Just in time for the nation’s birthday, House Republicans have passed the most regressive legislation in recent memory, a bill that’s expected to cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and boot some 12 million Americans off their health insurance, even as it explodes the federal deficit—all to extend and expand tax cuts that favor the rich.

The vote was 218-214.

Republicans unilaterally shoved through their “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” awkwardly named with President Donald Trump’s phrase, just in time to meet his demand that they deliver it for his signature by Independence Day.

Their fealty to Trump helped House Speaker Mike Johnson overcome resistance among some GOP members, even though the measure flagrantly violates Trump’s many vows not to reduce Medicaid spending. Trump has addressed that contradiction by falsely claiming the bill doesn’t cut Medicaid or other benefits.

No Democrat in either chamber voted for the bill, and the party is expected to make the cuts to Medicaid and other safety net programs, including food stamps, the center of their efforts to retake control of the House and Senate in next year’s midterm elections.

Here are some of the aspects that have led critics to declare this “the worst bill in modern American history.”

It’s incredibly regressive: The bill cuts taxes for rich people while reducing benefits for the poor. Broadly, it extends the 2017 tax cuts Congress passed during Trump’s first term while partly offsetting the cost with deep cuts to health care spending, food assistance, and other programs. Although it includes some tax cuts that would benefit lower-income Americans, the gains, in aggregate, flow to the rich, with the top 1 percent of families getting a break (according to an estimate from an earlier version of the bill) of $79,000 a year while families in bottom fifth would get $160. But that’s before you consider the lost benefits.

When you factor in spending cuts to the aid programs, those wealthiest households end up with an average 4 percent increase in after-tax income, while the bottom 20 percent of earners are docked by nearly that same percentage, according to a Yale Budget Lab analysis. In a recent survey of 4,500 Americans by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker and post-doc Patrick Sullivan, Republican respondents, when informed of these numbers, opposed the bill by a ratio of 3-t0-1, and overall support for it plummeted to just 11 percent.

It blows up the deficit: The bill will increase the deficit by $4.1 trillion, including interest over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget , by extending the 2017 tax cuts and adding new ones aimed at fulfilling Trump promises. These include an extension of a home mortgage interest deduction and a “no tax on tips” provision, albeit with a $25,000 cap on the amount of tips workers can claim—which experts say means it will not help lower-income service workers.

It slashes Medicaid: The bill includes both direct and indirect cuts to Medicaid spending. It limits so-called Medicaid provider taxes that states use to collect more matching funds from the program. (Those states are taking advantage of a loophole in the law, but by cutting it off, the bill leaves them with less Medicaid funding, likely causing many to reduce services.) The legislation also imposes a requirement that Medicaid recipients provide proof of employment to get benefits. This imposes a complicated bureaucratic burden on beneficiaries that CBO says will cut $280 billion in Medicaid spending over six years—in many cases because even many people who work (most recipients do) won’t be able to navigate the red tape the bill imposes.

It ends health coverage for millions: Nearly 12 million Americans will lose coverage as a result of the bill, according to CBO, mainly due to the burdensome new requirements places on Medcaid recipients, and steps that make it harder to sign up, like limited enrollment periods and new paperwork requirements.

It‘s an impediment for women’s health care: Of the 24 million women currently enrolled in Medicaid, 56 percent are of reproductive age and the majority are women of color. The bill excludes Planned Parenthood and some other providers from Medicaid, reducing access to birth control and other reproductive care. The cuts could also force more than 140 rural hospitals to shut down obstetrics services or drastically curtail them.

It slashes food stamps: The bill will cut federal spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps poor people buy food, by an estimated $287 billion over a decade. It also includes a bizarre provision that rewards states with the highest error rates in awarding food stamps. That’s the result of legislative wrangling in the Senate where, in a bid to win over Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, GOP leaders—barred by procedural rules from simply exempting Alaska—instead exempted the 10 states with the highest error rates. (Alaska is the highest.) This actually gives states on the cusp of making the list an incentive to get worse.

As with Medicaid, most of the cuts to SNAP and other aid programs will be done backhandedly, via onerous bureaucratic burdens. As the New York Times reported: “By including dozens of changes to dates, deadlines, document requirements and rules, Republicans have turned paperwork into one of the bill’s crucial policy-making tools, yielding hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to help offset their signature tax cuts.”

Among the new requirements, “able-bodied” elders, ages 55 to 64, will have to submit documents verifying their citizenship. And rather than letting states use information already on hand to verify the citizenship of Obamacare subsidy applicants, the legislation requires people to track down and submit those documents. Republicans, who for years have railed against federal bureaucracy, claim these paperwork tasks would weed out only people who don’t qualify for benefits, but CBO and many experts say such hurdles will cause millions of people who qualify for Medicaid, food stamps, and health subsidies to lose them.

It undermines clean energy development: The bill slashes spending on clean energy approved under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, likely leading to job losses and a capitulation to China’s domination of the sector. It removes tax incentives for wind, solar, and other renewable energy projects, though it delays some of the cuts until after the midterms. It also ends subsidies of up to $7,500 for electronic vehicles purchased this year.

It greatly expands ICE detentions and enforcement: As masked ICE agents stir up neighborhoods around the country, the bill throws cash at the agency—more than $100 billion in new funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement through 2029. As my colleague Inae Oh reports, that would “fund the single largest increase in immigration enforcement in US history. It would ramp up mass deportations to an unprecedented scale; create hastily built, sordid detention centers across the country; and all but ensure that millions of people who haven’t been accused of crimes are disappeared.”

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

The US House of Representatives voted 218 to 214 on Thursday to pass President Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, greenlighting deep cuts to America’s social safety net and the decimation of the country’s only federal climate strategy. Democrats uniformly opposed the bill, while all but two House Republicans supported it.

“This bill will leave America a far crueler and weaker place,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, in a statement. It “races the United States and the world toward climate catastrophe, ending support for renewable energy that is absolutely vital to avert worst-case climate scenarios.”

The “One Big Beautiful Bill” has now been approved by both chambers of Congress; all it needs now is Trump’s signature before it can become law. Trump is expected to sign it during an evening ceremony on July 4, Independence Day, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

One of Republicans’ biggest victories in the bill is the extension of deep tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term, which are estimated to cost the country more than $4 trillion over 10 years. The legislation also directs roughly $325 billion to the military and to border security, while cutting more than $1 trillion in funding for Medicaid, the joint state and federal program that covers medical costs for lower-income and disabled Americans.

