Last week, a bill that would give the Treasury Department power to designate a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” for supporting pro-Palestine protests was narrowly voted down in Congress. But the saga is far from over. It could still be passed in the coming days.

Called the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, the bill initially was introduced with broad bipartisan support. But after Donald Trump’s reelection, many Democrats flipped, fearing the incoming administration would use the bill not to stop terrorism, but to kneecap Trump’s political enemies.

Funding terrorism is already illegal. Still, all but one Republican in the House backed the bill when it came to a vote last week. There were also 52 Democrats who supported the measure.

Nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NAACP came out against the bill in a letter in to House leaders. “These efforts are part of a concerted attack,” they wrote, “on civil society that is targeted at more than just groups involved in the campus protests regarding Gaza.”

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has been particularly outspoken against the bill, which he believes could be applied beyond those opposed to Israel’s mass killings in Gaza to pretty much anyone opposed to Trump.

“A university has too many protests against Donald Trump? Terrorists,” McGovern said on the House floor Tuesday. “Environmental groups suing the administration in court? Terrorists. Think tanks that think differently than Donald Trump? Terrorists…Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist.” 

“This bill has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle to give the incoming administration the ability to revoke the nonprofit status of any advocacy group they want, simply by labeling them as terrorist sympathizers.”

Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024

As I wrote last week, the bill shows the ways in which the Biden-era crackdown on pro-Palestine activists sets up the possibility for Trump to take revenge on protesters.

Judging by the shocked faces on the European buyers and sellers attending the recent American Film Market in Las Vegas, the U.S. election didn’t end the way they had hoped. On the morning after, the most common reaction heard around the Palms Casino, where the conference took place, was “WTF” (or a variation of) along […]

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Biden administration has backtracked from supporting a cap on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.

According to representatives from five environmental organizations, White House staffers told representatives of advocacy groups in a closed-door meeting last week that they did not see mandatory production caps as a viable “landing zone” for INC-5, the name for the fifth and final round of plastics treaty negotiations set to take place later this month in Busan, South Korea. Instead, the staffers reportedly said United States delegates would support a “flexible” approach in which countries set their own voluntary targets for reducing plastic production.

This represents a reversal of what the same groups were told at a similar briefing held in August, when Biden administration representatives raised hopes that the US would join countries like Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom in supporting limits on plastic production. 

Following the August meeting, Reuters reported that the US “will support a global treaty calling for a reduction in how much new plastic is produced each year,” and the Biden administration confirmed that Reuters’ reporting was “accurate.” 

“If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”

After the more recent briefing, a spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality told Grist that, while US negotiators have endorsed the idea of a “‘North Star’ aspirational global goal” to reduce plastic production, they “do not see this as a production cap and do not support such a cap.”

“We believe there are different paths available for achieving reductions in plastic production and consumption,” the spokesperson said. “We will be flexible going into INC-5 on how to achieve that and are optimistic that we can prevail with a strong instrument that sends these market signals for change.” 

Jo Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit advocating for fenceline communities in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” said the announcement was a “jolt.”

“I thought we were on the same page in terms of capping plastic and reducing production,” she said. “But it was clear that we just weren’t.”

Frankie Orona, executive director of the nonprofit Society of Native Nations, which advocates for environmental justice and the preservation of Indigenous cultures, described the news as “absolutely devastating.” He added, “Two hours in that meeting felt like it was taking two days of my life.”

The situation speaks to a central conflict that has emerged from talks over the treaty, which the UN agreed to negotiate two years ago to “end plastic pollution.” Delegates haven’t agreed on whether the pact should focus on managing plastic waste—through things like ocean cleanups and higher recycling rates—or on tamping down the growing rate of plastic production.

Nearly 70 countries, along with scientists and environmental groups, support the latter. They say it’s futile to mop up plastic litter while more and more of it keeps getting made. But a vocal contingent of oil-exporting countries has pushed for a lower-ambition treaty, using a consensus-based voting norm to slow-walk the negotiations. Besides leaving out production limits, those countries also want the treaty to allow for voluntary national targets, rather than binding global rules.

“It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”

Exactly which policies the US will now support isn’t entirely clear. While the White House spokesperson told Grist that it wants to ensure the treaty addresses “the supply of primary plastic polymers,” this could mean a whole host of things, including a tax on plastic production or bans on individual plastic products. These kinds of so-called market instruments could drive down demand for more plastic, but with far less certainty than a quantitative production limit.

Bjorn Beeler, executive director of the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, noted that the US could technically “address” the supply of plastics by reducing the industry’s projected growth rates—which would still allow the amount of manufactured plastic to continue increasing every year. “What the US has said is extremely vague,” he said. “They have not been a leading actor to move the treaty into something meaningful.”

