ProPublic has reported that the Trump administration is moving to cut SSI disability benefits for 400,000 Americans with Down syndrome, autism, dementia, severe mental illness, and other disabilities who live at home with families that receive SNAP benefits.

The proposed rule would count a disabled adult’s bedroom as income and cut their monthly benefit by $300 to $330, or eliminate it entirely. The annual savings: $2 billion a year, according to conservative think tanks. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes the entire annual savings wouldn’t cover a single day of the cost of the tax cuts for the wealthy Republicans just passed. The Iran war has cost $25 billion in 8 weeks. Trump’s Pentagon is asking for $1.5 trillion in defense spending next year.

Trump promised not to cut Social Security. SSI is administered by the Social Security Administration. The White House says the disability programs are technically separate from retirement benefits. The kind of distinction only Ebenezer Scrooge would make. Or in this case, Russell Vought.

Cutting Shy’tyra Burton’s benefit saves $11 a day. If it forces her father to place her in a residential facility, the cost to taxpayers jumps to hundreds of dollars a day.

Huge shoutout to ProPublica for their reporting. Read the story Here.

The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act today in a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, 61 years after police beat John Lewis and 600 civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma for trying to register to vote.

Section 2 of the VRA has protected minority voters for 60 years by prohibiting election maps that dilute minority political power even without proof of intentional discrimination.

Alito just changed that standard. Now you have to prove intentional discrimination, which voting rights groups say makes cases all but impossible to win because lawmakers don’t write down that they’re doing racism.

Louisiana has one majority-Black congressional district despite Black voters making up more than a third of the state’s voting age population. Courts ordered a second. Alito said drawing that district violated the rights of white voters under the Equal Protection Clause.

Republicans can now redraw majority-minority districts across the South before November’s midterms. Black Democrats across the South could lose their seats.

Justice Elena Kagan filed a 48-page dissent and read it aloud from the bench - something justices almost never do, reserved for when they need the country to hear it in their voice. She called this the court’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act. She closed by saying “I dissent” four times.

The White House called it a complete and total victory for American voters. Just not Black ones. Sixty-one years. One decision.

The EPA has officially added abortion medication and hormonal birth control to a federal drinking water contaminants watch list, announced jointly by RFK Jr. and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as a Make America Healthy Again initiative.

This is the administration that pulled out of the Paris Agreement, gutted wetland protections, approved a 211-mile mining road through a national park, and is actively expanding fossil fuels and coal. But birth control in the water is where they draw the line. Students for Life ran a fake environmental campaign for years claiming women are putting abortion medication in the drinking water. There is no science behind it.

Former EPA officials told the New York Times that existing wastewater surveillance technology can already identify abortion medication on a specific street or in a specific home. Law professor Mary Ziegler warns this could lead to a much more robust set of prosecutions.

The EPA just opened a 60-day public comment period, Senator Ron Wyden called it a barely-veiled invitation for anti-abortion groups to flood it with demands to add mifepristone. Comment deadline is June 1st. Tell them birth control and abortion medication are not environmental contaminants, there is no peer-reviewed science supporting this, and that listing them opens the door to surveilling women in their own homes.

If they’re flooding the comment period, we flood it too. Birth control being on this list is not an accident. More on that soon.

Here’s the link to leave a comment.

https://www.regulations.gov/docket/EPA-HQ-OW-2022-0946

Shoutout to Abortion, Every Day for reporting on this.

Trump’s government has given Zambia until Wednesday to hand over its mineral rights or lose the AIDS medication keeping 1.3 million people alive. This story broke six weeks ago in the New York Times. Nobody noticed. A

leaked State Department memo confirmed the threat: sign over preferential access to Zambia’s copper, cobalt, and lithium or face massive cuts to PEPFAR funding.

Zambia relies on American money for 80 percent of its HIV treatment. 1.3 million people are on daily medication that depends on it. In December Trump’s government suspended health funding talks entirely when Zambia wasn’t moving fast enough on minerals.

The deadline is this week. Zambia said no. Zimbabwe walked away from a similar deal. Kenya’s compact is suspended by a court order.

