This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A four-hour legislative committee hearing in June, punctuated by applause and anger, offered a window into the growing backlash against data centers. The prospect of unchecked development has galvanized a cross-section of Ohioans, urban and rural, Democrat and Republican, alarmed about the spread of the giant computing facilities. Residents are demanding that local governments impose bans and moratoria on data centers while gathering signatures for a statewide ballot measure that could go before voters in 2027. Leading the push is an eclectic group from rural Southern Ohio, including an outdoor-tourism guide, a lawyer and others who fear that the state’s data center boom is changing their communities faster than they can respond. “Especially on America’s 250th anniversary it’s your job to make sure there’s life for another 250,” Nikki Gerber, the tourism guide, said at the June 1 statehouse hearing. Data centers powered by fossil fuels are a rising source of planet-warming emissions. But for many opponents, the concerns are closer to home: They fear that data centers will change the look and feel of familiar landscapes and threaten local air and water. Resistance to data centers is spreading across the country, especially against the supersize complexes being built to support artificial intelligence. The issue is emerging as a focal point in the November midterm elections, with about 40 local ballot measures in seven states, according to Ballotpedia. Ohio has the most, with 21, including 10 communities set to vote next month on local restrictions on data centers: Conneaut, Defiance, Granville, Oregon, Pataskala, Piqua, Sunbury, Upper Sandusky, Trenton, and Urbana. The Ohio campaign stands out because the Columbus region has become one of the nation’s data center development hot spots. If opponents prevail in Ohio, the outcome could reverberate beyond the state. But Gerber is not thinking about the national stakes. Her focus is the 1.3-gigawatt data center that Amazon Web Services wants to build about 15 miles from her campground. She’s worried about what the project could do to the area’s water levels and biodiversity. Inside Climate News visited her business, Moondoggie Liveree, tucked into the woods near Ohio Brush Creek, which flows into the Ohio River in Adams County. Gerber’s office is an open-air shed left behind by a previous owner, with walls covered with knickknacks, bumper stickers and signs. Among the messages: “Watch! 4 Turtles! Caution!” The business rents campsites, canoes and kayaks, and assists hikers. “Everybody thinks Ohio’s flat,” she said. “But it’s not, and it’s a really, really special area out here.” The office of Moondoggie Liveree, a business that supports camping, kayaking and outdoor tourism.Dan Gearino/Inside Climate News Gerber is a local leader in promoting Adams County—one of Ohio’s poorest counties based on median household income—as a destination for outdoor tourism. She’s worried that the proposed data center could open the door to more projects, transforming the rustic landscape into an industrial zone. She bought her property after working for years as a medical assistant. During the offseason, she builds rental cabins around the region. After learning about the proposed Amazon data center early this year, she grew frustrated by what she saw as a lack of details from the local government. Adams County officials did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In neighboring Brown County, also one of the poorest counties in the state, attorney Austin Baurichter left his job at a law firm office in Cincinnati, partly because he didn’t want to work on behalf of data center developers. He opened his own practice and connected with Gerber and others looking for answers about the projects. They seem to have little in common. Gerber spends most of her day outdoors in flip-flops and shorts, while Baurichter is an early-career lawyer, usually dressed in a suit and tie. But they share a dedication to the cause. Gerber is “the living embodiment of the sparkle emoji,” Baurichter said, interviewed by phone from his home office. He praised her energy and optimism. The two are among the half-dozen people at the core of Conserve Ohio, the organization leading a statewide campaign for a data center moratorium. Austin Baurichter testifies before the Select Committee on Data Centers on June 1 in Columbus, Ohio, asking lawmakers to listen to concerns about out-of-control development.The Ohio Channel via Inside Climate News Baurichter has grown frustrated with local governments, which he says are becoming more hostile toward data center opponents. He argues that some officials “got bamboozled” by developers early on, sometimes signing nondisclosure agreements and supporting projects without understanding the ramifications. He approaches his activism with intensity, bringing his legal skills into the fight, filing public-records requests and questioning officials at public meetings. > “We would rather you fight for our honor than for scraps that are being > offered by people who know what they’re offering [is] scraps.” In late September, he was there when the Ohio General Assembly voted on a temporary pause in the state’s gasoline tax. Data center opponents, along with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, a former director of the state health department, urged lawmakers to pass a measure pausing data center development that day. Majority Republicans declined to take up the issue. Ohio political blogger D.J. Byrnes, who writes The Rooster newsletter about Ohio politics, captured video of Baurichter speaking on the sidelines with state Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, a Cleveland-area Democrat. Baurichter admonished her for not doing more. “We would rather you fight for our honor than for scraps that are being offered by people who know what they’re offering [is] scraps,” he said. His conversations at the statehouse underscored his sense that leaders are not listening. “It’s exhausting, like throwing your energy down a black hole,” he said soon after. The legislature responded to public concerns last spring by creating the Select Committee on Data Centers. The panel has met five times, including the June 1 hearing, and has gathered feedback from local officials, data center companies, and the public. “We’re committed to being a good neighbor—operationally, economically, and in how we engage with communities across the state,” Thor Underdahl, data center and energy public policy manager for Meta, said at a June 4 committee hearing. Craig Sundstrom, head of energy and sustainability policy for Amazon Web Services, testified about the jobs and investment that data centers could bring. He pushed back against concerns about their water use, saying claims about excessive water consumption are false. An Amazon data center “uses less water than a few car washes do annually,” he said. State Rep. Adam Holmes, a Republican from a rural district in the east-central part of Ohio, is the committee’s co-chair. In an interview, he said that legislators are in a fact-finding phase, trying to understand how the state can reap the economic benefits of development while addressing the issues raised by voters. “It’s overwhelming the amount of money that’s coming, and it’s coupled with this historic transformation in technology that we’re facing,” he said. “The change is dramatic; that creates a lot of anxiety.” Ohio Rep. Adam Holmes, co-chairman of the Select Committee on Data Centers, speaking on the House floor.Ohio General Assembly via Inside Climate News Holmes wants to make sure consumers are protected from potential increases in electricity and water bills tied to data centers’ demand for those resources, he said. But he’s still figuring out how to approach proposals that would pause development. He noted that both Acton, the Democratic nominee, and her Republican opponent, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, support some form of a moratorium. That said, candidates differ on what could come next. On her campaign website, Acton has called for greater transparency, ending state incentives for data centers and restricting where they can be built. This is in addition to a moratorium that would give lawmakers time to establish new rules. Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate and prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, has proposed making electricity free for residents of communities with data centers and strictly enforcing clean-air and clean-water rules for the projects. He supports pausing development until state law clearly protects consumers. “Despite my opponents’ claims, I’m not ‘pro-data center,’” he said on his campaign website. “I’m pro-Ohio, and I have a plan to fix the problem.” Conserve Ohio leaders are skeptical of both candidates. They question whether politicians, especially Republicans, can withstand pressure from gigantic tech companies and Trump. The Trump administration has a stake in Ohio’s data center debate because the federal government owns the land that would host the largest data center in the country, Ports Technology Campus near Piketon, which is not far from Adams and Brown counties. When fully built, the project would require 10,000 megawatts of electricity. A proposed natural-gas power plant would supply 9,200 megawatts, with an additional 800 megawatts that may come from other sources. The federal government is working with SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate, to develop the site, with OpenAI expected to be its primary user. Even though Ports Technology Campus is a short drive from where Gerber and Baurichter live, the project is almost too large for them to comprehend, and its federal ownership makes it difficult to challenge, they said. So far, the proposal has drawn little opposition in Pike County, which, like Adams and Brown counties, has struggled to attract jobs for decades. Data center opponents are focusing on several dozen hot spots where resistance is strongest. Conserve Ohio advises local activists on how to obtain public records. In return, local activists help gather signatures for a statewide moratorium vote. As of Oct. 2, the campaign has collected about 140,000 signatures of the roughly 410,000 needed to qualify for the ballot, Baurichter said.The campaign is too late to make the November ballot, meaning the earliest the issue could go before voters is 2027. Polling suggests the campaign has public support. A survey released by Bowling Green State University’s Democracy and Public Policy Network found that 75 percent of residents opposed data center construction in their communities, while 63 percent oppose such projects anywhere in Ohio and 55 percent oppose them anywhere in the United States. Ohio has emerged as one of the country’s leading data center markets, ranking among the top five states for development based on the number of projects and their electricity demand, according to industry research firms. Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate research firm, ranks Columbus third among US data center markets behind Virginia and Portland and Eastern Oregon. Much of the development has happened in New Albany, a suburb northeast of Columbus. Amazon and Meta were among the companies that built large data centers in New Albany in the 2010s. Today, rows of buildings filled with computer equipment, surrounded by muddy construction sites, occupy much of the city, as The Columbus Dispatch showed in a recent video. For data center opponents, New Albany is an example to be avoided. An aerial view of Google’s New Albany data center campus in Central Ohio. Google via Inside Climate News Michael Thomas, CEO of Cleanview, a research firm that tracks power plants and data centers, said that the Columbus-New Albany area is attractive for data centers because of its abundant electricity and close proximity to many of the nation’s population centers. “Ohio has cheaper power than most other states, and historically the state and its utilities have offered generous incentives and easy permitting,” he said in an email. Back on Gerber’s property, she led a tour of Ohio Brush Creek, where the water level was unusually low. The area, she said, has suffered from drought broken up by flooding, making her wary of projects that may affect the region’s water. The campaign has cost Gerber time and added to her stress, but she sees those costs as small compared with what is at stake. She believes this fight will determine the future of Adams County. “It’s overwhelming,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Kristi Noem faces intensifying public scrutiny over her leadership of the Department of Homeland Security. Criticism of the former South Dakota governor has focused on her handling of the killing of Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent and her oversight of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The controversies have prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers—and a small but noteworthy group of Republicans—for her resignation or impeachment. The immediate flashpoint has been the January 24 killing of Pretti, which occurred during ongoing protests in Minneapolis. Noem initially described Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, as a “domestic terrorist,” a narrative repeated by others in the Trump administration. Her account was almost immediately contradicted by numerous videos that showed Pretti was unarmed and restrained when federal agents shot him repeatedly. “She should be out of a job,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said after the videos emerged. While President Donald Trump has publicly said Noem’s position is secure, a number of potential successors have reportedly emerged, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency. > “It’s magic-wand policymaking, where you need a crisis in order for something > to happen.” Noem’s handling of the killing—which came two weeks after a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis fatally shot protestor Renée Good—follows sustained criticism of her management of FEMA. Lawmakers, disaster response experts, and disaster survivors say her policies have slowed emergency response and delayed recovery funding. Long before the crisis in Minnesota, concerns were building over her approach to FEMA preparedness and spending and its response to calamities like last year’s devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country. “It’s a policy of chaotic austerity,” said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies disasters and adaptation. “It’s magic-wand policymaking, where you need a crisis in order for something to happen.” FEMA helps coordinate the response to major disasters like last year’s Los Angeles wildfires, but the agency more often acts like a bank, reimbursing states and cities for their disaster preparedness and recovery spending. When Noem took office, she throttled that spending by, among other things, requiring her personal sign-off on all expenses over $100,000. The pace of disbursements has since slowed to a trickle. Those restrictions reportedly hindered the agency’s response to emergencies like July’s floods in Texas because officials could not pre-position search and rescue teams. The acting head of FEMA at the time, David Richardson, was reportedly unreachable for several hours, and the agency did not answer two-thirds of calls to its hotline. More than 130 people died in the floods.  On Thursday, a coalition of disaster survivors released a “report card” that gave Noem’s leadership an “F.” Brandy Gerstner, a member of that coalition, lost her home and belongings in the Texas flood. She and her family live in the rural community of Sandy Creek and spent three days without power or water waiting for federal assistance. “Official help was scarce,” she said. “Despite that, Kristi Noem and Texas Gov. [Greg] Abbott have described the response as exceptional, a lie that insults the memory of those lost in the floods.” Beyond floods in Texas and fires in Southern California, the United States experienced relatively few major disasters last year. Even so, Noem’s restrictions on FEMA spending has also slowed payments to local governments still recovering from past catastrophes. The reimbursement backlog has reached $17 billion, according to the New York Times—more than the agency spends on such things in a typical  year.  Delays have also affected FEMA’s efforts to reduce the impact of future catastrophes. A Grist analysis found that the agency’s net spending on resilience grants declined over the past three quarters, even as climate-driven disasters intensified nationwide. The nonprofit news outlet NOTUS identified a $1.3 billion backlog of such allocations, the primary source of federal funding for states and cities seeking to harden infrastructure. FEMA terminated another climate resilience program last year, though a court has ordered it to reinstate that program. Former FEMA chief of staff Michael Coen Jr. said Noem’s departure could ease the logjam. “I don’t see another secretary coming in that is going to want to review every single grant,” said Coen, who served in the Obama and Biden administrations. “I would think that most executive leaders…are gonna find that that is micromanagement.” > “There’s plenty of towns in Vermont that would still say they’re waiting.”   Beyond Noem’s leadership lie other questions about the agency’s direction. The Trump administration has yet to nominate a permanent administrator, leaving Karen Evans, a former cybersecurity official, in charge since Richardson departed in November. Agency leaders have suggested firing more than 11,000 employees, many of them contract workers involved in local response and recovery efforts.  The Trump administration’s touted “review council” was set to produce a report on FEMA’s future, but Noem reportedly pared the council’s final report to a fraction of its original length. The panel abruptly cancelled its plans to present the findings in December, and its deadline has been pushed to March. “I think whether she stays or goes, there are huge issues that have been created in the last year at FEMA that have to be resolved quickly ahead of hurricane season,” Labowitz, said, referring to the season to come. Noem appeared to soften her approach last week. The agency paused its planned terminations, and Noem hosted her first in-person briefing with agency employees, whom she attempted to rally ahead of Winter Storm Fern. She also appeared to respond to mounting criticism on Thursday when she announced the release of $2.2 billion in disaster response funds. The money will reimburse states and local governments for repair costs associated with events like Hurricane Helene, the 2023 floods in Vermont, and coastal erosion in Louisiana. A press release frames the allocation as “additional” recovery money, but recipients told Grist that FEMA is merely following standard procedure in granting reimbursements. “We were all quite surprised yesterday when we were informed that the payment was coming as quickly as it came,” said Joe Flynn, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Transportation. FEMA told his agency that it would provide $22 million to help rebuild a fleet garage destroyed in the 2023 floods. “There’s plenty of towns in Vermont that would still say they’re waiting.”   The offer was less than the state had requested, but Flynn accepted it given uncertainty about future funding. “With everything going on in the federal government, an adequately granted award is a bird in the hand,” he said.  The press release appeared to have been composed in haste. It contained multiple typos, including a misspelling of Louisiana as “Louisianna.” The director of the Greeneville Water Commission, after confirming that FEMA will reimburse the cost of rebuilding infrastructure lost to Helene, noted that her own town’s name was spelled wrong as well.  “By the way,” said commission director Laura White, “they spelled Greeneville wrong!”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. After a tumultuous year under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has adopted a new, almost unrecognizable guise—one that tears up environmental rules and cheerleads for coal, gas-guzzling cars, and artificial intelligence. When Donald Trump took power, it was widely anticipated the EPA would loosen pollution rules from sources such as cars, trucks and power plants, as part of a longstanding back and forth between administrations over how strict such standards should be. > “The notion you could be excused from a black letter law just by asking for it > was startling to me—I thought it was a spoof. “ But in recent weeks, critics say the EPA has gone far further by in effect seeking to jettison its raison d’etre, forged since its foundation in 1970, as an environmental regulator. The EPA is poised to remove its own ability to act on the climate crisis and has, separately, unveiled a new monetary worth assigned to human lives when setting air pollution regulations. The current new value? Zero. “The EPA was designed to protect public health and the environment and did a remarkably effective job of that,” said William Reilly, who was EPA administrator under a previous Republican president, George HW Bush. “That record is now at risk and we will see the degradation of air quality in major cities. The administration seems to conceive the purpose of the agency as solely promoting business, which has never been the agency’s mission. That’s revolutionary—it’s not been seen before.” A vivid illustration of this, Reilly said, was when the EPA asked businesses last year to simply email a request to be exempt from air pollution rules. “The notion you could be excused from a black letter law just by asking for it was startling to me,” he said. “I thought it was a spoof. But it did happen.” After returning to the White House, Trump vowed to “unleash” oil and gas drilling and the burgeoning AI industry by sweeping away environmental regulations that the president says only serve a “globalist climate agenda” and a “scam” clean energy sector. The EPA under its current administrator, Lee Zeldin, has zealously followed this lead—initiating 66 environmental rollbacks in the first year, according to a tally compiled by green group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). This list includes paring back limits on pollutants such as mercury and soot coming from cars and power plants, cancelling grants for renewables and aid for communities blighted by toxins, squashing clean water protections, and deleting mentions of the climate crisis from the EPA website. Two particular reversals have shocked former EPA staff and could fundamentally transform the agency. Last year, the agency announced it would rescind the so-called “endangerment finding,” a landmark 2009 determination affirmed by the US Supreme Court and outside experts that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide harm human health. Removing the finding would essentially demolish all climate-related regulations issued by the federal government, a move cheered by pro-fossil fuel companies and Republican-led states that have urged Trump to take drastic action to remove any restraints on global heating. Then, this month, the EPA said that it would no longer consider the cost to human health from two common air pollutants—but would still weigh the cost paid by industry for regulatory compliance. > EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has said he wants to thrust “a dagger straight > into the heart of the climate change religion.” This will hide the outsized economic as well as health benefits of reducing pollution—the EPA had previously calculated that reducing emissions of tiny soot particles, harmful to lung, heart, and brain functions when inhaled, would deliver $77 in benefits for every $1 spent by businesses to comply. “This move ignores the incredible success we’ve had in reducing air pollution while growing our economy,” said Jenni Shearston, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It appears the EPA is putting more importance upon the cost to industry than the cost to the public. I’m worried this will mean more air pollution will be emitted as a result.” An EPA spokesperson said the agency was “taking steps to update” the consideration of human health in regulatory decision making, adding that “legal decisions about standards are guided first by scientific evidence of health risk, not by whether benefits can be assigned a precise dollar value.” They did not clarify how EPA will model these impacts in the future. The spokesperson also defended the decision to roll back the endangerment finding, a decision they said “is the legal prerequisite used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations.” Reilly’s criticism was an example of the “out-of-touch, elitist thinking that failed American taxpayers and held back real environmental progress,” and it was a “propagandist narrative by outlets parroting far-left talking points” to suggest the agency will no longer assess the public health costs of pollution, the spokesperson added. Zeldin, a Republican who was previously a New York congressman, has been an enthusiastic public champion for the Trump administration, appearing dozens of times on Fox News. However, unusually for an EPA administrator, Zeldin appears to be spending less time than predecessors telling Americans about efforts to cut their exposure to toxic air and water. Instead, the EPA chief has said he wants to thrust “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” called for a revival of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, and demanded drivers opt for gasoline, rather than cleaner electric, cars. In a novel move for an environmental regulator, Zeldin has even taken it upon himself to ensure that “making the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world” is a core priority for his agency. When asked on Fox in September whether he agreed with Trump’s attempt to shut down clean energy projects, Zeldin replied: “I am for whatever President Trump is advocating for.” The EPA’s 16,000-strong workforce, meanwhile, has been shrunk through firings and early retirements by a quarter, with entire divisions of the agency—such as the EPA’s scientific arm, the Office of Research and Development—slated for closure. Enforcement actions against rule-breaking polluters have plummeted. > “We no longer use EPA’s authorities to safeguard our water resources—we use > them to protect the interests of industry.” The changes amount to “a war on all fronts that this administration has launched against our health and the safety of our communities and the quality of our environment,” said Matthew Tejada, the former director of the EPA’s environmental justice program. “It is an attempt to completely eliminate EPA and just leave a symbolic husk,” said Tejada, who is now senior vice-president of environmental health at NRDC. Hundreds of EPA staff have revolted at this agenda, signing an open letter last summer accusing the administration of “recklessly undermining” the agency’s mission and promoting a “culture of fear”—a protest that led to 140 staffers being suspended from work. “He answers to capital and nothing else,” Justin Chen, president of AFGE Council 238, which represents EPA employees, said of Zeldin. “The EPA isn’t fulfilling it’s mission and won’t be able to again until the boot is taken off the neck of dedicated civil servants to do their job.” Anonymous testimonials taken from EPA staff by the union suggests a widespread sense of despair has taken hold. “To say that this year has been hard, insulting, demeaning, horrific, stressful…all would be a gross understatement,” said one. Another said Zeldin’s tenure had been “Orwellian.” A third staffer, who works on Great Lakes water quality, added: “We no longer use EPA’s authorities to safeguard our water resources—we use them to protect the interests of industry.” The EPA’s transformation will not immediately plunge the US back into the era that predated the agency’s foundation under Richard Nixon 55 years ago, a time when US cities were routinely shrouded in thick, choking pollution, lead was found in paint and gasoline, and rivers were so riddled with chemicals that they caught fire. But the next three years of the Trump administration threaten to erode much of the progress made since this time, warned Jeremy Symons, a former EPA policy adviser. “EPA’s current leadership has abandoned EPA’s mission to protect human health and safety. Human lives don’t count. Childhood asthma doesn’t count. It is a shameful abdication of EPA’s responsibility to protect Americans from harm,” he said. “Under this administration, the Environmental Protection Agency is now the Environmental Pollution Agency, helping polluters at the expense of human health.” The EPA said it rejects this criticism, pointing to a list of what it says are 500 environmental “wins” achieved in the first year of Trump’s term, including a “historic new agreement with Mexico to permanently tackle the Tijuana River sewage crisis, major action to regulate high-risk phthalate chemicals, accelerated enforcement to block foreign polluters, and billions of dollars directed toward reducing lead in drinking water.” “Contrary to the suggestion that the administrator’s focus is misplaced, talking about affordable energy and technology leadership directly supports the EPA’s mission,” the EPA spokesperson said. “Clean air and water depend on stable infrastructure, reliable energy, and innovation that allows us to reduce pollution more efficiently. By cutting red tape, improving oversight, and ensuring sound use of taxpayer dollars, the Trump EPA is building the foundation for long-term environmental and economic health.”

The Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to place a “black-box” warning—a high-danger label only used to flag risk of death, severe harm, or incapacitation—on Covid vaccines, CNN has reported.  According to the Friday CNN report, the initiative to include the warning—part of a range of efforts by Trump administration health officials to limit access to, public support for, and uptake of Covid shots and other vaccinations—is being led by FDA chief medical and scientific officer Vinay Prasad, who is also director of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. The plan to implement the warnings is expected to be made public by the end of December. Prasad has a long history of dismissing the pandemic, claiming in 2021 that Covid was not more harmful to children than the common flu. Health experts have continued to voice concerns that adding such a warning label may further reduce access to Covid vaccines by making clinicians more hesitant to recommend shots to groups who are at risk for severe Covid. Vaccines with black box warnings are particularly rare because vaccines are only approved after especially extensive safety and efficacy checks.  The news follows reporting earlier this week that the FDA is investigating whether Covid vaccines are linked to deaths in adults, continuing a campaign public health experts have viewed with extreme skepticism. Prasad wrote to FDA staffers in a November letter that “at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” without specific evidence. A CDC study released Thursday found that the 2024-2025 Covid vaccine was approximately 76 percent effective against emergency and urgent care visits in children aged 9 months to 4 years, and 56 percent effective for children 5-17 years old, compared to those who didn’t get the updated vaccine.  But since June, CDC recommendations have stated that “parents of children ages 6 months to 17 years should discuss the benefits of vaccination with their doctor.” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s FDA has already reversed previous federal policy on Covid vaccines, restricting the most recent vaccineto people who are at elevated risk due to age or an underlying health condition. Kennedy said in November that he instructed CDC to retract its long-held public stance that vaccines do not cause autism despite evidence to the contrary. (CDC’s website now claims that the assertion that vaccines do not cause autism is not “evidence-based.”) Health experts told my colleagues Kiera Butler and Anna Merlan earlier this year that RFK and his allies’ anti-vaccine decisions open the door to taking essential drugs off the market. “Kennedy’s crusade will create even more doubt over vaccines’ effectiveness, as he uses his position to broadcast and legitimize debunked ideas about their risks,” they wrote. “In the end, experts warn, it will be patients who suffer.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Years of underfunding and new delays in federal grantmaking threaten buoys and ocean monitoring assets run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that protect fishermen, cargo ships and endangered species across the country. With key grant deadlines now passed and new awards still pending, regional operators warn that some of those services could go dark at the peak of hurricane season. In the Northeast Channel, where warm, salty Gulf Stream waters collide with frigid meltwater from the Arctic, sensors that hung from a buoy like ornaments on a tree were stationed at the entrance to the Gulf of Maine. The sensors fed scientists and forecasters rare data from one of the Atlantic’s strangest crossroads. But in 2022, the buoy’s operator, the Northeast Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (NERACOOS), was forced to pull it from the water as stagnant federal funding made routine servicing impossible. Faced with hard choices, the group prioritized buoys closer to shore that are more critical for marine safety over the Northeast Channel buoy, which primarily supported research. Unlike many NOAA programs, the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS)—“the eyes of our ocean,” a network of regional associations that collect and track ocean data—enjoys bipartisan support in Congress. But year after year, federal appropriations have fallen short of what the program needs to properly service and maintain its buoys, sensors, gliders, and other equipment.   After the program was authorized by Congress in 2009, an independent study found that the program would need about $715 million to deliver on lawmakers’ vision. Since that study, the most the program has received is $42.5 million—a level it has effectively been stuck at for years. That number was always ambitious and would require slow, steady growth, according to Kristen Yarincik, executive director of the IOOS Association, a nonprofit that represents the 11 regional IOOS associations. But flat funding in recent years, combined with inflation and rising equipment costs, has made routine servicing and upgrades increasingly difficult. > “If one of our buoys goes offline, I hear about it from fishermen [first]. > What that tells me is that even a short outage really affects people.” This year, federal appropriations may offer some relief, matching the IOSS Association’s $56 million request—but only if the money actually moves on time. IOOS regions operate on five-year cooperative agreements with NOAA; the current agreements, covering 2021–2026, end on June 30 for most regions. IOOS sources say the next round of funding may be delayed by new layers of federal review within the Department of Commerce and the Office of Management and Budget. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Congress has not passed a full-year appropriations package, leaving agencies to operate under the president’s budget proposal, which zeroes out IOOS. “It’s so important that Congress finalize a full-year appropriations package for 2026 as soon as possible,” said Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), a member of the House Committee on Appropriations. “Both the House and the Senate have proposed a funding increase for IOOS Regional Observations, and it’s my sincere hope that both chambers will push the administration to adopt these spending levels.” Regional associations say they need to submit proposals by the end of January. Because Notice of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) to federal contractors are legally required to stay open for about 60 days, they need to have been published by the end of November to avoid problems next summer, according to Yarincik. “After that, the timeline, and therefore continuity of data collection, becomes at risk,” she said. As of early December, those NOFOs still have not been released. The question now is how long awards will be delayed, and how long a funding gap may persist come July. Once proposals are submitted, NOAA must still review, negotiate, and approve awards—a process that has been slowing under new rules requiring the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, to personally sign off on grants over $100,000. “They are a ways behind on this,” said Jake Kritzer, executive director of NERACOOS. According to Kritzer and Yarincik, NOFOs are typically published a year before the start date, making this round more than six months late. If a funding gap arises because of the delay, it would only exacerbate problems IOOS regional associations are already struggling with. > A funding gap next summer could hit just as hurricane season reaches its > height. In the Northeast, buoys lobstermen and cargo ships rely on are starting to show their age, Kritzer said. “Think of it like a car,” he said. “It may last 10 or 20 years, but over time the maintenance becomes more and more expensive.” And replacing an old buoy requires even more money up front. While the Gulf of Maine has lost a number of buoys, those that remain aren’t being serviced frequently enough. Buoys that should be serviced five times a year may see only a single visit, according to Kritzer. As sensors float at different depths, salt and biofouling buildup can degrade data quality, and sometimes the instruments go dark for hours or even days. “If one of our buoys goes offline, I hear about it from fishermen before our data guys or sensor technicians,” Kritzer said. “What that tells me is that even a short outage really affects people.” Fishermen use subsurface temperature data to find the most cost-effective places to fish and rely even more on IOOS data to decide whether it’s safe to leave the dock at all. “Maine lobstermen monitor the buoy readings and NERACOOS data products daily to understand sea conditions, make informed decisions about when it is safe to leave the dock, and be prepared for the conditions they will face at sea,” the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) said in a statement. “It directly impacts their ability to determine whether or not it is safe to go fishing.” The association also noted that NERACOOS data helps protect lobster populations and other sea life, including endangered whales, from human impacts. Sensors that monitor algal blooms and zooplankton help ensure lobsters have enough prey to feed on. Water-quality monitoring tracks pollution that can harm marine life. And acoustic monitoring systems help keep ships away from migrating whales. Cargo ships depend on that same real-time wave and wind data to plan safe transit in and out of port, avoid dangerous seas, and reduce costly delays. “Congress and NOAA should continue to fund and efficiently administer the IOOS and other navigation programs for the safe and efficient operations of our maritime industry,” said a representative from the American Association of Port Authorities. IOOS data supplements the National Weather Service’s own observation networks, sharpening coastal forecasts for local communities. The National Weather Service can still draw on its radars, satellites and other federal, military and private data, but IOOS-backed tide gauges and wave buoys help monitor flood risk and storm surge—data that allows emergency management to make more informed decisions.  IOOS officials warn that if regional systems go dark, many coastal forecasts would become less precise and less locally tuned. But the work that allows lobstermen to empty their traps, cargo ships to safely reach port, and coastal communities to get accurate flood warnings depends on steady funding. Supplementary funding sources can help keep IOOS regions afloat if a funding gap is realized, but IOOS leaders warn even a one- to two-month lapse in federal support could delay maintenance and force key services to go dark. If that happens, Yarincik said, “the availability of real-time data and accuracy of data products will be reduced, at a minimum, and this will impact navigational safety for commercial shipping, fishermen and recreational boaters; local flood monitoring for coastal communities; and weather forecasting, especially for hurricane intensity forecasts.”  IOOS helps supply the water-temperature data forecasters use to gauge how intense hurricanes may become. A funding gap next summer could hit just as hurricane season reaches its height, leaving lives and entire coastal communities vulnerable.

