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Vermont becomes first state in the nation to ban Parkinson’s pesticide paraquat
EWG urges New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania to act next to prohibit dangerous weedkiller
The Environmental Working Group praised Vermont for today becoming the first state in the nation to ban the use and sale of paraquat, one of the most toxic herbicides in the U.S., and one that’s linked to Parkinson’s disease and other serious health harms.
Gov. Phil Scott (R) signed the landmark legislation after the state Legislature passed it with strong bipartisan support. The new law makes Vermont the first to enact a statewide prohibition on the toxic weedkiller.
“We applaud Governor Scott and the champions in the legislature that made this moment possible that will protect all Vermonters, including farmers and children, from being exposed to this dangerous chemical,” said EWG Legislative Director Geoff Horsfield.
“With Vermont leading the way, states across the country now have a clear path to end the use of one of the most toxic herbicides still on the market,” said Horsfield. “This is a turning point in the effort to protect public health from a chemical that has been tied to devastating neurological harm.”
State Rep. Esme Cole (D-Windsor) and state Sen. Martine Gulick (D-Chittenden-Central District) championed their chambers’ versions of the bills.
EWG would also like to thank the leading organizations that supported the bill, including Vermont Public Interest Research Group, The Michael J. Fox Foundation, Parkinson’s Foundation, the American Parkinson Disease Association, the Vermont Natural Resources Council and others.
Paraquat is banned in more than 70 countries yet remains widely used across U.S. agriculture.
Vermont’s action is expected to intensify pressure on state policymakers throughout the country to restrict or eliminate use of the herbicide. Lawmakers in the nearby states of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania are currently debating similar proposals.
“We urge elected leaders in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and other states to move forward with their respective plans to ban the toxic weedkiller and build momentum to push more states to take action,” he added.
Several other states have introduced bills to ban paraquat, and California is considering new regulatory restrictions. These efforts are clear signs of escalating concern over the chemical’s well-documented health risks.
A growing body of research links exposure to an increased risk of Parkinson's disease, with additional evidence pointing to other serious health harms, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma and childhood leukemia.
The Environmental Working Group is a community 30 million strong, working to protect our environmental health by changing industry standards.
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As US Drivers Suffer High Gas Prices, Big Oil Celebrates and Plans Big Payouts for Shareholders
"These companies want Americans to believe price spikes are simply the unavoidable result of global events, but their own executives are openly telling investors that volatility, conflict, and supply disruptions are good for business."
May 26, 2026
A Tuesday report from Groundwork Collaborative reveals how fossil fuel companies are not merely scoring windfall profits from President Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran, but also using that money to reward shareholders rather than providing relief to consumers.
The price of gas has soared since Trump attacked Iran without any congressional authorization in late February, going from an average of under $3 per gallon at the start of the war to $4.49 per gallon as of Tuesday.
As US drivers have paid more at the pump, however, fossil fuel firms have been concerned with paying out dividends and conducting stock buybacks expanding production to lower prices, Groundwork Collaborative's report finds.
Among other things, the report notes that ExxonMobil is on pace to deliver $20 billion worth of stock buybacks in 2026, even as CEO Darren Woods has insisted that the company's decisions on production will be "grounded in value, not volume."
Additionally, the report documents how Shell recently announced "another 5% dividend increase and more than $3 billion in buybacks," with CEO Wael Sawan describing the company's commitment to paying shareholders as "sacrosanct."
Chevron has pledged roughly $3 billion in quarterly stock buybacks, while also saying increasing dividends for shareholders is its "first and foremost" priority.
Chevron CFO Eimear Bonner, the report adds, recently revealed that the company has no plans to boost output in response to high energy prices, stating that "capital spending and production outlooks are consistent with previous guidance."
Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, accused Big Oil of using Trump's illegal war as cover to keep prices high without taking any steps to reduce pain at the pump.
"These companies want Americans to believe price spikes are simply the unavoidable result of global events," said Owens, "but their own executives are openly telling investors that volatility, conflict, and supply disruptions are good for business. They are choosing buybacks over production, shareholder payouts over affordability, and corporate profiteering over the economic security of working families.”
