MAGA Report Cards — Education

Brad Finstad Asked the State to Investigate a Rochester Curriculum. The District Says It Never Adopted It — and the State Doesn't Pick Curriculum Anyway.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:24:18 +0000

In late June 2026, Brad Finstad sent a letter to Minnesota's education commissioner asking him to look into "the influence of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Learning for Justice program and related social justice frameworks being integrated into the Rochester Public School District."

It made the local news, which is what letters like this are for.

Then people started checking it, and three separate problems turned up. The school district says it never adopted the program. The official he wrote to has no authority over what any Minnesota district teaches. And the evidence in the letter came down to a footnote in a four-year-old document that the school board never voted on.

Nobody from Finstad's office had called the district to ask.

The district's answer

Rochester Public Schools put out a written response, reported in full by KIMT. The first thing it says is that nobody asked them anything:

"Neither Representative Finstad nor any member of his staff contacted Rochester Public Schools (RPS) before sending the letter to ask whether Learning for Justice curriculum, materials, or frameworks are currently being used in RPS or have been used in recent years. If they had reached out to inquire, Finstad's staff would have been informed that Rochester Public Schools has not adopted, approved, or implemented Learning for Justice as curriculum, required instructional materials, or a formal instructional framework."

The second thing it says is that he wrote to the wrong office:

"In Minnesota, local school districts are responsible for selecting curriculum and instructional materials that align with state academic standards. The Minnesota Commissioner of Education does not select or approve the curriculum used by local school districts. For that reason, Rochester Public Schools would have been the appropriate entity to contact for accurate information about what is being taught in RPS classrooms."

That is not a spin point. It's how Minnesota law works. Curriculum is a local decision. Finstad asked a state commissioner to account for something the state commissioner does not decide.

Superintendent Kent Pekel made the same point more bluntly to the Post Bulletin: if Finstad wanted to know how Learning for Justice is or isn't used in Rochester classrooms, he could have simply called, rather than writing to a commissioner to "ask about an issue over which he has no authority or influence."

Pekel added one more line: "He has not visited our schools once."

The evidence was a footnote

So what was the letter actually built on?

According to Finstad's office, Rochester school board documents show that social studies curriculum in the district "has been informed by Learning for Justice."

Pekel says that reference was "essentially a footnote" in a supporting document for an information-only agenda item at the February 8, 2022 school board meeting. Learning for Justice was listed alongside three other items under the heading "Informing our Practice" — material about how to teach, not what to teach.

"There was no vote taken and no decision on the agenda that night," Pekel said.

Meanwhile, the district had just approved new social studies curriculum at its most recent board meeting. Pekel said those new materials did not include anything created by Learning for Justice, and that he had confirmed the materials are not formally part of the current Rochester curriculum.

Finstad's office pushed back on one piece of this. Spokeswoman Jenny Luepke said Learning for Justice materials are written by the SPLC, and pointed to a March board document showing the district aligns its counselors with the American School Counselor Association model, which she said has integrated SPLC standards. Pekel's position is that the Learning for Justice materials — formerly branded Teaching Tolerance — are promoted by the SPLC rather than written by it.

That's a real disagreement about sourcing. It is not evidence that a Rochester classroom is teaching anything. And a phone call to the superintendent would have surfaced all of it before the letter went out instead of after.

There is one loose thread, and it's fair to name it. A conservative think tank, the Center of the American Experiment, later published an account from an unnamed former district staffer who says she was handed Teaching Tolerance handouts at a January 2024 staff training. The group's own editor's note concedes the date "has not been independently verified through a district record or session agenda," and the material described is adult professional development, not student curriculum. Even taken at face value, it is not what Finstad's letter alleged.

What the letter said about kids

The letter didn't stay on process. Finstad wrote that Learning for Justice content often pushes "leftwing activism, gender ideology and queer theory, white privilege and transgenderism."

He also told the commissioner that "public school should be politically neutral, but instead the Southern Poverty Law Center's Learning for Justice program is able to integrate far-left content and materials into our K-12 schools."

Read that sentence next to the district's answer. The program he says "is able to integrate" content into Rochester schools is a program Rochester schools say they never adopted.

Finstad's letter also cited the SPLC's legal trouble. That part is accurate as far as it goes: a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the SPLC on April 21, 2026 on charges of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. An indictment is an accusation, not a verdict — the organization has pleaded not guilty. And whatever happens in that Alabama courtroom, it says nothing about what is being taught in a Rochester social studies class.

This is the second letter this summer

Finstad has a method now, and it doesn't take long to see it.

Six weeks after the Rochester letter, he wrote to Minnesota's secretary of state raising the "potential" of noncitizens registering and voting. We checked that one: the state's own ten-year review had turned up three cases out of 13.3 million votes cast, and not one of them involved a person in the country illegally.

Both letters follow the same pattern. Pick a national conservative talking point. Address it to a Minnesota official who can't do much about it. Announce it. Let local TV carry the headline. Nobody has to prove anything, because a letter isn't a finding — it's a question, and a question can't be wrong.

His opponent said as much. DFL nominee Jake Johnson told KIMT:

"This is what people hate about politics. Congressman Finstad is abusing taxpayer resources by directing his congressional office to find and launch baseless attacks to support his reelection campaign."

Finstad is not the only Republican who has decided that the real problem in a classroom is the teacher. North Carolina's Virginia Foxx answered a fourth grader's persuasive essay by telling him to ask his teacher to explain propaganda, and that his teachers were "too interested in indoctrinating you."

What southern Minnesota is actually dealing with

Finstad represents one of the most agricultural districts in the country, and his constituents are in a genuine crisis. In July 2025 alone, 306 Minnesota farmers filed for the state's Farmer-Lender Mediation program — four times as many as the same month a year earlier. He spent two straight years calling the tariff damage "short term" while it kept getting worse.

He does not hold in-person town halls. When constituents in New Ulm and Rochester turned up at his offices in early 2025 asking for one, the Mankato Free Press could not find any record of Finstad ever having held one. Asked why he won't, he said such events let agitators "come with their pitchfork and scream and have a hissy fit in front of the cameras" — and in June 2026 he added, "I don't regret saying it at all."

So he won't stand in a school gym in his own district and take questions from the people who live there. But he will write to a state commissioner in St. Paul demanding an accounting of what a Rochester teacher is putting in front of a ninth grader — without calling the school, without visiting the school, and without checking whether the thing he's asking about is in the building at all.

The superintendent's offer is still open. Pekel said Finstad is welcome anytime to come see what Rochester is teaching and how, at a school "where our community's young people are doing amazing things."

Finstad has not taken it.

Source

Addie McCabe, "Finstad asks MDE for clarity on 'far-left' education materials; Rochester schools push back," KTTC, June 24, 2026. Additional reporting from Brian Todd at the Post Bulletin and KIMT. Photo: Post Bulletin / Forum Communications.

Sarah Sanders Says LEARNS Is Working. The Test She's Citing Is the One Arkansas Built Itself.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:48:31 +0000

On August 10, Baker Kurrus published what he said may be his last article about Arkansas public schools. He is an attorney in Little Rock, and he was superintendent of the Little Rock School District in 2015 and 2016. He has spent about two years writing long, careful, fact-heavy pieces about what the LEARNS Act would do to the state.

He ended this one like this:

"I am reduced to watching the state I love so deeply commit educational and economic suicide, and all I can say is that I told you so."

The "I told you so" is the part worth sitting with. Kurrus wrote down his predictions in advance. Nearly every one of them came true.

The scoreboard the state built for itself

Two months ago, Sarah Sanders put out a press release with a headline that could not be clearer: "LEARNS is Working: Student Test Scores Rise Across the Board."

The numbers in it are real. Since 2024, math proficiency went from 36.4% to 44.2%. Science went from 35.6% to 44.0%. English went from 33.8% to 39.5%. Overall proficiency went from 35% to 42%.

"Arkansas LEARNS is working and students across Arkansas are doing better because of it," Sanders said.

Two things about that.

First, "proficiency has risen by more than 20%" is doing some work. Going from 35% to 42% is a gain of seven percentage points. Calling that "more than 20%" is technically true, and it sounds twice as big as it is.

Second, and this is Kurrus's actual point: every one of those numbers comes from ATLAS — the Arkansas Teaching, Learning, and Assessment System. Arkansas wrote that test. Arkansas set the standards it measures. Kurrus explains what that means:

"The trick there is to keep the standards simple and keep the test at a level that is easy to master."

He is not saying anyone cheated. He is saying that when the state that wants the good news also gets to write the exam and decide what counts as passing, the good news is not worth much on its own. He predicted the ATLAS scores would keep climbing. He also predicted what the national test would show.

The national test says Arkansas is falling behind

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is the one test given the same way in every state. People call it the nation's report card. It's the only way to compare Arkansas to anywhere else.

By that measure, Arkansas has been going backwards — and not slowly. The Arkansas Times walked through the numbers from a state Department of Education presentation:

4th grade math, 2013: Arkansas was one point behind the national average. 2024: seven points behind. The nation dropped four points over that decade. Arkansas dropped ten.
4th grade reading, 2013: Arkansas was two points behind. 2024: four points behind.

Scores fell almost everywhere in the country. Arkansas fell faster. And this isn't a critic's spin on the data — it's what Sanders' own education secretary told lawmakers. Jacob Oliva said Arkansas had been following the national decline "if not at the same level, a more rapid level."

That is the same Jacob Oliva who said in June that "the plan is working."

So: on the test Arkansas built, Arkansas is improving. On the test everyone takes, Arkansas is losing ground faster than the rest of the country. The governor's press release only mentions one of them.

Half of LEARNS isn't even on the scoreboard

Here's the part that should bother everybody, whatever you think about vouchers.

The centerpiece of LEARNS is the voucher program — Educational Freedom Accounts. Lawmakers approved up to $379 million for it this year, and Kurrus puts the real cost at close to $400 million. And the private schools cashing those checks don't have to give ATLAS. They don't have to give any one test. They don't report results to the state the way public schools do.

Read that against the press release again. "LEARNS is working" is a claim about the whole law. The evidence offered is a test score from the public school students — the part of the system LEARNS is drawing money away from. The voucher half, the expensive half, the part that is actually new, contributes nothing to that number at all.

When the state did try to report on voucher students, the result was a mess. A mandated annual report released in October 2025 said EFA students outperformed 57% of students nationally in math and 59% in English. But as KATV reported, those students took 17 different tests. April Reisma of the Arkansas Education Association put it plainly: "You're comparing apples to oranges."

The same report claimed the program saved the state $12 million to $22 million. Its own data showed only 12% of voucher students were known to have switched out of public school. At least 42% were already in private school or homeschooled.

The people grading the program are paid by the people who wanted it

Kurrus raises the funding question directly, and he names names:

"The University of Arkansas Office for Education Policy has lots of positive things to say about LEARNS. That's not surprising. The office is partially funded through grants from voucher proponents – think the Walton Family Foundation – and it certainly seems to find ways to keep getting those large grants."

That checks out. In June 2024, the Office for Education Policy announced it had been awarded $1.175 million from the Walton Family Foundation over three years.

And the new three-year evaluation of the voucher program itself? Also funded by the Walton Family Foundation, announced in July 2026, run out of the same University of Arkansas department, with support from that same office. The state's mandated annual report on vouchers is co-produced with that department too.

None of that proves any researcher is bending a finding. But it means the state's official evidence that vouchers work is largely produced by an operation kept running by the foundation that spent years pushing for vouchers. If you would find that arrangement suspicious coming from a union or an environmental group, it should read the same way here.

Kurrus asked the researchers a question that doesn't need a grant to answer:

"I want the folks there to explain how students who were already in private schools or already home schooled will attain higher academic achievement simply because public tax dollars are now used to pay the costs that their parents paid before."

$400 million to change nothing

That question lands because of what Kurrus laid out in part one of this series in June.

There are 54,442 voucher applications pending for this school year. About $320 million of the money, he calculates, goes to families who are doing exactly what they were already doing and planned to keep doing — just with the state paying now.

The homeschool numbers make the case by themselves. Homeschool vouchers went from 3,422 to 11,286 in one year. Over that same stretch, the total number of homeschoolers in Arkansas went down by roughly 2,000. Eight thousand more checks. Two thousand fewer homeschoolers.

Meanwhile the promise — rescuing kids from failing schools — barely happened. The last official LEARNS report showed 3% of voucher students had left public schools graded D or F.

And the schools taking the money answer to almost nobody. Private schools don't have to follow the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Their teachers don't have to be certified. They can turn down any child for any reason. That last one is what Kurrus can't get past:

"School choice is not parental choice. Parents apply, then private schools make the choice of the students they want and don't want, getting paid for the number of students they accept."

We've seen where thin oversight goes. A private school in the Delta collected more than $300,000 in voucher money while its founder had students attack a 13-year-old and made kids scrub floors as punishment. She pleaded guilty. The checks kept coming.

Her father saw it the exact opposite way

The sharpest thing in Kurrus's two columns is the family history.

In 2002, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in Lake View School District v. Huckabee that the state must provide an adequate and equitable education to every child — and that the state can hand the job to school districts but can never hand off the responsibility.

The Huckabee in that case name is Mike Huckabee, Sanders' father. He didn't fight the ruling. In his 2003 State of the State address, he proposed consolidating districts with fewer than 1,500 students, because small schools couldn't offer a full curriculum. In 2004 he signed a bill forcing districts under 350 students to consolidate.

Arkansas had gone from 4,711 school districts in 1927 down to 240 by 2010. That was a century of deliberate work, and Mike Huckabee pushed it forward.

His daughter's law runs it in reverse. By Kurrus's count, the state will soon fund at least 228 more schools and districts than it did before LEARNS — including about 100 microschools that average around 15 students each, the exact kind of tiny, thinly-staffed school the consolidation era existed to end.

The lawsuit he sees coming

Kurrus closes with a warning that isn't rhetorical:

"Some day, some child who comes out of a micro school, a private school or even a home school might just sue this state because it failed to provide an adequate education. The constitution requires it, Gov. Mike Huckabee acknowledged it, and Lake View confirmed it."

The state can delegate the teaching. It cannot delegate the accountability. And Arkansas is now writing checks to hundreds of schools it openly does not have the staff to inspect.

That's the trajectory. A second state voucher program is already being studied at the Capitol — a $3,000 refundable tax credit that Kurrus calls "a wasteful example of political grandstanding." A federal voucher with no cap on its cost starts in Arkansas on January 1. And in Washington, 37 House Republicans have signed a one-sentence bill to abolish the Department of Education entirely.

Nine out of ten American children go to a public school, and Arkansas is no exception. Those parents are being handed a rising number from a test the state wrote itself, while the national scorecard says their kids are falling further behind — and while hundreds of millions a year go to schools that are not required to report a comparable score at all.

The man who ran Little Rock's schools called it two years ago, in writing, and got it right. We deserve better.

Source

Baker Kurrus, "State committing educational, economic suicide, former Supt. Baker Kurrus says," Arkansas Times, August 10, 2026 — part two of a two-part series. Photo: Arkansas Times.

Arkansas Already Has Two Voucher Programs. A Republican Wants a Third — and the Selling Point Is That It Has Fewer Rules.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:32:22 +0000

On August 3, the Arkansas House and Senate education committees met at the state Capitol. The next day, the news out of that meeting was that a legislative panel had approved a request to study a new $100 million tax credit for private school and homeschool families.

That would be Arkansas's third program for subsidizing private education costs.

The state already runs Educational Freedom Accounts, the voucher program Sarah Sanders created with the LEARNS Act in 2023. Arkansas has also opted into the new federal private school voucher that starts January 1. Now a Republican state representative wants to add a third — and his argument for it is worth reading closely, because he is not hiding what it's for.

What's being proposed

Rep. Brit McKenzie of Rogers asked for the interim study. The proposal outlines:

A tax credit worth up to $3,000 per child for education expenses — tuition, fees, textbooks, curriculum, tutoring, educational therapies, transportation, and technology.
A $100 million program starting in 2027.
Expansion to "uncapped universal availability" in 2029.
The credit would be refundable — meaning, per the study proposal, families could claim it even if they have no income tax liability at all, and get the balance as a payment.

McKenzie has not written a bill. "I would love (lawmakers) to consider" it, he said, but added: "I have no bills drafted for next session." What he has is a study, approved, with a mandate to gather input from state agencies, education providers, parent advocacy groups, and other states.

The pitch is that it skips the paperwork

Here is McKenzie's stated reason for wanting a second state program alongside the one Arkansas already has:

"Basically, this would be for anyone interested in school choice and not in EFA."

He said lawmakers have heard from homeschool families reluctant to apply for Educational Freedom Accounts because the program "did create regulation whereas they didn't have it before."

That is the sales pitch: a version with fewer rules attached.

It's worth knowing how few rules we're talking about. Educational Freedom Account families do have to take a norm-referenced test each year — but they get to choose which test. In June, lawmakers tightened things slightly: no using the money on sports that "limit participation based on tryouts or ability," and pre-approval now required to be reimbursed for anything the Arkansas Department of Education doesn't count as a "core educational expense."

Those are the "regulatory hurdles" the new program is designed to route around.

McKenzie's own framing was blunt: "My main thing is, I want a buffet of education freedom in Arkansas."

Meanwhile, the first program keeps growing

Arkansas is not short on ways to spend money on private education right now.

Educational Freedom Accounts opened to every K-12 student in the state last year. Lawmakers have approved up to $379 million for 2026-27, with most participants getting $7,208 each, and more than 54,000 students have applied.

Getting there took three separate votes. As the Arkansas Advocate laid out, lawmakers budgeted more than $187 million for the program last April — then had to add $90 million in June and another $32 million in January when that wasn't enough. Final cost for the year: more than $309 million. The governor's budget then asked for at least $309 million again, plus $70 million more set aside from surplus for "anticipated program growth."

The Advocate reports bipartisan worry about this. Democrats and rural Republicans have raised concerns about what else in the state budget gets squeezed, and the paper notes a similar program has contributed to budget problems in Arizona.

Into that, a proposal for $100 million more — heading for "uncapped."

Who the money has actually been going to

The case for vouchers is that they rescue kids from bad public schools. Arkansas's own numbers say otherwise.

According to the state Department of Education, 95% of participants in Arkansas's universal voucher program had never attended a public school before receiving a voucher — the highest figure of any state on that list. The program is not moving children out of struggling schools. It is paying tuition bills for families who had already chosen private school.

And oversight of where that money lands has been thin. A private school in the Delta collected more than $300,000 in voucher money while its founder directed students to attack a 13-year-old and made kids scrub floors as punishment — she pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and the state kept paying.

That is the program a new proposal would sit beside, with fewer requirements.

Even a conservative school choice group says no

The most interesting opposition isn't from the left.

Opportunity Arkansas, a conservative advocacy group that supports school choice, came out against the idea. CEO Nic Horton said the group stands "in full support of protecting and preserving" the Educational Freedom Account program, and added: "We see no reason to change course now."

Horton's other objection is about money. He argues state leaders should stay focused on eliminating the Arkansas income tax — and that a new personal education tax credit would slow that down. Sanders has approved four income tax cuts since taking office in 2023 and has pledged to phase the income tax out.

That is the collision at the center of this. You cannot promise to phase out the income tax, run a voucher program that has already needed three emergency funding votes in one year, and bolt on a $100 million refundable credit headed for "uncapped," all at once. Something gives.

From the other direction, Rep. Jessie McGruder, a Democrat from Marion who sits on the Education Committee, put it simply:

"I can't understand why we need another tax credit."

He also went after the premise directly. Money going to private schools and homeschools should face more scrutiny, not less: "I do not think we need fewer hoops to jump through. I think we need more hoops to jump through, because when we're spending taxpayers dollars, we need to have accountability in place."

Where the governor stands

Sanders has not endorsed this. Her spokesman, Sam Dubke, said she is interested in the study's findings, and declined to say whether she'd support the program. His full statement was a résumé:

"Governor Sanders has supported education freedom by establishing the EFA program, now used by nearly 50,000 students to attend the school of their choice, and by opting Arkansas into President Trump's federal tax credit scholarship program for school choice, and looks forward to reviewing this study's results when it is complete."

Read that again. It is not a position on the proposal. It is a list of the two reasons this proposal exists.

Sanders built the first program. She opted Arkansas into the second in January, saying she was "excited to see that with President Trump back in office, he's taking the education freedom movement nationwide." That federal credit — the first national private school voucher in American history, with no cap on what it can drain from the Treasury — starts in Arkansas on January 1.

A third program is now a live idea in the legislature because the first two made it one. "Looks forward to reviewing this study's results" is what a governor says when the answer is probably yes and the price tag isn't public yet.

