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      Trump administration cuts New York City’s anti-terrorism funding days after skyscraper attack

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      The Trump administration said it would cut terrorism prevention funding for New York City, according to a grant notice posted days after a gunman killed four people inside a Manhattan skyscraper.The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) stated in a grant notice posted on Friday that New York City would receive $64m less this year from its urban area security fund. The amount was listed in a single line of an 80-page Fema notice on the grant program.US Congress created the program to help cities prevent terrorist attacks.“It makes absolutely no sense, and no justification has been given to cut NY’s allocation given the rise in the threat environment,” a spokesperson for the New York state division of homeland security and emergency services said in a statement on Monday afternoon.Manhattan has been the site of two attacks on high-profile corporate executives in the last year. The most recent attack came from a gunman armed with an assault-style rifle in late July, who killed four people inside an office building that houses the headquarters of the NFL and several major financial firms.New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, highlighted the attack in her late July letter to the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, asking why the Trump administration had not announced the amounts each city would receive from the program this year. Fema is part of the Department of Homeland Security.Noem’s office did not respond to two messages from Reuters asking why the federal government cut New York’s funding.In December 2024, the chief executive of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot dead on the street in Manhattan in a targeted attack. And security has been particularly tight in New York City ever since the al-Qaida terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, which killed almost 3,000 people in lower Manhattan when Islamist extremists flew hijacked passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.Fema uses “an analysis of relative risk of terrorism” to decide how much money cities will receive, according to the grant notice posted on Friday. The agency may change the amounts later, according to the notice.In 2023, the agency considered city visitor counts, population density and proximity to international borders, among other factors, to determine the totals, according to a report signed by then Fema administrator Deanne Criswell.Fema has been decreasing terrorism prevention money for New York City each year since at least fiscal year 2022. The drop is much more drastic this year at 41% year-over-year.The New York City police department has used the funding in the past to pay for the Domain Awareness System, a network of cameras, license plate readers and detection devices, according to a 2016 statement from the former mayor Bill de Blasio’s office. More

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      Texas senator asks FBI to help locate and arrest Democrats for leaving state

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      The US senator John Cornyn of Texas has asked the FBI to aid Texas law enforcement in locating and arresting Democrats who left the state to forestall a plan sought by Donald Trump to aggressively redraw the state’s congressional map in a way that could help Republicans keep their House majority after the 2026 midterm elections.The senator’s request is a significant escalation in the fast-moving showdown that could set up a confrontation between the blue state leaders shielding the Democratic state lawmakers and the Trump administration. Earlier on Tuesday, Texas Democrats denied a legislative quorum for the second day in a row by scattering across the country, with many decamping to Chicago, Illinois, where the Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, has vowed to protect them.In a letter to the FBI director, Kash Patel, Cornyn, a Republican, said “federal resources are necessary to locate the out-of-state Texas legislators who are potentially acting in violation of the law”.The FBI declined to comment on the senator’s request to involve its agents.Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, said he would ask a court to declare vacant the seats of “any rogue lawmakers” who had not returned to work at the statehouse by Friday.“The people of Texas elected lawmakers, not jet-setting runaways looking for headlines,” Paxton, the long-embattled Trump loyalist challenging Cornyn for the Republican Senate nomination, said in a statement. “If you don’t show up to work, you get fired.”Texas House speaker Dustin Burrows said the chamber would attempt to reach quorum again on Friday, after it failed for a second consecutive day on Tuesday,Trump, who had been unusually silent on the dramatic showdown that he set in motion, also weighed in on Tuesday, arguing that Republicans were entitled to the five additional seats they could stand to gain if the new map were approved.“We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats,” Trump said in an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box. “We have a really good governor, and we have good people in Texas. And I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.”“In Illinois, what’s happened is terrible what they’re doing,” the president added. “And you notice, they go to Illinois for safety, but that’s all gerrymandered. California is gerrymandered. We should have many more seats in Congress in California. It’s all gerrymandered.”Democrats and Republicans have both used gerrymandering to maximize their party’s political power, though in recent years Republicans have been far more aggressive – and effective – in deploying the tactic.California voters approved an independent re-districting commission to draw the state’s congressional maps for the first time in 2010. But the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has vowed to “fight fire with fire” by asking voters to override the commission and approve new maps that would favor California Democrats if Texas moved forward with its gerrymandering plan. At a press conference on Monday, Newsom said he hoped Texas Republicans would retreat, but that California would not hesitate to respond in a way that carried “profound national implications” for balance of power in Washington.At a news conference in Illinois, Texas Democrats were joined by Pritzker, who hailed them as “heroes”, and the Democratic National Committee chair Ken, Martin, who accused Republicans of attempting to “steal their way to victory”.Pritzker has also said that Illinois may respond to Texas’s efforts by redrawing its own map in Democrats’ favor, given that “everything has to be on the table”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Trump came up with a new scheme to rig the system by ramming through a corrupt, mid-decade redistricting plan that would steal five congressional seats, silencing millions of voters, especially Black and Latino voters,” the governor said.The Texas house reconvened at 1pm local time on Tuesday, but enough Democrats were still outside the state to deny quorum for a second day. “There being 94 members present, quorum is not present,” said the House speaker, Dustin Burrows, a Republican. Burrows added that the Texas department of public safety was “actively working to compel their attendance after I signed their civil arrest warrants yesterday”.He said the House would reconvene and try to make quorum again on Friday.Gina Hinojosa, a Democratic state representative who left Texas for Illinois on Sunday, said that she and her colleagues planned to be absent from the state capitol for “as long as it takes” to thwart the Republicans’ redistricting plans.The current special legislative session, called by Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, lasts until 19 August. “As long as we need to stay away and deny quorum on this bill to pass the truck maps, I will stay away,” Hinojosa said, speaking from a suburb of Chicago.Abbott could continue to call additional special sessions, and it’s not clear how long Democrats could stay outside the state. Each lawmaker who has absconded faces a $500-per-day fine, and Abbott has ordered the Texas department of public safety to “locate, arrest and return to the House chamber any member who has abandoned their duty to Texans”.Hinojosa shrugged off Republicans’ threats to remove Democratic members from office, calling it “disrespectful” to the Texans who elected them, many of whom, she said, have expressed gratitude to their lawmakers for standing up to Trump. Though she lamented the redistricting “arms race” that the Texas undertaking had set off – with Democratic states vowing to respond in kind – Hinojosa said it was imperative that her party confront the “real, present-day threats” posed by redrawn congressional maps.“Democrats need to fight to win,” she said. “We fight to win for the day, and we take tomorrow as it comes.” More

