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      How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

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      There are many ways to characterize Proposition 50, the single ballot initiative that Californians will be voting on this election season.You could say it’s about redrawing congressional district lines outside the regular once-a-decade schedule. You could say, more precisely, that it’s about counterbalancing Republican efforts to engineer congressional seats in their favor in Texas and elsewhere with a gerrymander that favors the Democrats. You could, like the measure’s detractors, call it a partisan power grab that risks undermining 15 years of careful work to make California’s congressional elections as fair and competitive as possible.The way California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the Democrats are selling it to voters, though, boils down to something much simpler and more visceral: it’s an invitation to raise a middle finger to Donald Trump, a president fewer than 40% of Californians voted for and many loathe – for reasons that extend far beyond his attempts at election manipulation. For that reason alone, the yes campaign believes it is cruising to an easy victory.“There’s actually a double tease here,” said Garry South, one of California’s most experienced and most outspoken Democratic political consultants who has been cheer-leading the measure. “Trump and Texas, the state Californians love to hate. How can you lose an initiative that’s going to stick it to both?”Proposition 50, also known as the Election Rigging Response Act, proposes amending the California constitution and suspending the work of the state’s independent redistricting commission until 2031 so the Democrats can carve out five additional safe seats. That wouldn’t significantly change the power balance in California, since Democrats already occupy 43 of the state’s 52 House seats.But it would compensate for the five seats that Texas Republicans, acting on Trump’s direct urging, wrested for themselves earlier this year. “Fight fire with fire,” has been Newsom’s mantra, and several influential national figures in the Democratic party – everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the prominent New York congresswoman, to former president Barack Obama – have signed on.Democrats are optimistic they will see a significant vote shift in their favor next year, because Trump’s approval ratings are already underwater in the swing states that he narrowly won last November, and in California he is polling as low as 29%.But that won’t translate into more congressional seats if district boundaries are redrawn in a way that protects vulnerable Republican incumbents and eliminates meaningful competition. According to one estimate by the Brennan Center for Justice, Republicans already have a net 16-seat advantage for themselves in House races, thanks to gerrymandering efforts across the country in the wake of the 2020 census. The Texas move increases that advantage to 21 seats. And similar, smaller-scale moves in Missouri and North Carolina bring it to 23.“Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years,” Obama charges in a widely aired campaign ad that began circulating last week. “With Prop 50, you can stop Republicans in their tracks.”Polls and focus groups suggest many Californians have mixed feelings about abandoning their state’s non-partisan district maps, but a slim majority say they see the need to do so anyway and plan to vote yes on 4 November.Support for the measure has been rising steadily. Earlier this month, the yes vote was barely cracking 50% in most of the polling, and about 15% of poll respondents said they were undecided. Another 30% indicated that their support for or against was soft.Two surveys published this week, however, showed Proposition 50 passing by at least a 20-point margin and the yes vote is now up in the high 50s or low 60s. Fully three-quarters of those intending to vote yes told a CBS News poll conducted by YouGov that they were doing so to oppose Trump, just as the yes campaign has been urging.Ballot initiatives are not quite like other elections, though, especially in an off-year election likely to result in lower turnout than usual.“The history of [these] campaigns in this state shows that late-deciding voters tend to vote against initiatives,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican campaign consultant who teaches political communications at Berkeley and the University of Southern California. “They’re expressing an inherent skepticism that arises if voters don’t know a lot about a measure. They want to guard against it making their lives worse.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe latest polling data suggests that such last-minute skepticism may not apply in this case, most likely because Trump is such a polarizing, and motivating factor. Polls consistently show higher support for Proposition 50 among so-called “high propensity” voters – those who show up at the polls time after time – and early mail-in voting returns indicate stronger than usual numbers, with registered Democrats outnumbering registered Republicans by almost a two-to-one margin.The “yes” side has outraised the “no” side and been far more visible in campaign ads and appearances. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker who represented a southern California district for 16 years, promised over the summer to raise $100m to defeat Proposition 50 but has managed only a tiny fraction of that – less than $6m, according to the secretary of state’s office. And the big Republican guns who might ordinarily have hit the campaign trail have been conspicuous by their absence – something that suggests to many political observers they think the fight is unwinnable.Overall, the yes campaign has outraised the no campaign by about $138m to $82m.Even the pleas of the no campaign’s most visible advocate, Arnold Schwarzenegger, have proven ineffective. According to an Emerson poll, two-thirds of voters say it makes no difference to them what Schwarzenegger thinks. As a Republican, he lacks credibility with many Democrats, and as a moderate who loathes Trump, he has little traction with the Republican base. More than 20% of voters say his advocacy actually makes them more likely to do the opposite of what he wants.The problem for the no campaign, according to South and others, is that there is no message persuasive enough to counter the visceral appeal of “screw Trump”, particularly at a time when California voters are angry about ICE raids, military deployments in US cities including Los Angeles, federal funding cuts, the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, and more.Some groups, including one led by the billionaire Charles Munger Jr that has ploughed more than $30m into the no campaign, have pushed the argument that Proposition 50 is undemocratic. But national polling has consistently shown that appeals to democracy do little to sway voters because both sides think it is at stake. Calling Proposition 50 a “power grab” merely reminds voters that Republicans in Texas grabbed power first.Other opponents, including Steve Hilton, the leading Republican candidate in next year’s governor’s race, have sought to stir voter discontent with Newsom and cast the initiative as one more distraction cooked up by a governor with national ambitions when he should be focusing on the state’s housing shortage and affordability crisis. Hilton calls Proposition 50 an “illegal and corrupt contribution to [Newsom’s as yet unannounced] presidential campaign”.That works as red meat for the Republican base. But the last time Republicans tried to turn the California electorate against Newsom in a stand-alone ballot initiative – a recall vote in 2021 – Newsom prevailed by a 62-38 margin. And Newsom’s approval numbers have only increased as a result of Proposition 50.“The no side has two problems with its core argument,” South said. “It’s too complicated, and it’s too abstract. The average voter doesn’t have a clue what their congressional lines are. And, in addition to that, they don’t care.“So the choice comes down to: you can screw Trump, or you can pay homage to a redistricting commission that voters approved in 2010 and probably don’t remember. There’s no way this thing loses.” More

