ivanka trump

President Donald Trump and his team have been on the hunt for a leak, but it isn't going very well. Asawin Suebsaeng at Zeteo wrote on Tuesday that the leak hunt has been stalled "for a hilarious reason."

Describing the Trump administration as a "fascist-‘Office Space’" environment, Suebsaeng described the constant backbiting from a “den of snitches, ‘freaks,’ and paranoid tyrants.”

The constant paranoia and "snitching" has only grown worse in the last year, Suebsaeng wrote.

According tot he report, Trump is particularly upset about leaks from April reports that he's grown frustrated by a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Among the reports in the book is the characterization that Trump’s increasing volatility is causing him to make "reckless" decisions, particularly when it comes to the war with Iran.

“The leak hunt is a big deal right now,” one administration official said in April. Another source told Zeteo that staff in the administration were warned by a superior that “if you talked to Jonathan or Maggie [you] better be good at covering your tracks.”

The hunt for the leaks has continued over the past several weeks.

"By May, the president was so livid and paranoid about the leaks that he pushed his Justice Department to seriously consider raiding the homes of reporters, or just jailing them until they sold out their anonymous sources," the Zeteo writer said.

As of the beginning of June, the probe appears to have stalled, according to the site's sources. The reason, which Suebsaeng found to be hilarious, is that the list of possible people is too long.

“We started making a list of likely suspects, and it got too long,” a Trump administration official told Zeteo.

"I cannot possibly pretend that it isn’t hysterically funny how Trump has put himself in a position where it’s very hard for him to find the leakers because the senior personnel he tapped to be the leak-hunters-in-chief are also the ones who’ve been doing the leaking," wrote Suebsaeng. "Good help is hard to find!"

Two senior officials, one currently in the administration and one previously from the Trump White House, answered "of course" when asked if they've leaked. They felt they had cover because the information they had would be known to anyone at their level.

“It’s one of the worst-kept secrets at the White House,” the current official said. “I’m not ratting myself out; that would be ridiculous.”

A different advisor described the leak hunt as akin to the scene in the movie "Reservoir Dogs" in which characters point loaded guns at each other, ensuring their mutual destruction.

Asked about the matter, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle attacked the website, its founder and the reporter.

The new expose, "Regime Change," will be out later this month.

A rapid series of administrative, staffing and policy changes the Social Security Administration underwent early on in the second Trump administration are making it much harder to get disability benefits that millions of Americans rely on to make ends meet.

The agency cut more than 7,100 jobs – more than 13% of its workforce and its largest staffing cut ever. It closed six of its 10 regional offices, moved more services online and expanded the use of automated and artificial intelligence systems on its public phone lines.

Some rules changed and changed back again. For instance, Social Security officials announced in March 2025 that people would no longer be able to apply for benefits on the phone, only to reverse course a month later.

We’re social work professors at California State University, Sacramento, Binghamton University in New York and the University of Wisconsin-Madison who study these programs. And we have each independently found that even before 2025, it was hard to get disability benefits.

Now, we’ve found that the process has become even harder.

Missing metrics

In June 2025, the agency removed key customer service metrics, such as phone wait times and disability claim processing times, from its website. This data had provided the public with critical transparency about the agency’s performance.

Lacking insight into the impacts of the many changes underway, we launched a project to study how they were affecting access to disability benefits. We interviewed benefits representatives – lawyers, social workers and other kinds of advocates who help applicants and beneficiaries navigate Social Security systems.

We conducted in-depth interviews with 52 advocates at 32 nonprofits, such as legal aid agencies and disability organizations. These organizations collectively assist over 8,000 people every year.

We’re referring to these advocates by pseudonyms to maintain their privacy. Many insisted that neither they nor their employers be identified due to fear of retaliation by the Trump administration.

We published our findings in collaboration with two national disability advocacy organizations, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund and the American Association of People with Disabilities, in March 2026. We took the step of publishing with these organizations before submitting our work to academic journals because we wanted to share these findings with the public as soon as possible.

16 million people get these benefits

The Social Security Administration is a federal agency that runs some of the country’s biggest social safety net programs, including benefits for more than 60 million retired workers, as well as survivor benefits for the spouses of workers who have died and their children who are under 18.

In addition, the agency administers two kinds of disability benefits to a total of 16 million people.

Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, is a public assistance program for low-income older adults and people with disabilities under age 65. In 2026, it provides a maximum of US$994 per month for any one person getting benefits.

Social Security Disability Insurance, or SSDI, provides a limited pension for those who have worked long enough to qualify and now have disabilities that prevent them from working any longer. Payments vary based on one’s past wages, but the monthly average in 2026 is about $1,634.

To receive either kind of benefits, Americans must meet the Social Security Administration’s strict definition of disability, which considers health status, past education and employment and age to determine if a physical or mental disability makes someone unable to work.

There are no time limits on how long you can receive SSI benefits. But children and adults under age 65 are subject to periodic assessments of their eligibility and must adhere to the program’s rigid rules. For example, they can’t have more than $2,000 in assets at any time while receiving benefits, must submit their pay stubs for any earned income monthly, and must report any changes in their living situation, marital status or bank accounts.

