-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has devoted the last decade to spreading misinformation about the safety of routine childhood vaccinations. Now, he’s poised to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees the Centers for Disease Control, which sets the national immunization guidelines. Under Kennedy, physicians may face the challenge of having to tell patients that government guidance isn’t based on sound science. Dr. Mobeen Rathore, Chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Immunology, talked about how pediatricians may navigate those tricky conversations. On what he’s seeing:  We have worked very hard every year during flu season to increase the flu immunizations. And they have plummeted. The mis- and disinformation about the Covid vaccines sort of seeped into other vaccines, and now people are questioning all vaccines.  On the diseases that could come back if vaccination rates drop: Measles is always a huge concern because it’s a very contagious disease. Polio is a concern because it is only one flight away. A kid flies, or a parent flies, from a country with polio and gives it to somebody—that would be devastating. We are seeing more cases of pertussis [whooping cough]. People forget that these things were there. In my office, I see influenza, type B meningitis—when I was in training, we would have two or three kids in the hospital all the time with devastating results.  On what pediatricians will do if the government flouts the science on childhood immunization recommendations: Pediatricians count on and depend a lot on the American Academy of Pediatrics. I’m not in any way minimizing the great work the CDC does. But I think most of us realize that it has to be approved by the government, by people who may not be scientists, who may not understand science.  On how pediatricians’ conversations with parents could change: Most pediatricians are going to look at the positive and say, ‘Listen, the Academy [of Pediatrics] is non-biased. They look at all the data, and this is the science behind it.’ Most parents will ultimately do what’s best for their children. It’s not that they have anything against their children—it’s that because of the disinformation they are misunderstanding the situation. It’s our responsibility and duty to work with them and try to encourage them, engage them, help them understand the importance. We have to spend more time.  On the people who will suffer most if vaccine-preventable diseases return: The most vulnerable are the youngest children and the elderly. Certainly those who are at a disadvantage for healthcare are going to be at higher risk. Healthcare disparity puts not only people who are facing those disparities in danger, but it also risks the general population. Germs are the most non-racist living beings. All they need is to survive and grow and find somebody where they can do that,, and uUnfortunately, that’s us.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here. “When I am back in the White House, we will use every tool, lever, and authority to get the homeless off our streets,” Donald Trump said in a Spring 2023 campaign video. In June 2024, the US Supreme Court made this promise much easier to keep by overturning a lower court’s decision on criminalizing homelessness. Grants Pass, Oregon, where the case originated, had been punishing the unhoused with fines ranging from $295 to $1,250 and 30 days in jail. Ed Johnson was the initial lawyer who successfully argued this practice was unconstitutional. But after the Supreme Court weighed in, Grants Pass now was able to resume this practice. Other cities are likely to do the same. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Why are some cities criminalize opting to criminalize homelessness? These efforts are not aimed at solving homelessness, but at hiding it—and they’re not even effective in doing that. They increase people’s vulnerability and make it harder to get out of homelessness. People running for office think the rhetoric about getting tough resonates with voters, but it’s unworkable. We need to live in communities where we take care of the people who are the victims of our failed policies. What did the Grants Pass Supreme Court ruling really mean? The legal issue was very narrow. The question was whether cities violate the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment if they punish people for living outside when they have nowhere to live inside. The Supreme Court held that the Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause does not prevent that kind of punishment. There have been cities that have taken the Supreme Court’s invitation to follow the worst possible policies since that decision, but there have also been a lot of cities that have proceeded with existing evidence-based solutions. My hope, of course, is that there are more cities that figure out what works and they stick with that. The Supreme Court—both the majority and the dissent—were clear that there’s nothing requiring cities to punish people who are living outside. What sorts of policies would effectively address the homelessness crisis? You can’t solve homelessness without more housing. Secondly, we need prevention efforts. That means rent assistance, renter protections, and trying to preserve the affordable housing that we have. Because if we’re adding to the population of people who are forced outside, it offsets any efforts to move people inside. Finally, we need shelter so that people can stay safe, stable, and alive while they’re looking for permanent housing. People need to be in a place where