MAGA Report Cards — Jobs

Trump Is Paying $1.2 Billion of Your Money to Kill a Wind Farm — and Making the Company Spend $900 Million on Gas Instead

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:48:23 +0000

Trump promised to kill offshore wind by executive order on day one. Federal judges blocked him.

So he switched to a method the courts can't stop: writing checks.

Last week his administration agreed to pay German energy company RWE more than $1.2 billion to walk away from its U.S. offshore wind projects — including the only one planned in the Gulf of Mexico's federal waters, a 2,000-megawatt wind farm south of Louisiana that could have powered more than 350,000 homes.

That's your money. Paid to a foreign company. So that it doesn't build something.

The scale of it

The RWE deal is the biggest so far, but it isn't the first. The administration has now bought out about a dozen offshore wind leases, paying developers nearly $4 billion.

RWE isn't a marginal player. It's the world's second-largest offshore wind developer, running 19 wind farms across five countries. In late 2023 it paid $5.6 million for the right to develop in the Gulf's first-ever offshore wind lease auction — 102,000 acres about 40 miles south of Lake Charles.

RWE's own explanation of why it quit:

"After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future."

Not "the economics changed." Not "the wind is bad." There is no path forward to permit these projects.

The part that should make you sit up

The settlements don't just pay companies to stop building wind. Many of them require the company to spend its money on fossil fuels instead.

Under this agreement, RWE will invest:

$900 million to acquire a stake in Louisiana LNG, a planned liquefied natural gas export terminal near Lake Charles — one of the largest in the country, and set to be one of the state's largest sources of climate-warming pollution.
$300 million to reserve natural gas turbines for new gas-fired power plants.

Read that structure again. The federal government pays a company $1.2 billion to cancel a project, and as a condition, the company redirects $1.2 billion of its own money into the industries the administration prefers.

That is not deregulation. It is the government using public money to pick which private company invests in what — the exact thing Republicans spend every energy debate saying they oppose.

More than 50 environmental groups had urged RWE not to give in to the administration's "fossil fuel whims" before the deal closed.

What Louisiana specifically lost

Louisiana wasn't a reluctant host. RWE said it chose the state precisely because of Louisiana's political support for offshore wind and its large offshore energy workforce — the people who have spent careers building and servicing oil and gas platforms in the Gulf.

Those are the same workers. The same skills. The same shipyards.

Louisiana companies with offshore oil and gas ties helped build America's first offshore wind farm off Rhode Island, and had picked up engineering and construction contracts on East Coast projects. RWE planned to tap that workforce. It had already signed an agreement with Entergy to sell the power to customers in Louisiana and Texas.

A 2020 National Renewable Energy Laboratory study of a smaller hypothetical wind farm near Lake Charles estimated nearly 4,500 construction jobs and $445 million in goods and services — then 150 permanent jobs and about $14 million a year into the region once running.

Louisiana had set a goal of 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, proposed in 2021. Under Gov. Jeff Landry, who took office in 2024, that goal appears to have been abandoned.

Katharine Kollins, president of the Southeastern Wind Coalition, on what the deal does:

"This decision walks back years of development and stymies economic opportunity for the state."

She added that the administration should be supporting options for domestic energy production, "not removing them."

Where the policy actually comes from

It is worth being honest about the origin of this. Trump's hostility to wind turbines is not an energy analysis. It dates to at least 2006, when he began a decade-long fight with the Scottish government over an offshore wind farm he said would spoil the views from a golf course he was developing. He lost, and was ordered to pay Scotland nearly $300,000 in legal fees.

Since then he has claimed wind turbines drive up food prices, interrupt television reception, cause cancer, and drive people insane.

Four billion dollars of public money is now moving on the strength of that.

The pattern

When the courts said no, the administration didn't change course — it found a way around. That's becoming the house style. When a federal judge ruled the EPA's climate grant cancellations illegal, the agency decided the ruling meant it had to do nothing. When the Endangered Species Act got in the way, the administration simply rewrote the rule defining what counts as harming a species.

Meanwhile in Congress, Republicans have been running the same play through legislation — writing bills to make burning gas legally "clean" and to gut clean-air protections on behalf of Big Oil.

Still a chance, eventually

Madelyn Smith of the Southeastern Wind Coalition points out that a project on RWE's scale could be revived fairly quickly — much of the siting and feasibility work is already done, and another federal lease sale could be organized without much trouble.

The obstacle isn't engineering, or economics, or Louisiana. As she put it, for now the main obstacle is Trump.

"There's still hope under a different administration."

Source

Tristan Baurick, "Trump's offshore wind crackdown reaches the Gulf of Mexico," Verite News / Louisiana Illuminator, Aug. 15, 2026. Photo courtesy of RWE.

Three Hospitals in John McGuire's District Are at Risk of Closing. He Calls the Bill That Did It 'the Biggest Investment in Rural Hospitals in History.'

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:29:12 +0000

Southside Community Hospital in Farmville. Halifax Regional Hospital in South Boston. Community Memorial Hospital in South Hill.

Those are three hospitals in Virginia's 5th District that a Public Citizen analysis lists as at risk of closing because of the budget bill John McGuire voted for. Medicare classifies all three as Sole Community Hospitals — meaning each one is the only place to get short-term inpatient care for miles in every direction.

McGuire's response to this, as C-VILLE Weekly reported in June, is that the law he voted for "provides the biggest investment in rural hospitals in history, end of story."

It is not the end of the story. It isn't close.

What he voted for

On July 3, 2025, the House passed H.R. 1 — the law Republicans call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Clerk of the House records the roll call. McGuire voted Aye.

The bill squeezes Medicaid in two ways that land directly on hospitals.

First, the provider tax. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government pays 90 percent of the cost of covering adults through Medicaid expansion. Virginia raises its 10 percent share with a tax on hospitals. Hospitals agreed to that deal because expansion meant fewer uninsured patients showing up in the ER with bills nobody could pay. It worked: Julian Walker of the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association told C-VILLE that hospitals lost more than $713 million on charity care in 2018, the year before Virginia expanded Medicaid, and about $457 million by 2024 — roughly a 36 percent drop.

H.R. 1 steps the maximum provider tax down from 6 percent to 3.5 percent. That sounds like a break for hospitals. What it actually means is that Virginia's state government has to find the money somewhere else.

Second, state directed payments. Medicaid pays hospitals less than care costs — about 72 cents on the dollar, per Walker. States have been allowed to draw down federal dollars to narrow that gap. H.R. 1 caps those payments at the Medicare rate, which the American Hospital Association put at roughly 90 cents on the dollar for 2026. Better than Medicaid alone, worse than what many hospitals were getting.

And here is the cruel part of the design. The hospital tax is based on revenue, so bigger and richer hospitals pay more of it. The state directed payments are based on how many Medicaid patients a hospital serves. So when those payments shrink, the hospitals that lose the most are the ones treating the most poor people — which in Virginia means the rural ones.

What it does to the 5th District

The 5th District is not a place with slack in the system.

It is the worst region in Virginia for primary care shortages. In 2025, just over half its population lived in an area with roughly one primary care doctor for every 3,000 to 3,500-plus people. The national average is 9.5 percent of the population. Virginia's average is 14.5 percent. The next-worst district in the state, VA-9, is at 31.3 percent.
It has the fewest hospitals per square mile in Virginia — one hospital for every 787 square miles, more than twice the state average.
Fifteen of its counties — Nelson, Amherst, Buckingham, Cumberland, Powhatan, Fluvanna, Louisa, Goochland, Appomattox, Charlotte, Amelia, Nottoway, Campbell, Pittsylvania and Lunenburg — were classified as maternal care deserts by the March of Dimes as of 2022. No hospital in any of them provides OB-GYN care.

That last number got worse after the vote. In December 2025, Centra Southside Hospital in Farmville closed its obstetrics and gynecology department, citing financial and operational challenges that included recently enacted cuts to federal health funding. Patients who need a checkup or need to give birth now drive about an hour.

A June 2026 draft report from Virginia's Joint Commission on Health Care found five rural hospitals in the state at immediate risk of closure — 16 percent of all Virginia's rural hospitals — with Halifax Regional on that list. Eight more were deemed at risk, including Community Memorial. A second model in the same report put Community Memorial at the highest risk of financial distress in the state, with Southside and Halifax in the next tier down.

The report's own summary of what "at risk" looks like is worth reading slowly: these hospitals "may continue operating, but the range of services available to the community is becoming progressively narrower." They keep the emergency room and the outpatient clinic. Surgery goes. Obstetrics goes. That is how a county becomes a maternal care desert without a single hospital ever technically closing.

This is also a jobs story

Health care and social assistance is the single largest category of jobs in VA-5 — 49,506 people as of the most recent Census data, about one out of every six jobs in the district.

"Hospitals are some of the largest employers in Virginia," Walker said. "They directly employ about 138,000 to 140,000 people. For each hospital job in a community, there's a multiplier effect: Each hospital job supports two local economy jobs."

The Commonwealth Fund estimated in 2025 that H.R. 1 would cost Virginia 13,200 health care jobs by 2029.

Melanie Anne Egorin, a health policy expert at UVA's Batten School, described what that does to a small town: "Right now, hospitals are often the good-paying jobs in those communities. As those close, it furthers the cycle of job loss within our rural areas, in places where people really need health care. It isn't a place where somebody who goes to college can come back to as a nurse and serve their community if the hospital isn't there."

"End of story"

McGuire's defense rests on a $50 billion rural health fund written into the bill. Here is what that fund is actually worth.

Fifty billion dollars nationwide, paid out at $10 billion a year for five years. Sebastian Tello Trillo, a Medicaid policy expert and economist at UVA's Batten School, did the arithmetic for C-VILLE: "That is about 3 percent of all the cuts that they're making. So in some ways, they're saying, I'm going to take away $100, but I'm going to give you three back. Yes, three's something, great, but $3 once you took $100 out of me, that doesn't really solve all my problems."

For Virginia specifically: without the fund, the state's rural hospitals would lose nearly $2.1 billion between 2025 and 2034. The fund covers about 61 percent of that. Virginia's rural hospitals still come out $800 million poorer.

Meanwhile the American Hospital Association projects that 55,500 rural Medicaid patients in Virginia lose coverage under the law — the 10th largest coverage loss of any state in the country. The Joint Economic Committee estimates that more than 35,000 people in McGuire's district alone lose health coverage.

When someone loses coverage, they don't stop getting sick. They show up at the emergency room uninsured and the hospital absorbs the bill. That's the same charity-care hole Medicaid expansion had just spent six years filling.

The number he didn't want to talk about

McGuire also told C-VILLE that only 7 percent of Medicaid spending goes to rural hospitals — his argument that Medicaid was never really propping them up in the first place.

That figure traces back to the Trump White House, and it has been passed around at the highest levels — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used it at an August 2025 Cabinet meeting, and Medicare chief Mehmet Oz repeated it at a Senate Republican press conference three weeks later. When FactCheck.org tried to pin it down, it got a White House memo saying the number came from the CMS Office of the Actuary — and then, in its own words, "HHS didn't respond to our request for more information about the figure."

C-VILLE invited McGuire and his staff to respond to apparent factual errors and disputed data in his statements. They declined.

That is the pattern with this congressman and this subject. He will say it on friendly television — he went on Newsmax and called the COVID vaccine a "BLT sandwich of fetus baby parts" — and then decline to answer when a reporter asks him to back up a number. When a Charlottesville station tried to ask about rising health care costs, he dodged. His town halls are held over the telephone, with questions screened in advance; in April 2025 about a thousand constituents showed up to an "empty-seat" town hall he didn't attend.

He is not alone in the shape of this problem. Missouri's Mark Alford voted for the same bill and then, eight months later, introduced a bill to help keep rural hospitals open. At least Alford noticed there was a fire.

McGuire is still calling it the biggest investment in history. End of story.

The people of Farmville, South Boston and South Hill get to find out whether it is.

We deserve better.

Source

Nathan Alderman, "John McGuire vs. Hospitals", C-VILLE Weekly, June 10, 2026. (Photo: C-VILLE Weekly)

Derek Schmidt Says Washington Made Decisions That 'Don't Make a Lot of Sense Out in the Countryside.' He Was One of the People in Washington.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:36:15 +0000

On June 18, 2026, Derek Schmidt introduced a bill to keep USDA offices from closing in Kansas.

It's called the USDA Field Office Stability Act. He filed it with Democrat Sharice Davids, which is genuinely unusual and genuinely useful. It would bar the Agriculture Department from shutting or moving the county offices that farmers actually walk into — the Farm Service Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Rural Development — unless another office sits within 20 miles. It would force USDA to keep enough people on staff to keep the doors open during business hours.

Here is Schmidt explaining why it's needed:

"Many small offices are staffed by only one or two people, which means a reduction in staffing can leave the office unable to function."

He's right. That is exactly what happened. The question worth asking is who did it.

Kansas lost about a third of its USDA workforce

The numbers in Schmidt's own bill announcement are brutal. Kansas has lost more than 500 USDA employees — roughly 32 percent of its USDA workforce, the largest percentage drop in the region. Nationally, more than 24,000 USDA employees left the department after January 2025, a nearly 27 percent reduction between September 2024 and December 2025.

That did not happen by accident, and it did not happen because of some vague thing called "Washington."

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition tracked the departures using federal personnel data. It found about 20,000 USDA employees gone between January 2025 and January 2026, and attributed the majority of them — around 15,000 — to the Deferred Resignation Program, the buyout push run by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Kansas shows up in that data at 559 employees lost. Nearly 7,000 of the people who walked out the door nationwide had more than ten years of experience. Investigate Midwest, reporting on a separate NSAC analysis built from a Freedom of Information Act request, found the same cause: the losses came primarily after DOGE's early-retirement and deferred-resignation offers.

So: DOGE emptied the offices. Now let's look at what Derek Schmidt was saying while it was happening.

"Maturing"

In April 2025 — right in the window when most USDA employees were signing their buyout paperwork — Schmidt went on KVOE radio in Emporia and was asked about DOGE. He said the approach was "maturing" and would become more "predictable" over time.

Not "this is going too fast." Not "somebody should check what this does to farm country." Maturing.

Two months later, on June 12, 2025, Schmidt voted to make a big chunk of DOGE's work permanent. He put out a press release taking credit for it, naming "the Department of Government Efficiency," describing the $9.4 billion clawback of money Congress had already approved as a "watershed."

DOGE itself shut down on July 4, 2026, with no final report and nobody willing to own the wreckage. The wreckage stayed.

Ten months later, the countryside called

By April 2026, the empty offices were a problem Schmidt could not talk around.

On April 23 he signed onto a letter with 14 other members of Congress asking USDA to fix the staffing shortages. His own press release describing that letter lays out the damage in plain language: constituents were reporting "delays in application processing, payments, and contract certifications," with conservation programs and the FSA farm loan program hit hardest. If it kept up, the letter warned, the disruption would spread across every USDA program in that division.

Talking to KWCH the next day, Schmidt put it this way:

"Sometimes decisions get made in Washington that look good on paper, but don't make a lot of sense out in the countryside in Kansas."

Read that again. Schmidt is Washington. He has been since January 2025. He was in the room, he had a vote, and when the decision was in front of him he called it a watershed.

The Kansas Farmers Union's executive director, Nick Levendofsky, told the same station that some parts of the state now have no USDA staff at all, so producers either drive further or give up on benefits they've already earned. On KZRG in May, Schmidt described the mechanics himself: "In a lot of these small counties, there are literally one or two people. That's the entire staff of the USDA local office. Well, if you cut one person out of it or two, you're literally left with an office that can't function." And: "In some cases, there's nobody there to do the work."

He is describing, accurately and with real feeling, a thing he voted to lock into law.

The same offices Kansas farmers need because of his other votes

The timing is its own indictment. Kansas farmers need those FSA counters more than usual right now, and the reason is the trade war.

Schmidt voted twice in March 2025, and again that September, to keep the House from even considering a repeal of Trump's tariffs — one sentence tucked into a procedural motion, three times over. Kansas soybean sales to China for all of 2025 came to zero. Moody's put the Kansas economy in recession, driven largely by collapsing farm exports.

The federal answer to that has been bailout money. Bailout money is applied for, processed, and certified at exactly the county offices that no longer have anybody sitting in them.

We've seen this movie

This is now a recognizable genre. A Republican cheers the cuts, the cuts land on people back home, and the Republican writes letters.

New York's Andrew Garbarino did it with the 9/11 responders' health program — four rounds of DOGE cuts, four rounds of letters to undo them, and then a vote to make the rest of DOGE's cuts permanent. Kentucky's Andy Barr told a Lexington business crowd "don't worry about DOGE", passing along promises from Elon Musk that turned out to be wrong one after another.

The bipartisan USDA bill is a good bill. Kansas Farmers Union president Donn Teske thanked Schmidt and Davids for it, and he was right to. But it is a patch on a hole Schmidt helped cut, and it does not bring back 559 people or their combined decades of knowing which form a Kansas rancher needs.

If your congressman wanted to tell you about that, there'd be a room and a microphone somewhere. Schmidt's version of a town hall is a phone call, on a topic he picks, where his office told constituents up front it "will not give individual tax advice." When KCUR invited all nine members of Congress from the Kansas City metro to take live questions from constituents about DOGE and tariffs in 2025, Schmidt's office was among those that never responded to the invitation.

More than 1,000 people showed up to that event anyway. They had questions about this exact thing.

Source

Davids, Schmidt introduce bipartisan bill to keep USDA offices open for Kansas farmers and ranchers — KWCH, June 18, 2026, and Kansas congressman urges USDA to address staffing shortages at local offices — KWCH, April 24, 2026. Photo: KWCH.

Pete Stauber Bragged About His Union Bill at the Teamsters Hall. Then He Voted Twice to Kill It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:54:24 +0000

There is a way to tell whether a politician actually wants a bill to pass. It isn't the press release. It's the boring procedural vote nobody covers — the one that decides whether the bill gets a vote at all.

On June 9, 2026, Pete Stauber faced that vote twice on his own bill. He voted no both times.

The bill was his

In September 2025, Stauber co-authored the Faster Labor Contracts Act with Rep. Donald Norcross, a New Jersey Democrat. It's a real bill about a real problem: workers vote to form a union, and the employer simply runs out the clock instead of bargaining. Under the bill, an employer has to start negotiating within 10 days, a federal mediator steps in after 90 days, and after another 30 days the dispute goes to binding arbitration.