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      Early voting starts for New York mayoral and New Jersey gubernatorial races

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      Polling places opened on Saturday for the start of in-person voting for two of the year’s most closely watched elections: the New York City mayor’s race and the contest to pick New Jersey’s next governor.New Yorkers are choosing between Democrat Zohran Mamdani, Republican Curtis Sliwa and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat on the ballot as an independent. The incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, is also on the ballot but dropped out of the race last month and recently threw his support behind Cuomo.The New Jersey governor’s race features Republican state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli and Democratic US representative Mikie Sherrill.New York has allowed early voting since 2019, and it has become relatively popular. In June’s mayoral primary, about 35% of the ballots were cast early and in person, according to the city’s campaign finance board.New Jersey adopted early voting in 2021.The off-year elections in neighboring states could be bellwethers for Democratic party leaders as they try to decide what kinds of candidates might be best to lead their resistance to Donald Trump ’s agenda.The races have spotlighted affordability and cost of living issues as well as ongoing divisions within the Democratic party, said Ashley Koning, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University in New Jersey.“New York City pits the progressive wing against the establishment old guard in Mamdani versus Cuomo, while New Jersey is banking on moderate candidate Mikie Sherrill to appeal to its broad middle,” she said.Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has electrified liberal voters, drawn to his proposals for universal free childcare, free buses and a rent freeze for New Yorkers living in about 1m rent-regulated apartments.Cuomo has portrayed Mamdani’s policies as naive and financially irresponsible. He has appealed to voters to pick him because of his experience as the state’s governor, a position he gave up in 2021 after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment.Cuomo has also assailed Mamdani, who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, over his criticism of Israel.Mamdani, who has weathered anti-Muslim rhetoric during the contest, says Israel’s military actions in Gaza have amounted to genocide. Cuomo and Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels public safety patrol group, equate Mamdani’s position with antisemitism.The New Jersey gubernatorial candidates, in their final debate earlier this month, sparred over the federal government shutdown, Sherrill’s military records, Trump’s policies and the high cost of living in the state. The winner would succeed the Democratic incumbent, Phil Murphy, who is term-limited.Early voting is already under way in other states.In Virginia, voters began casting early ballots on 19 September. In that closely watched governor’s race, they’re choosing between former US representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, and the Republican lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears.One of those candidates will become Virginia’s first female governor. They clashed over cultural issues such as the rights of transgender children in sports and school bathrooms during their lone debate earlier this month.Early voting runs through 1 November in Virginia and 2 November in New York City and New Jersey. Polling sites in all three states will then open widely for election day on 4 November. More

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      Pennsylvania city divided over Trump as it reels from economic whiplash