Ray Render, left, a staffer for Rep. John Rose, meets with constituents in Gallatin, Tenn., about their concerns related to changes to Social Security Administration practices in March 2025. AP Photo/George Walker IV

Encountering long wait times and chatbots

The Trump administration made no formal changes to eligibility criteria for SSI or SSDI, despite considering proposals that could have narrowed eligibility rules and potentially excluded millions who qualify for these benefits today or reduced the size of benefits payments for many people with disabilities.

But when the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research center, analyzed state-level data from the first half of 2025, it found that 7% fewer claims for disability benefits were submitted to the Social Security Administration than during the same period a year earlier.

We got more insight into these changes during our interviews.

We heard that with fewer employees, the agency had fewer people available to answer phone calls, contributing to long waits. Customer service protocols also changed so that phone calls to the Social Security Administration were routed to field offices the callers hadn’t dialed, where staff couldn’t help them.

Other benefits representatives encountered AI chatbots that did not answer their questions, or found that staffers with specialized knowledge had been reassigned to perform other tasks.

“I just have so many cases that are stuck in purgatory because they don’t have enough workers to work them,” said Jane, a paralegal we interviewed in Social Security’s Kansas City region. “They don’t have enough workers to answer the phone to tell me what’s happening to them.”

Field office frustrations

Another source of friction emerged around visits to Social Security Administration field offices.

The agency has more than 1,200 field offices across the nation where people can seek services. Shortly before Trump took office in 2025, the agency began moving from walk-in services to requiring appointments. But the Social Security Administration had promised in 2024 that it would “not turn people away” if they couldn’t or didn’t want to make an appointment.

And yet benefits representatives told us in 2025 that many field offices did require appointments, and turned people away if they arrived without them.

This was especially frustrating because it was hard to make those appointments over the phone anymore, said Freddie, a benefits representative in the Denver region. “Now, we can’t reach anybody at Social Security,” she told us. “We can’t get through to make an appointment.”

As of May 2026, 10 offices in nine states are either open on an appointment-only basis or closed to the public until further notice.

Obstacles online and in person

The Social Security Administration’s push to conduct business online assumed that everyone could easily use digital platforms. But that’s simply not true for many of the most vulnerable low-income people with disabilities who have or are applying for SSI and SSDI benefits.

As Michael, an attorney in the Atlanta region, explained, it’s not reasonable to assume that “someone who’s in their 20s, but unhoused” or “someone in their 70s and having issues with memory loss” can handle an online application process.

Another challenge is the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, which has now extended to people who are authorized to live in the United States. Many immigrants who get disability benefits, or who support their relatives with SSI and SSDI benefits, are no longer sure it’s safe for them to visit Social Security offices.

Those fears were reinforced in February 2026, as reports emerged that some Social Security workers had been told to share appointment data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Several benefits specialists told us they no longer know how to advise such clients about the potential risks of interacting with the Social Security Administration, including whether it was safe to visit field offices or whether the agency might share their information with immigration authorities.

Dying while waiting

Staff cuts meant that the problem-solvers who advocates had once turned to had left, taking years of expertise with them. The agency’s remaining staff members were harder to reach than ever. Some were less familiar with the intricacies of the Social Security Administration’s policies and procedures than their senior colleagues who had left.

As disability benefits have become harder to obtain, many people are suffering. We heard multiple accounts of terminally ill clients dying before receiving benefits for which they were eligible.

For example, Anne, an attorney in the agency’s Philadelphia region, described the case of a homeless, seriously ill client who couldn’t move forward because Social Security Administration staff told her that they couldn’t locate paperwork she had submitted three years earlier.

“This woman is dying,” Anne said. “All you have to do is push a little button to get this moving, and you’re telling me you can’t.”

Miranda, an attorney in the Philadelphia region, explained that in the past, she advocated for clients over complex legal issues. During the second Trump administration, that’s changed.

Now, her clients may find that they need an attorney simply “to make sure something gets off someone’s desk and then faxed into the system.”

Faxing, rarely necessary for most everyday business transactions, is commonly used during the disability benefits application process.

“It is taking more of my time to do the same amount of work, which then means we’re not able to take as many cases” said Megan, a paralegal in the Boston region.

Suggesting possible improvements

Our report includes recommendations for improving how the Social Security Administration responds to applications for disability benefits.

In our view, the agency should employ enough people to handle all applications and appeals in a timely and accurate manner while protecting the data privacy and accessibility for all applicants – including those from immigrant families.

We also believe that the agency’s leaders would be wise to listen seriously to feedback from professional benefits representatives who help people with disabilities apply for SSI and SSDI benefits, such as those we interviewed, and their clients.

Katie Savin, Assistant Professor of Social Work, California State University, Sacramento; Callie Freitag, Assistant Professor of Social Work, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Matthew Borus, Assistant Professor of Social Work, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

US presidential elections are always about a choice for the future. Who do you want to lead the country? Who will best address your needs?

When it comes to California’s climate future, the most important figure in the state’s chaotic governor’s race may not be any of the candidates on the debate stage. It may not even be outgoing governor Gavin Newsom or President Donald Trump.