To the extent that the White House’s latest announcement was a clarification and not an outright reversal—as staffers reportedly insisted was the case—Banner said the Biden administration should have made their position clearer months ago, right after the August meeting. “In August, we were definitely saying ‘capping,’ and it was never corrected,” she said. “If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”

Another apparent change in the US’s strategy is on chemicals used in plastics. Back in August, the White House confirmed via Reuters’ reporting that it supported creating lists of plastic-related chemicals to be banned or restricted. Now, negotiators will back lists that include plastic products containing those chemicals. Environmental groups see this approach as less effective, since there are so many kinds of plastic products and because product manufacturers do not always have complete information about the chemicals used by their suppliers.

Orona said focusing on products would push the conversation downstream, away from petrochemical refineries and plastics manufacturing facilities that disproportionately pollute poor communities of color. “It’s so dismissive, it’s so disrespectful,” he said. “It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”

At the next round of treaty talks, environmental groups told Grist that the US should “step aside.” Given the high likelihood that the incoming Trump administration will not support the treaty and that the Republican-controlled Senate will not ratify it, some advocates would like to see the high-ambition countries focus less on winning over US support and more on advancing the most ambitious version of the treaty possible. “We hope that the rest of the world moves on,” said a spokesperson for the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic, vesting hope in the EU, small island developing states, and a coalition of African countries, among others. 

Viola Waghiyi, environmental health and justice program director for the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, is a tribal citizen of the Native Village of Savoonga, on the island of Sivuqaq off the state’s western coast. She connected a weak plastics treaty to the direct impacts her island community is facing, including climate change (to which plastics production contributes), microplastic pollution in the Arctic Ocean that affects its marine life, and atmospheric dynamics that dump hazardous plastic chemicals in the far northern hemisphere.

The US “should be making sure that measures are in place to protect the voices of the most vulnerable,” she said, including Indigenous peoples, workers, waste pickers, and future generations. As a Native grandmother, she specifically raised concerns about endocrine-disrupting plastic chemicals that could affect children’s neurological development. “How can we pass on our language, our creation stories, our songs and dances, our traditions and cultures, if our children can’t learn?”

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite the name, it is not a government department. In fact, it is not part of the government at all. It is a non-governmental commission that will provide advice to the Trump administration.

Musk says he will identify “at least $2 trillion” in savings from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. How will Musk do it? Details are scarce. Musk is recruiting “high-IQ revolutionaries” to work 80-hour weeks for no pay to help him with the task. 

Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget—the spending that Congress approves each year—is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense (DOD) exceeded $840 billion. 

The 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances in the latest audit account for 68 percent of the Pentagon’s budget.

About half of the massive defense budget goes to military contractors, with tens of billions directed to “Big 5” firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These contractors, according to a “60 Minutes” investigation last year, “overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys.” The misuse of taxpayer dollars became more acute “in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.” Another factor is the consolidation of the defense industry, resulting in less competition for contracts. 

Still, Musk may have a difficult time cutting DoD spending. First, Musk is the CEO of the company, SpaceX, that actively seeks billions in defense contracts. Second, if Musk is able to overcome his conflict-of-interest, defense industry lobbyists will lobby Congress to reverse any planned cuts. Finally, Trump has pledged to increase military spending during his second term. 

“I will provide record funding for our military,” Trump said in a video posted on his campaign website. 

Trump is calling for more defense spending even though defense spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The DOD struggles to accurately account how it spends this gusher of money. For the seventh year in a row, it has failed an independent audit. 

This year’s audit failure means that the DOD has not passed since Congress began mandating the audits in 2018. The 2024 audit, which surveyed 28 separate agencies that operate under the Pentagon’s umbrella, found that 15 agencies failed to provide enough information for the auditors to assess how they handle their money. 

Michael McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, was unfazed by this failure, calling it “expected.” He also argued that because some agencies passed, the audit was actually a success. “So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure,” McCord told reporters at a press conference on Friday. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

Nine agencies passed their audit and three agency audits are still pending. In 2023, auditors failed 18 agencies.

Eight agencies also did a better job this year of balancing their spending and the amount of cash they have in government accounts. But of those eight, only two agencies actually passed their audit. The other six, while properly accounting for their cash, did not have enough information about their other assets to pass the audit.

Even with the improvements McCord touted, the scope of the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of its assets is still vast. According to the audit, the 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances make up 44 percent of the Pentagon’s total assets and 68 percent of its budget. This year, the Pentagon held over $4.1 trillion in assets and had a budget of over $840 billion, meaning that auditors were unable to pin down $1.8 trillion in assets and $571 billion of the budget. 

Despite these failures, Congress continues to appropriate more money every year to the DOD. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the department to pass its audit by 2028, but has no mechanism for penalizing failure. 

McCord insisted that the Pentagon was on track for a clean audit by 2028, but that it would take the cooperation of the incoming Trump administration to reach that goal. If Trump is serious about improving government efficiency, he could push his DOD to do a better job tracking its assets. But if he decides not to, the Pentagon will not face any consequences.

SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for an even larger, upgraded vehicle slated to debut on the next test flight.