Nine out of ten American children go to a public school, and Arkansas is no exception. Their families have spent three years watching the state build program after program for the other one in ten — each one bigger than the last, each one carrying fewer requirements than the state program that came first, and each one drawing on the same budget that pays for their kids' classrooms. We deserve better.

Source

Reporting by Josh Snyder for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: "Arkansas legislative panel approves study of proposed $100 million school choice tax credit." Photo: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe.

America Now Has a National School Voucher. It Starts January 1, and Nobody Put a Limit on What It Can Cost.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:17:48 +0000

In less than five months, a brand new federal program starts handing out money. Twenty-seven states have already signed up for it. It is the first national private school voucher in American history.

Most people have never heard of it.

That is not an accident. It was not passed as an education bill. There was no floor debate about schools, no committee hearing where parents testified. It was slipped into the tax section of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," the giant budget bill Trump signed on July 4, 2025. If you were following the news that summer, you were hearing about Medicaid cuts and food aid. This was in the same bill, on a different page.

Here is what it does, in plain English — and what it takes out of all our pockets.

How it works

Starting January 1, 2027, you can give up to $1,700 to a nonprofit called a "Scholarship Granting Organization." That group hands out scholarships — vouchers — that families use for private school tuition and other school costs.

Then the federal government gives you the entire $1,700 back on your taxes.

Not a deduction. Not a percentage. The whole thing. It is a dollar-for-dollar credit worth 100% of what you gave, and it comes straight off your tax bill. You are not richer than before — you gave away $1,700 and got $1,700 back. But the donation cost you nothing. The government paid for it.

There is no other charity in America that works this way. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy put it, there is no other cause — "not children's hospitals, veterans' groups, or disaster relief" — where the federal government picks up the entire tab for your gift.

A few details that matter:

The $1,700 is per person, regardless of filing status. A married couple filing jointly gets $1,700, not $3,400.
It is nonrefundable. You need to owe federal income tax to use it. If you owe little or nothing, this tax break is not for you.
Contributions have to be cash. An earlier version let people donate stock, which would have let wealthy donors dodge capital gains taxes on top of everything else. That part got cut.
You claim it when you file your 2027 return, in 2028.

This is not like the state voucher programs you've heard about

A lot of states run vouchers. Arizona started the first tax-credit scholarship program back in 1997, and by August 2025 there were 22 such programs operating across 18 states.

But every one of those is a state program, paid for out of a state budget, with limits a state legislature wrote. State caps run from under $2 million a year up to $540 million. Lawmakers argue about that number every session, and voters can throw them out over it.

The new federal program has no cap at all.

Not a small cap. Not a generous cap. None. Each person is limited to $1,700, but there is no limit on how many people can do it, and no limit on the total amount of money it pulls out of the U.S. Treasury. The more people who claim it, the more it costs — forever, with no vote required.

That was a choice, and it was made late. The version the House passed had a safeguard: total payouts capped at roughly $5 billion a year. The bill's own author had written a $10 billion annual cap into his original version. Then the Senate parliamentarian ruled the provision broke the chamber's budget rules, and senators rewrote it to survive — a rewrite that threw the cap out entirely.

The House version would also have expired after a few years. The final one is permanent.

What it costs all of us

Congress's own scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, estimates the program will drain about $26 billion from federal revenue over ten years. That is the official number.

Outside analysts think it could be far bigger, because with no ceiling, the cost depends entirely on how many people sign up — and there is a large, well-funded movement whose whole job is getting people to sign up. ITEP ran the math. If roughly 59 million taxpayers who like the idea of vouchers all claimed the credit, it would cost $101 billion a year. If only half of them do, it is nearly $51 billion a year. Even if just 5 million people participate — fewer than the number of kids already in private school — it runs past $8 billion a year.

Put the high end next to what the federal government actually spends on schools:

Program	Annual federal spending
Title I, for schools serving low-income kids	$18.4 billion
IDEA state grants, for kids with disabilities	$14.6 billion
The new voucher credit (high estimate)	up to $51 billion

One uncapped tax credit for private schools could cost more than the two biggest federal K-12 programs combined — the money for poor districts and the money for children with disabilities.

And here is the part that reaches everyone: your state does not have to opt in for you to pay for this. States choose whether to participate. But a taxpayer in a state that opted out can still donate to a scholarship group in a state that opted in, claim the credit, and shrink the federal Treasury by $1,700. The families in the non-participating state get nothing. The bill still comes to everybody.

"Low-income" can mean half a million dollars

The program is sold as help for low-income families. Read the definition.

A student qualifies if the household earns up to 300% of the area median gross income. Not 300% of the poverty line, which is what most state programs use. Three times the median — the middle — for wherever you live.

The Congressional Research Service spells out what that means. If the median income in your area is $60,000, a household making $180,000 qualifies. If the median is $100,000, a household making $300,000 qualifies. In 2025, the highest area median income in the country was $195,200, in Santa Clara County, California. Three times that is more than $585,000.

One more wrinkle: area median income does not change based on how many people are in your household. A single adult and a family of six face the same cutoff.

Nobody has to answer for the money

State voucher programs usually come with strings. Private schools taking the money might have to be accredited, run background checks, or give students the state test.

The federal program has none of that. The Congressional Research Service notes that the law does not place any "requirements on private schools that enroll scholarship recipients." No accreditation. No state tests. No background checks. And a private school does not have to take a scholarship student at all — it can say no and keep taking everyone else's money.

The scholarship groups themselves face a thin set of rules: be a 501(c)(3), keep the money in a separate account, serve at least 10 students at more than one school, and spend at least 90% of the money on scholarships. They keep up to 10% for overhead.

And they must give priority to students who got a scholarship the year before, then to those students' siblings — before any new family is considered. Whoever gets in first stays in first.

We have written about what happens when nobody is watching. An Arkansas private school taking state voucher money had students attack a 13-year-old and made kids scrub floors as punishment — and Sarah Sanders' program kept the checks coming. The Wichita school Iowa candidate Zach Lahn co-founded had no accreditation, no state tests, and no licensed teachers.

Where the money actually goes

Every state that has opened vouchers to everyone gets the same result. The money goes to families who were already paying private tuition.

In Arkansas, 95% of voucher users had never attended a public school.
In Florida's first universal year, 69% of new recipients were already in private school. Only 13% had ever attended a public one.
In Iowa, about two-thirds were already in private school.
In Ohio, the share of voucher students who had been in private school the year before jumped from 7% in 2019 to nearly 55% in 2023 — and in Cleveland, the share of voucher users who were low-income fell from 35% to 7%.

For the kids who do switch, the research is not kind. Josh Cowen, a Michigan State professor who spent years evaluating these programs before turning against them, says studies of vouchers in Washington D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio found some of the largest test score drops "ever seen in the research record" — on par, he writes, with what the pandemic did to test scores.

Who wrote it

The House bill behind all this is H.R. 833, the Educational Choice for Children Act. Its author is Adrian Smith, who represents Nebraska's 3rd District.

When he reintroduced it in January 2025, Smith said it was about giving students "a brighter future, no matter their background or address." His press release listed 30 House cosponsors and endorsements from former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and more than 150 national and state groups. It also described his bill as providing "$10 billion in annual tax credits" — a number, a ceiling, a limit.

The law that passed has no such number.

Nebraska voters had already weighed in. In November 2024, they voted to repeal their own state's private school scholarship program, killing its $10 million a year. Colorado and Kentucky voters turned down voucher measures the same night; Nebraska's margin was the widest of the three, 65% to 35%. Nebraska has since opted into the federal program anyway.

The vote, and what happens next

The final bill cleared the House on July 3, 2025 by 218 to 214. Republicans voted 218–2 for it. The Senate had split 50–50 the day before, and Vice President JD Vance broke the tie.

The Treasury Department is still writing the rules; officials said in June that full guidance is expected by the end of September. Democrats have introduced a repeal bill in both chambers — the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act, S.4297 and H.R.9289. Both were referred to committee on the day they were filed and have not moved since.

Meanwhile the state-by-state fight is live. Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity, running for governor, was asked whether her state should join and answered "I would a hundred percent". In Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn's push to expand vouchers drew $3 million from Club for Growth and billionaire Jeff Yass. This program is the quiet half of a much louder campaign to take apart the Department of Education.

About 49.6 million American kids go to a public school — around nine in ten. Those schools have to take every child who walks in the door: rich or poor, disabled or not, any faith or none. They are the only schools that do.

Congress just built an unlimited pipeline out of the Treasury and pointed it somewhere else, and it never had to say out loud what it was doing. We deserve better.

Source

Details of the program from the Congressional Research Service report on P.L. 119-21 and The Hechinger Report's explainer, "What's a tax credit scholarship? The details behind the first national school voucher program." Photo: Alex Brandon/Getty Images.

On One Day Last July, Keith Self Introduced Four Bills. All Four Were Donald Trump's Executive Orders.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:50:51 +0000

Congress writes the laws. The president carries them out. That is the first thing anybody learns about how this country is supposed to work, and it is the whole reason there are two branches instead of one.

An executive order is not a law. It is an instruction a president gives the executive branch, and the next president can throw it in the trash on day one. That's the deal — a president gets to run the agencies, and if he wants something permanent, he has to persuade Congress.

On July 23, 2025, Keith Self introduced four bills in a single day.

Here are their official titles, from the congressional record:

H.R. 4727 — "To codify Executive Order 14235 relating to restoring public service loan forgiveness."
H.R. 4728 — "To codify Executive Order 14280 relating to reinstating commonsense school discipline policies."
H.R. 4729 — "To codify Executive Order 14292 relating to improving the safety and security of biological research."
H.R. 4730 — the Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History Act, whose own text says its purpose is "To codify Executive Order 14253 relating to restoring truth and sanity to American history."

Four bills. Four Trump executive orders. Written up, numbered, and filed by a member of the branch that is supposed to be checking him.

What's in them

These are not housekeeping measures. Each order does something real, and Self's bills would put each one beyond the reach of the next election.

Executive Order 14253, signed March 27, 2025, is the history order. It directs the Interior Secretary to review whether monuments and markers on federal land have been "removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history," to put the old ones back, and to make sure federal sites don't "inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times)" — and instead "focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people."

Read that plainly: a federal rule that historical markers must be flattering. Self's H.R. 4730 opens with pages of findings about a "revisionist movement" that casts the country's history as "inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed."

Executive Order 14280, signed April 23, 2025, is "Reinstating Commonsense School Discipline Policies." It targets the 2014 guidance from the Education and Justice Departments that told schools they could violate the Civil Rights Act if their discipline fell much harder on students of one race than another. The order calls that framework "discriminatory and unlawful 'equity' ideology."

Executive Order 14235, signed March 7, 2025, is titled "Restoring Public Service Loan Forgiveness." Despite the name, it narrows the program. Public Service Loan Forgiveness is what teachers, nurses, public defenders and nonprofit workers count on after ten years of payments; the order declares that the program "has misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest, but actually harm our national security and American values."

Executive Order 14292, signed May 5, 2025, restricts federally funded "dangerous gain-of-function research" on pathogens.

You can agree or disagree with any of these on the merits. That is a separate argument. The thing worth noticing is who was doing the writing, and who was doing the signing off.

This is not what a constitutional conservative does

Self is a member of the Freedom Caucus. He talks about the Constitution constantly. He is the author of H.J. Res. 198, introduced June 25, 2026 with nine cosponsors, which would repeal the 17th Amendment and take away your right to vote for your own U.S. senators, handing that power back to state legislatures.

His stated reason for that one is restoring "constitutional balance."

Set the two next to each other.

On the one hand: a congressman so concerned with the original constitutional design that he wants to strip voters of a power they've had since 1913 — a proposal we've covered before, as he keeps finding cosponsors for it.

On the other hand: the same congressman spending a day at his desk turning the president's orders into bills, which is the exact opposite of a legislature checking an executive. It is a legislature taking dictation.

Congress does not exist to ratify what the president already decided. If Congress independently concludes that a policy is right, it writes its own bill and defends its own reasoning. Self's four bills don't do that. Three of them say "To codify Executive Order" in the title, and the fourth borrows the order's name. The argument for each is that the president already made it.

Why it matters beyond one member

There is a version of Congress where members introduce the president's agenda because they believe in it and are willing to own it. Fine. But then they should be able to say what's in it, defend it in their own words, and take the vote.

Self's page on the national debt says careless federal spending is "an existential threat to our Republic." He voted for the budget bill anyway — the one the Congressional Budget Office scored at $3.4 trillion in added deficits and 10 million more uninsured people.

That is the shape of it. When Congress's independence is inconvenient to the White House, it gets set down. When it's useful — repealing an amendment, filing an anti-Sharia bill, lecturing about the Founders — it comes back out.

Texas's 3rd District sends one person to Washington to represent it. In July 2025 that person spent a day being a clerk for someone else's ideas.

Sources

Bill records from Congress.gov and the Government Publishing Office: H.R. 4730 bill text and H.J. Res. 198. Executive order texts from the Federal Register, including Executive Order 14253, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History". Photo: Official congressional portrait, 118th Congress.

Andy Biggs Calls Arizona's Anti-Trans Ballot Measure an '80-20 Issue.' Arizona Approved 16 Trans Athletes in Five Years.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:38:11 +0000

At a news conference on Monday, Andy Biggs — the congressman running to unseat Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs — stood with his party's nominees for secretary of state and attorney general to promote Proposition 318, an anti-trans ballot measure.

He didn't sell it as a policy that solves a problem. He sold it as a winner.

"This is an 80-20 issue."

That's the pitch. Not that Arizona schools are in crisis. That the polling is good.

The Arizona Mirror's Gloria Rebecca Gomez reported the whole news conference, and the framing was consistent throughout: Republicans are betting this measure drives their voters to the polls in November.

The problem it claims to solve

Republican lawmakers named Prop. 318 the "Protect Girls Sports in Arizona" act. Here's the part they don't lead with:

Arizona law already forbids transgender girls from joining school sports teams that match their gender identity. That ban passed in 2022, before Hobbs was even elected.

So what does Prop. 318 add? Two things.

First, it extends the ban past schools into private youth recreational organizations — leagues like Little League Baseball. Not state programs. Not public schools. Neighborhood kids' leagues.

Second — and this is the part that isn't about sports at all — it requires schools and athletic associations to make sure bathrooms, locker rooms, shower rooms and other "private spaces" aren't used by anyone of the opposite biological sex. The restriction applies to facilities "integral to athletic engagement," language broad enough to pull in facilities used by teams and even members of the public visiting during sports events. Critics say it could be read to cover every bathroom in a school.

And it works through lawsuits. Schools and athletic associations face legal action if they get it wrong. Which means the safest thing a school can do is police the question aggressively — checking, challenging, and asking children to prove themselves.

The number that ends the argument

Between 2017 and 2022, the Arizona Interscholastic Association approved exactly 16 applications from transgender students to play on teams matching their gender identity. About half of those were trans girls.

So: roughly eight trans girls, over five years.

The AIA oversees more than 170,000 student athletes.

That's the emergency. Eight kids out of 170,000, and the response is a constitutional-grade ballot measure that reaches into Little League and turns every school bathroom into a potential lawsuit.

LGBTQ advocates call it a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. The numbers make that hard to argue with.

Why it's on the ballot instead of in a bill

Biggs complained at the press conference that Republicans even had to go to voters at all — saying Hobbs had a chance to do this the easy way and didn't.

"She puts in jeopardy the opportunity for fair competitive athletics for women and it's really astounding."

That's a strange complaint, because it describes exactly how this is supposed to work. Hobbs has consistently vetoed anti-LGBTQ bills sent to her by the Republican legislature, including several that would have barred trans students from using school facilities matching their gender identity. That's a governor using a governor's power.

A large part of the reason Republicans wrote Prop. 318 as a ballot measure in the first place was to get around that veto.

It's worth being precise about Biggs's framing, too. The law banning trans girls from school sports already exists, and Hobbs never had the chance to veto it — it passed before she took office. Since then, Republicans haven't sent her further trans-athlete legislation. They've focused on school facilities. So the thing Biggs blames Hobbs for not doing is not quite the thing on the ballot.

The trap inside the measure

Here's the piece Arizona voters should understand before November.

If Prop. 318 passes, a future legislature essentially cannot undo it. The Arizona Constitution requires a three-fourths supermajority before lawmakers can change anything voters approved — and any change has to advance the measure's original intent, which rules out swapping in trans-inclusive policy.

The only other route is going back to the voters with a whole new ballot question.

Warren Petersen, the Republican nominee for attorney general, said the quiet part cleanly: he touted Prop. 318 as a long-term solution "that can't be undone by future legislatures."

That is the actual design. Not to settle a policy question, but to lock one in past the reach of anyone Arizonans might elect later.

The ad is built on a video from another state

The "Yes on 318" campaign released an ad Monday built around a viral clip from a Massachusetts girls' basketball game, in which an allegedly trans player shoves an opponent while grabbing the ball. The voiceover asks Arizonans to protect "female spaces from those 'pretending' to be someone they're not."

When that clip went viral in 2024, LGBTQ advocates made a simple point: one athlete's bad sportsmanship is not a reason to condemn an entire group of children.

The campaign's website also hosts a page called "rational voices," collecting quotes against trans athletic participation from Bill Maher, Caitlyn Jenner and Meghan McCain.

An out-of-state video clip and a celebrity quote page. That's the evidentiary base for a measure that would reach into Arizona's Little Leagues and school bathrooms.

What Biggs is actually running on

Biggs is not a stranger to this playbook. His record on Arizona's ballot and constitutional questions is a pattern of using structural tools to lock in outcomes — we've written about his push to repeal the 17th Amendment and about his "7 and 0" redistricting ambitions.

He's also running for governor with an anti-abortion record he has spent the campaign managing.

Prop. 318 fits neatly. It's a measure that does relatively little about school sports — those rules already exist — and a great deal about bathrooms, private leagues, lawsuits, and locking the whole thing beyond a future legislature's reach.

And Biggs's own stated reason for backing it wasn't any of that. It was the number: 80-20.

The people this actually lands on

Arizona's Democratic incumbents won narrowly last time — Attorney General Kris Mayes by 280 votes, Hobbs by just over a percentage point. Republicans think a wedge issue closes that gap.

So the strategy is legible. Find an issue that polls at 80-20, put it on the ballot, and let it pull your voters to the polls in a race you lost by 280 votes.

The cost of that strategy falls on a few thousand kids who wanted to play a sport, and on every student who now gets a school bathroom policed under threat of a lawsuit.

Mayes' campaign manager, Delaney Corcoran, put the political read plainly: "These attacks are designed to divide and distract Arizonans from the issues that matter most to Arizonans and their families."

Biggs told Arizona what this is when he called it an 80-20 issue. He was describing a turnout tool, not a problem in Arizona's schools. Voters should hold him to his own description.

Source

Top Republicans embrace anti-trans measure as a wedge in November races — Gloria Rebecca Gomez, Arizona Mirror, August 10, 2026. Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images.

Trump Proposed Zeroing Out North Dakota's Tribal Colleges. Julie Fedorchak Called His Budget 'A Starting Point.'

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:11:33 +0000

North Dakota has five tribal colleges: Turtle Mountain Community College in Belcourt, Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in New Town, Cankdeska Cikana Community College in Fort Totten, United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, and Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates. There are thirty-seven accredited tribal colleges in the whole country, and five of them are in this one state.

All five are in Julie Fedorchak's district, because North Dakota has one at-large seat and she holds it. Every North Dakotan is her constituent.

In May 2026, the Trump administration proposed cutting all federal funding for tribal colleges and universities. In its fiscal 2027 budget request, the Interior Department asked to cut more than $150 million from tribal colleges and tribal postsecondary programs. That was more than the $105 million cut proposed the year before, which Congress rejected. In fiscal 2025 those colleges received $196 million in total from the federal government.

The North Dakota Monitor asked the state's congressional delegation what they intended to do about it.

What the college presidents said

Twyla Baker is president of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in New Town. More than half her school's funding is federal. Asked what the proposal would mean:

"I can guarantee there would be TCUs that would be shutting down within a year to two years, and that it would be … the death knell for our institutions."

Without the federal money, she said, her college could keep the doors open "three, four years tops, and that would be with extreme budgeting across the board."

Russ McDonald is president of United Tribes Technical College, in Bismarck — the state capital, and the city Fedorchak's family has lived in for decades. Around 70% of his college's funding is federal. He was blunter:

"It'll close us. We'll close the doors."

"I mean, there's some reserves that we have that would just carry us to close. We might last a year."

These are not hypothetical institutions. A study by the North Dakota Tribal College System found the five colleges added $169.5 million to the state's economy over 2022–2023, supporting the equivalent of 2,106 jobs.

