Trump's school pressure campaign

Politico

a day ago

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THE CATCH-UP
SCHOOL DAZE: The Trump administration has partially backed down from its hold on almost $7 billion in federal funding for states and local schools, following a rare and ideologically broad backlash from Senate Republicans and a lawsuit from Democratic-led states. But most of the money is still being held back for now, pending further review, POLITICO's Juan Perez Jr. reports for Pros.
Out of the freezer: Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who led the letter, announced that OMB Director Russ Vought told her the money would be released. The funds for after-school programs, summer school, teacher training and English-language learners were originally expected to be disbursed at the start of the month, and advocates warned that their loss could upend school-district budgets and programming. Testifying in Congress last month, Vought declined to rule out the prospect of including the congressionally approved funding in a future rescission package.
Back in black: About $1.3 billion for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program is being released, after OMB finished a review of it, Juan reports. That 'could help ease an immediate budget crunch.' But Democrats said the freeze on the other dollars remained illegal and damaging: 'Every penny of this funding must flow immediately,' Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement.
More cuts: As the administration dismantles large parts of the Education Department, data shows that the number of civil rights cases resolved by the agency has plunged this year, AP's Collin Binkley reports. Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Congress last month that the pace wasn't slowing despite reduced staff, but the numbers tell a different story. Parents say they've felt the change.
On campus: President Donald Trump's highest-profile education fights, though, remain with elite universities — and some of them are reaching a crescendo. The White House is reportedly close to finalizing a deal with Columbia, but its fight against Harvard is heading back to court for a high-profile hearing Monday, NYT's Alan Blinder and colleagues preview.
Turning the Crimson tide: A deal with Harvard that Trump indicated last month was near still hasn't come together; in the meantime, the administration has continued to withhold research funding and repeatedly tried to increase its leverage with new demands and attacks. Negotiations are ongoing but 'have made limited headway,' the Times reports. 'Trump administration officials are looking to secure the most significant victory of their ongoing pressure campaign on academia.' But whether the judge rules for or against Harvard in its lawsuit over frozen funding could be pivotal to determining the contours of a deal.
The man in the middle: Alan Garber is the subject of a big new profile by The Atlantic's Franklin Foer, who writes that the mild-mannered Harvard president has 'positioned himself as an institutionalist and an opponent of illiberalism in all its forms: its Trumpian variant, yes, but also illiberal forces within his own university.' That makes him a partially unlikely target of Trump's crackdown on universities. But on campus at least, 'having been cast as a figure of resistance, Garber has earned the political capital to pursue his agenda.'
The big picture: 'Inside the powerful task force spearheading Trump's assault on colleges, DEI,' by WaPo's Laura Meckler and colleagues: 'The administration established the [Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism] in February to counter what it describes as widespread failure by universities to protect Jewish students since the start of campus protests against the Israel-Gaza war. In reality, many of the task force's unprecedented demands and punishments have nothing to do with antisemitism. Instead, they seek hiring and programming changes to strip long-standing conservative targets including DEI and a liberal worldview from higher education.'
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9 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW
1. KNOWING THE DISAPPEARED: 'He Came to the U.S. to Support His Sick Child. He Was Detained. Then He Disappeared,' by Melissa Sanchez and colleagues for ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News: 'Most of the men [deported to El Salvador without due process] were not hiding from federal authorities but were instead moving through the nation's immigration system. They were either in the middle of their cases, which normally should have protected them from deportation, or they had already been ordered deported and should have first been given the option to be sent back to a country they chose.'
2. THAT'S GONNA HURT: Affordable Care Act rates are set to surge next year — with large plans in Illinois, Texas, Washington, Georgia and Rhode Island seeking double-digit increases as high as 27 percent, WSJ's Anna Wilde Mathews scooped. The insurers blame rising costs as well as federal subsidy cuts. But the changes could be a rude awakening for consumers who have mostly seen single-digit hikes in recent years.
3. CLIMATE FILES: 'Trump administration memo could strike fatal blow to wind and solar power,' by POLITICO's Zack Colman and Josh Siegel: 'The directive could have a much broader impact, affecting scores of projects on private land that must pass through or connect with projects on Interior-managed federal land … Some companies and clean energy advocates worried the directive would slow solar and wind approvals to a crawl by creating a bottleneck at [Secretary Doug] Burgum's office.'
4. RESCISSIONS FALLOUT: Having now made it through Congress, the rescissions package's $1.1 billion in cuts to public broadcasting funding have local news operations worried about their survival, NBC's Megan Lebowitz and Raquel Coronell Uribe report. The fear is especially acute for smaller and more rural stations, where leaders are already making tough decisions about what to cut, AP's Mark Thiessen and David Bauder report from Anchorage, Alaska. For kids, the result could be a faster shift to less educational content on YouTube, streaming and social media, WaPo's Tatum Hunter reports.