they can stay connected to providers and continue to work with people who are trying to find them work and housing. It’s hard enough to do that when you’re not hiding from the police. And of course, if people are getting ticketed, fined, and arrested, and as a result, have recent convictions on their record, it’s going to make it even more difficult for them to move out of homelessness. Year-round, they will have to figure out where to go to the bathroom, where to store any valuables they do acquire, and how to find food. Seasonally, they’ll face frostbite, heat exhaustion, and increasingly, air pollution from wildfires. Are there any good, real-world examples of effective policy? > “It’s taken us decades to get into this hole: we’re 7.2 million housing units > short of what we need in the richest country in the history of the world. “ It’s taken us decades to get into this hole: we’re 7.2 million housing units short of what we need in the richest country in the history of the world. You can’t look at that statistic in any other way than a decades-long bipartisan policy failure. Among incremental improvements, Los Angeles County voters approved a measure that will devote an expected $1.1 billion a year in sales tax revenue to support housing and rent relief programs. New Orleans set up a Housing Trust Fund. Spokane, Washington, vowed to get rid of zoning-mandated parking minimums that make it impossible to build affordable housing. On the campaign trail, Trump mentioned creating “tent cities” on “inexpensive land” for homeless people. What do you make of that? There’s a pretty clear distinction between the things that will work and costly efforts that will make the problem worse. Moving people away from services, punishing them, and making their lives more difficult is going to be expensive and really ineffective.  What can we do to help people living outside? Even though homelessness is taking up more space in the media than ever, it often feels like people with the most information aren’t talking enough. Talk to your friends and colleagues about how we can solve this problem through building more housing and prevention efforts, and don’t make it worse by vilifying the people who’ve been forced to live outside. This is a housing shortage, and these are our neighbors: They are children, and seniors, and veterans, and working people, and people fleeing violent relationships.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here. Five years ago Minna Zelch and her then-15-year-old daughter, a transgender student, were elated when the state of Ohio granted her permission to play on her high school softball team. Just weeks later, legislation banning transgender athletes from participating in school sports was introduced in the statehouse. As the only transgender athlete who fit this category, Zelch says, her daughter overnight, “became the face of trans athletes in Ohio.” Now a 20-year-old college student out of state, her daughter, “spent more time her senior year of high school testifying at the state house than she did visiting colleges.” With the barrage of anti-trans legislation passed last year, her experience in Ohio foreshadowed the grim reality that young trans people and their families all over the country are experiencing as the Trump administration passes one executive order after another attacking trans rights. Her story has been edited and condensed for clarity. It’s just gotten steadily worse. Now we have an entire party whose members have basically said they want to eradicate a certain group of people. That’s beyond terrifying when your child is part of that group.  The main thing is to get your documents in order. And fortunately, for our daughter, as soon as soon as she turned 18, we had all the paperwork ready to go for everything. Her license was changed, her passport was changed, and so was her birth certificate.  We’re sending her back to college with her passport, in case she has to make a quick escape. I’ve talked to people about recommendations for immigration lawyers. Part of our fear is that her name is out there. She was actually doxxed at school last spring. If there’s a list, we’re on it. She does lots of things to be safe. She stays in groups, she doesn’t use public restrooms by herself. She finds places where she feels nobody here is gonna take her into the alley and beat her up. And she is fortunate. I hate to use this term, but she passes pretty well. If you didn’t know, you probably wouldn’t know. It’s still terrifying. People could easily find her, even though we’ve done as many things that we can to try and keep her identity somewhat secret. I asked my daughter what she was worried most about the Trump administration. Her biggest fear is that, and I quote, “My identity will not be no longer be recognized, and that according to the government, trans people will cease to exist.” > “My identity will not be no longer be recognized, and that according to the > government, trans people will cease to exist.” Her safety is of the utmost importance to me and her father. Physical safety is obviously a big component, but also her mental health and emotional well-being. She’s been out of Ohio for a year and a half, and I’m just now understanding how much she was impacted by all the advocacy work she had to do as a teenager.  She sat in hearing rooms and stood in front of legislators when they called her, and people she knew, and her friends, the most horrible things. They told children that they were groomers and sexual perverts and shouldn’t be allowed near other people. And that’s just the things I can say to you over the phone and that you can put in print. I don’t know if she will ever fully recover. Her personality has been completely changed because of what she had to do. And she’s not the only one. Children should not have to beg for basic human rights.  