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      Head Start avoids Trump’s cuts, but advocates are ready to defend it: ‘There’s too much good in this’

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      Tanya Stanton felt a sense of relief when she heard last week that the Trump administration seems to have reversed course on eliminating the Head Start early education program. She directs early learning programs at You Thrive, a Florida non-profit that provides Head Start services to approximately 1,100 children in the central part of the state.On Friday, the Trump administration released an updated “skinny budget”, which lays out the executive office’s discretionary spending priorities. It doesn’t contain a proposal to shut down Head Start, as mentioned in an administration memo obtained by the Associated Press in April. And that means thousands of families can breathe easier; the program served 833,000 low-income students nationwide in fiscal year 2022.Relief, however, does not mean that Stanton wants to lessen the pace of the advocacy that followed the announcement. “If anything, this has taught us that you can’t sit idle,” she said. Too much is at stake.Florida currently has over 45,000 children enrolled in 860 Head Start sites, the third highest number of students in the country behind California and Texas. In 2024, it received over $544m in federal funds. The budget may no longer target Head Start funding, but the administration closed half of the program’s 10 regional offices and federal funding freezes have affected its programs, and it does propose eliminating other programs that Head Start families rely upon, including preschool development grants and community block grants.“Until Congress passes and the president signs a final funding bill, we urge all Head Start supporters to continue advocating for the preservation of this vital program,” said Wanda Minick, Florida Head Start Association’s executive director.View image in fullscreenFor You Thrive’s Stanton, it has been a surprise to realize how little many Americans understand the full impact and scope of the program. Head Start has served 39 million children and families since its inception in 1965, according to government statistics. At its most basic level, Head Start provides free childcare in a nation where households can pay more on average for childcare than on their housing. Access to childcare has a major economic impact on families and communities, since a US Chamber of Commerce study finds that states can lose up to $1bn a year when parents and guardians can’t find or afford childcare. That is not even counting the hundreds of thousands of Head Start employees, whose possible job losses would also have ripple effects on their households and communities.Head Start is actually multiple programs that do much more than education and childcare. Early Head Start is for infants to three-year-olds, and its staff work on parenting skills with families one-on-one. Children also receive medical care such as dental, vision and mental health screenings. Head Start serves kids from ages three to five, and there’s also a Migrant Head Start for children of agricultural workers.Building stronger familiesDoing away with Head Start would have immediate effects for affected families and their greater communities, but could also have long-term – even generational – consequences, said child and family policy expert Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It. He noted a 2022 study showing that the children of Head Start participants were more likely to graduate high school and enter college; less likely to be teen parents and enter the criminal justice system; and had higher self-esteem – all of which translated to a 6% to 11% increase in wages.In her book A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle, Emory University historian Crystal R Sanders examined the impact Head Start had on economic opportunity in civil rights-era Mississippi. Through the Child Development Grant of Mississippi (CDGM), which ran from 1965-68, “federal money was going directly into the hands of working-class black people, something that had never happened in the state of Mississippi”, Sanders said.CDGM parents had the opportunity to work and go back to school. Many earned a GED or high-school equivalency, and some pursued college degrees, which resulted in better-paying jobs and even home ownership. “Head Start gave them a leg-up, too,” Sanders said. “That’s still true today.”For Lee Ann Vega, education manager at You Thrive, threats to Head Start are not just devastating – they’re personal. “It makes me sad for not only my families, but it makes me so sad for the children,” she said.Vega, 51, has Head Start to thank not only for a job but also for setting her on the right path in life. She and her brother were enrolled in Head Start after her mother abandoned the family due to substance abuse, and her father was working three jobs. The support she received inspires her passion for helping other children.“There’s so many days that I wake up and I thank God for allowing me to be a part of this process. Because Head Start works,” she said.Stanton of You Thrive said: “We are here to help the families achieve self-sufficiency.” To achieve this, staff work one-on-one with families to establish personalized goals. For some families, it means locating temporary or permanent housing. For some, it means entering higher education or learning new technical skills.View image in fullscreen“Some of them may not even know how to navigate on a laptop or computer,” Stanton said.Sometimes this leads to a job at Head Start itself, where former parents make up more than 20% of the program’s workforce. And while childcare as a whole pays low wages, Stanton noted that Head Start’s regulations, in a change made under the Biden administration, require that teachers earn as much as local public preschool or kindergarten teachers.