What North Dakota's senator said

Sen. John Hoeven gave the Monitor a written statement. Here it is in full:

"We provided strong funding for North Dakota's tribal colleges and universities this year, and I expect we will continue to fund them again in the coming year."

That is a commitment. It has a subject, a verb, and a promise in it. You can hold a man to that sentence next year.

What North Dakota's congresswoman said

Here is how the Monitor summarized Fedorchak's response:

"Rep. Julie Fedorchak, also a Republican, said the president's budget is a starting point and she plans to review priorities that matter to North Dakota communities, including tribal colleges."

A starting point. She plans to review priorities.

Read those two answers next to each other. Her senior senator, from the same party, in the same state, facing the same budget request, said he expects Congress will fund the colleges. Fedorchak declined to say whether she'd fight for them at all. She described a proposal to zero out five institutions in her district as an opening bid, and promised to look into it.

That is not a neutral statement. When the president proposes eliminating something and the only House member from that state calls the proposal a starting point, she is telling the people who wrote that budget that she is not going to be a problem.

She has a pattern of calling a cut something else

This is the second time we've seen Fedorchak respond to a cut by disputing the frame rather than the cut.

Last year she voted Aye on final passage of Trump's budget bill. The Joint Economic Committee projects 17,926 North Dakotans will lose health coverage as a result — 10,671 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 7,255 losing Medicaid. Her response was an op-ed on her own House website telling North Dakotans they were worried about "cuts that simply don't exist."

The cuts existed. The tribal college proposal exists too. It is written down in a budget request with a number attached to it.

The part about promises

There's a reason the tribal college presidents talk about this differently than a normal appropriations fight.

Federal support for tribal colleges isn't a grant program somebody thought up. It flows from treaty obligations — the United States committed to supporting education for tribal citizens, and Congress passed laws to codify it, guaranteeing tribal colleges $8,000 per student per year with inflation adjustments. As Baker put it to the Monitor:

"There are agreements in place from well before this administration was ever in existence that these structures were to remain in place. We prepaid with the land that this country occupies, and this is just a complete and utter reneging on that agreement."

Congress has never actually paid the full amount. A 2024 ProPublica investigation, cited in the Monitor's reporting, found tribal colleges are underfunded by about $250 million a year, and that the Bureau of Indian Education had never even asked lawmakers to fund them at the level federal law requires.

So the baseline was already a broken promise. The proposal on the table now is to stop paying entirely.

What it would take

Congress rejected this exact cut last year. It can do it again — but that takes members of Congress from the affected states saying plainly that they will not vote for it.

Hoeven said something close to that. Fedorchak did not.

She is not powerless here. She sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee — one of the most sought-after assignments in the House, and she landed it in her first term. She has the standing to say a sentence. She used it to say the budget is a starting point.

Meanwhile the dismantling continues elsewhere: Tim Walberg is running the committee effort to break up the Department of Education entirely. The pattern is the same one North Dakota's tribal colleges are living through — the cut is proposed at the top, and the members who could stop it decide to review their priorities.

Twyla Baker had one more thing to say about what her colleges do:

"Everything this administration says they want, we're doing that on our campuses."

Source

Federal cuts would be 'death knell' for North Dakota tribal colleges, campus presidents say — Ceilidh Kern, North Dakota Monitor, May 12, 2026. Photo by Michael Achterling / North Dakota Monitor.

The Only Ph.D. Scientist Representing Purdue Called the Federal Audit 'Long Overdue.' Then NSF Cancelled $5.9 Million in Purdue Grants.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:58:24 +0000

There are not many scientists in Congress. Jim Baird is one of them.

He earned a bachelor's and a master's in animal science at Purdue, and after Vietnam he went on to a doctorate in monogastric nutrition from the University of Kentucky. He served on the advisory council for Purdue's Dean of Agriculture. All three of his children are Purdue graduates. He sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and he co-chairs the Congressional R&D Caucus.

And Indiana's 4th Congressional District contains Lafayette and West Lafayette — which means Purdue University is his constituent.

If any Republican in the House was positioned to defend federal research money, it was this one.

Here is what happened instead.

What happened at Purdue

In April 2025, the Purdue Exponent went out and talked to the graduate students and faculty living through the first months of the administration's research cuts. The paper reported that "almost $170 million worth of Purdue's NIH and NSF funding may be on the chopping block" — two agencies that are, as the story put it, "responsible for doling out almost two thirds of the federal money appropriated to research."

The students were not subtle about what it felt like. One Ph.D. student, Izaak Gilchrist, told the paper:

"No one knows whether a future in science is even feasible in this country anymore."

"We are in graduate school to prepare for a career in science, and then (the cuts and layoffs are) opening up this whole question of, will there be careers in science in the United States?"

Another student, Montse Robles, said she had come from Mexico because "it was always a huge deal for me to do a Ph.D. here," and was now thinking about leaving for Europe. Nationally, nearly 2,000 scientists had signed an open letter on March 31 describing "a climate of fear" in the research community.

This is a newspaper published on the campus in Jim Baird's district, describing his district's largest research institution, in the field he holds a doctorate in.

The receipts: 13 grants, $5,917,472

You don't have to take the students' word for it. The National Science Foundation published its own list of terminated awards — a spreadsheet of every grant the agency killed, with the recipient and the obligated dollar amount.

Purdue University appears on it 13 times, for a combined $5,917,472 in cancelled research money, as of the list's June 5, 2025 export. Among the projects terminated:

$1,500,000 — a knowledge-graph warehouse for neighborhood information
$721,716 — a career-award study on the mechanisms of dehumanization
$644,957 — engineering education for sustainability
$555,089 — a long-term study of identity development in Black science students
$513,506 — a career award on reducing bias in engineering assessments
$349,516 — engineering research on diversity, equity and inclusion
$336,877 — research on reducing racially biased beliefs through genetics education

Eight of the 13 came out of NSF's engineering and STEM education directorates. These are not line items in a budget document. They are people — graduate students on assistantships, postdocs, lab technicians — whose salaries stopped.

What Baird said while it was happening

In March 2025, as the cuts were landing, WISH-TV asked Baird about the Department of Government Efficiency. He told them that an audit of the entire federal government for waste, fraud and abuse was "long overdue", and treated DOGE's recommendations as proof the cuts were needed.

Asked separately about the damage DOGE was doing, he offered the national debt and not much else:

"I am concerned about our indebtedness. We've been concerned about that for quite some time, and apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that."

That's what he told Fox59. Apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that. A scientist watching the machinery of American science get taken apart, describing it as a bookkeeping method.

DOGE itself is gone now — its charter expired on July 4, 2026 without a final report. The grants it helped cancel did not come back.

He knows exactly what the numbers are

This is the part that's hard to explain away.

In June 2025, Baird appeared at a Capitol Hill briefing — in his capacity as R&D Caucus co-chair, alongside Democrat Bill Foster — on what proposed NSF cuts would do to community colleges and STEM training. As Forbes reported it, NSF was facing cuts of up to 56 percent, with a 75 percent cut to the agency's STEM education directorate, if Congress followed the administration's proposed budget.

He introduced the NSF and USDA Interagency Research Act that same month. He shows up to the briefings. He knows the numbers.

And the President's budget request keeps coming back for more. In April 2026, the administration asked Congress for $4 billion for NSF — a 54% cut from the enacted level, and proposed funding STEM education at $428 million, another 54% cut.

Baird has not stopped any of it.

The part where he takes the credit

On April 28, 2026, Baird's office put out a press release with this headline: "Congressman Baird Announces Purdue University to Gain Over $2.7 Million in Research Under USDA Reorganization."

Read what he's actually celebrating. Purdue picked up a research project worth $2.701 million and seven Agricultural Research Service employees — because the USDA was decommissioning the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, the department's flagship research campus in Maryland. Baird's statement:

"Purdue University and the State of Indiana continue to solidify their standing as the premier location for agricultural research and opportunity. As a farmer and lifelong Hoosier, I am pleased to see the USDA expanding opportunities in Indiana as the agency refocuses on its core mission…"

Expanding opportunities. A federal research center was being shut down and its pieces scattered, and the co-chair of the R&D Caucus described the scattering as an expansion because seven jobs landed in his district.

Do the arithmetic on his own district. NSF cancelled $5.9 million of Purdue research. Baird's press release claims $2.7 million of salvage from a shuttered federal lab. He put out a statement about the $2.7 million. Search his press page for the $5.9 million and there is nothing there.

This is a familiar pattern on this site. Robert Aderholt chairs the subcommittee whose bill eliminates the adult job training program, the youth job training program and the jobs program for low-income seniors — and announced $22 million for rural hospitals back home out of that same bill. Cut it in Washington, cut the ribbon at home, and hope nobody puts the two next to each other.

Why this one stings more

Most members of Congress have never run a lab, never written a grant proposal, never sat on a university advisory council.

Baird has done all three. He knows what a terminated award does to a graduate student in year four. He knows that the research pipeline he came up through — a land-grant university, a doctorate in animal science, a career in agricultural extension — was built with exactly the kind of money now being cancelled.

He also isn't hearing about it, because he doesn't put himself in rooms where people can tell him. Baird does not hold in-person town halls. In late March 2025 — the same weeks the Exponent was interviewing frightened graduate students a few blocks away — more than 250 of his constituents packed the West Lafayette Public Library and held a town hall without him, chanting "Where is Jim?"

He wasn't there. He was in Washington, calling the audit long overdue.

Source

Trump cuts leave Ph.D. researchers, professors questioning future — Ronak Mohanty, The Purdue Exponent, April 22, 2025. Photo: The Purdue Exponent.

Gus Bilirakis Wrote a Bill to Cut Off Student Loans at Any College With a Diversity Office

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:45:27 +0000

Gus Bilirakis has been in Congress for 19 years. In that time he has put his name on hundreds of bills — Greek independence resolutions, veterans' benefits, rare disease research, daylight saving time.

He has also introduced, twice, a bill that would cut off federal student loans to students at any college in America that has a diversity office.

It is called the Eliminate DEI in Colleges Act. He filed it in June 2024 and again on February 13, 2025. It has two cosponsors.

What it actually says

Here is the operative sentence, from the bill text:

"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no institution of higher education shall be eligible to receive funds or any other form of financial assistance under any Federal program, including participation in any federally funded or guaranteed student loan program, unless the institution certifies to the Secretary that the institution — (1) does not and will not carry out any program, project, initiative, or other activity the primary purpose of which is to advocate, promote, or otherwise support diversity, equity, and inclusion; and (2) does not and will not maintain any office or other entity within the institution to advocate, promote, or otherwise support diversity, equity, and inclusion."

Read what that covers. Not "no federal DEI grants." Not "no taxpayer money for DEI programs." Any federal program. Explicitly including the federal student loan programs.

A college that keeps a diversity office does not lose a diversity grant. It loses its students' access to federal loans. It becomes, for federal purposes, not a college.

The bill also requires each school to hand the Education Secretary "any information needed" to verify its certification is truthful, and gives the Secretary regulatory authority to enforce it. A school that gets cut off may appeal to an administrative law judge, and that judge's ruling is final agency action.

The definition is broader than the title

The bill defines "diversity, equity, and inclusion" as the concept by which individuals are "classified on basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation" and then "afforded differential or preferential treatment" on that basis.

That definition is doing a lot of work, because it is written loosely enough to sweep in far more than admissions preferences. A women's center. A veterans' resource office. A first-generation-student mentoring program. A campus group for LGBTQ students with a staff adviser. An office of accessibility. Whether any of those counts is left to the Secretary of Education and to a school's own lawyers guessing at what a future administration will accept.

And the incentive runs one way. A university weighing whether some office might trip the certification is not weighing the loss of a grant. It is weighing whether its students can still get a Stafford loan. The rational response is to close anything arguable.

Who pays

Nothing in the bill distinguishes between a flagship research university and a community college, or between a public school and a private one. The penalty is the same everywhere, and it falls on students, not administrators: the school keeps its diversity office and its students lose their loans, or the school closes the office.

Florida has already banned state spending on DEI programs at its public universities. What Bilirakis's bill adds is federal reach — over every private college in the country too — and a penalty aimed not at the institution's budget line but at its students' ability to pay tuition.

He has a record on this

The DEI bill is not a one-off.

On March 30, 2022, the House took up a bill to name the federal courthouse in Tallahassee after Joseph Woodrow Hatchett. Hatchett was the first Black justice on the Florida Supreme Court. He later sat on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The New York Times called him a legal legend; the Tallahassee Democrat called him trailblazing. He died in April 2021.

The bill was sponsored by Florida's two Republican senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott. The Senate passed it unanimously.

Then Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia circulated a 1999 Associated Press story about an opinion Hatchett had written striking down a Florida school district's policy of student-led prayer at graduation, and House Republicans turned on it. The bill got 238 votes — short of the two-thirds needed under suspension — and failed. One hundred eighty-seven Republicans voted no.

Bilirakis voted no. Ten of Florida's 16 House Republicans did.

Clyde's explanation to the ABA Journal was that he disagreed with the 1999 ruling: "I don't agree with that. That's it. I just let the Republicans know that information on the House floor."

Two Republican senators from his own state sponsored the honor and the Senate gave it unanimously. Bilirakis voted it down.

The grandson of immigrants

Bilirakis is the grandson of Greek immigrants. His grandfather ran a bakery in Tarpon Springs, where the sponge docks were built by Greek divers recruited to Florida in the early 1900s. He co-chairs the Congressional Caucus on Hellenic Issues and files a resolution recognizing the anniversary of the Greek War of Independence year after year — 2024, 2025, and 2026. He holds the Greek Order of the Phoenix.

He clearly understands why a community wants its history recognized and its people counted.

He has introduced a bill to cut federal student loans off from any campus that keeps an office to do that for somebody else's community — and voted against putting a Black judge's name on a courthouse in his own state.

Sources

Bill text and status: H.R. 1282, the Eliminate DEI in Colleges Act, 119th Congress. House vote on the Hatchett courthouse designation: Roll Call 95, March 30, 2022. GOP opposition blocks bill to name federal courthouse after Black judge, a 'legal legend' — ABA Journal. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Young Kim's 'Stop DEI Act' Is One Sentence Long and Bans Something That's Already Illegal

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:57:00 +0000

On April 22, 2026, Young Kim introduced a bill called the Stop DEI Act.

Here is the entire operative text of it. Not a summary — the whole thing:

"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds may be made available under an applicable program to an institution of higher education that considers race, sex, ethnicity, color, or national origin in ways that violate the Nation's civil rights laws."

That's H.R. 8445 in full. One sentence, plus two definitions borrowed from other statutes.

Read it again slowly, because the trick is in the last six words: in violation of civil rights laws.

Colleges considering race in ways that violate civil rights law is already illegal. That is what "violate civil rights laws" means. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has barred discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin at any program receiving federal money for sixty years, and in 2023 the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions under both the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI.

So the Stop DEI Act bans conduct that is already banned.

Her own press release says so

We don't have to infer this. Kim's office wrote it down:

"The Stop DEI Act reinforces existing federal civil rights protections by ensuring that institutions receiving federal funds do not engage in practices that violate those laws."

Reinforces existing protections. Congress does not need to pass a law to reinforce a law. The law is already the law.

What the bill actually adds is a punishment: any college found to have crossed the line loses all funding under any "applicable program." Under the statute Kim's bill points to, that phrase means "any program for which the Secretary or the Department has administrative responsibility." That is the whole Department of Education — Pell Grants, federal student loans, work-study, TRIO, research grants, everything.

So the one thing the bill does that current law doesn't is hand the Secretary of Education a switch that cuts off federal financial aid to every student at a college, as a penalty for that college's conduct. The students who lose their Pell Grants would be the ones who had nothing to do with it.

Two cosponsors, four months, no movement

If this were a serious legislative priority, it would look like one.

H.R. 8445 has two cosponsors: Tim Burchett and Byron Donalds. It was referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce on the day it was introduced. As of August 2026 — nearly four months later — that is still the only action on the bill. No hearing. No markup. No floor vote.

A one-sentence bill with two cosponsors that restates existing law and never moves is not legislation. It's a press release with a bill number attached.

Kim is far from alone in this. Texas Rep. Brandon Gill runs an entire congressional task force devoted to hunting DEI, and Kentucky's Andy Barr spent $1 million on an ad telling voters "it's not a sin to be white" — one word away from a slogan the Anti-Defamation League catalogs as a hate symbol. This is a genre.

The quote

Here is what Kim said about her own bill:

"As one of the first Korean American women to serve in Congress, I can tell you firsthand: no one wants to be reduced to a DEI checkbox. I am so much more than that, and our children are so much more than that. That's why I'm introducing the Stop DEI Act to ensure these far-left policies don't continue unchecked."

She opens by invoking her identity — one of the first Korean American women in Congress — to argue that identity should never be considered.

And "these far-left policies" refers to something specific. Her press release names it: California's ACA 7, a proposed state constitutional amendment. Which is a state measure, in a state where voters already passed Proposition 209 banning racial preferences in public education — a fact her own release cites approvingly two paragraphs earlier.

So the argument is: California already banned this, the Supreme Court already banned this, federal civil rights law already bans this, and therefore Congress should ban it again, harder.

What she isn't doing

Kim has served in Congress since January 2021. In five and a half years she has not held a single in-person town hall — long enough that constituents built a website called Where Is Young Kim? to track it, and long enough that in March 2025 the Democratic Party of Orange County had to bring in a congressman from another district to hold a town hall in CA-40 so her constituents had somewhere to be heard.

If she had held one, someone might have asked her what a one-sentence bill banning something already illegal does for the cost of their kid's tuition.

Her actual record is a different story from her press releases. She voted Aye on Trump's budget bill on July 3, 2025 — the one that cut health coverage for 17 million Americans — and she has a 3% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, 13% for her career, while billing herself as a moderate Orange County Republican.

The Stop DEI Act will not pass. It was never built to. It was built to be introduced.

Source

Rep. Young Kim Introduces Stop DEI Act to Protect Equal Opportunity in Higher Education — Office of Rep. Young Kim, April 22, 2026. Bill text and legislative history from congress.gov.

Kevin Hern Helped Write the Rule That Let His McDonald's Company Get $1.07 Million Forgiven. Then He Said Student Debt Relief Made Working People Pay for Someone Else.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:17:32 +0000

In August 2022, the White House's Twitter account did something unusually simple. It found six Republicans who had just attacked President Biden's student debt relief plan, quote-tweeted each one, and posted a single fact underneath: how much federal loan money that member of Congress had already had forgiven.

For one of them, the number was $1,082,302.

That was Kevin Hern.

The thing that makes his case different from the other five isn't the size of the number. It's that, according to Bloomberg, he helped write the rule that made his company eligible in the first place.

Step one: change who counts as a small business

The Paycheck Protection Program was built for small businesses — the corner shop, the two-truck plumber, the diner with nine employees. Congress passed it in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic shutdowns, so that small employers could keep paying people.

Kevin Hern is a McDonald's franchisee. The Frontier reported that he owned 10 Tulsa-area restaurants when he first ran for Congress in 2018, and gave him the nickname "McCongressman." That is not a corner shop.

But franchises got a carve-out. In Bloomberg Opinion, Timothy L. O'Brien wrote it up under a headline that says the whole thing: "'McCongressman' Kevin Hern Gets a Large Order of PPP." The subhead: "Representative Kevin Hern pushed to make it easier for franchises to get federal loans. A company he controls did just that." O'Brien wrote that in March 2020, as Congress debated what became the largest economic bailout in American history, four legislators "pushed hard to make sure that franchise operators received special treatment."

It's worth pausing on the sequence. A sitting member of Congress helps shape the eligibility rules for a federal relief program. The rules end up treating franchise operators favorably. A company that member controls then takes the money.

Step two: take the money

KTAK Corp., the restaurant management company Hern co-owns, received a $1.07 million PPP loan that the government forgave, according to a Poynter fact-check drawing on federal loan records. It went to the five McDonald's the company owned at the time, as Oklahoma Watch later confirmed when readers asked whether an Oklahoma member of Congress had really had more than a million dollars in business loans wiped out while serving in Congress. The answer was yes.

When the loan first became public in July 2020, Hern's chief of staff Cameron Foster defended it to Fox 25: Hern "has been open and transparent with members of the community about his family business' need of a Paycheck Protection Program Loan during the COVID-19 crisis." Foster said the business kept all its employees at their current level or moved part-timers to full time, and that none of its employees had to file for unemployment.

Fine. Keeping people paid was the point of the program. Nobody needs to apologize for using relief during a shutdown.