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      It was set to be the most expensive project that the beaten-down manufacturing sector of Erie, Pennsylvania, had seen in decades. In a blighted corner of town, a startup planned a $300m plant that would turn plastic waste into fuel for steel factories.Neighborhood advocates in Erie’s impoverished east side hoped the facility would provide the jobs and prosperity they needed. Environmentalists decried the pollution they expected the plant to bring. Unions got ready for what they hoped would be hundreds of jobs created by its construction, with more to come once it opened.And then it was over. Mitch Hecht, founder of the company pursuing the project, announced that a Department of Energy loan crucial to the plant’s funding was put on hold as a result of Donald Trump’s policies, which “had a severe and immediate impact on our ability to move forward”.It was the latest bout of economic whiplash to strike the county on north-west Pennsylvania’s Lake Erie shoreline, just months after its voters helped return Trump to the White House. Those who backed the president say they are sticking with him, even as his administration’s spending cuts have upended projects and budgets and tariffs have created new uncertainties for businesses.Once reliably Democratic at the presidential level, Erie county has emerged as hotly contested territory ever since 2016, when Trump became the first Republican to win the area in 32 years. Joe Biden carried the county by a slim 1,417 votes four years later, but it flipped back to Trump in 2024 by nearly the same margin.“We’re set up in this moment for extreme growth over the next 15, 20, 30 years, and as we try to just hobble off the starting line, we’re just getting whacked over the head by these larger macro policies and intentional immigration policies that create an inflation environment,” said Drew Whiting, CEO of the Erie Downtown Development Corporation.View image in fullscreenThe non-profit’s renovation efforts have helped open a food hall and new apartments and shops in what was once the poorest zip code in the US, and its latest project is a mixed-use space that could create 100 jobs and bring in up to $10m a year in tax revenue. But since the start of the year, costs of labor and materials have jumped 37%, which Whiting blamed on a dollar weakened by economic uncertainty, along with labor shortages worsened by Trump’s immigration crackdown.A short drive from downtown, a placard reading: “A recycling revolution is happening in Erie” standing outside a long-shuttered paper mill is the only sign remaining of the plastic waste facility that the startup International Recycling Group (IRG) planned to build there.Though environmental groups warned IRG’s plant would create more pollution and lead to garbage filling Lake Erie, projects intended to fight the climate crisis and address long-running problems such as how to dispose of plastic waste were priorities of the Biden administration, and last year, IRG announced it had received a $182m loan commitment from the energy department.On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that paused disbursements of such funds, and by April of this year, Hecht had announced that the loan had been put on hold, and the project would be canceled. IRG did not respond to a request for comment, and the Department of Energy did not respond to an email sent during the government shutdown.Railing against “waste, fraud and abuse” in Washington, Trump has put on hold numerous federal programs. Erie’s food bank, Second Harvest, has lost $1m that would go towards food purchasing, or about 25% of their budget, due to such funding cuts, its CEO, Gregory Hall, said.Meanwhile, need for their assistance has only grown, climbing 43% in the past two to three years as food prices rose and local grocers went under. A deadlock in the state legislature over approving a budget, which began in July, has only worsened the financial situation. “It has been a plethora of different funding cuts, different programs canceled, that is truly having an impact on not only the amount of food, but the types and quality of food that we can provide to the neighbors in our region,” Hall said.Trump’s solution to the ills plaguing communities like Erie is tariffs, which he says will encourage businesses to bring jobs back to the US from overseas, and protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. Businesses are divided over how significant the levies are, and whether the turmoil they have brought will be worth it.“It’s greatly impacted profitability, but it’s also it’s leading to the product not getting harvested,” said Roger Schultz, a farmer outside Erie who said his largest markets for apples, Canada and Mexico, are far less interested in taking his crop this year because of the levies.He was skeptical that the president’s promises of new trade deals would lead to those markets reopening.“Fundamental changes have happened out there in the marketplace, and no amount of pleading or price cutting or, ‘Hey, won’t you try this,’ is going to get you back in that,” Schultz said.At the injection plastic firm Erie Molded Packaging, sales have risen 15% this year, and its president, Tom Tredway, said he is looking at expanding their factory, thanks in part to tax deductions for businesses included in Trump and the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. While all of their suppliers and customers are in the US, the thin-gauge aluminum that is used in liners for their plastic containers is manufactured abroad, and tariffs have driven the prices higher.“It’s a nuisance more than anything,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenJezree Friend, vice-president of the Manufacturer and Business Association, an Erie-based advocacy and training group, described the higher costs as a necessary evil.“It’s a growing pain that gets you now. I think a lot of the business owners recognize that and are actually OK with that, by what they’re telling me,” he said.When Second Harvest distributes groceries, people line up in their cars hours early out of concern that the food on hand may run out. Those who supported the president on a recent Wednesday said they were pleased with what he had done so far.“I think he stands up for the people. I think he’s doing right,” said Norm Francis, 81, who runs a business fixing stained glass. “Corporate greed”, he said, was to blame for food prices that had become increasingly unaffordable for him, but the tariffs were “the right thing to do”.Ahead of him in line was Sally Michalak, 73, a retiree who was counting on Trump’s deportation campaign to curb inflation.“He’s getting rid of the illegals, so once all that settles down, I think grocery prices will go down,” she said.As for his funding cuts, Michalak shrugged them off as a necessary component of transforming a government she viewed as broken.“It’s just one of these deals where, if the house burns down, you have to tear it down completely before you rebuild it, and that’s what he’s doing,” she said.Rebuilding was on the mind of Gary Horton, executive director of the Urban Erie Community Development Corporation, as he sat in the gymnasium of a shuttered elementary school not far from where IRG would have built its plant. Closed in 2012 as enrollment in the neighborhoods around it declined, the Burton school has been used by local police for active shooter drills that have left paint splatter on the walls and bullet casings on the floor.Two years ago, Horton’s group bought it and turned the grounds into a community garden, with plans to hopefully reopen the school if the neighborhood’s economy turned around, hopefully with the help of the plastics plant.“The success of it would have helped us here, but it would have also helped maybe cultivate an atmosphere where other developers or other owners of projects would do the same thing,” Horton said.Now that the project has been canceled, “the odds of doing something right now aren’t great,” Horton conceded. “But we still have the challenge, and we still have the opportunity.” More

