tariffs set up a reality for voters where they believe that Republicans are on the wrong side on everyday costs,” the Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told us. To this point in Trump’s term, unemployment and inflation have largely been steady, though consumer spending has started to slow. It will take time for the impact of the law to become apparent. This week, however, Trump added another combustible element to his economic agenda: He revived his trade war, threatening to increase tariffs on more than a dozen countries by August 1. Aides insisted to us that Trump, after blinking on imposing sweeping tariffs earlier this year, will not back down this time. (His belief in tariffs is one of his few consistent ideological positions, even though most economists oppose high tariffs.) [James Surowiecki: Trump’s only-okay economy] The advisers added that they hoped for a more systematic approach to trade negotiations in the months ahead—more senior-level talks, fewer Truth Social screeds—with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leading the discussions. One aide acknowledged to us that, even so, “there will be some fights” with other countries. Aides

ICE occupies an exalted place in President Donald Trump’s hierarchy of law enforcement. He praises the bravery and fortitude of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—“the toughest people you’ll ever meet,” he says—and depicts them as heroes in the central plot of his presidency, helping him rescue the country from an invasion of gang members and mental patients. The 20,000 ICE employees are the unflinching men and women who will restore order. They’re the Untouchables in his MAGA crime drama. The reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear. “It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible.” I recently spoke with a dozen current and former ICE agents and officers about morale at the agency since Trump took office. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of losing their job or being subjected to a polygraph exam. They described varying levels of dissatisfaction but weren’t looking to complain or expecting sympathy—certainly not at a time when many Americans have been disturbed by video clips of masked and hooded officers seizing immigrants who were not engaged in any obvious criminal behavior. The frustration isn’t yet producing mass resignations or major internal protests, but the officers and agents described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more. Despite Trump’s public praise for ICE officers, several staffers told me that they feel contempt from administration officials who have implied they were too passive—too comfortable—under the Biden administration. Some ICE employees believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe. At ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.” The administration argues that morale has actually never been higher—and will only improve as ICE officials begin spending billions in new federal funding. Tricia McLaughlin, the spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement the agency’s workforce has welcomed its new mission under Trump. “After four years of not being allowed to do their jobs, the brave men and women at ICE are excited to be able to do their jobs again,” McLaughlin said. [Read: Take off the mask, ICE] But ICE’s physical infrastructure is buckling. The agency is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest number ever, but it has been funded for only 41,000 detention beds, so processing centers are packed with people sleeping on floors in short-term holding cells with nowhere to shower.   “Morale is in the crapper,” another former investigative agent told me. “Even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers.” A common theme of my conversations was dissatisfaction with the White House’s focus on achieving 1 million deportations annually, a goal that many ICE employees view as logistically unrealistic and physically exhausting. The agency has never done more than a quarter of that number in a single year. But ICE’s top officials are so scared of being fired—the White House has staged two purges already—that they don’t push back, another official told me. Miller has made clear that not hitting that goal is not an option. He and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called ICE’s top leaders to Washington in May and berated them in a tense meeting. Miller set a daily arrest quota of 3,000, a fourfold increase over the average during Trump’s first few months. Veteran officials murmured and shifted in their seats, but Miller steamrolled anyone who spoke up. “No one is saying, ‘This is not obtainable,’” the official told me. “The answer is just to keep banging the field”—which is what ICE calls rank-and-file officers—“and tell the field they suck. It’s just not a good atmosphere.” Several career officials have been pushed out of leadership roles. Other employees have decided to quit. Adam Boyd, a 33-year-old attorney who resigned from ICE’s legal department last month, told me he left because the mission was no longer about protecting the homeland from threats. “It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December,” Boyd said. He told me that he saw frustration among ICE attorneys whose cases were dismissed just so officer teams could grab their clients in the hallways for fast-track deportations that pad the stats. Some detainees had complex claims that attorneys have to screen before their initial hearings, to ensure due process. Others with strong asylum cases were likely to end up back in court later anyway. The hallway arrests sent the message that the immigration courts were just a convenient place to handcuff people. Some ICE attorneys “are only waiting until their student loans are forgiven, and then they’re leaving,” he said. [Read: The terrible optics of ICE enforcement are fueling a Trump immigration backlash]

Jesse Duquette Walk this way. The post Transport appeared first on The Nation.