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      Spike Lee, Adam McKay and over 2,000 writers decry Trump’s ‘un-American’ actions in open letter

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      More than 2,300 members of the Writers Guild of America, including Spike Lee and Adam McKay, have signed an open letter decrying the actions of Donald Trump’s administration that represent “an unprecedented, authoritarian assault” on free speech.The letter, a combined effort from the WGA East and West branches, cites the US president’s “baseless lawsuits” against news organizations that have “published stories he does not like and leveraged them into payoffs”. It specifically references Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16m to settle a “meritless lawsuit” about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The letter notes that Trump “retaliated against publications reporting factually on the White House and threatened broadcasters’ licenses”, and has repeatedly called for the cancellation of programs that criticize him.Additionally, the letter blasts Republicans in Congress who “collaborated” with the Trump administration to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “in order to silence PBS and NPR”. And it says the FCC, led by Trump-appointed chair Brendan Carr, “openly conditioned its approval of the Skydance-Paramount merger on assurances that CBS would make ‘significant changes’ to the purported ideological viewpoint of its journalism and entertainment programming.“These are un-American attempts to restrict the kinds of stories and jokes that may be told, to silence criticism and dissent,” the letter reads. “We don’t have a king, we have a president. And the president doesn’t get to pick what’s on television, in movie theaters, on stage, on our bookshelves, or in the news.”Signees include Tony Gilroy, David Simon, Mike Schur, Ilana Glazer, Lilly Wachowski, Celine Song, Justin Kuritzkes, Desus Nice, Gillian Flynn, John Waters, Liz Meriwether, Kenneth Lonergan, Alfonso Cuarón, Shawn Ryan and many other prominent names in film and television.The letter, released on Tuesday, calls on elected representatives and industry leaders to “resist this overreach”, as well as their audiences to “fight for a free and democratic future” and “raise their voice”.The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced last Friday that it would shut down after 57 years in operation, following the decision by the Republican-controlled House last month to eliminate $1.1bn in CPB funding over two years, part of a $9bn reduction to public media and foreign aid programs.The corporation, established by Congress in 1967 to ensure educational and cultural programming remained accessible to all Americans, distributed more than $500m annually to PBS, NPR and 1,500 local stations nationwide. Despite the federal grants, stations mostly relied on viewer donations, corporate sponsorships and local government funds to stay afloat.The Trump administration has also filed a lawsuit against three CPB board members who refused to leave their positions after Trump attempted to remove them.“This is certainly not the first time that free speech has come under assault in this country, but free speech remains our right because generation after generation of Americans have dedicated themselves to its protection,” the letter concludes. “Now and always, when writers come under attack, our collective power as a union allows us to fight back. This period in American life will not last forever, and when it’s over the world will remember who had the courage to speak out.” More

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      US House panel subpoenas Bill and Hillary Clinton for Epstein testimony