Stauber's own news release said it takes an average of 458 days to reach a first contract. He leaned hard on his biography:

"As a former police office who organized my union, I've seen firsthand how unfair and frustrating this process can be for some. That's why I am proud to partner with Representative Norcross to hold employers accountable and ensure workers have a real voice at the negotiating table."

That's from the Mesabi Tribune's write-up of the September 2025 introduction, which also carried praise for him from Teamsters general president Sean O'Brien and from Local 346 in Duluth. Nearly 20 national unions endorsed the bill.

Good bill. Good instinct. Then it needed him.

The night at the union hall

On the evening of Wednesday, January 28, 2026, Stauber went to the Teamsters Local 346 hall in Duluth's Lincoln Park neighborhood to talk to members about the bill.

Constituents heard he'd be there. They filled the sidewalks on both sides of the building in subzero cold, holding signs, hoping for a word about ICE operations in Minnesota and about copper-nickel mining.

They didn't get one. Stauber left through the back.

The Duluth News Tribune editorial board wrote it up the following morning, and it is worth reading in full. Two things happened that night:

The press was shut out. Only WDIO-TV was let in. Reporters and photojournalists from other outlets — including card-carrying members of the Minnesota Newspaper and Communications Guild — were stopped at the door. A TV journalist from Northern News Now was physically pushed out by a man in a Teamsters jacket. (Local 346's secretary-treasurer, Zak Radzak, apologized: "We do not condone the physical contact of anyone.")
Stauber snuck out the back rather than take questions from the people standing outside.

The editorial board's verdict on the congressman was blunt: he "long has been avoiding gatherings open to the public," and his tele-town halls — "with attendees handpicked and the questions of the softball variety" — are not a substitute. "Controlled conference calls aren't accountability."

One constituent outside the hall told the paper: "You don't get much opportunity because he has not made himself available to any of us for a very long time."

Stauber's office didn't respond to the News Tribune's request for comment about the meeting.

So: a room full of union members got the pitch. The neighbors outside in the cold got a back door.

The two votes that decided it

The bill never got scheduled for a floor vote, so Norcross had to force it there with a discharge petition — a rare maneuver where a majority of the House signs a paper to yank a bill out of leadership's hands. It hit the required 218 signatures on May 21, 2026.

The Teamsters thanked the seven Republicans who signed it by name: Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Brian Fitzpatrick, Don Bacon, Max Miller, Riley Moore, and Rob Bresnahan.

The bill's Republican co-author was not on that list.

That set up two procedural votes on June 9, and both of them were the real vote. Here is the official record from the House Clerk:

Roll call	Question	Result	Stauber
2026-212	On Motion to Discharge, H.Res. 1140	Agreed to, 220–199	Nay
2026-215	On Agreeing to the Resolution, H.Res. 1140	Passed, 221–201	Nay
2026-216	On Passage, H.R. 5408	Passed, 230–193	Yea

On the motion to discharge, exactly 9 Republicans voted yes. On the rule, 11 did. Stauber — the bill's Republican co-author — was in neither group.

Then, once the bill was safely on the floor and 210 Democrats had guaranteed it would pass, he voted yes. Twenty Republicans did.

Read the sequence again. He voted twice to keep his own bill from getting a vote. Had his position won, the Faster Labor Contracts Act would have died in Speaker Johnson's desk drawer without ever reaching the floor. Only after that failed did he vote for it.

Then he took the credit

The next day, Stauber's office put out a press release headlined "Stauber Legislation to Speed Up First Contracts for New Unions Passes House."

Timothy W. Andrew, a Duluth attorney who has represented labor unions since 1992 and is a state bar–certified labor and employment law specialist, called it out in the News Tribune in June:

"He was happy to be a cosponsor of the bill when it made him look independent and pro-worker. … That is the definition of having it both ways. Union members know the difference between solidarity and political convenience."

Andrew's point about the press release: "What he disingenuously failed to mention was that when the bill needed help getting to the floor, he voted against it."

His advice to voters in the 8th District: "judge Stauber not by the headline he posted afterward, but by the vote he cast when the bill's future was on the line."

We have watched another Republican work this exact play — Maria Elvira Salazar handing out oversized novelty checks for money that came from bills she voted against, then telling a camera she couldn't remember the votes. The mechanics are identical. Vote where the party wants you, then send the press release where the voters are.

What "friend of labor" is supposed to mean

Stauber's district is union country — the Iron Range, the Duluth port, the building trades. He built his political identity on being the Republican who organized his police department's union. He sells that story constantly.

The rest of his record on working people is easier to read than the June 9 sequence:

He voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill, saying he would "not be complicit in paving a destructive and irreversible path towards socialism" — then, weeks later, announced nearly $9.4 million in FAA grants to 29 airports in his district without mentioning that the money came from the bill he'd voted against.
When Trump doubled steel tariffs to 50%, Stauber thanked him for protecting "our way of life on the Iron Range." In February 2026 he voted against ending Trump's tariff emergency on Canada — Minnesota's largest export market, which bought nearly $7.1 billion in Minnesota goods in 2023. That resolution passed anyway, 219–211, with six Republicans crossing over. He wasn't one.
In February 2026, union workers stood outside his Hermantown office asking him to address what ICE raids were doing to the region.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act is the clearest case because he wrote it. He knew what it did, he knew who it helped, and he told a hall full of Teamsters he was for it. When the House asked him whether it should get a vote, he said no. Twice.

We deserve better.

Sources

Duluth News Tribune, Local View: Stauber's faster-contracts flip-flop was pure hypocrisy, by Timothy W. Andrew (June 27, 2026)
Duluth News Tribune Editorial Board, Our View: Snubs by Stauber, Teamsters unacceptable (Jan. 30, 2026)
Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives — roll call votes 212, 215 and 216 (June 9, 2026)

Photo: Constituents rally outside the Teamsters Local 346 hall in Duluth while Rep. Pete Stauber met with members inside, Jan. 28, 2026. Dan Williamson / Duluth Media Group.

700 People in Casa Grande Lost Their Jobs. Six Weeks Later, Juan Ciscomani Brought the Speaker of the House There to Celebrate.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:07:00 +0000

On June 23, 2026, Lucid Motors told its workers in Casa Grande, Arizona that about 700 of them were losing their jobs. The electric-vehicle maker was cutting 18 percent of its U.S. workforce. The company said the move was about aligning production with demand and cutting inventory.

Casa Grande is a small city in Pinal County, and Lucid was supposed to be its future.

On August 5 — six weeks later — Juan Ciscomani brought Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Casa Grande for a roundtable about how well the economy is going.

Not to meet the laid-off workers. To a different factory, to talk about the tax law that Ciscomani had voted for.

What the town actually looked like that summer

Local TV went to Casa Grande the day after the layoffs were announced and talked to people.

Melody Johnson's husband was one of the workers who lost his job.

"Every time we were holding our breath. We're still in shock and we have to figure out how we're gonna pay our mortgage and get insurance again. That's been the biggest thing. We've taken a huge hit and we're just trying to pick up the pieces right now."

Michael Hill manages the Cook-E-Jar Bakery and Cafe. He said Lucid workers had been as much as 15 percent of his regular business. He also said he knew bartenders who had landed jobs at the plant and were thrilled about it, "only to be let go shortly after."

Roy Delsi, a longtime resident, put it shorter: "If you want to get laid off, work there." And: "Now it looks like it's gonna be a black eye to the community."

That's what 700 jobs leaving a small city sounds like from the inside.

The part Ciscomani owns

Casa Grande is in Ciscomani's district. He says so himself — his own office titled the August press release "Ciscomani Hosts Speaker Johnson, Secretary Bessent at Rural 6th District Manufacturing Facility."

He also voted, as part of Trump's budget bill, to phase out the clean-energy tax credits that had been fueling the electric-vehicle business — including the $7,500 credit people got for buying one.

What happened next is not a matter of opinion. Cox Automotive, which tracks car sales for the industry, found that electric vehicles were 10.5 percent of new U.S. vehicle sales in the third quarter of 2025 — and 5.8 percent in the fourth, immediately after those incentives were revoked at the start of October. Q4 EV sales came in at 234,000 vehicles, 36 percent below the year before.

Lucid saw it coming. As E&E News reported in July, the company warned investors in February that the tax law's elimination of the EV credit and of penalties for emissions violations, "along with other factors," could "reduce demand for our products and have a material adverse effect on our business, prospects, results of operations and financial condition."

Ciscomani saw it coming too. Before the final vote, he was one of 13 House Republicans who signed a letter urging the Senate to scale back the clean-energy cuts in the bill they had just passed.

Then he voted for the bill anyway. Asked about it afterward by E&E News, he said: "I'm very proud of that whole bill."

This is a habit, not an accident. We've documented the same pattern in his campaign advertising: say the reassuring thing, do the other thing, count on nobody checking.

He wasn't the only one who noticed the timing

The day Johnson and Bessent flew in, Senator Ruben Gallego sent Bessent a letter asking him to spend part of the trip somewhere other than a photo op.

Gallego wrote that since June, multiple clean-energy manufacturing and generation companies had announced cancellations and workforce cuts in Pinal County, and that "over 700 workers have been laid off in just the last two months." Nationally, he put the damage at 223 manufacturing, clean energy and industrial projects facing cancellation or delay, at least $82.8 billion in capital investment, and as many as 111,765 jobs.

"These job losses will negatively impact the entire local economy," he wrote.

Nobody from the roundtable went to see those workers.

What they said instead

Here is Ciscomani, in his own press release, from the town where 700 jobs had just vanished:

"I'm incredibly honored to have welcomed Speaker Mike Johnson and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Arizona's Sixth District to see the real, tangible impact of the Working Families Tax Cuts Act. Manufacturing has long been a cornerstone of rural Arizona's economy, supporting hundreds of local jobs and strengthening communities across our district."

Speaker Johnson said American manufacturing is "roaring back to life."

Bessent said "the promise of the American Dream is extending to every factory floor."

Six weeks earlier, on another factory floor in the same town, 700 people had been told to clear out their lockers.

Why this one matters

Every politician holds events at factories. That's not the story.

The story is that Ciscomani had a choice about which factory. One of them is a Frito-Lay plant with a good news release attached. The other is an EV plant where his own vote helped knock the legs out from under demand, and where Melody Johnson's family is now trying to figure out the mortgage.

He picked the one with the Speaker of the House in it.

When the tax credits propping up his district's electric-vehicle plant were on the chopping block, Ciscomani wrote a letter saying cutting them was a bad idea, voted to cut them anyway, and now says he's proud of the whole thing.

Voters in the 6th District will decide in November whether "proud of that whole bill" is what they wanted their vote to buy.

Sources

Lucid Motors will be laying off about 700 people at its factory in Casa Grande — KJZZ, June 23, 2026
'Still in shock': Casa Grande feels impact after Lucid Motors layoffs — Arizona's Family, June 24, 2026
Megabill vote plagues Arizona moderate's reelection fight — Timothy Cama, E&E News by POLITICO, July 17, 2026

Photo: Arizona's Family (KPHO).

Jake Ellzey Helped Kill the Dallas–Houston Bullet Train. He's an Airline Pilot Funded by Airline Pilots' Unions.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:40:38 +0000

On April 14, 2025, Jake Ellzey put out a press release with a headline that started with two words: "It's Over."

The U.S. Department of Transportation and Amtrak had just terminated a $63.9 million federal grant for the Texas High-Speed Rail Corridor — the long-planned bullet train between Dallas and Houston, formerly the Texas Central Railway project. Ellzey took credit for the "numerous conversations and collaboration" with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy that led to it.

Six days later, on WFAA's Inside Texas Politics, he was blunter. The segment ran under his own words: "Texas congressman on Bullet Train Project: 'This was all one big grift.'"

There's something he didn't mention in the press release.

What Jake Ellzey does when Congress isn't in session

From his own campaign biography:

"Today, Commander Ellzey is a commercial airline pilot based out of DFW."

That's not a secret and it's not a scandal by itself. Plenty of members of Congress keep a profession.

But a 90-minute train between Dallas and Houston competes with the airplane that currently makes that trip. Nobody has ever pretended otherwise — Southwest Airlines said so in writing the last time Texas tried this, as you'll see below. The people who fly that route for a living have a direct financial interest in whether the train gets built.

And they are among Jake Ellzey's most consistent donors.

The money, from the FEC's own records

Federal Election Commission filings for Ellzey's campaign committee show the following from airline pilots' union political action committees across the 2022, 2024 and 2026 cycles:

PAC	2022	2024	2026	Total
Air Line Pilots Association PAC	$17,500	$10,000	$10,000	$37,500
Southwest Airlines Pilots' Association PAC	$15,000	$10,000	$10,000	$35,000
Allied Pilots Association PAC	$5,000	$10,000	$10,000	$25,000
NetJets pilots (NJASAP PAC)	$7,500	$8,500	$6,500	$22,500
Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association PAC	$2,500	$2,500	—	$5,000

That's about $125,000 from pilots' organizations to one member of Congress in three cycles — including $35,000 from the union representing Southwest Airlines pilots.

You can check the underlying filings yourself in the FEC's receipts database for committee C00770438.

Texas has been here before

Killing a Texas bullet train on behalf of the airline business is not a new play.

In the early 1990s a company called Texas TGV proposed a 200 mph line linking Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. Southwest Airlines fought it hard. In a 1991 filing quoted in Simple Flying's history of that campaign, the airline argued:

"The American reality is that high-speed rail will be viable in Texas only by destroying the convenient and inexpensive transportation service the airlines now provide, and only by absorbing huge public subsidies."

Texas TGV raised more than $70 million and collapsed in the mid-1990s.

Thirty years later, the same route, the same fight, the same outcome — this time with a congressman who flies for a living doing the honors.

What the grant actually was, and what got lost

Ellzey's press release framed this as stopping a taxpayer boondoggle. Two things are worth being precise about.

First, the $63.9 million was a planning grant under the Corridor Identification and Development Program. It paid for studying the corridor, not for laying track.

Second, the project it was studying was not small. When the final construction agreement was signed in June 2021, ABC13 reported the numbers: a $16 billion project, a 200 mph train covering Dallas to Houston in 90 minutes, roughly 17,000 direct construction jobs over six years, 20,000 more in the supply chain, and more than 1,400 permanent jobs once running.

Those are Texas jobs. And Ellzey's district — all of Ellis, Navarro, Anderson, Hill and Cherokee counties, plus parts of Tarrant, Dallas, Freestone and Johnson — sits squarely in the country between the two endpoints.

The argument he did make

To be fair to him, Ellzey's stated objection wasn't about airlines. It was about land:

"Land cannot be taken, homes cannot be destroyed, and lives should not be disrupted for a project that does not serve the needs of our state. As I have stated before, I strongly oppose the use of eminent domain for private ventures like the high-speed rail project."

That's a real concern and rural Texas landowners have raised it in good faith for a decade. A member of Congress who represents farmland is entitled to weigh in on it.

But two things can be true. The eminent domain argument is genuine, and it is also the argument that happens to line up perfectly with the financial interests of the people funding his campaign — and with his own profession.

At minimum, a reader in Ellis County deserves to know all of it before deciding what "one big grift" means.

He's on the committee that writes the checks

This isn't a backbencher's opinion. Ellzey sits on the House Appropriations Committee — the panel that decides where federal money goes — and on its Defense, Interior-Environment, and Labor-HHS-Education subcommittees.

When someone with that seat says a project should lose its funding, it loses its funding. He said so himself: the decision came after "numerous conversations and collaboration" with the Transportation Secretary.

We've written about what the rest of his record looks like in 3 Things to Know About Jake Ellzey, and about the broader bill for Texans in what Texas's Republicans in Congress are costing you.

The question

If a congressman who flies commercial jets out of DFW, and who has taken roughly $125,000 from pilots' union PACs, uses his seat on the Appropriations Committee to help cancel the funding for a train that would compete with commercial jets out of DFW — that is worth saying out loud.

He never said it. So we did.

Sources

Jake Ellzey, "It's Over — U.S. Department of Transportation and Amtrak Rescinds Grant for Texas Central's High-Speed Rail Boondoggle," April 14, 2025; and "Texas congressman on Bullet Train Project: 'This was all one big grift,'" WFAA Inside Texas Politics, April 20, 2025. Contribution totals compiled from Federal Election Commission filings for committee C00770438.

Twelve Days Ago, a Court Revived Scott Fitzgerald's Act 10. The Exemption at the Heart of the Case Covered the Agency His Father Had Just Been Handed.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:36:18 +0000

On July 29, 2026, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals reversed a lower-court ruling and upheld Act 10, the 2011 law that stripped collective bargaining rights from most of Wisconsin's public employees. The unions are expected to appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Fifteen years on, that law is still the most consequential thing Scott Fitzgerald has ever done. He was Wisconsin's Senate Majority Leader when it passed. His brother Jeff was Assembly Speaker. Between them, the Fitzgerald brothers ran both houses of the legislature that sent it to Scott Walker's desk.

And the legal defect that has kept Act 10 in court for a decade and a half — the reason a Dane County judge threw out chunks of it in 2024 and the reason it's headed to a state Supreme Court that will have a 5-2 liberal majority in September — is about who the law let off.

One of the agencies it let off had been handed to Scott Fitzgerald's father three days before the bill was introduced.

The timeline

February 8, 2011. The Walker administration named Stephen Fitzgerald superintendent of the Wisconsin State Patrol. Stephen Fitzgerald is the father of Scott Fitzgerald, then Senate Majority Leader, and Jeff Fitzgerald, then Assembly Speaker. He had been Dodge County sheriff for 14 years and a U.S. marshal.

The Wisconsin State Journal's editorial board did not take long to react. Their editorial ran under the headline "Fitzgerald pick to head State Patrol smacks of favoritism," and opened: "The father of Wisconsin's two most powerful state lawmakers was just picked to lead the Wisconsin State Patrol, and that doesn't pass the smell test."

Scott Fitzgerald said he had not been consulted about his father's application and had not asked to be.

February 11, 2011. Three days later, Walker introduced the budget repair bill that became Act 10.

March 2011. It passed, over weeks of protests that filled the Capitol. Scott Fitzgerald ran it through the Senate.

What the law did — and who it skipped

Act 10 ended most collective bargaining for state, county, municipal and school employees. Teachers, nurses, prison staff, snowplow drivers, clerks: all stripped.

But it carved out a category called "public safety employees." According to a Wisconsin Legislative Council issue brief, that category covers police officers, firefighters, deputy sheriffs, county traffic police, combined village protective services officers — and state patrol members and state motor vehicle inspectors.