Part of me seeks some comfort in the fact that there’s a lot of us who are not going to stay quiet, we’re not going to let them do this to our children. They’re not going to get away without lots of people shedding light on their hatred and bigotry.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here. At a December 2024 press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump said his administration would be looking into privatizing the United States Postal Service, renewing efforts from his first presidential term to limit government programs and services. The Washington Post reported that same month that Trump stated the government should not subsidize the agency due to its annual financial losses.  “The days of bailouts and handouts are over,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said during a December 2024 hearing with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. “The American people spoke loud and clear…there’s going to be significant reform over the next four years.”  To understand more about what’s happening with USPS and get a better sense of where calls for government cuts are coming from, I talked with Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union. The union represents over 200,000 USPS employees and retirees. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The Trump administration and groups like DOGE are pushing for more cuts to the federal government. For USPS, the argument seems to be that the mail system loses money and is no longer relevant, and therefore, should be curtailed. What do you think about this perspective? To me, DOGE is a question of billionaire oligarchs trying to figure out how to get more money into their private profits. So all of this stuff about efficiency is really a cover for that, and that also carries over to those who want to privatize the Post Office. The Post Office takes in about $80 billion a year in revenue. Those on the private side of the industry want their hands on that money because when it’s in the public domain, they can’t use it to generate private profits.  What’s the value of the Post Office? I think the way that people communicate has changed fundamentally. I’m sure it changed when Morse code came in, when the telephone came in, and it certainly has changed with the advent of the internet. But change doesn’t mean that the Post Office no longer has tremendous value.  With the advent of the internet, you had this tremendous growth of e-commerce. The Postal Service is vital if e-commerce is going to work for everybody, particularly on the small business side. On the customer side, the Post Office is there by law for every single person, no matter who we are and where we live. If it were to be privatized, then the decisions on who gets to engage in e-commerce or who gets medicine through the mail would depend on whether a company can make a profit. The Post Office is based on non-profit, and it’s based on service. So it’s changing, but it’s invaluable.  Then there’s less tangible things like helping in natural disasters. The Post Office could really do a lot more than they do now—if they were allowed to—in terms of getting water and supplies in the stricken areas and the rebuilding that follows. You also have the whole question of democratic rights, the question of voting by mail, the question of access to the ballot box. The Post Office provided millions of people in this last election access to the ballot box.  What could be accomplished if—instead of privatizing USPS—we expanded it? The Post Office can do and should do a lot more than it does. There are all sorts of opportunities for expanded services. There’s new opportunity for financial services—tens of millions of low-income people are either unbanked or underbanked. In many parts of the world, people do basic banking and financial services through a public postal service. People like Elon Musk are virulently anti-union. The Post Office is one of the largest unionized workforces in the country. And what the unions have brought to the postal workers is equal pay for equal work—opportunities for women workers, for Black workers, and workers of color who are usually marginalized and don’t have the same opportunities. We’re the largest employer of veterans outside of the Defense Department. So all of those things are mixed in. There has been a lot of work against previous attempts to privatize USPS. Do you think these pushes for privatization will be any different with the new Trump administration? There’s been constant efforts to piecemeal privatization of the Postal Service, and some of that has taken hold. There was Staples [starting in 2013], and a couple decades before, there was a similar effort for Sears’ department stores to do the retail. If the postal service gets turned over to the private sector, then prices are going to go up and service is going to go down. And what happens if that private company no longer can or wants to do it and people lose their services?  The White House in 2018 advocated for the breaking up and the selling off of the public postal service. So that’s a whole different level [of privatization].  