Trump’s leverage has already failed everywhere. Which means if he follows through, 1.3 million people lose their treatment not because negotiations collapsed but out of spite.

Since Trump took office, aid trackers at Boston University estimate his cuts have contributed to over 518,000 child deaths and 263,000 adult deaths from manageable diseases. The testing money is gone too so we can’t even count them all.

Two weeks ago I covered Gilead Sciences charging $28,000 for an AIDS drug that costs $25 to make. This week Trump’s government is threatening to let people die of AIDS unless a poor country hands over its minerals. The through line is the same: human lives are not the point. Resources are. The people dying are the leverage. Hat tip to Jonathan Larsen at The Fucking News for tracking this story.

The State Department transferred $1.25 billion in disaster relief and peacekeeping money into Trump’s Board of Peace - a personal international organization he chairs for life with no audits, no transparency, and no congressional vote.

Senate Democrats are about to pass the Fix Our Forests Act, handing permanent industrial logging authority to Tom Schultz, a former lumber executive now running the Forest Service who believes you prevent wildfires by not having trees, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, a political operative with no land management background, and Michael Boren, the Undersecretary who illegally built a private airstrip inside a national recreation area and is now in charge of your national forests. Thanks to More Than Just Parks for flagging this story.

House Oversight Chair James Comer confirmed some Republicans want to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for testimony she could give without being under oath.

The DOJ indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for paying informants to infiltrate the KKK, intelligence they shared with the FBI for years until Kash Patel cut the relationship in October and Todd Blanche indicted them six months later.

At the White House Correspondents Dinner, Trump’s first as president, a gunman sprinted through security and exchanged fire with Secret Service. Before Trump’s press conference, MeidasTouch Network pointed put that MAGA accounts tweeted the same ballroom talking points simultaneously. Trump bragged about the crowd size and made the case for his $400 million ballroom with a secure underground bunker. Make of that what you will.

Welcome to the golden age.

This week on the Gilead Gazette: Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti pressured the state legislature to pass a brand new law giving his office sovereign immunity, specifically to stop six women from testifying about nearly dying under the state’s abortion ban. One woman’s fetus had organs growing outside its body. Others developed sepsis. They waited years for their day in court. He invented a law to silence them the week before they were scheduled to testify.

In Louisiana, AG Liz Murrill filed with the Fifth Circuit to stop all telehealth abortion pill prescriptions nationally while her mifepristone lawsuit plays out. Since Dobbs, abortion rates have actually increased nationwide - bans haven’t stopped abortions, telehealth has kept them accessible, which is exactly why Republicans are trying to kill it.

New Guttmacher data confirms the bans are failing at their only stated purpose: the abortions Republicans spent years calling murder are up, while emergency medical care for pregnancy complications has decreased so precipitously it’s costing women their lives.

We’re also in a femicide crisis that the media won’t name. This week alone: a Louisiana man killed eight children in a domestic violence shooting, Justin Fairfax killed his wife during divorce proceedings, a Utah man killed his wife the day after she filed for divorce, and D4vd was charged with murdering a 14-year-old girl he’d been sexually abusing. The New York Times called it “relationship stress.” It’s femicide, connected to the manosphere, Andrew Tate, Epstein, and a culture that treats women as property.

Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court struck down the state’s Medicaid abortion funding ban, ruling it violates the state’s Equal Rights Amendment. A win.

For the most essential reporting on attacks on women’s rights, follow Jessica Valenti and subscribe to Abortion, Every Day .

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Eric Trump went on Fox News this week to celebrate a $24 million Pentagon contract his company just won for autonomous military robots - in a war his father started, while his father controls the Defense Department.

Before his dad became president, Eric Trump ran golf courses and hotels. That was his entire professional background.

His business partner explained on Fox that these robots need to rapidly deploy in situations where “we cannot always be calling a CEO to ask for permission.” No human in the loop. Lethal decisions made independently. By robots funded by a contract Eric Trump got while his father runs the Pentagon.

Senator Elizabeth Warren said: “Is the Pentagon just a cash machine for Trump’s kids now? This looks like corruption in plain sight.”

