South Dakota tribe declares state of emergency over crime
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — The Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota has declared a public safety state of emergency on its reservation, asking for more law enforcement resources from the federal government.
It's the tribe's third emergency declaration in six years as members contend with methamphetamine and other illicit drug use, trafficking and gun violence on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. The tribe previously declared states of emergency in 2019 and 2024.
Kathleen Wooden Knife, president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, wrote in the declaration on Tuesday that the emergency is due to 'pervasive law and order and public health issues ... creating threats to public safety, the health and welfare of the general public.'
The declaration asked for increased patrol and investigative support from federal agencies, cooperation from the 12 communities on the reservation and coordination between the tribe and federal government.
Law enforcement is stretched thin on many reservations in the U.S., leading some tribes to sue the federal government. In a lawsuit the Oglala Sioux tribe filed against the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. government is obligated by treaty to support law enforcement on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
The Rosebud Indian Reservation has a dozen law enforcement officers for an area that stretches nearly 1 million acres (404,686 hectares) across five counties, said Lewis Good Voice Eagle, chief of staff to Wooden Knife. Low staffing is partially due to 2016 budget cuts, as well as difficulty retaining officers who don't receive the same benefits as they would working elsewhere.
After previous emergency declarations, the reservation received help from the U.S. Attorney's Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Interior, though it was not enough to solve the problems, Good Voice Eagle said.
'With the shortage of law enforcement and the shortage of juris doctorate barred attorneys, it has really created another nightmare on the Rosebud Indian Reservation,' he said.
Crime on South Dakota's nine Native American reservations has been a longstanding issue and the subject of tense relations with former South Dakota governor and current Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The nine tribes in the state banned her from tribal lands last year for saying publicly that tribal leaders were catering to drug cartels on the reservations.
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Sen. Martin Heinrich of N.M. on trying to save clean energy incentives
Sen. Martin Heinrich, Democrat from New Mexico, joined Canary Media's live event in Washington, D.C., on June 4 for an interview with David Roberts of the Volts podcast. Listen to the audio here or catch it on a forthcoming episode of Volts, to be released later today. Or read the transcript below, provided courtesy of Volts. David Roberts: Sen. Heinrich, thank you for coming. Welcome. I appreciate it. I thought I'd start with, obviously, everybody's thinking about the Big Beautiful Bill — sorry, I've been training to say that with a straight face all week. Conventional wisdom going into this process was the Inflation Reduction Act is dumping a bunch of money into red districts, a bunch of money into red House districts. Mike Johnson has a one-vote majority. Things are very tight. That means every Republican representative has the power to sink the thing, basically. So, I think the conventional wisdom was, "He's going to have to make some big compromises to get this thing through. It's going to be a really delicate process." No, it was not a scalpel. It was a sledgehammer — wiped the whole thing out. And they all voted for it. Did you expect that, and how do you account for it? Sen. Martin Heinrich: Well, I think, under a historical perspective, that's not what would have happened. With a different Republican president, that's not what would have happened. So, what none of us could quite account for when we were putting the Inflation Reduction Act together, is a second Trump presidency where literally the party becomes sort of cultish. You know, the fealty to this president is just like nothing I've ever seen. Right. So, that's hard to plan for. The second thing is, House Republicans just folded. They did not use their power. And we did see what happens when some House Republicans did use their power. You look at what Ryan Zinke and a few other Republican House members did on the public lands provisions where they were trying to sell off our public lands to pay for portions of the bill. They said, "We're not going to vote for the bill until you take that out." Well, you know what they did? They took it out. So we had all those folks sign a letter, and none of them meant it. I mean, that's the reality. They weren't willing to use their political power to say, "I'm not going to vote for the bill until you fix this, this, and this." Roberts: Yeah, well, speaking of selling off public lands, Sen. Mike Lee has said publicly that he wants to bring that back in. Is that plausible? Like, I no longer have any baseline sense of what's plausible or not anymore. You know what I mean? So, like, is that