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      Trump was planning to send troops to San Francisco. Now he’s not. Here’s why | Joe Eskenazi

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      This story was published in collaboration with Mission Local.The mayor of San Francisco said on Thursday that Donald Trump had simply called him – no go-betweens or consigliere required – and told him there would no longer be a deployment of federal agents or troops to the city.The president simply dialed Daniel Lurie up and talked at him. And, just like that, a daylong crisis and flood-the-zone news cycle across the Bay Area regarding the imminent deployment of border protection agents to the region was quelled. Or not: Oakland’s mayor, Barbara Lee, said the president didn’t call her. Lurie and other local leaders are taking the president’s words to mean that the rest of the Bay Area will be spared – but there was no overt pledge regarding that.It’s great for the people of San Francisco that the president has capriciously decided to unsend the troops he capriciously decided to send. But the real story here is, per the president’s summation on social media of his discussion with Lurie, that the commander-in-chief is overtly stating that he is basing a domestic military deployment upon what local “friends of mine” (the billionaire CEOs Jensen Huang of Nvidia and the local boy Marc Benioff of Salesforce) lobbied him to do. Trump also noted that Lurie asked him “very nicely” not to establish a military beachhead in San Francisco.All for the good. But what if Huang and Benioff had been in the mood for a military parade and called for sending in the troops? What if Lurie had been less polite?If things had gone even slightly differently, it stands to reason that federal immigration agents and/or armed troops could be rolling through the city by now.There are only so many turns of phrase you can employ: this is just a profoundly fucked-up way to lead a country. It’s like dealing with King George or a warlord out of the dark Ages.This city’s billionaires are very good at some things, and those things have made them a lot of money. But being good at those things doesn’t make your average billionaire an expert on military intervention, the local drug trade or, for that matter, immigration policy or crime in the city.Speaking of capricious, Benioff was for sending in the guard before he was against it.It figures: Salesforce veterans tell me they expect Benioff would do great schmoozing in a one-on-one with the president – because their personalities are so similar.For a guy who drinks so much coffee, Daniel Lurie is remarkably even-keeled. When asked about his discussion with Trump, Lurie told the press that he simply recited all of San Francisco’s heartening crime statistics over the telephone – and kept reciting them, sprinkling in a little real estate boosterism along the way.“Everything I told you is all I said to him,” the mayor said today. “I keep repeating, and I said to him, that we are at 70-year lows when it comes to violent crimes. Tent encampments are at record lows. I spoke about more office space being leased than vacated. For the first time, retail is back. Hotel bookings are up 50%. Convention bookings are also up 50%. This is a city on the rise. And that’s what I said to him. And that’s what I say to everybody.”The president, Lurie said, “asked nothing of me”. Nobody was made to purchase Trump’s 555 California St property at an exorbitant markup. No promises to build a Trump Tower on top of Salesforce Tower were required to call off the troops. It remains unclear whether Lurie finally referred to Trump by name when on the phone with Trump. Evidently, he wasn’t asked to.I’d like to think the mayor really did say “retail is back!” to the man presently tearing down the White House to install a ballroom fit for people who feel Versailles is too understated. If he did, it worked.But nobody is expecting peace in our time: “They want to give it a ‘shot’,” Trump wrote. “Therefore we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday.”All of the things Lurie told the president – and “everybody” – are true. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: subjectively, you may not feel safe in San Francisco. Objectively, you’ve rarely been safer. San Francisco’s reported crime totals are low, and that’s something you could say before this mayor or this president. We are on pace for our lowest homicide total since 1954, but last year’s total was the lowest since 1961. Car break-ins, which were long part of the San Francisco Condition and gave us the municipal nickname “bip city” are way down.But the fact that it was true does not matter: what Huang or Benioff or other billionaire pals tell the president is what matters.The problem, however, is that parts of San Francisco still look gnarly – gnarlier, arguably, than they did in the 1970s when teams of serial killers roamed the streets. There are swaths of the city in which people are living in overt filth and misery and are overtly buying, selling and using drugs. There are still unhoused people, drug addicts and unhoused drug addicts shambling about. They may be disinclined to give you the Zodiac killer treatment, but their presence makes people uncomfortable. This makes people – including terminally online tech CEOs and venture capitalists – feel unsafe. This makes ostensibly intelligent tech barons ping the president on social media and ask him to send in the national guard.If Lurie did indeed stave off an intervention of armed soldiers or rampaging immigration agents by telling the truth, then more power to him. To paraphrase the familiar quote, honesty is one of the better policies.But the “shot” Lurie has apparently been granted was to clean up a problem he has explained – quantitatively – that we don’t have. Lurie will purportedly meet with the attorney general, Pam Bondi. But it remains to be seen whether any federal assistance from the FBI or DEA to combat drug trafficking doesn’t come with serious – and capricious – strings attached. Every bargain with Trump and his gang is a Faustian bargain.San Francisco’s crime stats have been headed the right way for a while. But our gnarliness vibes have not – so we recalled our district attorney and dumped our prior mayor. It’s not enough for Lurie to point to numbers. He has to deliver the right vibes – the kind of vibes that can appease our billionaire class and the president they call up and lobby. That’s a hard job. Get that man a cup of coffee.Retail, they say, is back. It remains to be seen whether and when federal immigration agents will be, too.