“Head Start is an economic boon for communities, whether it’s the jobs it creates at those centers or the jobs that allow Head Start parents to work,” said Sanders, the Emory historian.The Trump administration budget proposal from April stated that eliminating Head Start aligned with its “goals of returning control of education to the states and increasing parental control”. That argument, Sanders said, “would suggest that they are actually not familiar with Head Start because Head Start prioritizes parental involvement”. Head Start standards require each agency to include parents on policy councils that decide or approve everything from enrollment and curriculum criteria to staffing.Tocra Waters is co-president of the policy council at Verner Early Learning Center in Asheville, North Carolina, where her three-year-old son Sincere has been enrolled in the county’s only Early Head Start program since the summer of 2023.The program provided crucial support at an unsettled time in her life. Waters and her two children had transitioned to a new home after spending time in a shelter, where Waters had gone after leaving an abusive partner. Sincere was “closed off” around people he didn’t know, she said.In home-based visits, Waters learned how to set boundaries and rules for Sincere, while he learned colors and improved his motor skills. Now in a classroom at Verner, Sincere has made friends and interacts more with others in all settings. “He’ll say, ‘Hi, morning, have a nice day,’ and it just melts my heart,” Waters, 32, said.Waters has seen her own confidence increase through her participation in the policy council. She values “that opportunity to be able to bring suggestions to the table … being an African American or a Black woman, in spaces, it seemed like we were not heard at times,” she said. She trusts Verner to care for her son and said its services “allowed me to be able to provide for my kids and still chase my dreams”.A future without funding?Verner, a non-profit center, received $3.2m, or 60% of its $5.3 operating budget this year from Head Start funding to support 139 children. Although the administration’s plans to eliminate Head Start funding gave CEO Marcia Whitney “heart palpitations”, she noted that “we as an organization would not cease to exist” if funding disappeared.However, they would start charging tuition for many of its programs, a move that would price out most of their Early Head Start families and force some to leave their jobs to stay at home with their children.The situation is far more critical for centers like those run by You Thrive Florida, where 98% of their funding comes from Head Start; the rest comes from the United Way and the state.While the Trump administration said eliminating Head Start would allow state and local governments to have control over education, Haspel said “states are absolutely not prepared to make that kind of shift”. He pointed out that states struggled to distribute pandemic stabilization grants to childcare programs because they lacked the staff and technological infrastructure to transfer funds as quickly and easily as the federal government.According to Minick, Florida would need to invest $688m to replace Head Start services. Florida already has its own version of Early Head Start, the School Readiness program. But it has stricter eligibility requirements; parents must work up to 20 hours a week and contribute co-pays. Minick estimates that those rules mean that only 13,000 of the more than 40,000 students in Head Start could now enroll (the state’s voluntary pre-kindergarten program currently has no waiting list). And Florida’s legislature is considering slashing its funding for state-run early learning programs by up to 8%.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenFor Sanders, the question is less whether the state governments can administer these programs but whether they are willing to do so, especially in states with a history of educational and racial segregation. “Historically, when we have left complete control of education to states, that has created inequality,” she said. When the CDGM received federal funding as one of the nation’s first Head Start programs, she noted, “the segregationist governor of Mississippi could not take away money from working-class Black people”.Even with an annual budget of $12bn, Head Start at best serves half of eligible children. “I don’t envision Americans truly saving any money by doing away with Head Start,” because it is so underfunded, Sanders said.Because the program has enjoyed bipartisan support since its inception, Haspel “would be somewhat surprised” if Congress agreed to the administration’s initial request to eliminate it completely. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the government on 28 April on behalf of a coalition of Head Start providers and parents, alleging that the executive branch does not have the power to impact Head Start’s funding without congressional approval.Stanton, for one, is hopeful. Longtime Head Start staff across the nation – people who have worked for the program for 30 or 40 years – told her that they have experienced tough moments like this before, though perhaps not of this magnitude.“I’m just a believer. I’m like, there’s too much good in this,” she said. More