To pay for the tax breaks, the bill sunsets clean energy tax credits that were put in place by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), making wind and solar projects ineligible unless they start construction before July 2026 or are placed in service by 2027. It also imposes an expedited phaseout of consumer tax credits for new and used electric vehicles—by September 30 this year instead of by 2032. Green groups described the legislation as “historically ruinous” and “a self-inflicted tragedy for our country.”

The IRA’s tax credits and additional incentives for green energy from the bipartisan infrastructure act, also passed under former president Joe Biden, were projected to reduce the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent by 2030. Combined with additional action from states, cities, and private companies, they could have put the US on track to meet the country’s emissions reduction target under the UN’s Paris Agreement.

Once Trump signs the megabill, however, the US will have no federal plan to address the climate crisis. “Every lawmaker who voted for this cynical measure chose tax cuts for the wealthiest over Americans’ health, pocketbooks, public lands, and waters—and a safe climate. They should be ashamed,” said Manish Bapna, president of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement.

Agriculture experts have also objected to Trump’s policy bill, which removes the requirement that unobligated climate-targeted funds from the IRA be funneled toward climate-specific projects—in part so they can be directed toward programs under the current farm bill, an omnibus bill for food and agriculture that the federal government renews every five to six years. The Trump megabill will increase subsidies to commodity farms by about $50 billion.

The final version of the bill doesn’t include a proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands; this was dropped following outcry from the public and some conservation-minded GOP lawmakers. It also lacks stringent limits on the use of Chinese components in renewable energy projects that were proposed in an earlier version of the bill. Some Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate voted for the legislation in exchange for carveouts in their states, like reduced work requirements for food stamps and less severe health care cuts.

In Thursday’s House vote, only two Republicans broke with their party to vote nay: Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes measures that would increase the federal deficit, and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who had hesitated to support cuts to Medicaid.

All Democrats voted against the bill. Immediately preceding the House vote, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York railed against the policy in a record-breaking 8 hour and 45-minute House floor speech invoking scripture: “Our job is to stand up for the poor, the sick, and the afflicted,” he said. 

Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have promised to hold Republicans accountable. More than three dozen of its members have said they’ll hold “Accountability Summer” events lambasting Republican lawmakers who supported the bill. “As Democrats, we must make sure they never live that down,” the group’s chair, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Tex.), said in a statement.

Similarly, Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat for Hawaiʻi, told the New York Times that his party should use the spending cuts as a cudgel against Republicans ahead of next year’s midterm elections: “Our job is to point out, when kids get less to eat, when rural hospitals shutter, when the price of electricity goes up, that this is because of what your Republican elected official did,” he said.

“And they get away with the corruption,” read the email subject line. I knew it was from Bill Moyers, because launching right into the point was the M.O. when he sent me news clips and ideas, sometimes several times a day, in the waning months of the first Trump administration. They would ding in at 5 a.m. or earlier—that, too, was the M.O. of a man who, then in his mid-80s, showed no sign of slowing from a pace that his longtime producer, Judy Doctoroff, described to me as that of an “overwhelmingly energetic idea machine.”

Moyers died last week, at 91. You can watch the tribute from his former colleagues at PBS, or read about his accomplishments in the big papers’ obits. It’s an incredible arc—born to a dirt farmer in Oklahoma, ordained a Baptist minister at 25, LBJ’s right-hand man and present on Air Force One after the Kennedy assassination, key architect of the Great Society and the Peace Corps, and then, for decades, legendary correspondent and host on PBS and CBS, where his interviews and documentaries changed how Americans thought about masculinity, spirituality, economic inequality, pollution, and more. (You can spend days browsing his work (including an interview with Clara Jeffery, MoJo‘s editor in chief, and yours truly, as well as a fantastic two-part conversation with my colleagues David Corn and Kevin Drum, at his website. And be sure to read David’s appreciation of Moyers for a lovely story of what came from that interview!)

This story, however, begins where Moyers’ New York Times obituary ends, after his official retirement in 2015. That’s when I got to know him, though he didn’t seem particularly retired to me. He was reading everything, talking to everyone, charming the socks off people with that soft drawl while also steelily driving them toward where he needed them to go. He talked about journalism as a calling, whose goal was “getting as close as possible to the verifiable truth.”

He also thought hard and strategically about what the truth might accomplish. Once I heard him described as “that curious and very rare blend of idealist-operator,” and that sounded exactly right. He would quote George Bernard Shaw (“It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics”) or the inscription on a 17th-century church: “In the year 1653 when all things Sacred were throughout ye nation, either demolisht or profaned, Sir Robert Shirly, Baronet, Founded this church; Whose singular praise it is, to have done the best things in ye worst times, and hoped them in the most callamitous.” His first executive producer, Jerry Toobin, noted that “In all the years I have worked with him, I have never heard him say anything dumb.”

Moyers had come to the conclusion that his early call to the ministry was “a wrong number,” but he never lost a preacher’s ability to enchant. Moyers had, as Doctoroff puts it, “an expansive view of public affairs, those things that make us human and feel connected with each other,” which led him to make documentaries on poetry, on myth, on addiction (this one featuring his son opening up about his own struggles.) His special on the song “Amazing Grace“ is a love letter to America.

At the Center for Investigative Reporting (now MoJo’s parent organization), filmmaker Steve Talbot worked with Moyers on a 1999 documentary about the politicization of the courts—another topic on which he was ahead of his time—and remembers how surprisingly easy it was to get him in front of Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer. “I soon discovered the reason it was possible to book the interviews was that both Kennedy and Breyer were big admirers of Moyers’ intelligence and journalistic integrity. They wanted to meet and engage with him.”

Former Mother Jones publisher Steve Katz recalls that after his first meeting with Moyers, “as starstruck as I was, I left thinking that what we see of Bill on TV is exactly the same man I met with just now. That, to me, was such an expression of Bill’s authenticity. It also was clear to me that as heartfelt and good a man as he was, he had a clear grasp on the question of power—how to get it, and how to use it.”

In “retirement,” Moyers was running his own media enterprise, producing videos, articles, and documentaries nonstop. He was also the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which made grants to transparency watchdogs, nonprofit journalism, and environmental organizations.