a thing that could happen? Heinrich: So, I've spent my entire — I started out as an outfitter guide working on public land. So, this has been part of my life for all of my adult life. And I really cut my teeth fighting back on a previous effort to sell off our public lands. Would Mike Lee very much like to do that? Sure. The question is going to be, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens here, is we saw what happened in the House: You're inserting risk into an already wobbly kind of legislative effort. You never know when the wheels are going to come off on one of these things. So, the question is, what do the other Republican senators think about that effort? And given the unpopularity of that kind of approach in a lot of the Intermountain West, where we have Republican senators in places like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and other places that understand how unpopular this is and how much risk it's going to create, I don't know if they do it or not. Roberts: Can you give us a sense of, like, how many senators is the margin here? Like, how many would have to really make the jump to kill this thing or at least force changes in it? Heinrich: To force changes, like, if you can put a group of three together, you can probably force changes. Because no one's banking on Ron Johnson being a yes. Like, he seems to have carved out a pretty solid position for himself. You know, Rand Paul, you never quite know where he's going to land. So, you want to build a very solid whip count. And so, I honestly don't think it takes a lot of Republicans to force some changes. And for the sake of this overall industry and all the jobs that we've created and the hundreds of billions of dollars of factory investments, I hope they will use the power that they have because there are a handful of folks that could solve the timeline problems that could clean up the foreign entity of concern and make it functional instead of a mountain of red tape. There are a lot of things that — setting aside the bigger issues of taking health care away from well over 10 million people — we could fix a lot of the IRA issues and preserve a lot of jobs, and mitigate rising electricity prices if they would use that power. Roberts: Well, you said that maybe selling off public lands outright would be a step too far. Another thing in the House bill is an extensive amount of fossil fuel leasing, leasing of public lands. And they sort of go beyond. You know, it's always just like they look around at whatever's around. They're like, "How can we get more extreme than that?" So now they're mandating that we lease public land to fossil fuels, plus opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge up, etc., etc. Public lands in general just become sort of open season. What's the valence of that issue, do you think? Heinrich: Meanwhile, if you're in the oil and gas industry, you're probably thinking, "Stop helping!" Oil is $65 a barrel. Production, Saudis are increasing production. This cuts both ways for them. It's like, "Yeah, sure, thanks. You're reducing royalties. But by the way, the market is being flooded right now." So, it's kind of a mixed bag for that entire sector right now. And because they made a deal with Trump during the election, they're kind of biting their tongue. Roberts: Yeah, I saw someone make a similar point that the tariff on steel is going to jack up fossil fuel drilling. Heinrich: It is very hard to produce a barrel of oil below $65. You can do that in the Permian Basin. But there are a lot of places where they start shutting off rigs when you get to that price point. Roberts: So, the purported drive behind all this is to find revenue. That's, I guess, what surprised me is it turned out that finding revenue to pay for tax cuts for rich people turned out to be No. 1 through No. 5 on the priority list. And everything else got bumped, except they want to reduce royalty rates for the leasing of public land. That revenue — you know, Medicaid, one thing — but that revenue they can sacrifice. Heinrich: That's what pays for our public schools in New Mexico. So, that change alone in my state is likely to cost the state of New Mexico close to $2 billion over the course of the next 10 years. And that will come at the cost of our school kids. Roberts: Yikes. So, I was going to say your committee, the Energy Committee, would be the committee where leasing of public lands is discussed and hashed over. But something you mentioned a few minutes ago backstage that hadn't even really occurred to me is that they might not do the committee process. Heinrich: They might go directly to the floor with a substitute for the House bill. Roberts: And this would just be like calling the bluff of all the senators saying, "This or nothing." "Jump or you're dead," or "Jump or Trump will ..." Heinrich: "We all jump together." Roberts: What do you think are the chances of that? Heinrich: I try not to handicap — like, I'm not in that mindset. So, I'm not a good person to predict how they will handle the procedural issues. Roberts: And if they did, I mean, this is, of course, everybody's just guessing about this. But if they did today, right now, with the bill as is, do you think it gets to 51? Do you think that your colleagues, your Republican colleagues, will use the power