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      Colbert on Trump administration’s ethos: ‘Take full responsibility and dump it on somebody else’

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      Late-night hosts dug into the chaos at Newark airport leading to a cascade of cancellations, Donald Trump’s alleged Hollywood tariffs and the visit of the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, to the White House.Stephen ColbertOn Tuesday’s Late Show, Stephen Colbert looked into the cascade of delays at Newark airport this week, causing the cancellation of hundreds of flights. The culprit was a terrifying 90-second blackout during which air traffic controllers temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control, making them unable to see, hear or talk to them. “Those are three fairly important things,” Colbert deadpanned.The blackout was caused by a fried piece of copper wire. “Unlike the other blackouts at Newark, which are caused by the grand coconut margarita at terminal A Chili’s Too,” Colbert joked.In response to the crisis, Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, went on Fox News to, as Colbert put it, “take full responsibility and dump it on somebody else”.Duffy criticized old infrastructure in the US that hasn’t been updated in “30 or 40 years”, but said “this should’ve been dealt with in the last administration. They did nothing.”“Yes, this problem has been going on for years,” Colbert agreed. “Biden should’ve done something about it. Or really, the guy before him should’ve done something about it.”In truth, Biden did do something about it; in the 2021 infrastructure bill, he approved $25bn to improve airports. The upgrades began, but were partially derailed by Trump’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) laying off more than 400 staffers at the Federal Aviation Administration shortly after taking office, including maintenance mechanics and employees who work on electrical issues. “Those are the people who do the stuff!” Colbert exclaimed. “There are plenty of useless people you could’ve fired, like the TSA agent who says you can’t bring in a snow globe. I hate having to chug my snow globe right before security.”Duffy claimed that he was going to spend the money on a new system, but warned that it would take three to four years. “Not exactly what you want to hear in a crisis,” Colbert noted.And it’s a crisis that probably won’t get better soon, as many air traffic controllers are now out on a 45-day trauma leave following the blackout. “Wait a second, there’s such a thing as trauma leave?” Colbert wondered. “Bye! I’m off to the tropics.”Jimmy KimmelIn Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel recapped the visit of the new Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, to the White House, where Donald Trump insisted that “regardless of anything, we’re going to be friends with Canada”.“Poor Mark Carney had a helluva job today,” said Kimmel, noting that Trump keeps referring to Canada as the “51st state”. “It was like an Ewok going to a meeting on the Death Star.”But Carney “handled it well”, according to Kimmel. “In a friendly way, he made sure Trump knows they have no intention of becoming our 51st state.” Carney diplomatically told Trump that Canada is “not for sale, won’t be for sale”, to which Trump interjected: “But never say never!”“He doesn’t take no for an answer – in fact, he was found liable for it in a court of law,” Kimmel said, referring to a May 2023 verdict in which a New York court found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E Jean Carroll, and ordered him to pay $5m.Kimmel also addressed Trump’s threat to (somehow) slap a 100% tariff on any movie made outside the US, “which caused every studio executive in Hollywood to double up on their Ativan yesterday,” he quipped. “No one seems to know what’s going on with these tariffs, including our own secretary of the treasury.“Remember how everyone said the main requirement to get a spot in his cabinet was to be good on TV? Well, here is our treasury secretary, Scott Bessent,” Kimmel continued before a clip of Bessent struggling to answer the basic question “who pays tariffs?” before Congress.“Try unplugging him and plugging him back in,” Kimmel laughed. “Scott Bessent has the demeanor of a headmaster at an all-boys school that’s under investigation.”Seth MeyersAnd on Late Night, Seth Meyers opened with Trump’s Truth Social post on Monday in which he claimed that he would order the government to reclaim and reopen the infamous Alcatraz prison. “I love that you can tell from his social media post what movie he watched on the plane,” said Meyers, referring to Clint Eastwood’s 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz, which played on public television in Florida while he was at Mar-a-Lago.Trump also joked with reporters about the possibility of becoming pope and said: “I would not be able to be married, though.”“And it looks like Melania has voted,” Meyers quipped next to a photo of white smoke.The Vatican’s conclave to elect a new pope is set to begin on Wednesday. “So just remember, black smoke means no decision, white smoke means a new pope and pink smoke means it’s a girl!” Meyers joked.The Late Night host also touched on reports that the US army is planning a parade to honor its 250th anniversary as well as Trump’s 79th birthday, including military vehicles, aircraft and nearly 7,000 soldiers. “And to honor Trump’s military service, he won’t be there,” Meyers quipped. More

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      We can’t just be against Trump. It’s time for a bold, progressive populism | Robert Reich