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      The House oversight committee on Tuesday issued subpoenas to Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as several former attorneys general and directors of the FBI, demanding “testimony related to horrific crimes perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein”.The investigative committee’s Republican chair, James Comer, sent the subpoenas in response to two motions lawmakers approved on a bipartisan basis last month, as Congress navigated outrage among Donald Trump’s supporters over the justice department’s announcement that it would not release further details about Epstein, a disgraced financier who died in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.The subpoenas raise the possibility that more details will become public about Trump’s relationship with Epstein, which stretched for years but appeared to have petered out by the time Epstein was convicted of sexually abusing girls in 2008. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of a sexually suggestive sketch and lewd letter Trump sent to Epstein as a 50th birthday gift in 2003.The president and his allies have long flirted with conspiracy theories around Epstein’s death in federal custody, but the justice department upended those by concluding he died by suicide and a long-rumored list of his client did not exist. That prompted some Trump supporters to criticize the president for failing to make good on his pledge to bring full transparency to the case, which Democrats moved to capitalize on by pushing congressional Republicans into tricky votes intended to make the Epstein case files public.Shortly before House lawmakers left Washington DC for Congress’s August recess, the Republican congressman Scott Perry won an oversight subcommittee’s approval to compel depositions from the Clintons and the former top federal law enforcement officials in a bid to reveal more about Epstein’s activities. Democratic congresswoman Summer Lee also successfully pushed a motion to subpoena justice department files related to the case.In addition to the Clintons, the committee sent subpoenas to former attorneys general Jeff Sessions, Alberto Gonzales and William Barr, who served in George W Bush and Trump’s presidencies, and Merrick Garland, Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, who served under Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Former FBI directors James Comey and Robert Mueller also received subpoenas.In the letter to Bill Clinton, Comer noted that the former president had flown four times on Epstein’s private jet, and repeated an allegation that he had “pressured” Vanity Fair not to publish sex trafficking claims regarding Epstein. The chair further says that Clinton was “allegedly close” with Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted on sex trafficking charges related to Epstein.“Given your past relationships with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, the Committee believes that you have information regarding their activities that is relevant to the Committee’s investigation,” Comer wrote.In his letter to Hillary Clinton, Comer draws a more tenuous connect, writing: “Your family appears to have had a close relationship with both Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell”. In addition to details about them, Comer notes that Clinton “may have knowledge of efforts by the federal government to combat international sex trafficking operations of the type run by Mr. Epstein”.Comer set Bill Clinton’s deposition date as 14 October and Hillary’s as 9 October. Others who received subpoenas were given dates ranging from mid-August through early October, while US attorney general Pam Bondi has until 19 August to release documents related to the case.In addition to the subpoenas, Republican congressman Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna are collecting signatures for a discharge petition to force a vote on legislation compelling release of the Epstein files. That vote is not expected to happen until the House returns from recess in early September.Trump has authorized the justice department to request release of the transcripts from the federal grand juries that indicted Epstein and Maxwell, while last week, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche interviewed Maxwell in Florida in what the White House said was a bid to uncover new details about the case. More

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      I was the US labor secretary. Trump’s latest firing undermines a key agency | Robert Reich

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      I spent much of the 1990s as the secretary of labor. One unit of the labor department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information.So what does Donald Trump do? In one fell swoop on Friday, he essentially destroyed the credibility of the BLS.Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May.Well, that’s too bad. Revisions in monthly jobs reports are nothing new. They’re made when the bureau gets more or better information over time, which it often does.Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”. Then he ordered her fired and replaced with someone else – presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.How can anyone in the future trust the information that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: they cannot.Trump has destroyed the credibility of this extraordinarily important source of information.When Trump doesn’t like the message, he shoots the messenger and replaces the messenger with someone who will come up with messages that he approves. So we’re left without credible sources of information about what is really occurring.Trump is in the process of trying to do the same with the Federal Reserve – demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates or lose control of the agency.What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell gives in to Trump? It loses it.In the future, we wouldn’t have confidence that the Fed is fighting inflation as rigorously as it should. And without that confidence, longer-term interest rates will spike because investors will assume that there’s no inflation cop on the beat, and therefore will demand a higher risk premium.Trump hates facts that he disagrees with. That’s why he’s dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, which has repeatedly shown that the climate crisis isn’t a “hoax”, as Trump claims, but more like a national emergency.It’s why Trump is attacking American universities, whose scientists are developing wind and solar energy, and whose historians have revealed America’s tragic history of racism and genocide of indigenous people.He is killing off the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, which are showing the sources of sickness and disease and how we can guard against them.This is a man and a regime that doesn’t want the public to know the truth. He is turning the US into George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.The Trumping of America is happening so fast and in so many places that it’s hard to see the whole. Which partly explains why he doesn’t want the facts out. He doesn’t want us to know how bad it really is.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His next book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, will be out on 5 August More