By this time, Moyers had become profoundly disillusioned with the major newsrooms where he had spent much of his career. He’d always been one of the very few voices on national television unapologetically saying the big truths about American society—about injustice, racism, and the capture of politics by moneyed interests. He’d clashed with his network bosses (at one point, he said the changes demanded by CBS executives to his exposé about baby formula had “turned Jaws into ‘Gums’”). Now, as he watched traditional media struggle to grasp the Trump era, the stakes seemed existential.

Thus the “and they get away with the corruption” email he sent me. It was about a New York Times story exposing, two years after the fact, that the 2017 Trump tax bill had been even more of a giveaway to the wealthy than we knew. “Not a single corporation with a news division—the major networks, cable, newspaper chain, etc.—covered it,” Moyers wrote. “A free and independent press? Bah, humbug…. Who will show us how corruption is not just episodic but systemic? That capitalism has democracy by the throat because democracy no longer has any balls?”

Moyers was acutely aware, sooner than most, that big money was eating away at American democracy. “Ninety-six percent of the people believe it’s important that we reduce the influence of money [in politics],” he said in a 2014 interview. “Yet 91 percent think it’s not likely that its influence will be lessened. Think about that: People know what’s right to do yet don’t think it can or will be done. When the public loses faith in democracy’s ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game’s almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class.” He went on to say that “there are people fighting back [and] if it weren’t for them, I would despair. It’s the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there’s still hope.”

Watching mainstream media first make Donald Trump a celebrity and then normalize his authoritarianism, Moyers had come to believe that real accountability was going to have to come from the outside—from journalists who were not part of corporate media, and who were focusing on themes that were getting lost in the day-to-day headlines. One of these themes was corruption. He cited an annual survey by Chapman University that for nine years running has found “corrupt politicians” topping the list of Americans’ fears—ahead of “people I love becoming seriously ill,” terrorism, and nuclear weapons.

Corruption was a topic Mother Jones had been focused on since its founding. During the 2016 campaign, our reporters were among the very few digging into the massive conflicts of interest created by Trump’s business interests all over the world. Moyers told me that as part of the Schumann Foundation’s very last round of grant funding, it would support our work on this beat.

To him, it was all about connecting the dots. Again earlier than most, he realized that people were getting lost in a sea of doom-scrolly headlines, and propagandists were weaponizing this information overload. He sent me a column by the New York Times’ Charles Blow, which warned that “Investigations and exposés by the press may dazzle and awe [but] keeping track of all the corruption and grift is exhausting, and maybe that’s the point.”

“Telling people he and his gang are corrupt is no longer news,” he would say. “If you can show them what America is going to look like because of it, they might be moved.”

Bill trusted Mother Jones to do the work of exposing how “corruption is not just episodic, but systemic.” He also trusted us to show that this was not an abstract concept—that it cost all of us, in terms of money, opportunity, and quality of life.

In 2003, just months after US troops marched into Iraq on the strength of government lies, when hope for the power of truth ran pretty low, Moyers gave a speech laying out the history of movements for change in America, and how they have always been intertwined with the power of journalism. He quoted the muckraker Lincoln Steffens, who set out to “slay the dragon of exalting ‘the commercial spirit’ over the goals of patriotism and national prosperity.”

“I am not a scientist,” Steffens had said. “I am a journalist. I did not gather the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis…My purpose was…to see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride.”

Moyers believed that “shameful facts, spread out in all their shame,” could still “set fire to American pride”—especially when those facts laid bare how government was being turned into an ATM for the wealthy and connected. One of the last emails he wrote me noted that, “It will probably not surprise you that after four decades covering [big money’s] sabotage of democracy, from that first documentary on political action committees back in the 1970s, I often think of what the historian Plutarch said in his eulogy for the fallen Roman republic: ‘The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, however, this process of corruption spread to the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subject to the rule of emperors.’”

“Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere,” Moyers closed. “When he rode into town, it was ripe for plucking.”

Rereading this, in the 23rd week of the second Trump administration, is depressing—but also strangely calming. Moyers knew Trump was not an aberration, but the logical extension of a problem that went back decades. Corruption, he wrote me, is “a condition beyond individual scandals—more a totality of governance, a philosophy that says democracy exists for us to take what we can while we can—to hell with the law, rules, norms and the country. It’s the crime family manifesto of the mafia, affixed to the civic life and public affairs of the nation.”

There are few people who’ve embodied the best of journalism—its ability to cut through BS, its capacity to uplift those who’ve been wronged, its curiosity and burning appetite to tell the stories people need to know—like Bill Moyers. We’ve never needed him more. But the worst way to honor him would be to mope about what we’ve lost. The best—and only—way to pay tribute to him is to go out and do the work.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

As the nation celebrates its 249th birthday, it’s hard not to wonder about the future of the American experiment. Two-and-a-half centuries ago, a collection of disparate colonies overcame regional differences to forge a nation. Sure, on slavery, the most divisive issue of the time, they punted. And the mighty rhetoric of freedom and liberty was deployed to the advantage of wealthy male landowners. Nevertheless, despite their differences, they banded together beneath a banner of ideals for a common cause.

These days, the people in charge do not seem keen on bolstering our communality. President Trump and his MAGA cult are propelled more by animus and retribution—let’s crush the libs!—than by a desire to strengthen the bonds among the diverse citizens of this large nation. In a highly symbolic act that did not receive sufficient attention, Trump declined to attend the funeral of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, who had been assassinated by a Trump supporter who opposed abortion rights and gay rights. The day of that memorial ceremony, Trump golfed with Republican leaders and posted on social media, “WHY ARE THE DEMOCRATS ALWAYS ROOTING AGAINST AMERICA???” Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance spends much of his time snarkily trolling progressives and Democrats on social media.

This pair evinces absolutely no interest in bridging gaps, healing wounds—much less in serving as role models of comity and decency. At every opportunity, they choose bombast and insult over discourse and debate. They seek to divide and conquer, and they define their politics by identifying and pummeling enemies. In one conversation I had with Barack Obama when he was president, he remarked, “I am the president of all Americans, including those who did not vote for me. I have to consider what’s best for them, even the ones who don’t like me.” That’s not how Trump and Vance see it.