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      Demonstrations against Donald Trump Trump are getting larger and louder. Good. This is absolutely essential.But at some point we’ll need to demonstrate not just against the president but also for the United States we want.Trump’s regressive populism – cruel, bigoted, tyrannical – must be met by a bold progressive populism that strengthens democracy and shares the wealth.We can’t simply return to the path we were on before Trump. Even then, big money was taking over our democracy and siphoning off most of the economy’s gains.Two of the country’s most respected political scientists – professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University – analyzed 1,799 policy issues decided between 1981 and 2002. They found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”Instead, lawmakers responded to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. And “when a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.”Notably, Gilens and Page’s research data was gathered before the supreme court opened the floodgates to big money in Citizens United. After that, the voices of typical Americans were entirely drowned.In the election cycle of 2016, which first delivered the White House to Trump, the richest 100th of 1% of Americans accounted for a record-breaking 40% of all campaign donations. (By contrast, in 1980, the top 0.01% accounted for only 15% of all contributions.)The direction we were heading was unsustainable. Even before Trump’s first regime, trust in every major institution of society was plummeting – including Congress, the courts, corporations, Wall Street, universities, the legal establishment and the media.The entire system seemed rigged for the benefit of the establishment – and in many ways it was.The typical family’s inflation-adjusted income had barely risen for decades. Most of the economy’s gains had gone to the top.Wall Street got bailed out when its gambling addiction caused it humongous losses but homeowners who were underwater did not. Nor did people who lost their jobs and savings. And not a single top Wall Street executive went to jail.A populist – anti-establishment – revolution was inevitable. But it didn’t have to be a tyrannical one. It didn’t have to be regressive populism.Instead of putting the blame where it belonged – on big corporations, Wall Street and the billionaire class – Trump has blamed immigrants, the “deep state”, socialists, “coastal elites”, transgender people, “DEI” and “woke”.How has Trump gotten away with this while giving the super-rich large tax benefits and regulatory relief and surrounding himself (especially in his second term) with a record number of billionaires, including the richest person in the world?Largely because Democratic leaders – with the notable exceptions of Bernie Sanders (who is actually an independent), AOC and a handful of others – could not, and still cannot, bring themselves to enunciate a progressive version of populism that puts the blame squarely where it belongs.Too many have been eating from the same campaign buffet as the Republicans and dare not criticize the hands that feed them.This has left Trump’s regressive populism as the only version of anti-establishment politics available to Americans. It’s a tragedy. Anti-establishment fury remains at the heart of our politics, and for good reason.What would progressive populism entail?Strengthening democracy by busting up big corporations. Stopping Wall Street’s gambling (eg replicating the Glass-Steagall Act). Getting big money out of politics, even if this requires amending the constitution. Requiring big corporations to share their profits with their average workers. Strengthening unions. And raising taxes on the super-wealthy to finance a universal basic income, Medicare for all, and paid family leave.Hopefully, demonstrations against Trump’s regressive, tyrannical populism will continue to grow.But we must also be demonstrating for a better future beyond Trump – one that strengthens democracy and works on behalf of all Americans rather than a privileged few.

      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 More

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      ‘Maduro did not close our bureau – Trump did’: Voice of America journalists speak out