      Joe Eskenazi is an editor and columnist for Mission Local. Io Yeh Gilman and Xueer Lu contributed reporting More

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      Federal workers squeezed as shutdown drags on: ‘I can’t believe we’re not going to get paid’

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      More furloughs, more anxiety and more economic stress are bearing down on federal employees as the shutdown of the federal government continues into its fourth week with Republicans and Democrats at a standstill on negotiating a budget deal.“There’s no sight of this ending and we’re starting to wonder if we’re going to be made whole and if this is going to continue into the next round of pay, which is what we’re headed into now. On Friday, we will be missing our first full paycheck,” Johnny Jones, council secretary treasurer for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) TSA Council 100, and a TSA employee in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, said.“Now people are really starting to get nervous. They’re starting to make preparations for liquidations or they’re making preparations in their lives of how we’re going to survive.”He cited cases of members crying and starting to get desperate, citing the previous shutdown in 2019 where he and other co-workers had to help a co-worker transport her children to Colorado to be with family because she could no longer afford childcare.“I just can’t believe we’re not going to get paid,” Jones added. “ It’s unbelievable. If you worked at McDonald’s and they did this, they could sue you, shut your business down, but you’re working for the government, they cannot pay you, and it’s OK. And this is a problem. People are now going to have to take home debt. People are going to have to take on new things, maybe even work their full shift, pick up their kids and do GrubHub or something, looking for other means of income on the side.”Meanwhile in Washington, the deadlock continues.“I don’t have a strategy,” Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, told reporters on 21 October, as the House of Representatives’ calendar for October remains empty. House members have been on paid vacation since 19 September, when it went on recess.The House speaker’s office said in a statement: “He has consistently said that the House will return to regular legislative session as soon as Chuck Schumer and the Democrats vote to end the shutdown and reopen the government.”Democrats have held firm on a budget that includes extending healthcare subsidies that would prevent health insurance premiums from soaring for millions of Americans, resulting in loss of health insurance for about 15 million Americans due to the subsidy expirations and cuts to Medicaid.Throughout and leading up to the shutdown, federal workers have been subjected to threats by the Trump administration, which have included threatening to withhold back pay to furloughed workers, conducting reductions in force (though a federal court has temporarily blocked the firings), and cutting federally funded infrastructure programs with threats to go after programs deemed priorities for Democrats.Trump referred to Russell Vought, the White House office of management and budget director, as “Darth Vader” on 21 October.“They call him Darth Vader, I call him a fine man. He’s cutting Democrat priorities, and they’re never going to get them back,” Trump said, in claiming the shutdown allows the administration to enact cuts to federal services and programs.“It’s played hell with our psyche, for sure,” said Ruark Hotopp, District 8 national vice-president of the AFGE in the midwest and an employee at the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, on the consistent attacks on federal workers since January 2025, from “department of government efficiency” (Doge) cuts, to rhetoric from Vought and other Trump administration officials criticizing federal civilian employees.Hotopp explained he was in Washington DC lobbying various members of Congress around these issues last week, and the threats were laughed off by Republican Senate staff.“This was a Republican senator’s office, and they reassured me that, while we understand what the president’s saying, that we don’t agree with the president’s position, and it is the full intention of the United States Congress to make sure these those folks get paid. So while that’s reassuring to me, to see this sort of public rhetoric to the folks on the frontlines, that’s not reassuring at all,” he said.“The president is one of the very first people to say this rhetoric needs to be toned down, while he then fans the flames,” added Hotopp. “If we’re going to get back to some sort of normalcy, it has to start with the president himself.”Nicole Cantello, president of the AFGE Union Local 704 and an attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), explained the rollout of furloughs had been “chaotic” for federal employees at the agency, with the EPA using leftover funds to stave off furloughs in the beginning of the shutdown, only for mass furloughs to be issued earlier this week.“I’m located here in the Great Lakes, and we are the ones that do all the work to try to protect the Great Lakes. Drinking water for over 40 million people come from the Great Lakes. The people that check the health of the lake to those who find cases against polluters, all those inspectors, they were all just furloughed,” Cantello said. “The human health and environment will definitely be impacted. More pollution will go out.”She expressed concern for the prolonged shutdown and its impact on attrition. Since January 2025, the EPA said its workforce had been slashed from 16,155 employees to 12,448 employees through firings, retirements and buyouts. The Trump administration had attempted to cut dozens more workers at the agency through a reduction in force during the shutdown.“Given everything that’s happened here, who knows who will come back from the furlough?” Cantello said. “I don’t have a good handle on that, but I’m worried that we’re losing and more people and the agency will be rendered even more ineffective.”A spokesperson for the EPA would not comment on or provide numbers on how many workers were furloughed at the agency, but said: “Congressional Democrats are not only unwilling to vote for a clean funding bill, but their goal is to inflict as much pain on the American people as possible. The false narratives being peddled by union bosses and their Democratic allies are nothing more than deliberate fear-mongering designed to create chaos and deceive hardworking Americans.” More

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      Why is Trump, the self-proclaimed ‘president of peace’, aiming to topple the Venezuelan regime?