Trump has no recognition of the public interest, only his own self-interest. Which is how we ended up with the atrocious legislation passed by congressional Republicans this week. As we have heard repeatedly, it gives to the wealthy (handing them huge tax breaks) and robs from the poor (stripping millions of Americans of their health care coverage and slashing food assistance for children). Even Republicans who initially opposed these draconian provisions—including those who represent huge numbers of Medicaid recipients, as well as other constituents who will be severely harmed by this legislation—allowed themselves to be bullied by Trump and his MAGA henchmen into voting for it. The measure is estimated to expand the deficit by $3.3 trillion or so over 10 years (and maybe more). It will pour $100 billion into ICE and border enforcement, bolstering the burgeoning police state that the Trump administration is creating to deport law-abiding and hard-working residents. (For comparison’s sake, the annual FBI budget is $11.4 billion.)

Besides breathtaking cruelty, this bill features an absurd internal logic. Trump claimed that undocumented immigrants must be rounded up for the sake of American prosperity. Yet to pay for this operation, he and his Republican minions will decrease after-tax income for some Americans within the lower 20 percent and snatch health insurance from millions—and cause fiscal instability. Moreover, expelling millions of migrants will likely trigger a labor shortage that will spur a rise in prices. The message to many Americans is this: We will pick your pocket to deport people who work the jobs you’d rather not.

In a much-noticed social media post, Vance declared that the impact of the cuts in Medicaid and nutrition assistance of the bill were “immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.” As if persecuting immigrants will offset the human suffering this bill yields. Try telling that to a parent whose child goes hungry or an adult child whose parent loses his or her care for dementia. Or a low-income family that will have to get by with several hundred dollars less a year.

The gleeful malice of the past few months has been nauseating. Trump, Elon Musk, and their crew relished demolishing USAID, not pausing for a nanosecond to consider the dire consequences. A new study concludes that from 2001 to 2021 USAID programs prevented 92 million deaths in 133 nations. This included 25 million deaths caused by HIV/AIDS, 11 million from diarrhea diseases, 8 million from malaria, and 5 million from tuberculosis. The study forecasts that the annihilation of USAID will lead to 14 million deaths in the next five years. Yet Trump, Musk, and others have cheered the demise of this agency. How can plutocrats be so mean? The USAID budget last year was a mere 0.3 percent of the total federal budget.

Down the line, Trump and his MAGA band have expressed little concern or empathy for those clobbered by their vengeful policies. They are smashing the scientific research infrastructure of the nation and assaulting universities. They are demonizing public servants. They are eviscerating laws that protect our water and air—the common resources we share—and sacrificing our children’s future by unplugging programs that address climate change. All while recklessly vilifying their fellow Americans who disagree with these moves as enemies of the nation. Hatred is the currency of their realm—and crypto is the currency of their corruption.

This is a far cry from the originators of the union who were forced to overcome differences to achieve independence and place America, with all its ills, on the path to becoming one of the most dynamic forces in human history.

So on July 4, 2025, we can celebrate the imperfect start of our national enterprise, despite the dark turn it has taken. As we do so—and as we contend with the discouraging and disturbing developments of the moment—we ought to keep in mind a fundamental fact: There are more of us than them. More Americans reject the cruelty of Trump’s mass deportation crusade than accept it. More Americans oppose the profoundly unfair billionaires-enriching-Medicaid-slashing-deficit-busting tax-and-spending mega-bill than embrace it. More Americans disdain the Trump presidency than hail it.

The question at hand, all these years after Thomas Jefferson provided the original pitch deck for American democracy, is whether the majority can triumph. Can it overcome institutional barriers, disinformation, and distraction and find a path toward responsible governance that addresses the shared interests and values of the citizenry? We all may have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it demands great work—eternal vigilance, you might say—to protect that right so we all can put it to good use.

Enjoy your burgers, hot dogs, tofu sausages, and ice cream.

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

A generation of scientific talent is at the brink of being lost to overseas competitors by the Trump administration’s dismantling of the National Science Foundation (NSF), with unprecedented political interference at the agency jeopardizing the future of US industries and economic growth, according to a Guardian investigation.

The gold standard peer-reviewed process used by the NSF to support cutting-edge, high-impact science is being undermined by the chaotic cuts to staff, programs and grants, as well as meddling by the so-called department of government efficiency (DOGE), according to multiple current and former NSF employees who spoke with the Guardian.

The scientists warn that Trump’s assault on diversity in science is already eroding the quality of fundamental research funded at the NSF, the premier federal investor in basic science and engineering, which threatens to derail advances in tackling existential threats to food, water and biodiversity in the US.

“Before Trump, the review process was based on merit and impact. Now, it’s like rolling the dice because a DOGE person has the final say,” said one current program officer. “There has never in the history of NSF been anything like this. It’s disgusting what we’re being instructed to do.”

Another program officer said: “The exact details of the extra step is opaque but I can say with high confidence that people from DOGE or its proxies are scrutinizing applications with absolutely devastating consequences. The move amounts to the US willingly conceding global supremacy to competitors like China in biological, social and physical sciences. It is a mind-boggling own-goal.”

The NSF, founded in 1950, is the only federal agency that funds fundamental research across all fields of science and engineering, and which over the years has contributed to major breakthroughs in organ transplants, gene technology, AI, smartphones and the internet, extreme weather and other hazard warning systems, American sign language, cybersecurity and even the language app Duolingo.

In normal times, much of the NSF budget ($9 billion in 2024/25) is allocated to research institutions after projects undergo a rigorous three-step review process—beginning with the program officer, an expert in the field, who ensures the proposed study fits in with the agency’s priorities. The program officer convenes an expert panel to evaluate the proposal on two statutory criteria—intellectual merit and broader impacts on the nation and people—which under the NSF’s legal mandate includes broadening participation of individuals, institutions, and geographic regions in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

Applications from across the country that are greenlighted by the program officer are almost always funded, though may be subject to tweaks after revision by the division director before the grants directorate allocates the budget.

That was before Trump. Now, DOGE personnel can veto any study without explanation, the Guardian has confirmed.

“We are under pressure to only fund proposals that fit the new narrow priorities, even if they did not review as well as others,” said one current program officer. “The NSF’s gold standard review process has 100 percent been compromised.”

Research aimed at addressing the unequal impact of the climate crisis and other environmental hazards is particularly vulnerable, according to several sources. New proposals are also being screened for any direct reference or indirect connection to diversity, equity or inclusion (DEI).

“NSF is being asked to make science racist again—which contradicts evidence that shows that diversity of ideas is good for science and good for innovation. We are missing things when only white males do science,” said one program officer.

In addition to DOGE interfering in new proposals, at least 1,653 active NSF research grants authorized on their merits have so far been abruptly cancelled—abandoned midway through the project, according to Grant Watch, a nonprofit tracker of federal science and health research grants canceled under Trump.