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      Carolina Valladares Pérez, a Washington-based correspondent for the government-funded international news service Voice of America, has reported from places where press freedom is severely restricted – war zones and autocratic states – in the Middle East and across Latin America. Intimidation and threats from state officials were not unusual – but she always managed to get the story out.Now for the first time in her career, Valladares Pérez says she has been silenced – not by a faraway regime, but by the government of the United States.“Nicolás Maduro did not close our bureau,” she said, of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader. “Donald Trump closed it. I find this astonishing.”Valladares Pérez is one of hundreds of VoA journalists who remain shut out of their newsroom nearly two months after Donald Trump signed a late-night executive order aimed at dismantling their parent company, the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). The journalists had been hopeful they might be able to return to their broadcasts this week – VoA was even included in the rotation of news outlets assigned to cover the president as part of the White House press pool. But whiplashing court orders and a newly announced “partnership” to broadcast a hard-right, pro-Trump news outlet have clouded their path forward.“We have 3,500 affiliates around the world – these are television stations, radio stations, digital affiliates, who depend on our content,” said Patsy Widakuswara, VoA’s White House bureau chief, who is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the president’s authority to gut an independent agency. “The void is going to be filled by our adversaries – it already is.”VoA’s pro-democracy programming reaches hundreds of millions of people across the globe, broadcasting in 47 languages. It is often the only alternative to state-run media in places where press freedom is severely restricts, including in Russia, China and Iran. But the administration has denigrated the outlet as the “Voice of Radical America” and accused it of producing “propaganda”.View image in fullscreenFollowing Trump’s March edict, VoA’s broadcast went dark for the first time since its founding during the second world war, initially to counter Nazi propaganda. Some radio stations began playing music instead of the news. VoA’s website remains frozen in time, the homepage dated to that Saturday morning. As many as 1,300 VoA employees have been placed on administrative leave.The order also directed USAGM to cancel the federal grants that support VOA’s sister outlets Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Without funding, those broadcasters have struggled to remain operational.The Trump administration has defended the decision to cut the broadcasters as part of its effort to downsize the federal government and slash what it described as “frivolous expenditures that fail to align with American values or address the needs of the American people”.“Shut them down,” the Trump ally and adviser Elon Musk declared on X earlier this year, as his so-called “department of government efficiency” began its work.In response to the president’s March order, Kari Lake, a fierce Trump loyalist and prominent election denier who was installed as a special adviser to the US’s global media agency, declared that VoA’s networks were “not salvageable”. But it appears the former local news anchor turned unsuccessful Republican candidate is now working to bring the news outlet back on air and online in some capacity.In a statement on Monday, Lake said “the plan has always been to have meaningful, comprehensive, and accurate programming. However, this administration was halted in its tracks by lawfare, which prevented the implementation of much-needed reforms at VoA.”On Tuesday night, she announced on X that the One America News Network (OAN), which has perpetuated conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was sued by voting-machine companies for promoting claims of election fraud, will provide VoA’s “newsfeed and video service free-of-charge”.Last month, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle VoA, as well as Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. But VoA staff and journalists remain on administrative leave while the court process plays out.The judge, US District Judge Royce Lamberth, later ordered the administration to restore funding Congress appropriated for Radio Free Europe, but the ruling was paused on appeal.On Saturday, a divided panel of three circuit court judges paused parts of the ruling, ordering the Trump administration to return the VoA employees back to work. In a dissent, federal appeals court judge Cornelia Pillard warned that the stay “all but guarantees that the networks will no longer exist in any meaningful form” by the time litigation is resolved.Challenging the ruling, attorneys representing the VoA journalists have asked the full US court of appeals for the DC circuit to rehear the case en banc.The Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the US’s largest and oldest international broadcaster is part of a broader crackdown on press freedom in the US, journalists and experts say. In late April, the president also signed an executive order aimed at slashing federal funding for NPR and PBS, accusing the news outlets of similarly spreading “radical woke propaganda”.“The reason we have such a huge audience is because we’re not propaganda,” Widakuswara said. “Much of our audience lives in places where there is government propaganda, and they can smell it a mile away. They turn to us because they trust us.”Ilan Berman, senior vice-president at the American Foreign Policy Council, said VoA and its sister outlets were an “indispensable” asset in the information war, countering anti-American narratives and disinformation in unfree societies.“Authoritarian regimes understand very well that controlling information is essential to controlling their populations,” Berman, who serves on the board of RFE/RL and MBN, wrote in an email, while traveling in the Middle East, where he said media outlets hostile to the US already saturate the airwaves.“America and its allies have unfortunately been playing defense for a while now,” he added. “And the shuttering of our messaging outlets is only going to make those voices stronger, and ours weaker.”Desperate to return to work, Widakuswara has been leading the charge to raise awareness of VoA’s plight and keep newsroom morale up amid the turbulence of the last several weeks. On 4 May, the account, @savevoanow was suspended by X, the platform owned by Musk, for allegedly “violating rules against inauthentic accounts”. The account has since been restored but it unnerved Widakuswara and her colleagues, who have vowed not to remain silent.“What we’re fighting for is not just for our job but our continued editorial independence,” the White House reporter said.A ‘reward to dictators and despots’The silencing of VoA has alarmed press freedom advocates but drew gleeful reactions from Chinese and Russian state media. “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself,” said Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-backed RT network, who cheered Trump’s “awesome decision”.The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a prominent press freedom organization, called Trump’s effort to eliminate the news outlets a “reward to dictators and despots” and urged Congress to restore the agency it created “before irreparable harm is done”.“When a US president is behaving this way domestically towards media, it creates a kind of permission structure for world leaders to treat the press the same way in their home countries,” said Katherine Jacobsen, the CPJ’s Canada and Caribbean program coordinator.US-based foreign journalists whose visas are now in jeopardy because of the dismantling of USAGM say deportation to their home countries would put them at risk of reprisal, imprisonment and possibly even death at the hands of authoritarian governments.“In Burma, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, there were people who fought for freedom and democracy, and they came to work at RFA,” Jaewoo Park, a journalist for Radio Free Asia in Washington, recently told the Guardian. “It’s very risky for them. Their lives are in danger if Radio Free Asia doesn’t exist.”According to the agency, 10 of its journalists remain jailed or imprisoned around the world – in Myanmar, Vietnam, Russia, Belarus and Azerbaijan.At the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the organization’s president, Eugene Daniels, voiced solidarity with VoA’s journalists.“To our friends at Voice of America, I can’t wait until you’re back at the White House grounds to continue reporting important stories for audiences around the world, especially in countries where leaders suppress the freedom of expression and the press,” he said during a speech that eschewed punchlines in favor of a robust defense of the first amendment and press freedom.Valladares Pérez is also looking forward to that day.“Our reporters want to go back to work. Our job is not to be at home, being silent and not publishing,” she said. “Our job is to take our microphones, to keep talking, reaching our audiences and telling them what’s happening in the US. This is our mission.” More

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      Why are the Democrats greenlighting Trump’s crypto plans? | Corey Frayer