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      Trump firing of statistics chief puts US data credibility at risk, experts warn

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      Donald Trump’s firing of the head of the main agency for producing jobs figures risks propelling the US into the same category as countries notorious for “cooking the books” such as Argentina and Greece, experts have warned.Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner last Friday, after accusing her agency of “faking” the latest employment figures for “political purposes,” which showed the US economy adding a lower-than-expected 73,000 jobs in July.The BLS, the US government official source for labor statistics since 1884, also revised down the estimates of new positions created in May and June by a combined 258,000.Trump provided no evidence for his accusations against McEntarfer, which he reinforced in social media posts on Monday, calling the bureau’s latest reports “rigged” and concocted.But his decision jeopardizes the US’s tradition of impartial and reliable statistic collection on which the country’s economic stability and international reputation depends, specialists have told the Guardian.Erica Groshen, McEnterfer’s predecessor as BLS commissioner during Barack Obama’s presidency, warned earlier this year that an impending civil-servant rule change that presaged last Friday’s sacking could usher in a “politicization” of government statistical bodies – whereby experts are pressured to produce massaged numbers that fitted an incumbent president’s agenda.She raised the specter of Greece and Argentina, where official statistics became discredited as a result of government-instigated misrepresenting of figures.The International Monetary Fund stopped accepting the Argentinian government’s inflation figures in 2013 after officials were found to have deliberately understated the rate for the previous six years.After threatening Argentina – historically one of the IMF’s biggest borrowers – with expulsion, the organization did not extend another loan to it until 2018.In the case of Greece, government statisticians were accused of having made inflation and soaring budget deficits “disappear” in the 1990s as the country sought respectable-looking numbers that would enable to qualify for the single European currency, the euro.Greece subsequently joined the currency, but at an exorbitant long-term price. The 2008 global financial crash plunged its economy into a deep recession, and the government was forced to accept multi-billion dollar bailouts from the IMF and European Union – at the cost of painful cuts to social services.Andreas Georgiou, who became head of Greece’s main statistics agency during the crisis, even faced prosecution after he discovered that authorities had been dramatically understating budget deficits for years.Both countries experienced severe political backlashes.In Argentina, after two further IMF loans failed to stabiliize its economy, Javier Milei, a populist economist and ally of Trump, was elected in 2023 promising to take a chainsaw to the governing bureaucracy and many public services.In Greece, a succession of left and rightwing governments have taken office amid a rise in support for radical and populist parties, giving rise to concerns for the health of the country’s democracy.Talking to the Guardian, Groshen warned of comparable scenarios following a rule change rolled by the White House’s office of personnel management in April.“Bureau of Labor Statistics leaders could be fired for releasing or planning to release jobs or inflation statistics unfavorable to the president’s policy agenda,” she wrote in a briefing paper.The revision altered the category of about 50,000 permanent civil servants to “policy/career” status, making their removal easier.Originally tabled in April to allow 30 days for comments, it gave agencies the right “to expeditiously remove career employees in policy-influencing positions for poor performance or misconduct, such as corruption or for injecting partisanship into the performance of their official duties”.The precise roles of officials affected were not defined, but Groshen pointed out that, if implemented, the president would determine who would be reclassified.The change stemmed from an executive order Trump issued on his first day back in the White House on 20 January. It stated that the power of “policy-influencing” civil servants is “delegated by the president, and they must be accountable to the president”.Groshen, now a specialist in government statistics at Cornell University, said the changes in civil servant status would make it easier for the government to tamper with numbers it disliked.“There are a number of changes to the civil service that makes it much easier for the administration to interfere with the activities of statistical agencies and that worries me,” she said.Under increased threat of removal, civil servants in federal statistics bodies “might also face pressure to change methodologies or reveal pre-release information”, she wrote.“By making it easier to remove employees if a president determines that they are interfering with his or her policies, it increases the potential for passivity or political loyalty to be prioritized over expertise and experience.” More

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      How the Trump administration made a sewage crisis ‘woke’ – podcast

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      Like hundreds of families across Lowndes County, Alabama, the McPhersons do not have access to proper sanitation – just a pipe carrying raw sewage a short distance from their home. For a country that is one of the richest in the world, it is a public health scandal.“There’s a chance if you don’t watch yourself, everything will shoot down with force and get all over you,” says Christopher McPherson.Nina Lakhani, a senior reporter for Guardian US, explains to Nosheen Iqbal that Lowndes County is one of the poorest districts in the country and has a history of brutal cotton plantation enslavement and also the civil rights and Black power movements.They discuss the way the soil has affected access to sanitation in the county, the significant health and psychological problems that have followed, and the long struggle for justice in which a landmark civil rights ruling under the Biden administration has been overturned by the actions of Donald Trump.Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More