The only hiccup was an abortive attempt to catch the rocket's Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in South Texas, something SpaceX achieved on the previous flight on October 13. The Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world, reaching an altitude of 118 miles (190 kilometers) before plunging through the atmosphere for a pinpoint slow-speed splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The sixth flight of the world's largest launcher—standing 398 feet (121.3 meters) tall—began with a lumbering liftoff from SpaceX's Starbase facility near the US-Mexico border at 4 pm CST (22:00 UTC) Tuesday. The rocket headed east over the Gulf of Mexico, propelled by 33 Raptor engines clustered on the bottom of its Super Heavy first stage.

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© SpaceX.

America’s culture wars are not usually waged at the Federal Communications Commission. With rare exceptions — like net neutrality — the New Deal-era agency stays out of the headlines, while focusing on issues like rural broadband access and stopping spam calls. But that will change come January, when Brendan Carr becomes chairman of the agency […]

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz to be the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Oz is a physician, professor emeritus of cardiothoracic surgery at Columbia University and hosted the daytime talk show “The Dr. Oz Show” from 2009 to 2022. The show featured segments on health, wellness and occasionally true […]

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite the name, it is not a government department. In fact, it is not part of the government at all. It is a non-governmental commission that will provide advice to the Trump administration.

Musk says he will identify “at least $2 trillion” in savings from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. How will Musk do it? Details are scarce. Musk is recruiting “high-IQ revolutionaries” to work 80-hour weeks for no pay to help him with the task. 

Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget—the spending that Congress approves each year—is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense (DOD) exceeded $840 billion. 

The 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances in the latest audit account for 68 percent of the Pentagon’s budget.

About half of the massive defense budget goes to military contractors, with tens of billions directed to “Big 5” firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These contractors, according to a “60 Minutes” investigation last year, “overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys.” The misuse of taxpayer dollars became more acute “in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.” Another factor is the consolidation of the defense industry, resulting in less competition for contracts. 

Still, Musk may have a difficult time cutting DoD spending. First, Musk is the CEO of the company, SpaceX, that actively seeks billions in defense contracts. Second, if Musk is able to overcome his conflict-of-interest, defense industry lobbyists will lobby Congress to reverse any planned cuts. Finally, Trump has pledged to increase military spending during his second term. 

“I will provide record funding for our military,” Trump said in a video posted on his campaign website. 

Trump is calling for more defense spending even though defense spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The DOD struggles to accurately account how it spends this gusher of money. For the seventh year in a row, it has failed an independent audit. 

This year’s audit failure means that the DOD has not passed since Congress began mandating the audits in 2018. The 2024 audit, which surveyed 28 separate agencies that operate under the Pentagon’s umbrella, found that 15 agencies failed to provide enough information for the auditors to assess how they handle their money. 

Michael McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, was unfazed by this failure, calling it “expected.” He also argued that because some agencies passed, the audit was actually a success. “So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure,” McCord told reporters at a press conference on Friday. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

Nine agencies passed their audit and three agency audits are still pending. In 2023, auditors failed 18 agencies.

Eight agencies also did a better job this year of balancing their spending and the amount of cash they have in government accounts. But of those eight, only two agencies actually passed their audit. The other six, while properly accounting for their cash, did not have enough information about their other assets to pass the audit.

Even with the improvements McCord touted, the scope of the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of its assets is still vast. According to the audit, the 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances make up 44 percent of the Pentagon’s total assets and 68 percent of its budget. This year, the Pentagon held over $4.1 trillion in assets and had a budget of over $840 billion, meaning that auditors were unable to pin down $1.8 trillion in assets and $571 billion of the budget. 

Despite these failures, Congress continues to appropriate more money every year to the DOD. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the department to pass its audit by 2028, but has no mechanism for penalizing failure. 

McCord insisted that the Pentagon was on track for a clean audit by 2028, but that it would take the cooperation of the incoming Trump administration to reach that goal. If Trump is serious about improving government efficiency, he could push his DOD to do a better job tracking its assets. But if he decides not to, the Pentagon will not face any consequences.

Jimmy Kimmel took aim at Sylvester Stallone during his monologue on Monday night for calling Donald Trump the “second George Washington.” The “Rocky” and “Tulsa King” actor spoke at an American First Gala at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday night, where he introduced the President-elect as such. “When George Washington defended his country, he had no idea […]

On Monday morning, Donald Trump tried to do what he has done many times before: rewrite history in an attempt to make himself look like a man of moderation.

This time it concerned Trump’s treatment of the media, which has included a long history of threats and denigration. “In order to Make America Great Again, it is very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press,” Trump told Fox News Digital. Those remarks, at least to anyone who has paid attention over the past decade, starkly diverged from his record of attacking American journalists, which just two weeks ago saw the president-elect saying that he wouldn’t mind if journalists were shot at.

Trump also told the outlet that he feels “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press,” adding, “If not treated fairly, however, that will end. The media is very important to the long-term success of the United States of America.”

These claims are confounding—in fact, rendered useless—when you consider the lengths the president-elect has gone to to attack journalists who produce coverage that is critical of him. On the weekend before Election Day, Trump told Fox News, “To make America great, you really do have to get the news shaped up,” and called reporters present at a rally later that day “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people,” as my colleague Dan Friedman reported at the time.