When President Joe Biden tried to enact student loan forgiveness programs, it was treated as an unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach of power. But now that Donald Trump is president, mucking around in student loan programs is perfectly fine and dandy—though this time the goal is to hurt people rather than help them.  Trump is preparing to turn the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program into yet another tool of retribution. Under PSLF, students who enter public service—including government and nonprofit jobs—have any remaining balance on student loans forgiven after 10 years of payments.  Public service jobs are often lower paying than their private-sector equivalents, especially for those requiring advanced degrees. Before PSLF was created in 2007, student loan debt would often act as a barrier preventing graduates from taking public-sector jobs.  But now, the Department of Education is gearing up to remove eligibility from any employer that it deems to be involved in “illegal activities.” The Trump administration’s warped sense of what constitutes an illegal activity is exactly what you’d expect. Trump’s March executive order requires Education Secretary Linda McMahon to redefine public service to exclude organizations that work on immigration issues or transgender rights, along with any employers that she determines are “aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” or violate state laws like trespassing, disorderly conduct, or blocking highways.  People rally outside of the Supreme Court in 2023, protesting against a lawsuit seeking to block President Joe Biden’s student loan relief efforts. In other words, organizations that focus on anything that Trump and McMahon don’t like will get yeeted from eligibility for the PSLF program.  Of course, it’s not illegal to work with immigrants, to help trans kids, or to engage in peaceful protests, but the Trump administration doesn’t care. The entire point is to make loan forgiveness unobtainable for filthy liberals. There’s no way that this won’t be used as a weapon, where the Trump administration can remove any organization it doesn’t like, for any reason, wiping out loan forgiveness for employees—regardless of the law. Contrast this with Biden’s detailed rulemaking efforts explaining his authority to enact student loan forgiveness and lengthy outlines of each proposed rule change. But honestly, it probably didn’t matter what Biden proposed: The Supreme Court was always going to rush to rule against him. Even when the Biden administration significantly narrowed the scope of relief after the ruling, red states kept suing to ensure that students would stay saddled with debt.  Watching Trump pretend that this is about “restoring” PSLF is ridiculous given his behavior during his first term, when only 7,000 people received loan forgiveness and the other 99% of applications were denied. While Biden fixed that deliberately broken process, Trump is wiping it out again.  When Biden exerted any presidential authority, no matter how well-grounded in law, it was deemed a historic crisis and a trampling of Congress. But when Trump throws up a lawless, bigoted executive order, it’s totally fine.  Who needs law when you’ve got Congress and the Supreme Court willing to let you do whatever you want?

In a sign Republicans are out of touch with regular Americans, Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday bragged that the Senate had “the longest continuous work period in 15 years.” “We’ve taken more roll-call votes so far this year than at the same point in any year since at least 1989,” Thune added in a speech on the Senate floor, as he tried to build support for Senate Republicans’ actions to strip health care and food aid from the poorest Americans in order to cut taxes for the rich and fund President Donald Trump’s masked deportation force. YouTube Video How long was this “continuous work period,” you might ask? The Senate was in session on weekdays from Jan. 3 through March 14, the chamber’s first scheduled weeklong break, according to the Senate’s official calendar. Of course, that time in session includes days off for federal holidays and days where they gaveled out early.  As of Wednesday, the Senate has had 111 days in session since Jan. 3, according to the secretary of the Senate. During that time, they’ve had 11 Fridays where they didn’t meet, in addition to various scheduled breaks. What’s more, Thune bragging about the number of votes taken is an odd choice. The GOP and its unified control of Washington have so far enacted just 49 pieces of legislation, according to GovTrack, which monitors actions in Congress. That’s far off track from the 117th Congress, when Democrats had unified control of the nation’s capitol. The Democratic-controlled 117th Congress had 1,234 pieces of legislation enacted over the course of two years. Republicans would have to seriously pick up the pace over the next year and a half to get to that level. And if Republicans want to talk about quality over quantity, Democrats have them beat there, too. In the 117th Congress, Democrats passed a sweeping COVID-19 relief bill, which gave Americans stimulus checks. They also expanded subsidies for Americans to obtain health care, passed $1 trillion in infrastructure funding, and allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices to lower prescription costs. What have Republicans done this Congress?  They passed a budget that will strip away health care and food stamps from millions of Americans. They made it harder for Americans to afford the cost of college, and beefed up Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make Trump’s deportation gestapo the largest police force in the United States. Republicans are also set to let the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies expire, which will cause millions to become unable to afford their health insurance.  But congrats on working a few full weeks in a row, Republicans. What a sacrifice.

According to President Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Americans are jumping at the chance to work long, low-paid hours in the fields.  Lori Chavez-DeRemer appeared Wednesday on Fox News, where both she and the hosts challenged the silly leftist notion that U.S. citizens aren’t keen to take certain difficult jobs.  “What happened to the threat from the left that American citizens won’t do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do?” asked Todd Piro, co=host of “Fox & Friends First.” “Because when I look at these numbers, I think, ‘Nope, the American citizen is willing to do those jobs.’” “Americans are willing to do the job,” Chavez-DeRemer replied. “What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.” YouTube Video While there’s nothing wrong with putting more money back into the pockets of American workers, some of the positions Chavez-DeRemer and the Trump administration are hounding about have a long history of low pay and abusive work conditions.  Forty-two percent of crop farmworkers are foreign born and not authorized to work in the U.S., according to the Department of Agriculture. Undocumented immigrants have been known to live in bug-infested shacks as they work long hours on farms for little pay.  This push to put Americans in the fields comes amid the Trump administration’s brutal push to expel undocumented—and even some documented—immigrants from the U.S. And with the administration telling Americans to turn to the fields if they want to keep their Medicaid coverage, it seems as if Trump and his crew are aware of their dire need to fill the labor shortage they’re fomenting.

A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | MAGA world implodes after Trump cronies flip-flop on Epstein files