GOP victory: For conservatives, cutting PBS and NPR money is the attainment of a goal Republicans have tried but failed to reach for decades, NYT's Jim Rutenberg reports. Democrats see it as part of a Trump crackdown on journalism. But public media was also more vulnerable as Americans' information ecosystems have moved away from local news, eroding their support from Republican politicians who protected the funding in previous debates.
5. DEMOCRACY WATCH: 'Trump-Driven Chaos Comes to U.S. Attorney's Offices in Waves,' by NYT's Santul Nerkar and Jonah Bromwich: 'On Wednesday afternoon, the highest ranking federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Jay Clayton, was blindsided [by the firing of Maurene Comey] … Mr. Trump has concentrated power within the Justice Department in Washington and, in two of the [New York-area] offices, has elevated loyalists with little prosecutorial experience, leading to confusion and plummeting morale within the rank and file. His moves raise the question of what, exactly, a U.S. attorney is empowered to do, beyond serving Mr. Trump's chosen agenda.'
One to watch: Acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba could find out her fate at a federal judges' meeting Monday, just before her interim stint expires, the New Jersey Globe's David Wildstein reports. Habba told staffers that she hopes to stay in the role but doesn't know if she will.
6. ESCAPE TO ALCATRAZ: Trump is dead serious about trying to turn Alcatraz Island back into a new maximum-security prison — and the costliest option would top $2 billion, Axios' Marc Caputo scooped. 'Trump's interest in Alcatraz is motivated more by symbolism than necessity,' and it's early yet in the planning. Another possibility would cost $1 billion to build a smaller facility on part of the island. Trump hasn't made any final choices.
7. TRADING PLACES: Trump is taking a tougher tack in trade negotiations with the EU, demanding that a deal include tariffs of at least 15 to 20 percent, FT's Andy Bounds and colleagues report. That's higher than the 10 percent threshold they'd been discussing, and Trump doesn't want to move on auto tariffs either. The shift left European negotiator Maroš Šefčovič 'downbeat' in an evaluation today of how the talks are going. 'We don't want a trade war, but we don't know if the US will leave us a choice,' says one EU diplomat.
8. FED UP: As some conservatives seek to use concerns about the Fed's headquarters renovations as justification for Trump to fire Chair Jerome Powell, AP's Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak report that Trump appointees pushed for more white marble to be included. In Trump's first term, his picks on the Commission of Fine Arts advocated for marble over the glass walls the Fed wanted, for aesthetic/historical reasons. 'The marble does not explain the roughly $600 million in cost overruns … But the roots of its extensive use further muddies the White House's attempts to use the renovation to paint the central banker as [a] profligate spender as a possible pretext to removing him.'
9. PLEADING THE FIFTH: Annie Tomasini today became the third former Joe Biden aide to invoke her Fifth Amendment right in the House Oversight Committee's probe of Biden's mental fitness. Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) slammed Tomasini as trying to hide the truth, while her attorney said there was no evidence of her wrongdoing — and that Biden made his end-of-term clemency decisions himself. The growing trend reflects Biden aides' 'fear that they have become targets for political retribution,' WaPo's Toluse Olorunnipa reports. Republicans allege a cover-up.
TALK OF THE TOWN
IN MEMORIAM — 'Ernest 'Pat' Furgurson, former Baltimore Sun columnist and historian, dies,' by The Baltimore Sun's Jacques Kelly: He was 'a former Baltimore Sun national affairs columnist, Washington bureau chief and a Civil War historian who also held posts in Moscow and Saigon … He was 95. … He was elected to Washington's Gridiron Club in 1977 and was its historian from 1992 to 2002.'
— Andrew Schwartz, chief comms officer for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, died Wednesday. The center remembered him as 'a mentor, a coach, a brother to everyone in the CSIS family,' with a 'network in Washington [that] was far and wide.' Wrote Neal Urwitz, Schwartz was 'a Democrat who worked for Fox News, an adopted son of New Orleans who worked at a suit-and-tie think tank, and a digital-first communications pioneer who could barely turn on his computer.'
OUT AND ABOUT — SPOTTED at Dentons' third annual summer bash Wednesday evening at Royal Sands Social Club: Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Jason Smith (R-Mo.), Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), Mike Collins (R-Ga.), Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), David Valadao (R-Calif.), Brian Babin (R-Texas), Andy Barr (R-Ky.), Vince Fong (R-Calif.) and Ron Estes (R-Kan.), Joe Crowley, Jeff Denham, Eric Tanenblatt, Matthew Cutts, Stephen Lawson, John Holahan, Mike Zolandz, Andrew Renteria, Terry McAuliffe and Kevin McCarthy.
— Coinbase and Circle hosted a reception last night at The Ned to celebrate House passage of the GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act. SPOTTED: Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Reps. French Hill (R-Ark.), Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), Andy Barr (R-Ky.), Jim Himes (D-Conn.), Jeff Crank (R-Colo.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Tim Moore (R-N.C.), Troy Downing (R-Mont.), Nick Begich (R-Alaska), Dave Taylor (R-Ohio) and Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.), Brooke Bennett, Brooke Nethercott, Grace White, Megan Guiltinan, Max Raymond, Ashley Gunn, Julia Krieger, Kara Calvert, Nick Carr, Darin Carter, Veronica Hash, Robin Cook, Faryar Shirzad, Paul Grewal, Andrew Gallucci, Ashley Scott, Caroline Hill, Lulio Vargas-Cohen, Dante Disparte, Amy Dudley, Heath Tarbert, Erik Rosenblatt, Anthony De Abreu, Alex Côté and Garrett Brock.
TRANSITION — Mark Wetjen is now global head of policy and regulatory affairs at OKX. He previously was a partner at Dentons and is a former acting CFTC chair.
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