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      When Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) gained access to treasury payment systems in February, Democratic party leadership pledged to protect government payments from Donald Trump’s influence. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries held a press conference announcing the Stop the Steal act that would prevent the takeover of critical government payment infrastructure. On that very same day, high-profile Democrats joined with Republicans to introduce legislation allowing for payments to be made in cryptocurrencies called stablecoins. The bill paves the way for the US president to require that all payments to and from the government are made with cryptocurrencies, which could include the one he has a business interest in.After making millions off a “memecoin”, the crypto-opportunist-in-chief recently entered the burgeoning crypto-payments market by launching a stablecoin. For the uninitiated, stablecoins are crypto products that allege to hold the value of a currency like the US dollar and are intended to be used as digital payments. In fact, stablecoins constantly fail to hold their value, aren’t subject to federal consumer protections, and aren’t backed by the full faith and credit of the government. If a consumer’s stablecoins are hacked, fraudulently or accidentally spent, or lost due to a misplaced password, stablecoin companies will not reverse or reimburse those payments like a credit card company would. If a stablecoin company fails, consumers are not protected by anything like federal deposit insurance. Stablecoins have also become the preferred cryptocurrency for illicit finance.In an awkwardly playful nod to Trump’s crypto interests, bipartisan stablecoin bills have been introduced in the House and Senate entitled “Stable” and “Genius”, respectively, following Trump’s 2018 assertion that he is a “stable genius”. Sponsors of legislation claim their bills protect consumers, guarantee stability and curb their use in illicit finance. Many academics and experts disagree with those assertions. As they point out, the bills give crypto businesses such as the president’s access to the same payment system that banks and credit card providers use while subjecting them to far weaker standards than their traditional counterparts.Almost unbelievably, gutting consumer protections and privatizing the dollar may be the least concerning outcomes of stablecoin legislation. On 25 March, Trump issued an executive order mandating adoption of digital payments to and from the US government. That may sound innocuous, but the government already makes 95% of its disbursements electronically. The order doesn’t intend to modernize an already-modernized system. Musk exposed the order’s true intent when his Doge team took over the payment system, to the aforementioned alarm of congressional Democrats. He endorsed putting those payments “on the blockchain” – and in so doing, make public payments with private stablecoins.It’s not a hypothetical. The administration has already floated issuing $3.3bn in the housing department’s community development block grants via stablecoins. USAID has been instructed to make disbursements in stablecoins. And the treasury payments Musk was referring to? That’s $5.45tn in government payments from social security to veterans’ pay and pensions, federal employee salaries and income tax refunds. Americans might be forced to adopt cryptocurrencies whether they like it or not.The president has demonstrated his willingness to use the power of his office to enrich his family and friends and to provide favors to crypto business partners. Under Trump, SEC lawsuits against his crypto business partners Justin Sun and Binance have been halted. Just last week, Trump’s World Liberty Financial announced an opaque $2bn deal with a firm in the United Arab Emirates that is chaired by the UAE’s national security adviser, who is the brother of the country’s president. It’s naive to think Trump would shy away from using his power to shovel profits to the politically influential crypto industry, and his own crypto venture in particular.Crypto’s ascendant political influence may explain Democrats’ confusing pledge to stop Trump profiting from the presidency with one hand while pushing stablecoin legislation with the other. Conflicts of interest or not, the Democrats’ campaign arm continues courting crypto, though it doesn’t accept donations in cryptocurrencies. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chair, Kirsten Gillibrand, is a lead sponsor of the Genius bill. During the Senate banking committee consideration of Genius, news broke that Trump’s company was speaking with Binance about the launch of a stablecoin. It was as if the committee had called a recess for a word from its sponsor. Five Democrats still voted in support. House Democrats have sought amendments that would bar government officials from having a financial interest in such assets, but they’ve gotten little traction. This weekend, nine former Democratic supporters of the bill threatened to block further consideration unless concerns over issues ranging from money laundering to national security were addressed. But they said they remained “eager to continue working with our colleagues to address these issues”.The Democratic party has rightly pointed out that a sitting president’s conflicts of interest undermine the firmament of our democracy. Anyone, especially the president, who would use an office of public trust for personal benefit must be held accountable. Astoundingly, Democrats are poised to bless Trump’s crypto grift with the Genius act. If they do, it will be clear that, at least when it comes to crypto, they would rather endorse the president’s abuses than fight them.

      Corey Frayer is the director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America and a senior adviser on crypto markets to the former SEC chair Gary Gensler More

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      Trump news at a glance: Canada not for sale, says Carney; trans military ban proceeds for now