Stephen Hayes of The Dispatch noted that Fox spent years covering Hunter Biden’s laptop - congressional investigations, special counsels, hearings, rally chants - and zero evidence emerged that Joe Biden did anything illegal. Eric Trump goes on Fox to brag about his Pentagon contract and they ask him to tell them more about the robots.

Rep. Shontel Brown said it directly: “The Trump family gets rich off of Trump’s war. Working people get higher prices.”

The president starts a war, his son gets a Defense Department contract for autonomous weapons in that war, and Fox News throws him a party. Tell us about the robots, Eric.

The Trump administration has identified 384 naturalized American citizens whose citizenship it wants to revoke, and they’re calling it the first wave.

Between 1990 and 2017, the government filed just 305 denaturalization cases total over 27 years, averaging 11 per year, almost exclusively targeting people who committed war crimes abroad before becoming Americans.

Now the Trump administration has ordered DHS to refer 200 denaturalization cases a month to the DOJ. They’ve assigned those cases to prosecutors in 39 regional offices who have never handled denaturalization before, pulling them off healthcare fraud, civil rights enforcement, and procurement cases.

The administration hasn’t explained what led them to target these specific 384 people. What we do know is that Trump specifically named Americans of Somali descent as targets.

UVA law professor Amanda Frost, who has written extensively on the history of denaturalization, says the government has used this power in the past to target people it views as political opponents.

If you were born here, your citizenship cannot be revoked. If you were naturalized, the Trump administration is now telling you it’s conditional.

And if they’re willing to go after naturalized citizens today, the question is who’s next. Political enemies. Activists. People they simply don’t like. They called these 384 people the first wave. Which means they already know there will be a second.

Happy Earth Day. The Trump administration is building a border wall through Big Bend National Park and the adjoining state park, one of the most remote and ecologically irreplaceable landscapes in the United States. Big Bend accounts for roughly one percent of all border apprehensions in the entire country. In 22 years of guiding river trips through the region, one local guide has seen exactly one group of migrants cross. The administration waived more than two dozen environmental laws in February to fast-track construction. After massive bipartisan backlash - conservative judges, sheriffs, ranchers, and tourism operators all united against it - the CBP map quietly changed in April to show detection technology instead of a physical wall through the national park. The tractors didn’t leave. Roads are being widened, survey stakes are in the ground, and a $1.2 billion contract was awarded to Fisher Sand and Gravel at $17 million a mile. Fifth-generation cattle rancher Yolanda Alvarado’s family cemetery will be cut in half by the wall. Her grandparents are buried there. The Center for Biological Diversity just filed a lawsuit arguing the environmental waivers are unconstitutional. The former Big Bend superintendent says existing surveillance technology has already been working. Crossings have dropped to historic lows under Trump’s own crackdown. There is no operational need for this wall. Donate to Keep Big Bend Wild and the Center for Biological Diversity’s legal fund. Call your representatives. Remember who did this. Make sure to subscribe to More Than Just Parks

The Atlantic published a bombshell investigation this week reporting that FBI Director Kash Patel is a hard-drinking alcoholic whose addiction is actively interfering with his ability to do his job. His security detail has requested breaching equipment, the kind SWAT teams use, to wake him up because he was unreachable behind a locked door. He’s known to drink to obvious intoxication at a Washington club called Ned’s in front of White House staff, then spend his weekends at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas on the FBI jet.

More than two dozen sources told The Atlantic that early morning meetings had to be rescheduled because of his alcohol-fueled nights, that agents were losing their minds waiting for time-sensitive decisions, and that officials are genuinely alarmed about what happens if there’s a terrorist attack while Patel is unavailable.

He was confirmed 51-49 because Trump wanted someone personally loyal running federal law enforcement. He’s purged agents who worked January 6th cases, fired a counterintelligence squad focused on Iran days before the US went to war with Iran, and polygraphs employees to find out if anyone has said anything mean about him.

He responded to The Atlantic by filing a $250 million defamation lawsuit, which immediately backfired when his own lawsuit confirmed the very thing the FBI had previously called 100% false. If the lawsuit moves forward, there will be discovery. The last thing Kash Patel wants is a deposition.

BlisterPearl on X called him and Hegseth the liquor cabinet. No notes. Hat tip to Sarah Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic for the reporting.