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Instead, it might just be Chevron, the multinational oil company that was founded in the Golden State more than 100 years ago. It is among the largest producers, refiners, and sellers of petroleum products in a state rapidly shifting toward electric vehicles. Depending on which candidate is talking, the company is an example of how Big Oil is strangling consumers or an example of how climate regulations are strangling the state economy.

The behemoth — it reported $12.3 billion in profit last year — took the spotlight last month when an interviewer asked leading Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra about Chevron’s contributions to his campaign. The former state attorney general and Biden-era health secretary gave what seemed to be a candid response:

“Chevron, that’s the problem with politics. They’re not the bad guy. Does everybody here drive an electric vehicle? You need Chevron. I need Chevron. My people of the state of California need Chevron … Chevron wants to give me a check, that’s — that’s their prerogative.”

The phrase “I need Chevron” soon appeared in anti-Becerra videos by the likes of climate hawk Jane Fonda, implying that the candidate was saying he needs Chevron to get elected. Progressive billionaire Tom Steyer, Becerra’s lead Democratic opponent, urged him to return the contribution and said he is “doing [the] bidding” of Big Oil. Representative Katie Porter, another leading Democrat, said in a statement that she “hasn’t made millions off Big Oil or taken their checks.”

Becerra is not entirely wrong. California consumes around 13 billion gallons of gasoline annually, all of it specifically formulated to meet the state’s stringent clean air standards. Most of it comes from just six refineries, and Chevron owns two that account for one-third of the state’s production. That gives the company and its peers tremendous leverage. But California’s gas consumption has declined by about 15 percent from a peak in 2004 due to improved fuel economy in conventional vehicles and growing adoption of electric vehicles. It could fall by half over the next two decades.

The primary is June 2. The challenge for the next governor will be to continue the energy transition while retaining the infrastructure needed to move and refine oil. This has never been accomplished in a place as large as California, which was the world’s fifth-largest economy in 2025. The risks are tremendous: If the state moves too quickly, it could create shortages and price spikes for drivers already paying the highest prices in the country. If it moves too slowly, it could lock in decades of air pollution and hinder global climate progress.

“It’s messy,” said Emily Grubert. She is a civil engineer and sociologist at Notre Dame who has studied fossil fuel transitions and advised the state government on oil infrastructure. “As soon as you realize that actually transitioning away from fossil fuels means you have to close things, people get really freaked out.”

Newsom spent much of his governorship going after Big Oil, an effort that included a series of executive actions to restrict fracking in Kern County oil fields. When the war in Ukraine sent gas prices surging, Newsom and Democrats in the Legislature passed a series of bills to stop what he called “price gouging.” These laws empowered a new oil-focused watchdog agency, created a tool that could impose refinery price caps, and required refineries to maintain certain storage reserves, all of which cut profit margins for Chevron and others. The new refinery rules added to multiple carbon taxes that make selling gasoline in California more expensive.

However, there is some evidence refiners have overcharged Californians. Even after accounting for state taxes, environmental fees, and production costs, a gap remains between gas prices in the Golden State and everywhere else. This gap appeared in 2015 after a refinery fire in Torrance and has come to be known as the “mystery gasoline surcharge.” It now averages about $1. Last fall, a state regulator concluded that refiners’ monopoly power may be the reason for the price spikes.

Oil companies accused Newsom of trying to regulate them out of existence, and many threatened to leave. Two major refiners, Wilmington and Benicia, announced last year that they would close their operations, forcing a state that already imports about 60 percent of its oil to rely on imports of gasoline refined in Asia. Chevron relocated its corporate headquarters from the San Francisco suburb of San Ramon to Houston in 2024, and it has delivered a series of ominous warnings this year as climate regulators have revised the state’s almost 15-year-old carbon tax.

“The proposed regulation will cripple the survivability of the state’s remaining refineries, which will result in California losing the entire industry,” Andy Walls, the president of Chevron’s refinery business, wrote in an open letter to Newsom in March. The implication was clear: unless you relax your regulations, we will leave the state and strand you without gasoline. That would mean paying Asian refiners to produce more of the state’s specific blend, at significant cost.

The Newsom administration spent much of 2025 trying to work out a grand bargain with the industry. The Legislature eased rules governing drilling in Kern County oil fields, helping maintain a stable supply of crude to refineries. It also delayed implementing a refinery profit cap and allowed the temporary sale of gasoline with higher concentrations of ethanol. The state’s climate regulator has also suggested giving refineries free allowances under the state’s cap-and-trade system, even if it means less money for big projects like high-speed rail and sustainable housing. The idea is to give investors enough certainty that they’re willing to remain in California even as the state uses less gasoline.

Experts believe it will take a lot more than that to manage inevitable changes.

“You actually can’t have a smooth and safe and effective transition without some form of coordinating function for that decline,” said Grubert. She believes a degree of state ownership of refineries will be necessary to keep facilities open if they stop being profitable. The wrong approach, she says, would be to respond to each potential refinery closure with ad hoc subsidies and state support, since that would allow refiners to extort the state one by one.