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      It was a solemn pledge at the heart of Donald Trump’s “America first” appeal.A “Make America great again” (Maga) foreign policy would mean the end of military commitments that had in the past sucked the US into draining and drawn-out wars far from its own shores.Now an intense military buildup targeting the authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela is stretching that commitment to the breaking point, as the White House strikes a bellicose posture that seems to mock Trump’s self-proclaimed “president of peace” image.In recent weeks, US forces have carried out at least eight strikes, killing at least 38 people, against boats in the Caribbean off Venezuela’s coast that Washington said were being used for drug trafficking. The latest strike, announced on Friday by Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, reportedly killed six people on a boat allegedly being used to smuggle drugs on what was said to be “a known narco-trafficking route”.Two further strikes in the Pacific this week killed at least five people as tensions also rose between the US and Colombia over the Trump administration’s tactics against alleged traffickers.But the main focus has been Venezuela amid a buildup that has seen nuclear-capable B-52 bombers and elite special operations forces deployed off the South American country’s shores.Trump this month signaled a further escalation by authorising the CIA to conduct operations inside the country, fuelling fears that the US was trying to foment a military coup against Maduro – whom it has designated a “narco-terrorist” and for whose arrest it has offered a $50m bounty – or even prepare a ground invasion.“Action on the ground would be the least preferred option, and it certainly wouldn’t be GI Joe – it would be special ops people,” said Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst and national intelligence officer for Latin America.“With technology, you don’t need to invade any more. The whole idea, I believe, is to get the Venezuelans to take him out.”Some Venezuelan analysts say local support for a coup is thin.The policy has been shaped by a Trump administration power struggle that has seen Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and acting national security adviser, triumph over Richard Grenell, Trump’s envoy to Venezuela, who was sidelined after arguing for a pragmatic approach that would help secure oil deals.Maduro and other senior regime figures are said to have offered extensive concessions in an effort to end the confrontation with Washington, including offering the US a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil industry. The Trump administration has even eased some sanctions on Venezuelan oil, granting Chevron a licence to resume operating in the country and increase exports from Venezuela. But longstanding tensions have instead escalated further after Rubio pressed the case for a tough approach.“Trump had, in many conversations, meetings with different people emphasized that he really only cared about [Venezuela’s] oil,” said a US businessman with longstanding ties to Venezuela and close knowledge of the White House’s policy. “But Rubio was able to drum up this ‘narco-terrorist’ rhetoric and get Trump to pivot completely. The U-turn really reflects Rubio’s expanded influence in the administration.”Rubio, a longtime critic of Maduro’s socialist regime, won the support of Stephen Miller, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff, and Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, in persuading Trump.He did so partly by seizing on the administration’s designation of Tren de Aragua, a transnational gang of Venezuelan origin, as a “foreign terrorist organisation” that had infiltrated the US and allegedly fuelled the influx of undocumented migrants fleeing Maduro’s regime.A White House proclamation last March further identified the gang as being in cahoots with the Cartel de los Soles, a shadowy grouping of Venezuelan military figures which the administration insists is headed by Maduro and is responsible for trafficking drugs to the US. Other sources have questioned that characterisation of the cartel and Maduro’s connections to it.Experts also question Venezuela’s significance as a drugs supplier. Although the country is a conduit for trafficking, it is not a primary source for most illegal substances entering the US. Fentanyl, which is responsible for most US drug-related deaths, is mainly sourced from Mexico.There are doubts over the legality of the boat strikes – which Rubio has vociferously justified – and the military escalation in the name of combating drugs.The White House insists the actions, believed to be led by the CIA, are legal under the 2001 USA Patriot Act – passed after the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks – which affords scope for action against designated foreign terrorists, a category that now includes Maduro.William Brownfield, a former ambassador to Venezuela and ex-state department drugs and law enforcement czar, said the policy was unprecedented and vulnerable to legal challenge.“I never had anyone seriously suggest to me during my seven years as drugs and law enforcement chief that this issue could be addressed the way it is now,” he said. “I couldn’t even propose it because no one would even entertain the thought of using the military for a law enforcement mission.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnderlying Rubio’s drive may be a mixture of ideology and political ambition. The son of Cuban immigrants, he has long denounced Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, for the financial and oil support they have provided to Cuba’s communist regime.Observers say Rubio is eyeing the Republican presidential nomination in 2028 – when Trump is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term and where adopting a hard line on Venezuela could help secure the Cuban ethnic vote in a close primary election.Tommy Pigott, a state department spokesman, played down Rubio’s role in shaping the policy, saying in a statement: “The president is the one who drives and determines our foreign policy. It is the job of the cabinet to implement. Secretary Rubio is honored to be a part of the president’s team.”He added: “Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela; he’s a fugitive of American justice who undermines regional security and poisons Americans and we want to see him brought to justice.”But there are also wider foreign policy considerations as the US tries to revive its historical habit of treating Latin America as its back yard.“Rubio’s position is that the United States was not paying sufficient attention to the Latin American region writ large and I actually agree with that,” said Brownfield. “The Trump administration is, in fact, being fairly clear when it says that the Maduro regime is a threat to basic democratic values throughout the western hemisphere.”Angelo Rivero Santos, a Latin American studies professor at Georgetown University and former diplomat in Venezuela’s embassy in Washington, said the Trump administration was reasserting the Monroe doctrine, devised in the 19th century and which saw the US claiming Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence.“It’s not only Venezuela,” he said. “When you look at their statements on the Panama canal, at the impositions of tariffs on Brazil, the latest spat with the Colombian government, not to mention the military presence in the Caribbean, you see a return of the Monroe doctrine.”One aim, Santos argued, was to install more Trump-friendly governments in the region similar to those of Javier Milei, Argentina’s president; Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador; and Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa.Another, said Armstrong, the former CIA analyst, was an “ultra-nationalist” projection of strength.“The message is: ‘We’re tough guys,’” he said. “Maduro, like the Cubans, has given the United States the finger and told us to go fuck ourselves, and we have failed with all of the so-called maximum pressure policy that started in Trump 1.0 and has continued and increased in Trump 2.0.”The result, he warned, could be an unpredictable sequence of events as the US tries to goad Maduro into retaliation, which could be used to engineer his downfall.“They can hit a naval target, say a coastal civilian facility, and that might be the provocation that gets Maduro to hit back and maybe do something dumb,” he said. “Then you go for big targets in Caracas, and get a form of chaos. If that doesn’t do it, you put a couple of guys in, special forces or Navy Seals, to do a snatch. Of course he’s not going to go alive. I don’t see a pretty solution.”Aram Roston contributed additional reporting More