Which agency is that? The one Stephen Fitzgerald had been given seventy-two hours earlier.

To be precise about what this is and isn't: as superintendent, Stephen Fitzgerald was management, not a union member. He didn't personally collect a bargaining right out of the carve-out. The point is narrower and harder to explain away — while the legislature his two sons controlled was turning every other corner of state government upside down, the agency that had just been handed to their father was written into the safe list.

Why the carve-out is the whole lawsuit

Act 10's exemptions were never clean, and that's what has kept it in litigation.

State law recognizes 22 "protective occupations." Act 10 exempted seven of them. Capitol police, University of Wisconsin police and conservation wardens were left out — officers who, as the circuit court found, "have the same authority and do the same work as law enforcement officers and state patrol troopers and inspectors" who were exempted.

The unions' argument, as reported by PBS Wisconsin, is that the line was drawn politically: the groups that got the exemption had endorsed Walker in the 2010 election, and the groups that didn't, didn't. In 2024, Dane County Judge Jacob Frost agreed that the split was irrational and violated equal protection. The appeals court reversed him twelve days ago. The Supreme Court will likely have the last word.

Fifteen years, and Wisconsin still doesn't have a settled answer about whether Scott Fitzgerald's signature law is constitutional — because of how the exemptions were drawn.

He's still taking money from the unions he exempted

Fitzgerald left the legislature for Congress in 2021, but the arrangement travels.

This election cycle, his campaign has taken $4,500 from the Milwaukee Police Association's federal PAC — a police union of exactly the kind Act 10 spared, with its most recent check dated June 15, 2026.

Teachers' unions, whose members lost their bargaining rights under his law, are not on his donor list.

The habit

This is the same man who, after Wisconsin voters elected Democrats to every statewide office in 2018, led a lame-duck session that stripped powers from the incoming governor and attorney general and cut early in-person voting — a provision a federal judge struck down. It's the same man who, this summer, told the Green Bay Packers that their concerns about his push to rewrite the NFL's broadcast law were "laughable."

The through-line isn't ideology. It's that Scott Fitzgerald has spent a quarter century deciding who gets left inside the rope, and has never once had to explain the choice to the people left outside it.

Act 10 took bargaining rights from a school secretary in West Bend. It did not take them from the State Patrol. Wisconsin's courts have been arguing about why for fifteen years.

Sources

Wisconsin appeals court overturns ruling that had restored collective bargaining power, Wisconsin Watch, July 2026
Court Decisions on 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, Wisconsin Legislative Council issue brief, July 2026
Top lawmakers' father Stephen Fitzgerald to lead State Patrol, Wisconsin State Journal, February 8, 2011

Riley Moore Wrote to the Fed Demanding One Named Executive Be Removed From an Advisory Panel. Her Company Says the Layoffs Had Nothing to Do With Visas.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:02:00 +0000

In July 2026, Riley Moore did something members of Congress do not normally do. He wrote to the chair of the Federal Reserve and demanded that a specific private citizen be removed from an advisory panel.

The citizen was Asha Sharma, who became CEO of Microsoft Gaming earlier in 2026 and runs Xbox. She had been named a co-leader of the Federal Reserve's Productivity and Jobs Task Force, which studies how new technology — mostly artificial intelligence — affects employment. She serves on it alongside the economist Charles I. Jones and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Moore's letter to Fed Chair Kevin Warsh called for Sharma's removal, arguing that her recent corporate decisions raise questions about whether she belongs on a panel about productivity and jobs. On social media he framed it more directly: the "first question should be why Xbox CEO Asha Sharma" was picked while the company was cutting American jobs and hiring through the H-1B visa program.

The claim he built it on

Here is the difficulty. The thing Moore is accusing her of is not established.

Microsoft announced roughly 4,800 job cuts in the round that set this off, with about 1,600 falling in the Xbox division. Microsoft is separately one of the country's largest H-1B sponsors. Those two facts are true and they happened at the same time.

That is not the same as the second thing being the cause of the first, and Microsoft has said flatly that it isn't. Microsoft told Newsweek:

"These decisions are based on business need, not visa status. H-1B employees were also impacted by job eliminations in the U.S."

Independent experts quoted in the same piece describe the overlap as real but ambiguous. Immigration attorney Richard T. Herman: "A company can legally lay off workers and still file H-1B LCAs, but it doesn't make the optics easy to defend."

"Optics that are hard to defend" is a fair criticism of Microsoft. It is not evidence that a named executive personally fired Americans to import cheaper replacements — which is the viral version of the story, and the version Moore's demand rests on.

He did not hold a hearing. He did not subpoena Microsoft's filings. He did not ask the Labor Department to audit the company's Labor Condition Applications. He wrote a letter asking that one woman lose her seat.

The pattern

This is not the first time Moore has gone after people by category rather than conduct.

In March 2025 he introduced the "Stop CCP VISAs Act", which, despite what the name suggests, would bar every citizen of China from getting a U.S. student visa — not party members, not anyone screened for anything. Every one. Chinese American organizations including the Committee of 100 and Asian Americans Advancing Justice called it discriminatory for treating every Chinese student as a suspect based on nationality.

On the visa program itself, Moore is unambiguous. He told Fox News in July 2026:

"I think the H-1B visa program is a scam, and it's one that has been perpetrated on the American worker for far too long."

"Essentially, we shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas and people were told to 'learn how to code.' Well, now they're being replaced with the H-1B visa workers on the coding jobs as well. So when is the American worker actually going to get a win here?"

And on his standing in the fight: "I'm certainly not the lone voice in this. I might be the loudest."

The part West Virginians should notice

Set aside what you think of the H-1B program. There's a real argument that it's used to hold down wages, and serious labor economists make it.

Look instead at what Moore does with the argument.

The workers he says he's defending are American software engineers at a company headquartered on the other side of the country. The remedy he pursued was not a bill, not an investigation, not an enforcement referral — it was getting one executive removed from an advisory panel at the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, the thing actually happening to workers in West Virginia's 2nd District runs through his own committee. Moore sits on House Appropriations. He led the Republican Study Committee's task force charged with turning DOGE's cuts into permanent law, calling the $9.4 billion package "only the first step — more cuts are coming." Those cuts fall on federal jobs and federal grants in a state that has fewer of both to spare than almost anywhere else.

When he asked that same committee for $50 million to get clean drinking water to McDowell County — holding up a jar of brown tap water from a constituent's home — it voted him down.

A letter about one executive's seat on a Fed panel gets written and gets covered. A jar of brown water gets voted down. Both of those are things Riley Moore did this year.

Source

Jayujyoti Mullick, "Riley Moore demands removal of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma", The American Bazaar, July 22, 2026. Photo via The American Bazaar.

A Hospital in David Joyce's District Has Been Dark Since March 2025. He Called It "Devastating" and Sent One Letter.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:32:59 +0000

In March 2025, two hospitals in Trumbull County, Ohio shut their doors. Nearly 700 employees were furloughed. The county lost its only behavioral health provider.

Nearly a year and a half later they are still closed. The main one, Trumbull Regional Medical Center in Warren, has no license to operate and has lost its Medicare and Medicaid certification. Crews have been taking the signage down.

Trumbull County is in David Joyce's district. Asked about it in April 2026, Joyce said the closure "has been devastating," and said he is working to increase health care access in rural areas through appropriations and funding programs.

Here is what the record actually shows him doing about it.

One letter, in May 2025

On May 14, 2025 — about two months after the doors closed — Joyce joined Senator Jon Husted and Rep. Michael Rulli in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking the Justice Department to investigate "the legality of the events that led to the subsequent closures."

The letter asked DOJ to look at Steward Health Care's financial decisions, allegations of Medicaid and Medicare billing fraud, and the possible misuse of federal money. Steward is the bankrupt chain that owned the hospitals before Insight Health System bought them in October 2024. Insight closed both in March 2025, saying Steward never made payments it owed under the bankruptcy.

"If fraud or abuse played any part in this outcome, it is essential that those responsible be held accountable," the lawmakers wrote.

That was a reasonable thing to ask for. It is also the last thing about this hospital that shows up in the public record under his name. Search the news coverage of the Trumbull closures — WFMJ, the Tribune Chronicle, the Vindicator, Ideastream, Business Journal Daily — and the May 2025 letter is the only item where Joyce appears.

No hearing. No bill. No follow-up when the situation got worse — and it got much worse.

What happened after the letter

The hospitals were supposed to reopen. They didn't.

On September 23, 2025, the Ohio Department of Health inspected both facilities. They failed. Insight had planned to restart emergency services that month; the failed inspection pushed that off indefinitely.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services also terminated its agreement with both facilities, citing failures in hospital governance, patient rights, discharge planning, and the federal law that requires emergency rooms to screen and treat anyone who walks in.

"We're disappointed Insight can't get it open, disappointed it didn't pass inspection," said Tom Connelly of AFSCME Ohio Council 8, which represents workers there. The nurses, he said, "want to get back to work."

By April 2026, the Ohio Department of Health's own spokesperson could offer nothing: the department and Insight "have had some discussions on next steps, but there are no new developments to report at this time." Insight's statement was that it "is continuing to work on the Trumbull hospital licensing process."

An Ohio state representative, Nick Santucci, floated the possibility that the buildings "may not ever be hospitals again" and suggested repurposing them for other industries.

Seven weeks after the letter, he voted to take $33 billion out of Ohio's Medicaid

Here is the part that matters most, and it is not complicated.

On July 3, 2025 — seven weeks after signing a letter demanding accountability for a hospital collapse in his district — Joyce voted for Trump's budget bill.

That law takes an estimated $33 billion in federal Medicaid money out of Ohio over the next decade. Analysts expect the result to be fewer doctors, more strain on rural hospitals, and worse outcomes for families who already have trouble getting care. As many as 356,000 Ohioans are projected to lose health coverage under it.

Medicaid is how a lot of hospitals in places like Trumbull County stay open. When you cut it, hospitals close. That isn't a prediction — it's the thing Joyce says he finds devastating when it happens in Warren.

So when he says he is working on rural health care "through appropriations," it's worth being precise about what he actually appropriated. He sits on the House Appropriations Committee, which decides where federal money goes. The single biggest health care vote of his term moved $33 billion out of Ohio, and he cast it for.

This is a pattern we keep running into. Shelley Moore Capito voted for the same bill and then cosponsored legislation to prevent rural hospital closures. Cindy Hyde-Smith told Mississippi "Medicaid is not going anywhere," voted to cut it, and started writing rural hospital rescue bills. The vote does the damage. The press release does the cleanup.

The people still fighting for it aren't in Congress

On August 3, 2026 — a year and a half after the closure — people in Trumbull County were still holding events to try to get the hospital reopened. The groups doing it were Good Trouble Trumbull, AFSCME Ohio Council 8, and the Mahoning Valley Solidarity Alliance.

"It's just not a good situation for the community. We needed this hospital," Connelly said.

"I was born in this hospital; it's where my brothers and sisters were," said Patricia Dunbar, an organizer with Good Trouble Trumbull.

The closure left the Warren area with one hospital.

Joyce is not mentioned in the coverage of that event.

What accountability would have looked like

Joyce has been in Congress since 2013. He is a senior member of the committee that writes federal spending bills. He had real tools here. He could have pushed his own committee to attach conditions to federal money flowing to hospital owners like Steward and Insight. He could have demanded a hearing on what private equity ownership did to a bankrupt hospital chain that took federal dollars and left two Ohio communities without care. He could have voted against a law that pulls tens of billions of Medicaid dollars out of his state.

He sent a letter to the Attorney General, and then he voted for the cuts.

A year and a half later, the emergency room is still dark, the signs are coming off the building, and the people trying to bring it back are union members and neighbors organizing on their own time — the same thing that happened in his district when constituents got tired of waiting for a town hall and held their own.

"Devastating" is the right word for it. It just isn't an action.

Source

Insight in talks about reopening the Trumbull County hospital — WFMJ, April 21, 2026. Photo: WFMJ.

Bill Hagerty Wrote a Bill to Fix America's Bridges. Then He Stalled the Senate for a Weekend and Voted Against the Law That Funded It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:07:00 +0000

In May 2021, a bridge over the Mississippi River nearly fell down.

Inspectors found a crack in a critical steel support beam on the Interstate 40 Hernando de Soto Bridge at Memphis. They called 911. The bridge shut down completely — about 45,000 vehicles a day, roughly 30 percent of them commercial trucks, suddenly had nowhere to go. It stayed closed for almost three months. Investigators later found the crack had been visible in a kayaker's photograph since 2016, missed by inspection after inspection.

Two weeks after that bridge closed, Bill Hagerty did something genuinely good. He introduced a bill to fix bridges.

Eleven weeks after that, he shut down the United States Senate to delay the law that paid for it — and then voted against it.

This is the whole story, in order.

May 25, 2021: he introduces the bridge bill

Hagerty joined a bipartisan group of senators, led with Democrat Sherrod Brown of Ohio, to introduce the Bridge Investment Act. It created a competitive grant program to repair and replace deficient bridges and chip away at the national backlog of bridge repairs. It required American-made steel and iron in the projects it funded.

The price tag: $3.265 billion.

In the announcement, Hagerty pointed directly at what was happening back home:

"Tennesseans, particularly those in Memphis and the Mid-South, know all too well right now the necessity of maintaining our bridges..."

He was right. He named the ongoing I-40 closure as the reason the country needed to invest in its bridges. It's hard to argue with a senator making that case while a major river crossing sits closed in his own state.

August 2021: the bridge program goes into the infrastructure bill

Here's what happened to Hagerty's idea. It didn't die in committee. It didn't get watered down. It got written into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill essentially whole.

Go read the law. Section 11118 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is titled "Bridge investment program." The law authorizes it at $600 million for 2022, $640 million for 2023, $650 million for 2024, $675 million for 2025, and $700 million for 2026.

Add those up: $3.265 billion — the exact figure from Hagerty's own press release.

His bill's program. His bill's number. Sitting in the law.

August 7–9, 2021: he grinds the Senate to a halt

The bill was headed for passage. More than a dozen Republicans had joined Democrats to clear the early hurdles. And then one freshman senator decided nobody was going anywhere.

The Associated Press described what he did: Hagerty "spent the weekend using a procedural maneuver to essentially grind the chamber to a halt." A final vote that could have happened days earlier was pushed toward the early hours of Tuesday morning. Senators lost a second straight summer weekend to it.

On August 7, he took the floor and laid out his objections: the bill wasn't really paid for, it was "a 2700-page bill going through no committees," and Democrats would hold it hostage in the House until a separate "multi-trillion-dollar socialist bill" passed.

His colleagues in both parties were not impressed.

Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota: "We have squandered not minutes, not hours, but several days."

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah: "Criticism is expected. And, I note, criticism is also pretty easy. If you don't like this bill, what bill do you like instead? What would you do instead?"

Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, one of the lead negotiators, was blunter: "I think he's doing Trump's bidding. I don't think there's any doubt about it."

Tester wasn't guessing. According to the AP, Trump called Hagerty that Sunday morning. Later the same day Trump put out a statement egging him on: "Congratulations to Senator Bill Hagerty in remaining true to 'AMERICA FIRST!'"

Meanwhile, about 8 in 10 Americans supported spending more on roads, bridges, ports, and drinking water pipes, according to an AP-NORC poll taken at the time.

August 10, 2021: he votes no

The bill passed anyway, 69 to 30. Hagerty voted no.

So did his Tennessee colleague Marsha Blackburn.

Both of Tennessee's senators voted against the largest bridge investment since the interstate highway system was built — including the bridge program one of them wrote.

What Tennessee got anyway

The money came to Tennessee regardless, because that's how formula funding works. Tennessee was allocated $302 million for bridges over five years under the law's Bridge Formula Program, Nashville's Fox 17 reported in January 2022 — for a state with roughly 880 bridges rated in poor condition.

Tennessee also got $813 million from the law's broadband program to extend high-speed internet to every remaining unserved home and business in the state by 2028.

None of that happened because of Bill Hagerty. It happened over his objection, after he'd spent a weekend making sure it took longer.

The part that doesn't add up

A senator can vote against a big bill and still be honest about it. Plenty of Republicans thought the price tag was too high and said so once, on the record, and moved on.

That's not what happened here.

Hagerty didn't just object. He looked at a shut-down bridge in Memphis, wrote a $3.265 billion program to fix bridges like it, watched Congress adopt his program word for word — and then used the Senate's rules to personally delay the vote, at the urging of a president who wanted the whole thing dead, before voting against his own idea.

His stated reason was the deficit: he cited a CBO estimate that the bill would add about $256 billion over a decade. It's a real number, and reasonable people can care about it.

But watch what that principle does four years later. On July 1, 2025, Hagerty voted to pass Trump's budget bill — the one that cut health coverage and food aid to help pay for tax cuts, and added trillions to the debt doing it. The national debt has since climbed to about $39.9 trillion, roughly $3.9 trillion higher than when Republicans took full control.

So the deficit was worth shutting down the Senate over when the money was for bridges. It wasn't worth a single procedural objection when the money was for tax cuts.

Tennessee has 880 bridges in poor condition. One of them nearly collapsed into the Mississippi River with people driving over it. Hagerty knew that better than almost anyone in the Senate — he said so himself, in writing, in May 2021.

Then in August he made everyone wait, and voted no.

Sources

AP: Infrastructure push slowed by Tennessee senator's objection (Brian Slodysko, August 9, 2021)
Hagerty, Senators Introduce Bipartisan "Bridge Investment Act" (May 25, 2021)
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Public Law 117-58 — Sec. 11118, Bridge investment program
Senate Roll Call Vote 314 — passage of H.R. 3684, August 10, 2021 (Hagerty: Nay)
Hagerty Delivers Floor Remarks on Senate Infrastructure Bill (August 7, 2021)

Mike Bost Says Trump's Tariffs Put "All 3,000 of Those People" Back to Work in Granite City. His Own Press Release Said 500.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:25:01 +0000

Ask a politician about tariffs in southern Illinois and you'll get Granite City. The U.S. Steel mill there is the local proof text for whether steel tariffs work.

Here is what Mike Bost told the Effingham Daily News on March 6, 2026:

"Because of Trump wisely using the 232 Tariffs, when he came back in six months after he was elected and used the 232 the way it was supposed to be used, all 3,000 of those people went back to work. So I think that they're a very appropriate tool to be used wisely, and I think that people need to understand that."