That point was reinforced this month by a report from the California Energy Commission that has not received much notice. The analysis of the state’s shaky fuel system found that “California cannot sustainably manage this transition through repeated crisis interventions at an asset-by-asset level.” It suggested options that included “legal obligations to operate,” “centralized planning of closures,” and “direct state management or ownership of assets.”

The Iran war will accelerate a decline in both the supply of, and demand for, oil. Gas retailers like Chevron are already struggling to find additional imports of refined fuel, and some experts predict shortages if the Strait of Hormuz does not open within weeks. Meanwhile, electric vehicles continue gaining market share, and Newsom plans to roll out subsidies for them this year. Wider adoption of these vehicles, and hybrids, will further crimp demand, making any remaining refineries more likely to shutter.

All of this helps explain the showdown between the leading Democrats in the governor’s race, who are each trying to find a lane in a field that at one time included more than 50 candidates.

Becerra has given lip service to clean energy, but many public statements suggest a friendliness toward oil producers. As attorney general, he initiated a few lawsuits against petroleum companies, and supported other state climate lawsuits, but punted on major investigations. He has focused his gubernatorial campaign on vows to fight Donald Trump and protect healthcare, and has made controversial promises to freeze utility and insurance rates. On decarbonization, he has noted that “climate action only succeeds if it is affordable, reliable, and fair.”

After the chaos of the early primary, many oil producers have decided that Becerra is their candidate. Chevron last month contributed the maximum allowable amount of $39,200 to his campaign, the first time in a decade it has backed a gubernatorial candidate. Last week, the company contributed another $500,000 to an independent political committee supporting Becerra. California Resources Corporation, the state’s largest driller, also gave $500,000 to a Becerra committee. And gas companies like Sempra are among the donors to an anti-Steyer political committee that has raised more than $24 million.

Steyer, meanwhile, has made attacking Big Oil the focus of his campaign, as it was during his 2020 presidential run. He says he would lower gas prices by activating the refining profit cap that Newsom has declined to use, investigating what is causing high gas prices (something the state has already done), and taxing private jet fuel. When refineries “inevitably” close, he says he will stockpile an oil reserve and import more refined fuel for as long as California needs it.

Steyer has also had to address his own fossil fuel ties. The hedge fund he founded, Farallon Capital, remains a major player in coal power finance abroad, including in Indonesia and Australia. Steyer still holds a stake in the firm, which he left in 2012, but his campaign says he no longer receives dividends from its fossil fuel investments.

California uses a “jungle primary” in which the top two candidates advance to the general election, regardless of party. The latest poll shows Becerra essentially tied with former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican, with Steyer trailing at around 15 percent. The most likely outcome is that Becerra or Steyer will make it to the general election. (The other Democrats, including Porter and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, trail behind in the double digits.)

Railing against Big Oil has long proven to be good politics in California. But in the wake of Trump’s second election victory, Democrats have sought to downplay climate issues and focus instead on affordability. The question in the governor’s race is how best to achieve that in the long run. Is it better to use a bully pulpit against companies like Chevron in an effort to break their market power, or conciliate them in the hope that they don’t flee?

Mike Madrid, a veteran California political operative, believes Becerra’s approach will resonate more with the young and Latinos, both of whom often decide statewide elections.

“This attack on Chevron, it works for the base Steyer already has,” he said. “Young Latino working-class men are the demographic most affected by gas prices. Do you think they’re saying we need to get rid of Chevron? Of course not.”

Steyer’s campaign may not get him over the line in the primary, but he has at least been consistent. In a 2013 blog post for this very publication, he celebrated the result of the Virginia governor’s race, where a climate-focused Democrat beat a fossil-fuel-friendly Republican with help from Steyer’s own war chest.

“A new political dynamic is emerging,” he wrote at the time. “Climate change is a winner, not a loser,” and is “no longer electoral Kryptonite.”

If Chevron has its way, next week’s primary results will prove otherwise.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/chevron-oil-california-governor-becerra-steyer/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

On Monday afternoon, June 1, the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump was "backing off" from his plan to create a $1.7 billion "anti-weaponization fund" for Americans it claims were unfairly targeted legally by the Biden administration and former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. And the Trump-era U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said it would abide by a federal judge's order temporarily blocking the fund. According to former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance — a law professor and frequent legal analyst for MS NOW — the fund's fate is only one of the many legal setbacks the Trump administration has suffered recently.

Vance examines those setbacks in an early June Substack video as well as a Substack column.

Critics of the "anti-weapon fund" are attacking it as a "slush fund" — a description that Vance agrees with. After the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agreed to settle a lawsuit from the Trump administration, DOJ announced the creation of the fund as part of that settlement. President Trump's critics are also saying it is unfair that Trump, according to the settlement, will not be audited by the IRS.

Noting a federal judge's footnotes, Vance, in the video, explained, "This is Footnotes 2 and 3 in the judge's order. The second one, she points out that the settlement that Trump receives conflicts with DOJ policy. She says it may be in conflict; it absolutely is, because, you know, here he is suing over having his taxes released. And instead of a settlement that compensates him for that, there's this huge $1.776 billion slush fund —this incredible slush fund, and also the forgiveness."