Multiple NSF scientists who oversee a diverse range of NSF programs described the grant cancellations as “unprecedented,” “arbitrary,” and a “colossal waste of taxpayer money.”

Almost 60 percent of the projects abandoned are in states which voted for Joe Biden in 2024, Guardian analysis found. More than one in nine cancelled grants—12 percent of the total—were at Harvard University, which Trump has particularly targeted since coming to power in January.

In addition, studies deemed to be violating Trump’s executive orders on DEI and environmental justice—regardless of their scientific merit, potential impact or urgency—are being abruptly terminated at particularly high rates.

It’s not uncommon for the NSF and other federal research agencies to shift focus to reflect a new administration’s priorities. Amid mounting evidence on the crucial role of diversity in innovation and science, Biden priorities included increased effort to tackle inequalities across the STEM workforce—and a commitment to target underserved communities most affected by the climate crisis and environmental harms.

Trump’s priorities are AI, quantum information science, nuclear, biotech, and translational research. “It’s normal that a new administration will emphasize some areas, de-emphasize others, and we would gradually transition to new priorities. During the George W. Bush administration there were shenanigans around climate change, but it was nothing like this kind of meddling in the scientific review process. You never just throw proposals in the garbage can,” said one current NSF staffer.

“Our mandate is to advance science and innovation. And we just can’t do that if we’re not thinking about diversifying the STEM workforce. We don’t have enough people or diversity of thought without broadening participation—which is part of the NSF mission mandate,” said a former program officer from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science who recently accepted a buyout.

“It has been soul-sucking to see projects that went through the review process being changed or terminated over and over again,” they added.

The Federal Reserve estimates that government-supported research from the NSF and other agencies has had a return on investment of 150 percent to 300 percent over the past 75 years, meaning US taxpayers have gotten back between $1.50 and $3 for every dollar invested.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” includes a 56 percent cut to the current $9 billion NSF budget, as well as a 73 percent reduction in staff and fellowships, with graduate students among the hardest hit.

Last week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced that it will be moving into the NSF headquarters in Virginia over the course of the next two years. The shock announcement—which did not include any plans on relocating more than 1,800 NSF employees—has triggered speculation that the administration eventually plans to defund the agency entirely.

For now, program officers are also being instructed to return research proposals to scientists and institutions “without review”—regardless of merit and despite having been submitted in response to specific NSF solicitations to address gaps in scientific and engineering knowledge around some of the most pressing concerns in the US. This includes projects that have in fact undergone review, and others which can no longer be processed due to staff and program cuts, according to multiple NSF sources.

In one case, a 256-page proposal by scientists at four public universities to use ancient DNA records to better forecast biodiversity loss as the planet warms was apparently archived without consideration.

In an email seen by the Guardian, the NSF told Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist and principal investigator (lead scientist) based at the University of Maine, that all proposals submitted to the Biology Integration Institute program were returned without review. A second email said their specific proposal had been “administratively screened” and the area of proposed study was “inappropriate for NSF funding.”

An estimated 40 percent of animals and 34 percent of plants across the US are currently at risk. The proposed study would have used an emerging technology to extract ancient DNA from lake sediments, ice cores, and cave deposits to better understand which species fared better or worse when the planet naturally warmed thousands of years ago—in order to help model and protect biodiversity in the face of human-made climate change.

Gill told the Guardian the team took great care to avoid any reference to DEI or climate change. The grant would have created much-needed research capacity in the US, which is lagging behind Europe in this field.

“Ancient DNA records allow you to reconstruct entire ecosystems at a very high level. This is a very new and emerging science, and grants like this help catalyze the research and reinvest in US infrastructure and workforce in ways that have huge returns on investments for their local economies. It’s an absolute slap in the face that the proposal was returned without review,” Gill said.

In another example, two academic institutions chosen to receive prestigious $15m grants for translational research—a Trump priority—after a 30-month cross-agency review process led by the engineering directorate and involving hundreds of people will not be honored.

The proposals selected for the award through merit review will be returned without review for being “inappropriate for NSF funding,” the Guardian understands.

“This is complex, very high-impact translation science to achieve sustainability across cities and regions and industries…we’re being instructed to put the principal investigators off, but nothing’s going to get funded because there’s DEI in this program,” said an NSF employee with knowledge of the situation.

Meanwhile scores of other proposals approved on merit by program officers are disappearing into a “black box”—languishing for weeks or months without a decision or explanation, which was leading some to “self-censor,” according to NSF staff.

“It’s either NSF staff self-censoring to make sure they don’t get into trouble, or it is censorship by somebody inserted in the scientific review process from DOGE. Either way it’s a political step, and therefore problematic,” said Anne Marie Schmoltner, a program officer in the chemistry division who retired in February after 30 years in the agency.

In addition to distributing funds to seasoned researchers, the NSF supports students and up-and-coming scientists and engineers through fellowships, research opportunities and grants.

This next generation of talent is being hit particularly hard under Trump, who is attempting to impose sweeping restrictions on visas and travel bans on scores of countries. The proposed 2026 budget includes funding for only 21,400 under- and postgraduate students nationwide—a 75 percent reduction from this year.

Like many scientists across the country, Gill, the paleoecologist, is not accepting new graduate students this fall due to funding uncertainty. “That’s a whole generation of young scientists who see no pathway into the field for them. I cannot stress enough how deeply upsetting and demoralizing these cuts are to a community of people who only ever wanted to solve problems and be of use.”

Yet the NSF student pipeline provides experts for the oil and gas, mining, chemical, big tech and other industries which support Trump, in addition to academic and government-funded agencies.

“Industry is working on optimizing what they’re doing right now, whereas NSF is looking 10, 20 years down the road. The US wants a global, robust economy and for that you need innovation, and for innovation you need the fundamental research funded by the NSF,” said Schmoltner.

The NSF declined to comment, referring instead to the agency website last updated in April which states: ‘The principles of merit, competition, equal opportunity and excellence are the bedrock of the NSF mission. NSF continues to review all projects using Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria.’

The sweeping cuts to the NSF come on top of Trump’s dismantling of other key scientific research departments within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Agriculture (USDA) and US Geological Service (USGS).

The USGS is the research arm of the Department of Interior. Its scientists help solve real-life problems about hazards, natural resources, water, energy, ecosystems, and the impacts of climate and land-use change for tribal governments, the Bureau of Land Management, fish and wildlife services, and the National Parks Service, among other interior agencies.