What should people take away from these ongoing discussions about cutting USPS? The Post Office is the low-cost anchor of the package industry. What’s keeping the rates and the package rates lower than they would be otherwise is because the Post Office is in the public domain. That’s one of the reasons why some of these big package companies would like to make it harder on the Post Office through more privatization. That low-cost anchor helps serve everybody. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here. In one of his many day-one executive orders, President Donald Trump called for a 90-day hiring freeze of federal employees to “reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition.” Michael Embrich, a US Navy veteran of the Iraq War and War in Afghanistan who also does advocacy work for veterans—including as a policy advisor for the Secretary of Veterans Affairs—has regularly raised his concerns in Rolling Stone and other outlets about how such a freeze would affect those who have served in the military. “Medical professionals, crisis hotline responders, and claims processors are desperately needed to keep the VA running,” Embrich wrote in Rolling Stone. “Now, with hiring frozen…veterans will wait longer for care, disability claims will pile up, and crisis lines—lifelines for veterans on the brink—will be understaffed.”  Although Trump’s Inauguration Day order states that it “does not apply to military personnel of the armed forces” and submitted an exemptions list via the VA, a subsequent memo from the department says that additional exemptions to the hiring freeze for veterans must pass through the Office of Personnel Management and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. I talked with Embrich in January about what is happening and the importance of the VA for not only veterans but also citizens. How did you get involved in advocating for veterans? I joined the Navy right out of high school. I have a long line of Navy service in my family. My great-grandfather served during WWI, and my grandfather was torpedoed twice during WWII, so it’s kind of a family tradition. I’m from a town called Bayonne, New Jersey—a very blue-collar town—and was looking for economic opportunities. I didn’t have a lot of college scholarships that excited me, and plus, I probably couldn’t afford to go live on campus somewhere anyway. So I decided to join the Navy for the educational benefits and to be around training and adventure. I joined right before 9/11, so I was immediately deployed for Operation Enduring Freedom and then went back out to sea for Operation Iraqi Freedom.  My goal was to go back to college after getting out of active duty. In 2004, when I started to apply to colleges, I figured out really quickly that the GI Bill was not living up to its promise: free college for military service. When I started to use it as one of the first post-9/11 veterans, it barely covered the cost of tuition.  I figured: “Wow, there’s something we need to do about this.” I worked with my senator, my member of Congress here in Hudson County, and ended up meeting with Senator [Jim] Webb in Virginia, who was the former Secretary of the Navy, and we later came up with the Post-9/11 Montgomery GI Bill. It was my crash course into government and politics. A lot of the discussion in media coverage of the Trump administration seems to be about how the VA is not efficient and how that justifies cuts. What are some things that people aren’t aware of about this issue? I think the reason that the VA gets a bad rap—especially from the right—is because it proves that a national healthcare plan can work in the US. I have very good private insurance, but I end up waiting months to see a provider, whereas at the VA, my appointments are scheduled relatively quickly.  The VA also provides specialized care to veterans. There’s a lot of talk in DOGE that the VA should be privatized. That would be a disaster for veterans. You can’t put a veteran with a traumatic brain injury into their local ER or their local general practitioner doctor’s office and say, “Treat this veteran with specialized care for their PTSD.” The VA knows how to do that and to throw it out now would be incredibly detrimental to not only the nation but to our veterans. The VA does have a large budget compared to the rest of the federal government but not compared to the Department of Defense. So why can’t we spend a small percentage of that taking care of veterans? FROM OUR READERS Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s developing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has floated slashing entitlement programs. Our readers told us what that would mean for them. My family’s worries revolve around my veteran husband and his VA health care and disability benefits. He has been diagnosed with ALS. The Project 2025 promises of cutting those benefits or erasing them are terrifying. My husband served for 22 years. We cannot imagine a government who spits on these veterans and their families after the fact. It is shameful. —Belinda, 67 In the eyes of the incoming congressional GOP, DOGE, and the Trump cabal, I must be the worst of the worst. I am a retired federal employee, a disabled veteran, and a Social Security recipient. My income and medical care are provided by the federal government. Given their stated objectives to cut both Social Security and the VA, I could be left broke, homeless, and sick, despite working 50 years until I was unable to work longer. I feel like Bond strapped under the laser when Goldfinger says, “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.” —Kenneth, 64 In one of your recent Rolling Stone stories, you talked about the VA and its capacity for emergency response in situations like the height of the Covid pandemic. What could an expanded VA do to help those both within and outside of the veteran community? A lot of people also don’t think about the VA’s Fourth Mission to bolster the nation’s preparedness for emergencies: the war on terror, natural disasters, a public health crisis. The VA can outperform the private sector, especially when it comes to national health emergencies. For instance, the VA provided vaccines for non-veterans during the Covid crisis, supplied over one million pieces of PPE early on when people couldn’t get masks, and provided negative pressure rooms [to isolate infected patients]. The VA helped ease that burden on the national healthcare system.  