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      In the White House on Tuesday, the prime minister of Canada told Donald Trump: “As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale.” Trump agreed: “That’s true.”Mark Carney continued: “Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign … it’s not for sale. Won’t be for sale, ever.” “Never say never,” said Trump. Carney smiled and mouthed “never, never, never, never.”The light sparring between the two leaders came as Trump’s script about a 100% tariff on foreign-made movies was undergoing a further rewrite as the president said he would consult with the industry.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump and Carney meet amid trade and sovereignty disputesDonald Trump has said he “just want[s] to be friends with Canada” after his first post-election meeting with the country’s prime minister, Mark Carney – who used the gathering to shoot down any prospect of his country becoming the 51st state.Read the full storyUS supreme court backs Trump trans military banThe Trump administration can begin to enforce a ban on transgender troops serving in the military while a challenge to the policy plays out in the courts, the supreme court ruled on Tuesday, a significant decision that could lead to the discharge of thousands of military members.Read the full storyPentagon stopped Ukraine aid without Trump’s approvalRoughly a week after Donald Trump started his second term as president, the US military issued an order to three freight airlines: stop 11 flights loaded with artillery shells and other weaponry that were bound for Ukraine. The order to cancel the flights – which were quickly reinstated – originated in Pete Hegseth’s office, without Trump’s approval.Read the full storyTrump claims Houthis to stop ship attacks in truce The US will halt its bombing of Yemen’s Houthis after the group agreed to stop targeting shipping in the Red Sea, Donald Trump has said. It comes after Israel claimed its jets had bombed Yemen’s main airport out of service in retaliation for a missile strike on Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. Oman, which has been mediating, confirmed a deal to ensure “freedom of navigation” in the Red Sea.Read the full storyTrump softens tone on movie tariffsDonald Trump appeared to be softening his tone after widespread dismay in Hollywood and further afield at his shock announcement of 100% tariffs on films “produced in foreign lands”, saying he was “not looking to hurt the industry”.Read the full storyAmericans’ health at risk as Trump cuts EPA staff Americans’ health is being put at risk after new cuts were announced by Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce staffing to 1980s levels and gut its scientific research arm, experts and advocacy groups warned.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Columbia University is slated to cut 180 staff whose work was supported by federal grants that have now been revoked by the Trump administration.

      North Carolina election officials must certify Democrat Allison Riggs as the winner of a state supreme court election, a federal judge ruled.

      The California governor proposed a $7.5bn tax credit program and offered to work with Donald Trump to boost US film production.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 5 May 2025. More

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      Woman says Boston hotel guard told her to leave bathroom because she ‘was a man’

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      A couple visiting Boston says they were left confused and appalled after being forced out of the Liberty Hotel during a Kentucky Derby party on Saturday, following what they describe as being confronted and wrongfully accused in the women’s restroom.Ansley Baker and her girlfriend, Liz Victor, both cisgender women, said a hotel security guard entered the women’s bathroom and demanded Baker leave the stall she was using, claiming she didn’t belong there.“All of a sudden there was banging on the door,” Baker recalled to CBS News.“I pulled my shorts up. I hadn’t even tied them. One of the security guards was there telling me to get out of the bathroom, that I was a man in the women’s bathroom. I said: ‘I’m a woman.’”Victor, waiting by the sinks, heard the commotion and saw the security guard confronting Baker.“I looked down and I saw her shoes and that’s when I was like: ‘What is going on?’” she told the network.The couple said that once Baker was being escorted out, other women in line hurled insults, calling her “a creep” and demanding she be removed. Security staff then allegedly asked both women to show their IDs to confirm their gender. After a heated exchange, they were told to leave the hotel.View image in fullscreenIn a statement shared with CBS, the Liberty Hotel accuse the two women of sharing one stall: “An incident occurred at the Liberty Hotel on Saturday, May 3 where several women alerted security of two adults sharing a bathroom stall. The bathroom was cleared out as two adults in one stall are not permitted. After leaving the bathroom, a member of the couple from the stall put their hands on our security team and it was then that they were removed from the premises.“The Liberty Hotel has a zero-tolerance policy for any physical altercations on our property. The safety of our guests and staff is our priority, and this event is under investigation. The Liberty Hotel is and always will be an ally of the LGBTQ+ community and a place where everyone is welcome and celebrated.”Later on Tuesday, the Liberty Hotel said it had now “concluded the investigation into the situation that occurred on May 3rd”, in a fresh statement shared with the Guardian that appeared to take a different stance on the incident.The security officer involved in the incident was being “suspended from their position immediately” following the hotel’s investigation.The statement also added that the general manager was reaching out to the individuals involved, and that the hotel was conducting “mandatory retraining for all staff on inclusive practices and guest interaction protocols, with a particular focus on creating a safe and welcoming space for LGBTQ+ individuals”.The statement went on: “In a reaffirmation of our values, the hotel is making a donation to a local LGBTQ+ organization that we have partnered with in the past, on International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT), on May 17.”It then repeated a point made in the earlier statement: “The Liberty Hotel is and always will be an ally of the LGBTQ+ community and a place where everyone is welcome and celebrated.”Baker and Victor had insisted in interviews with local media that they were never in the same stall and disputed the hotel’s initial account of events.“Once the stall door opened, and I’m the only one in there, it escalated further,” Baker told Boston News 25. “I don’t think that aligns with what they’re saying.”The couple said they have made sure that Boston mayor Michelle Wu’s office was aware of their experience in hopes that they can stop a similar situation from happening to anyone else.They also hope their experience can spark awareness and change.“We know we’re not the only ones that face this kind of thing,” Baker said to CBS. Victor added: “It was a very scary situation, but trans women experience this every single day in the US and across the world.”The Guardian has not been able to reach the couple for comment.The incident comes at a time of heightened tension between the administration and the LGBTQ+ community. Some of Donald Trump’s earliest moves in office were to sign executive orders directing the prohibition of gender transitions for people under the age of 19 and banning trans athletes from competing in women’s sports.On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, instructing the federal government to remove “all radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms”.Trump has also limited access and funding for LGBTQ+ arts, with orders that instruct arts organizations not to fund projects that promote “gender ideology” as well as appointing himself chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.The incident also echoed an ongoing Republican talking point centered on bathrooms and gender identity. In November 2024, the South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace introduced a bill to ban the representative Sarah McBride from using the bathroom that corresponds with her gender identity. Speaker Mike Johnson has supported and subsequently enforced that ban. More