Trump’s big, beautiful bill cuts the USGS budget by 39 percent. This includes slashing the entire budget for the agency’s ecosystems mission area (EMA), which leads federal research on species & ecosystems and houses the climate adaptation science centers.

EMA scientists figure out how to better protect at-risk species such as bees and wolverines, minimize harmful overgrazing on BLM lands, and prevent invasive carp from reaching the Great Lakes—all vitally important to protect food security in the US as the climate changes.

The EMA has already lost 25 to 30 percent of employees through DOGE-approved layoffs and buyouts, and is now facing termination. “We’ve already lost a lot of institutional memory and new, up-and-coming leaders. [Under Trump’s budget], all science in support of managing our public lands and natural resources [will] be cut,” said one USGS program officer.

“Our economy is driven by natural resources including timber, minerals, and food systems, and if we don’t manage these in a sustainable way, we will be shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Like at the NSF, the USGC’s gold standard peer-review system for research approval and oversight is now at the mercy of DOGE—in this case Tyler Hasson, the former oil executive given sweeping authority by the Interior secretary. According to USGS staff, Hasson’s office accepts or rejects proposals based on two paragraphs of information program officers are permitted to submit, without any dialogue or feedback. “The gold standard scientific review is being interfered with. This is now a political process,” said one USGS scientist.

A spokesperson for the Interior department said: “The claim that science is being ‘politicized’ is categorically false. We reject the narrative that responsible budget reform constitutes an ‘assault on science’. On the contrary, we are empowering American innovation by cutting red tape, reducing bureaucracy and ensuring that the next generation of scientists and engineers can focus on real-world solutions—not endless paperwork or politically motivated research agendas.”

The USGS, office of management and budget and White House did not respond to requests from comment.

The first pilot episode of Reveal exposed how the Department of Veterans Affairs was overprescribing opioids to veterans and contributing to an overdose crisis. Journalist Aaron Glantz explained how he received—surprisingly quickly—a decade’s worth of opioid prescription data from the federal government. 

“Sometimes, you have to sue to get the records,” he said. “I have to think that there were some people over there in DC who were as concerned as we were about this.”

After that first show was made, host Al Letson didn’t know what to expect. “We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” he said. 

Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Congress held hearings during a government lockdown, and there’s been a sea change in the way veterans are prescribed painkillers. And today, the show is on more than 500 stations. 

This week on Reveal, we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired.  

On the 249 anniversary of the country’s declaration of independence from tyranny, the Trump administration was in court asking a judge to let it send eight men to South Sudan, a war-torn country where they face a significant possibility of torture or death. The government wished to subject these men, and then untold thousands more, to such a fate without the guarantee of due process promised in the Constitution. And on America’s birthday, they got their wish.

A federal judge in Massachusetts declined to halt the deportations. He lay the blame at the feet of seven Supreme Court justices who had allowed the removals to move forward the previous day. The Trump administration had a plane to fly them from a US military base in Djibouti scheduled for 7pm ET on July 4. Presumably, they are now in South Sudan.

The July 4 courtroom drama is the denouement of a months-long battle over the Trump administration’s plan to remove non-citizens to so-called third countries, nations that the immigrants have no ties to. The Massachusetts judge, Brian Murphy, had required the government to provide non-citizens the chance to object to the third country on grounds that they may face torture there before removing them. This kind of due process was in accordance with federal law, international law, and the Constitution. But in late June, the Republican appointed Supreme Court justices allowed the administration’s third-country removals proceed without this due process.

This led to a final showdown on Independence Day over whether some of the key liberties won through the creation of the United States will still endure. In a last-ditch effort to halt their client’s removal to South Sudan, where people are subjected to horrific violence, lawyers for the eight men argued that the removal is an unconstitutional punishment with additional cruelty intended to deter future migration. Further, the eight men had been convicted of felonies and served their sentences. Trump has no additional right to inflict further punishment by removing them to a country where torture likely awaits.

In a video hearing in federal court in Washington, DC on Friday, Judge Randolph Moss was disturbed by the wide latitude the Trump administration claimed to punish individuals through deportation to whatever country it wishes. If an orthodox Jew on route to deportation to Israel angered a DHS agent, Moss asked, could the government instead remove him to a country where he couldn’t practice his religion?

Ultimately, Moss transferred the case to Massachusetts where the litigation over third-country removals had been playing out. There, Judge Murphy declined to halt the flight to South Sudan due to the Supreme Court’s previous orders in the case.

In 1776, drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson zeroed in on an abusive and malleable justice system. He accused the king of depriving colonists of trial by jury and for “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.” As my colleagues David Corn and Tim Murphy noted, commemorating the holiday, Trump’s immigration agenda reflects modern shades of these notorious offenses: condemning hundreds—and soon likely many thousands—of immigrants to torture in other countries without the fair processes guaranteed by the Constitution and beyond the protection of the American judicial system.

The United States has rarely lived up to the full promise of its founding documents. This July 4, the Trump administration acted more like the monarchy the colonists overthrew than the revolutionaries demanding freedom.

Remember when Congress banned TikTok? A bipartisan majority passed a law last year to ban the massively popular social media platform due to the national security implications of its control by the Chinese government. President Joe Biden signed it into law, and in January the Supreme Court upheld the law. And yet, TikTok is still with us. So what happened?

How does a law… not become a law? According to the Trump administration, the president has the authority to nullify laws he doesn’t like. The fate of the TikTok ban hasn’t made national headlines in months among the deluge of other notable anti-democratic Trump administration actions. But in letters obtained this week by the New York Times, the Trump administration is claiming broad powers to simply wipe from the books laws it does not like. The TikTok ban has become Exhibit A.

The TikTok law operated not as an outright ban but by making it illegal to host the app in app stores and cloud and internet services, with punishing fines for companies that disobeyed. But in seeking to overturn the law by fiat, the Trump administration tells companies like Apple and Google that they are off the hook.

“Article II of the United States Constitution vests in the President the responsibility over national security and the conduct of foreign policy,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in an April letter to tech companies including Apple, Google, and Amazon. The TikTok law, she continued, does not “infringe upon such core Presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.” In other words, if the president invokes his authority in the realms of national security and foreign affairs, he can nullify a law.