Between September and November, Trump insulted, attacked, or threatened the media more than 100 times, according to an analysis conducted by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.

So what prompted Trump’s apparent about-face on the media? It comes on the heels of a meeting Trump reportedly had on Friday at his Mar-a-Lago estate with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the husband-and-wife hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. For context, Trump and the hosts go way back; Scarborough, a former Florida congressman, reportedly gave Trump advice during his first presidential campaign, and the ex-president would call into the influential morning show to discuss politics and policy. But their relationship soured as Trump’s popularity grew, the hosts became more critical of his policies, and Trump launched a baseless personal attack against Brzezinski that earned him rebukes from even within his own party.

But after Scarborough and Brzezinski on Monday announced that the trio had met for the first time in seven years, Trump appears to have softened his view on the media at large.

“We talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets,” Scarborough said on-air Monday, adding, “We talked about that a good bit. It’s going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show….that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.”

Joe and Mika went to Mar a Lago to talk with Trump over the weekend. First face-to-face meeting in seven years. "We didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues and we told him so," @JoeNBC says. "What we did agree on – was to restart communications," @morningmika says. pic.twitter.com/lyWZWK4CwX

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 18, 2024

Trump also discussed the meeting with Fox News Digital, describing it as “extremely cordial,” adding that they discussed some of his Cabinet picks. “The meeting ended in a very positive manner,” he reportedly said, “and we agreed to speak in the future.” 

Brzezinski’s take—that it’s worth talking to Trump for those who have access—has some merit: After all, more than 76 million Americans voted for him. But then again, mainstream journalists have tried. Trump repeatedly rebuffed sit-down interview invitations during the campaign from CBS News and NBC News, both of which Harris did do; Instead, Trump gave interviews to a bevy of right-wing male podcasters. If Trump and his team are serious about respecting the press, they will have to engage with them—respectfully, and on the issues—rather than denigrate them.

They could start with us: Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a list of questions from Mother Jones, including about whether Trump would apologize for saying he’d be ok with journalists being shot at; whether he’d commit to stop calling journalists “fake news” and “the enemy of the people”; whether the newly named press secretary Karoline Leavitt would commit to holding regular news briefings at the White House, unlike during his first term; and what specific steps Trump would take to improve his relationship with the news media.

It’s ultimately unclear if Trump’s sudden friendliness toward the media can be attributed to the MSNBC reunion at Mar-a-Lago. But one thing remains certain: You probably can’t trust this one, at all.

Americans of a certain age tend to throw around the term “Orwellian” willy-nilly. But the expression really suits in describing the behavior of our felonious, twice-impeached president-elect.

In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, a dictatorship represented by the all-powerful “Big Brother” dictates the reality its citizens must adhere to, however topsy-turvy. Official slogans include “ignorance is strength,” “freedom is slavery,” and “war is peace.”

In this context, another slogan comes to mind: “Drain the swamp.”

Trump didn’t invent this populist expression, but he made it a centerpiece of his first campaign—a vow to rid DC of the toxic influence of special interest money, lobbyists, etc. Of course, politicians of both parties have long railed, often without much credibility, against special interests in Washington, and the US Supreme Court’s trashing of campaign finance safeguards has indeed created a cesspool of oligarchic influence in DC that crosses party lines.

It’s not the slogan itself that’s Orwellian. The Orwellian part is Trump’s evocation of the Swamp as he appoints foxes to guard the federal henhouse yet again. It’s a trolling of the libs, but a trolling with potentially dire consequences—and a signal that our government is for sale, more openly now than ever.

Exhibit A: Trump’s selection of Chris Wright, the CEO of a Denver fracking services company called Liberty Energy, for the position of energy secretary. Wright has no government experience and certainly no experience related to the nuclear weapons whose oversight is a critical part of DOE’s role.

Meanwhile, as typical of Trump’s cabinet picks to date, Wright’s other qualifications for the job are—to use Orwellian “Newspeak”—doubleplusungood.

It has escaped nobody’s notice that Trump’s top consideration in doling out key positions is loyalty to the boss. For attorney general, he chose Matt Gaetz, an inexperienced lawyer (but fierce loyalist) who has been accused of sexual impropriety—no charges were ever filed—and is notorious for allegedly foisting upon House colleagues videos of women he’s bedded. For his director of national intelligence, Trump picked Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman my colleague Dan Friedman describes as a “uniquely bad choice.” Namely, she lacks intelligence experience and is so in sync with Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine that her nomination was even celebrated on Russian television. To oversee White House communications, he picked a bomb-thrower who cut his teeth at UFC. For Health, he chose Robert Kennedy Jr., a man with no academic expertise in the areas he would oversee, and whose views and priorities are far from the mainstream, as my colleague David Corn has reported. (In this administration, apparently, ignorance is indeed strength.)