The high fuel prices aren't being felt just in the US, but across the world.
Karthik Sankaran, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, explained in a Tuesday analysis how oil prices are hitting nations in the Global South particularly hard.
"A recent story in The New York Times described how the price for transporting corn into refugee camps in Somalia had doubled or even tripled, as had the price of water at diesel-powered public tubewells," Sankaran wrote. "Meanwhile, protests this week in Kenya against fuel price hikes have led to four deaths, and political and financial stresses are mounting across the continent."
Sankaran also pointed to problems in India, where "sharp jumps in the price of liquid petroleum gas have hit urban households hard, particularly those whose breadwinners work in small-scale industrial establishments."
Despite the actue global economic pain, energy experts who spoke with CNN on Tuesday expressed skepticism that the crisis would abate anytime soon, despite Trump's regular hyping of a deal to end the conflict.
Rory Johnston, an oil market researcher and founder of Commodity Context, told CNN that he wasn't buying optimism from commodities futures markets after Trump claimed to have made significant progress on an agreement with Iran.
"Nothing has fundamentally changed," Johnston said. "The strait remains closed."
Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, said that a deal to end the war wouldn't instantly bring energy prices back to where they were before the war began, estimating it could take months just to get 80% of the pre-war oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.
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Mamdani Announces Plan to Build 200K New Affordable Homes
"We are the largest city in the nation," the mayor said of the bold new proposal. "We have the resources, the talent, and the will to achieve this."
May 26, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his long-anticipated plan on Tuesday that he said will confront the city's housing crisis "with the urgency it demands," setting out the goal of building and preserving 400,000 affordable housing units.
Aimed at driving down housing costs in one of the nation's most expensive rental markets, the mayor described his program—titled "Block by Block: The Housing Plan For A New Era"—as one that will set about meeting "two of the most ambitious housing targets in modern New York City," during a press conference in Brooklyn on Tuesday.
Using a $22 billion capital investment over the next five years, the city is set to build 200,000 new affordable and rent-stabilized homes while preserving and stabilizing another 200,000 over the next decade.
According to a press release from the mayor's office, the large investment—which makes up about a sixth of the mayor's five-year capital plan—will be paired "with an ambitious land use agenda to boost housing production across the five boroughs and innovative new financing tools to build and preserve affordable housing more quickly and efficiently."
It will also include modifications to the zoning code to create hundreds of housing co-ops.
Mamdani said on Tuesday that the construction and maintenance of these units would increase the number of homes available to New Yorkers facing homelessness by 45%.
"We are the largest city in the nation. We have the resources, the talent, and the will to achieve this," Mamdani said on Tuesday, surrounded by a coalition of housing advocates, labor union representatives, and city officials.
He said the construction boom will "kickstart" the city's economy. According to the city's Department of Housing Preservation & Development, the program will create an average of 30,000 jobs per year during construction and 12,700 permanent jobs once it's completed.
Mamdani is also directing around $5.6 billion to the New York City Housing Authority to renovate existing units and reduce long wait times. NYCHA has over 170,000 units, and many of them are decades old and badly in need of repairs.
In addition to around $5 million aimed at helping landlords to fix longstanding maintenance issues and cover missed rent, the plan also targets landlords with troubled histories with "roof-to-cellar" inspections of their properties.
"This is about putting city government in the driver's seat. This is about delivering the changes that New Yorkers have been demanding with little avail," Mamdani said. "We will prove that government can deliver on the solutions to the toughest problems, not just debate them."
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Critics Say Trump NDA Requirement Would 'Kneecap Whistleblower Protections'
The lone intent of the new policy, said one watchdog, "would be to protect the administration from the leak of embarrassing, politically damaging, or unlawful information.”
May 26, 2026
The Trump administration—the self-styled “most transparent administration in history”—plans to require all federal government employees to sign nondisclosure agreements in what it claims is an effort to stop damaging information from leaking, but what critics warn is a cynical effort to subvert accountability and hide malfeasance.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday on a draft notice posted to the Federal Register by the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which is expected to be published on Wednesday.