Vance continued, "And then, in the third footnote, she really, interestingly, points out that she's aware, because there's been news reporting, on the fact that internally, in the IRS, lawyers prepared a memo that outlined the pushback to Trump's lawsuit. It was, at best, a very weak lawsuit, like many of his cases are, and the IRS wanted to fight it. And the decision was made at a political level to let it go forward and to roll over and enter into this settlement."

Vance predicted that "there's a lot more to come" legally with pushback against the "anti-weaponization fund."

In her Substack article, Vance lays out other legal setbacks that Trump has suffered recently — including cases involving the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's anti-transgender policies with the Pentagon.

"In the Kennedy Center case," Vance explained, "Judge Christopher Cooper held that adding Trump's name to the facility violated the clear language of federal law that requires the building to honor 'President Kennedy and President Kennedy alone'…. The D.C. Circuit enjoined Pete Hegseth from enforcing his anti-trans policy Monday. It was designed to keep transgender people from serving in the military…. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed its motion to dismiss DOJ’s indictment due to vindictive prosecution last week."

Leah Atwood was rattled. It was the tail end of March, and for days she and her colleagues at Agroecology Commons had been fielding dozens of emails alerting them to grant terminations targeting a $300 million U.S. Department of Agriculture program. One after another, within a single week, 49 of the 50 grantees received notices from the USDA informing them that their grants were canceled.

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

By the end of the month, Agroecology Commons still hadn’t gotten a notice from the USDA. While their peers were figuring out how to pick up the pieces, it seemed as though their $2.5 million grant, structured largely to help farmers of color acquire and sustain land, remained untouched. All they could do was wait. Resignation settled in — after all, they’d been in this position before.

Shortly after President Donald Trump returned to office last January, his administration launched a sweeping campaign to eliminate initiatives it has deemed wasteful or misaligned with its political agenda. At the USDA, that has meant slashing billions in grants and gutting a mix of newer and longstanding federal programs that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly framed as the administration’s attempt to “stop wasteful spending.”

During the administration’s first year, Agroecology Commons lost multiple grants amidst the USDA’s funding purge. In response, the nonprofit filed a joint lawsuit against the agency, claiming that the grants were terminated unlawfully. In August, a judge granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction that restored their access to some of the money until the court makes its final determination based on the merits of the case.

All 49 other recipients of the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access grants received termination emails from the USDA during that week in March. In their written cancellations, which gave grantees two business days’ notice, Steven Peterson, the associate administrator of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, explained to the grantees that their programming didn’t align with the agency’s priorities and that its funding structure was not in keeping with the intent of Congress. He used the same language about cutting waste and discontinuing DEI efforts that had become routine for the administration. But whereas the administration tended to be vague about its claims of waste and fraud, Peterson’s letter was surprisingly specific.

“Instances of excessive or frivolous expenditures,” he wrote, “such as purchasing gazebos, massages, a camper/RV, and oversized office supply budgets (in one case, over $130,000) — instead of land are an affront to taxpayers.”

Through it all, Agroecology Commons still hadn’t heard a thing.

Questions swirled throughout the grantee network, but no one could explain why Agroecology Commons’ project alone was spared. Atwood’s team presumed their grant wasn’t terminated because of the ongoing litigation. Now, they continue to wait to see whether their funding will abruptly disappear, too.

“We are trying to accomplish as much as we can in the time that we have, because we don’t know when it’s going to be canceled,” said Atwood. “It’s a strange reality.”

Neither Agroecology Commons nor any of the other grant recipients that Grist spoke to seems to know who may have made those expenditures.

Kavita Koppa helps run RAFI, a farming organization based in North Carolina that was one of the 49 grants that was canceled; they’d been awarded $8.5 million to help agricultural producers in North Carolina, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Koppa says RAFI was just about halfway through its five-year contract with USDA and had spent roughly $1.1 million when the termination notice came. From the beginning, almost $2.3 million of their total award had been set aside for grants to support farmer land acquisition and market access, with around $400,000 of that set aside for RAFI to acquire land parcels on behalf of farmers. Another $1.9 million was budgeted for project management costs, which included the fees associated with verifying financial compliance in federal audits, attorneys for farmland acquisition, and translation fees; and then $350K for a bucket of miscellaneous project activities, such as paying guest speakers at workshops, contracting report writers, and mass distributing hard copies of farmer resources. The last $3.9 million was budgeted for technical assistance, a figure that encompassed the full budgets of the five subawardees that RAFI was working with on the project.

“Under the guise of increasing land access for producers, the ILA program included no minimum requirement for direct producer support,” a USDA spokesperson told Civil Eats in March. “Instead, the program permitted the abuse of federal funds, including expenditures on the purchasing of a barbeque smoker, construction of a gazebo, massages, and for one awardee, a $20,000 budget for ink pens alone. To no surprise, a peek behind the curtain of this Biden-era program revealed the egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars to the tune of nearly $300 million dollars.”