in the way that the House Republicans didn't? Heinrich: I think that's an open question. I think there are a number of Republican senators who recognize that there are big equities here that could be really problematic. I mean, when you have, you take just one example, West Virginia, you've got major factories, companies like Form Energy and others that set up shop there to take advantage of those incentives and to plan for the next 10 years of the future of our economy in storage and clean steel and other things. Are the two senators from West Virginia going to stomach those? You know, they went to those groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings and, you know, it's up to them. They could force this change. Will they? I haven't seen a lot of profiles in courage, but if they decide to do it, they have the power to change this bill. There's no question about that. Roberts: Well, another thing that your committee would deal with, if your committee dealt with something, would be the rescission of all these DOE — I think this is one of the things that really hurts this crowd, all these grants, all this money that was going out the door, some of it they're just pulling back. Some of it they're trying to yank that's already out the door. So, like, what's the — is that legal? What is the legal status? Heinrich: No. First off, just to clarify, it's not legal, but this is an administration that is willing to break the law and then pay the consequences later if they're held to account by a court. So, they're going to test the bounds of all of this. I have a great deal of sadness around all of this because we are the country that we are because we invested so methodically, over time, in science. And whether you care about NIH or, in my case, NNSA and DOE, we are where we are because of those investments that we've made. And we are chasing the smartest scientists out of this country right now. The Chinese are recruiting them, the Europeans are recruiting them, and a lot of the people that DOGE got rid of — I'm all for, like, if you can make something more effective or more efficient, we should do that. You don't take the people who just got promoted because they don't have some sort of tenure yet. You fire the highest performing people in the agencies. That's nuts. And that is not how you run a good private sector operation. So it saddens me to see the impact there because I literally moved to New Mexico right out of college because I love the fact that it had two national labs and an active private sector and things like semiconductors. And I thought, this is a place where a science person can go and have a future. Roberts: Yeah, and the funny thing is that the current Republican coalition has this sort of odd split between the MAGA types and these tech guys who have joined more recently with a much more like, "Let's go to Mars, humans will overcome" — that sort of attitude. And they're just standing by watching silently as the American scientific establishment is razed to the ground. They're not making a peep. Heinrich: And it's unilateral disarmament with respect to the real competition with China because, like, you look at the stuff that they're yanking, the money that is designed to make our manufacturing sector make the same kind of changes that our energy sector has already made. That's a competitive issue. There's so much dissonance, cognitive dissonance in all of this. Like, if you don't like China controlling the battery supply chain, maybe you should build batteries in the United States. So, don't get rid of the incentives to build batteries in the United States. Roberts: You can't build them here, but you also can't buy the ones that China's making. What's the remainder there? Let's talk a little bit about permitting on two scores. One is there was a lot of discussion of permitting last session. There's a lot of dispute about who exactly is responsible for that not making it over the line. But it was a relatively sophisticated agreement of people with different perspectives. What the Republicans have done left on their own devices is come up with, "Hey, what if people can just pay to bypass environmental review?" Which like, is that as ridiculous as it looks on the surface? Is that a plausible kind of reform? Will that do good? Is that on your list of good permitting reforms? Heinrich: No, it's not. You shouldn't do permitting reform and budget reconciliation. You're not supposed to take something that is policy and masquerade it as a budget item so that you can include it in budget reconciliation. The biggest reason for that is we need long-term certainty in the permitting process. So personally, I believe that the Democratic Party needs to be the party that says, "The United States of America can build big things again." So how do you create the certainty where you can do that and do it on a timeframe that actually makes sense? I spent 17 years shepherding one transmission project through the federal, you know, morass. Roberts: Did it ever happen? Heinrich: Two NEPAs. Yeah, SunZia, it's being built right now. Three and a half gigawatts of clean power coming onto the grid right now. But 17 years is not a reasonable timeframe. So, I am very proud of the permitting reform that the Energy and Natural Resources Committee did last Congress. I