Oregon’s Senate Republican leader shared debunked claims from a social media parody account about federal government spending in a state-issued email newsletter decrying “fear-mongering and misinformation.”

Sen. Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, dedicated the first 400 words of his official legislative newsletter on Monday night to “cutting through the rhetoric” on several of President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders.

“There has been a lot of fear-mongering and misinformation on Trump’s recent executive orders,” Bonham wrote. “While I am not surprised, the rhetoric is absolutely counterintuitive to having intellectually honest policy discussions. Agree or disagree, seeking truth around these policy decisions is important.”

He proceeded to describe examples of “gross mismanagement” uncovered by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, a commission Trump created to slash federal spending. Bonham’s examples included more than half a billion dollars spent on sushi, hundreds of thousands on coffee and thousands on paper coffee cups — but those examples, which have spread like wildfire on conservative social media, aren’t real.

They originated with a Jan. 24, 2025, post on X, Musk’s social media company, by a user named “Not Elon Musk” that is clearly marked and reads as a parody account:

“Good morning X! My experience with DOGE has been totally wild so far. I told you yesterday about the $600 million per year the Pentagon was spending on Sushi…

Well, I just found another wild one! The Air Force was spending $1,280 per paper coffee cup! Like literally those ones you find at the office. $1280!!! We also found that $230k per month was being spent by the IRS on Starbucks Cinammon Roast K Cups, but everyone was working from home!

Anyway, back to work! Have a great day!”

Right-wing users spread those claims around the internet, posting on Facebook and TikTok but without the parody disclaimer.

And on Monday they made it to Bonham’s newsletter.

In an email to the Capital Chronicle, Bonham said he didn’t know those claims originated from a parody account. He said they’re minor compared to billions “squandered” by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which handles most overseas humanitarian aid.

“I’m not without fault, but I definitely didn’t pull it from a parody account,” he said. “Those examples were all over the internet — shared widely. Your question feels like a smoke and mirror attempt to not cover the real issue — the gross mismanagement of spending.”

The Air Force does have a history with expensive coffee cups, but they weren’t paper cups: In 2018, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, pressed the agency for answers on why it spent nearly $1,300 apiece on special reheatable coffee cups that plugged into airplanes. The Air Force used them to heat coffee and soup on long flights and stopped buying them under congressional scrutiny in 2018, the Air Force Times reported.

After questions from the Capital Chronicle, Bonham sent his constituents a second newsletter on Wednesday morning, noting that he received questions about his analysis of federal spending. Moving forward, he wrote, he’ll use official government sources like USASpending.gov and the Government Accountability Office, as well as the nonprofit fiscally conservative watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste.

And this time, as Bonham decried spending he disagreed with — money for trans health care in Guatemala, purchases of Politico Pro’s legislation tracking and policy newsletters, and “improper” payments of the wrong amount or made to the wrong person — he cited his sources.

“The more I research the worse it gets,” he wrote. “On a positive note, while people are questioning sources of certain waste examples, more attention is brought to this glaring issue — and our nation will be better for it.”

Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com.

New Oregon U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter didn’t anticipate that the first bill she introduced in Congress would be to prohibit unelected billionaire Elon Musk from retaliating against federal employees.

The pulmonary and critical care doctor ran for Congress to work on lowering prescription drug prices and expand access to behavioral health treatment, as well as addressing other issues she sees working with patients. But constituents in her east Portland district demanded action after Musk and people working for him seized control of federal administrative offices, gained access to the U.S. Treasury Department’s records of Americans’ personal financial information and dismantled the federal agency that distributes aid overseas.

In response, Dexter introduced the “Stop Musk Act,” her first bill. It’s just 43 words, spelling out that no federal employee can face retaliation for “resisting, circumventing or preventing Elon Musk or individuals he oversees from taking unlawful or unconstitutional actions relating to federal agencies.”

“It’s not what I had on my bingo card, but it’s definitely what is needed right now,” Dexter said. “And it’s absolutely in response to my constituents. Over 1,000 of them have called and specifically talked about Elon Musk needing to be stopped this week.”

Dexter’s proposal, which she acknowledged has next to no chance of passing in the Republican-controlled House, is among several actions Oregon’s Democratic congressional delegation have taken to oppose the Trump administration and Musk’s unprecedented power over federal agencies.

U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum, a swing-district Democrat who like Dexter is in her first term, joined Oregon’s Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley at a rally outside the U.S. Treasury on Tuesday. She directed most of her comments toward Musk.

“Get your hands out my pockets!” she said. “Get your foot off the Constitution. Take your foot off my neck.”

Over the weekend, U.S. Reps. Val Hoyle and Andrea Salinas joined Merkley for town hall events in Newport, Philomath and Salem where they told crowds of hundreds that they were ready to fight. Dexter is planning more town halls and hopes to have Attorney General Dan Rayfield join her at one. Rayfield, who served with Dexter in the state House, is leading Oregon’s legal response to the Trump administration, including securing an indefinite block Thursday to a Trump executive order that attempted to repeal a constitutional guarantee that babies born in the U.S. to immigrant parents are automatically citizens, even if their parents are not.

Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com.

Troubled by a steep rise in attempts to ban books in Oregon and nationwide, state Sen. Lew Frederick proposed what he sees as a simple bill.

Oregon law already bans discrimination in education and requires that textbooks address the contributions various groups of people have made to Oregon and American history. Frederick introduced Senate Bill 1583 to prevent school boards and district personnel from banning textbooks or library books just because they include stories about people of color, LGBTQ+ people, religious people, people with disabilities or any other group protected from discrimination.

The bill wouldn’t stop districts or school boards from deciding which books to include in a local curriculum or a school library. And parents or guardians would still be able to decide what books their own children are able to read or check out from school libraries.