Koppa says she has never seen the budget items that the USDA cited. “The details were shocking,” she said. “We didn’t do those things. Why are we being treated as if we did something unethical or wasteful?”

Breanna Horsey, executive director of Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, who led another land access project working to expand Iowa’s fruit and vegetable farmers ability to secure permanent and affordable land access, is also adamant that her $1.8 million grant had no carve-outs for the expenditures detailed in their termination notice. Viva Farms’ Anna Chotzen, project manager of another ILCMA project that was awarded a $2.5 million grant to help beginning and historically underserved farmers in two Washington counties access farmland, said the same. Her team has no idea where those budget items came from. All she knows is that it wasn’t them.

Gloria Montaño Greene, former Deputy Undersecretary of the USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation in the Biden administration who helped oversee the creation of the ILCMA program, questions the validity of the excessive spending claims.

“If that dollar amount for $20,000 in pens was put in there, did they show proof of that?” said Montaño Greene. “Show the proof, right?”

Throughout April, at least 45 of the 49 terminated grantees — including two subgrantees — filed appeals against the termination to the National Appeals Division, an independent office of the USDA, Grist has learned. According to Amanda Koehler, a consultant on the land access program, all but two were informed that their award terminations are not appealable because the decision to terminate “was a matter of general applicability and not based on the individual application of specific program criteria.” (The outstanding two, said Koehler, have not heard back yet.)

That finding by NAD should put the USDA’s justification for cancellation under closer scrutiny, she added, because it “underscores, in my opinion, that terminations were not based on anything the awardees did or didn’t do.” To her knowledge, none of the grantees — including Agroecology Commons — had budgets that included any of the claims USDA has made concerning wasteful or fraudulent spending.

“This termination doesn’t seem like it was rooted in anything about our conduct with this grant,” said RAFI’s Koppa. “It seems to be part of some sort of larger motivation where we were not being treated fairly.”

JohnElla Holmes, who oversees the Kansas Black Farmers Association, which was awarded a land access grant of $8.4 million to help Black producers acquire farmland across Kansas, Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, says that roughly 62 percent of the organization’s grant was intended to go directly to farmers. She alleges that, following the administration change, the USDA took nearly a year to supply her team with the necessary approvals required by the grant’s built-in budgetary structure to award payments to farmers. Last November, Holmes says they finally heard from FSA staffers who requested changes to their paperwork. Over the next two months, she worked with them to submit all the revisions and additional documentation the agency asked for. Then, after another period of waiting on USDA, the grant was canceled.

Other grantees and sources close to the program also say that the USDA obstructed the distributions of funding to farmers with its scarce and severely delayed communication, lack of institutional support, and, crucially, the absence of necessary budgetary approvals over the last year.

The USDA declined to comment for this story.

On Tuesday, 24 other ILCMA grantees joined the lawsuit that Agroecology Commons filed last year. The plaintiffs are seeking another preliminary injunction, with the aim of reversing the grant cancellations and restoring grantees’ access to the funds.

While it still has its money, Agroecology Commons plans to move forward with the land access grant. Atwood’s team, though, is proceeding cautiously — holding off on making longer-term investments into hiring or programming, and scrambling to fundraise against the possibility of a sudden cutoff.

“When you talk about wasteful spending — the years and years that went into getting this program to even exist, and then to just terminate it,” Atwood said incredulously. That, to her, “seems like the real waste.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/usda-canceled-land-access-grants-fraud-evidence/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

President Donald Trump is now on a losing streak, and it's coming as a result of his own party members.

Speaker Mike Johnson met with the president at the White House on Monday, and, not long after, it was revealed Trump would no longer fight to establish a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund to pay out alleged victims of government overreach.

Punchbowl News reported that the GOP is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Trump's political endorsement can boost or sink primary candidates, but his brand is so toxic in the general election that more and more lawmakers are making it past their primaries and pivoting against Trump.

Trump's ballroom has also become a political sticking point for Republican lawmakers. The unpopular $1 billion funding demand from Trump came after he said he would fully fund the ballroom himself with sponsors and donors.

The third potential Trump failure is about his new "golden fleet" of 20 to 25 battleships that Trump demanded the U.S. Navy build. Trump initially requested 34 ships. The Trump fleet of ships won't be finished before the end of Trump's term. The House Armed Services Committee is beginning the markup for the 2027 defense reauthorization budget this week.

Trump initially asked for $66 billion for the fund, but the full program is expected to cost $1.5 trillion.

Republicans also still haven't delivered funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CPB). Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told Punchbowl that he can't pass ICE and CPB funding with the weaponization fund in the budget.

Outside of his GOP allies in Congress, Trump is also fighting with longtime ally with Benjamin Netanyahu. According to Axios, Trump reportedly yelled at the embattled prime minister, calling him "f—— crazy" for bombing Lebanon at a time when he's desperately trying to end their war against Iran. Trump's Iran war bungle continues to haunt him as he struggles with a humiliating failure. One of Iran's major sticking points in negotiations is that Netanyahu stop bombing Lebanon.

These failures all come amid a slew of legal battles Trump keeps losing over the Kennedy Center, the slush fund and his ballroom.

