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tim sheehy
'Starvation Wages' at Giant US Corporations Force Workers to Seek Taxpayer-Funded Aid
"No one who works for a company making billions in profits should be living in poverty," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Jul 23, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders recently commissioned a government analysis of federal aid programs and how much employees of some of the largest and most politically influential corporations in the country are relying on food and healthcare benefits due to the chronically low wages paid by Amazon, Walmart, and other firms.
On Wednesday, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the results of its research, revealing trends that Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime critic of economic inequality and poverty wages and the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, called "beyond unacceptable."
Six years after the GAO first analyzed low-wage workers' use of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the report found that the number of Amazon employees who required federal assistance has nearly tripled since 2020, despite the fact that the e-commerce giant has increased its annual profits from $11.59 billion to $77.67 billion in that time.
The analysis focused on 11 states—Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Washington—whose combined populations comprise about one-fifth of the US population.
Last year, 12,346 of Amazon's employees needed SNAP assistance, for which households must earn less than 130% of the federal poverty level to qualify. A family of three would have to make around $35,000 or less to qualify for the program. Millions of people were shut out of the crucial program by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which required states to impose strict limits on eligibility.
More than 11,000 Amazon workers also relied on Medicaid last year in the states surveyed.
"Corporations underpay workers, don't provide healthcare, and outsource core worker needs to the government," said the labor-focused media organization More Perfect Union.
While Walmart topped the list of corporations whose employees used Medicaid benefits, as it did in 2020, its share of workers who rely on the two federal programs went up only slightly over the five-year period, while Amazon's share grew significantly.
Amazon spokesperson Rachael Lighty told The Washington Post—owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—that the company's hiring spree since the coronavirus pandemic contributed to its increased share of Medicaid and SNAP beneficiaries, and noted that Amazon offers "part-time options for those who want them," which makes more employees eligible for the benefits.
But the Post noted that many people who may want full-time employment and the higher wages it offers can only find part-time work. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has found an increase in part-time employment since the pandemic.
Sanders noted that Walmart increased its annual profits from $14.88 billion in 2020 to $21.89 billion in 2025, but the number of workers who relied on Medicaid grew by 55% to more than 16,000 people in the 11 states sampled by the GAO.
“American taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize the starvation wages of large corporations like Walmart and Amazon," said the senator. "These corporations are making record-breaking profits, paying their CEOs exorbitant compensation packages, and spending billions of dollars on stock buybacks to enrich their wealthy shareholders. It is beyond unacceptable that these corporations, owned by some of the wealthiest people on the planet, are receiving corporate welfare from the federal government."
Rideshare and delivery apps like Uber and DoorDash, which were not significantly featured in the GAO's 2020 report, are now the top employers of people who use SNAP benefits and are in the top three employers of workers on Medicaid.
Nicole Moore, president of Rideshare Drivers United, told the Post that gig workers across the country struggle to make ends meet with "absolutely precarious income."
The analysis comes a year after the passage of the OBBBA, which delivered $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to corporations and the rich and which Republican proponents said was partially focused on eliminating waste and fraud in government programs like Medicaid. The law includes work requirements for the program and is expected to slash $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade.
Republicans have intensified their fixation on "fraud" in social services in recent months after fraudulent payments were found in Minnesota's public programs.
Warren Gunnels, the minority staff director for the Senate HELP Committee, said the GAO analysis shows that "the problem isn't the single mom getting $6 a day in food stamps."
"The problem is Jeff Bezos, worth $269 billion, more than doubled his wealth since 2020 while paying wages so low the number of Amazon workers on food stamps and Medicaid nearly tripled," said Gunnels. "Bezos is the welfare queen."
Sanders called on Bezos and the Walton family, which owns Walmart, "to get off of welfare and pay their workers a living wage with good benefits."
"No one who works for a company making billions in profits should be living in poverty," said the senator. "This is especially true after these corporations and their multibillionaire owners received a massive tax break from President Trump’s so-called ‘Big, Beautiful Bill,’ paid for by the largest cuts to Medicaid and nutrition assistance in history.”
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House Subpoena of BreakThrough News Threatens Press Freedom
Jul 23, 2026
In a direct attack on the First Amendment, the House Ways and Means Committee has subpoenaed independent news outlet BreakThrough News, demanding internal records under the guise of investigating foreign influence in the tax-exempt nonprofit sector.
The committee, chaired by Rep. Jason Smith, is seeking BreakThrough News’ financial records, internal communications, and more. Lawmakers claim the probe focuses on tax compliance. But abusing congressional subpoena power to target a news outlet whose coverage a committee chair doesn’t like undermines core press freedom guarantees.
