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Workers are winning a greater percentage of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)-recognized union elections than at any point in the past 15 years. Yet The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 far-right playbook includes a blueprint for eroding the NLRB’s ability to protect organizing workers. A new Center for American Progress analysis explains how this far-right playbook would threaten workers’ ability to come together in unions to bargain for better wages and working conditions.
This new CAP analysis of NLRB elections data has found that:
The Project 2025 policy playbook offers instructions for future administrations to neuter the NLRB’s enforcement capacity and turn it against unions by firing key agency leaders, making it easier to decertify unions, and closing off established ways of forming unions.
“The NLRB has been a key part of the Biden administration’s strategy for empowering workers to ensure they have a fair shot at forming a union,” said Aurelia Glass, policy analyst for the Inclusive Economy team at CAP and author of this analysis. “Crucial appointees are holding lawbreaking corporations accountable and helping reverse a decadeslong trend that allowed bad actors to bust workers’ unions before they could form. Project 2025 offers a playbook for how an administration could jeopardize the NLRB’s ability to protect organizing workers and threatens rolling back unions’ success over the past four years.”
Read the analysis: “Project 2025 Would Undo the NLRB’s Progress on Protecting Workers’ Right To Organize” by Aurelia Glass
The Center for American Progress is a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action. We combine bold policy ideas with a modern communications platform to help shape the national debate, expose the hollowness of conservative governing philosophy and challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter.
Of the roughly 450 hospitals identified in a new analysis as at risk of closure or service cuts, around 200 are located in congressional districts represented by Republicans.
The unprecedented Medicaid cuts that US President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans approved last summer are putting hundreds of hospitals across the country at high risk of cutting services or permanently shutting their doors, a potentially devastating outcome for millions of poor Americans that was repeatedly predicted ahead of time.
The advocacy group Public Citizen released a report Monday identifying 446 hospitals that could be forced to reduce services or close because of the Trump-GOP Medicaid cuts, which will amount to around $1 trillion over the next decade. The at-risk hospitals collectively served 7 million patients in 2024, according to Public Citizen's analysis.
Nearly 200 of the hospitals listed in Public Citizen's report are located in congressional districts represented by Republicans who voted for the Medicaid cuts, and 146 are in states represented by Senate Republicans—nearly all of whom supported the sprawling budget package that included the assault on Medicaid.
“Trump’s cuts to Medicaid will hurt millions of low-income and disabled Americans, and will deepen financial strains that are already plaguing rural and safety-net hospitals—compromising their ability to deliver care, potentially leading many to close,” said Public Citizen researcher Eileen O’Grady, the author of the report. “Congress should take urgent action to restore all Medicaid funding cuts enacted by Trump and Republicans in Congress, and should extend the enhanced premium tax credits for coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces.”
The report comes as Republicans are reportedly considering billions of dollars in additional healthcare cuts—and kicking hundreds of thousands more off their health coverage—to help fund Trump's illegal and increasingly expensive war on Iran.
Public Citizen found in its report that there's at least one hospital at risk of closing or slashing services in 44 states and Washington, DC. States with the highest proportion of at-risk hospitals are Connecticut, California, New York, Massachusetts, and Washington, the analysis shows.
"It is notable that while there are more at-risk hospitals in Democrat-led states and congressional districts, a substantial number of hospitals in Republican-led states and congressional districts are threatened by Medicaid cuts," the report observes. "Almost all congressional Republicans voted to pass the Big Ugly Law."
"When unlawful force is repeated over time, it risks becoming normalized."
The Trump administration's most recent attack on a boat in the Caribbean, which killed four people last week, "highlights a sustained pattern of unlawful use of lethal force outside any context of armed conflict, amounting to extrajudicial executions," Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.
The US military announced last Wednesday that it had conducted its 47th attack on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The Trump administration has presented little evidence for its claim that the targeted boats have been engaged in trafficking drugs to the United States. At least 163 people have been killed in these attacks since September 2025, all of them without trial.
Human Rights Watch is part of a chorus of international organizations and observers that have condemned the boat bombing campaign as acts of murder in flagrant violation of international law.
“These strikes aren’t one-off incidents, they’re part of a pattern of using military force where the law does not permit it, over and over again,” said Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “The fact that these strikes have faded from public attention does not make these violations any less grave or unlawful.”
The organization noted that there is no ongoing military conflict in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific that would make those traveling by boat legitimate targets.