All 3,000 of those people went back to work. It's a clean, memorable number. It is also not what happened, and the best witness against it is Mike Bost.

His own press release said 500

On March 7, 2018, Bost's office put out a statement with this headline: "Bost Statement on Bringing 500 Jobs Back to Granite City Works."

The release says U.S. Steel would restart one of the plant's two blast furnaces, and that "the company anticipates calling back approximately 500 employees beginning this month." Bost, then co-chairman of the Congressional Steel Caucus, called it "a big victory for the hardworking steel families in Granite City."

Later in 2018 U.S. Steel restarted the second furnace and brought on about 300 more workers. Five hundred plus three hundred is eight hundred. It is not three thousand.

And then the furnaces went back down — with the tariffs still in place

This is the part the tariff story always skips.

The mill's first blast furnace has been idle since 2019 — one year after the restart Bost celebrated, with the Section 232 tariffs fully in effect. The second was temporarily idled in the fall of 2023, and as St. Louis Public Radio reported, that "quickly became indefinite," costing hundreds more jobs. For more than two years the plant made no steel at all — it just processed slabs shipped in from other mills.

The tariffs did not prevent any of that. They were there the whole time.

What the mill actually looked like the week he said it

Bost gave that interview on March 6, 2026. At that moment, Granite City Works employed about 1,110 people and neither blast furnace was producing steel.

The second furnace relit the weekend of March 28, 2026 — three weeks after his interview — following a December 2025 announcement by U.S. Steel. United Steelworkers Local 1899 president Craig McKey told St. Louis Public Radio the union expects to bring back roughly 450 more positions, which would put total employment "closer to 1,300."

Thirteen hundred, if everything goes right, is a good day for Granite City. It is worth celebrating. It is still less than half of "all 3,000."

The restart wasn't the tariffs — it was a corporate deal with a two-year clock

The reason the furnace came back on isn't Section 232. It's the Nippon Steel purchase of U.S. Steel, finalized June 18, 2025.

Under the national security agreement attached to that sale, Nippon cannot close, idle, or sell Granite City Works before June 18, 2027 without presidential sign-off. That is a two-year protection, and it expires next summer.

So the honest version of the Granite City story is: an ownership change with a legally binding open-for-two-years clause got the furnace lit, and the guarantee runs out in June 2027. That's a much more precarious thing to tell steelworkers than "all 3,000 went back to work."

One more thing: it isn't his district

Granite City was in Illinois's 12th District when Bost put out that 2018 press release. It isn't now. After the 2022 redistricting, Granite City and most of the Metro East moved into the 13th District, represented by Democrat Nikki Budzinski — who issued the statement as the plant's congresswoman when the furnace restarted.

Bost is entitled to talk about a plant he once represented and worked on. But he's using it in 2026 to sell tariffs to voters in a district that doesn't include it, with a jobs number that his own office never claimed and that the mill has never hit since the layoffs.

Why the exaggeration matters here

Steel tariffs are not free. They protect the mills that make steel by raising the price for everyone who buys it — the manufacturers, farmers, and builders who are also Bost's constituents. Whether that trade is worth it is a real argument. "All 3,000 of those people went back to work" is not an argument; it's a number that ends one.

We wrote about a neighboring Indiana Republican who made the same pitch in Erin Houchin Wrote an Op-Ed Called 'Trump's Tariffs Are Reviving American Manufacturing.' Indiana Then Lost 9,148 Factory Jobs. The pattern is identical: pick the one plant that reopened, round the number up, and don't mention the years it sat cold.

Granite City deserves better than being a talking point. So do the people who have to decide whether to believe one.

Source

Marie Adamick, "US Rep. Mike Bost defends ICE, supports Iran war", Effingham Daily News, March 6, 2026, and "Granite City Works plans to produce steel again this weekend", St. Louis Public Radio, March 27, 2026.

Mark Messmer Is Vice Chair of the Workforce Protections Subcommittee. He Wrote the Bill to Ban Workplace Heat Protections Forever.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:25:00 +0000

On July 21, 2026 — in the middle of a summer of dangerous heat across the country — a House committee voted 18 to 15, straight down party lines, to make sure the federal government can never again try to keep workers from dying of heat on the job.

The bill they voted on was written by Mark Messmer.

Messmer has been Indiana's 8th District congressman since 2025. He sits on the House Education and Workforce Committee, and on that committee he serves as vice chair of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections — the panel whose entire job, by name, is protecting workers.

The bill he wrote is called the Heat Workforce Standards Act. Here is what it actually says, in full:

"The Secretary of Labor may not finalize, implement, or enforce the proposed standard titled Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the Federal Register on August 30, 2024 ... or any substantially similar standard."

That's the whole bill. Forty-four words. There's no replacement standard in it. There's no expiration date. There's no process for a future administration to try again. It just says: never.

What the rule would have required

The rule Messmer wants to kill forever is not exotic. OSHA published it in August 2024. It sets two trigger points:

At a heat index of 80°F — drinking water (a quart per worker per hour, kept "suitably cool"), a break area to cool off in, and a gradual ramp-up period for new workers.
At a heat index of 90°F — a paid rest break of at least 15 minutes every two hours.

Water. Shade. A break. OSHA picked 80 degrees because, by its own analysis, that threshold catches 96 to 100% of heat-related worker deaths. The rule would cover roughly 36 million workers — about a third of the country's full-time workforce.

The people it covers are the ones who don't get to sit in air conditioning: farmhands, roofers, road crews, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, line cooks, foundry workers.

The body count

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has documented 1,042 American workers killed by heat on the job between 1992 and 2022 — an average of 34 a year. Over the decade from 2011 to 2020, BLS counted 33,890 heat injuries and illnesses serious enough that the worker missed days of work.

Safety researchers say both numbers are undercounts, because heat deaths get written down as heart attacks.

Eighty-plus labor, medical, and public-health groups wrote to Congress the day of the vote, pointing out what makes this bill different from an ordinary "we don't like this regulation" fight:

"This bill would permanently prohibit the Department of Labor from finalizing, implementing, or enforcing a federal heat standard ... no sunset provision, no mechanism for future reconsideration."

Their other line was blunter: "Workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods."

"The Biden Heat Rule was never about safety"

That's Messmer's own description of a rule about drinking water and rest breaks. He said it in his own press release announcing the bill in November 2025:

"The Biden Heat Rule was never about safety, but was rather, unsurprisingly, focused upon expanding federal bureaucratic control over hard working Americans."

He framed it as a small-business owner's complaint about red tape: "As a small business owner myself, I've seen how unwarranted, heavy-handed regulations can crush innovation, increase costs, and undermine the productivity of American institutions."

Notice what's missing. Not one word in that release about the workers who die. The release lists what the rule would do to businesses — paperwork, fines, "regulatory requirements" — and never once mentions a heat death, a heat injury, or a single person who has been hurt.

The line in his own press release that doesn't survive contact with Indiana law

Buried in the background section of that release is the argument Messmer uses to say nobody gets hurt by his bill:

"State governments already have the authority to establish their own occupational safety and health standards and are required to have their plans be 'at least as effective' as Federal OSHA standards."

Fine. So what does Indiana do?

Indiana has a state workplace-safety agency, IOSHA. And Indiana has a state law, Indiana Code 22-8-1.1-17.5, that says this:

"The commissioner may not adopt or enforce any provision used to carry out the enforcement of this chapter that is more stringent than the corresponding federal provision enforced by the United States Department of Labor."

Read those two passages together. Messmer's defense is that states can write their own heat rules. Indiana law says its labor commissioner is forbidden from going beyond the federal standard. Indiana can only ever copy Washington.

So if Messmer's bill becomes law and the federal heat standard is dead forever, the state ceiling drops to zero — and by Indiana statute, Indiana cannot raise it. Hoosiers working in the heat would have no federal protection and no legal path to a state one.

Messmer spent sixteen years in the Indiana legislature before he came to Congress — six in the state House and ten in the state Senate. This is not a corner of state law he can plausibly claim to be unfamiliar with.

Who asked for this

Messmer's press release names them. The Heat Workforce Standards Act is endorsed by the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, the Mason Contractors Association, Independent Electrical Contractors, the National Restaurant Association, the American Building Materials Alliance, and about twenty more trade groups — an almost perfect list of the industries whose workers the rule would have covered.

That's the same pattern a report published in May 2026 by the Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and Harvard Law School's Center for Labor and a Just Economy laid out: the US Chamber of Commerce and major employers publicly praising worker safety while lobbying to block heat rules. That report estimated a real federal heat standard could save up to 1,500 lives a year.

Messmer's own campaign money comes from the same neighborhood. His donors include the home builders' BUILDPAC and the Indiana Farm Bureau's political action committee, according to FEC filings compiled by Who Bought My Rep — construction and agriculture, two of the four sectors OSHA's rule names by name.

He is not the only one. Florida's Byron Donalds signed on as a co-sponsor, which we wrote about in Byron Donalds Co-Sponsored a Bill to Strip Heat Protections From Florida's Outdoor Workers. But Donalds is one of 62 co-sponsors. Messmer is the author.

The part that should bother his own district

Messmer also sits on the House Agriculture Committee. Agriculture is one of the four sectors OSHA's rule explicitly covers, and southwest Indiana is farm country — the same constituents he tells farm audiences he's fighting for.

Indiana is not Arizona. Nobody has to pretend it is. But a grain bin, a warehouse dock, or a roof in Evansville in July is hotter than the air outside it, and the rule Messmer wants permanently banned would have meant that on those days, the worker gets fifteen minutes and cold water.

His committee sent the bill forward in the middle of a stretch of dangerous heat across the country. It now waits for a floor vote.

Source

Jake Johnson, "Amid deadly temperatures, GOP advances bill to ban federal heat protections for workers", The Real News Network / Common Dreams, July 24, 2026. Photo of Rep. Mark Messmer by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.

Erin Houchin Wrote an Op-Ed Called 'Trump's Tariffs Are Reviving American Manufacturing.' Indiana Then Lost 9,148 Factory Jobs.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:55:45 +0000

On April 29, 2025 — three weeks after Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs — Erin Houchin published an op-ed with a headline that left no wiggle room:

"President Trump's Tariffs Are Reviving American Manufacturing."

In it, she wrote that the tariffs were doing exactly what they were designed to do, that "now we're seeing the results, not just in statistics or economic reports, but in real communities," and that "this is just the beginning."

She closed: "President Trump's America First agenda is not a slogan—it's a governing philosophy. ... And it's working."

Fifteen months later, the statistics and economic reports she waved off have arrived.

What actually happened to Indiana

On July 22, 2026, the nonpartisan Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois published Tariffs and the Midwest: Impacts on Households, Manufacturing, and Economies in Six States.

For Indiana, as Indiana Legislative Insight summarized the findings:

	Indiana, 2025 tariffs
Added cost to the average household	$2,600 ($3,600 counting all tariffs in force)
Lost state GDP	$2.65 billion (−0.51%)
Manufacturing jobs lost	9,148
Added cost to the average small-business importer	$586,000

Across the six Midwest states studied, tariffs cost almost 42,000 manufacturing jobs and more than $18 billion in GDP. Only Michigan took a bigger hit than Indiana.

There's a reason for that, and Houchin knows it better than most members of Congress: Indiana is the most manufacturing-dependent state in the country. Manufacturing is 24.2% of its GDP — the next closest Midwest state is Iowa at 16.7% — and 16% of its workforce, double the national share. When you tax the imported steel, aluminum and components that factories buy, Indiana is the state that pays first.

The report's own framing is that Midwest states are "manufacturing-intensive and have large agricultural sectors, making them vulnerable to tariffs and retaliatory actions by other countries."

The researchers also worked out the marginal cost, which is the number to remember every time the rate goes up: each additional one-percentage-point increase in tariffs costs the average Hoosier family $364, kills 1,288 Indiana factory jobs, and knocks 0.07% off state GDP.

Last week, the administration announced a new round of tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on goods from more than 80 countries.

Her evidence was one bicycle company

Houchin's op-ed made its case with a single example: Guardian Bikes, which was putting $19 million into a factory in Seymour, Indiana, to build bicycles domestically. She toured the plant, quoted CEO Brian Riley saying tariffs drove the decision, and called it proof.

Guardian is a real company doing real work — it makes thousands of bikes a day in Seymour and pays starting wages around $22 an hour. Nobody should want that factory to fail.

But one plant is not a state economy. Guardian's expansion and Indiana's 9,148 lost manufacturing jobs happened in the same year, in the same state. Houchin's column was about the first number.

There's a further wrinkle. Guardian has since asked the federal government to add a 50% tariff on the aluminum, steel, frames and parts in imported bicycles — a push the Indianapolis Business Journal reported puts the company at odds with much of the bicycle industry. That is what tariff policy usually looks like up close: a concentrated winner who wants more, and a diffuse set of losers who each pay a little.

Houchin's op-ed only described the winner.

The honest caveats, and why they don't rescue the column

Two things cut in her favor and are worth saying plainly.

Indiana's economy did not collapse. The state's forecasting consultant, S&P Global Market Intelligence, warned in April 2025 that tariff uncertainty would drag growth down to 1.3%, and by December was telling lawmakers that tariff impacts had been "generally less than feared in spring 2025." Real gross state product grew about four percent last year.

But "less bad than the worst case" is not "reviving American manufacturing." The study measures what the tariffs themselves did — $2.65 billion in output that didn't happen, 9,148 factory jobs that don't exist, $2,600 out of the average Hoosier household's pocket. A growing economy that would have grown more is still a household paying more at the register.

And the household number is the one voters feel. $2,600 a year is a car payment. It is the deductible. It is a big share of the grocery budget for the 21,534 households in her district that use SNAP to buy food.

She's not the only Hoosier who wrote this check

Indiana's other Republicans have been running the same play. Fellow Indiana congressman Marlin Stutzman kept defending the tariffs while Indiana farmers ate a $607 million hit — the agricultural half of the same story the University of Illinois team documented.

Houchin has been in Congress since 2023. She sits on Energy and Commerce, Rules, and Budget. She wrote that "if we stay the course on tariffs ... we can see a manufacturing resurgence like this across every state in the country."

Indiana stayed the course. It lost 9,148 manufacturing jobs, and every household in the state paid for the privilege.

Source

Tallying tariffs' Indiana impact — Indiana Legislative Insight, August 5, 2026, reporting on the MEPI/PMCR study. Houchin's op-ed was published by WBIW on April 29, 2025, and is linked above.

Jen Kiggans Called DOGE Cuts 'So Necessary.' Then 70 Veteran-Owned Businesses in Her Own District Lost Contracts.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:52:07 +0000

Jen Kiggans chairs the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Her job, by title, is watching for things that hurt veterans and calling them out.

In November 2025, Politico published a count of what DOGE had done to veteran-owned businesses. Two-thirds of every contract DOGE cancelled at the Department of Veterans Affairs that year was with a veteran-owned company. Around 550 veteran-owned businesses nationwide were hit.

Virginia's 2nd District — Kiggans's district, built around the Navy in Virginia Beach and Hampton Roads — lost at least 70 contracts among veteran-owned businesses. More than any oversight chair would want in her own backyard.

Her statement to Politico:

"As a veteran, I am troubled any time a veteran-owned business is impacted by budget cuts. I am actively working to review and reverse these cuts."

That's a fine sentence. The problem is everything she said before a reporter counted.

What she said while it was happening

Kiggans didn't discover DOGE in November 2025. She was there at the start.

In December 2024, before Trump had even taken office, she publicly praised a "productive first meeting" with Elon Musk and DOGE co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy, the Virginia Mercury reported.

In February 2025, as mass firings hit Virginia — one of the largest concentrations of federal employees in the country — she called the cuts "so necessary." That was said while the workers being cut were struggling to find new jobs.

Later that year, on the John Fredericks Show, she told laid-off federal workers that there were other jobs out there and that they needed to "go out and get them."

That is not a person who was blindsided. That's a person who watched it happen to her own district for eleven months and cheered.

$8.3 million, and who it was for

The contracts weren't the whole of it. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress cited by the Mercury, DOGE terminated more than $8.3 million in grants and leases tied to Virginia's 2nd District — including funding connected to veterans' services and facilities, and programs serving military families.

Hampton Roads is not a district where that's an abstraction. It's a district where the Navy, the shipyards, the VA and the contractors around them are the economy. Kiggans knows this better than almost anyone in Congress; she's a former Navy helicopter pilot married to a retired F-18 pilot.

The businesses on the other end of those cancelled contracts were run by people like the ones Politico interviewed: a nine-year Navy veteran who started walking dogs after losing his translation business, a ten-year Army veteran who furloughed half their staff, another who considered selling a car to make payroll. Several would only speak anonymously, afraid the government would retaliate against what was left of their business.

Some of the cancelled VA contracts had been helping register cancer patients and provide health care support to veterans. The VA says that work is now done in-house.

The oversight chair who didn't oversee

Here's the part that should bother her constituents most.

Kiggans has a gavel. She runs the subcommittee that exists specifically to investigate the VA and hold it accountable, and she has used it plenty — hearings on VA bonus payments, on mental health policy, on the Hampton VA Medical Center.

When the largest disruption to veterans' services in years came from her own party's White House, what her constituents got was a statement, issued after a reporter did the counting. She has not pointed to a hearing she called on it, a letter she sent, or a contract she got restored.

"Actively working to review and reverse these cuts" is the sentence a member reaches for when there is no formal action to name. If any of those 70 contracts came back, her office hasn't said so.

The politics arrived on schedule

By December 2025, even Elon Musk was calling DOGE only "somewhat successful" and saying he wouldn't do it again. The Virginia Mercury asked Kiggans for an interview about her support for the program and sent her a list of detailed questions about its impact on her district.

She didn't respond.

Virginia's 2nd is rated a toss-up — the only one in Virginia, by the nonpartisan Inside Elections. In November she faces Elaine Luria, the retired Navy commander she unseated in 2022, who won the Democratic primary on August 4, 2026.

That's the timeline, laid end to end: praise DOGE in December 2024, call the firings "so necessary" in February, tell the fired to go get other jobs, absorb 70 contract cancellations and $8.3 million in lost grants, issue a sympathetic statement when Politico calls, decline the interview when the Mercury calls, run for re-election.

The cost of "efficiency" in a Navy town

There's an argument to be made for cutting wasteful federal contracts. It's not a crazy position, and plenty of veterans hold it.