Consistent with the Trump administration’s efforts to squash negative reporting on its endeavors, the new rule contains a sweeping order that would ban federal employees from going to the press with any information deemed “confidential.”
Notably, this is different from the typical designation of "classified" vs. "unclassified." It encompasses “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” or “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available and should not be disclosed under applicable law.”
Both current and former employees would need "written permission from an authorized agency official" to speak to the press about matters deemed "confidential" under the draft's terms, or they could be subject to civil and criminal penalties.
It will be up to individual agencies whether they require employees to sign the NDAs, but the document said doing so would "promote consistency across government, better protect confidential information, and better inform federal employees of their rights and obligations regarding confidential information."
Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon has already enacted a strict NDA that “prohibits the release of non-public information without approval or through a defined process," which it enacted late last year along with random lie-detector testing aimed at finding leakers.
The draft notice reported on Tuesday suggests a similar requirement will become blanket policy across a wide swath of agencies. The notice gives an idea of what sorts of information the administration wants to shield from journalistic scrutiny.
The document cites the unauthorized leak in February 2025 of information about the Department of Homeland Security's mass deportation targets in Los Angeles and Aurora, Colorado, which led then-Secretary Kristi Noem to start subjecting employees to polygraph tests to root out leakers.
Another whistleblower in January published identifying information for about 4,500 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol employees.
The draft also pointed to disclosures to the New York Times and Washington Post, giving the outlets advanced notice of the planned US raid on Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro in January, which the outlets waited to publish until after the illegal operation was complete.
The NDA proposal is the latest attack on critical journalism by the Trump administration, part of a pattern to assert stricter control over the flow of information to the public.
The Pentagon has sought to strip credentials from outlets unless they agree to only publish approved information. Trump and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr have threatened the broadcast licenses of networks that give Trump negative coverage and opened investigations into them. Trump, meanwhile, has personally launched unprecedented multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against media outlets, many of which judges have thrown out of court due to lack of merit.
In a statement sent to Common Dreams on Tuesday, Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, called the proposed NDA requirement "not just absurd" but "unnecessary and dangerously secretive."
“This policy, from a president who has previously attempted to impose oppressive, corporate-style confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements on federal employees," Harper said, "would kneecap whistleblower protections, undermine the First Amendment, and wrongly inhibit the public’s right to know.”
OPM Director Scott Kupor defended the requirement. “In much of the private sector," he told the Post, "employees handling sensitive business or customer information are routinely required to sign confidentiality agreements, and the federal government should not be held to a lower standard.”
But critics argue that the federal government doing the same poses potential First Amendment violations. Although federal whistleblower laws protect employees’ ability to go to the press about waste, fraud, and abuse, experts told the Post that the NDA proposal could, in practice, be used as a “catchall gag order” that could lead employees to feel their jobs are in danger if they speak out.
“Trying to force the entire federal government to adopt the Trump organization’s aggressive use of NDAs won’t make anybody safer and won’t improve agency processes," Harper said. "Its sole intent would be to protect the administration from the leak of embarrassing, politically damaging, or unlawful information.”
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said the NDA proposal shows the Trump administration is continuing "its efforts to silence federal employees.”
“This proposed rule," said Kelley, "sweeps in an extraordinarily broad category of information, extending restrictions to the very material the public relies on to learn when an administration is causing harm. Federal employees do not surrender their First Amendment rights when they accept federal employment."
"OPM claims the form will be ‘optional’ for agencies to use and merely restates existing law," Kelley added. "We know that will not be true. OPM will pressure agencies to make the NDA mandatory and then fire employees who refuse to sign it."
He said the rule change was unnecessary because there are already "extensive policies and procedures" to prevent classified and privileged info from being leaked.
Kelley said, "This proposed rule sweeps in an extraordinarily broad category of information, extending restrictions to the very material the public relies on to learn when an administration is causing harm."
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