was deeply involved in those negotiations, and we got most of the committee. Yeah, we lost Josh Hawley and we lost Bernie Sanders, but the people in between voted for this. We should pick that up, dust it off, and pass it because we have a coalition, and that's a bird in the hand that would actually make a meaningful difference instead of throwing for the sort of dogmatic end zone and saying, "We're going to destroy NEPA completely" or "We're going to let people do 'pay to play' as part of the permitting process." Roberts: Yeah, do you anticipate that happening? Like, when this bill is done and off the plate, do you think permitting reform is going to be on the agenda? Heinrich: I think it will largely be determined as part of the process where we scrub the bill with the parliamentarian. So, the question is, does it survive what people on the Hill call the "Byrd bath," after late Sen. Byrd? And this is clearly, in my view, this looks an awful lot like policy masquerading as budget. So, if it comes out, that's the most likely place where it comes out. Roberts: Well, I want to get back to permitting reform, but they have defied the Senate parliamentarian once now. So, is that just a thing now? Like, I think Thom Tillis has said, he or Thune said he wouldn't overrule the parliamentarian. But, like, I don't know how seriously to take that. Heinrich: Well, I mean, one data point does not give you a trend. We're going to find out if that was an anomaly or a trend, and if it's a trend — I mean, I try to impress upon my colleagues on the Republican side who get very exercised about certain members in my party. I'm like, "Think through all of this stuff and think through, like, when AOC is in the White House, what's she gonna do?" Like, when you start ignoring the Congress and saying, "You can just take the money from this project and put it in this project instead," even though that's not what our laws say, how are those Air Force bases in Texas going to fare under a president you don't like? So, we've got to get some guardrails back on all of this, where Congress is doing its job and there are real delineations of power between the administration and Congress. Roberts: I think this is part of what freaks a lot of people out. It doesn't seem like giving the president dictatorial powers is the kind of thing you do if you anticipate the other party ever being in that chair again. You know what I mean? But back to permitting reform, never mind democracy, back to permitting reform. I think the sort of conventional wisdom is that the Republicans — this was in the last round — want it to be easier for oil and gas. The Democrats want it to be easier basically for transmission, mainly, and clean energy. Republicans don't like the transmission part. A lot of Democrats don't like the oil and gas part. We're going to do them together. But now, they have the votes, theoretically, to just bully their way through with their own permitting bill. Do you think there is enough support for the transmission side of things on the Republican side? Heinrich: There is, and look, the transmission pieces of that largely lived in that Energy and Natural Resources effort. They don't live in the Environment Public Works Committee. That's where a lot of the NEPA stuff would happen. But in terms of having a balanced product, we came up with something that satisfied both sides. John Barrasso is from Wyoming, a conservative Republican, cares about oil and gas production, and he championed that effort. And I, on the other side, have spent my life trying to make transmission work. We came up with something that both sides could agree creates a lot more certainty in the process and a faster path to either yes or no. I mean, there are lots of times when the answer needs to be no, but you need to get there in a year or two, not in 12. So, I think this is actually doable. And if you want to make some changes to NEPA, you have a chair and ranking member in EPW, in the Environment Public Works Committee, that work well together too. So, take a crack at that as well. If you put it in reconciliation, it's really a roll of the dice. And how long will it last? And in permitting, we want the solutions to be in law, and we want them to be durable. Roberts: The people on the clean energy side who were advocating in favor of this previous permitting reform effort, there's a lot of division on the left, I'm sure you're aware, but the people who are for it, their basic point was, "If you make everything easier, clean energy wins." Is that your take? Is that your take? Heinrich: That's 100% my take. Roberts: Is that the Republicans' take, like do they know that? Heinrich: I think they're selective about their datasets. So, I'm not sure that they have quite realized that. Because if you ask them about energy storage, they're like, "Well, it doesn't even work yet." I'm like, "Well, in New Mexico, 15% of our generation mix is storage. Like, what do you mean it doesn't work?" But you never get everything you want in a legislative vehicle. But you can get what you need. And we will continue to make progress. When 95% of what's in line to go on the grid is clean, we're winning. We just need to win faster. Roberts: Win faster. You know, the process, as you say, it's not clear what the process is going to be. There's