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      What is the White House East Wing and why has it been torn down in Trump’s renovation plans?

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      It was confirmed on Friday that the East Wing of the White House has now been completely destroyed, days after construction started on the planned $300m (£225m) ballroom that Donald Trump is adding to the historic building.The demolition marked a reversal of Trump’s earlier promise in July that none of the White House’s existing infrastructure would be torn down during construction of the ballroom.The rapid pace of the project, coupled with images of rubble at the president’s residence has elicited a chorus of disgust among White House alumni and presidential historians, while the Trump administration has dismissed the criticism as “manufactured outrage”.What is the East Wing?The East Wing was first known as the East Terrace and was built during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt in 1902. Franklin Roosevelt created the East Wing in its current form in 1942 to add working space during the war, but also to conceal an underground bunker that had been constructed for the president and staff.Over time it became the home base for the first lady and her staff. It was also the home of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.View image in fullscreenSitting across East Executive Avenue from the Treasury Department, it represented the social side of the White House and was where tourists and other guests entered for events.In the original plan for the ballroom, it would have remained untouched and, in Trump’s telling, become a space where guests would mingle, sip cocktails and eat hors d’oeuvres until they were called into the ballroom for dinner. However, days after ground was broken on the new project, the White House confirmed the entire wing would be torn down and that process appeared to be completed by Friday.What can we expect from the new ballroom?Trump has complained that the White House needs a large entertaining space and that the East Room is too small, with capacity for only about 200 people.The 90,000-square-foot (27,400sqm) ballroom will dwarf the main White House, at nearly double the size, and Trump says it will accommodate 999 people.Renderings released by the White House suggest a strong resemblance to the gilded ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and home in Palm Beach, Florida. The White House has said the ballroom will be ready for use well before Trump’s term ends in January 2029, an ambitious timeline.View image in fullscreenThe president has been adamant that the ballroom will not come at a cost to taxpayers, because it is being privately funded by “many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly”.Donors for the proposed ballroom include a slew of major tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google. Defense contractors and communications companies have also pitched in, including Lockheed Martin, Palantir, T-Mobile and Comcast.The president began construction despite the lack of signoff from the National Capital Planning Commission, the executive branch agency that has jurisdiction over construction and major renovations to government buildings in the region.What has been the reaction to the bulldozing of the East Wing?The image of broken masonry, rubble and steel wires at America’s most famous address appeared to strike a chord even with people who have become accustomed to shrugging off Trump’s outrageous antics.David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush, tweeted: “Something profoundly symbolic about Trump taking a wrecking ball to the White House … paying for the demolition with money from cronies and insiders seeking government favors … and the Republicans in Congress acquiescing as Trump treats public assets as private property.”View image in fullscreenThe National Trust for Historic Preservation on Tuesday asked the Trump administration to pause the demolition until the planning commission review was completed. Its letter expressed concern that the proposed ballroom would “overwhelm the White House itself”.Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, was quoted by WTOP News as saying: “Maybe it’s just the dislike of change on my part, but it seemed painful, almost like slashing a Rembrandt painting. Or defacing a Michelangelo sculpture.”In an appearance on Fox News on Friday, Trump adviser Stephen Miller defended the unannounced demolition of the entire East Wing, arguing that the extension was not really part of the White House.“It was a cheaply built add-on structure … [it] is badly in need of refurbishment, repair and renovation,” he said.What have other presidents done to change the White House?Presidents have added to the White House since construction began in 1792 for a host of reasons, and Trump aides say his decision to build a ballroom follows that long tradition.Thomas Jefferson added the east and west colonnades.Andrew Jackson built the North Portico on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the White House, aligning with the South Portico that James Monroe added after the original mansion was rebuilt after the British burned it during the war of 1812.Theodore Roosevelt added the West Wing to provide dedicated space for the president and senior staff, while Franklin D Roosevelt added the East Wing.One of the most significant White House renovations happened under Harry Truman, when the mansion was found to be so structurally unsound that he ordered a complete gutting of the interior that lasted from 1948 to 1952. The project, including Truman’s addition of a balcony to the second floor of the South Portico, was highly controversial.Other changes include the creation of the Rose Garden during John F Kennedy’s administration and Richard Nixon’s decision to convert an indoor swimming pool that was built for FDR’s physical therapy into a workspace for the growing White House press corps.With Reuters and the Associated Press More