But the argument only works if the person making it is willing to look at what actually got cut and say whether it was waste. Kiggans has never done that. She endorsed the cuts in the abstract, and when the specifics landed on veteran-owned businesses in her own district, her response was that she was "troubled."

Being troubled is not oversight. It's a feeling. Her constituents gave her a gavel.

Source

DOGE had a cutting spree. 550 vet-owned businesses felt it. — Politico, November 22, 2025, and Musk's doubts about DOGE spotlight political risks for U.S. Rep. Jen Kiggans — Virginia Mercury, December 17, 2025. Photo: Francis Chung / POLITICO.

Rob Wittman Wrote an Op-Ed Demanding 'a Scalpel, Not a Sledgehammer.' Two Months Later He Voted to Hand Over the Sledgehammer.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:01:57 +0000

In May 2025, Rob Wittman published an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch pushing back on the chaos coming out of Washington. It was, by the standards of his party at that moment, a brave thing to write.

Here was the line everybody quoted:

"We need to pursue targeted savings – not reckless cuts. That means using a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, when it comes to rightsizing the federal workforce or realigning federal spending."

Virginia Mercury columnist Roger Chesley wrote about it under a headline that captured the mood: Wittman's scrutiny "needs company from other Republicans." Chesley's first question was blunt: what took you so long?

Wittman's emailed answer was that he'd been at it from the start:

"I've spoken up from the beginning. I called for a compassionate approach to federal workforce reforms, raised concerns after mass layoffs at the Department of Education, and advocated for Virginia's research institutions to continue receiving federal funding."

"I've shared personal stories from Virginia's First District directly with cabinet secretaries and White House officials to ensure the human impact of these policies is fully understood."

Chesley took him at his word and closed with the obvious test: "The proof, though, will be how everyday Americans are affected."

Here's the proof.

What he did next

On June 12, 2025, the House voted on the Rescissions Act of 2025 — the bill that cancelled $9.4 billion Congress had already approved and promised, and wrote DOGE's cuts into permanent law. It passed by two votes, 214–212.

Wittman voted yes.

On July 17, the House voted again to send the final version to the president. It passed 216–213.

Wittman voted yes again.

That is not a scalpel. Cancelling money Congress had already committed — with no line-item review of what each cut would do — is the definition of the sledgehammer he had just written a newspaper column against.

The op-ed was in May. The first vote was in June. Five weeks.

Virginia paid more than almost anybody

This matters more in Virginia than in most states, and Wittman knows it better than most members.

More than 341,000 federal employees lived in Virginia as of 2023, according to Census Bureau figures Chesley cited. The commonwealth's economy is built on federal payrolls, federal contracts, and the towns that grew up around them.

In January 2026, the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO published an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data that put a number on it:

Virginia had a net decline of 23,500 civilian federal jobs through November 2025.
That single year wiped out six years of federal job growth in eleven months.
On top of that, Virginia companies filed layoff notices covering nearly 7,000 more workers — a 70% increase over 2024.

Bob McNab, who chairs the economics department at Old Dominion University, explained what those numbers mean in practice:

"On average, each federal government employee earns about 1.6 times the average private sector employee. If we include benefits, that ratio climbs to two. So, Virginia losing 23,500 federal government jobs last year is roughly the equivalent of losing 47,000 private sector jobs."

He added that there is no quick fix: Virginia would need to add 2,000 jobs a month just to catch up, and even then, "the deficit between when they were fired and replaced is still there."

The job losses contributed to Virginia losing its ranking as the No. 1 state for business in the country.

The op-ed was the alibi, not the position

There is a way to read Wittman's May column charitably: he saw the damage coming, said so publicly, and then got rolled by his leadership.

The trouble is that he wasn't rolled. He had two chances, five weeks apart, on a bill that passed by two votes and then by three. In a margin that thin, one member changing his mind changes the outcome. He was, in the most literal sense, in a position to stop it.

Eric Scorsone of the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center told WHRO that the shock "may cause problems for the economy in the long term," and offered the one hope available: more military spending. "Virginia has really relied on the federal government," he said. "It has been a good deal, quite frankly. But that's kind of going away."

Wittman is vice chairman of the full House Armed Services Committee and chairman of its Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee. If anyone in Congress was positioned to protect Virginia's federal workforce, or to trade a vote for it, it was him.

And this is the second time we've written this sentence about him

The same month he was publishing his op-ed about reckless cuts, Wittman was also telling Chesley that "Virginia's vulnerable populations" were "protected in the Medicaid portion of the reconciliation bill." He had already signed a letter promising not to support any bill cutting Medicaid coverage. He voted for that bill too.

Two issues, one method: publish the concern, collect the credit for independence, then vote with leadership when the roll is called.

Ohio's Troy Balderson ran the same play on the same bill and got caught inside 24 hours. Wittman's version had a longer fuse and a bigger bill attached — 23,500 Virginia jobs, and counting.

He was right in May. He voted the other way in June and July. Virginians got the sledgehammer.

Source

The op-ed quotes and Wittman's emailed responses come from Roger Chesley's May 16, 2025 Virginia Mercury column, Va. GOP congressman's scrutiny on federal cuts, job losses needs company from other Republicans. Photo: Christopher Tyree / Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism.

James Comer Voted Against the Infrastructure Law and Said It Wouldn't Help His District. Now He's Taking Credit for $24 Million of It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:12:47 +0000

On July 1, 2026, James Comer put out a press release with good news for western Kentucky. The U.S. Department of Transportation had awarded $24 million to the Paducah-McCracken County Riverport Authority to build Riverport West, an expansion of the region's main public port.

He called it "a major win for McCracken County" that "will help unlock new opportunities for economic growth across our region." His office laid out the work he'd done to land it: eight months of calls to senior officials at the Department of Transportation, a letter to Secretary Sean Duffy, a meeting he set up between Paducah leaders and DOT staff in Washington.

It is a good project. Paducah sits where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers meet, and 23 barge companies have operations or headquarters in the city. The existing port has leased out nearly every parcel it has. The new one will add a 650-foot dock, three barge berths, and more than a mile of rail.

There is just one thing missing from Comer's announcement.

Where the $24 Million Came From

The grant is a BUILD grant — the Department of Transportation's program for local and regional transportation projects. Comer's press release says so twice. What it never says is where the money in that program comes from.

The first page of the Department of Transportation's own funding notice for the 2026 BUILD round spells it out in a single sentence:

"The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Pub. L. 117-58, November 15, 2021, IIJA) authorized and appropriated $1.5 billion to be awarded by the Department of Transportation ('DOT') for FY 2026 for Local and Regional Project Assistance Program Grants under National Infrastructure Investments."

That's the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. It set aside $1.5 billion a year for these grants, for five years running, through 2026. Paducah's $24 million came out of the last of those five pots.

Comer voted against that law.

The Vote

On November 5, 2021, the House passed the infrastructure bill 228–206. Comer voted no (Roll Call 369). It passed anyway, because 13 Republicans crossed over and made up for the Democrats who voted against it.

Kentucky's senior senator had already voted for it three months earlier. The Senate passed the same bill 69–30 on August 10, 2021, and Mitch McConnell voted yes. Rand Paul voted no.

So the money Comer spent eight months chasing exists because other members of Congress — including the Republican leader from his own state — voted to create it, while he voted to kill it.

What He Said At the Time

This isn't a case of a congressman quietly voting no on a big bill and hoping nobody notices the details. Comer explained his vote, at length, in a statement his office sent to Kentucky newspapers on November 10, 2021.

Here is what he said:

"I voted NO on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that passed Congress in the dark of night. Less than 10% of the bill contained surface infrastructure, like roads and bridges, with significant money going toward things that do not affect Kentucky's 1st District — like mass transit and green energy."

Read that last part again. Things that do not affect Kentucky's 1st District.

Paducah is in Kentucky's 1st District. McCracken County is in Kentucky's 1st District. The port Comer just spent eight months lobbying for is in Kentucky's 1st District, and the $24 million he's celebrating came out of the bill he told his constituents wouldn't do anything for them.

He was wrong. That's allowed — people get big bills wrong. What's harder to defend is going back four and a half years later and taking a victory lap for the money without ever mentioning you tried to stop it from existing.

He Even Told Us the Rule

The same 2021 statement contains a line that reads very differently in 2026. Comer was warning his colleagues about what a yes vote would mean:

"Any member of Congress who voted yes can also take credit for passage of the massive socialist spending bill — which will undoubtedly lead to more inflation and government dependency."

Comer's position in 2021 was that a vote is a claim of ownership. Vote yes on something, and you own it. That was his argument for why voting yes was so dangerous.

By his own rule, he doesn't get to own this one. He voted no.

Who Does Get Credit

Comer's press release thanks "the Trump Administration" for the investment. The Riverport Authority's executive director, in a quote included in that same release, thanked Comer along with Senators McConnell and Paul.

Nobody in the announcement thanks the law that put the $24 million on the table.

That is the whole trick. The program has a name — BUILD — that sounds like it has always existed. Federal money arrives with a Department of Transportation letterhead, not a roll-call number. Unless somebody goes and reads the funding notice, there is nothing in the announcement to tell a voter in Paducah that their congressman voted against the bill that paid for their port.

So here is the roll-call number: 369. November 5, 2021. Comer, Nay.

This Is a Playbook, Not an Accident

We've written about this move before, because it keeps happening.

In 2021, every single Republican in Congress voted against the American Rescue Plan — and then a whole group of them put out press releases bragging about the money it sent home, including some who later voted against refilling the same fund they'd told local restaurants to apply for. In North Carolina, Tim Moore spent a decade as House Speaker blocking Medicaid expansion, then called it something "we can all be very proud of" once it finally passed over his objections.

The pattern is always the same. Vote no. Let it pass. Wait. Show up for the ribbon cutting.

It works because voting and spending happen years apart, in different places, covered by different reporters. The vote is a five-second entry in a roll call in Washington. The check is a local TV story with a photo of the congressman.

What This Says About How He Represents Us

Comer has now been in Congress for nine years, and he chairs the House Oversight Committee — the committee that is supposed to make sure federal money is spent honestly and that the public can see what its government is doing.

He is also a congressman who does not make himself easy to ask about votes like this one. In July 2025, after Frankfort organizers reached out to his office eight times trying to find a date and finally invited him to a town hall of their own, Comer neither showed up nor sent anyone from his staff. When protesters showed up outside his Paducah office in chicken suits in March 2025 asking him to face voters, his spokesperson said he "does not plan on holding therapy sessions for left-wing activists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome."

A town hall is exactly where a question like this gets asked. Congressman, you said this bill wouldn't help our district. Now you're announcing $24 million from it for our port. Which was it?

There is a good answer available, and it would take him about ten seconds: I voted against the bill, I still think it spent too much, and I'm glad this piece of it is coming to Paducah. That's honest. It's also not what happened. What happened is a press release that describes eight months of phone calls and never once names the law.

Western Kentucky is getting a port. That's genuinely good for Paducah, and the people at the Riverport Authority who spent years planning it deserve the credit they're getting.

Their congressman voted no.

Source

WPSD Local 6, "Comer secures $24M BUILD grant to extend Paducah's main public port" (July 2026). Photo: WPSD Local 6.

Tom McClintock Wrote a Bill to Throw Out 500 Lawsuits by Workers Dying of Silicosis

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:10:00 +0000

On June 3, 2026, the House Judiciary Committee voted 16 to 7, along party lines, to advance a bill written by Tom McClintock.

The bill is H.R. 5437, and here is what it does, in the plainest terms the text allows. Section 3 has two parts:

"(a) In General.—A qualified civil action may not be brought in any Federal or State court.

(b) Dismissal of Pending Actions.—A qualified civil action that is pending on the date of enactment of this Act shall be dismissed, as soon as is practicable after the date of enactment."

A "qualified civil action" is a lawsuit against a maker or seller of a stone slab for injuries "caused by exposure to respirable silica."

So: no new lawsuits, and every lawsuit already filed gets thrown out. KQED reported the number of pending cases the bill would dismiss at about 500. Most of them are from California — McClintock's own state.

What the lawsuits are about

Engineered stone — also sold as quartz or artificial stone — is now the most popular kitchen countertop material in America. Cutting and polishing it releases crystalline silica dust. Breathing that dust causes silicosis, an incurable disease that scars the lungs until they stop working.

In California, the only state actively tracking it:

More than 560 people have been confirmed with silicosis
At least 31 have died since 2019
Dozens have undergone lung transplants; dozens more were found ineligible for one

Nearly all of the patients are low-income Latino men, many of them immigrants, who told KQED they did not know the dust was dangerous until they or their co-workers got sick. And because workers' compensation has largely not covered them, the cost of their treatment has fallen on California taxpayers.

The scientific problem with McClintock's premise is that this isn't a story about a few bad shops. Growing evidence shows the silica dust from artificial stone is uniquely toxic, and stonecutters get sick even when the safety rules are followed — even in sophisticated shops using water suppression, ventilation and masks. That is the assessment of doctors and workplace safety experts including those at Cal/OSHA and the California Department of Public Health.

Australia banned artificial stone outright in 2024. California took a key step last month toward banning slabs with more than 1% crystalline silica.

McClintock's argument

Here is what he said at the markup:

"This legislation addresses a fundamental question of fairness in our civil justice system. Who should be held responsible when workplace safety laws are violated? Who is liable when an otherwise safe product is misused? We're now seeing crippling lawsuits that ignore the guilty fabricators and instead sue the manufacturers, because that's where the money is."

Because that's where the money is. That is a sentence about lawyers. It is not a sentence about the 31 people who are dead.

His bill's own findings section declares that these products "are not inherently dangerous" and "do not pose an inherent risk of injury to human beings" — a claim contradicted by the public health agencies of his own state.

David Michaels, a former OSHA assistant secretary of labor who is now an epidemiologist at George Washington University, put it this way:

"It is tragic that the Republican majority showed no interest in stopping this epidemic that is killing workers. Passage of this legislation will undoubtedly result in more workers being disabled by deadly dust."

The name is not an accident

McClintock called it the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Stone Slab Products Act.

That is a near-copy of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, the 2005 law that gave the gun industry broad immunity from lawsuits over the harm its products cause. It is the most famous industry liability shield in modern American law, and McClintock modeled his title on it directly.

Which tells you the ambition. This isn't a tweak to a legal standard. It's a request for the same kind of blanket protection Congress gave gunmakers, for an industry whose product is currently killing his constituents' neighbors.

Who benefits

At the hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin argued the bill was preferential treatment for one man: Marty Davis, CEO of Cambria, the Minnesota company that is the largest domestic producer of engineered stone.

"Check out this legislation, which would protect one super-powerful, super-rich Donald Trump campaign donor from facing any accountability in the courts as young working men die from avoidable lung failure."

The "Trump campaign donor" part checks out. FEC records show Martin E. Davis of Cambria gave $100,000 to the Trump 47 Committee in October 2024 and $150,000 to Trump Victory in 2020, plus six figures apiece to the Republican National Committee, the NRCC and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer's fundraising committee.

To be precise about one thing: those same records show no contributions from Davis or anyone listing Cambria as their employer to McClintock's own campaign. Whatever moved him here, it wasn't a check with his name on it.

The industry did spend on Washington, though. Cambria reported $250,000 in lobbying in 2025 and $50,000 in the first quarter of 2026. Cosentino, the Spanish manufacturer, reported more than $350,000 in 2025 and $80,000 in the first quarter of 2026.

Meanwhile, several major manufacturers have started selling low-silica or silica-free products in the U.S. since Australia's ban. Cambria has not.

The verdicts this would erase

Juries have started to rule. A former Los Angeles stonecutter won $52.4 million in 2024, a verdict now under appeal. A 28-year-old stoneworker in Colorado won $17.4 million in May 2026.

Twenty-eight years old. That is what this disease does — it takes young men, because you don't need decades of exposure when the dust is this concentrated.

McClintock's bill would end that avenue entirely, for everyone, including the roughly 500 cases already filed and waiting.

The other job he holds

McClintock chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement — one of the top posts overseeing Trump's deportation campaign. He wrote the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act, which cleared his committee in March 2026.

The workers whose lawsuits H.R. 5437 would dismiss are, by KQED's reporting, nearly all low-income Latino men and many of them immigrants.

It is the same committee, the same chairman, the same session of Congress: expand the machinery aimed at immigrant workers, and close the courthouse door on the ones dying of an occupational disease.

This is a pattern with this Congress, not an anomaly. Byron Donalds cosponsored a bill to strip the first federal heat protections from outdoor workers. Hal Rogers, who represents the heart of black lung country, won't back the bill to raise miners' benefits. The through-line is who gets protected from what.

McClintock's original cosponsor on H.R. 5437 was Andy Biggs of Arizona. The bill now has 16 cosponsors and is waiting on a House floor vote.

Source

California Lawmaker Pushes Immunity for Stone Makers Amid Silicosis Epidemic — Farida Jhabvala Romero, KQED, June 4, 2026. Photo: Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images. Bill text and legislative history from congress.gov and govinfo.

Andy Barr Co-Chairs the Bourbon Caucus. He Voted to Keep the Tariffs Killing Kentucky Bourbon.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:06:25 +0000

On November 1, 2021, Andy Barr put out a press release with the headline "Barr Toasts to Suspension of EU Tariffs on American Distillers." He'd organized a bipartisan letter with more than forty members of Congress asking the administration to get the European Union's tariffs on American whiskey lifted. When it happened, he took the win:

"As Co-Chair of the Congressional Bourbon Caucus, I led multiple letters to both the Trump and Biden Administrations pushing for the full removal of these tariffs. I will always be an advocate for enhanced access to international markets for our distillers, so that they can provide Kentucky spirits and the world's best bourbon to countries across the globe."

Eric Gregory, president of the Kentucky Distillers' Association, was quoted in that same press release: "Representative Barr is a steadfast supporter of our industry and we are grateful to have him on the frontlines fighting for Kentucky distillers."

Four and a half years later, the tariffs are back, they're worse, and Barr is on the other side.

What the tariffs have done to Kentucky bourbon

The numbers come from the Kentucky Distillers' Association's own economic impact report, covered by WKMS in February 2026:

Kentucky spirits exports were down 12% from January through October 2025 compared with the year before.
Exports to Canada — the industry's biggest foreign market — fell 42%. Canada put a 25% tariff on American liquor in March 2025 in response to Trump's tariffs, and most Canadian provinces pulled American alcohol off the shelves entirely.
Exports to the European Union fell 13%.