The problem is what he said when other people got relief.

Step three: tell everyone else that debt forgiveness is theft

On August 24, 2022, Biden announced he would cancel up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers earning under $125,000, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.

Hern's reaction, as Tulsa's KTUL reported:

"To recap, in the last two weeks, the 'Party of the People' has supercharged the IRS to go after working-class Americans, raised their taxes, and forced them to pay for other people's college degrees."

"Forced them to pay for other people's college degrees."

Two years earlier, taxpayers had been forced to pay for his McDonald's payroll — under rules he'd helped shape — and the debt had been erased entirely.

The White House noticed. Its account quote-tweeted him with one line and the exact figure: Congressman Kevin Hern had $1,082,302 in PPP loans forgiven. It did the same to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene ($183,504), Vern Buchanan ($2.3 million), Markwayne Mullin ($1.4 million), Mike Kelly ($987,237) and Matt Gaetz ($482,321), as Forbes reported. Those six posts were the six most popular tweets on the platform in that three-hour window.

Hern's answer, reported by Raw Story, was defiance:

"Very proud to have kept employees paid during the pandemic when businesses were forced to shut down at no fault of their own. Millions of small businesses across the country did the same. If the White House wants to attack that, I'll win that fight any day of the week."

Notice that this defense works just as well for the borrowers he was attacking. They also didn't cause the thing that put them underwater. They also kept paying what they could. They also didn't ask for a crisis.

The difference is that Hern got a seat at the table when the rules were written, and they didn't.

He's not alone, and that's the point

This is not a one-off. It's a pattern we keep running into.

In South Carolina, Ralph Norman called student debt relief "a special kind of idiocy" after his own companies had $608,500 wiped out. In Kentucky, Brett Guthrie ran the same play. In Pennsylvania, Mike Kelly — whose car dealerships had $987,237 forgiven — voted against even requiring PPP recipients to be disclosed.

What links them isn't hypocrisy for its own sake. It's a consistent idea about who deserves help: people who own things, and not people who owe things.

What that idea looks like when he's writing law

Hern's record makes the principle explicit, and he's been candid about it.

He sits on the Ways and Means Committee, which wrote the tax provisions of Trump's budget bill. Speaking at a Ways and Means Republican meeting while pushing to add work requirements to more safety-net programs, he described his vision of the American Dream: it "is not a destination. It is a place that you continue to work until you're not here anymore."

After voting for that bill's Medicaid cuts, he told a Tulsa Regional Chamber forum that he didn't know just how sweeping the impacts would be on local health care systems — then praised the new Medicaid work requirements anyway: "What we don't want to do is waste benefits on people who are able to take care of themselves."

Waste. That's the word for a Medicaid recipient.

Meanwhile his own finances kept him busy. He violated the STOCK Act in 2021, filing nearly two dozen July trades worth as much as $2.7 million weeks after the legal deadline — one of 45 Republicans on this site who broke that disclosure law. In March 2026, a NOTUS analysis found he appeared to be late again on between $4.2 million and $17.6 million in trades. His office's entire response was: "The filings aren't late."

Now he wants the Senate

Hern won Oklahoma's Republican Senate primary on June 16, 2026, with Trump's endorsement, to replace Markwayne Mullin — who, per the same White House thread, had $1.4 million of his own forgiven.

If he wins in November, he'll spend six years voting on who gets federal help and who doesn't.

We already know his answer. He told us in 2022. The government forgave $1,082,302 of his company's debt under rules he helped shape, and when it forgave $10,000 of a nurse's, he called that forcing working people to pay for other people's college degrees.

Source

Nicholas Reimann, "White House Slams Republicans Who Criticized Student Debt Relief But Received PPP Loans," Forbes, August 25, 2022, and Timothy L. O'Brien, "'McCongressman' Kevin Hern Gets a Large Order of PPP," Bloomberg Opinion, July 7, 2020.

Julia Letlow's Signature Bill Makes Schools Hand Parents a List of Every Book in the Library. It Died in the Senate. Now She's Going There.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:20:08 +0000

Julia Letlow is a former university administrator with a doctorate, and education is the thing she says she came to Congress to do. Her one signature piece of legislation is the Parents Bill of Rights Act, H.R. 5.

She introduced it in 2021, reintroduced it in 2023, and pushed it through the House on March 24, 2023 by 213 to 208 — every voting Democrat against, plus five Republicans. It went to the Senate and died there.

In January she'll be a senator.

What the bill actually says

Republicans spent the floor debate insisting the bill has nothing to do with banning books. Rep. Virginia Foxx, then the Education Committee chair, said so repeatedly. Rep. Chip Roy said it does "nothing more" than "ensure that parents know what's in the libraries."

Here is the operative text, verbatim. It gives parents the right to receive:

"(i) a list of the books and other reading materials available in the library of their child's school; and (ii) inspect such books or other reading materials"

and separately requires that every school receiving federal Title I funds provide parents exactly that list and that opportunity.

Roy is right that the word "ban" doesn't appear. But the bill's opponents weren't arguing that it bans books. They were arguing that a federally mandated, parent-facing inventory of every book in every school library is the machinery a ban runs on. More than 1,600 books were removed from school libraries in the 2021–22 school year alone, according to PEN America, disproportionately titles dealing with LGBTQ lives and with race.

Roy, for his part, didn't hide the ball on the floor: "yes, some local jurisdictions removing certain books, absolutely, and God bless them for it."

The part about students

The bill also gives parents the right to give or withhold consent before a school can:

"(i) change a minor child's gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name; or (ii) allow a child to change the child's sex-based accommodations, including locker rooms or bathrooms"

In practice that means a school cannot call a student by the name that student asks to be called without telling the parents first.

Rep. Mark Pocan, then chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said the effect would be to force "schools to forcibly out transgender students, even if it puts those youth in harm's way." Rep. Melanie Stansbury said the bill was "modeled after bills passed at the state level" that have censored teaching and endangered students.

And then the House added to it. Two amendments from Rep. Lauren Boebert were adopted before passage: one establishing a parental right to know whether the school allows transgender girls to play in girls' sports, and another establishing a parental right to know whether the school allows a transgender girl to use a bathroom or changing room matching her gender.

Those are now part of the bill Letlow authored.

What Letlow said about her own bill

On the House floor, she told her colleagues:

"This bill is not complex or complicated. Nor should it be partisan or polarizing, and contrary to what you may hear from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, it is not an attack on our hard-working teachers, who will always be the heroes in my eyes."

"It is not an attempt to have Congress dictate their curriculum or determine the books in the library. Instead, this bill aims to bring more transparency and accountability to education."

Both halves of that can't hold at once. A bill that requires every federally funded school in America to produce a list of its library holdings for parents on demand is Congress reaching into what's in the library. That may be a defensible thing to do — reasonable people think parents should be able to see it — but it is not "not an attempt."

And a bill that is "not partisan or polarizing" doesn't pass with zero votes from the other party.

Why it matters now

Letlow's district is one of the poorest in the country. When she was first elected, nearly 30% of families with children in Louisiana's 5th were under the poverty line, and she told CNN that education "can be used as a catalyst to lift a region out of poverty."

That is the right diagnosis. It's the kind of thing a former university administrator in a poor rural district is uniquely positioned to act on — school funding, teacher pay, broadband, early literacy, the community and technical colleges that feed the region's workforce.

Her signature contribution to the education debate instead was a bill about library inventories and pronoun disclosure. It received no Democratic votes and never became law.

Starting in January she will sit in the chamber that killed it, with a Republican majority. It will be back.

We deserve better.

Sources

H.R. 5, the Parents Bill of Rights Act, as passed by the House (118th Congress)
House Roll Call 161, March 24, 2023 — passed 213–208
Lexi Lonas Cochran and Mychael Schnell, "House Republicans pass Parents Bill of Rights" — The Hill, March 24, 2023
Christopher Kane, "House Republicans pass anti-LGBTQ Parents Bill of Rights Act" — Washington Blade, March 24, 2023
Photo: Greg Nash / The Hill

Mary Miller's Child Care Bill Was One Sentence Long. By the Time It Passed, It Could Cut Off a Whole State.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:49:50 +0000

On February 26, 2026, Mary Miller introduced a bill about child care fraud. You can read the whole thing in about thirty seconds.

It was called the No Funds for Repeat Child Care Violations Act. Its entire operative content was one amendment to the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act: strike the words "Secretary may" and insert "Secretary shall."

That's it. It turned a discretionary power to withhold funds from a state that keeps violating program rules into a mandatory one.

On June 3, the House passed it 217 to 207. By then the bill had grown from one section to six, picked up a new short title — the Stop Child Care Scams Act of 2026 — and started carrying something the February version didn't have anywhere in it.

What got added

Compare the bill as introduced with the version the House sent to the Senate. Section 5 of the passed version is new, and it does two things:

First, it cuts the improper payment threshold in half. Under current rules, a state has to file a corrective action plan when its improper payment rate goes over 10%. The bill drops that trigger to 5 percent and writes it into permanent law.

Second — and this is the part worth reading twice — it adds this:

"If for each of 2 consecutive fiscal years the improper payment rate of a State determined under this section is more 5 percent, then such State shall be ineligible to receive funds under this subchapter" — unless the state satisfies the Secretary of Health and Human Services that it will fix things.

A state goes over 5% two years in a row, and every low-income family in that state can lose its child care assistance, unless one Cabinet secretary decides otherwise.

If that mechanism sounds familiar, it's because we've written about it before. It is, essentially, the CRACKDOWN Act that Glenn Grothman introduced the very same day — same 5% threshold, same two-consecutive-years trigger, same "shall be ineligible" language, same escape hatch through the HHS Secretary.

Grothman's standalone bill is still sitting in committee. Miller's bill is the one that carried the idea onto the House floor and over to the Senate.

"Improper payment" is not the same thing as fraud

This is the load-bearing point, and it isn't a matter of opinion. The Government Accountability Office has said it flatly, and the House Education and Workforce Committee quoted it in its own report on the companion bill: while all fraudulent payments are improper, not all improper payments are due to fraud.

An improper payment is any payment made in the wrong amount, to the wrong recipient, or for a service that didn't qualify. In practice a huge share of them are documentation problems — a missing form, a late eligibility recertification, a payment that was actually too small.

Miller's public case for the bill is about scams. Her office cited an estimated $600 million a year in improper payments across federal child care programs, and the bill's fraud sections are genuinely aimed at fraud: they require the HHS Secretary to investigate it, and to permanently bar any provider found to have committed it after all appeals are exhausted.

You can argue about whether permanent debarment with no discretion is the right call. But at least those sections punish the people who did something wrong.

Section 5 doesn't. Section 5 punishes a state's error rate — and the people it takes the money from are the families, not the bureaucrats who filed the paperwork wrong.

What that would mean in Illinois

In Miller's own state, more than 36,000 children age five and under get their child care paid for through this program, according to the First Five Years Fund. That's 16% of the kids who qualify — the other 84% are already going without.

Child care in Illinois runs about $19,807 a year. Families who get the subsidy pay an average of $335 a month instead.

Now imagine Illinois posts a 5.2% improper payment rate two years running. Under Section 5, unless one federal official is satisfied with the state's promises, the funding stops — for all 36,000 of those kids at once. Their parents' options are to quit a job or find $1,651 a month.

That's the mechanism. Not a fine on the state agency. Not a clawback of the misspent money — which, incidentally, federal law already allows, along with three-year on-site reviews of every state and mandatory independent audits.

The vote

The final tally on June 3 was 217 to 207. Republicans voted 212 to 0 in favor. Democrats voted 207 to 4 against. Miller voted yes on her own bill.

An almost perfectly party-line vote is worth noticing on a bill whose supporters describe it as common-sense anti-fraud housekeeping. When 207 members of one party vote against stopping fraud, it's usually because the bill in front of them does something else too.

It's now with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

The pattern

Miller sits on the House Education and Workforce Committee, which moved eight of these bills at once in early March. She's a member of the House Freedom Caucus. And she has built a record of writing bills that take something away and naming them after the thing they threaten.

She demanded Congress lock in every DOGE cut permanently — "Every DOGE cut targets waste, fraud, and abuse. Congress MUST codify them quickly. What's the holdup?!" — and was one of only eight cosponsors of the bill to write DOGE into federal law.

Child care assistance for 36,000 Illinois kids is not waste, fraud, or abuse. It's the thing that lets their parents go to work.

We deserve better.

Source

House passes Mary Miller bill targeting child care fraud — WSIU, June 5, 2026. Bill text and roll call: H.R. 7726 and Roll Call 198. Photo: WSIU.

Illinois Became the First State to Screen Every Kid for Mental Health Problems. Mary Miller Wrote a Federal Bill to Stop It.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:47:14 +0000

On July 31, 2025, Illinois became the first state in the country to require that every public school offer a mental health screening to every student in grades 3 through 12, once a year, free.

The law is Senate Bill 1560. It doesn't diagnose anyone and it doesn't treat anyone. It's a check — the same idea as the vision and hearing screenings schools have done for decades — meant to catch a kid who's struggling before the struggle turns into something worse. The state pays for the screening tools. The Illinois State Board of Education has to publish model policies and guidance by September 1, 2026. It takes effect in the 2027-28 school year.

And parents can already opt their child out.

Two weeks after it was signed, Mary Miller — who represents Illinois's 15th District — reintroduced a federal bill to override it.

What her bill does

The Parents Opt-in Protection Act, H.R. 4986, would require prior written consent before a student takes part in any covered school survey, analysis or evaluation that touches sensitive personal information. And the consent has to be given for that specific survey — a general authorization at the start of the year doesn't count.

In practice that means a separate signed permission slip, returned to the school, for each screening. Not a form you can decline. A form you must affirmatively return, or your child isn't screened.

Miller's own description of the Illinois law, in her announcement:

"J.B. Pritzker's plan to impose invasive 'mental health screenings' on kids, forcing parents to jump through hoops to opt out, is ridiculous and unacceptable. My bill will put parents back in charge by requiring written consent before these screenings happen."

Note the scare quotes around mental health screenings, and the word invasive for a questionnaire a school nurse gives a fifth grader.

Note also the logic. Her objection is that opting out makes parents "jump through hoops." Her fix is to require every parent in the state to jump through a hoop for every screening — and if the form doesn't come back, the kid doesn't get checked. The hoop doesn't go away. It gets moved in front of the kids who need the screening most, whose parents are the least likely to have the time, the English, or the stable address to return a form on schedule.

The House Committee on Education and Workforce — which Miller sits on — voted in July 2026 to advance the bill to the full House. It hasn't had a floor vote.

The law she's fighting isn't what she says it is

Here's what SB1560 actually does, from the state's own announcement of it.

Governor JB Pritzker: "Annual mental health screenings will be available for all Illinois students in grades three through twelve by the 2027 school year. This is a national first worth celebrating."

State Superintendent Sanders: "With universal screening, we shift from reaction to prevention. The earlier we identify a need, the better support we can provide."

State Rep. Lindsey LaPointe, who sponsored it: "No child should have to struggle in silence, especially in our public school system."

Screenings are available to every student, not forced on any. Parents can already say no. The state supplies the tools so districts don't have to pay for them. And the law pairs the screening with the BEACON portal, so a family that gets a flag has somewhere to go next.

Opponents of Miller's bill also point out that federal law already contains protections here: the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment requires schools to notify parents and give them an opt-out before surveying students about sensitive topics. Her bill isn't filling a gap. It's converting an existing opt-out into an opt-in, which is a very different thing when you're talking about reaching every child.

Look at who's backing it

Miller's press release lists the groups supporting the bill: the American Principles Project, Parents Defending Education, the Parental Rights Foundation, the Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Independent Women's Forum — and Moms for America.

Moms for America is the organization that hosted the rally outside the Capitol on January 5, 2021, where Miller stood at a podium and declared that "Hitler was right on one thing. He said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future.'" The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum condemned the remark. Republicans and Democrats in Illinois both called on her to answer for it. She apologized three days later.

Five years on, that same organization is on the endorsement list for her bill about who gets to decide what happens to Illinois children.

What's actually at stake

Nobody has to guess what a mental health screening is for. It's for the kid who has stopped eating lunch, or who has started writing things in a notebook that a parent will only find out about much later, or who is being hurt at home and has no adult to tell.

Some of those kids have parents who will read the form and sign it. Some of them have parents who are the reason the form should never have to come home at all.

Illinois built a system that reaches all of them and lets any parent pull their child out. Miller wants a federal law that reaches only the ones whose parents send back a piece of paper.

She sits on the committee that just advanced it. And her constituents have been keeping count of how often they get to ask her about things like this in person: a March 2025 protest outside her Mahomet office carried signs reading "Where's Mary? 1,532 days in office, ZERO town halls." In February 2026, when constituents organized a meet-up in a Quincy park and invited her, she didn't respond.

We deserve better.

Source

Parents' rights bill sent to House amid Illinois mental health debate — WTVO, July 2026. Photo: CBS Chicago.

Mark Harris Personally Wrote Two of the Ten Bills to Take the Education Department Apart

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:43:09 +0000

On July 9, 2026 — one week after introducing a bill to repeal the rule that keeps for-profit colleges from running entirely on federal money — Mark Harris introduced two more.

They are H.R. 9610, the Less Bureaucracy, Better K–12 Education Act, and H.R. 9611, the Less Bureaucracy, Better Higher Education Act. Congress's own bill records list the sponsor of each as Rep. Harris, Mark [R-NC-8].

Between them, they would strip the Department of Education of its two biggest program offices and hand them to the Department of Labor.

What's inside those two offices

The names are bureaucratic. What's in them is not.

The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education runs Title I — the money that goes to school districts with the most kids in poverty. It runs migrant education. It runs teacher-quality grants. It runs funding aimed at rural schools and at the federal testing that tells parents how their schools are actually doing.

The Office of Postsecondary Education runs the federal programs that get first-generation and low-income kids into and through college.

Harris's bills don't change any of those programs on paper. They change who runs them — moving the statutory authority, the staff, and the money to an agency that has never run them, as the Washington Examiner reported.

Here is how Harris explained it:

"With educators in my own family, I know the heart they have for helping students reach their full potential. The federal government should support that work, not get in the way with unnecessary bureaucracy."

Moving a filing cabinet is not the same as fixing a problem

The word doing all the work in that quote — and in both bill titles — is bureaucracy.

But nothing in either bill eliminates a form, a rule, a grant application, or a staff position. Title I still exists. Its regulations still exist. The people who administer it still exist. They just work at the Labor Department now.

The National School Boards Association, which represents the local elected boards that actually spend this money, put it plainly:

"While local school boards support efforts to streamline government, shifting core educational programs across disparate federal agencies does not eliminate bureaucracy — it fragments it."

There's already evidence about what happens. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon pointed out during the committee's debate that when education functions had already been moved over to Labor, the result was "significant" funding delays, with staff struggling to get access to the internet and software they needed to do the job.

Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee, was blunter: "Whatever you say about the 'problems' at the Department of Education, these bills will only make things worse."

The point isn't efficiency. It's permanence.

Harris's bills are two of ten in a package the House Education and Workforce Committee called "Less Bureaucracy, Better Education," released July 10 and approved by the committee on July 16.

The package spreads the department's work across four agencies: K-12 programs and career education to Labor, family-engagement and special-education grants to Health and Human Services, civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department, and the entire federal student loan operation to Treasury.

We've written about what that package does as a whole. But the reason it exists is worth saying directly.

The Trump administration has spent two years moving these functions out of the Education Department by executive action. Those moves can be undone by the next administration, and courts have been asked whether some of them were legal at all. Congress already wrote down, in law, that dismantling the department this way wasn't allowed — and then Republicans let it happen anyway.

Bills like Harris's fix that problem for them. Once the transfer is in statute, no future president can move it back, and no court can call it unlawful. That's not streamlining. That's welding the door shut.

The district that has to live with it

Harris represents North Carolina's 8th District, which covers all of Anson, Montgomery, Richmond, Scotland, Stanly and Union counties plus parts of Cabarrus, Mecklenburg and Robeson. His district offices are in Monroe and Laurinburg.

Several of those are exactly the kind of counties Title I was built for: rural, low-income, with school districts that lean on federal poverty funding to hire reading teachers and keep programs running.

None of it disappears under Harris's bills. It just gets handed to an agency with no experience running it, in a transfer the committee's own witnesses say has already caused funding delays where it's been tried.

Harris is a first-term member on the Education and Workforce Committee. In the space of eight days in July, he introduced three bills touching federal education law. Every one of them removes a protection or moves a program away from the agency built to run it. Not one of them puts a dollar in a classroom.

We deserve better.