usually sort of a vote-a-rama towards the end of things where people throw out amendments. I'm just curious if there are particular — I mean, maybe you don't want to show your hand exactly what sort of amendments you have in your back pocket, but are there areas... You know, as you said backstage, like, mostly this is just about accountability. It's just about making people vote against things in public so they're on record for it. Like what, what sort of things would you like to bring up and force your Republican colleagues to vote against? Heinrich: Well, as you said, there's an awful lot of benefits in specific red states and districts. So, you know, highlighting where people are on those things, if you've got a battery factory, like those are the kind of places where I think we really need to press that accountability. There's no doubt that some of that is going to be determined by what comes out in the parliamentarian's process and then what's left. And then you have to focus on what's left. Roberts: Can you just talk briefly for people who have not been following this debate? Obviously, there's little to no prospect of restoring the tax credits fully, the wind and solar tax credits, or restoring the tech-neutral tax credit. But there are perhaps opportunities to undo a little bit of the damage that was done to them. Can you just go through a few of the sort of specifics? Heinrich: Yeah, I think the two areas where, if Republican senators choose to lean in, they can see substantial improvements to the predictability of the next few years is one, that the language is all over the map about how to wind up the IRA tax credits. And you never, like, you never want to deal with a situation where you're making a decision about whether you get the credit or don't get it based on when the project goes into service. You need to be able to plan based on when you start building the project. Roberts: For the obvious reason that you can't control when your project goes into service, it's dependent on a bunch of factors beyond your control. Heinrich: Exactly. So, bankability is a problem. They could choose to fix those issues, and that would make a giant difference. I also think the foreign entities of concern language that the House put in is just a big red tape mess, and no one can figure out how to comply with it. So, come up with something that actually says, "Okay, there's a real issue here, and we're going to respect that, but we're going to have language that the rules of the road are clear to actual project developers." Roberts: Yeah, and as you say, it's a little odd to go so overboard to prohibit anything coming in from China, but then also to kill the domestic manufacturing credit. Like, where do they, where else are they going to come from? Where do they think they're going to come from? Heinrich: Intellectual consistency is not a strong suit right now in the ... Roberts: Yeah, well. So, I don't know if they like what's been said privately, but, like, Capito's on the record wanting hydrogen hubs back. Hoeven wants the geothermal thing restored. I think Tillis has been on about the messy FEOC language. So, like, people are taking stands. And I would think intuitively you wouldn't stick your head out and do that if you weren't going to follow it on, because otherwise you'll look like a jerk. But then a bunch of House Republicans just did that. So maybe they will do that. But are you hearing other people more quietly behind the scenes? Heinrich: There's a constellation of roughly seven or eight senators who are worried about a number of these provisions. All they need to do is get together and agree we're going to support one another and demand some changes, and changes will be made. So, if it doesn't happen, it will be a choice by their choice not to exercise the leverage that they have. Roberts: Before we turn to some audience questions, I want to ask a little bit broader political question. So, the political theory of the case with the Inflation Reduction Act, and I think this is also true of the Infrastructure Act and CHIPS, too, is if we flood red districts and states with new investment, new factories, new jobs, new opportunities, we will make this irreversible. Basically. Like, this will give it political resiliency. This was sort of like the premise of the Biden administration. And like this, the House vote really seems to cast that whole theory of the case into question. But if tangible benefits to your district don't sway you, what's left? Like, what does? What world are we living in? What are the political physics of this new world? What sways people anymore? Heinrich: I mean, I think we'll learn what the political physics are when we see what the impact of these actions is in the next election, which I think will be substantial. I think the problem here is the timeline was too short. And then you have the sort of cultish issue around Donald Trump where he's able to change people's minds in a way that previous presidents were not. And so those things combined in a way that really broke down. I think if we had five years of factories, you know, being ingrained in those communities, it would sway a lot more House members. Roberts: Yeah, and I guess sort of the other half of that is, it's a little disturbing that it didn't move more Republicans, but