Then it stopped being about numbers on a page. Jim Beam paused whiskey production at its main Clermont facility for all of 2026. Bulleit's parent company had already halted production for a few months at its Lebanon site in 2025.

Kentucky distilling is a $10.6 billion industry, up from $1.8 billion in 2012, and Kentucky accounts for more than a quarter of everybody working in distilled spirits in the United States. When Clermont goes quiet, it isn't just Jim Beam. As Gregory put it: "That's not just going to impact distilleries. That's going to impact a lot of supply chain jobs down the line."

That's coopers, corn farmers, truckers, bottlers, and the small towns built around a rickhouse.

Barr's answer: "short-term turbulence"

In April 2025, with Canadian provinces already clearing American bourbon off their shelves, Barr was asked about the tariffs at an event in Kentucky. He told Spectrum News 1:

"My message is that for short-term turbulence with the tariffs, in the long-term, this is the policy that is good for distillers."

He added that "what the Trump administration is doing with their trade policy is actually working towards better, more free, more fair reciprocal trade."

Mitch McConnell — the senator whose seat Barr is now running for — went the other way, opposing the tariffs in part because of what they do to Kentucky's bourbon sector.

Then he had a chance to actually stop it, and voted no

On February 11, 2026, the House voted on a resolution to terminate the national emergency Trump used to impose the tariffs on Canada.

Barr voted Nay. Canada is the market where Kentucky's exports had just fallen 42%.

It was one of the rare tariff votes where the House had a real choice — the resolution passed 219 to 211. Only 6 Republicans voted yes; 210 voted no. Barr was one of the 210. Five months later Trump announced a 50% tariff on Canadian products, and WUKY reported in July 2026 that Kentucky bourbon was in the crosshairs again.

British Columbia's premier, David Eby, was asked whether American liquor would come back to store shelves. His answer: "There is not a chance in hell that U.S. alcohol is back on shelves in British Columbia."

That's the market Barr voted to keep locked.

Kentucky is not the only place this pattern shows up — a 119-year-old New Hampshire dairy farm is getting crushed by the same Canada tariffs while its senator says she disagrees with them and declines to do anything about it.

The damage doesn't bounce back

Barr's framing — short-term turbulence, long-term gain — assumes markets snap back once a trade fight ends. Kentucky already ran that experiment.

A Kentucky Distillers' Association-commissioned report found that after Trump's 2018 tariffs, Kentucky whiskey exports fell 26% — and overseas demand never fully recovered. That's the last round. Distributors found other whiskeys, shelf space got reallocated, and it stayed gone.

Barr knew this. In 2021 he was the one writing letters to two administrations explaining it.

What changed wasn't the economics

Nothing about bourbon changed between 2021 and 2025. What changed is that the tariffs became Trump's tariffs, and Barr started running for Senate.

He still runs on bourbon. The title he used in that 2021 press release — Co-Chair of the Congressional Bourbon Caucus — is the same one he's carried through this entire fight. He just no longer treats access to foreign markets as something worth crossing his party for.

And he won't take the question in a room full of Kentuckians. Barr holds only telephone town halls, having concluded during Trump's first term that "live in-person massively attended town halls were shouting contests." When Lexington constituents invited him to one in March 2025 — the same month Canada's tariff on American liquor took effect — more than 900 people showed up and spoke to an empty chair with his name on it.

"I will always be an advocate," he said in 2021.

Always turned out to have a deadline.

Source

New tariffs again place Kentucky bourbon in the crosshairs — WUKY, July 24, 2026. Photo: WUKY/NPR.

William Timmons Called Mass Federal Firings "Freeing the Bureaucrats" and Said It Was "Just Fantastic." A Year Later, Many of Them Still Can't Find Work.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:44:43 +0000

In April 2025, three southern Republican congressmen got on the Republican Study Committee's Right to the Point podcast to talk about the Masters. It was Masters Week. They picked their golfers — Rick Allen took Rory McIlroy, Mike Collins took Scottie Scheffler — and in between, they talked about what was happening to the federal workforce.

South Carolina's William Timmons put it this way:

"We're freeing the bureaucrats to go and be productive members of the economy. It's just fantastic."

That's from the transcript the Washington Reporter published on April 10, 2025. The "bureaucrats" he was talking about are people with jobs, mortgages, and kids. They were being fired.

A year later

On April 22, 2026, NBC News went and found some of them.

Reporters Fiona Glisson and Gary Grumbach talked to 13 people who lost federal jobs or took the "Fork in the Road" buyout. A year on:

Seven were still unemployed.
Two were re-employed and making far less than before.
Two were getting by on side hustles.
Four had moved to find work.

One of them, John Burg, had spent decades working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, on assignments in Thailand, Kosovo, and El Salvador. He was laid off in January 2025. He applied to his 599th job and stopped counting. He now does carpentry in his Maryland neighborhood — changing lightbulbs for elderly neighbors, building a porch — and makes about 15% of his old salary.

"I feel more connected to my local community than ever. More disconnected from my financial goals," he told NBC.

David Harbourt ran safety and occupational health at the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. He now commutes from Maryland to Kansas two weeks a month as a consultant while his wife works full time and raises their two kids alone half the month.

"The job market, particularly in Maryland, is unforgiving now. ... There's a stigma being a former fed. And that affects your marketability."

Bree Danner found out she'd lost her job at the CDC — in overdose prevention — while she was on her way to say goodbye to her dying grandmother. She has since spent her savings and her severance and run up credit card debt.

WellFed, a group that supports laid-off federal workers, estimates only about 25% of its members have found new jobs. OneAID, a group of former USAID staff and partners, estimates at least half of its members are still unemployed.

That is what "freeing the bureaucrats" looked like a year out. Not a fantastic outcome. A long-term unemployment problem.

He wasn't a bystander. He was on the oversight committee.

This is the part that separates Timmons from a random member giving a hot take.

In January 2025, he was appointed to the House Oversight subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency — the congressional panel created to oversee DOGE, chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene. He celebrated it:

"I am deeply honored by Congresswoman Greene's confidence in my leadership and dedication to ensuring a more efficient, effective, and accountable federal government."

He spoke at the subcommittee's very first hearing, which the committee itself branded a "war on waste."

Oversight means asking hard questions of the thing you're overseeing. On the podcast, Timmons was not asking questions. He was selling:

"A private company could never get away with what this federal government's getting away with. They'd be fired by the board immediately. We've got these agency headquarters that are 25 percent occupied. It's costing taxpayers ten billion a year."

He described a hearing at the Voice of America building and the plan to sell it: "I bet it'll sell for tens of millions of dollars, and they're going to put up, probably, apartments there... And that's the kind of stuff that we're talking about those subcommittee and it is exciting."

Exciting. Fantastic. Those are the words of a booster, not an auditor.

The numbers he was cheering turned out not to hold up

On August 6, 2026, the Government Accountability Office — the nonpartisan watchdog that works for Congress — published its review of DOGE's public savings list.

CBS News reported the findings: DOGE "did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent" of its claimed grant savings. Of the 264 leases DOGE claimed credit for terminating, 108 were already in the process of being eliminated before DOGE existed. And DOGE "did not respond to GAO's request for information or interviews."

Real property — the very thing Timmons was most excited about — is where the GAO found some of the clearest overstatement.

This is the same pattern we've documented with other Republicans who talked up DOGE instead of checking its work: Alabama's Gary Palmer, who said DOGE had done better oversight in six weeks than Congress had in 40 years, and Texas's Beth Van Duyne, who called it the golden age of DOGE. DOGE itself expired on July 4, 2026 without ever filing a final report.

What it means back home

South Carolina is unusually exposed to this. Nearly a third of the state's $13.6 billion budget comes from federal funds, which is why the Legislature was warned it couldn't just ignore DOGE cuts. The state lost close to $700 million in federal money that had been set aside for broadband expansion and home energy rebates.

Broadband is rural internet — the kind of thing the Upstate's smaller towns had been waiting on for years. Home energy rebates are money that helps people pay to insulate a house or replace a broken heat pump.

Timmons has never had to explain any of that in a room full of his own constituents. He hasn't held an in-person town hall in years, and in January 2026 he told a chamber of commerce crowd he's "very excited to be done with it."

The tell

Read the "freeing the bureaucrats" line one more time and notice what it assumes: that these people's jobs weren't real work, that private employers were waiting for them, and that a firing is a favor.

None of the three turned out to be true. The one thing that was true is that it made for a good line on a golf podcast.

Sources

Washington Reporter, "EXCLUSIVE: Reps. Mike Collins, William Timmons, and Rick Allen talk DOGE, SCOTUS, and golf ahead of Master's Week" — April 10, 2025.

Fiona Glisson and Gary Grumbach, "A year after DOGE, former federal employees are still looking for work" — NBC News, April 22, 2026.

"We May Lose a Couple": Dale Strong Promised Huntsville Would Come Out Ahead on DOGE. Then 279 Senior Marshall Employees Went on the List to Leave.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:42:33 +0000

On February 20, 2025, Dale Strong stood up at Drake State Community and Technical College in Huntsville and told his district not to worry about the federal cuts coming their way.

"I still believe Space Command is coming to our area. And then, you hear talk about Iron Dome. That right there is Alabama. These jobs, while we may lose a couple, we will gain many of them in the end."

That's Alabama Political Reporter's account, published four days later. The same month, he told a Huntsville audience the cuts would ultimately benefit the city.

"A couple." Here's what actually happened.

The numbers

Huntsville isn't a place where federal jobs are a side business. It is where more than half of Alabama's roughly 40,000 federal workers work — Redstone Arsenal, and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, which employed about 7,000 people out of roughly 21,000 federal workers in the city.

Then came the buyouts. POLITICO, working from documents it obtained, reported that at least 2,145 senior-ranking NASA employees were set to leave — and that 279 of them were at Marshall. WHNT relayed the numbers and asked NASA about them; NASA said only that the deferred resignation program was "a voluntary opportunity available to NASA employees."

These were not entry-level positions. POLITICO reported they were GS-13 through GS-15 — the senior technical and management grades a space agency is built on, the people with the specialized skills you cannot hire back in a quarter.

On top of that, in November 2025 NASA laid off contractors at Marshall who were working on International Space Station programs as ISS work winds down — a few dozen jobs, confirmed by Rep. Robert Aderholt's office.

That is not "a couple."

The two things he promised instead

Strong's argument wasn't that the cuts wouldn't happen. It was that Huntsville would come out ahead because of two specific wins he named on stage: Space Command and the Iron Dome missile-defense program.

Notice what both of those are. They are not jobs. They are hopes about future federal spending decisions made by other people — the exact kind of promise that costs a congressman nothing to make and that voters can't hold him to for years.

Meanwhile the losses were immediate, specific, and already scheduled when he said it.

He wasn't a bystander

Strong sits on the House Appropriations Committee. He is vice chair of the subcommittee that funds NASA, the Justice Department, and the Commerce Department, and he chairs a Homeland Security subcommittee.

That means the agency losing 279 senior people in his own district is an agency he helps write the budget for. When a member of the Appropriations Committee says the cuts to his district will work out in the end, he isn't a spectator offering a prediction. He is one of the people with a vote on it.

He is also, by a wide margin, funded by the industry that lives off those budgets. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Leidos, L3Harris, Parsons, and Blue Origin are all on his donor list, along with Huntsville contractors like Torch Technologies and Verity Integrated Systems. He takes more than eight times what the average House member takes from the defense sector — $239,500 against an average of $29,408 — according to OpenSecrets' sector benchmarking. Only about 1% of his money comes from small grassroots donors.

The contractors kept their contracts. The civil servants at Marshall took the buyout.

The pattern across the party

Strong is one of several Republicans who told their districts DOGE would be fine and then didn't check. Alabama's own Gary Palmer said DOGE did better oversight in six weeks than Congress had done in 40 years. Texas's Beth Van Duyne called it the golden age of DOGE. South Carolina's William Timmons, who sat on the DOGE oversight subcommittee, said firing federal workers was "freeing the bureaucrats... it's just fantastic".

On August 6, 2026, the Government Accountability Office published what it found when it examined DOGE's public savings claims. CBS News reported that DOGE could not verify the calculation method behind 96 percent of its claimed grant savings, that 108 of the 264 leases it took credit for terminating were already ending before DOGE existed, and that DOGE "did not respond to GAO's request for information or interviews."

DOGE itself expired on July 4, 2026 without filing a final report.

What Huntsville is left with

Strong's own prediction is now testable, and the test is not going his way. The senior NASA workforce in his district got smaller. The two things he said would make up for it are still promises.

He has never held a public in-person town hall where anyone could ask him about it. His opponent invited him to four of them in writing on July 27, 2026, and his office didn't reply.

"We may lose a couple." Two hundred seventy-nine of the most senior people at Marshall Space Flight Center were on the list, and the district's congressman — a man who sits on Appropriations — told them it would all work out.

Sources

Wesley Walter, "DOGE meet with mixed response in AL" — Alabama Political Reporter, February 24, 2025.

"Report says MSFC will lose nearly 300 employees in effort to shed staff, NASA responds" — WHNT. Photo: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center.

Frank Lucas Called DOGE "a Good Thing." He'd Just Spent Weeks Quietly Begging It to Give His District's Workers Back.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:30:07 +0000

On the morning of March 27, 2025, Frank Lucas sat down at a Ripon Society breakfast in Washington and told a room of Republicans what Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency had done to Oklahoma.

It was a specific list.

"Initially, they fired all 10 federal predator control people at USDA in my state."

Those are the workers who handle migratory birds and other animal problems that state and local officials can't. Lucas explained what they did, he said, and they came back to work.

Then there was the research station.

"I also lost 15 of my 61 scientists at a research station in El Reno, Oklahoma."

That's a quarter of the scientific staff at the Oklahoma and Central Plains Agricultural Research Center — the USDA facility on the old Fort Reno grounds in his own district. Lucas explained the value of the research. Those scientists came back too.

So: a member of Congress watched a White House operation fire 25 federal workers in his district and his state, spent his own time walking DOGE through what those people actually do, and got the firings reversed.

And then, in the very same remarks, he said this:

"They will sometimes make dramatic recommendations for change, and that's a good thing. We just have to make sure that it's a good change."

He knew. He said so out loud.

There's a version of this story where a congressman is caught off guard — where DOGE moves too fast, nobody in Congress knows what's happening, and the damage gets discovered after the fact.

That's not this version. Lucas knew exactly what DOGE was doing, in detail, in his own district, and he described it to reporters at the time.

Two weeks after the Ripon breakfast, Oklahoma Watch reported that Lucas had introduced a bill to shield the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City — one of the FAA's largest facilities, training tens of thousands of students a year in a country with a well-documented air traffic controller shortage — from any future government shutdown.

Why did he want it protected? He said part of the reason was DOGE. He was worried about the academy, he told the reporter, because DOGE was looking at "anything and everything." And his worry wasn't limited to the academy. It extended to "any number of things" — including food safety inspections.

That's the same man who told the Ripon Society that dramatic recommendations from that same program were "a good thing."

Here's how he described his role:

"My job is to work with the administration, whoever the administration is, work with my colleagues, whoever they may be, and try and make sure that wise decisions are made. We helped DOGE on a couple of issues, in a general sense, see that perhaps things should be done differently."

Read that again. We helped DOGE see that perhaps things should be done differently. That is a man describing damage control on a program he was publicly endorsing.

What Oklahoma actually lost

DOGE's own claimed savings sheet puts Oklahoma at $376,967,499 in cancelled federal spending. Those aren't abstractions — every line is a contract, a grant, or a job somewhere in the state.

And Lucas's own account is the proof that DOGE wasn't cutting "waste, fraud and abuse." It was cutting people it had never bothered to look up. All ten predator-control workers in an entire state, gone in one pass. Fifteen scientists at a research station whose work a House Agriculture Committee aide would later describe as work that "cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world."

Nobody at DOGE knew what any of them did. A congressman had to explain it.

The layoffs weren't confined to those two. More than 300 FAA employees were fired in a single weekend, and KFOR reported that many of them worked at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City — the very campus Lucas turned around and wrote a bill to protect.

One of them told KFOR they got the email at 10:35 on a Friday night, at their personal address, while they were out shopping for clothes to wear back to the office.

"It was due to performance, which was the most shocking part about it."

They had worked as an FAA contractor for nearly a decade before joining the agency the previous fall. They hadn't been an employee long enough to have had a performance evaluation at all.

"This narrative — that federal employees are just wasteful or crazy — it couldn't be further from the truth. My colleagues and I work very hard to serve our communities and uphold our agency's missions."

The part he never says out loud

Lucas is not a bystander to DOGE. He is a senior Republican — in Congress since 1994, chairman of a House Agriculture subcommittee, a member of the Financial Services Committee. When cuts land in his district, he has the standing to object publicly, on the record, by name.

He didn't. He worked the phones quietly, got his own constituents rehired, and then went to Washington and called the program that fired them a good thing.

That's not oversight. That's a member of Congress buying insurance for his own district while endorsing the thing burning down everyone else's — because the other 434 districts didn't have Frank Lucas making calls on their behalf. When DOGE's charter finally expired on July 4, 2026, it left behind no final report, no accounting, and nobody willing to own the wreckage.

The people Lucas got rehired were lucky. Most weren't.

Meanwhile, 45,277 households in his district — about 15% of them — rely on SNAP to eat, and an estimated 36,705 people in his district are projected to lose health coverage from the cuts he voted for. There's no quiet phone call that gets those back.

We deserve better.

Source

Lucas & Pfluger Discuss DOGE Effort to Reshape Government — The Ripon Society, March 28, 2025. Photo: The Ripon Society.

"A Lot of These People Are Not Working Very Hard at All": Glenn Grothman Asked Trump to Fire 200,000 Federal Workers

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:01 +0000

On October 3, 2025, three days into a government shutdown, Glenn Grothman went on Wisconsin Public Radio and said out loud what most of his colleagues were careful not to.

He wanted the shutdown used as an opportunity to fire people.

"I would certainly hope that President Trump would step up and let go — certainly in the Department of Defense, probably other departments, as well — find (100,000) or 200,000 jobs that are not necessary," he told WPR's "Wisconsin Today."

Then he explained why he thought that was fine:

"A lot of these people are not working very hard at all. To keep hiring people, many with over six-figure salaries when they aren't working that hard, that's just irresponsible."

Asked for evidence, he offered this: "There is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there that these people aren't working that hard."

Anecdotal evidence. That is the entire case for firing up to 200,000 people.