And while the US government has provided scant evidence that those it has killed were trafficking drugs, Human Rights Watch said that even if evidence of drug trafficking existed, suspected criminals are still not lawful targets of lethal force unless they pose an imminent threat to the lives of others.
The boat strikes have continued in the background as President Donald Trump has launched attacks against Venezuela and Iran, both of which international organizations have described as acts of aggression that violate the laws of war.
Trump has also enacted a crippling economic blockade of Cuba with the explicit goal of toppling its government so the US can "take" the island, and has previously threatened to use economic leverage or the US military to forcibly annex Greenland.
“When unlawful force is repeated over time, it risks becoming normalized,” Yager said. “That’s dangerous because it opens the door to using lethal force whenever and wherever a government wishes and without constraints.”
“It is obscene that companies like TotalEnergies are making enormous profits from war, while ordinary people’s lives are being shattered and the world faces a spiraling economic crisis," said one campaigner.
As energy and finance officials from across the European Union prepared to review energy supply levels amid the US-Israeli war on Iran on Tuesday, campaigners from a leading climate action group renewed their call for officials to go further than just releasing oil reserves in order to keep costs down.
Oil giants that have benefited from the growing global energy crisis set off by the US-Israeli attacks and Iran's retaliatory closing of the Strait of Hormuz should be held to account for their "fossil fuel profiteering," said 350.org.
After a virtual meeting of energy ministers from the G7 countries on Monday, 350.org called on officials to tax the windfall profits of companies like France's TotalEnergies, which is estimated to have made $1 billion in profits in just the last month since Iran closed the strait in retaliation for the US and Israeli attacks.
Total has reportedly "monopolized" about 70 crude oil shipments from the UAE and Oman in the last month, as Murban crude prices surged from $70 to $170 per barrel.
As Common Dreams reported Monday, 350.org released an analysis showing that spiking oil and gas prices resulting from the US-Israeli war have cost consumers and businesses more than $100 billion in the past month.
“It is obscene that companies like TotalEnergies are making enormous profits from war, while ordinary people’s lives are being shattered and the world faces a spiraling economic crisis," said Fanny Petitbon, France team lead for 350.org. "At a time of such profound human suffering, no company should be allowed to exploit chaos and conflict for financial gain. The G7’s deafening silence on these windfall profits speaks volumes, signaling a failure to hold corporate greed accountable while the rest of the world pays the price.”
Revenues from taxing windfall profits could "be used to support vulnerable households, accelerate the transition to renewable energy, and fund recovery efforts in regions affected by conflict," said Petitbon.
“The principle is clear: extraordinary profits made in times of crisis should be redirected for the public good, not concentrated in the hands of a few," she said.
The ministers from the G7 countries—which include the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy—met virtually to discuss how the war in Iran is affecting energy and commodity markets and inflation. They called on countries “to refrain from imposing unjustified export restrictions” on oil and gas, but did not announce any specific steps they plan to take.
"We stand ready to take all necessary measures in close coordination with our partners, including to preserve the stability and security of the energy market," the ministers said in a statement. "We recognize the importance of coordinated international action to mitigate spill overs and safeguard macroeconomic stability."
Earlier this month, the International Energy Agency coordinated the release of 400 million barrels of oil to mitigate the supply shortfall caused by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, from which about one-fifth of the world's oil supply flows.
But gas prices across Europe have continued to rise by 70% nonetheless. In the US, the average price of gas rose to $4 per gallon on Tuesday for the first time since August 2022.
Brent crude oil, which cost about $70 per barrel before the war, has gone up to $119 per barrel, and analysts are projecting prices as high as $200 as the conflict continues.
Monday's virtual summit was held ahead of an emergency meeting of EU energy ministers, who were told by EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen in a letter Monday that they were "encouraged to make timely preparations in anticipation of a potentially prolonged disruption" of energy imports.
Jørgensen emphasized in a video posted on social media Monday that the growing energy crisis underscores how a transition away from oil and gas toward renewable sources is crucial for economies as well as the planet.
The crisis in the Middle East is affecting energy prices also here in Europe.
My message on what we must do to protect our citizens and businesses.
Now and in the future.
↓ pic.twitter.com/jiLmavxV8K
— Dan Jørgensen (@DanJoergensen) March 30, 2026
"We will need immediate targeted measures to combat this crisis, but all of these measures need to be in line with our long-term strategy, which is more renewables as fast as possible," said Jørgensen.