During Hurricane Sandy, the VA was there to provide medical assistance and respond on the spot with mobile VA vans to assist people who may have been injured or displaced.  That’s why this whole nonsense of privatizing the VA misses the mark. When people think of the VA, they think healthcare. Well, the VA provides educational benefits, mortgages, and home loans. The VA provides burial spots and headstones for veterans to be buried. How do you privatize that?  What could the VA or the government do to better support veterans?  The long-term solution is a public healthcare system that serves all Americans. The VA is overburdened with the failures of the private healthcare system—they’re overburdened with people who lack medical care. When a veteran shows up at the VA emergency room and they haven’t seen a doctor in 20 years because they didn’t have outside healthcare, the VA picks up 20 years of lack of medical care to get that person up to speed. Every time there’s a spending battle in Washington, the VA is caught up in that spending battle. Veterans don’t know if they’re going to get care. Veterans don’t know if they’re going to get their health benefits or their compensation for disability, because if the government’s not funded, then that money is not there. DOGE’s grand plan is to lay off federal government jobs. Well, 30 percent of those jobs are veterans. If you want to help veterans, don’t fire them from their jobs and put them on unemployment.  Are there certain advocacy groups who are fighting for veterans that we should be paying attention to?  There’s a labor union called the American Federation of Government Employees that represents a lot of veterans. The last Congress had the same story about the VA—it was inefficient, it didn’t work, and they were going to clean house. They’re picking a fight, but it’s more of a smoke and mirrors operation over there.  The VA doesn’t need a vast overhaul. What it needs is more funding, more attention, and more support from the private sector healthcare system to be better. It doesn’t need to have roadblocks thrown in front of it to perform its mission, but I think that’s what the plan is at this point. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here. Under President Donald Trump, Republicans have promised to cut key components of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature green legislation. The bill pledged $370 billion in funding for clean energy investments. About a third of that money has been invested in the last two years. A majority of it went to Republican districts—about 85 percent of project investments. Yet, Trump still has vowed to “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”  Mother Jones spoke with Carl Weatherley-White, Head of Capital Markets for Greenbacker, in January, before the beginning of the second term, about the potential impacts of the next administration repealing the IRA. Greenbacker is a renewable energy investing company with over 450 projects around the US.  This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed. Do you think existing renewable energy projects will be hit by a new Trump administration repealing the IRA? In the unlikely event that the IRA is repealed, then you have a lot of turmoil. A lot of projects that are under development will have to either renegotiate their power purchase agreements to get higher pricing. If they cannot do that, they would have to kill the projects. How do you prepare for a full repeal? We’ve accelerated some of our development so that we can grandfather projects. We have a pipeline of projects under development and under construction that work under the current tax law. I think if the change did happen, then we would revisit our development pipeline, and prioritize projects. We’d have to really rerun the numbers on all our projects and decide which ones still are still financeable and which ones aren’t. How would the repeal trickle down to the public? It basically gets at the cost of electricity. You have utilities that are delivering electricity, and they set rates at a level that create a return on their investment that is established by regulators. If a tax credit goes away, then they would have to increase rates to cover their costs. And so given the amount of electricity predicted to come from renewable energy, without a tax credit I think you’d likely see significant pressure to increase electricity prices. And honestly, that would create another political problem for any administration. Is there anticipation of some of these projects that have been funded by IRA facing increased scrutiny or auditing? I don’t think so. The rules are very detailed. There’s already a lot of scrutiny, not only by the Internal Revenue Service, but also by all of the market participants: lawyers, accounts, bankers, investors. They’re all very careful to make sure that the products are well structured and they’re safe. It already is a pretty robust ecosystem.