it's also a little disturbing — and this I've heard from people in the Biden administration — they are disturbed that in their view, they didn't get much credit from the left for it either. In their view, they didn't get credit from anybody for anything. It seems like the space whereby a Democratic administration can be successful is just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. The passage is getting narrower and narrower. You have enemies on all sides. You have no friends. Am I overdoing this? Heinrich: It's a choice to tell that story. And I don't think we told that story effectively. Now, I mean, I will tell you that my closing ad was built all around the ability to build big clean energy projects, and it was full of IBEW workers and laborers. And, you know, the reality is that I performed very well in my state, higher than, you know, there was a delta between the Senate race and the presidential race. And it was partly because a lot of center-right, skilled tradespeople could see themselves as part of the team in those ads. And that was not the story that got told by either the Biden or Harris campaigns effectively. I mean, those got caught up in other issues. And so, we didn't tell that story. And if we had told that story on a national scale, I think people would recognize just how much the world has changed as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act. Roberts: Okay, final question before audience questions. This is a question that I've asked every public official I've spoken to since the election. Out in Democrat land, I think there's a sentiment that Trump came in and just started steamrolling and has met weirdly little resistance. There was weirdly little — where are the heroes? Where are the people standing up? Where is everybody? You know what I mean? Like, everybody's looking around like, "I thought you were going to stand up to this." So, I think people on the left are like, "Where's the fight?" So, do you think that's a fair critique, A? And B, where is the fight? Heinrich: I understand the need for that because this is an administration that is behaving in ways that we have not seen in modern American history. I also recognize that you have to look at the tools and the math that you have, and right now, we don't have the math. If you want to constrain this administration, get busy. The biggest opportunity we have to do that is going to be the midterm elections. We will slow things down, and we will filibuster, and we will do lots of things in the meantime. But right now, you have a situation where they have effective control of both houses of Congress. They have the White House, and more often than not, they have a friendly Supreme Court and a friendly court electorate, except for the very extreme, clearly outside the box, extralegal things that they have done. And in those cases, the courts have been constraining them, and the system is working. But I think it is not going to be any magic person in the House or the Senate. It's going to take all of us, and it's going to be the most powerful thing that is changing our ability to slow them down or change outcomes is actually the things that are going on in red states, in red districts where people who normally would be seen as absolutely friendly are questioning what these Republicans are doing. So, when you start laying off veterans by the thousands at the VA, and then you go home and you hear about it, that's the stuff that is actually creating the space for us to begin to govern again and begin to limit the impact of this excessive administration. Roberts: All right, well, let's take some questions. Do we have a roving mic? Hands up if you have questions. Audience Question 1: Hi. First of all, thank you guys so much for this talk. It's been really amazing and very informational. I want to push you on the last question. You know, we have a lot of industry, we have NGOs, a lot of maybe former DOE employees in the crowd. And I want to ask what we can do to make your job easier. I mean, is it money? Is it media? Is it new reports or new research? What can we do to help get legislation passed while not being in government? Heinrich: I think one, it's really helpful when groups are pragmatic and support what is never going to be perfect. Like, this is not a game of the perfect. It requires compromise to get real, durable things done in Congress, no matter who's in charge. And so, being the adult in the room who's willing to take some arrows because things are never going to be perfect, that's an important dynamic. I think in the midst of this current situation, where we have the Trump administration really running roughshod over many of our norms and our democratic institutions, I think the most powerful thing that people can do is tell their own stories. So, when somebody gets online and says, "You know, I spent this many years in the Marine Corps and then I went to work for the Veterans Administration, and I got let go after my promotion because I didn't have a year's worth of service," that resonates with people. And it tends to find its way in front of my colleagues who have sort of stopped listening to the phone calls, the letters, and the emails. It gets in their feed because it's algorithmically based. And the same is true of people's jobs. Like when