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Each year, the Sweeney Center for Public Policy at Rowan University in New Jersey hosts a conference on the state’s current and future energy landscape. In 2023 and 2024, the gatherings focused heavily on the rapidly accelerating development of offshore wind, which state officials then predicted would power some 2.5 million homes—about two-thirds of the state’s total housing units—by 2030. At this year’s event, however, the industry was barely mentioned, and when it was, its one-time advocates were subdued and almost eulogistic.   Tim Sullivan, the head of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, which had been closely involved with the state’s efforts to develop offshore wind, sounded wistful. “I remain optimistic and confident that it gets done sometime in our lifetime,” he told the conference. Optimism about the future of US offshore wind has collapsed since President Trump, a vehement critic of the industry, returned to office in January. In the ensuing nine months, his administration has accelerated the end of federal tax credits for wind development, imposed tariffs on turbines and other needed parts, and eliminated funds for building onshore port facilities for servicing wind farms.  > Analysts say the administration’s policies will lead to $114 billion in > offshore wind investments being canceled or delayed. This has had a devastating effect, especially on the East Coast, where just two years ago some 30 utility-scale wind farm lease areas, spread across the continental shelf waters from Maine to South Carolina, were in the permitting and planning stages of development. According to a July 2024 report by the American Clean Power Association, investment in US offshore wind projects was predicted to hit $65 billion by 2030. By 2050, the report said, the country could be generating 86,000 megawatts of offshore-wind-generated electricity, enough to power roughly 40 million homes.  But in an April report, the market research firm BloombergNEF forecast a 56 percent decrease in offshore wind development by 2035 compared to its prediction the previous year. This reduction will delay or cancel some $114 billion in offshore wind investments, according to the report.  What remains of American offshore wind activity today are just seven farms off the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coasts. The country’s first wind farm to be finished was a small, five-turbine array off Rhode Island’s Block Island, which became fully operational in 2016. The US’s first utility-scale farm, South Fork, came online just two years ago; it is located off Long Island, New York, and consists of 12 turbines capable of powering up to 70,000 homes. The remaining five farms are still under construction. Massachusetts’ Vineyard Wind, located about 15 miles off the coast off Martha’s Vineyard, is the furthest along; about half of the project’s planned 62 turbines have been installed and are sending power to the grid. Connecticut and Rhode Island’s shared farm, Revolution Wind, has installed about 70 percent of its planned 65 turbines. New York’s Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind, located off western and eastern Long Island, respectively, have begun preparing the seabed for turbine and transmission cable installation. Further south, the 176-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, located about 25 miles outside the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, is expected to begin sending power to the state’s grid early next year.  Together, and running at full capacity, these seven farms should be able to power 2.6 million homes. That’s a substantial achievement for a country that had no offshore wind a decade ago. But it is a far cry from the Biden Administration’s goal of 10 million homes by 2030.  Opposing wind power of all kinds has been a cornerstone of President Trump’s domestic energy policy. On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order temporarily withdrawing “all areas on the outer continental shelf from offshore wind leasing.” The order also required a review of the federal government’s leasing and permitting processes for wind projects.  Following Trump’s order, the myriad federal agencies with a hand in regulating offshore wind moved quickly. In March, the EPA revoked the air quality permit for Atlantic Shores, a partnership between the oil giant Shell and the renewable energy company EDF Group, which was planning a project off the southern New Jersey coast that could have had up to 200 turbines. The EPA’s action was enough for Atlantic Shores to pull the plug on the whole endeavor. In a statement to E&E News following the project’s cancellation, a spokesperson for Shell said the company “will not lead new offshore wind developments.” And, just last week, another major oil company, BP, and its partner Jera Nex announced that they were pausing its only planned US wind farm, Beacon, located off the Massachusetts coast.  In April, the Interior Department had issued a stop-work order to Empire Wind, the 54-turbine project in the early stages of development off Long Island, New York. Other than an almost entirely redacted 36-page draft analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, presumably about Empire Wind’s impact on fisheries, no other information on the cause of the order was provided. Another stop order came in August, this time to Revolution Wind, the nearly completed 65-turbine farm located off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. This time, the issuing agency was the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which cited concerns about Revolution’s impact on national security. Other than the two-page order itself, BOEM provided no documentation justifying the decision.  > Offshore wind development had already faced intense opposition from coastal > communities and the fishing industry. After direct negotiations between New York’s governor and top Trump administration officials, Empire Wind was allowed to resume construction in May. Revolution Wind was able to restart in September following an injunction issued by a federal judge. But significant economic damage was done. According to Kris Ohleth, director of the research group Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, the stop-work orders led to “several hundred people a day who are no longer working” and weekly losses for the companies that amounted to $20-30 million. Offshore wind developers right now “are essentially riding it out by laying off staff and going back to skeleton crews,” she said.  Under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the budget package passed by Congress in July, Biden-era federal tax credits for wind and solar developers, which would have expired no earlier than 2032, will now end in July 2026. This drastically shortened deadline spelled the end for the dozens of proposed offshore wind projects that were still in the planning stages, because, without the tax credits, they would be too expensive to build and maintain. To further jack up costs, the administration imposed a 50 percent tariff on wind turbine parts and components, most of which are produced in Europe and China.  In addition to tax credits, the Biden administration had made a massive investment in the onshore infrastructure to service the wind farms. Thirteen port projects were being built on both US coasts, most of which were in the Northeast. The facilities would have served as marshalling grounds for the turbines’ massive towers, blades, and engines before being loaded onto specially built transport ships. Other sites would have manufactured some of the parts needed to construct and service the turbines, transmission stations, and electrical cables.  But, in August, Sean Duffy, the secretary of the Department of Transportation, canceled $679 million in funding for offshore wind, $177 million of which was designated for port development. The money would instead be redirected to ship building. “Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” Duffy said.  No onshore location is at more risk than New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the largest commercial fishing port in the US has been steadily transforming over the past decade into an offshore wind marshalling and manufacturing hub. Expansion plans for New Bedford have been scrapped or are on hold. “This was going to be a place that provided a substantial amount of jobs for a part of New England that is economically challenged,” said Elizabeth Wilson, a professor at Dartmouth College who studies the evolution of US offshore wind energy. “You have all of these manufacturing facilities that were planned but aren’t happening, so all of those jobs no longer exist.” > “Demand for electricity is growing nationally, driven by data centers that > power the digital economy,” says a grid operator. To be sure, the US offshore wind industry was already facing mounting challenges before Trump returned to office this year.  During the Biden years, offshore wind development was pushed along at breakneck speed. BOEM held six auctions that carved out over 30 offshore wind lease areas amounting to millions of acres of seafloor. In turn, states courted the streams of developers who had purchased the leases and needed to connect their farms to onshore transmission stations. In the case of some projects, seabed surveying—which uses sonar that could be loud enough to harm marine species, especially whales and dolphins—was conducted before environmental impact statements were done. This ignited intense opposition from coastal communities and the fishing industry. Commercial fishermen argued that large swaths of their lucrative grounds would become off-limits due to habitat destruction and the risk of fishing gear being lost or damaged from snagging on transmission cables or other infrastructure. Some scientists and environmentalists, who otherwise supported clean energy, raised concerns about the cumulative impacts of thousands of huge, noisy turbines operating in the middle of the migration routes of critical marine and avian species.  Most critically, though, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine splintered the global supply chain, hiking the prices of many of the components needed for offshore wind development. The manufacturers were the first to back out of the US market—in 2023, Siemens Gamesa scrapped plans to build turbine blades in Virginia, while turbine engine manufacturer Vestas failed to establish a facility at a New Jersey port that would have assembled nacelles—engines— for turbines. And, in January, the Italy-based cable manufacturer Prysmian informed Massachusetts that it wouldn’t be moving forward with plans to repurpose a plant that once housed a coal-fired power generator into an offshore wind transmission cable factory.  The most significant blow came in New Jersey in 2023, when the Danish developer Ørsted canceled two massive projects off the state’s southern coast. Rather than endure the increasingly turbulent market conditions and a relentless campaign from opposition groups, Ørsted wrote off $4 billion in losses and focused on its smaller New York projects, Revolution and Sunrise Winds. After Atlantic Shores pulled the plug on its farm earlier this year, New Jersey’s offshore wind portfolio was reduced to zero.  The sinking fate of the US offshore wind industry comes at an inflection point for energy producers and providers on the East Coast and elsewhere in the country. At the Rowan University conference, Asim Haque, a senior vice president at PJM Interconnected, the Northeast US’s grid operator and the largest in the country, noted that, after years of procuring energy supply far above projected demand, PJM just barely managed to secure the capacity it predicts it will need for 2026-27.  > “Our current level of political and regulatory volatility does not support > large projects that take a long time to build,” an expert says. This, Haque said, is due to a confluence of factors. “Demand for electricity is growing nationally, driven by data centers that power the digital economy and the development of artificial intelligence,” he said in an interview. At the same time, Haque added, plants that generated power from fossil fuels or nuclear closed because they had either reached the end of the life cycle or were prematurely shuttered by state governments pushing to transition to renewable sources. Many of the states in PJM’s footprint are a part of a regional power sharing agreement, which has allowed certain ones, like New Jersey, long unable to produce enough of the electricity it needs on its own, to buy cheap power from neighboring states with energy surpluses. (In 2024, the state imported more than 35 percent of its power.) Those days appear over. With the huge surge in demand, Haque said, states are keeping much more of their energy for themselves. High demand and limited supply, of course, equal rate hikes.  Ultimately, Haque’s message, as well as those of the other speakers at the Rowan conference, emphasized the need for an all-of-the-above approach to energy—a point that would have been anathema in previous years, when expectations for offshore wind and other renewable sources were high. “These policy swings over the last four or five years, for a grid operator that has to actually make sure that an electron is generated and delivered in real-time across a many-million-mile transmission system [that’s] trying to serve 67 million consumers—it’s very tough,” he said.  Wilson, the Dartmouth professor, said the effort to launch US offshore wind provides lessons about the country’s ability to build huge, modern infrastructure of any kind.  “Our current level of political and regulatory volatility does not support large projects that take a long time to build and cost billions of dollars,” Wilson said. “Having a policy system that changes day-to-day doesn’t allow you to develop and invest in something that takes a decade to build.” In the meantime, zero carbon energy advocates are facing a tough reality. “PJM doesn’t pick and choose its resource mix,” Haque said of his company. “We operate the grid based on what we’ve got.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Coal miners, their family members, and union representatives rallied outside of the US Department of Labor’s headquarters in Washington one morning early last week, urging the Trump administration to enforce a rule that was meant to protect miners from serious health complications but has been on hold for months. The rally, which included members of the National Black Lung Association and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), sought to highlight how lax industry standards for exposure to dangerous substances have impacted workers, and demand the government move forward with stricter protections. A new Biden-era rule, which went into effect in June 2024, was meant to limit miners’ exposure to silica dust, which is released during the mining process. Those tiny silica particles can cause dangerous and irreversible damage to miners’ health, including black lung, silicosis, lung cancer and other diseases. “If we don’t [enforce the rule], this is just going to be an earlier death sentence for our miners,” said Vonda Robinson, vice president of the National Black Lung Association. “Twenty-eight years old, 30, 35 years old and passing away—that shouldn’t be.” > “Put a pillow over your face, and that’s how these coal miners breathe. They > smother every day.” The rule requires mining companies to lower exposure limits for silica to half the previously permitted amount. It also requires mine operators to monitor workers’ exposures to silica dust, compel them to provide periodic health examinations at no cost to miners and update standards for respiratory protection. For Robinson and many of the attendees, the fight is personal. Robinson’s husband was diagnosed with black lung at 47 years old and is now “totally disabled,” she said. Some attendees at the rally carried portable oxygen machines, while others held up pictures of loved ones who had died from the disease. Black lung has been on the rise in the past 20 years, despite previously having been on the decline since the 1970s. In central Appalachia, the disease now affects one in five miners with 25 years of mining experience, according to the UMWA. Coal mines were originally required to comply with the new rule by April 14, 2025. However, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) pushed back that deadline by four months just days before it was set to be implemented, citing the administration’s restructuring of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health as the reason for the pause. “Given the unforeseen NIOSH restructuring, and other technical reasons, MSHA offers this four-month temporary pause to provide time for operators to secure necessary equipment and otherwise come into compliance,” MSHA said at the time. Legal challenges filed by industry groups, including the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association (NSSGA) and the National Mining Association (NMA), prompted the Eighth US Circuit Court of Appeals to issue a temporary stay halting enforcement of the rule. In a statement, NMA spokesperson Ashley Burke said that the association is “absolutely supportive of the new lower levels,” but that the rule “needs to allow for the use of administrative controls and personal protective equipment for compliance with the standard to supplement and enhance engineering controls.” “The MSHA rule must align with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s silica rule on methods of compliance,” Burke said, adding that OSHA “has adopted a strict but workable approach to achieve these same silica levels; we are asking for consistency across government.” Critics have said that those measures—such as rotating shifts and the use of respirators—are insufficient, arguing the practices would only increase the number of workers exposed to the dust and don’t sufficiently protect miners. The rule instead requires mining companies to implement engineering controls, such as ventilation and water sprays, as the primary method to meet lower exposure limits. > “President Trump loves to use coal miners as political props. But when the > cameras are turned off, he couldn’t care less.” MSHA chose not to defend the rule in court, instead asking the Eighth Circuit in August to keep the case on hold as it discusses a potential settlement with the industry groups. The agency also successfully urged the court to reject attempts by the American Thoracic Society, UMWA and United Steelworkers to intervene in the case in defense of the rule. The administration has now requested a third delay from the court due to the federal government shutdown. To some of those present at Tuesday’s rally, those moves represented a backslide on Trump’s promises to support coal workers. Trump is a vocal ally of the coal industry and has taken steps to boost production of the fuel in his first months in office. The president’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act mandated that millions of acres of federal lands be made available for mining, and his administration has consistently sought to prop up the industry in executive and regulatory actions. “President Trump said we’re going to dig, baby dig,” said Robinson. “OK, we can do that, but let’s take care of the health and safety of our miners.” “I would ask him—put a pillow over your face, and that’s how these coal miners breathe. They smother every day,” Robinson said. In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said that “President Trump cares deeply about unleashing America’s energy potential, as well as standing up for those who fuel our country, such as hardworking coal miners.” “Blue collar Americans played a key role in sending President Trump back to the White House because they know he has their back, and with the help of great leaders across the administration…he is working tirelessly to deliver policies that improve the livelihoods of working families across the nation,” Kelly said. But Jason Walsh, a former Obama administration official and executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental organizations, said that Trump’s pro-coal rhetoric represented empty promises to the workers underpinning the industry. “President Trump loves to use coal miners as political props. But when the cameras are turned off, he couldn’t care less whether they’re sick or healthy,” Walsh said. “This is a guy who digs coal, loves coal, calls it beautiful. But what he really digs is coal industry profits. He really digs PAC checks from coal company CEOs. He couldn’t care less about miners or the communities they live in.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Gavin Newsom vetoed a California bill that was set to ban the sale of cookware and other consumer goods manufactured with PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” human-made compounds linked to a range of health issues. The governor’s decision on Monday followed months of debate and advocacy, including from high-profile celebrity chefs such as Thomas Keller and Rachael Ray, who argued that nonstick cookware made with PFAS, when manufactured responsibly, can be safe and effective and urged lawmakers to vote against the proposal. Newsom said in a statement that the legislation was “well-intentioned” but would affect too broad a swath of products and would result in a “sizable and rapid shift” of cooking products available in the state. “I am deeply concerned about the impact this bill would have on the availability of affordable options in cooking products,” Newsom wrote, adding that the state “must carefully consider” the consequences of a dramatic shift in available products. Concerns over the use of PFAS, chemicals used to make cookware and other items non-stick and water-resistant, have grown significantly in recent years. Called “forever chemicals,” because they do not break down naturally, PFAS are used in non-stick cookware, waterproof mascara and dental floss, among other items. They have been linked to a number of health issues, with some linked to high cholesterol, reproductive issues and cancer. A United States Geological Survey study in 2023 detected the chemicals in almost half the country’s tap water. Under the bill approved by California’s legislature, the state by 2030 would have banned the sale or distribution of goods, including cleaning products, cookware, floss, food packaging and ski wax, with “intentionally added” PFAS. The bill had the support of major environmental groups, as well as opposition from influential figures, such as Ray and Keller, and high-profile chefs who argued it would place an unfair burden on restaurants. Ray argued the focus should be on educating consumers rather than eliminating the products. “Removing access to these products without providing fact-based context could hurt the very people we’re trying to protect,” Ray said. Ben Allen, the state senator who introduced the legislation, told the Los Angeles Times he planned to keep working on the issue. “We are obviously disappointed,” he told the newspaper. “We know there are safer alternatives—[but] I understand there were strong voices on both sides on this topic.” Over the weekend, Newsom also vetoed legislation focused on racial justice, including a bill that would allowed universities to give the descendants of enslaved people preference in admissions preference, while approving funding for a reparations study. He also signed a bill allowing a wide range of family members to care for children if the federal government deports their parents.