What does Trump do when facing a humiliating defeat? He closes everything down. If that doesn’t work, he dumps it entirely and criticizes the hell out of whoever’s then in charge. Call it the Trump dump.

He did this in the 2020 election — refusing to accept defeat and then trying to close it all down by instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol. When that didn’t work, he spent the next four years blaming Biden for everything.

When performers scheduled to appear at the Kennedy Center canceled in protest of Trump’s taking over the center and putting his name on it, Trump closed the center, with the lame excuse that he was “renovating” it.

Then, Friday, after a federal court ordered him to reopen the center and remove his name, he announced, “I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND,” followed by: “The Kennedy Center will soon be closed, probably never to open again” and “the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially.”

A similar Trump dump occurred over the weekend after artists pulled out of his 250th anniversary concert series on the mall when they discovered that the series was a promotional vehicle for Trump. In response, he said he was canceling the series and replacing it with a Trump rally.

Trump is pulling a nearly identical — and far more serious — Tump dump in Iran. In mid-April, rather than accept Iran’s humiliating blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, he pretended he was in charge and that he’d close the strait. So he ordered a naval blockade, which did nothing but maintain the status quo.

Last Friday, when Iran signaled it might be willing to reopen the strait on its own terms (by charging tolls), Trump once again acted as if he were in charge, announcing that he’d be making a “final determination” on a potential deal that “must see the strait reopened, and then Iran must work with the U.S. to have its highly enriched uranium DESTROYED.”

Now that Iran is reportedly breaking off talks with the Trump administration and seeking “complete closure” of the Strait of Hormuz because of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, we can expect an even larger Trump dump.

What might this one look like? One likelihood: Trump takes credit for brokering a shaky peace deal between Iran and Israel over Lebanon’s Hezbollah, while blaming critics inside the U.S. for imperiling his peace talks with Iran. He announces he’s ending the ceasefire — which ended over the weekend anyway, with the U.S. military striking Iranian radar and drone sites near the Strait of Hormuz — and that “he’s finished with negotiations!” He then claims he’s done. He’s destroyed Iran’s military and killed off its old regime and warns that if Iran doesn’t open the strait and give up its nuclear program, he’ll resume bombing. It’s up to them.

In effect, he leaves the problem of reopening the strait to other countries more dependent on oil shipped through it, such as China, and the problem of taming Iran’s nuclear ambitions to Israel. It’s the final Trump dump.

We’ll see.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Far-right MAGA Republicans have been calling not only for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, but also, for naturalized U.S. citizens to be stripped of their citizenship because of their political views. Some MAGA Republicans have called for prominent U.S. citizens like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who was born in Uganda) and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar (who is originally from Somalia) to be denaturalized and deported. But according to National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Jaclyn Diaz, the Trump administration's push for mass denaturalization is proving to be much more difficult legally than the MAGA movement anticipated.

According to Diaz, the denaturalization cases filed so far underscore the "legal and practical constraints on using this tool more broadly."

Diaz reports, "NPR reviewed 34 publicly announced denaturalization cases filed or resolved by the DOJ as of May 19, including 11 revocations of citizenship…. In the last 16 months, the Trump Justice Department says it surpassed the number of cases filed during all four years of the Biden administration — 64, according to available data. The administration is pitching a supercharged denaturalization effort as yet another way to address border security."

Daniel Kanstroom, a Boston College law professor known for his expertise on immigration law, told NPR, "I'm not seeing a major surge of worrisome denaturalizations. To me, it's not at the level of an emergency."

According to Kanstroom, naturalized U.S. citizens enjoy much stronger legal protections than undocumented immigrants.

Kanstroom told NPR, "These are cases in which the law is pretty clear that people are entitled to due process. They're entitled to be heard by a federal judge, not just an immigration judge. So the protections in place for people facing denaturalization are pretty robust."

Nonetheless, Case Western Reserve University law professor Cassandra Robertson finds it deeply troubling that the Trump administration is willing to target U.S. citizens for denaturalization because of their political views.

Robertson told NPR, "The denaturalization efforts are an attempt to suppress the political speech of naturalized citizens. Although the cases that have been brought first are maybe people who've committed some pretty bad crimes, the government's rhetoric is certainly not limited to that."

Diaz notes, "Robertson, of Case Western, said the government appears to be intentionally picking cases with criminal convictions because they are easier to win. Still, Robertson, who has studied U.S. denaturalization, worries about where the policy could lead, especially because civil denaturalization cases come with fewer protections than criminal proceedings do."

Robertson told NPR, "It's just a dangerous road to go down for denaturalization. I might not feel sorry for the heinous child abuser who loses their citizenship. I'm not going to lose sleep over that. But I am going to lose sleep over what it does to the system. Because once it becomes easy to take somebody's citizenship away — it becomes easy to take anybody's citizenship away."

President Donald Trump's administration has become "all-consumed" by one pressing issue, according to a new Politico report, distracting them from vital legislative wins and causing allies to fret about "the end of MAGA."