you attack somebody's job, what they did with Empire Wind, I thought that was absolutely unacceptable. You take a project that was fully permitted, and you try to do something outside the law to then threaten 2,000 union jobs. Like when those folks get online and say, "This is what they did to me, and this is what it meant for my kids and my family," that stuff resonates. And I think we need to urge people, if you've been impacted by some of these extreme abuses of power, tell your story. When I go to the floor, I don't talk about what I think. I oftentimes read from the letters. I tell people's story from my state. Audience Question 2: I just want to say thank you so much for your plain speak. You started off talking about a brain drain, and I just want to know if you see a road back from that, because that is real, and I don't know how long those consequences will last. So, I'd love you to talk about that. Heinrich: It is real, and it will take time. The sooner we can start, the better. I mean, we need to change the discourse in this country to one again where we can argue about our opinions, but facts should be facts. And the way we've allowed the social and other media to be so fractured that people are able to consume the narrative of what's going on in this country through a soda straw instead of having some common understanding of what we are as a nation is really caustic to our ability to lead and to compete with our near-peer competitors. So, we need different leadership. Elections matter. And then, we are going to have to, like, day by day, show that we value those things. We value how we compensate you, how we talk about you. We have to stop with this dumbing-down approach to the world. It is not in the interest of a great nation to do that. Roberts: Yeah, and I'll just add something. I saw on social media a couple of days ago, a letter from a guy who'd been let go from the NIH and had tweeted about it and then followed up saying, "Less than two hours after my tweet, I got a letter from the Chinese authorities with an offer to move my lab to the city of my choice with full funding for 20 years." Heinrich: And if you don't think that the science that we do has value, I think they understand the true economic value of our scientists and our engineers. Audience Question 3: Thanks so much for a great conversation. I have a question that's related to a very public departure from the administration last Friday. Elon Musk is no longer leading the DOGE effort. Roberts: Let me just clarify. Unclear, maybe. Audience Question 3: Well, whether he is or isn't, he made some pretty controversial statements about OB3. And my question to you is, are his comments helpful to the Senate, or are they a head-fake? Heinrich: I have no idea at this point. I mean, we've all been through this with Elon where like, "Oh, he's an interesting guy. He's pro-science, he's into electric cars. Well, we kind of like him." And then he swings and becomes the person we've seen for the last couple of years, and now he's swinging back. So, I try not to obsess about anything that he tweets. I try to pay attention to, you know, what he does. I don't know how it's going to play out. It probably pushes the two factions of Republicans a little further from each other, which is not a terrible dynamic to be able to slow things down and dig deeper into this thing and make people understand that 13 million people are going to lose their health care, and kids in a lot of states are not going to have money for their schools and the actual implications of this stuff. But it could change tomorrow too, as we've seen happen again and again. Roberts: And just a quick follow-up, because I meant to ask you about this earlier, and we forgot to talk about it. But one thing Elon tweeted about is AI. So maybe just say a quick word about what your colleagues are missing about AI in this bill, just real quickly. Heinrich: This bill is a direct pathway to much more expensive electricity costs, higher electricity bills, and the inability for us to compete effectively with our competitors on artificial intelligence. The short version of this is simply that the energy they want to build, whether you want to build small modular reactors, or stick a combined-cycle natural-gas generator on the grid, or old-school AP last-generation nuclear reactor, all that stuff, great, that takes time. And so all this stuff that is fast and cheap and that we can do immediately is the stuff they're killing in this bill. Ninety-five percent of the stuff in the queue, over 90% of it is renewables and around 95% of it is clean, if you throw nuclear into that bucket. But the stuff that we can build, we've already built on the nuclear side. It's going to be a few years before the next reactor comes along. If you order a combined-cycle natural-gas turbine yesterday, you're going to get it in 2030. So, are we going to starve the entire grid at the time of the largest increase in demand since the air conditioner became commonplace? That's what this bill is going to do. And the impact of that, you know, I've warned my colleagues, the impact is going to be prices are going to go up for electricity everywhere, and we're going to make darn sure people understand why that happened. Roberts: All right, on that note, thank you, Sen. Heinrich.