In an exclusive story on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported on the Trump administration’s plans to weaponize the IRS, much as he has weaponized the Department of Justice, against his perceived enemies. “Sweeping changes” are planned, the Journal reported, citing anonymous sources, “that would allow the agency to pursue criminal inquiries of left-leaning groups more easily.” > A senior IRS official involved in the effort has drawn up a list of potential > targets that includes major Democratic donors, some of the people said. A key aspect of the changes is giving President Donald Trump’s political appointees control over the IRS’s criminal investigations division. Gary Shapley, an adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, will take the reins, per the Journal. In April, Shapley, a former IRS agent, was named acting commissioner at the behest of Elon Musk, and then fired days later after Bessent objected. He will now reportedly work to weaken the role of career IRS lawyers in investigations, paving the way for politically motivated probes of people and groups Trump and his allies dislike. Shapley is already collecting a target list of progressive donors and groups, the paper reported, including, not surprisingly, billionaire George Soros, that bogeyman of right-wing conservatives, and groups with ties to his Open Society Foundations. > “I’ve been speaking to friends…who are just absolutely appalled at at this, > and in shock that this would materialize.” “This is, without doubt, a very troubling development,” John Koskinen, who served as IRS commissioner under President Barack Obama and at the beginning of Trump’s first administration, told me in an email. Such investigations could be used not only in pursuit of criminal cases, but also as a rationale for yanking a progressive organization’s tax-exempt status, eliminating the ability of its donors to take a tax deduction—a potential death knell for any nonprofit group’s ability to survive and support its mission. (During the 1980s, the Reagan administration tried doing this to Mother Jones. Spoiler alert: We won.) Partisan IRS enforcement also happens to be illegal. “Section 7217 of the US Criminal Code prohibits the president or anyone in the White House from suggesting or ordering an IRS audit,” Koskinen says. “Putting administration loyalists in charge of the IRS generally and the criminal division in particular with the expressed aim of auditing individual taxpayers or trying to eliminate the tax exemption of nonprofits the administration does not approve of certainly violates the spirit if not the letter of the Criminal Code.” “We’ve been talking about this a lot,” says a corporate lawyer who specializes in criminal tax defense and asked for anonymity to protect his clients from potential retribution by the administration. “I’ve been speaking to friends of mine who used to work in the government, who believed in the system, and who are just absolutely appalled at at this, and in shock that this would materialize.” If that lawyer were defending one of these liberal entities—especially one that Trump and his minions have threatened in the past, like the Ford Foundation—he would make the case that the government was practicing selective prosecution: “There is a slim line of authority a defendant could use to argue here, and of course, the danger here is that the government will forum shop.” That is, the Justice Department would file the case in a judicial circuit whose judges were more likely to side with the administration. “But this seems like a situation,” the attorney adds, “where a lot of juries might rebel at what might be perceived as an overreach of government authority,” even if they believe the defendant is guilty: We’re going to find this person not guilty, and F you for bringing this case! Even if the group or individual prevails in court, however, the time and money required to defend against such actions is a major drain on resources—and a distraction from a group’s charitable mission. So even if a vindictive government loses in the courtroom, it still wins by harassing its foes. This whole episode, assuming the administration moves ahead with its plans, represents a wild about-face. After taking over the House in 2010, congressional Republicans were so incensed by the IRS’s investigation of sketchy tea party groups under Obama that they set about gutting the IRS’s enforcement budget, and launched a series of dog-and-pony House hearings to justify further cuts. Representing the government at one 2015 hearing was Koskinen, who had described the evisceration of his budget as “a tax cut for tax cheats.” Indeed, those cuts decimated the taxman’s ability to conduct audits of wealthy, sophisticated individuals and businesses. A Democratic-led Congress finally restored ample funding under President Joe Biden—an effort Republicans tried to defeat by spreading disinformation. But the GOP has since succeeded in rescinding the lion’s share, not to mention the Trump administration’s layoffs of virtually all IRS employees hired under Biden, which included lawyers capable of tackling those high-level audits. If the IRS goes after liberal groups as promised, another former agency higher-up told me, it would fall upon the Treasury Department’s Office of the Inspector General (TOIG) to investigate complaints and determine whether there was, in fact, improper politicization of tax enforcement. But in this era of rampant abnormality, it’s unclear that the normal oversight process will stand. Soon after taking office, Trump unceremoniously fired inspectors general throughout the government. On the list for dismissal was Loren Sciurba, a career deputy inspector general then standing in at TOIG, which didn’t have a confirmed chief. When that office reached out to the White House for clarification on its intent, noting that Sciurba wasn’t even in an “acting” role, it got no reply, and Sciurba apparently stayed on—he’s still listed as IG on the office’s website. (Sciurba did not respond to a message left for him at home.) Regardless of the outcome, the mere appearance that the IRS is willing to do the administration’s bidding “will undermine the average taxpayer’s confidence that the IRS is acting solely on the merits of the case rather than pursuing a political vendetta when they are contacted by the IRS,” Koskinen says.   “The fear generated by this action is totally inconsistent with the goal of having a government that follows the law rather than doing whatever it pleases or is asked to do by the president,” he continues. And the administration’s goal, per the Wall Street Journal, of trying “to remove to the extent possible the Chief Counsel’s office from criminal enforcement indicates that following the law is not a goal.”

