Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
The Trump administration is slashing federally funded preschool programs, threatening childcare for more than half a million kids. A federal judge in Rhode Island received at least six credible death threats after blocking Trump’s funding freeze. To help immigrant children find legal representation, the Trump administration is awarding a $150 million contract to a small Texas law firm with ties to the president. And the government just agreed to pay a German company $1.22 billion to kill its offshore wind leases and build gas plants instead.
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Trump Moves to Slash Crucial Education Program for Kids
Republicans spent three years screaming about protecting children from drag queens reading books and then loosened background checks on the adults actually watching them eight hours a day.
On Thursday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed a rule that would overhaul Head Start — the federal program that provides free childcare, meals, early education, and health services to about 800,000 low-income kids — by handing states the power to set their own standards. Those include class sizes, staff ratios, teacher credentials, background checks, and transportation.
The rule would slash the share of funding centers can spend on administration from 15 percent to 5 percent, supposedly “saving” the government $2.2 billion. HHS says it will reinvest those savings to “preserve or expand” 200,000 spots.
It claims the savings will come from “administrative overhead.” The overhead in question is speech therapists and disability specialists, but nobody’s putting that on the press release.
HHS calls this “increasing access by capping administrative overhead and reducing compliance-driven activities.” Kennedy says Head Start lost more than 100,000 slots under Biden because of “burdensome paperwork,” which is a hell of a way to describe background checks on people who work with children.
Judge Receives MAGA Death Threats After Ruling Against Trump
A federal judge ruled against the Trump administration and within weeks the richest man on Earth was helping strangers find his daughter’s home address.
U.S. District Judge McConnell, an Obama appointee in Rhode Island, has received at least six credible death threats since he temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s freeze on trillions in federal funding.
The threats reached his wife first. The U.S. Marshals Service warned him one mentioned her by name. Then Laura Loomer doxxed his daughter’s personal information and posted a photo of her, and Elon Musk boosted it to his 200 million followers.
Then, someone sent a pizza to his home that he never ordered. The name on the order was Daniel Anderl — the 20-year-old son of a federal judge, shot and killed at their front door in 2020 by a gunman disguised as a delivery driver.
“I don’t think anything disturbed me as much as that did,” McConnell said.
Trump has repeatedly called judges who rule against him radical left lunatics and communists on Truth Social, after which the threats against those judges reliably spike. The White House said suggesting any of this resembles a threat is “deeply unserious.” A spokesperson added that “no one understands the dangers of political violence more than President Trump.”
Which is true in the same way no one understands fire better than an arsonist.
Trump-Linked Law Firm Chosen to Represent Immigrant Children
They drained the swamp right into the pockets of a Trump ally.
The Trump administration is awarding a $150 million contract to represent immigrant children to the Houston-based Burke Law Group, a small Texas firm where only two of its 26 attorneys actually practice immigration law. Co-founder Marcella Burke was previously appointed by Trump to the Senior Executive Service at the EPA and the Interior Department.
The deal was a “single source cooperative agreement,” which means the firm was selected without a standard bidding process. Michael Lukens of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights called the group “clearly unqualified.”
The new contract doesn’t start until August 15, and the old one already expired last Friday, leaving a gap of over a week with no legal representation for these children at all. Officials offered to extend the existing contract only if providers agreed to share confidential information about their clients with the government, including details about the children and their sponsors. Nonprofit leaders refused, fearing the data would be used to target the same families for enforcement.
Meanwhile, children’s immigration hearings are being moved up by weeks or months, making legal help harder to find. In June, an average of 1,796 children were in ORR custody, with an average stay of 194 days.
You can build an IKEA bookshelf faster than these kids can get a hearing, and at least IKEA gives you instructions in your language.
The Trump Admin. Just Paid Another $1.22 Billion to Kill Wind Power
The Trump administration has now spent $4 billion paying energy companies to stop doing the thing that would save the planet.
The German energy company RWE has reached a $1.22 billion deal with the U.S. government to relinquish its offshore wind leases and redirect the funds toward fossil fuels. It’s the fifth such deal the Trump administration has struck, and it brings the running total to almost $4 billion of taxpayer money spent on killing offshore wind.
RWE is giving up leases off New York, California, and Louisiana, after it paid $1.1 billion for the New York lease alone in a 2022 auction. The company said there was “no path forward to permit these projects in the US for the foreseeable future.”
RWE will take that $1.22 billion and pour it straight into fossil fuels: $900 million for a stake in a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Louisiana, and $300 million to develop 15 natural gas power plants.
After a similar $928 million deal with TotalEnergies, seven states sued, with New York Attorney General Letitia James calling it a “sham deal” and “illegal agreement.”
A report last fall from the Environmental Integrity Project found that every fully operational LNG facility in the U.S. had violated federal pollution limits, discharging illegal amounts of bacteria, zinc and oil into waterways. So naturally we’re building more.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump’s “Voter Fraud” Crusade Just Lost for the 20th Straight Time. The Justice Department’s push to seize states’ unredacted voter rolls has now failed in court twenty times, most recently on Monday when U.S. District Judge Philip Brimmer dismissed its case against Colorado with prejudice. Brimmer, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled the executive branch had no legitimate reason for access to records that were never under its constitutional jurisdiction. The DOJ has now sued in 30 states and D.C. and lost every time, with most of the judges who rejected it — including eight appointed by Trump himself — being Republican appointees. It is a perfect record, just not the kind Trump was hoping for.
Senate Unanimously Agrees to Oppose Pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell. The Senate unanimously passed a resolution telling Trump not to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, who is serving 20 years for sex trafficking minors. When asked about a pardon, Trump said he’d “take a look at it.” Maxwell’s own lawyer had already offered her testimony in exchange for clemency, and Sen. Jacky Rosen said the resolution was specifically to prevent acting AG Todd Blanche from making that deal to clear Trump’s name. Every single Republican voted yes, which means even they didn’t want to be on record defending this one.
New York Becomes the First State to Halt New Data Centers. Gov. Kathy Hochul is set to sign the country’s first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers, blocking new construction in New York for up to a year. The pause halts state permitting and directs regulators to write standards addressing energy demand, water usage, and environmental impact. Communities across the country have been fighting to block these facilities for years, and moratoriums have been floated in at least a dozen states and gone nowhere. New York just became the first with the nerve to actually do it. Twelve other states are welcome to stop taking notes and start copying.
FDA Approves Moderna’s mRNA Flu Vaccine. The FDA approved the first mRNA flu vaccine, Moderna’s mFlusiva, for adults 50 and older, despite the fact that RFK Jr. has called mRNA vaccines “the deadliest vaccine ever made” and cut nearly $500 million in mRNA research funding last year. The FDA initially refused to even review it under Kennedy’s handpicked vaccine director, then reversed course two weeks later. In trials, the shot was 27% more effective than standard flu vaccines, and an independent FDA advisory panel voted unanimously to approve it. Kennedy’s HHS responded by saying he believes mRNA products “warrant heightened scientific scrutiny,” which is the coward’s way of saying he doesn’t believe in medicine.