Yahoo
28 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The hemp loophole: Unregulated products in Ohio are a threat to consumer safety
Flowers of hemp plants that contain less that 0.3 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) the primary psychoactive substance in marijuana. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original article.) More than five years after Congress passed the 2018 Farm Bill, Ohio faces a growing public health crisis. What was designed as legislation to support American farmers has instead spawned an unregulated market of lab-created intoxicants sold without oversight in gas stations, convenience stores, and smoke shops across the state. The 2018 Farm Bill removed hemp, defined as containing less than 0.3% delta-9 THC, from the federal Controlled Substances Act. This was intended to revitalize American hemp farming for industrial purposes, but the law created an unintended loophole that chemical manufacturers quickly exploited. As I recently testified before the Ohio Senate General Government Committee, these intoxicating hemp products are often marketed as 'hemp-derived' or 'Farm Bill compliant' but the truth is much darker. In most cases, these intoxicants crowding gas station shelves are not derived from American-grown hemp. Rather, they often start with hemp-derived CBD imported primarily from countries like China and India, which is then synthetically converted through chemical processes involving acids and solvents into artificial THC. This process essentially breaks down the CBD molecule and rebuilds it into a synthetic compound like delta-8 THC. This is a far cry from the natural plant compounds found in traditional cannabis. When I visited Ohio stores late last year, I purchased numerous 'farm bill compliant' products containing these synthetic compounds from stores within walking distance to the Ohio Statehouse. Laboratory testing revealed these products had inconsistent potency, extremely high doses, unlisted ingredients, and chemical contaminants left over from the manufacturing process. This is fundamentally a public health problem. These are not merely 'marijuana-lite' products, as some proponents suggest, and they have little to do with actual hemp. The chemical conversion process introduces unknown compounds and contaminants that have shown time and again they pose significant health risks. The synthetic nature of these products means they often contain compounds that have never been studied for safety in humans or even named by science. Reports of adverse reactions continue to increase, with poison control centers documenting rising incidents of accidental ingestion, particularly among children attracted to brightly colored packaging resembling candy. Data from the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study recently revealed that 11% of high school seniors report using delta-8 THC. That is troubling, since delta-8 didn't exist in the marketplace five years ago. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE The FDA has repeatedly warned manufacturers about illegal sales and unsafe products, issuing dozens of warning letters. All THC edibles are federally illegal under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act – a fact that hemp intoxicants manufacturers and retailers conveniently overlook. However, without clear enforcement authority or resources, these warnings have done little to stem the tide of unregulated intoxicants flooding into communities across Ohio. Ohio voters made their desires clear by approving adult-use cannabis in 2023. The state is now implementing a comprehensive regulatory system for cannabis products that includes rigorous testing, packaging requirements, age verification, and consumer protections. This existing framework presents the most logical path forward for regulating hemp intoxicants. If these products are to exist in Ohio's marketplace, they should be subject to the same rigorous oversight as other intoxicating cannabis products and should be sold only through licensed dispensaries with appropriate age restrictions, testing requirements, and consumer safeguards. We've heard opponents in every state argue that such regulation hurts small businesses. Yet these products have only been around for a handful of years, and convenience stores and gas stations have thrived without resorting to selling artificial THC before. More importantly, the dangers they present, especially to young people who can currently purchase them with little or no age verification, far outweigh any economic arguments. Ohio would not be blazing a new trail by regulating these products. Even deeply conservative states recognize the need for oversight. Just this month, both Tennessee and Alabama, hardly progressive strongholds, signed laws into place regulating hemp-derived intoxicants. Their law specifically prohibits synthetic cannabinoids created 'by a chemical synthesis, modification, or chemical conversion from another cannabinoid,' precisely the type of products currently flooding Ohio's unregulated market in the form of gas station weed. The hemp intoxicant problem represents a rare opportunity for bipartisan action in our divided political landscape. This isn't about cannabis legalization, Ohio voters have already decided that question. It's about ensuring that all intoxicating products, particularly synthetic ones, are properly regulated to protect public health. Federal regulators failed to anticipate or address this problem. Now it falls to state lawmakers to protect their constituents. Other states, including many led by conservative majorities, have already taken action. It's time for Ohio to do the same. 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