“It’s not telling people that they have to read certain things,” Frederick, D-Portland, told the Capital Chronicle. “There’s none of that. It’s just saying that these books that are in your libraries are books that are part of the whole library. They’re going to be there. It’s not forcing anybody to do anything.”

But Frederick wasn’t prepared for the reaction, or for his bill to become the latest culture-war issue rocking the Oregon Legislature in a five-week session that’s supposed to be focused on housing and addiction. By Monday afternoon, a full 24 hours before a scheduled hearing, more than 500 people had submitted written testimony about the measure. That’s more comments than lawmakers received about Gov. Tina Kotek’s $500 million housing bill or nearly any other measure considered this year.

Republican Rep. Ed Diehl of Stayton, a first-term lawmaker, called Frederick’s bill the “worst I’ve seen so far” in an email urging parents to show up for the hearing. He built a following last year by agitating against a new law that requires insurance companies to cover any gender-affirming treatments prescribed by a doctor.

More opposition came from a pseudonymous Twitter account with nearly 30,000 followers: It posted a glossy campaign-style ad against the proposal, replete with archival legislative video and stock footage of parents and children. The two-and-a-half-minute video doesn’t include any disclosure of who paid for it.

The bill’s supporters leapt into action, with the Oregon Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union sending their own email blasts urging supporters to submit testimony and show up to the Capitol.

Personal experience

Frederick didn’t work with educators, librarians or other groups when he drafted the bill, and organized support only appeared in response to attacks from conservative activists. He drew instead on his experience as a former teacher and public information officer in Portland Public Schools and the values he learned growing up.

Frederick’s paternal grandparents were teachers and sharecroppers who left Mississippi because they weren’t allowed to teach Black children to read. His father went on to become a mycologist – a scientist who studies fungi – and Frederick grew up as a “faculty brat,” surrounded by books.

His parents were active in the Civil Rights Movement, and Frederick was one of the first Black students at his Atlanta high school in the 1960s. As a young man, he lived the history that he fears is now being censored – schools in Florida, for instance, have banned or refused to purchase children’s books about civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.

In his office, flanked by bookshelves crammed with a random assortment of books, Frederick said it was important that people have the ability to read what they choose, even if the subject matter is disagreeable. He disagreed with parents’ efforts to ban Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and cancel a field trip to see a performance of William Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” when he was a teacher, and he thinks teachers in a Seattle suburb who tried to ban “To Kill a Mockingbird” over concerns that it was a “white savior narrative” were making a mistake.

“I disagree with a number of books,” Frederick said. “Even some of those over there I disagree with vehemently, but I have read them so that I can understand what’s being said and why it’s being said and how it fits into a world view.”

Bans spread

Public schools and libraries have long been the battlefront in America’s culture wars, and book bans aren’t anything new. But they’ve grown in recent years: the free speech advocacy group PEN America tracked nearly 3,400 instances of book bans in the 2022-23 school year, up from 2,500 in the 2021-22 school year.

At the state level, the Oregon Intellectual Freedom Clearinghouse run by the Oregon State Library tracked 93 attempts to remove books or other materials at libraries throughout the state between July 2022 and June 2023.

“No matter the stated reason for a challenge, one pattern is clear: Challenged materials are disproportionately about, by or center the story of people from an underrepresented race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age or disability – the same groups protected from discrimination by ORS 659.850,” state librarian Wendy Cornelisen wrote to lawmakers. “Over 70% of the items challenged in 2022-23 focus on one or more of those identities.”

State law now requires that instructional materials for American history and government classes include the role of Native Americans, people of European, African, Asian, Pacific Island, Chicano, Latino, Middle Eastern or Jewish descent along with immigrants, refugees and people with disabilities or who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

The state library’s report includes Oregon’s most recent school book ban, when the Canby School District temporarily removed 36 books from high school and middle school libraries in response to parent complaints. After months of deliberating, the district decided to permanently ban just one book, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” while restricting three fantasy novels and one historical fiction book to high school libraries, the Oregonian/OregonLive reported.

Most of the books challenged in Canby were written by women, and many featured people of color and LGBTQ+ people. The list included modern classics like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as well as books by authors John Green and Rainbow Rowell, mainstays of young adult literature.

Tamara Quandt, an elementary school teacher and parent in the district, told the Capital Chronicle it was clear that some parents and school board members were specifically targeting books about LGBTQ+ people and people of color.

“The people championing it were definitely driven by a political agenda and used a lot of religious rhetoric, but they were very careful,” Quandt said. “They had talking points that had come from outside organizations and knew they couldn’t say ‘We want these books removed because we don’t want LGBTQ characters.’ They would always use that there was just sexual content or inappropriate content for students.”

Concerns about sex

Most of the written testimony submitted to the Legislature focuses on concerns about sexually explicit materials.

“We do not want more racist and LGBTQ information shoved into the faces of our kids. It is everywhere, it doesn’t need to be in the textbooks. They need to learn reading, writing and math, not other agendas,” Monica Carroll of Medford wrote in one representative message.

Diehl, the Stayton Republican, rallied conservatives to the Capitol to protest the bill but didn’t respond to an interview request. In his email newsletter, he described the measure as an attack on schools, parents and students.

“The bill is thinly disguised as protecting against discrimination,” Diehl wrote. “But the intent is clear – to prevent local school boards from removing ideologically driven content that could harm our kids. They are doing this because all across Oregon, communities are pushing back against this agenda that goes against their values and common sense.”

A hearing on Senate Bill 1583 is scheduled for 3 p.m. Tuesday in the Senate Education Committee, with a possible vote on Thursday.

Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on Facebook and Twitter.