Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
The federal government has already refunded $81 billion in tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Maine Senator Susan Collins is under intense scrutiny after a 26-year-old Colombian man was killed by ICE agents. The CDC stopped tracking a parasite that is now causing explosive diarrhea in 29 states. And a rapper says he paid $600,000 for a Trump pardon that never came.
But before we get to the news, we need you to take a moment to support independent media. As you’ll learn in a moment, cable networks owned by corporations and right-wing billionaires are all too eager to allow this president and his friends to tell them how to do their jobs. AlterNet America was created specifically because we can’t count on media outlets captured by MAGA oligarchs to hold this administration accountable. But because we’re completely reader-supported, our work can’t continue unless readers like you decide it’s worth funding. We’re counting on you to make today the day you become a paying subscriber.
Taxpayers Fork Over $81 Billion in Tariff Refunds
Imagine paying a cover charge, getting inside, and the bouncer chases you down the street to hand the money back. That’s U.S. trade policy.
The government has already paid out $81 billion in tariff refunds this fiscal year, according to budget figures released Monday. During the same period last year, the figure was $5 billion.
A Treasury official said the spike was almost entirely because of the February Supreme Court decision that shut down a big chunk of Trump’s extra tariffs and forced the money back to the companies that paid it. Most of the refunds happened in May and June.
The deficit is now growing again. It hit $1.367 trillion in the first nine months of the fiscal year, up 2 percent. The government spent more than $1 trillion just paying interest on its debt.
Now the White House is preparing fresh duties to skirt the court-imposed limits, plus a threatened 100 percent tariff on any country that taxes American tech companies.
Trump had pitched the tariffs as a catch-all fix to bring back factories, close the deficit, and land better deals. What they actually did was create jobs in the Treasury Department’s refund processing office.
Protesters Swarm Susan Collins’ Office After ICE Killing
Susan Collins voted to give ICE $70 billion and is now shocked that ICE spent it in Maine.
Protesters descended on the senator’s Biddeford office this week after a 26-year-old Colombian man was fatally shot by ICE officers on Monday. It was the second fatal ICE-linked shooting in less than a week.
Demonstrators held signs reading “Abolish ICE” and “Crush ICE.” Some entered the entryway. The message was not subtle.
Collins responded on X that the shooting “requires a full and impartial investigation.” This from the senator who voted yes on Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which handed ICE another $70 billion.
Democratic candidates hoping to challenge her were less diplomatic. Nirav Shah pointed out that Collins bankrolled an agency empowered “to terrorize our communities with no accountability.” Jordan Wood said ICE needs to be “abolished.”
Collins’ odds at reelection have been sliding, down to 34 percent on Kalshi from nearly 47 percent on July 6. Turns out voting to supercharge an agency that keeps killing people in your home state is bad politics.
Those numbers don’t move unless someone connects the vote to the body count. That’s this newsletter. And unlike Collins, we don’t take corporate money. Become a paying subscriber today and help us keep the lights on.
CDC Stopped Monitoring Parasite That’s Now in 29 States
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Trump’s government stopped monitoring a disease and then there was an outbreak of that disease.
In July 2025, the CDC stopped surveilling cyclospora at the federal level as part of the Trump administration’s cuts under the banner of “government efficiency.” A collaborative program called FoodNet had tracked eight foodborne pathogens. It now regularly monitors two.
The dropped diseases include campylobacter, listeria, shigella, vibrio, Yersinia, and cyclospora. That last one has sickened 1,000 people in Michigan alone, the state’s worst outbreak, with cases in 28 other states.
CDC talking points last summer blamed funding. A spokesperson suggested state health departments could pick up the slack. Colorado said that absent funding it would cut back too. Colorado is now having its own cyclospora outbreak.
Craig Hedberg, an infectious disease professor at the University of Minnesota, said cutting FoodNet “normalizes the idea that foodborne disease surveillance is expensive and unimportant.” And whatever they saved on surveillance, Michigan is spending on toilet paper.
Rapper Sues After Paying $600,000 for a Trump Pardon
If you’re going to pay $600,000 for a pardon, at least get scammed by someone the White House has heard of.
Rapper Boosie Badazz, whose legal name is Torence Hatch, is suing operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman after allegedly paying them $600,000 to secure a pardon from Trump that never came.
Boosie says the pair pitched themselves as having major pull inside Trump’s orbit. On New Year’s Day, his lawyer got a call claiming Trump had already signed the pardon and the White House just hadn’t announced it. It never surfaced.
Boosie is now trying to recover $300,000 under a contract clause requiring half the fee be refunded if no pardon was delivered. Burkman and Wohl allegedly refused, arguing no such refund agreement existed and that their firm was effectively broke after millions in fines.
A White House official flatly denied the duo had any role, saying the clemency team had “never heard from” Wohl or Burkman and that their involvement would actually hurt a person’s chances. That’s a service you can get for free.
So: Taxpayers are on the hook for Trump’s $81 billion mistake, ICE is shooting people with Susan Collins’ money, the CDC stopped tracking a disease that immediately broke out everywhere, and two known grifters charged a rapper $600,000 to lower his chances of a pardon. The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly the way the people in charge want it to.
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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tonight.
POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Kentucky Governor Challenges the Senate Replacement Process. Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized since June 14, and Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear is now signaling he may challenge the state’s 2024 vacancy law, which Republicans passed specifically to stop him from appointing McConnell’s replacement. The law says the seat gets filled by special election, not a governor’s pick, but there’s a wrinkle: the Kentucky Constitution says the governor appoints when a statewide office goes vacant, meaning the law Republicans wrote to keep Beshear out of it may be unconstitutional. After McConnell’s office finally released a photo of him, Beshear responded that McConnell must prove he can “meaningfully engage” in his job.
University of Tennessee to Pay $1.9 Million to Professor Fired Over Charlie Kirk. The University of Tennessee System Board of Trustees approved a settlement with former assistant professor Tamar Shirinian, agreeing to pay her $1.9 million. Shirinian was suspended and then fired after making a crass Facebook comment on a friend’s private post two days after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025, saying in part that the “world is better off without him in it.” A social media provocateur spread the comment, sparking outrage and calls for her firing. She sued in federal court on Oct. 29 and was formally fired Feb. 11. She will not be reinstated, and state officials including the attorney general and Gov. Bill Lee must sign off.
Nearly a Billion People Have Gained Access to Clean Water The UN Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026, released July 7, found that since the goals’ 2015 adoption, nearly one billion people gained access to safely managed drinking water and 1.2 billion to safely managed sanitation. New HIV infections fell 30 percent between 2015 and 2024, AIDS-related deaths dropped 35 percent, electricity now reaches 92 percent of the world’s population, and internet access surged from 40 to 74 percent. Social protection covers more than half the global population for the first time in history, and a data revolution now tracks nearly every indicator through more than 3.2 million data points.
New England Was Just 20% Forests in 1850. Now, It’s 60%. New England was 80 to 90 percent deforested by 1850 after colonists spent two centuries burning entire hemlock forests just for the bark and feeding whole trees to railroad engines. Then farmers discovered Ohio had no rocks, abandoned their land, and the trees just came back on their own. Massachusetts, the third-most densely populated state, is now 60 percent forested. Boston is several degrees cooler than it has any right to be because of all the tree cover. Scientists call it the greatest forest recovery in world history. The trees just showed up again once humans left them alone, which is a lesson we keep learning and keep forgetting.