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      Trump news at a glance: Pentagon announces it is deploying US aircraft carrier to the Caribbean

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      The Pentagon said on Friday that it was deploying the United States’ most advanced aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, a serious escalation in the Trump administration’s war against drug cartels that provides the resources to start conducting strikes against targets on the ground.The move will bring the USS Gerald Ford carrier, with dozens of stealth fighter jets and surveillance aircraft, in addition to other warships that accompany the carrier, to the coast of Venezuela as the carrier nears the end of its deployment in the Mediterranean.Sending the carrier strike group to the Caribbean is the clearest sign to date that the administration intends to dramatically expand the scope of its lethal military campaign from hitting small boats alleged to be carrying drugs bound for the US to targets on land.Pentagon deploys top aircraft carrier as Trump militarisation of Caribbean ratchets upThe carrier strike group has dozens of F35 fighter jets, increasing the firepower and ability of the US to hit air-defense systems in Venezuela. That would clear the way for US special operations or drones to destroy land-based targets, current and former officials said.The expanded naval presence “will bolster US capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the western hemisphere,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement.Read the full storyUS and Canada spar over ad of Reagan denouncing tariffs that led to derailed trade talksThe latest breakdown in relations between the US and Canada appears to stem from a one-minute television advertisement featuring former US president Ronald Reagan declaring “trade barriers hurt every American worker”.Canadian prime minister Mark Carney says he is ready to resume trade talks with the US. However, Ontario premier Doug Ford – whose provincial government ran the ad earlier in the week – says it will run again during the first game of the World Series Friday night. Ford added that the campaign would end Monday.Read the full storyUS court rejects Trump officials’ effort to delay rulings on veterans benefitsA panel of US judges rejected an effort by the Trump administration to delay court rulings on claims by veterans who say they have been unfairly denied disability benefits and other compensation. The 9-0 ruling, handed down on Wednesday by the court of appeals for veterans claims, is the latest example of the growing number of federal judges pushing back against Trump administration moves.Read the full storyEast Wing of White House reduced to rubble as part of Trump’s ballroom constructionThe East Wing of the White House has now been completely destroyed to pave the way for Donald Trump’s $300m (£225m) planned gilded ballroom, just days after the administration announced it would happen and contradicting Trump’s earlier promise that the building would not be touched.Satellite images on Friday showed the historic building’s eastern section reduced to rubble, to the outrage of historians, former White House officials and much of the public.Read the full storyUkraine wants US to stay involved, says Zelenskyy after meeting western alliesVolodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine wants the US to stay involved in efforts to end the war after a meeting of western allies in London that took place without Donald Trump.The Ukrainian leader chose not to overtly lobby for the supply of US Tomahawk cruise missiles at a meeting of more than 20 mainly European leaders from the “coalition of the willing” but instead emphasised the need for the west to work together.Read the full storyVirginia Democrats aim to redraw maps to help party gain seats in CongressVirginia has entered the national mid-cycle redistricting battle, with Democratic state lawmakers intent on redrawing the state’s congressional maps to deliver two or three additional Democrats to Washington.Read the full storyTrump officials to send election observers to California and New JerseyThe Department of Justice plans to send federal election observers to California and New Jersey next month, targeting two Democratic states holding off-year elections after requests from state Republican parties. Election monitoring is routine but this move comes as both states are set to hold closely watched elections with national consequences on 4 November. Democrats fear the new administration will attempt to gain an upper hand in next year’s midterms with unfounded allegations of fraud.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s top advisers during his first administration, said that the president will seek and likely win a third term in office, despite the fact that this would violate the 22nd amendment of the US constitution.

      The New York state attorney general, Letitia James, pleaded not guilty on Friday to charges of bank fraud and false statements brought after Donald Trump publicly called for her to be prosecuted in a move widely seen as political retribution.

      The US will expand the use of facial recognition technology to track non-citizens entering and leaving the country to combat visa overstays and passport fraud, according to a government document published on Friday.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened Thursday 23 October. More