Source

Mark Harris introduces bill moving key education programs to Labor Department — Washington Examiner, July 9, 2026. Photo: Washington Examiner.

Mark Harris Wants to Repeal the One Rule That Keeps For-Profit Colleges From Living Entirely Off Your Tax Dollars

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:36:24 +0000

On July 2, 2026, Mark Harris introduced a bill with a friendly name and a very short job description.

The Promoting Access and Revenue Integrity Through Institutional Transparency Act — the PARITY Act — does two things, both of them deletions. It repeals Section 487(a)(24) of the Higher Education Act, and it repeals Section 487(d), which is how that first section gets enforced.

Section 487(a)(24) is the 90/10 rule.

What the rule actually does

The 90/10 rule says that a for-profit college can't get more than 90% of its revenue from federal money. It has to find at least a tenth of its income somewhere else — real students paying with real dollars that didn't come from the U.S. Treasury.

That's the entire rule. It doesn't cap enrollment. It doesn't ban anything. It's a market test: if literally nobody will pay for your program except the federal government, that's evidence your program isn't worth what you're charging.

Harris's argument is that it's unfair, because it applies only to for-profit schools and not to public or nonprofit ones.

"Washington should not pick winners and losers in higher education," he said in his announcement. "By repealing the outdated 90/10 rule, the PARITY Act ends a double standard that singles out career schools and ensures every institution is treated fairly."

House Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg called the rule "outdated" too. Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana, who is carrying the Senate version, said it's "time to level the playing field."

Here's the part none of those three statements mention: how the 90/10 rule got its teeth back, and who it got them back from.

The loophole was a machine for recruiting veterans

For years, the 90/10 rule had a hole in it. GI Bill benefits and Defense Department Tuition Assistance are federal money — but they weren't counted on the federal side of the 90/10 ledger. They counted as the other 10%.

Think about what that does to a for-profit school's incentives. Every veteran you enroll doesn't just bring tuition. Each one lets you enroll roughly nine more students on federal student aid without breaking the rule. A veteran wasn't a student. A veteran was a key.

The result was documented over and over: aggressive, deceptive recruiting aimed straight at service members and veterans, at schools that then failed to deliver the jobs they'd promised. In 2014 alone, an estimated $2 billion in GI Bill funding and $248 million in Defense Department tuition assistance went uncounted in the federal revenue calculation for for-profit colleges.

Congress closed that loophole in 2021 with votes from both parties. The Education Department's rule implementing it took effect January 1, 2023.

So when Harris says the 90/10 rule is "outdated," he is describing a guardrail that has been fully functional for three years, after Congress spent a decade fighting to fix it.

"Pure corporate welfare for subpar schools preying on students"

Harris's bill is not the first attempt. House Republicans put a full 90/10 repeal into the tax and spending package that moved in 2025. Harris's own press release says so: "In the House-passed version, House Republicans repealed 90/10 completely, but the repeal was not included in the Senate's version that became law."

When that push was live, veterans' groups did not treat it as a paperwork cleanup.

Barmak Nassirian of Veterans Education Success told Military.com:

"The 90/10 rule is a modest market-viability requirement that ensures that the federal government isn't the only source of a college's revenues. Repealing it is nothing short of pure corporate welfare for subpar schools preying on students."

Allison Jaslow, the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, called the repeal language an "assault on veterans education," demanded it be pulled, and said members who kept it "should feel the wrath of the veterans community."

The Congressional Budget Office scored repealing the rule at roughly $1.6 billion in additional federal cost over ten years. That's not a savings measure. It's a transfer — from taxpayers to the schools that couldn't clear a 10% test.

The Senate stripped the repeal out. Harris reintroduced it as a standalone bill anyway.

North Carolina has 615,440 veterans

This is not an abstract policy fight for the state Harris represents.

North Carolina is home to 615,440 veterans — about 7.3% of everyone in the state, according to VA data. Thirty-seven percent of them have a service-connected disability. Nearly eight percent live below the poverty line.

And the market Harris says is being unfairly singled out is not large in his state. As the Carolina Journal reported, North Carolina has roughly 44 for-profit institutions enrolling about 10,900 students total — Strayer's North Carolina campus, MyComputerCareer in Raleigh, NASCAR Technical Institute in Mooresville, Miller-Motte, and a long list of cosmetology and barber programs.

So the bill protects a sector serving about eleven thousand North Carolinians from a rule that only bites when a school can't attract a single non-federal dollar for more than nine out of ten enrollments — in a state with more than 600,000 veterans whose benefits are exactly what made that sector worth farming in the first place.

The fair version of his argument

To be straight about it: Harris is right that the rule applies unevenly. Public and nonprofit colleges take federal student aid and face no 90/10 test. That's a real inconsistency, and plenty of people who defend the rule concede it.

There are two ways to fix an inconsistency. You can extend the standard to everyone, or you can delete it for the people who don't like it.

Harris's bill deletes it. There is no replacement guardrail in the PARITY Act — no new limit, no new disclosure, nothing that would stop a school from running on 100% federal money again. Harris and Banks argue a separate earnings-and-return-on-investment standard passed in the Working Families Tax Cuts Act makes 90/10 redundant. Nassirian's answer to that argument was that the replacement framework is "high-risk, complicated and untested" and "contains no safety net" if it doesn't work.

Harris sits on the Education and Workforce Committee, and this is his first term. A week after the PARITY Act, he introduced two more bills — one for K-12, one for higher education — to move the Education Department's two biggest program offices over to the Labor Department. Both are part of the ten-bill package that committee advanced in July to break up the Department of Education and scatter its work across other agencies.

For a member who says Washington shouldn't pick winners and losers, he has been remarkably consistent about which side keeps winning.

We deserve better.

Source

Harris takes aim at federal rule career schools call unfair — Carolina Journal, July 2, 2026. Photo: U.S. Air Force via Military.com.

A 10-Year-Old Sent Virginia Foxx His Class Essay. She Wrote Back to Tell Him His Teachers Were Indoctrinating Him.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:32:05 +0000

A fourth grader in North Carolina wrote a persuasive essay for school. His teacher liked it enough to mail it to his congresswoman with a note attached:

"Please enjoy this student's hard work and passion."

The essay argued that the federal government should offer a $5,000 tax credit to people who buy electric cars, because they cut pollution. He was ten years old. He had researched it. He was proud of it.

The congresswoman is Virginia Foxx. She wrote back.

What she sent a child

Foxx's reply, as Scripps News reported from the copy the boy's mother posted publicly, told Christian Mango that a $5,000 credit would add to the national debt and that he and his classmates would be the ones stuck paying it off. She listed news articles about the downsides of electric vehicles.

Then she got to the part that traveled around the country:

"Incidentally, please ask your teacher to explain propaganda to you. While I will never be able to know you, my guess is that your teachers will not give you a good educational experience and help you learn to think as they are too interested in indoctrinating you. How sad."

That was written by a member of Congress, to a 10-year-old, about the teacher who had just told her the boy worked hard.

His mother, Emily Mango, posted the letter on Instagram in May 2026:

"Imagine being a 10-year-old and receiving this demoralizing and reprehensible response from N.C. Rep. Virginia Foxx to your persuasive essay on the benefits of electric vehicles... He researched, cited facts, and made good arguments in his essay — an essay that had nothing to do with politics. He was proud of his essay."

She added:

"Foxx, who is 82 years old, responded to a 10-year-old in a disrespectful, hostile, and unkind tone. She told my 10-year-old that he and his classmates are responsible for paying the national debt. She attacked his teachers, his school, his education, and referenced propaganda, indoctrination, and other concepts that a 10-year-old has not been exposed to."

The story went national. The Daily Beast reported that it asked Foxx's office for comment; Jalopnik walked through the boy's actual argument — electric cars are "better for the environment. They pay less. And there's no gas." Snopes looked into it, found the letter appeared authentic, and left it unrated for a specific reason: Foxx has never publicly confirmed she wrote it.

She has also never publicly said she didn't.

Who she is, exactly

Plenty of members of Congress send bad form letters. This one is different because of who signed it.

Virginia Foxx is a career educator. Per her biography, she taught sociology at Appalachian State University, ran its Upward Bound program — a federal program that helps low-income and first-generation students get to college — served as an assistant dean, sat on the Watauga County Board of Education for three terms, was president of Mayland Community College, and holds a doctorate in education from UNC Greensboro.

She was also the first person in her family to graduate from high school. She worked as a janitor at that high school. She didn't have running water or electricity at home until she was 14.

Someone gave her an education anyway.

And in Congress, she has run education policy for years. She chaired the House Committee on Education and the Workforce from 2017 to 2019 and again from 2023 to 2025, was its ranking member in between, and still sits on it in the 119th Congress.

So when she tells a fourth grader that his teachers are "too interested in indoctrinating you" than in helping him "learn to think," she isn't a random politician venting. She is a former community college president with an education doctorate, writing on congressional letterhead, about a public school teacher she has never met, on the basis of one essay about cars.

The teacher's offense was mailing in a kid's homework.

It isn't a slip. It's the policy.

The letter reads like a bad day. It isn't out of character — it's the same argument Foxx's committee makes in legislation.

The House Education and Workforce Committee, which she sits on, spent 2026 advancing a package of bills to break the Department of Education into pieces and scatter student aid, TRIO, HBCU funding and Title I across agencies that have never run them. Thirty-seven House Republicans have signed a one-sentence bill to abolish the department outright.

The premise underneath all of it is the one in Foxx's letter: that public school teachers are not educating children, they are indoctrinating them. Say it in a committee markup and it's a policy argument. Say it to a 10-year-old who mailed you his homework and you can see what it actually is.

Foxx has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 4% lifetime score, so it's no surprise she disagreed with the boy about electric cars. Disagreeing with him was never the problem. She could have written four sentences explaining why she votes the way she does on energy, and it would have been a civics lesson.

She chose to tell him his school was failing him instead.

The part about the debt

There's one more thing worth pulling out, because it's the sentence his mother singled out.

Foxx told a fourth grader that he and his classmates will be responsible for paying down the national debt.

Foxx has been in Congress since 2005 — 21 years. On July 3, 2025 she voted Aye on final passage of Trump's budget bill, which passed 218-214 and paid for its tax cuts by cutting Medicaid and food assistance. She now chairs the Rules Committee, which decides which bills reach the floor at all.

If Christian Mango's generation inherits a debt, it will not be because a 10-year-old asked for a rebate on a car. It will be because of votes cast by adults who had the power to do otherwise, over two decades, one of whom mailed him a lecture about it.

She won't take the question in person

You cannot ask Foxx about the letter at a town hall, because she does not hold them.

She has not held an in-person town hall since 2010. Asked about it on Fox News in March 2025, she said town halls are "just an opportunity for people to yell at their member of Congress." Constituents in Boone have organized their own and left a chair empty for her.

A 10-year-old found the one way left to reach her — the mail — and this is what came back.

We deserve better.

Source

Justin Boggs, "'Totally inappropriate': Mom blasts congresswoman's response to son's EV letter," Scripps News, May 14, 2026, which credits the News & Observer for obtaining the letter. Photo: AP, via Scripps News.

Marsha Blackburn Says Government Pressure on Speech Is 'What Authoritarian Regimes Do.' A Fired Professor Just Sued Her for Doing It.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:24:57 +0000

On August 7, a tenured theater professor at Austin Peay State University filed a federal lawsuit against Marsha Blackburn. He says she used her office to get him fired for something he posted online.

The timing is hard to miss. He filed the day after Blackburn won the Republican primary for governor of Tennessee.

The professor is Darren Michael. He had taught at Austin Peay for 19 years. According to The Tennessean, his lawsuit accuses Blackburn of a "calculated campaign to punish" him "for expression she and the government disfavored by threatening adverse action against his employer."

What he actually posted

Michael shared an article. That's it.

The article was about something Charlie Kirk said at a Turning Point USA Faith event in Salt Lake City on April 5, 2023 — about a week after a shooter killed three students and three adults at The Covenant School in Nashville on March 27, 2023. Asked about gun rights, Kirk said:

"I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights."

Michael added no comment of his own. He posted the quote.

Blackburn shared his post from her government account and wrote: "What do you say, @austinpeay?"

The lawsuit says she also shared a screenshot showing Michael's face and his contact information.

On September 12, 2025, Austin Peay announced it had fired him. The school said his comments were "insensitive, disrespectful and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death."

He got his job back. And $500,000 of your money.

The university did not hold up. The next month it walked the whole thing back, saying Michael had actually been suspended, not terminated. On December 31, 2025, a spokesperson confirmed he had been fully reinstated as a tenured professor.

In January, he reached a settlement with the school. His lawyer confirmed to The Tennessean that Michael was ordered to receive $500,000.

That money comes from a public university in Tennessee. Which means it comes from Tennesseans.

And he is not the only one. At least seven Tennessee lawsuits have come out of firings and other legal actions tied to Charlie Kirk's death. Together they have cost Tennessee taxpayers more than $3.2 million in settlements and back pay — more than any other state in the country, according to public records reviewed by The Tennessean.

That is the bill Tennessee is paying for a pressure campaign against people's speech.

What the lawsuit says Blackburn did

The lawsuit does not just point at a tweet. It alleges Blackburn "crossed" into "impermissible coercion" through "public statements, private correspondence and private meetings," along with "explicit and implicit threats" of sanctions and enforcement proceedings against the university unless it fired Michael.

It also says Austin Peay's own administration described the school as being "under external pressure, including coercive pressure from Blackburn," and from "government actors who have direct influence over funding for APSU."

That last part matters. A U.S. senator has real power over federal money that flows to a public university. When that senator publicly demands to know what the school is going to do about one of its professors, the school hears more than a question.

Michael says he was fired "without prior notice, without a hearing and without opportunity to respond to charges." He says he and his family had to move after the university handed his home address to at least one news outlet.

Blackburn's campaign is fighting it. Her spokesperson, Abigail Sigler, said they had not been served yet and called the suit "a meritless attempt to punish Senator Blackburn and others for criticizing outrageous public statements concerning political violence and the murder of a husband, father, and patriot." Sigler said criticizing public statements is "protected speech, not defamation."

These are allegations, and a court will sort them out. But the underlying facts — the post, the tag from her government account, the firing days later — are not in dispute.

This is the second one

Michael's case is the second lawsuit that names Blackburn. It's the first that names her as a defendant.

Laura Sosh-Lightsy, a dean at Middle Tennessee State University, was fired on September 10, 2025 — one hour after Blackburn tagged the college in a post about comments Sosh-Lightsy made the night Kirk was killed. She has sued MTSU, accusing Blackburn of using her "position to pressure MTSU to retaliate" against her. That case is still going.

One post from a senator. One hour. One career.

Now the part where she says the opposite

Here is what makes this more than a lawsuit.

Blackburn has spent years telling Americans that a government official leaning on a private institution to silence speech is the mark of a dictatorship.

In July 2021, she wrote to President Biden over his administration's work with Facebook on vaccine misinformation. Her words:

"The blatant actions by your administration to work with big tech companies to censor Americans' free speech are shocking – and arguably a violation of the First Amendment."

And:

"ordering big tech companies to ban Americans that do not regurgitate government approved messaging—is what authoritarian regimes do."

She said the U.S. government "should be standing up to, not looking to mirror, authoritarian regimes."

Read that again, then read what she is accused of here. A sitting United States senator pointed her official account at a state university and asked what it was going to do about an employee who shared a quote she didn't like. Days later he was gone.

If a government official pressuring a private company to drop a citizen's speech is what authoritarian regimes do, it is difficult to explain why a government official pressuring a public college to fire a professor is something else.

This is a pattern with her. When a dark-money group ran an ad she didn't like about her opioid record, her lawyers demanded it come off the air within 48 hours. Free speech, in Blackburn's telling, is a principle that seems to apply mostly to people who agree with her.

And about that quote

There's one more thing worth sitting with.

The speech Michael was fired for sharing was Charlie Kirk saying that some gun deaths every year are "worth it." Michael didn't say it. He repeated it.

Blackburn's own record on guns is not in tension with that sentiment. She is the 12th-most NRA-funded lawmaker in the country, taking roughly $1.3 million over her career — about 12% of everything she has raised. In June 2022, she voted against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a modest gun safety law that expanded mental health services and strengthened background checks for buyers under 21.

Nine months later, six people were killed at The Covenant School in her state.

A Tennessee professor lost his job for circulating a quote about the cost of that policy. The senator who helped cost him his job voted to keep the policy.

What this means for Tennessee

Blackburn is asking Tennesseans to make her governor. Governors have far more direct control over public universities than senators do — over budgets, over boards, over appointments.

The question every Tennessean should ask is simple: if this is what she did to a professor with a Senate seat, what does she do with a governor's office?

Tennessee taxpayers have already paid more than $3.2 million to clean up after this campaign. They didn't get a vote on it.

Source

Evan Mealins and Angele Latham, "Austin Peay prof fired over Charlie Kirk post sues Marsha Blackburn," The Tennessean, August 8, 2026. Photo: The Tennessean / USA TODAY Network.

Ralph Norman Called Student Debt Relief "A Special Kind of Idiocy." His Own Companies Had $608,500 Wiped Out.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:43:50 +0000

In August 2022, President Biden announced he would cancel some federal student loan debt. Republicans in Congress were furious. Then a list started going around online naming 13 Republican politicians who were attacking student debt relief — while their own businesses had taken pandemic loans the government forgave.

Ralph Norman was on that list. And he had a response ready.

It takes, he said, "a special kind of idiocy to equate (student debt forgiveness) to the PPP."

So let's look at the numbers, since Norman brought them up.

$608,500, forgiven

PolitiFact ran the list down and rated it True. It credited Norman with $306,520 in Paycheck Protection Program loans. When the fact-checkers went to ProPublica's federal loan records, they found more than that. At least three companies tied to Norman — who was, at the time, a sitting member of 23 different companies — took four PPP loans:

FM Hotel LLC — $169,100
GBC Rock Hill LLC — $164,900
Catawba Hotel Associates II — $114,400 and $160,100

That's $608,500 in federal money. Norman's businesses had their loans forgiven. He did not have to pay it back. Neither did his companies.

Norman is not a small-business owner scraping by. He is a real estate developer at the Warren Norman Company in Rock Hill, the firm founded by and named after his father. Hotels, office parks, commercial buildings. That's the business that got the money.

What he says about people who owe money for school

Here is the part that matters. Because Norman has been extremely clear about what he thinks of people who borrowed money and want help paying it back — and he wrote it all down himself, on his own congressional website.

In April 2022 — four months before the White House called him out — Norman posted a column titled "Here We Go Again: Cries to 'Cancel' Student Debt." He wrote:

"It's not fair. It's not right. It will NEVER have my support or vote in Congress. And frankly, I'm angry this foolish idea keeps coming up."

He said forgiveness is "not a moral use of taxpayer dollars." He said it would "inequitably benefit people with those debts, leaving everyone else out to dry." He said the whole idea is pushed by "those with student loan debt who would rather not have to pay, obviously."

In November 2022 he followed up, calling Biden's plan "unfair, unethical, and illegal" and "nothing more than a vote buying scheme right before the election."

Read those sentences again, then read the loan list again. Every objection Norman raises — people who'd rather not pay, taxpayers stuck with someone else's debt, everyone else left out to dry — describes exactly what happened with the hotel loans. He simply never applies the standard to himself.

The letter he signed

On August 31, 2022, Norman put his signature on a letter to President Biden posted on Rep. Lauren Boebert's congressional website and signed by eight House Republicans in all, including Paul Gosar, Byron Donalds, Louie Gohmert and Troy Nehls.

The letter called relief for student borrowers a "taxpayer-funded bailout" and an "election-year bribe." It said broad relief was "an act of highway robbery and a slap in the face to hard-working American families." It said spending more on it would "appease the demands of gender studies majors."

Norman signed his name to the phrase "taxpayer-funded bailout" after federal taxpayers covered $608,500 in loans to companies he was part of.

"But PPP was different"

Norman's defense was that "the PPP helped people remain employed while the government literally shut down much of the economy."

That's a real distinction, and it's worth stating fairly: PPP loans were designed to be forgiven if the money went to payroll and other pandemic costs. The fact-checkers said so themselves. Nobody broke a rule by taking one.

But that defense cuts both ways. Congress designed PPP forgiveness on purpose — and Congress could design student loan relief on purpose too. That's the whole argument. Norman's position isn't that the government should never wipe out debt. His position is that the government should wipe out debt for hotel LLCs and not for the nurse who borrowed $40,000 to get her degree.

And when the courts eventually killed Biden's plan, Norman didn't say "the design was wrong, let's do it properly through Congress." He said he'd been right all along.