On Tuesday morning, Politico released an extensive new report on the massive political headwinds buffeting Trump. Not so long after his earth-shaking return to power, he is now struggling to get anything done at a time when the GOP desperately needs a win to sell in the midterms.

"A year and a half into his second term, Trump’s legislative agenda is stalled in a Congress he has undermined," the report explained. "He has yet to end the war he started in Iran, let alone the one he’s spent months trying to end between Russia and Ukraine. A series of court rulings has stopped the administration in its tracks on everything from an 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' that could have been used to compensate the president’s political allies to renaming the Kennedy Center."

Allies close to Trump described the White House as being in a state of "burnout," now driven largely by its "nearly all-encompassing focus on ending the Iran war." As Politico noted, the conflict has now lasted over twice as long as Trump once predicted, and shows no signs of a clean resolution anytime soon.

“The administration is all-consumed by this conflict. They’re pretty much in a funk with it — or fatigue — in that there’s nothing happening,” one anonymous source close to the situation told Politico. “Even if there are wins, no one’s communicating them. There’s just no other play outside of — we are stuck in this quicksand of Iran.”

In turn, Trump is also failing to see any gains from Congress, with his much-demanded SAVE Act voting reform stalled out and the funding for his White House ballroom becoming mired in controversy. As Politico noted, many MAGA allies insist that Trump is being failed by those around him, as opposed to failing because of his own inadequacies, with some demanding new GOP leadership in Congress.

“Is this how MAGA ends — with a whimper not a bang?” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, said. “Texas shows that the President still has all the juice — it needs to be applied starting with [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune’s removal.”

Meanwhile, others are worried "that the administration is spending more time huddling behind closed doors trying to end a war than passing — and selling — the president’s agenda."

“This is the first time that I’m even questioning, maybe he doesn’t have as much political capital as I thought he did, or they’re just not using it right in the right way,” the anonymous source added.

A second anonymous source close to the White House added that the impending 250th anniversary festivities might be "among the last of the good days for the administration," amid fears that Democrats will regain power in the midterms and make life miserable for Trump in the remainder of his term.

“Members of Congress that have never been in the minority don’t know how s—— it is — and staff hasn’t been through this, which none of them have… not in the proctological exam kind of way. You can only defy a subpoena for so long,” the source said. “I think there’s a rude awakening that will come if that happens.”

A prominent political analyst argued on Monday that President Donald Trump’s administration is falling apart because of the one thing he cannot change — his aging body.

“He’s 80!” political analyst David Rothkopf told The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles on Monday. “He’s had a good life, and he should be at Mar-a-Lago sitting by the pool, having a margarita, talking to his friends about things he used to do.”

He added, “Unfortunately, he is a disturbed, sick lunatic who holds the most powerful job in the world and is at a stage of his existence where, because he’s a narcissist, the only thing he cares about is himself. And if every single one of us ceased to exist, he wouldn’t care, because the world is him.”

In addition to Trump’s advancing age, Rothkopf also pointed to the president’s weight, an issue he raised because obesity can harm one’s physical and mental health. Trump claimed that he is 6’3” and 230 pounds, although as MS NOW commentator Michael Steele recently observed, that would give him roughly the same physique as professional American football players Sam Darnold (6'3" 225 lbs) and DK Metcalf (6'4" 229 lbs).

“When they say he’s 6′3″ and 230 pounds, all you have to do is Google what a 6′3″, 230-pound athlete looks like,” Rothkopf argued. ”Trump does not look like that.”

He also observed that “we know that the assertion that he has bruises on his hands because of handshaking is ludicrous. And we know that Trump’s assertion that he is the only guy who’s had to go through all these cognitive tests and he passed them with flying colors is silly because you don’t get cognitive tests unless the doctor thinks you’ve got a problem with your cognition.”

In terms of Trump’s behavior, Rothkopf described it as “erratic,” saying that the president does “irrational things” and is “ignoring rational advice.”

“Look, you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know that this guy is behaving in an erratic, irrational way for whatever the organic reason is,” Rothkopf said. “You don’t have to be a doctor to know that this guy is physically unwell.”

In response to Rothkopf’s remarks, the Trump White House told The Daily Beast that “David Rothkopf is a far-left loser who clearly suffers from a severe and debilitating disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”

Yet Rothkopf is not alone in expressing concern about Trump’s fitness. Earlier this month psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham — who formerly taught psychiatry at Tufts University — told AlterNet that he co-authored a letter to Congress with dozens of other medical professionals for that exact reason.

“It’s a red flag,” Dr. Abraham told AlterNet. “People perseverate because they can’t think of anything else to say, because they’re cognitively impaired, or they perseverate because their emotional motor is stuck in high gear. In the last five to 10 years, he has planted red flags of concern again and again and again, and they’ve clustered.”

He particularly identified what appears to be Trump’s struggle to “internalize certain control over his language,” such as mixing up Iceland and Greenland in a recent speech.

“Not only did he have these kinds of linguistic failings, but he began to exhibit more and more signs of really rage and poor impulse control, and at night, what appeared to be manic kinds of episodes where he would tweet, you know, 100, 200 times a night,” Abraham said.