Months before hundreds of federal immigration agents raided a rundown apartment complex in Chicago—some even rappelling onto the roof from Blackhawk helicopters in the early hours of September 30—local law enforcement had repeatedly visited the building to try to remove some immigrants living there, according to a longtime tenant. The immigrants, many from Venezuela, had fallen behind on rent, and the landlord, a real estate investor from Wisconsin, wanted them gone. During multiple visits, officers from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office locked some of the people out of their units, says Cassandra Murray, 55, a US citizen who lived on the building’s fourth floor for about a decade. The place was in dire need of renovations—mold, mice, broken elevators, and a putrid stench were common—but despite the barely habitable conditions, some of the evicted families returned soon after the deputies left. “I felt sorry for them, especially the women with children, because I could tell these people had nowhere to go,” Murray told me. The raid at 7500 S. South Shore Drive became a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s militarized effort to detain and deport immigrants. Nearly 300 federal officers from Border Patrol, the FBI, and other agencies arrested 37 people, forcibly separating children from their parents and pulling residents into vans outside. Afterward, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who criticized the operation, urged state agencies to investigate whether agents had used excessive force against kids in the building or infringed on people’s rights But the story of the raid is not only a story about aggressive agents; it is also a story about the struggles asylum seekers face while seeking safe and affordable housing. Some of the Venezuelans at 7500 S. South Shore were reportedly in the building without a lease; others had moved in with temporary rental assistance from a state program, but that funding ended and city-run shelters for immigrants had closed. “They were all just looking for somewhere to stay,” says Murray. To understand the raid, you need to rewind to 2022, when Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott began busing migrants to so-called sanctuary cities, including Chicago, to protest the Biden administration’s immigration policies. At the height of Abbott’s political stunt, 12 to 15 busloads of immigrants were arriving in Chicago every day—about 28,000 people by late 2023, and 50,000 by late 2024. Many slept on the floors of police stations or at O’Hare airport, waiting for space in shelters. Resettling the new arrivals was a financial strain: In November 2023, Chicago’s City Council allocated $150 million and the state chipped in another $160 million, on top of the $176 million that had already been given by the city, state, and federal governments. The funding would go toward an intake center and winterized tent shelters that could hold 2,000 migrants for up to six months at a time. But these were temporary solutions: By late 2024, as border crossings from Mexico plummeted, the city prepared to close the shelters in January 2025. Instead, Chicago announced a new “unified” shelter system that would house migrants together with non-migrants experiencing homelessness. “This will help to ensure that we have a single and equitable shelter system for anyone,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said at the time. > “That building was fucked up before the raid,” says a tenant organizer. “Now > you’ve got this horrific thing that happened.” There were downsides: Migrants who had been in the United States for longer than 30 days were no longer eligible for placement in a shelter. And there wouldn’t be enough beds for everyone. “Could this lead to people on the street?” Johnson added. “I don’t want to see anyone lose, right? But the harsh reality is that we can do what we can afford. We’ve been stretched to the limits.” In 2022, the state had also created a program to help transition immigrants from shelters to apartments; the Asylum Seeker Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ASERAP) provided up to six months of rental assistance. But this, too, was temporary. In 2023, six months of rental assistance was reduced to three months, sparking concerns that people might be forced back onto the streets if their immigration cases stalled and they didn’t have work permits yet. Three months “is such a short amount of time,” Charlotte Long, then a housing specialist connecting migrants with apartments, told Block Club Chicago. By mid-2024, ASERAP, which also relied on federal funding, was no longer taking applications. The Illinois Department of Human Services told me that the program assisted more than 6,600 households from 2022 to mid-2024. The state did not track what happened to immigrants after they were placed in apartments and their financial assistance ran out. But some were clearly struggling. In 2024, Injustice Watch reported that Illinois officials had placed recent Venezuelan arrivals in an apartment in Woodlawn that city officials had taken to court over unsafe conditions, such as rats and flooding. Others wound up in the South Shore neighborhood—the “eviction capital” of Chicago, as organizer Dixon Romeo, from the group Southside Together, put it to me. In fact, WBEZ reported that asylum seekers receiving state rental assistance were more likely to end up in the 60649 zip code, which includes South Shore, than anywhere else in the city. Broken and boarded up windows at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. Federal agents raided the building during the early morning hours of September 30. Residents were awaken by flash-bang grenades and helicopters.Joshua Lott/The Washington Post/Getty The apartment complex at 7500 S. South Shore was in disarray long before federal agents tore it apart. For years, tenants’ maintenance requests were ignored by management. In 2024, Jonah Karsh of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization started helping residents demand improvements, including having their gas turned on so they could cook. But it was an uphill battle. City lawyers eventually sued the owner’s companies for a long list of code violations, noting in court documents that fire extinguishers were missing and “all stairways are filthy with strong smell of urine.” “It’s difficult to walk through without swallowing a gnat,” reporters for WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times wrote after they visited the site. “It’s dimly lit inside and completely dark in some corners. A stray cat roams the second floor, likely hunting the mice or cockroaches that residents say infest the building…Elevators are out of order and filled with garbage…Water pours through the ceiling of one unit, pooling below.” “That building was fucked up before the raid,” says Romeo, the organizer at Southside Together, who has canvassed tenants there. “City, state, county, federal government—everybody has a role in why that building looks like it does. Now you’ve got this horrific thing that happened and there’s a lot of light on the situation,” he adds, “but there are buildings like that in every city in America, whether they’re raided by ICE or not. There are housing issues here.” > According to news reports, one resident saw someone he believed to be a worker > from the building photographing units “where the Venezuelans lived.” The 130-unit complex is owned by Trinity Flood, the Wisconsin real estate investor, who purchased it in 2020, along with two other distressed South Side buildings. After the sale, she sued the previous owners, alleging they’d overcharged her and hadn’t informed her about all the renovation needs, or that the apartment required 24-hour security, which Flood claimed would cost $15,000 a month. (The suit was settled in 2023, according to The Real Deal, a real estate news outlet that examined the property’s history of code violations.) The building had failed the past 14 annual inspections, per city records, and in April Wells Fargo sued to foreclose on the building. Both the bank and the city have requested that a court-appointed receiver be put in charge of the complex, but litigation is ongoing. Murray, the fourth-floor tenant, says conditions took a turn for the worse after Flood assigned a firm called Strength in Management to manage the building in 2024. The new company did not hire security for the building prior to the raid, even though the front doors didn’t lock. (Neither Flood nor Strength in Management responded to my requests for comment.) “The building was wide open, like we lived in a barn,” says Murray. Anyone could walk in. As a result, the unhoused population grew, driven in part by immigrants, including some whose rental assistance had run out. Murray estimates there were more squatters in the building than paying tenants. (Some had stopped paying rent in protest of the abysmal conditions.) Strength in Management filed 25 eviction cases in 2024, more than in the prior four years combined; sheriff’s deputies came around multiple times this year, Murray told me, but the squatters kept coming back, or new ones would arrive. “I remember hearing on the news about how the shelters shut down for them,” she adds. (The Sheriff’s Office declined to comment.) In August, a city attorney told a lawyer for Wells Fargo that Strength in Management had been unable to “re-assert control over the building” after it was overrun by “armed occupants.” The Department of Homeland Security, too, claimed its agents targeted the building because it was “known to be frequented” by members and associates of the Tren de Aragua gang; prior to the raid, a 25-year-old resident of the building was charged with murdering someone in the neighborhood. (DHS has since admitted that only 8 of the 37 people arrested in the raid had a criminal record, and only one was a verified Tren de Aragua member.) Murray says her immigrant neighbors weren’t causing trouble, and she never saw any gang activity or other behavior that scared her: “Even though the building was open the way it was, nobody ever bothered nobody—the building was quiet.” When some immigrants first moved in two or three years ago, she says, she felt frustrated that not all of them were taking their trash out, but they were receptive to her complaints and ultimately proved to be friendly neighbors: It was the Venezuelans who put up lights in the dark hallways, she says—not management—and they swept and mopped the floors and cleaned the stains off the stairs.   Debris and personal items belonging to Venezuelan immigrants were strewn in a hallway.Jim Vondruska/Reuters/Redux In the early hours of September 30, while residents were asleep in their beds, hundreds of federal agents stormed the apartment. Rodrick Johnson, a US citizen, told Block Club Chicago that he heard “people dropping on the roof” before FBI agents busted through his door. Officers handcuffed occupants with zip ties, then led them outside to vans, where they sat for hours wondering whether they would be arrested. It’s unclear who tipped off the feds for the raid. Chicago officials said they didn’t have advance notice about it or collaborate on the operation. Days earlier, according to WBEZ and the Sun-Times, one resident saw someone he believed to be a worker from the building photographing the units “where the Venezuelans lived.” After the raid, reporters found a map crumpled up in the entryway of the apartment that labeled each unit as either “vacant,” “tenant,” or “firearms.” The units designated as “vacant” had been raided—tape was left over their doors, labeled with the letters “PC,” according to a video I was shown of one hallway and a photo from WBEZ. Most units designated as “tenant” appeared to have been left alone, leading to questions: How did federal officers know about the building’s layout and occupancy? Karsh, of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, notes that the landlord or property management would have likely possessed that information. Had federal immigration agents, he wondered, been deployed as an extralegal eviction force? After the raid, a small moving crew told Block Club Chicago that they were clearing out the now-empty units, but they didn’t say who hired them. “Doors were boarded up,” the outlet added. “In one room, there were zip ties and blood stains on the floor next to baby shoes.” As journalists came by, seeking more information, property management informed tenants that it would finally lock the front door and hire armed security. Murray, who just moved out, is frustrated about the timing. “Now they have security because they don’t want them to see the real truth,” she says. “But we have been asking for security for years and couldn’t get it.”