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      The Trump administration is defending abortion pill access in court. What?

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      The Trump administration on Monday asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit that takes aim at the abortion pill mifepristone – a move that stunned many observers for what seemed a defense of the drug by a president who has overseen the most dramatic rollback of abortion rights in modern US history.At first blush, it may seem a victory for abortion access – but experts worry that, in reality, the move preserves the administration’s ability to play coy about any future plans to attack abortion rights.When Donald Trump first returned to the White House earlier this year, US anti-abortion activists had high hopes for the man who helped orchestrate the downfall of Roe v Wade. They thought he might use a 19th-century anti-vice law to effectively ban abortion nationwide. Failing that, they imagined that he might use the power of the Food and Drug Administration to roll back access to mifepristone or even yank it from the market entirely.Instead, over the last few months, the Trump administration has attempted to dodge the issue entirely. The Monday request, to a Texas judge who has become a reliable vote for abortion opponents, continued that pattern.The lawsuit seeks to roll back several FDA regulatory changes that have, over the last decade, considerably expanded access to mifepristone, one of two drugs typically used in US medication abortions. It revives a lawsuit that led to a stinging 9-0 defeat for abortion rights opponents when the court ruled the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, a group of anti-abortion doctors, did not have the legal standing to sue in the first place.Rather than let the matter die, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri moved to take over the case as its new plaintiffs. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the US district court for the northern district of Texas, where the case is being heard, agreed to let the attorneys general move forward.However, in its Monday filing, the Trump administration argued that there is no reason why the case should proceed in Texas.“At bottom, the states cannot keep alive a lawsuit in which the original plaintiffs were held to lack standing, those plaintiffs have now voluntarily dismissed their claims, and the states’ own claims have no connection to this district,” the administration wrote.Abortion rights supporters have long pointed to one reason why the case was filed in Texas: Kacsmaryk. A Trump appointee with a track record of abortion opposition, Kacsmaryk once took the unprecedented step of ruling to reverse the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone, which would lead to its removal from the market.Nicole Huberfeld, a health law professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, found it “a little funny” that the Trump administration’s filing seemed to call out its own side for judge-shopping.It is possible that Trump, who was never exactly a true believer in the anti-abortion movement, has now soured on it. While the movement helped propel him to the White House in 2016, it became something of an albatross for him in 2024, as outrage over Roe’s collapse led abortion rights to become one of the election’s top issues.Yet Huberfeld found the filing more notable for what it did not say: namely, it shied away from revealing the Trump administration’s plans for mifepristone. She believes the administration may try to change mifepristone access through the FDA, and that the legal reasoning in Monday’s filing could be used against a future lawsuit by blue states against new restrictions.“They’re basically saying that the states don’t get to just challenge FDA policy because they want to,” Huberfeld said. “Which, in my view, is a set-up for anticipating that blue states may try to challenge any changes on mifepristone rules.”FDA Commissioner Martin Makary could, for example, move to reverse regulations that permit people to dispense abortion pills through telehealth – which accounts for about a fifth of all US abortions – or eliminate mifepristone’s approval. Project 2025, the notorious playbook of policy proposals authored by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, urged the FDA to do exactly that.Last month, Makary told the Semafor World Economy Summit that he had “no plans to take action” on mifepristone. However, he added: “There is an ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone. So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.”Decades of studies, conducted in more than a dozen countries, have found that mifepristone is safe and effective. However, anti-abortion groups have repeatedly pushed studies that claimed to find that mifepristone is dangerous. (Some of those studies have been retracted.)“My guess is that the Trump administration is trying to walk the fine line of not looking like it’s threatening access to mifepristone while also, potentially, through the FDA trying to limit access to mifepristone,” Huberfeld said. “In other words, I don’t think the FDA’s actually going to be hands-off.” More