Bondi’s letters informed the tech companies that continuing to host TikTok, despite the plain language of the law, was not illegal. Not only was it a promise that the Trump administration would not enforce the law, but that no future administration could. This move is unprecedented. “Recent past presidents have been aggressive in exercising law enforcement discretion,” Harvard Law School’s Jack Goldsmith told the Times, “but they haven’t suspended the operation of a law entirely or immunized its violation prospectively.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has attempted to thwart or ignore the law. In the past week, his Education Department refused to disburse $7 million in funding for afterschool care programs, English language instruction, and other programs. The money was appropriated by Congress and signed by the president, and its disbursement is required by law. But the Office of Management and Budget, under director Russel Vought, has claimed the power to impound funds. In the case of the missing education money, OMB is investigating whether the funds were being used to further a “radical leftwing agenda.” This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has illegally refused to spend money, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Still, claiming that the president has inherent powers to nullify represents an unprecedented power grab by the Trump administration. If the law can be turned on and off by the president, Congress’ authority is worthless. Today, it’s the TikTok ban and spending requirements. What’s next?

The massive piece of legislation to which President Donald Trump has just attached his legacy allocates $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement over the next four years—including $45 billion to expand the detention of immigrants to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations. It will make ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history, with more money than the federal prison system, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration combined.

What will that mean, practically speaking? I turned to former officials who have run large prison systems, as well as attorneys who specialize in immigrant detention, to understand the logistical concerns with expanding a detention system so quickly.

Hugh Hurwitz was acting director of the Bureau of Prisons during part of Trump’s first term, managing 122 facilities and some 170,000 incarcerated people nationwide.

Martin Horn was secretary of corrections for Pennsylvania in the late 1990s and commissioner of New York City’s corrections department in the 2000s.

Eunice Hyunhye Cho is an attorney who challenges unconstitutional conditions in immigrant detention centers with the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute, wrote a book about the private prison companies that incarcerate immigrants.

In separate interviews—excerpts of which have been edited for length and clarity—they dove into how this $45 billion spend could, as Eisen put it, “drastically change the landscape of immigration enforcement and detention in this country.”

On the size of the allocation

Cho: “It’s enormous. Currently, ICE spends around $3.4 to $3.9 billion a year on immigration detention.”

Hurwitz: “Forty-five billion dollars is an astronomical amount of money—the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has an $8 billion annual budget. The money for ICE is available through September 2029, so Congress doesn’t expect Homeland Security to spend it in one year.”

Cho: “Even if you average it out over the years—and that may not be right, they may spend it very quickly—$45 billion is at least three or four times the amount they currently spend on immigration detention.”

Eisen: “It will drastically change the landscape. A vast infrastructure of detention will be built, and actually has already started, even before this bill was signed.”

On the number of potential detainees

Hurwitz: “ICE wants to increase their capacity from about 41,000 people a day to 100,000—that’s pretty significant. To put it in comparison, BOP’s population today is about 155,000. And ICE doesn’t have 122 prisons like BOP has.”

Cho: “This is an extraordinary number of people. ICE is rounding up people through home raids, workplace raids, court check-ins, courthouse arrests, arrests near schools, places of worship. The other thing is that ICE is refusing to release people from detention who have traditionally been released, people who may be eligible for bond and parole, people who are very medically vulnerable, and even people who have won their cases.”

On where the money might end up

Hurwitz: “Remember, ICE doesn’t own prisons. So my guess is the immediate effort will be in contracting with private prison companies or states and localities that have capacity to hold these people.”

Cho: “They have also discussed new ways of detention, including temporary tent detention sites, so some of the money may go to logistics corporations and toward sites like Alligator Alcatraz, an example of how they may contract with a state. And there’s Guantanamo—ICE is supposed to be reimbursing the Department of Defense for use of those facilities—as well as flights. They may choose to build their own facilities, but it takes time to do that, so to extend the number of detention beds quickly, they’ll probably go with preexisting facilities or temporary facilities.”

On staffing challenges

Horn: “How do you recruit enough staff to supervise that number of individuals? How quickly can you onboard them and train them? Staffing is absolutely critical—custodial staff, but also medical staff. And if you look at these very rural locations, typically there are not a large number of trained medical professionals, so you’re going to have to get people to relocate. Are there places for them to live? How long is the commute going to be?”

Hurwitz: “All correctional facilities nowadays are having difficulty hiring staff. The private prisons and states and localities, they’re all looking for the same candidates, right? Most places have increased the salaries and created other incentives to recruit people, but it’s still difficult to find good candidates.”

On medical concerns

Hurwitz: “In the BOP, we have sentenced inmates who have been in the system a while. Because we had them for a long time, we knew what their medical conditions were, so we could send them to the appropriate places. ICE has a challenge, because these people aren’t going to be there that long, so they don’t know their medical history, they just don’t have the depth of information that you have with sentenced inmates. And that makes everything more risky.”

Cho: “Immigration detention facilities were terrible places to be even before the Trump administration. We have documented conditions of abuse, medical neglect, preventable deaths, sexual assault, use of force, force-feeding on hunger strikers. There have been suicides. You have people who are placed in brutal conditions of confinement, who had mental health treatment outside, but once they come in they’re either cut off from their medication or placed in solitary confinement, which can further exacerbate mental health distress. We’ve been tracking cases where people who are life dependent on insulin are not receiving it.”

On Alligator Alcatraz

Horn: “The pictures that I saw of the Florida facility show a large open space separated by chain link fence with bunk beds. We don’t know how many showers, how many toilets, how many wash basins they’re providing.”

Hurwitz: “That was built by the state of Florida. I’ve never been in an ICE detention facility, so I don’t really know what an ICE detention facility looks like. That’s not how we would run a Bureau of Prisons facility.”

Cho: “I haven’t seen it. I don’t think many people have. There are some very clear issues—tent facilities in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the swamp. Heat concerns, whether or not it’s actually safe during hurricane season, inclement weather. They were already reporting flooding on the first day.”

Eisen: “They are talking about alligators and pythons guarding the perimeter of the facility. The cruelty and inhumanity here is pretty unprecedented.”

On local, state, and federal prisons taking immigrants

Eisen: “It is very common to find detention bed space in county jails and state prisons, and less common in the federal system, though it did happen in Trump 1.0. Conditions depend on the facility; some have air conditioning and enough space, and in some the infrastructure is much worse. These are immigrants who have not been convicted of a crime for the most part, or have not been accused of committing a crime. Correctional officers are trained for a certain population, whereas ICE detention officers are trained for a different population.”