Then he voted on it

Words are one thing. Norman had two chances to vote.

May 24, 2023. The House voted on a resolution to kill Biden's student debt relief program outright. Norman voted yes. It passed 218–203.

July 3, 2025. Norman voted for Trump's budget bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That bill rewrote student lending in this country, and the changes took effect July 1, 2026:

The SAVE repayment plan — the most generous one, used by more than 7 million borrowers — is gone.
Graduate students used to be able to borrow what their program actually cost. Now they're capped at $20,500 a year and $100,000 total.
Parents borrowing for their kids are capped at $20,000 a year, $65,000 per child. Future Parent PLUS borrowers no longer qualify for any income-based plan at all.
The new Republican-designed repayment plan, RAP, doesn't forgive anything left over until you have been paying for 30 years.

Thirty years of payments before anything gets forgiven. Norman's companies filled out paperwork.

Who this lands on in South Carolina

This isn't abstract. In South Carolina, 782,300 people carry federal student loan debt — about 17.7% of the adult population — totaling $31.4 billion. The average borrower here owes $40,138.

That average South Carolina borrower owes about one-fifteenth of what Norman's three companies had erased.

None of those 782,300 people got a letter saying their balance was zero. Norman's companies did, and then Norman spent the next four years explaining why the people who didn't are the real freeloaders.

He is not alone in this. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania had $974,100 forgiven across four car dealerships and then voted against making the government publish who got the money. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky called loan forgiveness a "bribe" while a company he helps run had $4.4 million in federal loans wiped clean. It's a pattern, not an accident.

He's asking for a promotion

Norman is not retiring on this record. On July 18, 2026 — days after Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly, and one day after Trump endorsed Graham's sister for the seat — Norman announced he was running anyway.

That special primary is August 11. Before South Carolina votes, it's worth being clear about the rule Norman actually lives by: federal debt relief is a lifeline when it lands on his balance sheet, and "a special kind of idiocy" when it lands on yours.

Source

Businesses associated with these GOP politicians had pandemic loan program borrowings forgiven — Andy Nguyen, PolitiFact / Poynter, September 1, 2022

Mike Kelly Took $974,100 in Taxpayer Loans. Six Weeks Later He Voted to Keep the List Secret.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:35:00 +0000

In April 2020, the federal government started handing out emergency loans to keep small businesses alive. The program was called the Paycheck Protection Program, and the money came from us — the taxpayers.

Four car dealerships owned by Mike Kelly, the congressman from Pennsylvania's 16th District, got in line early. Very early.

Mike Kelly Chevrolet in Butler — $268,500, approved April 10, 2020
Mike Kelly Automotive Group in Uniontown — $327,500, approved April 10
Mike Kelly Hyundai in Butler — $180,800, approved April 10
Mike Kelly Automotive, LP in Butler — $197,300, approved April 13

That's $974,100. Every single dollar was later forgiven. With the interest that piled up on top, the amount wiped clean was $987,237.

Nobody paid it back. It was our money, and it stayed gone.

He got in during the round that ran dry

Timing matters here, so look at the dates again. All four loans were approved between April 10 and April 13, 2020.

The program was funded with $349 billion, and by April 16 the entire pot was empty — less than three weeks after the CARES Act was signed, leaving what the Urban Institute described as "many struggling applicants without cash assistance." Restaurants, barbershops, and corner stores across western Pennsylvania filled out the paperwork and got nothing, because the money was already spoken for.

Four dealerships owned by a sitting member of Congress were not among the ones left waiting. Every one of them was approved with days to spare.

Then he voted to keep the list secret

On May 28, 2020 — six weeks after his dealerships got their money — the House voted on a bill called the TRUTH Act. It was simple. It would have required the Small Business Administration to publish the name of every business that received one of these loans, so the public could see where hundreds of billions of dollars actually went.

Kelly voted no.

The bill came up under a rule requiring a two-thirds majority, so it failed even though a big majority backed it: 269 in favor, 147 against. Every Democrat who voted, voted yes. Kelly was one of 146 Republicans who voted no.

He was not the only one with a personal stake in that vote. The news site Sludge went through the loan records and found that ten Republicans whose own private companies had taken this money voted against the disclosure bill — Ralph Norman, Brett Guthrie, Vicki Hartzler, Kevin Hern, Rick Allen, Greg Pence, Devin Nunes, Markwayne Mullin, Roger Williams, and Mike Kelly.

Sludge also put Kelly's net worth at $10.4 million.

We've written about what Brett Guthrie did with his — $4.4 million forgiven for a company he helps run, from a congressman who called student debt relief "a bribe to score political points." It's the same story with a different last name.

The list came out anyway. A judge had to force it.

Kelly's vote didn't end the fight over disclosure; it just moved it to court.

The SBA released borrower names in July 2020 but withheld the precise amounts on the bigger loans, putting them in broad ranges instead. Five news organizations — the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bloomberg, Dow Jones and ProPublica — sued under the Freedom of Information Act. A federal judge ruled against the government, and on December 2, 2020, the SBA finally published the names, addresses and exact loan amounts.

That is the only reason you can read the four numbers at the top of this page. Kelly voted for you not to have them. The courts overruled him.

"PPP loans are designed to be forgiven. Student loans are not."

Here's where it stops being about one bad vote and starts being about what Mike Kelly actually believes.

When President Biden moved to cancel some student loan debt in August 2022, Kelly was furious. He tweeted that asking "plumbers and carpenters to pay off the loans of Wall Street advisors and lawyers isn't just unfair" — it's "also bad policy."

The White House replied with a single sentence: "Congressman Mike Kelly had $987,237 in PPP loans forgiven."

Kelly fired back:

"A Democrat governor declared my family's business non-essential and shut our doors. This money saved over 160 essential jobs in Western Pennsylvania during the pandemic. PPP loans are designed to be forgiven. Student loans are not. Big difference!"

Read that last part again, because it's the whole argument and it falls apart on contact.

PPP loans are "designed to be forgiven" because Congress designed them that way. Congress wrote the rules. Congress decided that this particular kind of debt, owed by this particular kind of borrower, would be cancelled at taxpayer expense. Kelly was in Congress the whole time.

There is no law of nature that says a car dealership's debt gets erased and a nurse's doesn't. That's a choice somebody made. Kelly likes the choice when it lands on him.

He didn't stop there, either. In February 2023, he joined 127 House Republicans on a Supreme Court brief to kill Biden's plan, and put out a press release bragging about it:

"From the onset, I have voiced my strong opposition to the Biden administration's student loan handout. Make no mistake: this unconstitutional act is nothing more than a political ploy that will ultimately cost taxpayers approximately $400 billion."

A "handout" that "will cost taxpayers." He was describing his own dealerships.

And in October 2023, when Biden cancelled $9 billion in debt for 125,000 borrowers, Kelly went at it again: "No student loan is forgiven. The debt is just transferred onto the backs of the American taxpayers." The White House replied by posting the same number a second time.

That second sentence is a precise description of his own $987,237.

The number of jobs keeps growing

One more detail worth noticing. In 2022 Kelly said the money saved "over 160 essential jobs." A year later he said it saved "nearly 200."

The federal paperwork says something else. Add up the "jobs reported" on all four loan applications and you get 147 — 52 at the Chevrolet store, 42 at the Automotive Group, 29 at Hyundai, and 24 at the LP.

The figure he quotes in public has gone up by about a third. The figure his businesses filed with the government has stayed where it is.

"I have made no decisions in this business since 2011"

Kelly's defense in 2020 was that this had nothing to do with him. His son Brendan runs the dealerships and handled the loan application. "I have made no decisions in this business since 2011," he told KDKA. Asked whether being a congressman got the loans special treatment, he said, "No, absolutely not."

His spokesman told Keystone Newsroom that Kelly was "not part of the discussions between the business and the PPP lender" — the same outlet that noted Kelly ranked as the 46th wealthiest member of Congress in 2018.

Fine. Take him at his word about the application.

It does not explain the vote. Nobody's son cast that ballot on May 28, 2020. Kelly did, personally, on the House floor, six weeks after nearly a million taxpayer dollars landed in businesses that carry his name. And it doesn't square with the way he talks about those businesses the moment he's defending them — "my family's business," "our doors," "our family business."

He's hands-off when the question is a conflict of interest and hands-on when the question is credit.

It is also not the last time a Kelly family financial transaction would end up in front of investigators. In July 2025 the House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to formally reprove him over his wife's purchase of Cleveland-Cliffs stock the day after he learned the company's Butler plant would be saved — we laid that one out in full here. The committee didn't punish him for the trade. It punished him for how he answered questions about it.

He is not alone in Pennsylvania, either. Just up the road, Rob Bresnahan sold up to $130,000 in Medicaid stock and then voted to cut Medicaid.

Meanwhile, in the 16th District

While Kelly was calling debt relief for working people a handout, here's what was happening to the people he represents.

The budget bill he helped write as chairman of the Ways and Means Tax Subcommittee is projected to knock 27,016 people in PA-16 off their health coverage, according to the Joint Economic Committee. In the same district, 53,616 households rely on SNAP to buy groceries — about one household in six, including more than 20,000 with a senior in the home.

Those people asked for help too. Nobody wiped their debt clean.

We deserve better

Strip away the tweets and it's four facts in a row:

Kelly's businesses took $974,100 in taxpayer money in the opening days of a program whose entire $349 billion was gone by April 16.
Six weeks later he voted to stop the public from finding out who got that money.
All of it was forgiven — $987,237 with interest.
He has spent the years since calling the same kind of relief, offered to nurses and teachers and mechanics, a "handout" that costs taxpayers.

You can believe the Paycheck Protection Program was good policy. Plenty of people do; it kept paychecks coming during a shutdown nobody chose. But you cannot believe it was good policy and that forgiving a working person's loan is a scam. They are the same act of government. The only thing that changes is who's holding the note.

We deserve a representative who applies the same rule to himself that he applies to us.

Sources

Tracking PPP — MIKE KELLY CHEVROLET INC. and the three other Kelly dealership records — ProPublica, from SBA data
House Roll Call 113, H.R. 6782 (TRUTH Act), May 28, 2020 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives
Members of Congress Profited From COVID Bailout While Small Businesses Were Shut Out — Sludge, December 24, 2020
White House Drags House Republican Opposed to Student Debt Relief After He Had $1 Million in PPP Loans Forgiven — Mediaite, October 5, 2023

Photo: Official congressional portrait, via Wikimedia Commons.

Glenn Grothman Wrote a Bill That Can Cut Off an Entire State's Child Care Aid Over a Paperwork Error Rate

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:02 +0000

The federal government helps low-income parents pay for child care through a program called the Child Care and Development Block Grant. In Wisconsin, it covers more than 18,500 children age five and under — about 18% of the kids who qualify, according to the First Five Years Fund. The average cost of care in the state is $17,963 a year.

Glenn Grothman wrote a bill that can shut a state out of that program entirely.

Not for stealing. For having an error rate.

What the CRACKDOWN Act does

The bill is H.R. 7721, and Grothman gave it a name he clearly enjoyed: Combating Regulatory Abuse, Closing Known Deficiencies, and Overseeing Waste Nationwide. CRACKDOWN.

He introduced it on February 26, 2026. A week later the Education and Workforce Committee approved it. Everything below comes from the committee's own report, House Report 119-587, which is the official record of what the bill does and how it moved.

Two changes:

It cuts the improper-payment threshold from 10% to 5%. Under current rules, a state that goes over 10% has to file a corrective action plan. Grothman's bill drops that trigger to 5% and writes it into permanent law.
It adds a death penalty. If a state's improper payment rate tops 5% in two consecutive fiscal years, the bill says that state "shall be ineligible to receive funds under this subchapter" — unless it satisfies the Secretary of Health and Human Services that it will fix things.

Read that again. A state goes over 5% twice, and every low-income family in that state can lose its child care assistance — unless one Cabinet secretary decides otherwise.

Grothman then made it broader. In the March 5 markup he offered an amendment "to clarify that the bill applies to all improper payments, not just overpayments." That passed by voice vote. So a state that underpays providers is now racking up the same score that can get it thrown out of the program.

"Improper payment" does not mean fraud

This is the whole thing, and it is not a matter of opinion. The Government Accountability Office has said it plainly, and the committee report quotes it: "While all fraudulent payments are considered improper, not all improper payments are due to fraud."

An improper payment is any payment made in the wrong amount, to an ineligible recipient, or for an ineligible service. That includes:

A payment that was too small.
A payment that was probably fine but the file was missing a document.
A payment to a family whose eligibility paperwork was late.

None of that is theft. It is administration. And Grothman's bill treats a state that runs a 5.1% error rate for two years the same way you would treat a criminal enterprise.

The tools he says don't exist already exist

The pitch for this bill is that nobody is watching. The committee report's minority views walk through what is actually already on the books:

States above 10% already must file corrective action plans, and HHS's Office of Child Care already oversees that process.
HHS conducts on-site monitoring reviews of every state on a three-year cycle, and has started publishing the resulting oversight reports.
Federal law already requires states to arrange independent audits, and requires them to repay the federal government for misspent funds — or HHS can simply deduct the money from future payments.
HHS can already "disallow improperly spent funds, deduct improperly spent funds from subsequent allotments, take some combination of the actions, or impose other sanctions."
The GAO issued nine recommendations in 2020 for tightening oversight of the fund. HHS has addressed all nine.

Grothman's committee held a markup on eight fraud bills at once. Per the minority views, the majority "did not produce any evidence of widespread fraud in the program, presenting only vague and unfounded allegations."

What "unlimited power for the Secretary" looks like in practice

The bill hands the HHS Secretary sole discretion over whether a cut-off state can get back in. The minority views call that "unlimited power," and warn it "could open states up to invasive, excessive, and inequitable oversight."

That is not hypothetical. The same report documents what this administration did in early 2026, before the bill even moved:

After an independent journalist posted a video claiming Minnesota child care centers were drawing federal money without serving children — a claim the state agency reviewed and found the centers "were operating as expected at the time of the video" — the administration froze all child care funds to Minnesota and rolled out a nationwide documentation regime. HHS then suspended five states' access to nearly $10 million across child care, TANF and social services block grants.

The five states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. The minority views note that HHS "provided no evidence of fraud in these five states beyond the fact they are led by Democratic Governors." A court blocked the freeze.

Grothman's bill would give that same Secretary a statutory switch to do it again, permanently, and call it the law.

The vote

The committee approved H.R. 7721 on March 5, 2026, by a recorded vote of 19–15 — a straight party split. Democrats' one amendment, which would have required HHS to turn over its communications to states about the funding freeze, failed 15–19.

The CRACKDOWN Act then got folded into a bigger package. Announcing its passage, Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg's office listed the eight reforms inside H.R. 7726, the Stop Child Care Scams Act — Grothman's CRACKDOWN Act among them, described this way: "States that allow improper payments to spiral out of control will be held accountable."

That bill passed the House on June 3, 2026, 217 to 207. Grothman voted yes. Two hundred and seven Democrats voted no.

Who actually pays

Here is the part nobody on that committee had to answer for.

CCDBG reaches roughly 15% of federally eligible children nationwide. It is already far too small. In Wisconsin, families who can't get help pay that $17,963 a year themselves, or one parent leaves the workforce. The First Five Years Fund estimates the state's child care shortage costs Wisconsin's economy $2.6 billion a year in lost earnings and productivity.

Grothman's answer to a program that serves too few children is a rule that can make it serve none — in an entire state — because a state agency's paperwork error rate sat a point too high for two years running.

He knows how to legislate the other direction when he wants to. This is the same member who wrote a bill to make it easier to pay disabled workers below the minimum wage by stripping out counseling requirements he called burdensome. Paperwork protecting a disabled worker: an unnecessary obstacle. Paperwork used to disqualify a state from helping poor families afford day care: essential accountability.

It is the same instinct running in both directions. The people at the bottom are the problem, and the rules should be arranged accordingly.

Source

House Report 119-587, Combating Regulatory Abuse, Closing Known Deficiencies, and Overseeing Waste Nationwide Act of 2026 — U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce, April 6, 2026

Robert Aderholt Wrote the Bill That Zeroes Out Job Training. Then He Announced $22 Million for His District.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:46:00 +0000

Most members of Congress vote on spending bills. Robert Aderholt writes one.

He chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education — the panel that decides how much money goes to public schools, community health centers, medical research, worker training, and the agencies that enforce wage laws. It is one of the most powerful chairmanships in Congress, and he has spent 29 years in the House to get it.

In June 2026, his subcommittee advanced its bill for the coming year. The House Appropriations Committee approved it on a party-line vote, 34 to 28.

Aderholt described it this way:

"This bill advances educational opportunities, restores accountability and ensures taxpayer dollars are directed toward core functions like biomedical research, biodefense infrastructure and rural health."

Here is what is actually in it.

The job training programs are not cut. They are deleted.

From the official summary of the bill prepared by the Appropriations Committee's Democrats:

WIOA Adult Job Training — eliminated. A cut of $876 million.
WIOA Youth Job Training — eliminated. A cut of $948 million.
Senior Community Service Employment for Older Americans — eliminated. A cut of $395 million. That is the program that places low-income people over 55 into part-time community jobs.
Job Corps cut in half — down $880 million.
Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act state grants cut by $1.8 billion, or 62 percent.
The Employment and Training Administration overall: down $3.3 billion, or 32 percent.
The entire Department of Labor down $3.7 billion — 27 percent below the prior year.

Worker protection agencies — the ones that investigate wage theft and unsafe workplaces — lose $240 million.

The schools

The Department of Education takes a $8.1 billion cut, 10 percent below the prior year. Inside that:

Title I grants — the money that goes to schools serving low-income children — cut by $1.9 billion.
English Language Acquisition — eliminated. $890 million gone.
Title II-A, the teacher training grants — eliminated.
Preschool Development Grants — eliminated. $315 million.
Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, which help the poorest college students, cut by $364 million.

And abstinence-only education gets a $5 million raise.

The health care

$2 billion cancelled for operating Affordable Care Act insurance plans.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality — eliminated entirely. That's the federal agency that studies patient safety in hospitals.
Nearly $1 billion terminated from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund.
Major cuts to CDC HIV/AIDS prevention and the Ryan White program.
Cuts to maternal and child health programs, and to programs providing contraception.

Committee Democrats put the total bill at $201.8 billion — $19.1 billion, or 9 percent, below the prior year. Republicans describe the discretionary allocation as $189.3 billion, a 3 percent cut. Either way, the direction is the same.

Then came the press releases

On June 16 — five days after the committee approved that bill — Aderholt's office announced that he had secured $35 million for Alabama hospitals and health centers, with $22.1 million going to four rural hospitals in his own district.

His explanation:

"One thing that I wanted to do is try to help local health centers and hospitals, especially in rural areas, to make sure they don't close and make sure that everybody has access, regardless of their zip code and regardless of where they live."

Regardless of your zip code.

The same bill that carries that $22 million eliminates the adult job training program, eliminates the youth job training program, eliminates the jobs program for low-income seniors, and takes $1.9 billion from schools that serve poor kids. Those cuts don't check zip codes either.

This is the appropriator's oldest trick, and Aderholt is running it from the chair. Write a bill that takes a great deal away from a lot of people quietly, put a line in it that gives a visible amount back to a few people loudly, and hold the press conference about the second part.

Alabama's 4th is not a district that can absorb this

Look at who lives there.

In AL-04, 36,500 households — about 13% of every household in the district — rely on SNAP to eat, including 17,377 households with children and 12,922 with a senior over 60, according to USDA data. The Joint Economic Committee projects that 23,527 people in his district will lose health coverage under the cuts he voted for — 20,900 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 2,627 losing Medicaid.

This is a rural, low-income district in a state with some of the worst health and education outcomes in the country. We added up what Alabama's Republicans in Congress are costing the state.

A district like AL-04 is exactly who Title I is for. It is exactly who adult job training is for. It is exactly who the senior employment program is for. Aderholt did not lose a vote on those programs — he wrote the bill that ends them, and he chairs the subcommittee that could have written it differently.

Nobody gets to ask him about it

If you live in Alabama's 4th and you want to ask your congressman why the bill he wrote eliminates job training, you will have to find him first.

Aderholt has not held a public in-person town hall in years. When constituents in Northport organized their own in March 2025 and left an empty chair for him, he didn't come. He says he prefers "one-on-one" meetings at his district offices — private conversations, where nobody else hears the question or the answer.

He has represented this district since 1997. He is on the ballot again in November.

We deserve better.

Sources

House panel approves $189 billion Labor-HHS-Education spending bill — Alabama Political Reporter, June 11, 2026.
FY27 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education bill summary — House Appropriations Committee Democrats.
Aderholt secures $35 million for Alabama hospitals, steers $22 million to rural facilities — Sawyer Knowles, Yellowhammer News, June 16, 2026.