A week later, it happened

Grothman was not talking into the void. On Friday, October 10, 2025 — seven days after that interview — the administration sent reduction-in-force notices to more than 4,000 federal employees at at least seven agencies. KPBS reported the targets included the IRS, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and the Department of Education's Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

The CDC alone got 1,300 notices. More than 800 of those were reversed almost immediately — because the agency had fired people it turned out it needed.

On October 15, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston paused the whole thing. From the bench she asked the government's lawyers: "This hatchet is falling on the heads of employees all across the nation and you're not even prepared to address whether that's legal?" She described the administration's approach as "very much 'ready, fire, aim'" and said the human cost of that "cannot be tolerated."

Her order stopped the layoffs already underway and blocked new ones at more than 30 agencies. Then Congress itself shut the door. The spending bill that ended the shutdown barred the use of any federal funds "to initiate, carry out, implement, or otherwise notice a reduction in force" anywhere in the federal government between October 1, 2025 and January 30, 2026.

So the plan Grothman publicly asked for got carried out, got called a hatchet job by a federal judge, got partially reversed by the agencies themselves within days, and then got banned by a bipartisan act of Congress. He has not, as far as we can find, revisited the idea.

The 2019 vote almost nobody else cast

Here is the part of Grothman's record that explains everything else.

In January 2019, in the middle of a five-week shutdown, Congress passed the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act. It is a short bill. It guarantees that federal workers who go unpaid during a shutdown get their back pay when it ends — including the ones who were required to keep working without a paycheck.

It passed the House 411 to 7.

Grothman was one of the seven. The full list of Nays: Justin Amash, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Glenn Grothman, Thomas Massie, Chip Roy, and Ted Yoho.

Four hundred and eleven members of Congress — including virtually every Republican — thought people who are forced to work without pay should eventually be paid. Grothman was in the seven who did not.

And in that same 2025 WPR interview, he told listeners exactly how he still feels about it:

"I felt they changed the rule a couple of years ago where, if you are not working, say you don't work for a month, you get paid for that month anyway. So there are a lot of federal employees (who are) going to come out ahead of the game."

"The rule they changed a couple of years ago" is the law he voted against. He is still annoyed it exists. He thinks workers who lost a month of income are coming out "ahead of the game."

About 18,000 Wisconsinites work for the federal government

This is not an abstraction in his state. WPR reported that roughly 18,000 civilian federal workers live and work in Wisconsin. VA hospital staff. Social Security claims processors. Food safety inspectors. Air traffic controllers. National Guard technicians.

Grothman also told WPR that a shutdown wouldn't matter much: "I don't think it's going to be as big an impact as people say. All the big federal programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, they all continue on as before. There are people who are going to get a delayed paycheck but they're still going to get their paycheck."

A "delayed paycheck" is the phrase you use when you have never had to make rent on one.

He sits on the committee that oversees the federal workforce

Grothman is a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, per the House Clerk's official member roster — the committee whose actual job is oversight of how the federal government is staffed and run.

That means he had every tool available to make the case with evidence. Hearings. Subpoenas. GAO requests. Inspector general referrals. Data.

He used none of them. He went on the radio and said there's "a lot of anecdotal evidence."

This is the same pattern we documented with Gary Palmer, who claimed DOGE did better oversight in six weeks than Congress managed in forty years — right up until the GAO reported that DOGE wouldn't even answer the auditors' questions. And it's the same pattern that ran through DOGE's entire short life: enormous claims, no receipts, and nobody willing to own the wreckage afterward.

What it adds up to

Grothman's position on federal workers has been consistent for seven years, and it is simple:

2019: one of seven members to vote against guaranteeing back pay to workers forced to work through a shutdown.
2025: publicly asked the president to use a shutdown to cut 100,000 to 200,000 jobs, based on "anecdotal evidence."
2025: called the back-pay law "a little ridiculous" and said unpaid workers would "come out ahead of the game."

He has never had to name a single unnecessary job. He has never held a hearing to find one. He just knows, somehow, that a lot of these people aren't working very hard.

About 18,000 of them are his constituents' neighbors.

Source

Wisconsin GOP Rep. Glenn Grothman: Lay off 100K to 200K federal workers — Wisconsin Public Radio, October 3, 2025. Photo: WPR.

Glenn Grothman Wrote a Bill to Make It Easier to Pay Disabled Workers $3.46 an Hour

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:00 +0000

There is a corner of federal law almost nobody knows about. It says that if you have a disability, your boss is allowed to pay you less than the minimum wage. Not a little less. A lot less.

It is called Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and it has been on the books since 1938. Today about 40,000 people work under it. The Labor Department's own numbers say the median worker in that program earns $3.46 an hour.

In May 2026, Glenn Grothman introduced a bill to make it easier to put more people into those jobs — and to put them there younger, with fewer questions asked first.

What the bill actually does

The bill is called the Restoration of Employment Choice for Adults with Disabilities Act, H.R. 8736. Grothman has introduced some version of it in the 118th Congress and the 117th too. This is not a one-off. It is a project.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service wrote the plain-English summary. In its words, the bill "relaxes requirements that allow entities with a special wage certificate to pay subminimum wages to individuals with disabilities." Specifically, it does two things:

It "eliminates a requirement that an individual with a disability who is age 24 or younger receive pre-employment transition services and meet specified vocational rehabilitation criteria before beginning subminimum wage work."
It weakens the career-counseling rule. Right now an employer has to make sure a subminimum-wage worker actually gets periodic counseling and referrals to other kinds of work. Under Grothman's bill, the employer is off the hook if it makes "a documented effort" to contact the state agency and the agency doesn't come through.

Read that first one again. The protection he is removing exists for exactly one reason: to stop a young person with a disability from being handed a below-minimum-wage job at 18 or 19 and staying there for the rest of their life without ever being told there was another option.

Those protections were bipartisan, and they are barely ten years old

The rules Grothman wants gone are not some leftover regulation. Congress passed them.

In 2014, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act added Section 511 to the Rehabilitation Act, and it took effect in 2016. As the Labor Department laid out in 2024, WIOA "established new limitations on the payment of a subminimum wage." Certificate holders have to document that young workers got transition services before they started, and that every subminimum-wage worker gets counseling every six months for the first year and every year after that.

That is the paperwork Grothman calls a burden. It is also the only thing standing between a 19-year-old and a lifetime at $3.46 an hour.

The numbers he is not mentioning

The Labor Department published all of this. From its December 2024 analysis of the program:

The mean average hourly earnings for workers on a 14(c) certificate is $4.08. The median is $3.46.
Those workers get a mean of 11.45 hours a week. At the median wage, that is about $40 a week.
As of May 1, 2024, 40,579 workers with disabilities were being paid subminimum wages, at 801 employers.
About 91% of them have an intellectual or developmental disability listed as their primary disability.
Only about 4% of certificate holders are private for-profit businesses. Roughly 93% are community rehabilitation programs — many of them funded with public money.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Half the people in this program are making less than half of that.

The Labor Department looked at all of it and concluded that "subminimum wages are no longer necessary to prevent the curtailment of employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities." It proposed phasing the certificates out over three years. More than 17,000 people filed comments.

Then, on July 7, 2025, the Trump administration's Labor Department withdrew the proposal entirely — "formally discontinuing the rulemaking process and removing the proposal from further consideration."

So the phase-out is dead. Subminimum wage is staying. And Grothman's bill would push it further, by lowering the age at which someone can be routed into it and cutting the counseling that might get them out.

"Freedom to choose"

Here is how Grothman describes what he is doing. He told Seehafer News that "adults with disabilities deserve the freedom to choose the workplace environment that works best for them without unnecessary government obstacles standing in the way."

The "unnecessary government obstacle" is a counseling session. The "freedom to choose" belongs to a person who, under this bill, would no longer be guaranteed the information needed to choose anything.

He has been making this argument for years. In February 2021, when Democrats tried to end Section 14(c) in the COVID relief bill, he warned that doing so would leave people with disabilities limited to "day rehabilitation services or unpaid volunteer work, or have no option other than being at home."

That was the argument in 1938 too. The Labor Department's review found it doesn't hold up anymore: the number of employers using these certificates fell from 2,820 in April 2015 to 801 by May 2024 — a decline of almost 86% — while the employment rate for people with disabilities generally climbed. Employers stopped using it and disabled people kept working.

He is on the committee that writes these rules

This matters more than a backbencher's message bill usually would. Grothman sits on the Education and Workforce Committee — per the House Clerk's official member roster — the committee with jurisdiction over federal labor law and the Rehabilitation Act, including the very section his bill amends. He is not shouting from the sidelines. He is inside the room where this gets decided.

And the country is moving the other way. In South Carolina in 2022, a bipartisan effort to end subminimum wage for people with disabilities passed the state Senate unanimously. The Labor Department counted 53 certificate holders sitting in states that are already phasing the practice out. States are closing this door. Grothman is trying to hold it open, and widen it for teenagers.

What this says about who he works for

Grothman has spent his career arguing that people at the bottom are not trying hard enough. He said giving public employees Martin Luther King Jr. Day off is "an insult to all the other taxpayers." He told Wisconsin Public Radio last October that federal workers "are not working very hard at all." He argued for repealing Wisconsin's equal pay law because, in his words, "you could argue that money is more important for men."

This bill is the same instinct pointed at people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Not "how do we get them a real wage." How do we make it easier to pay them $3.46 an hour, starting younger, with less explanation.

There are about 40,000 people in this program. Ninety-one percent of them have an intellectual or developmental disability. They are somebody's kid, somebody's brother, somebody's neighbor. They work eleven hours a week for forty dollars.

Glenn Grothman looked at that and decided the problem was too much counseling.

Source

H.R. 8736, Restoration of Employment Choice for Adults with Disabilities Act — Congress.gov
Rep. Grothman Introduces New Adults with Disabilities Employment Bill — Seehafer News, May 15, 2026. Photo: Seehafer News.

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.

Texas Just Made a Felony Out of Something Greg Abbott Legalized — While Big Beer Wrote Him a $500,000 Check

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:31:44 +0000

On Friday, July 31, 2026, a whole shelf of products that Texans had been buying legally for seven years became felony drugs.

Delta-8. Delta-10. THCP. THCA flower. As of that morning, Texas classifies them as Schedule I controlled substances — the same legal tier as heroin, LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms. Getting caught with one is now a state jail felony: 180 days to two years behind bars and a fine up to $10,000. Austin police confirmed they'll charge it that way.

Roughly 14,000 licensed hemp retailers operate in Texas. Experts told the Texas Tribune that somewhere between 60% and 90% of what those stores sell just had to come off the shelves.

Now here's the part worth sitting with.

The man who legalized these products is Greg Abbott. And a month before they became felonies, the owner of the largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributor in the country wrote him a check for half a million dollars.

First, One Thing Straight

Marijuana itself didn't change status. It was already illegal in Texas and it still is.

What changed is hemp-derived THC — the gummies, drinks, vapes, and flower sold at gas stations and smoke shops across the state. That's the market that got criminalized overnight.

Abbott Built This Industry. On Purpose.

In 2019, Greg Abbott signed House Bill 1325, which legalized hemp products containing less than 0.3% delta-9 THC. Lawmakers were trying to help Texas farmers.

Texans took him at his word. They signed commercial leases. They took out loans. They hired people. By the time the Legislature turned on them, the industry had grown to more than 8,000 retailers, and an economic study put it at 50,000 workers and over $8 billion in annual revenue. That study was commissioned by a hemp company, so treat the exact figures as the industry's own estimate — but it's the number the Texas Tribune cited, and nobody in the Legislature offered a smaller one.

Even discounted, that's tens of thousands of Texans who went to work every day in a business the Governor's own signature made legal.

Then He Played the Reasonable One

In 2025, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made killing that industry his signature project. He called THC products "poison in our public." He said the ban ranked among his "top five" bills in seventeen years in the Legislature. He filmed himself walking through smoke shops making amateur investigative videos.

Senate Bill 3 passed. And on a Sunday night in June 2025, minutes before the deadline, Abbott vetoed it.

His stated reason was that a total ban wouldn't survive court:

"Allowing Senate Bill 3 to become law — knowing that it faces a lengthy battle that will render it dead on arrival in court — would hinder rather than help us solve the public safety issues this bill seeks to contain."

He asked lawmakers instead for something modeled on how Texas regulates alcohol: no sales to minors, mandatory testing, local opt-outs, more money for enforcement.

Hemp business owners cheered. The Texas Hemp Business Council posted that Abbott "has shown the people of Texas who he works for." Conservatives cheered too — Dana Loesch, the former National Rifle Association spokesperson, called Patrick's ban "stupid" and told him to "do your job as a parent and parent instead of idiotically expanding government."

Abbott got to be the sensible one. He got the credit for saving 50,000 jobs.

And Then His Own Agency Did It Anyway

Here's how the ban happened without a single legislator voting for it.

Back in 2021, the Texas Department of State Health Services quietly rewrote its definitions of "tetrahydrocannabinols" and "marihuana extract" to sweep in delta-8 and its cousins. Hemp companies sued and won an injunction, and for five years the rule sat frozen.

In May 2026, the Texas Supreme Court lifted that injunction. DSHS then published notice in the July 10 Texas Register that the old definitions would take effect July 31.

DSHS is a state health agency. It answers up through the Health and Human Services Commission, whose executive commissioner, Stephanie Muth, Abbott appointed on December 3, 2025.

To be clear about what we can and can't show: nobody has produced an order from Abbott telling DSHS to do this. That's rather the point. The Governor who publicly vetoed the ban ended up with the ban anyway — carried out by an agency inside his own executive branch, with no roll call to point at and no veto pen required.

He never had to cast a vote. He never had to give a speech. He never had to explain it to the 50,000 people whose jobs he'd taken credit for saving. And he has not, in the days since, lifted a finger to stop it or asked the Legislature for the regulatory framework he said he wanted instead.

Follow the Beer Money

Now the part every Texan deserves to know, however you feel about weed.

John L. Nau III is the president and CEO of Silver Eagle Distributors — the largest distributor of Anheuser-Busch products in the United States. Beer is his business.

THC drinks are beer's competition. Cynthia Cabrera of the Texas hemp company Hometown Hero described the industry's motive this way: "Beer companies would prefer a ban because they're losing market share to THC drinks. Rather than just participate in the market, they would rather do what they've done for 100 years and make sure that there is no competition in the beer market."

Here's what Nau has given Texas's two most powerful Republicans this election cycle, straight from state campaign finance filings:

To Greg Abbott:

$250,000 — June 26, 2025
$24,811.27 — October 21, 2025
$500,000 — June 29, 2026

That's $774,811 to the Governor.

To Dan Patrick:

$150,000 — July 7, 2025
$275,000 — June 29, 2026

That's $425,000 to the Lieutenant Governor.

Look at the dates on those two biggest checks. June 29, 2026. The same day. To both men. Thirty-two days before the state made their donor's chief competitor a Schedule I felony drug.

Nau has put more than $4 million into Texas politics this cycle. Abbott is among his biggest beneficiaries.

There's no evidence of an explicit deal, and both men frame the crackdown as protecting children. But Texans are allowed to notice the pattern: the state's biggest beer distributor writes seven-figure checks to the two men with the most power over his competition, and his competition gets criminalized.

If a Democrat took three-quarters of a million dollars from an industry and then regulated that industry's rival out of existence, every Republican in Texas would call it what it is.

Real Texans Are Closing Their Doors

This isn't abstract. KERA talked to the people losing everything.

Molly Mathias ran Go Easy in Dallas for six years. Smokable products were about half her sales. She's closing permanently.

"One week you're doing good, you're successful, the next week, your business could completely get shut down."

Mike Williams cofounded Wild Revival in Denton, making cannabis-infused cocktails. Seven of his customers — seven shops — closed.

Craig Katz runs government relations for a company with 55 cannabis locations across five states, including a dozen in Texas. His point should end this debate:

"We're not against regulation. We're absolutely for regulation. We've been asking for regulation for years."

That's the whole thing right there. The industry asked to be regulated. It asked for age limits, testing, and labeling — the exact framework Abbott said he wanted in his veto message. Texas gave it prohibition instead, through the back door, and never delivered the regulation Abbott promised in its place.

For the shops still standing, the state raised annual retail licensing fees from $150 to $5,000 per location, and put manufacturers on the hook for $10,000 a year. Small operators can't carry that. The big ones can.

Who Actually Pays

Veterans. When the Legislature was debating SB 3, veterans and Texans with chronic pain testified that these products let them manage without opioids. Nobody has offered them a replacement.

Working people. Tens of thousands of jobs, in an industry the state invited them into.

Small business owners. The ones who read the 2019 law, believed the Governor of Texas, and built something.

And every Texan who now faces up to two years in a state jail for a gummy that was sitting legally on a shelf the day before.

The Freedom Part

Texas Republicans campaign on personal liberty and getting government off your back. Abbott has run this state for eleven years on that promise.

Under that promise, Texas made an intoxicant legal, watched tens of thousands of people build careers on it, and then made possessing it a felony without a single vote in the Legislature — while the two officials in charge collected $1.2 million from the country's biggest Anheuser-Busch distributor.

You can believe THC should be regulated. Plenty of reasonable Texans do, and so does the hemp industry itself. But regulation is not what happened here. What happened is that a competitor got removed from the market, and the man who profits most from its removal was writing the Governor the biggest checks of the cycle while it happened.

Greg Abbott opened this industry in 2019 and watched his own executive branch shut it down in 2026 — after telling Texans he'd saved it. In between, he took $774,811 from the man who sells the beer.

We deserve better.

Source

What is still legal under Texas' latest THC ban — The Texas Tribune, July 30, 2026. Photo: Kaylee Greenlee for The Texas Tribune.

The USDA Has Lost 20,000 Workers. Now It's Telling 2,500 More to Move Across the Country or Quit.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:50:00 +0000

A year ago this month, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins signed a memo reorganizing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The plan was to move most of the department's Washington-area staff to five regional hubs and shrink the D.C. footprint to a fraction of its size.

The USDA's own announcement, dated July 24, 2025, laid out the math. Roughly 4,600 employees worked in the National Capital Region. Afterward, USDA expected "no more than 2,000 employees will remain."

That's about 2,600 people told to relocate to Raleigh, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Fort Collins, or Salt Lake City — or find another job.

Last week, current and former USDA employees got on a call with federal union leaders and explained what that actually means on the ground.