Wright, too, is a loyalist, but this pick feels distinctly transactional—Swamplike. Trump, after all, met multiple times during his campaign with top fossil-fuel CEOs, promising that, if they gave him money and helped him get elected, they would be richly rewarded. Wright, who denies the climate crisis and completely dismisses the US clean energy transition—which is weird, because it is well under way, despite the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to thwart it—is the industry’s reward. As was Trump’s choice for Interior, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgham, who is apparently champing at the bit to expand drilling on federal land.

The New York Times reports that Wright’s wife, Liz, co-hosted a Trump fund-raiser in Montana, and that the couple donated a total of $350,000 to a Trump campaign committee. Most notably, Wright was the preferred choice of oil billionaire Harold Hamm, a major Trump donor and co-host of gatherings where candidate Trump wooed oil executives with what sounded suspiciously like a pay-to-play pitch.

Hamm has been playing the political money game for ages. As former Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson wrote in an early profile of the oilman, Hamm began supporting political causes in earnest starting in 2007, founding a group called the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance (slogan: “Good things flow from American oil”) and giving millions of dollars to candidates and right-wing causes supported by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch—including nearly $1 million to support Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 2012 bid for the White House.

In his rush to exploit North Dakota’s Bakken Shale, Harkinson wrote in 2012, Hamm’s company, Continental Resources, “has ridden roughshod over environmental laws….

Documents acquired by ProPublica show that it has spilled at least 200,000 gallons of oil in North Dakota since 2009, far more than any other company. That year, in one of its few formal citations against oil companies, the state’s health department fined Continental $428,500 for poisoning two creeks with thousands of gallons of brine and crude, but later reduced the amount to $35,000. Around the same time, during a thaw, four Continental waste pits overflowed, spilling a toxic soup onto the surrounding land. The Industrial Commission said it would fine the company $125,000, but it ultimately reduced the sum to less than $14,000, since “the wet conditions created circumstances that were unforeseen by Continental.”

Hamm stepped up for Trump in 2016, securing a VIP seat at the 2017 inauguration and exerting his influence during Trump’s first term. From the Washington Post:

In early 2020, he lobbied Trump to help persuade Saudi Arabia and Russia to end a price war that had driven down the price of oil below $0 a barrel, causing Hamm to lose $3 billion in just a few days.

The effort appeared to pay off. In April 2020, under pressure from Trump, members of OPEC, Russia and other oil-producing nations agreed to the largest production cuts ever negotiated—nearly 10 million barrels a day—as oil demand collapsed during the pandemic. 

This time around, Hamm, now Continental’s executive chairman, and his fellow oil and gas executives, would love to see some of those pesky environmental regulations go bye-bye, including the fines imposed under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act on drillers who spew waste methane—a particularly potent greenhouse gas and primary component of so-called natural gas—into the atmosphere.

The purpose of regulating the fossil fuel industry is to ensure Americans clean air and water and at least some hope of escaping the worst ravages of a warming planet. Killing such regulations, and preventing new ones that cost his donors money, is a big part of what this second Trump administration—not to mention the US Supreme Court, with its decisions crippling the automony of federal agencies—is poised to deliver.

Call it Swamp 2.0.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has debuted a new—and implausible—reason that the House Ethics Committee’s report into allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) should not be released: Gaetz is now a private citizen.

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper on Sunday morning, Johnson claimed that since Gaetz resigned from Congress on Wednesday, he does not deserve to be subject to the scrutiny of lawmakers. Yet Johnson neglected to provide the full context: Gaetz resigned shortly after Trump announced he would nominate him for the post of attorney general—which is about as far from “private citizen” as one could get.

“There’s a very important protocol and tradition and rule that we maintain, that the House Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction does not extend to non-members of Congress,” Johnson said. “I think that would be a Pandora’s box. I don’t think we want the House Ethics Committee using all of its vast resources and powers to go after private citizens.”

"The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report. Not once."

.@SpeakerJohnson lays out why he opposes the release of a House Ethics Committee report on Attorney General pick former Rep. Matt Gaetz. pic.twitter.com/gQbvi7LoMh

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 17, 2024

As Tapper pointed out, Johnson’s claim is untrue: In the past, the committee has released reports focused on former Rep. Bill Boner (R-Tenn.), former Rep. Buz Lukens (R-Ohio), and former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), all after their resignations.

Johnson’s latest stance comes after he initially said, at a Wednesday news conference, that he would not be—and could not be—involved in decisions about whether to release the Gaetz report. Two days later, after reportedly spending time with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Johnson changed his tune and said he would “strongly request” that the committee not release its findings. That was on Friday, the same day the committee was reportedly set to vote on the matter.

When Tapper asked Johnson if Trump asked him to change his position and advocate against the release of the report, the Speaker denied it. “The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report, not once,” he claimed.

Whether Gaetz actually stands a chance at running the Department of Justice is uncertain: NBC News reported Saturday that more than half of Senate Republicans, including some in leadership roles, do not believe he’ll survive the Senate confirmation process.