Zach Lahn Ran a School With No Accreditation, No State Tests, and No Licensed Teachers. Now He Wants to Police Iowa's.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:45:00 +0000

Zach Lahn, the Republican nominee for governor of Iowa, has a specific plan for the people who teach Iowa's children.

At a Moms for Liberty debate in January 2026, he said he wants to "wipe out the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners" — the state board that licenses teachers — and replace it with people who would "suspend their licenses or permanently take their licenses" when teachers "indoctrinate our kids."

Before he ran for governor of Iowa, Lahn co-founded a school in Wichita, Kansas.

It didn't have licensed teachers at all.

Wonder

The school is called Wonder. It opened in 2018 on the campus of Wichita State University, serving pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. It was financed by Chase Koch — the son of billionaire Charles Koch — and Chase Koch's wife at the time, Annie Koch. (Annie Koch and Lahn later each divorced their spouses and married each other; they have seven children in a blended family, and the kids appear in his campaign materials.)

Wonder did not seek accreditation through the Kansas Department of Education. Iowa Starting Line laid out what that means in practice: the school "was not required to follow state regulations, administer state tests, or hire licensed teachers."

Instead of teachers it had "guides" and "coaches." Students were grouped into multi-age studios. There were no traditional grades, no report cards, and no homework.

Set aside whether that's a good way to run a school — plenty of families would love it. The point is the double standard. Every rule Lahn wants to enforce on Iowa's teachers, and every measurement Iowa's public schools live and die by, is a rule his own school opted out of entirely.

He wants the power to revoke a licensed Iowa teacher's credential over "indoctrination." He ran a school where nobody needed a credential in the first place.

The $314 million

Lahn also said he would expand Iowa's ESA voucher program, the education savings accounts that send public money to private school tuition.

The program is already enormous. It cost Iowa taxpayers more than $314 million in 2025-26, up from $218 million the year before. By March 2026, the Des Moines Register reported that Iowa's ESAs subsidize 99% of the state's private school students.

Ninety-nine percent. That is no longer a program to help a struggling family find a different option. It is a second, publicly funded school system with none of the public system's obligations.

Meanwhile, in the schools that take every child who shows up, public school leaders describe ballooning class sizes and eliminated programs.

The accountability asymmetry

Here is the trade Iowa has made, stated plainly.

A public school in Iowa must accept every student in its boundaries, including the ones with disabilities and the ones who are expensive to teach. It must hire licensed teachers. It must administer state tests and publish the results. It must hold open school board meetings. If it fails, everyone can see it fail.

A private school taking voucher money is under none of those obligations, and the money follows the student out the door.

Lahn's answer to that asymmetry is to make it bigger — more voucher money going out, and tighter licensing control over the teachers who stayed.

We've documented where this road goes. In Arkansas, a voucher school where kids were made to scrub floors and a classmate was beaten kept getting state money. In Pennsylvania, Stacy Garrity says she'd back the new federal private-school tax credit "a hundred percent" in a state a court found unconstitutionally shortchanges poor districts. Nationally, 37 House Republicans signed a one-sentence bill to abolish the Department of Education outright.

The pattern in his own record

The Wonder story is not an isolated fact about Lahn. It's the same story as the rest of his résumé.

He got his political start in 2014 as state director of Americans for Prosperity–Montana, the Koch network's flagship advocacy group, where he led the campaign to stop Montana from expanding Medicaid. It failed. His statement afterward claimed the vote stood "directly against the voices of millions of Montanans" — in a state whose entire population was about 1.02 million. He later conceded: "Two mistakes were made yesterday."

He then ran a school funded by a Koch. He is now running for governor of Iowa on a platform of moving public education money to private schools.

And as the Wall Street Journal found, the man selling this as Iowa common sense is a millionaire political operative who was still voting in Kansas as recently as 2022.

Iowa's public schools educate the overwhelming majority of Iowa's kids. They are being asked to absorb the cuts while the man who wants to run the state points the licensing board at their teachers.

We deserve better.

Source

"Co-founder of Wichita private school contending for Iowa GOP's gubernatorial nomination," Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector, May 29, 2026, and "Meet Zach Lahn: Koch political operative running for Iowa Governor," Iowa Starting Line, June 2026.

A Court Ruled Pennsylvania Underfunds Its Schools. Stacy Garrity Says the Money Went to 'Nothing to Show For It.'

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:25:00 +0000

Start with the fact that isn't in dispute.

On February 7, 2023, a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court judge ruled that the state's school funding system violates the state constitution. Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer wrote:

"Students who reside in school districts with low property values and incomes are deprived of the same opportunities and resources as students who reside in school districts with high property values and incomes."

Pennsylvania has some of the widest spending gaps between rich and poor districts in the country. Studies presented at trial estimated the state would need an additional $4.6 billion a year to give every student an adequate education. Legislative leaders didn't appeal. The ruling is final.

That is the starting condition for anyone running for governor of Pennsylvania. Here is how Stacy Garrity describes the increases the state has made since.

"Nothing to show for it"

Garrity has criticized the state's court-ordered funding increases as spending "with nothing to show for it."

That's a striking thing to say about money a court ordered the state to spend because it had been shortchanging poor districts for decades. The increases aren't a fad program someone dreamed up. They're the remedy for a constitutional violation identified in 2023 — and no school funding remedy shows up in graduation rates in two or three years.

Her framing is that spending more on public schools has been tried and failed. Pennsylvania's own courts found the opposite: that it had never been tried at all in the districts that needed it.

What she'd do instead

Garrity's actual education plan is a set of ways to route public money to private schools.

The federal tax credit. Trump's 2025 tax law created a program letting individuals claim tax credits of up to $1,700 for donating to nonprofits that award private school scholarships. States have to opt in. Asked on a December radio appearance whether Pennsylvania should join, Garrity answered:

"I would a hundred percent."

Gov. Shapiro has not opted in, saying he's waiting on federal guidance about how it would work.

Lifeline Scholarships. Garrity supports passing the program — Pennsylvania's voucher proposal, also called PASS — which Shapiro vetoed out of the 2023–24 budget. She also wants to expand the state's existing Education Improvement Tax Credit and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit programs.

The framing. At a January Press Club event she put it this way: "parents, not bureaucrats, make the best decisions for their child's future." Her campaign says Pennsylvania "should absolutely support strong public schools, but families must also have meaningful choices, including charter schools, cyber charters, private schools, and scholarship opportunities."

Notice that "should absolutely support strong public schools" is the only sentence in there with no policy attached to it. Everything with a mechanism — a tax credit, a scholarship, an opt-in — points somewhere other than the public school down the street.

Where the money would actually come from

Here's the arithmetic Pennsylvania has to face.

The state is under a court finding that it needs roughly $4.6 billion more per year to fund its public schools adequately. Every dollar diverted into a tax credit for private school donations is a dollar not available for that.

And the students who'd be left behind aren't randomly distributed. The ruling found that nearly $1 billion more in state aid could flow to Philadelphia alone under a fair funding formula weighted to student need. Those are the districts with low property values — the ones with no ability to make up a shortfall locally, and the ones with the fewest private schools nearby for a voucher to be worth anything.

A voucher is only useful if there's a private seat to spend it on and a way to get your kid there. In much of rural Pennsylvania, and in the poorest urban districts, there often isn't. What there is, everywhere, is the public school — which loses funding either way.

Vouchers have a track record

We've watched this run in other states. Research on places that have already tried it finds vouchers mostly fund students who were already attending private school, with wealthy families "overwhelmingly the recipients" — while draining the public schools most kids rely on.

Idaho is a live example. Gov. Brad Little signed a $50 million private-school tax credit in 2025 two days after admitting on the record that it lacked accountability, in a state that already spends less per student than anywhere in America. A year later Idaho cut higher education, raised tuition, and flat-funded K-12.

Pennsylvania would be doing it from a worse starting point: under an active court finding that its public schools are unconstitutionally underfunded.

The question worth asking

Garrity is entitled to believe in school choice. Plenty of people do.

But "nothing to show for it" is not an argument about school choice. It's a claim about whether the court-ordered money is working — made two years into a remedy for a fifty-year problem, by a candidate whose alternative is to send some of that money somewhere else.

A court told Pennsylvania it was failing its poorest students. Stacy Garrity's answer is to call the fix a waste and route the money to private schools. We deserve better.

Sources

Pa. primary election 2026: Your complete guide to Republican Stacy Garrity in the race for governor — Katie Meyer, Spotlight PA, April 9, 2026. Photo: Spotlight PA.
Pennsylvania's school funding system violates state constitution, judge rules — Dale Mezzacappa, Chalkbeat Philadelphia, February 7, 2023

Brad Little Cut Idaho's Budget to Pay for Trump's Tax Bill — Then Bragged About the Leftover Cash

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Here is a straightforward story about where money goes.

In 2026, Idaho matched its state tax code to the federal tax cuts in Trump's budget bill. That's called conformity, and it isn't automatic — the Legislature has to vote for it. Idaho did, through House Bill 559, and made it retroactive to 2025. The cost to the state budget: a $155 million reduction.

That money had to come from somewhere. It came out of Idaho.

The cuts

On March 16, 2026, Brad Little signed Senate Bill 1331, the 2026 Idaho Rescissions Act. It cut 4% from most state agencies in the current fiscal year and 5% in the next one. K-12 schools, Medicaid, the Idaho State Police, and the Department of Correction got a smaller 3% cut instead of the full 4%.

The stated reason was exactly what you'd expect: conforming with the federal tax cuts in Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, plus revenue uncertainty.

It barely passed. The Senate approved it 18–17 on March 2 — a single vote. The House followed 48–22 on March 6.

House Majority Leader Jason Monks, a Republican, described the bill he was asking his own members to vote for:

"a crappy bill that we have to vote on, but it's a necessary bill"

Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow put the responsibility where it belonged:

"Gov. Little knows these cuts will hurt Idaho families because his own administration warned they would."

Little's own statement on signing it was about efficiency:

"Idahoans expect their state government to operate efficiently and effectively, and the balanced budget we approved for the current fiscal year delivers on both fronts."

Who actually absorbed it

"Most state agencies" is a phrase that hides the specifics. Here's what got hit, according to Idaho Education News:

Idaho's public colleges and universities took it worst. A 4% cut this year, then 5% for four-year universities and 3% for two-year schools next year. A $9.5 million line item meant to cover enrollment growth was zeroed out entirely.
Students got the bill. Tuition went up $350 to $425 — the largest increase in three years. That's a state cut converted directly into a household cost.
Idaho Launch, the program that helps Idaho kids pay for training and college after high school, was cut $10 million this year and $10 million next year.
The Idaho Digital Learning Alliance had its budget cut roughly in half, a $13.4 million reduction that eliminated elementary programs and state funding for driver's education.
K-12 was flat-funded at $2.75 billion for fiscal 2027 — the second consecutive session with no discretionary increase, which with inflation is a cut in everything but name. Districts were also left with a $9 million shortfall in employee insurance funding.

Remember where Idaho was starting from. It already spends less per K-12 student than any other state in America, and ranks 48th of 50 for public education. This is the state that decided it had room to trim.

Then he showed everyone the leftovers

Now the part that makes this a story about Brad Little's priorities rather than Idaho's finances.

On July 23, 2026, Little announced that Idaho closed the fiscal year with a $250 million positive cash balance. He called it discipline:

"Some decisions were not easy but they were the right ones. We stayed disciplined, and as a result Idaho protected its priorities, maintained healthy reserves, and finished the year in an even stronger financial position than anticipated."

Then he told Idahoans not to get any ideas about that money:

"Some may look at the year-end cash balance and conclude that Idaho should restore spending reductions or significantly expand government. We won't."

Read those two quotes together. The state cut driver's ed, cut Idaho Launch by $10 million, zeroed out enrollment funding, raised tuition on Idaho families by up to $425 a student, and left school districts $9 million short on employee insurance — and then finished the year with a quarter of a billion dollars in the bank and announced that none of it is coming back.

That's not a state that ran out of money. That's a state whose governor decided the cuts were the goal.

He knew how to intervene when he wanted to

Little wasn't powerless here. He proved it in the same session.

When the Legislature tried to cut $478,600 from medical residencies, Little issued a line-item veto, writing that defunding eight residents mid-residency would signal "that the state may not honor its commitments" while Idaho faces "one of the most severe physician shortages in the nation."

He was right about that. He simply chose not to apply the same reasoning to the college students, the high school kids losing Idaho Launch money, or the districts carrying an insurance shortfall.

And this is not the first time Little has taken money out of Idaho's classrooms by choice. In February 2025 he signed House Bill 93, a $50 million program handing private- and home-schooling families up to $5,000 per student in taxpayer money — two days after telling reporters the bill didn't meet his own accountability standard: "There's not enough accountability in it." He signed it anyway. In 2026 the Legislature cleaned that tax credit up and expanded who qualifies.

So in the space of about a year: $50 million out the door to private schooling, $155 million out the door to match federal tax cuts, and 4-to-5% off the top of nearly everything the state does.

The trade

The federal law Idaho chose to match, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, cuts taxes for the top 1 percent of taxpayers by more than $1 trillion over the next decade. Idaho conformed to it, took a $155 million hit doing so, and then made college students, school districts, and state agencies cover the difference.

Brad Little is asking Idahoans for a third term this November. This is what the last one bought them.

A governor who cuts your kid's school to match a tax cut written in Washington, then sits on $250 million and says the cuts are staying, is not being disciplined. He's choosing. We deserve better.

Sources

Idaho governor signs additional budget cuts for current fiscal year 2026 into law — KMVT, March 17, 2026. Photo: KMVT.
Little lauds Idaho's bottom line — but downplays how Idaho got there — Kevin Richert, Idaho Education News, July 23, 2026
Find out what passed and what didn't. A look back to the 2026 legislative session — Idaho Education News

Brad Little Signed a Law That Can Send an Idahoan to Prison for Using the Wrong Bathroom

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:55:00 +0000

There are a lot of things Idaho could have criminalized this year. On March 31, 2026, Brad Little picked using the bathroom.

The law is House Bill 752. The Legislature's own one-line description of it reads:

"INDECENCY AND OBSCENITY – Adds to existing law to prohibit a person from entering a restroom or changing room of the opposite sex, to provide a penalty, and to provide exceptions."

The House passed it 54–15 on March 16. The Senate passed it 28–7 on March 27. Little signed it on March 31, and it became Session Law Chapter 263. It took effect on July 1, 2026.

What the penalty actually is

This is not a fine or a citation. Idaho Education News laid out the ladder: a first offense is a misdemeanor, and a second offense within five years is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Five years in a state penitentiary. For which restroom door someone walked through.

Idaho has real problems. It spends less per student than any other state in America. It ranks 48th of 50 for public education. Brad Little's Legislature spent its 2026 session building a felony offense out of a bathroom.

The exception clause tells you everything

Every law has exceptions. Read this one — it's the part of House Bill 752 that carves out when entering the "wrong" restroom is allowed. As Boise State Public Radio reported, the statute permits it:

"when the person is in dire need of urinating or defecating and such facility is the only facility reasonably available at the time"

Idaho lawmakers had to write the words "dire need of urinating or defecating" into the state code, and Brad Little had to sign them, because they wrote a law so sweeping that it needed an emergency-bathroom escape hatch to function at all.

That is not a serious public safety measure. That is a law written to make a point about a group of people, patched afterward so it wouldn't be completely absurd in practice. The other exceptions — for custodial staff, medical personnel, and emergencies — exist for the same reason.

The second law: $100,000 fines for not reporting kids

House Bill 752 wasn't the only one Little signed. He also signed House Bill 822, which requires schools to notify parents within 72 hours if a student asks for help with "social transitioning" — including asking to be called by different pronouns, or asking about which bathroom or sports team to use.

The enforcement mechanism is $100,000 fines on schools and health care providers that don't comply.

Think about what that does to a school counselor. A kid comes to them scared, in confidence, and says something about who they are. Under this law, the counselor has 72 hours to report that conversation to the child's parents — or the school faces a six-figure penalty. The law does not ask the counselor what they think is safest for that particular kid. It sets a clock.

The bill's sponsor was Rep. Bruce Skaug of Nampa. The floor sponsor on the bathroom bill was Rep. Cornel Rasor of Sagle. But bills don't become law without a signature, and Brad Little signed both.

This is a pattern, not a session

Little didn't stumble into 2026. He's been building this record for six years.

In 2020, he signed House Bill 500, barring transgender girls from girls' sports, and House Bill 509, which locked an "immutable" biological sex onto Idaho birth certificates so transgender Idahoans could never correct them.
In 2023, he signed House Bill 71, making it a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison for a doctor to provide gender-affirming care to a transgender minor. That ban became fully enforceable in June 2025 after a lawsuit against it was dismissed.
In 2026, he added the bathroom felony and the school reporting mandate.

Doctors face a decade. Repeat "offenders" face five years. Schools face $100,000. Every year the list of Idahoans exposed to criminal or financial penalty gets a little longer, and every year Brad Little signs.

Who this actually reaches

Transgender Idahoans are plainly the target. The law bars people from using the restroom that matches their gender identity, and it arrived alongside a second bill about transgender students in schools.

But here's the practical problem with a law like this. The statute makes it a crime to enter the restroom "of the opposite sex." Nobody checks a birth certificate at the door. In real life, the question of who belongs in a restroom gets settled by whoever is standing in it and decides someone looks wrong — and now that person has a criminal statute to point at.

That's not a hypothetical harm to one group. That's every Idahoan's next bathroom trip becoming something the state has an opinion about.

The choice he made

Brad Little is running for a third term in 2026. He is not a bystander to any of this. Idaho's governor holds a veto pen, and he has used it — in the same 2026 session he line-item vetoed a $478,600 cut to medical residencies, warning it would signal "that the state may not honor its commitments" during one of the worst physician shortages in the country.

So he knows how to say no. He knows how to tell his own party that a bill goes too far.

He just didn't do it here.

Brad Little had a pen, a veto, and a choice. He chose to make Idahoans criminals over a bathroom door. We deserve better.

Sources

House Bill 752 (2026) — Idaho State Legislature: full text, vote tallies, and signing date
Find out what passed and what didn't. A look back to the 2026 legislative session — Idaho Education News, April 2026. Photo: Idaho Education News.
Idaho's 2026 legislative session closes. Here's what passed — Boise State Public Radio, April 5, 2026

The Trump Administration Wants to Scrap 1,400 Rules Governing Head Start. Those Rules Are What Makes It Work.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:15:00 +0000

On Thursday, August 6, 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it plans to gut the rules that govern Head Start.

Not the funding. The rules. Which, as it turns out, is the same thing.

Over 1,400 regulations could be scrapped under the proposal — roughly 200 pages of rule changes. The federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs posted notice that it intends to "significantly reduce regulatory requirements" for the program, according to reporting by CalMatters and Stateline.

Head Start launched in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. It serves the lowest-income families in the country — a family of four earning less than $33,000 a year. It provides early childhood education, meals, health screenings, literacy and math curriculum, and support for parents.

Kids who go through Head Start are more likely to go to college and hold professional jobs later in life, according to a 2022 study.

What's on the chopping block

HHS didn't publish a line-by-line list. But reporting and the proposal itself point at most of the program's core standards:

Low student-to-teacher ratios
Minimum teacher qualifications
The requirement that Head Start accept all income-eligible children — regardless of whether they have a disability, and regardless of whether their parents are citizens
Disability screening

The Georgia version of the proposal also includes permission for programs to suspend or expel children for behavioral issues, and a requirement that nearly all programming be conducted in English, Georgia Recorder reported.

Read that list again. Expelling four-year-olds. Ending the guarantee that a disabled child gets a seat. Ending the guarantee that a citizen child whose parent isn't a citizen gets a seat. Larger classes, less qualified teachers, English only.

The pitch

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy says trimming the rules would free up roughly $2.2 billion that could be used to expand the program.

"We are removing unnecessary bureaucracy, strengthening nutrition and physical health, trusting parents and local communities, and opening Head Start to hundreds of thousands more children. That's how we renew the promise of Head Start for the next generation."

HHS said it expects the cuts to be "well-received by Head Start programs, since they will welcome reduced (administrative) burden and increased flexibility." It also said local programs would be free to keep whatever standards they think best serve their communities.

Why "free to keep them" isn't the same as keeping them

That last part is the trick, and the people who run Head Start centers said so immediately.

Melanee Cottrill runs Head Start California, which advocates for the state's 1,813 centers. Individual programs are unlikely to hold themselves to standards nobody requires, she said — especially while under pressure to serve more students with the same money.