"A forced choice"

Chearice Vaughn works for a USDA office that handles grants and loans for rural development projects — clean water systems, small business lending in towns that have no other lender. She and 45 members of her team were told to relocate from Washington to Dallas.

Of the people on her team who got relocation notices, she said 86% were people of color.

"It's a forced choice: uproot your entire life, or leave federal service."

Vaughn, who is also president of AFSCME Local 3870, said the stakes aren't really about the staff:

"It's about whether the next little town waiting on clean water gets it in time. It's about whether the next small business owner in a town with no other lender gets a chance at all. We built these things once. We're asking to be allowed to keep building them."

That's the part the word "reorganization" hides. These aren't abstract headquarters jobs. Somebody processes the rural water grant. If that somebody quits rather than move to Dallas, the grant waits.

The number that tells you how this ends

The administration presents relocation as an option. Officially, nobody is being fired.

But the National Federation of Federal Employees polled nearly 3,000 of its Forest Service bargaining unit members about the reorganization. Genny Kotyk, who leads the union's Forest Service Council, said 7% said they'd be willing to relocate.

Seven percent.

That poll covered Forest Service members, not every affected USDA employee. But if the willingness to pack up and move is anywhere near that low across the department, this isn't a relocation. It's a layoff with a different name on it. That was the union leaders' central point on the call: the reorganization "will amount to widespread layoffs, as many workers will choose not to relocate."

And this is on top of losses that already happened. Since President Trump returned to office, the USDA has lost more than 20,000 employees, according to Office of Personnel Management data. Most went through early retirement or buyouts offered by the U.S. DOGE Service. USDA's own July 2025 release put the deferred-resignation count at 15,364 at that point.

Fire season

Here's where it gets hard to defend.

The Forest Service is the largest firefighting agency in the United States. In 2025 alone, more than 6,500 Forest Service employees left through layoffs, buyouts and early retirements, according to OPM.

Kotyk said the reorganization now puts a similar number in the same position:

"We're looking to lose, potentially, another 6,500 employees that are going to be forced to either change their job duties, have a longer commute, or move completely across the country, or resign, or retire. Forty percent of those employees have some kind of fire qualification, and because they're higher level staff, they typically also have a more seasoned career and have higher level fire qualifications."

Forty percent, weighted toward the most experienced. Kotyk said the cuts are already affecting the response to the wildfire season currently burning through Canada and parts of the Midwest and North.

Now compare that with what USDA said when it announced the plan:

"To be clear, all critical functions of the Department will continue uninterrupted. For example, we are at the height of fire season, and to date, have not only exceeded hiring goals, but have preserved the ability to continue to hire."

Both things can't be true. Either the firefighting workforce is fine, or the union representing it is watching senior fire-qualified staff walk out the door during an active fire season.

What else runs through this department

Kevin Shea ran the USDA as acting secretary under President Biden. He listed what the department actually does day to day: fighting pests and diseases, protecting forest land, ensuring food safety.

"All of this requires an adequate and qualified workforce. These new proposed actions, added to the damage already done, all but ensures that we'll not have one."

Food safety means meat and poultry inspection. Pest and disease work means keeping something like a new bird flu strain or a crop blight from ripping through American agriculture. These are not luxuries the department added during a spending spree. They're the reason it exists.

The justification, and the arithmetic

USDA's stated case rests on cost. The release described the department as "bloated, expensive, and unsustainable," noted the South Building carries about $1.3 billion in deferred maintenance, and argued the hub cities offer "a more affordable cost of living for USDA employees."

Rollins framed it as delivering for farmers:

"President Trump was elected to make real change in Washington, and we are doing just that by moving our key services outside the beltway and into great American cities across the country."

Two problems with that.

First, most USDA staff were never in Washington to begin with — the department's own figure was about 4,600 people in the capital region. And as the Wisconsin Examiner reported, the majority of the staff reductions so far have come from outside D.C. — from the state and county offices that are, by definition, already close to the people they serve. You don't get closer to farmers by cutting the field staff.

Second, a reorganization that pushes out large numbers of trained, experienced federal employees doesn't save money in any sense a taxpayer would recognize. It converts people who know how a wildfire incident command works, or how a rural water loan gets underwritten, into vacancies. Rehiring and retraining for those roles costs real money, and the gap in between costs communities time.

Where it stands

Several national labor unions have asked a federal court in San Francisco for an injunction to block the relocations. That case is ongoing. USDA is proceeding in the meantime.

USDA spokespeople did not return a message from the Wisconsin Examiner seeking comment.

The Beltsville Agricultural Research Center — 6,500 acres in Prince George's County, Maryland — is on the list of properties USDA will vacate and hand back to the General Services Administration.

Source

Reported by Sam Gauntt for the Wisconsin Examiner, July 27, 2026. Photo: Danielle J. Brown / Maryland Matters.

Byron Donalds Co-Sponsored a Bill to Strip Heat Protections From Florida's Outdoor Workers

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:20:00 +0000

Florida summers are dangerous if your job is outdoors. Ask anyone who roofs a house, picks crops, paves a road, or landscapes a lawn in July. So you'd think the people who want to run Florida would be racing to keep those workers safe.

Byron Donalds is racing the other way.

Donalds — the sitting congressman from Southwest Florida and the frontrunner to be Florida's next governor — is one of 60 Republicans co-sponsoring HR 6213, a bill written to block the first federal rule ever designed to protect American workers from extreme heat on the job.

What the bill kills

The rule Donalds wants to stop is not complicated or extreme. Proposed by OSHA in 2024, it would, when temperatures climb past 80 degrees, require employers to give workers:

Rest breaks
Access to shade
Clean drinking water

That's it. Water, shade, and a break when it's dangerously hot. HR 6213 would forbid OSHA from finalizing or enforcing that standard — or anything "substantially similar."

The stakes are life and death. OSHA estimates heat exposure kills at least 559 workers every year and injures or sickens nearly 25,000 more. OSHA says the standard would prevent nearly all of those heat deaths and about 65% of the injuries. Killing the rule means those deaths keep happening.

And it hits Florida especially hard. According to the Florida Policy Institute, at least 611,100 Floridians work outdoors — in agriculture, construction, landscaping, and recreation. Those are the people Donalds is voting to leave unprotected.

Whose side is he on?

The bill's own supporters admit who they're doing this for. As Rep. Greg Casar of Texas put it during Tuesday's hearing, members of Congress "get to work indoors, get paid a fat salary," and are "prioritizing wiping out those heat protections, basically because industry lobbies are asking for it."

That's the whole story. The heat rule has drawn fire from, in the Orlando Weekly's words, "some of the most powerful lobbying forces in the country." Sixty-five labor, health, and advocacy groups signed a letter opposing HR 6213, warning that "workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods."

When it's a choice between the lobbyists and the guy sweating on a Fort Myers rooftop, Donalds picked the lobbyists. That's consistent with his record: his top congressional funders included Koch Inc and Florida's electric utilities, the same big-money interests that fund the fight against safety and environmental rules.

Florida won't fill the gap

Donalds and other supporters argue states should handle worker safety themselves. But Florida has made crystal clear it won't.

In 2024, Florida's GOP-controlled Legislature — with Gov. Ron DeSantis's signature — passed HB 433, which barred local governments from making their own heat-safety rules. That law was aimed squarely at killing a Miami-Dade ordinance meant to protect farm and construction workers. Florida also has no state workplace-safety agency of its own, so enforcement falls entirely on an understaffed federal OSHA — which the Orlando Weekly notes has just one inspector for every 93,877 workers in the country.

So the "let the states do it" argument is a dodge. Florida already refused to do it. Donalds now wants to make sure the federal government can't either. That leaves outdoor workers with nothing.

The same playbook he'd bring to the governor's office

This is the tell. Donalds wants to be governor of a state built on outdoor labor — tourism, farming, construction — and his answer to record-breaking heat waves is to block the rule that would give those workers water and shade.

It fits everything else on his record. He voted for Trump's budget bill, which cuts $3.8 billion from Florida's health care system, then claimed it would "protect Medicaid." Over and over, Donalds sides with the powerful and against the people who actually keep Florida running.

When a construction worker collapses on a job site next August because his boss wasn't required to give him a break, remember that Byron Donalds put his name on the bill that made sure of it.

Source

Orlando Weekly: Florida Republicans jump aboard U.S. House bill that seeks to block heat protection for workers (reporting by McKenna Schueler; photo of Donalds by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons)

Tony Wied's District Is Losing Jobs and Health Care. He's Writing Fox Op-Eds About Socialism.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:34:00 +0000

On July 17, Rep. Tony Wied published an op-ed on Fox News warning that socialism "threatens the American Dream." He pointed to some primary wins by self-described socialists in New York and called it an "earthquake."

Here's what Wied's op-ed did not mention: a single concrete idea to lower costs, save jobs, or protect health care for the people of Wisconsin's 8th District — the people who actually sent him to Congress.

That's the tell. While his constituents deal with real, painful problems right now, their congressman is spending his time on cable-news culture war.

What's actually happening back home

Wied represents northeast Wisconsin. Here's the reality on the ground in his district:

Jobs are disappearing to Trump's tariffs — the tariffs Wied supported. Hundreds of workers have already lost their jobs: 240 when the Saputo cheese plant in Suamico closed, 93 shipbuilders laid off at Marinette Marine after the Navy canceled a ship order, and 150–200 more at Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry after tariffs crushed demand.
Health care is on the chopping block. Wied voted for the "Big Beautiful Bill" that Wisconsin's own health department projects will strip health insurance from 270,000 Wisconsinites — then turned around and claimed "no cuts to Medicaid have been identified."
He won't even face voters. When constituents wanted a town hall, Wied wouldn't hold one. Local Democrats had to host their own, under the banner "photo ops don't feed families."

Cheese workers laid off. Shipbuilders out of work. A quarter-million people at risk of losing their insurance. And their representative's big move this week was an op-ed about Zohran-style socialists in New York City.

Fear-mongering is not a jobs plan

Wied likes to talk about the "American free enterprise system." But the actual free enterprise in his district — the cheese plants, the foundries, the shipyards — is the thing getting hammered by the tariffs he cheered for. He didn't write an op-ed about that. He didn't offer a plan to bring those jobs back. He wrote about socialism.

This is the oldest trick in the book: when you don't want to talk about your own record, point at a scary boogeyman somewhere else. New York socialists aren't closing cheese plants in Suamico. Wied's tariffs and Wied's votes are the ones hitting his constituents in the wallet.

The bottom line

The families of northeast Wisconsin don't need their congressman to be a Fox News columnist. They need him to save their jobs, protect their health care, and show up to answer their questions.

Tony Wied had the time and the platform to do something useful this week. He chose to scaremonger about socialism instead. That choice tells you everything about who he's really working to impress — and it isn't the people back home.

Source

Tony Wied, "Socialism's rise inside the Democratic Party threatens the American Dream," Fox News, July 17, 2026.

The 10 Lowest-Paying States in America Are Nearly All Run by Republicans

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:20:00 +0000

The party that never stops talking about the economy has a data problem.

According to new numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 10 states where working people earn the lowest annual pay in the country are, with a single exception, all led by Republicans. Every one of them has a Republican governor except Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor, Andy Beshear. Nine of the bottom ten are run top to bottom by the GOP.

Here's the list, from bad to worst:

10. Oklahoma — median annual wage $75,360
9. Indiana — $75,280
8. Idaho — $74,440
7. Montana — $74,110
6. Nebraska — $71,850
5. Kentucky — $71,410
4. West Virginia — $69,910
3. Louisiana — $69,240
2. Mississippi — $66,540
1. Arkansas — $65,100

These aren't cherry-picked. This is the federal government's own wage data. And it lands the same way a lot of these rankings do lately: the states at the very bottom keep turning out to be the ones Republicans have run for years.

"But everything's cheaper there"

Whenever a list like this comes out, the defense is always the same — sure, wages are lower, but so is the cost of living, so it all evens out.

For some of these states, there's a grain of truth to that. Three of the four cheapest housing markets in the country — West Virginia, Oklahoma and Louisiana — show up on this low-wage list, so a smaller paycheck does stretch a little further on a mortgage.

But look closer and the excuse falls apart fast. Take Idaho: the median worker earns $74,440, yet the median home now costs $476,300. Or Montana, where people earn $74,110 while the typical home runs $505,600 — more than the national average. In those states you get the worst of both worlds: some of the lowest pay in the country and home prices that would make a Californian wince. The "your dollar goes further" story doesn't survive contact with a Montana real estate listing.

For comparison, the national median home price in May 2026 was about $387,400. A worker in Idaho or Montana is earning bottom-ten wages while paying well above the national price to put a roof over their head.

The wage floor these states refuse to raise

Low pay isn't weather. It's a policy choice — and it's one these states keep making on purpose.

Six of the ten states on this list still pin their minimum wage to the federal floor of $7.25 an hour, a rate that hasn't budged since 2009. Louisiana and Mississippi don't even have a state minimum wage law on the books — they simply default to the federal $7.25. Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky and Oklahoma all sit at $7.25 too. That floor buys less every year that inflation goes up, and the Republican legislatures in these states have left it right where it is.

Now look at where the wage floor actually went up. The two states on this list with the highest minimum wage — Nebraska at $15.00 and Arkansas at $11.00 — didn't get there because their Republican leaders decided to give workers a raise. They got there because voters went around them. Nebraskans passed Initiative 433 at the ballot box in 2022. Arkansans passed Issue 5 in 2018 with nearly 69% of the vote. In the reddest states in America, the only time low-wage workers got a raise, they had to give it to themselves.

Low pay, and then they cut the safety net

Here's the part that turns a bad ranking into a broken promise.

The people earning these bottom-ten wages are exactly the families who lean on programs like Medicaid and food stamps to get by. And the members of Congress these states send to Washington — the senators and representatives from Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia and the rest — voted for Trump's budget law, which pairs $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts with $1 trillion in tax giveaways for the richest 1 percent and delivers the largest cut to SNAP food assistance in history — hitting the very constituents scraping by on the lowest wages in the country.

So the sequence, for a family in one of these states, is this: your state keeps your wages at the bottom of the national barrel, refuses to raise the minimum wage above $7.25, and then your representatives in Congress vote to cut the food and health assistance that low pay forces you to rely on. Three hits, all from the same party, all pointed at the same people.

That's not a coincidence you can spin away with a line about population growth. It's a record.

The bottom line

Republicans love to campaign as the party of the working man and the strong economy. But when the federal government tallies up where working people actually earn the least, the list is almost entirely theirs — nine of the ten lowest-paying states in America, run by GOP governors and GOP legislatures, several of them still paying a minimum wage frozen at $7.25 since 2009.

The next time one of these politicians tells you the other side doesn't understand the economy, remember which states landed at the very bottom of it.

Source

"MAGA humiliated as 10 worst states with lowest wages revealed — and they're nearly all red," The Mirror US, July 20, 2026. Photo: Getty Images.

Ryan Mackenzie Cheered Trump at the Same Mack Trucks Plant That Cut Jobs Over Trump's Tariffs

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 11:05:00 +0000

On June 23, President Trump held a campaign event at the Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Lehigh County. He was there to boost Ryan Mackenzie, the Republican congressman from Pennsylvania's 7th District, who is fighting to keep his seat this November.

Here's the part nobody on that stage wanted to talk about: this is the same plant that announced hundreds of layoffs last year — and the company blamed Trump's tariffs.

The plant the tariffs hit

Rewind to spring 2025. Right after Trump rolled out his tariffs, Mack Trucks announced it would lay off 250 to 350 workers at the Macungie plant, pointing to market uncertainty and the impact of the tariffs. The company ultimately laid off about 170 people, and recalled nearly 150 later in the year.

The plant isn't back to where it was. It now employs 2,800 people — down from 3,050 in April 2025, when the layoffs were announced.

Even on the day of Trump's visit, a Mack spokesperson repeated it plainly: heavy-duty truck orders in 2025 "were negatively affected by market uncertainty about freight rates and demand, possible regulatory changes and the impact of tariffs."

So when Trump stood in front of those workers and bragged about his trade policy — 50% tariffs on foreign copper, aluminum and steel, and 100% or more on finished goods from dozens of countries — he was bragging about the very policy the company says helped cost some of those workers their jobs.

What Mackenzie said — and what he didn't

Ryan Mackenzie took the stage next to Trump and told the crowd:

"You are the president that is fighting for all Americans."

He thanked Trump for the work he does "for our veterans, our first responders, and everybody across this country."

What Mackenzie didn't do — not at the rally, and not when the layoffs were announced — is ask Trump to lift the tariffs squeezing his own district.

He had the chance, back when the layoffs were announced. His response then? He blamed the company. In a statement to LehighValleyNews.com, Mackenzie said he was "disappointed" in Mack's decision, pointed a finger at "the previous administration," and criticized the company for building plants in Mexico. The tariffs — the thing Mack itself blamed — went unmentioned.

He voted to protect the tariffs. Repeatedly.

This isn't just about staying quiet. When Congress had chances to rein in the tariffs, Mackenzie voted to protect them:

In April 2025 — the same month Mack announced the layoffs — he voted for the budget rule that blocked the House from forcing a vote to repeal the tariffs.
In 2026, he voted against ending the "national emergency" Trump declared to impose the tariffs in the first place.

So the chain of events is simple. Trump imposed tariffs. Mack Trucks announced layoffs and blamed the tariffs. Mackenzie protected the tariffs with his votes. Then he stood next to Trump at that same plant and called him "the president that is fighting for all Americans."

Tell that to the workers who got layoff notices.

Why this rally happened at all

Mackenzie's seat is one the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has marked as a top target in its push to retake the House. He faces Bob Brooks, president of the Pennsylvania Professional Firefighters Association, in November.

That's why Trump flew in. "We got to get Ryan Mackenzie elected," he told the crowd — right before telling Mackenzie, "Run up here, Ryan, fast. Nobody wants to hear you."

That one line says a lot. Mackenzie wasn't there to speak for Lehigh Valley workers. He was there as a prop — to stand quietly, praise the man whose tariffs cost his constituents their jobs, and hope voters don't connect the dots.

His district deserves a representative who fights for its workers, even when it means standing up to his own party's president. Mackenzie has shown us — with his silence and with his votes — that he won't.

Source

This post is based on reporting from the Pennsylvania Capital-Star: "Trump campaigns with Mackenzie at Mack Trucks plant affected by tariff layoffs" by Peter Hall, June 23, 2026, with additional reporting from LehighValleyNews.com. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images, via the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.