The fact that Johnson is still defending him is ironic for more reasons than one: The House Speaker’s hardcore Christian beliefs—which include urging a return to “18th century values”—are well known. Gaetz, on the other hand, was investigated over sex trafficking allegations by the department Trump has tapped him to lead. (Gaetz has denied the allegations and the DOJ opted not to file charges.)

But when Tapper pressed the issue, asking whether the Republican party still cared about electing leaders who are “moral in their personal lives,” Johnson dodged the question. Trump’s nominees, he declared, “are persons who will shake up the status quo.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For people involved with research and advocacy about climate change, the results of last week’s presidential election sting.

To get a sense of what’s to come and what’s needed to ensure domestic climate action continues, I spoke with Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and author who teaches at Texas Tech University and is chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy.

She is one the country’s best-known communicators about climate change and often talks about how her religious faith informs her views about protecting the environment. Her 2021 book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, was not written for this moment, but might as well have been.

She specified that she was speaking for herself and not for her employer or any organization. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you feeling about the election results?

Disappointed and concerned. I was a lead author of the National Climate Assessment under the last Trump administration, and, as you know, I am firmly of the conviction that a thermometer does not give you a different answer depending on how you vote. A hurricane does not knock on your door and ask you which political party you’re registered with before it destroys your home.

Climate change is no longer a future issue. It’s already affecting us today. It’s affecting our health. It’s affecting the economy, which was a big factor in this election. It’s affecting the safety of people’s homes, the cost that they’re paying for insurance and for groceries, and it’s putting our future and that of our children on the line.

I want to see politicians arguing over who has the best solutions to climate change. I want them arguing over how to accelerate the clean energy transition. I want them to have competing proposals for how to build resilience and how to invest in the infrastructure and the food and the water systems that we need to ensure that people have a better and more resilient future. And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what we’re going to see with this administration. Of course, I would be absolutely delighted to be proved wrong.

What’s a good mindset going forward for people who care about supporting the energy transition?

That’s a great question, because our mindset really determines what we focus on and what we can accomplish. So in terms of our mindset, I am an advocate for recognizing, first of all, that the situation is dire, and on many fronts. It’s already getting worse. People might be surprised to hear me say that, because often I’m tagged as a relentless optimist. But for me, hope begins with recognizing how bad the situation is, because you don’t need hope when everything’s fine. And I’m a scientist, so I have a front row seat to what’s happening in terms of climate impacts, and the biodiversity crisis, the pollution crisis and more. So our mindset has to begin with a realistic look at what’s happening and how it is already affecting us. We cannot sugar coat it.

But that is only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin has to be focused on what real solutions look like. And when we lose hope, we tend to look for silver bullets, for one solution that if everybody did this, it would fix the problem. There are no silver bullets, but there’s a lot of silver buckshot, so to speak. If we put it all together, we have more than enough of what we need.

And often, too, when we lose hope and when we’re discouraged and frustrated, I see a tendency to turn on each other, to say, ‘Well, you know, you’re not doing exactly what I think should be done, so I’m not going to talk to you or even work with you. I’m going to criticize what you’re doing.’ Now, more than ever, is a time to come together, to focus on what unites us rather than what divides us, to be focused on what we can accomplish together, even if different people come at it for different reasons. 

I really feel like, in the next four years, we need to lean into collaborations and partnerships and solutions that have multiple wins for both people and the planet. So one group of people might be advocating for solutions because it has an immediate health benefit. Others might see the immediate economic benefit. Others might see the benefit for nature. For too long, we’ve worked in silos, and now we don’t have time for single wins. We need multiple wins. We need partners that are in it for multiple reasons, and the more we focus on what we can accomplish together, I think the more positive outcomes we’re going to see, and the more allies we’re going to gain, especially at the local to regional level.

You’ve talked about your faith and how it informs your thinking about climate. Does that help when facing the potential for adversity like we’re seeing now?

Oh yes, it definitely does. If you’re familiar with the Bible, you know that there are many, many passages that talk about incredibly negative circumstances and our mindset when confronting and addressing those. All through the Bible, whether you’re looking at David or whether you’re looking at the apostle Paul, there are so many stories and histories of people who confronted suffering and felt discouraged and frustrated at the situation that they were in.

I love the fact that you’re bringing up mindset multiple times. The most important part of my faith is not what it says about nature, but what it says about our attitudes and our mindsets. For example, there’s this one verse in Second Timothy, where Paul’s writing to Timothy, who he mentored, and he says, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, rather a spirit of power, of love and a sound mind.” And for me, that’s so impactful, because when I start to feel overcome or overwhelmed by fear, as many of us do when we’re dealing with these situations, I remind myself that that’s not coming from God.

What God has given us is a spirit of power, which is a bit of an old-fashioned way to say that we should be empowered, because research shows that when people are overwhelmed with fear it will paralyze us, and that’s the last thing we need right now. We need to be empowered to act.

The second part is the spirit of love, because love considers others. It’s not just about ourselves, it’s not selfish. It’s about other people and other things that are being affected, in most cases, more than we are.