"Those standards are what make Head Start a high quality program. Head Start will still exist, but it will be very different from what it is today."

A voluntary class-size cap is not a class-size cap. A voluntary disability screening requirement is a screening that gets cut the first time a budget gets tight.

Deborah Stipek, former dean of the Stanford School of Education, put the research question plainly:

"The complete gutting of these goals ignores what we know really works in early childhood education. If you're going to spend money on something, wouldn't you want it to have positive effects?"

Beth Meloy, who actually worked on the federal Head Start standards, allowed that simplifying them is probably a good idea — too many standards can be genuinely burdensome for a small local program. Gutting them, she said, is something else:

"Head Start is built around a mission of giving low-income children a path to sustained education and life outcomes. These changes lack the thoughtfulness that these children deserve."

The disability screening is the cheapest thing in the program

Of everything on the list, this is the one with the clearest price tag attached.

Head Start screens children for disabilities. Catching something like dyslexia at age four means intervening at age four. Not catching it means special education at age nine, at many times the cost, after the child has already fallen behind.

Stipek made exactly that point: identifying and addressing disabilities early can reduce the need for special education later, potentially saving thousands of dollars per child.

Kennedy's $2.2 billion in "savings" doesn't count what gets spent later by school districts picking up the kids the screening would have caught.

What this looks like on the ground

Georgia: Head Start serves more than 23,000 children across 350 centers. In rural parts of the state, more than a quarter of all childcare slots come through Head Start, according to Kristin Bernhard of the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students.
California: about 70,000 children are enrolled — and the number would be higher, but programs turn families away because they can't hire staff. Early childhood educators sometimes earn less than fast food workers.

Bernhard said she supports getting more children enrolled, but warned about the method:

"Reducing paperwork can be a great thing, but we don't want to reduce actual accountability towards achieving high quality services for this population of children."

This is not one policy. It's a pattern.

Head Start is the latest piece of early childhood and public education to come apart this year.

In July, a House committee advanced 10 bills to break up the Department of Education and scatter its programs — student aid, TRIO, HBCU funding, Title I — across other agencies. Thirty-seven Republicans have signed a one-sentence bill to abolish the department outright.

And HHS already scrapped the rule capping child care copays at 7% of a family's income. When the Senate got a chance to undo that on July 30, 14 Republican senators voted no.

Cheaper childcare: blocked. Department of Education: being dismantled. Head Start standards: being scrapped.

The consistent thread is that the programs being taken apart are the ones aimed at families who can't buy the private version.

What happens next

The proposed rules are now open for a mandatory 60-day public comment period. The change would likely go through review before becoming official in 2027.

Sixty days is the window in which anyone — a parent, a teacher, a pediatrician, a school board — can put an objection into the federal record.

Source

NC Newsline / Stateline, "Trump administration threatens to gut Head Start rules," by Carolyn Jones, originally published by CalMatters, and Georgia Recorder, "Trump administration plan to roll back Head Start regulations could impact over 350 Georgia centers," by Maya Homan. Photo by Florence Middleton for CalMatters.

Mike Lindell's Plan: Cut Minnesota's Budget in Half, and Fill the Hole With His Own Charity

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:00:00 +0000

On Thursday, August 6, 2026, Mike Lindell released a 72-page plan for what he'd do as governor of Minnesota.

The headline is eliminating the state income tax. The arithmetic underneath it is cutting the state general fund budget in half.

Minnesota's primary is August 11. Voting has already begun.

What gets cut

In some places the plan is very specific:

Education: $4.9 billion, roughly 19% of what Minnesota spends on schools.
Healthcare: $11 billion.
Public assistance programs: $3.6 billion.

That's $19.5 billion out of schools, hospitals and help for people who can't make rent.

Minnesota is a state that has, historically, taxed more and gotten more for it — better schools, better healthcare, better roads, parks, social services. The plan's argument is that the extra spending hasn't produced better results, and it cites Mississippi's recent early-literacy gains at far lower spending as proof.

Set aside whether that comparison holds. Ask instead what happens to a Minnesota school district that loses a fifth of its money, in a state where the federal government is already pulling out. Under Trump's budget bill, Minnesota is set to lose $15.4 billion in federal Medicaid funding over the next decade, and an estimated 152,000 to 253,000 Minnesotans will lose health coverage.

Lindell's $11 billion healthcare cut would land on top of that.

Where the money comes back from

Here's the part that deserves the closest reading.

Lindell doesn't claim the state can simply do without the $19.5 billion. He proposes replacing $16.5 billion of it with something the plan calls the "Lindell Direct Assistance Program" — his own charitable model. The claim is that "services can be delivered with private sector sponsorship for 40% less than government assistance."

Read that again. A candidate for governor is proposing to take $16.5 billion of Minnesota's public services — the hospital funding, the school funding, the assistance programs — and hand them to a privately sponsored charity operation named after himself.

There is no statute for this. No agency. No accounting. It is a line in a campaign document.

The rest of the gap gets filled with "dynamic scoring" — the standard tax-cutter's assumption that cutting taxes generates so much growth it pays for itself. The plan books $3.9 billion in revenue on that basis.

So: $19.5 billion in real, specified cuts, offset by a charity that doesn't exist and a growth projection that assumes the cuts work.

Whether he can run a charity is a fair question

This is where Lindell's own record stops being background and becomes the point.

A Star Tribune investigation published in July found that creditors are chasing MyPillow in court for more than $25 million in unpaid bills — including a $15.4 million default judgment to a footwear supplier and an $8.8 million default judgment to FedEx, which accused Lindell of misrepresenting the company's ability to pay. Most of the judgments were defaults, meaning MyPillow didn't show up to defend itself. MyPillow told a court that if a levy on its Amazon account wasn't lifted, the company "could go out of business."

Lindell has since stepped down as CEO of MyPillow to focus on the governor's race.

And last week, an administrative law judge found probable cause that Lindell broke Minnesota campaign finance law — by having his campaign buy 2,500 pillows from his own company and throw them off a parade float.

That is the operator being proposed as the backstop for $16.5 billion of Minnesota's schools, hospitals and safety net.

Who actually pays

Eliminating an income tax doesn't make government cheaper. It moves who pays.

Minnesota's income tax is progressive — higher earners pay a higher rate. Delete it and the revenue has to come from somewhere else, or the services go away. In Lindell's plan, the services go away.

The people who lose the most are the ones who use public services most: families whose kids are in public school, people on Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare, the 452,600 Minnesotans who receive SNAP, the 1 in 6 Minnesota kids who faces hunger every day.

The people who gain the most are the ones with the biggest incomes.

Lindell's plan would make Minnesota the 10th state with no income tax, joining South Dakota, Texas, Wyoming, Florida and the rest. Those states are not, generally, known for their schools or their hospitals.

Minnesota is. That's the trade on the ballot Tuesday.

Source

Minnesota Reformer, "Lindell releases plan to eliminate income tax with massive cuts to education, healthcare spending," by J. Patrick Coolican, August 6, 2026. Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer.

14 Republican Senators Just Voted to Let Your Child Care Bill Go Up

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:06:01 +0000

Child care is one of the biggest bills a working family pays. It now runs more than $13,000 a year per child, and it went up another 5% between August 2024 and August 2025.

On Thursday, July 30, 2026, the Senate had a simple, direct chance to stop that bill from going up even more for about a million low-income families. It voted 47 to 52 not to.

What the rule did — and what Trump's HHS did to it

There's a federal program called the Child Care and Development Fund. It helps roughly 994,000 low-income families pay for child care so parents can work, go to school, or train for a job.

In 2024, the government set some basic ground rules for it. The most important one: a family's copayment couldn't exceed 7% of their household income. That's the federally recognized benchmark for what "affordable" child care actually means. Two other rules made providers more stable — states had to pay them up front and based on enrollment rather than daily attendance, and had to use grants and contracts to build up child care supply in places the market wasn't serving.

In May 2026, Trump's Department of Health and Human Services published a rule called "Restoring Flexibility in the Child Care and Development Fund" that wiped out all three. It took effect July 13.

Note what HHS did not do: it didn't replace the 7% cap with a different affordability standard. It didn't propose a cheaper path. It just removed the ceiling and left nothing in its place. As the Southern Education Foundation noted in its analysis, before the 2024 rule several Southern states were charging families well above the benchmark — Alabama 10%, Florida 9%, North Carolina 10%, Missouri 14%. With the cap gone, those rates can come right back.

Ohio families lose the most

The Center for American Progress ran the numbers in April. Ten states still hadn't reached the 7% benchmark, with maximum copayments running from 7.8% of income in Wisconsin all the way up to 27% of income in Ohio. Families in those states stood to save between $440 and more than $15,000 a year once the cap kicked in.

Ohio was the worst case in the country. An Ohio family at the top of the eligibility range could have saved as much as $15,482 a year — a figure reported by Common Dreams from that CAP analysis. That's not a rounding error. For a family scraping by on the kind of income that qualifies for child care assistance, $15,000 is the difference between making rent and not.

Ohio Senator Jon Husted voted to keep that money out of his own constituents' pockets.

Maine is on that list too — it was operating under a waiver from the cap as of December 2024, meaning Maine families hadn't seen the savings yet either. Susan Collins voted no as well.

The 2024 rule required states to work toward the 7% threshold, with waivers for states that needed more time. Scrapping it means states are no longer obligated to get there at all. Families in those states now have no path to relief — not a slower path, no path.

It was a one-page vote

This wasn't a complicated bill with tradeoffs buried in the fine print. Senator Patty Murray brought it under the Congressional Review Act, which exists precisely so Congress can cancel an executive branch rule it disagrees with. A simple majority would have done it.

Murray was blunt about the stakes on the floor: "If Trump had simply done nothing, and left the seven percent cap in place, some of these families would have ended up saving as much as $15,000 a year for their family. This is really a slap in the face to moms and dads all over the country."

She also named the tradeoff these same senators keep making. "How about instead of a $1.5 trillion war budget, we make sure every working family in America can afford child care?" she asked — pointing out that Trump's tariffs already tax diapers, formula, and car seats before you even get to the child care bill.

Every Republican in the chamber voted against it except Mitch McConnell, who was absent.

The senators who voted no

Fourteen of them have report cards on this site. Each one cast a Nay:

Alabama — Tommy Tuberville
Alaska — Dan Sullivan
Arkansas — Tom Cotton
Florida — Ashley Moody
Idaho — Jim Risch
Kansas — Roger Marshall
Maine — Susan Collins
Mississippi — Cindy Hyde-Smith
Nebraska — Pete Ricketts
Ohio — Jon Husted
South Dakota — Mike Rounds
Tennessee — Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty
West Virginia — Shelley Moore Capito

Two of them — Tuberville in Alabama and Moody in Florida — represent states that were already charging families above the 7% benchmark before the cap existed.

The part that should stick

These are the same senators who talk constantly about the cost of living and about supporting families. Here was a vote where those two things were the entire question. No amendments, no procedural fog, no partisan poison pill. Just: should a working parent have to hand over more than 7% of their paycheck for child care?

They said yes, she should. And the program only reaches 13% of eligible families in the first place — so this was a vote to make an already-thin lifeline thinner.

How they voted

The record is public and permanent: the official Senate roll call for vote 215 on S.J.Res. 199, July 30, 2026.

Congress Wrote Down That Dismantling the Education Department Was Illegal. Then Republicans Let It Happen Anyway.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:10:23 +0000

On January 20, 2026, Congress released a bipartisan spending package. Buried inside was a sentence that should have stopped everything:

"no authorities exist for the Department of Education to transfer its fundamental responsibilities under numerous authorizing and appropriations laws, including through procuring services from other federal agencies, of carrying out those programs, projects, and activities to other federal agencies."

Read that again. Congress — the branch of government that actually writes the laws — put in writing that the Trump administration had no legal power to do what it was already doing.

Lawmakers went further. They said the moves would "create inefficiencies, result in additional costs to the American taxpayer, and cause delays and administrative challenges in Federal funding reaching States, school districts, and schools." They called the agreements "unprecedented." They said the work was going to agencies that don't have the "experience, expertise or capacity" to do it.

And then they did nothing to stop it.

What was happening at the exact same moment

That same week, between 40 and 50 Education Department employees were told to pack up and move to the Labor Department.

Not transferred. Not reassigned. Just… moved. They still work for Education. They still get paid by Education. They do the same job, for the same boss. They just do it in a different building.

One official inside the department described the whole plan this way:

"What it really means is, 'Pick up your [Personal Identity Verification] card and laptop and move over to Labor."

Another put it even more simply: "Do your Education work at Labor."

Here's the part that tells you everything about how well thought out this was. Labor wouldn't give the workers parking spots. So the Education Department hired vans to shuttle people back and forth twice a day. If the van schedule didn't line up with someone's shift, they'd work part of the day at Education, ride the van over, and finish at Labor.

That's the "efficiency" plan. Vans.

Congress had the pen. It chose not to use it.

Here's the thing that should make you angry.

Congress wasn't a bystander here. This language was in a spending bill — the one thing Congress fully controls. If lawmakers believed the transfers were illegal, they could have written one sentence banning them and dared the administration to defy it.

They didn't. The package restricted moving money for these agreements without clear legal backing, but it did not ban the agreements or the employee moves themselves. Instead, lawmakers asked for briefings every two weeks on costs, staffing, and the effect on schools.

They wrote down that the administration had no legal authority to do this — and their response was to ask for a status update.

Then they passed the bill. The House approved the package 341–88 on January 22. The Senate followed 71–29 on January 30. The House cleared the final version 217–214 on February 3 — with 196 Republicans voting yes — and Trump signed it into law that same day.

The transfers went ahead. Nothing stopped.

This isn't just Democrats saying it's illegal

The day after the bill became law, Congress's own nonpartisan lawyers at the Congressional Research Service published their analysis. It's dry, careful, lawyerly writing — and it does not go well for the administration.

The Education Department leans mainly on an old law called the Economy Act, which lets one agency order "services" from another. CRS is blunt about the limit of that law: "the Economy Act does not authorize the transfer of statutory functions."

On whether the Education Secretary can hand her own duties to somebody else, CRS wrote that the law setting up the department lets her delegate to her own staff and make small changes inside the agency — but "Neither authority allows the Secretary to transfer her statutory duties outside of the department."

And there's a bedrock principle CRS quotes: a responsibility Congress hands to a specific agency "may not be transferred except by specific action of Congress."

Specific action of Congress. That's the whole ballgame. Congress created the Education Department. Congress assigned it these jobs by law. Only Congress can move them. A president can't. A Cabinet secretary can't. A handshake deal between two agencies definitely can't.

To be precise: CRS didn't declare the deals illegal. Its careful conclusion was that two questions are still open — whether the spending law's transfer ban reaches these deals, and whether the deals move real duties or just "services." Both are now being fought out in federal court in Massachusetts, where school districts, unions and a group of states are suing to block them.

But notice who isn't in that courtroom. Congress is the branch that was wronged here. It's the one that said the authority doesn't exist. And it's letting school districts and states do its fighting for it.

Six months later, Congress still hadn't gotten its briefings

Remember those biweekly briefings — the thing lawmakers asked for instead of a ban?

On July 30, 2026, Sen. Patty Murray told a Senate committee that the Education Department had spent over a million dollars just to carry out one of its deals with the Labor Department. Then she said this about all the rest:

"Show us the receipts. There are now 13 more of these agreements, and Congress has not received any information about what they cost."

Six months. Fourteen deals with six different agencies. Zero cost information handed over.

The one thing Congress actually asked for, it never got. And there was no consequence for that either.

Look at what's being handed away

Since May 2025, the Education Department has signed 14 interagency agreements. This isn't paperwork shuffling. These are the jobs Congress built the department to do:

Special education — the office that carries out the law guaranteeing kids with disabilities a free public education — is moving to Health and Human Services.
Civil rights enforcement — the office where families file complaints when a school discriminates against their child — is moving to the Justice Department.
Tribal education is moving to the Interior Department.
International education programs are moving to the State Department.
The government's roughly $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio is headed toward the Treasury Department.

Meanwhile, roughly half of the department's 4,000-plus employees are already gone through layoffs and buyouts.

And the civil rights office? The Government Accountability Office found it took in more than 9,000 discrimination complaints between March and September 2025 and closed about 7,000 — by dismissing 90% of them.

That's what "efficiency" looks like in practice: your kid's discrimination complaint gets closed without being fixed.

Even the money argument falls apart. Education has long used a grant system called G5 that it gets to use for free. The system it now has to use at HHS and Labor costs money. And the union representing department workers says Education is on a hiring spree to refill jobs it eliminated last year — because it no longer has enough people to do the work the law requires.

Then Republicans started writing laws to make it legal

Here's the tell.

On July 15, 2026, the House Education and Workforce Committee — chaired by Michigan Republican Tim Walberg — approved a package of 10 bills that would permanently move Education's jobs to Labor, Treasury, State, HHS and Interior. Nearly along party lines.

Walberg called it the "first step toward ending the Department of Education's reign over our nation's education system."

But stop and think about what those bills are. They mostly mirror the interagency agreements that already happened. If the administration already had the authority, why does Congress need to pass a law giving it that authority?

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici said it out loud at the markup. The bills, she said, "demonstrate that Republicans in Congress know that the Department of Education lacks the authority to transfer offices and programs to other federal agencies without congressional action, and are now trying to cover for the unlawful actions already taken."

That's not a talking point. That's just what the legislation means. You don't write a law authorizing something that was already allowed.

Two Republicans tried. The rest didn't.

To be fair, a couple of Republicans have done something.

Sen. Tim Kaine introduced S. 5046 on July 21 — a bill that would flatly bar the Education Department from offloading four of its offices: special education, postsecondary education, K-12 education, and Native American education programs. Two Republicans signed on as cosponsors: Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Two. Out of 53 Senate Republicans.

"This bill is straightforward," Collins said at the markup. "It keeps the administration of important landmark education programs at the Department of Education, where Congress specifically put them and where they belong." Moving special education to HHS, she said, "fundamentally misunderstands" a program created in 1975 to guarantee kids with disabilities a free and appropriate public education — an office that today serves more than 8 million children.

Murkowski said Alaska Native communities in her state weren't even consulted before the Indian Education office was handed to Interior. "So these are issues that have real-time impact on our children right now."

The bill cleared the Senate health committee 13–9 on July 30 — and even that was a watered-down version. Sen. Patty Murray tried twice to go further: once to block all the transfers, once to at least protect the civil rights office from being shipped to the Justice Department. Both amendments failed. Collins voted against the civil rights one; she wants that office moved to DOJ.

"Don't keep running up the middle"

Then there's what the rest of the Republicans on that committee said.

The panel's own chairman, Bill Cassidy, voted against the bill — even though he agrees moving special education to HHS is a bad idea. His reason:

"I do think the administration should be allowed to pilot how to address inefficiencies and the potential for efficiencies by operationalizing these IAAs."

The administration should be "allowed" to keep doing a thing Congress put in writing it has no authority to do. That's the chairman of the committee that's supposed to oversee it.

Alabama's Tommy Tuberville — who is now running for governor — called the bill "misguided" and told the committee the Education Department deserves credit, not oversight.

"President Trump's Department of Education has changed. It's changed for the better. I'm hearing it from my state. We need to listen to them. We need to applaud them for what they're doing."

He finished with a football metaphor: "Don't keep running up the middle when we need to throw the football."

That's a United States senator, sitting on the committee that wrote the laws creating these offices, being asked whether an agency can ignore those laws — and answering with a play call.

Murray put the actual stakes plainly: only Congress can abolish the Education Department. "But despite this, President Trump and Secretary McMahon have tried to subvert Congress and the will of the people by entering into these illegal interagency agreements."

And even having cleared committee, the bill needs 60 votes on the Senate floor. Republicans hold 53 seats. Two of them are on board.

The bottom line

Congress said it was illegal. Congress had the power to stop it. Congress passed the bill anyway, asked for briefings, never got them, and then House Republicans started drafting laws to bless the whole thing after the fact.

This is what "checks and balances" looks like when the people holding the checks don't want to use them. A department created by Congress is being taken apart without a vote of Congress — and the members who wrote down that it was unlawful are the same ones letting it happen.

The kids losing here aren't abstractions. They're the child with a disability whose services get slower. The family whose civil rights complaint gets dismissed. The college student whose loan servicer changes hands mid-repayment. The rural school waiting on a grant that's now bouncing between two agencies and a shuttle van.

Our schools were built by law. They're being dismantled without one. We deserve better.

Source

Education begins moving out employees even as Congress says it lacks authority — Eric Katz, Government Executive, January 20, 2026. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images.