Cho: “Jails or prisons may not have been set up to ensure that people can call immigration attorneys, or that people who speak different languages can access medical care. We were talking to folks in Alaska, and there were stories of people who had missed their immigration proceedings or their bond hearings because the facility just wasn’t set up to make sure they would be there.”

Hurwitz: “Obviously, [holding immigrant detainees] is not what BOP is designed to do, but BOP and ICE did sign an intergovernmental agreement, and BOP housed a small number of detainees for ICE at five, six facilities—maybe it’s more now. I think BOP generally tried to separate them—they were kept in separate housing units or separate wings away from the general population. When I was director, [operating to house immigrant detainees] certainly wasn’t our preferred method, because it was different than how we do things. And when you’re running a prison, you don’t like to do things differently.”

On private prison companies taking immigrants

Cho: “Private prison companies have been chomping at the bit for this reconciliation package to pass. They very early on recognized what an economic boon this would be.”

Eisen: “Ninety percent of people in immigrant detention facilities are in private facilities, and we have seen companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group already profit from the president’s immigration agenda. There’s the potential reactivation of a detention center in Leavenworth, Kansas; we’ve seen the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas reopen; the reopening of Delaney Hall, owned by GEO Group in Newark. What’s also really important to note is that these companies own transportation subsidiaries to transport people across the country, and those will be expanded as well.”

Hurwitz: “When BOP worked with private prisons, we were putting criminal aliens in those private facilities and didn’t require them to run programming—they were going to be deported after their release, so there was no reason for BOP to invest in programming—but yet, all of the contractors ran programming. And why did they do that? An idle population is more apt to get into fights. So they put in the programs on their own.”

On oversight

Eisen: “This new money comes at a time when the administration is rolling back attempts to oversee what’s happening. You’ve seen members of Congress attempting to visit detention facilities, and ICE issued guidance in June asking for 72 hours’ notice for a visit, even though federal law authorizes members of Congress to visit any detention facility at any time unannounced.”

Cho: “The Trump administration basically defunded the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties as well as the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which were both responsible for investigating abuses in immigration detention facilities. [Facing blowback, the administration backpedaled, but advocates doubt its commitment to those missions.] And ICE has weakened standards for facilities that are going to be combined ICE detention plus criminal detention. Things as basic as not allowing legal groups to provide legal orientation, not specifying the number of telephones that must be provided, not specifying in their medical care guidelines that prescription medication must be provided to detainees. Standards have become so weak as to render them practically meaningless.”

Eisen: “In 2024, right before Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General issued a report after inspecting ICE detention facilities. They observed mold, rust, peeling paint in showers, bathrooms with clogged or inoperable toilets, broken sinks, water leaks, people not seeing doctors as often as they were supposed to. I bring all this up because those were the conditions when there was more significant oversight. So one can only imagine what’s going to happen with less oversight.”

On what won’t get funding—and what will

Cho: “It’s important to note what the $45 billion is being taken away from. There’s $11 billion being cut from Pell Grants, $20 billion being cut from Medicaid for the provision of nursing home staff. I am reading proposals for increased detention centers in places that were formerly nursing homes—that is one of the starkest manifestations of what this is going to look like, what this budget bill is doing in terms of the fabric of our communities.”

Hurwitz: “I believe the ‘big, beautiful bill’ had another $5 billion for BOP, so from a BOP perspective, the amount of money is pretty good.”

On the speed of the expansion

Hurwitz: “They’re on a pretty aggressive track, from what you hear from the president, but I have no reason to think that it can or can’t be done. I don’t have enough information.”

Horn: “Anything having to do with detention that you do in a hurry is generally not a good idea. That’s been my experience.”

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

They are vital pollinators who come out at night, but now moths have emerged into the bright light of day as co-creators of a new piece of music—composed using the insects’ own flight data.

Ellie Wilson composed Moth x Human in a protected habitat on Parsonage Down in Salisbury, Wiltshire. She assigned each of the 80 resident moth species a different sound, which was triggered when it landed on her monitor.

Around the automated melody created by the moths, she composed music for live violin, cello, trombone, piano, and synths. Wilson will be interviewed and the piece performed twice, at London’s Southbank Centre this weekend as part of the New Music Biennial.

“I wanted to compose a piece of music that was, in part, created by the insects themselves,” said Wilson. “The moths randomly created these little tiny melodies—little fragments and motifs which I used to compose the rest of the piece, including tapping on the body of the cello to imitate the sound of a moth getting trapped in a lamp.”

Moth populations are experiencing steep declines across the globe due to habitat loss, pesticides, and the climate crisis. This has a knock-on effect on the ecosystem because moths are an important food source for bats, owls and birds—but also because moths are critical to pollination, albeit in ways that are still not fully understand.

“Many of us don’t see moth numbers declining because they come out at night but they’re just as vital to our ecosystem as bees and butterflies,” said Wilson.

Wilson created the work with the support of Oxford Contemporary Music and with biodiversity scientists at the UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology. The piece highlights the impact of the decline of the UK moth populations by ending with data from a different area: a farmland monoculture with only 19 moth species.

“I wanted the difference in moth populations to be audible,” said Wilson. “There’s so much sound at the beginning of the piece. At the end, there’s very little.”

Wilson said the scientists she teamed up with were enthusiastic about their work being turned into music. “They’ve been trying to get the message across about catastrophic moth decline but they can’t get traction using figures and data,” she said. “Music is an accessible way for people to understand the disaster unfolding.”

Wilson is not the only UK musician using nature to draw attention to the climate breakdown: Cosmo Sheldrake is appealing against the refusal of his legal attempt for the Ecuador forest to be recognised as a co-creator of a song he wrote.

“The nature of the ecological crisis is fast, so striking, so completely urgent and total—and natural sounds have so much charisma and power—that music based on nature can reveal and communicate things about the natural world far more effectively and powerfully than science can,” Sheldrake said.

“So much can be revealed from listening to ecosystems,” he added. “Removing a single tree devastates the soundscape even though the forest might not look any different.”

Radio Lento recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, streaming “captured quiet” from 105 locations in 26 UK counties. And the UK-based design and architecture firm Heatherwick Studio is transforming an uninhabited island in Seoul, South Korea, into a public park, featuring musical performances based on soundwaves created by the mountainous terrain.

But Finland has taken things one step further, becoming the first country in the world to create an official soundscape.