And then the last part is about a sound mind. Our sound mind can use the information that we have to make good decisions, and so that is really my own litmus test for how I’m making decisions…not out of fear, but out of power, love and a sound mind.

Sean Duffy is entering the real world of Washington D.C., with Donald Trump tapping the Fox Business host and former Representative of Wisconsin to be his nominee as his secretary of transportation. Duffy would replace Pete Buttigieg, who was selected by sitting President Biden to lead the department under his administration. Duffy represents a double-dip […]

“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin is speaking out against Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s decision to meet with President-elect Donald Trump ahead of his return to the White House. The “Morning Joe” co-anchors visited Trump and members of his team at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, Nov. 15. It was the first time in seven years that […]

On Monday morning, Donald Trump tried to do what he has done many times before: rewrite history in an attempt to make himself look like a man of moderation.

This time it concerned Trump’s treatment of the media, which has included a long history of threats and denigration. “In order to Make America Great Again, it is very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press,” Trump told Fox News Digital. Those remarks, at least to anyone who has paid attention over the past decade, starkly diverged from his record of attacking American journalists, which just two weeks ago saw the president-elect saying that he wouldn’t mind if journalists were shot at.

Trump also told the outlet that he feels “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press,” adding, “If not treated fairly, however, that will end. The media is very important to the long-term success of the United States of America.”

These claims are confounding—in fact, rendered useless—when you consider the lengths the president-elect has gone to to attack journalists who produce coverage that is critical of him. On the weekend before Election Day, Trump told Fox News, “To make America great, you really do have to get the news shaped up,” and called reporters present at a rally later that day “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people,” as my colleague Dan Friedman reported at the time.

Between September and November, Trump insulted, attacked, or threatened the media more than 100 times, according to an analysis conducted by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.

So what prompted Trump’s apparent about-face on the media? It comes on the heels of a meeting Trump reportedly had on Friday at his Mar-a-Lago estate with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the husband-and-wife hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. For context, Trump and the hosts go way back; Scarborough, a former Florida congressman, reportedly gave Trump advice during his first presidential campaign, and the ex-president would call into the influential morning show to discuss politics and policy. But their relationship soured as Trump’s popularity grew, the hosts became more critical of his policies, and Trump launched a baseless personal attack against Brzezinski that earned him rebukes from even within his own party.

But after Scarborough and Brzezinski on Monday announced that the trio had met for the first time in seven years, Trump appears to have softened his view on the media at large.

“We talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets,” Scarborough said on-air Monday, adding, “We talked about that a good bit. It’s going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show….that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.”

Joe and Mika went to Mar a Lago to talk with Trump over the weekend. First face-to-face meeting in seven years. "We didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues and we told him so," @JoeNBC says. "What we did agree on – was to restart communications," @morningmika says. pic.twitter.com/lyWZWK4CwX

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 18, 2024

Trump also discussed the meeting with Fox News Digital, describing it as “extremely cordial,” adding that they discussed some of his Cabinet picks. “The meeting ended in a very positive manner,” he reportedly said, “and we agreed to speak in the future.” 

Brzezinski’s take—that it’s worth talking to Trump for those who have access—has some merit: After all, more than 76 million Americans voted for him. But then again, mainstream journalists have tried. Trump repeatedly rebuffed sit-down interview invitations during the campaign from CBS News and NBC News, both of which Harris did do; Instead, Trump gave interviews to a bevy of right-wing male podcasters. If Trump and his team are serious about respecting the press, they will have to engage with them—respectfully, and on the issues—rather than denigrate them.

They could start with us: Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a list of questions from Mother Jones, including about whether Trump would apologize for saying he’d be ok with journalists being shot at; whether he’d commit to stop calling journalists “fake news” and “the enemy of the people”; whether the newly named press secretary Karoline Leavitt would commit to holding regular news briefings at the White House, unlike during his first term; and what specific steps Trump would take to improve his relationship with the news media.

It’s ultimately unclear if Trump’s sudden friendliness toward the media can be attributed to the MSNBC reunion at Mar-a-Lago. But one thing remains certain: You probably can’t trust this one, at all.

“Morning Joe” co-anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, two of the news media’s most vocal opponents of Trump policy in recent years, told MSNBC viewers Monday morning they are hoping for some form of detente. The duo, who have in recent years grappled with hurtful invective from President-elect Donald Trump, visited him and members of […]

President-elect Donald Trump has selected Brendan Carr to serve as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Carr is the senior Republican on the FCC, having served previously as the telecommunication agency’s general counsel. Trump first nominated Carr to the FCC in 2017. “Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the […]

Americans of a certain age tend to throw around the term “Orwellian” willy-nilly. But the expression really suits in describing the behavior of our felonious, twice-impeached president-elect.

In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, a dictatorship represented by the all-powerful “Big Brother” dictates the reality its citizens must adhere to, however topsy-turvy. Official slogans include “ignorance is strength,” “freedom is slavery,” and “war is peace.”

In this context, another slogan comes to mind: “Drain the swamp.”

Trump didn’t invent this populist expression, but he made it a centerpiece of his first campaign—a vow to rid DC of the toxic influence of special interest money, lobbyists, etc. Of course, politicians of both parties have long railed, often without much credibility, against special interests in Washington, and the US Supreme Court’s trashing of campaign finance safeguards has indeed created a cesspool of oligarchic influence in DC that crosses party lines.

It’s not the slogan itself that’s Orwellian. The Orwellian part is Trump’s evocation of the Swamp as he appoints foxes to guard the federal henhouse yet again. It’s a trolling of the libs, but a trolling with potentially dire consequences—and a signal that our government is for sale, more openly now than ever.

Exhibit A: Trump’s selection of Chris Wright, the CEO of a Denver fracking services company called Liberty Energy, for the position of energy secretary. Wright has no government experience and certainly no experience related to the nuclear weapons whose oversight is a critical part of DOE’s role.

Meanwhile, as typical of Trump’s cabinet picks to date, Wright’s other qualifications for the job are—to use Orwellian “Newspeak”—doubleplusungood.

It has escaped nobody’s notice that Trump’s top consideration in doling out key positions is loyalty to the boss. For attorney general, he chose Matt Gaetz, an inexperienced lawyer (but fierce loyalist) who has been accused of sexual impropriety—no charges were ever filed—and is notorious for allegedly foisting upon House colleagues videos of women he’s bedded. For his director of national intelligence, Trump picked Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman my colleague Dan Friedman describes as a “uniquely bad choice.” Namely, she lacks intelligence experience and is so in sync with Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine that her nomination was even celebrated on Russian television. To oversee White House communications, he picked a bomb-thrower who cut his teeth at UFC. For Health, he chose Robert Kennedy Jr., a man with no academic expertise in the areas he would oversee, and whose views and priorities are far from the mainstream, as my colleague David Corn has reported. (In this administration, apparently, ignorance is indeed strength.)

Wright, too, is a loyalist, but this pick feels distinctly transactional—Swamplike. Trump, after all, met multiple times during his campaign with top fossil-fuel CEOs, promising that, if they gave him money and helped him get elected, they would be richly rewarded. Wright, who denies the climate crisis and completely dismisses the US clean energy transition—which is weird, because it is well under way, despite the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to thwart it—is the industry’s reward. As was Trump’s choice for Interior, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgham, who is apparently champing at the bit to expand drilling on federal land.

The New York Times reports that Wright’s wife, Liz, co-hosted a Trump fund-raiser in Montana, and that the couple donated a total of $350,000 to a Trump campaign committee. Most notably, Wright was the preferred choice of oil billionaire Harold Hamm, a major Trump donor and co-host of gatherings where candidate Trump wooed oil executives with what sounded suspiciously like a pay-to-play pitch.

Hamm has been playing the political money game for ages. As former Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson wrote in an early profile of the oilman, Hamm began supporting political causes in earnest starting in 2007, founding a group called the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance (slogan: “Good things flow from American oil”) and giving millions of dollars to candidates and right-wing causes supported by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch—including nearly $1 million to support Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 2012 bid for the White House.

In his rush to exploit North Dakota’s Bakken Shale, Harkinson wrote in 2012, Hamm’s company, Continental Resources, “has ridden roughshod over environmental laws….

Documents acquired by ProPublica show that it has spilled at least 200,000 gallons of oil in North Dakota since 2009, far more than any other company. That year, in one of its few formal citations against oil companies, the state’s health department fined Continental $428,500 for poisoning two creeks with thousands of gallons of brine and crude, but later reduced the amount to $35,000. Around the same time, during a thaw, four Continental waste pits overflowed, spilling a toxic soup onto the surrounding land. The Industrial Commission said it would fine the company $125,000, but it ultimately reduced the sum to less than $14,000, since “the wet conditions created circumstances that were unforeseen by Continental.”

Hamm stepped up for Trump in 2016, securing a VIP seat at the 2017 inauguration and exerting his influence during Trump’s first term. From the Washington Post:

In early 2020, he lobbied Trump to help persuade Saudi Arabia and Russia to end a price war that had driven down the price of oil below $0 a barrel, causing Hamm to lose $3 billion in just a few days.

The effort appeared to pay off. In April 2020, under pressure from Trump, members of OPEC, Russia and other oil-producing nations agreed to the largest production cuts ever negotiated—nearly 10 million barrels a day—as oil demand collapsed during the pandemic. 

This time around, Hamm, now Continental’s executive chairman, and his fellow oil and gas executives, would love to see some of those pesky environmental regulations go bye-bye, including the fines imposed under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act on drillers who spew waste methane—a particularly potent greenhouse gas and primary component of so-called natural gas—into the atmosphere.

The purpose of regulating the fossil fuel industry is to ensure Americans clean air and water and at least some hope of escaping the worst ravages of a warming planet. Killing such regulations, and preventing new ones that cost his donors money, is a big part of what this second Trump administration—not to mention the US Supreme Court, with its decisions crippling the automony of federal agencies—is poised to deliver.

Call it Swamp 2.0.