The following can be attributed to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern:
“Congress shouldn’t be using a tax investigation as a pretext to dig through a newsroom’s internal communications or financial records. Freedom of the press applies to all journalists, regardless of whether politicians like their editorial slant or their politics.
“Allowing a congressional committee to harass an independent newsroom with a broad subpoena sets an awful precedent. If lawmakers can abuse tax oversight to single out outlets whose reporting offends them today, no newsroom in America is safe from government intimidation tomorrow.”
FPF strongly urges the House Ways and Means Committee to withdraw its subpoena against BreakThrough News and stop using congressional oversight as a tool to retaliate against independent media.
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Trump Admin Has Taken $13 Billion in Oil Wealth From Venezuela, But Congress Is 'In the Dark' About Where It Went
"The picture now coming into focus is that the intervention has been... little more than a pretext for extracting economic wealth that rightfully belongs to the people of Venezuela," said one economist.
Jul 23, 2026
Since President Donald Trump's operation in January to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the US has taken more than $13 billion in revenue from Venezuelan oil sales. But nobody, including Congress, is entirely sure where the money has gone.
The Financial Times, which reported the figure on Wednesday based on estimates of oil sales out of Venezuela since January, pointed out that the Trump administration has given vague and contradictory answers about who currently controls the revenues from the Latin American nation's largest export and source of wealth.
Trump said in the days after the US attack that Venezuela's oil wealth would be "controlled by me." At a rally on Wednesday, he boasted that the US "won in Venezuela" and had paid for the operation "many many times over" by "taking tremendous amounts of oil" from the country.
He added that "Venezuela is doing better than they've ever done before." But economic data from the country tells a very different story.
According to economist Francisco Rodríguez of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in the first quarter of this year, Venezuela had just 2.5% growth in its gross domestic product—its worst in five years. This is despite the fact that its oil exports grew by 25% during the first quarter.
He said this was likely "because the US didn’t transfer to the Venezuelan government the totality of its increased oil revenues."
While the executive order signed by Trump in January describes the proceeds from oil sales as nominally belonging to Venezuela, they are being held in accounts controlled by the US Treasury Department. It prohibits Venezuela from independently withdrawing from the accounts without approval from the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
At a Congressional hearing this week, Michael Kozak, a senior State Department official, acknowledged that "it's their money, but they have to get our permission" to receive it.
While the State Department has claimed that “billions of dollars have been disbursed to the Venezuelan economy” and that “financial monitoring is under way to ensure funds benefit the Venezuelan people," the FT found little evidence that this is the case.
A website set up by the Venezuelan government to track exports from US-run oil sales shows just a single transfer of $300 million in March.
The administration has made explicitly clear that it is using the oil revenues as a tool to exert leverage over Venezuelan policy. In January, Vice President JD Vance said that the administration would allow Venezuela to sell oil as long as its policies "serve America's national interest."
A senior US official told The New Yorker that the administration has authorized about $6 billion to be disbursed to the government of Venezuela's interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, though there was no indication it had actually been transferred or spent.
Francisco Rodríguez said that even if it was, this "leaves an obvious question: where are the remaining $7 billion?"
He speculated that some of it might have been paid directly to joint venture partners, but noted that this would only account for a "fraction" of the difference and said there could be "other more complex explanations, beyond the possibility that the US is simply sitting on the money."
However, he said, "what is becoming increasingly clear is that the main reason Venezuela's economic recovery has been so sluggish is that, while the country is generating more oil revenue, it is not collecting on it."
In April, Kozak said the administration would provide quarterly reports on where the funds have gone. But Democrats on the Foreign Affairs Committee said they had not received them.
The lack of transparency has drawn concern from members of both parties in Congress, which Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said has been “kept in the dark.”
“Trump’s invasion of Venezuela has been about oil, power, and graft from the very beginning, with billions of dollars in Venezuelan oil revenue being controlled by the Trump administration without transparency or safeguards,” Castro told the Financial Times.
Even María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.)—who promoted a Trump-led regime change effort in Venezuela by saying it would be a "field day" for US oil companies—has called for the administration to publicize reports on where the money is going.
The question of what has happened to Venezuela's wealth is made more urgent by the twin earthquakes the country suffered in June, which killed about 5,000 people, injured 17,000, and left 18,000 homeless, according to government figures.
A World Bank report released Thursday estimated that reconstruction could cost close to $50 billion.
The earthquake has been met with calls for the US to lift its harsh sanctions on Venezuela, which have cost the country tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars in lost revenue since 2015 and which advocates have said are further hobbling the nation’s recovery.
Trump ratcheted up these sanctions in the months leading up to his operation to overthrow Maduro, and many have remained in place following the earthquake.
The US has provided more than $386 million in earthquake-related assistance to Venezuela. But it's just a fraction of the oil wealth it appears to be holding.
Francisco Rodríguez said the apparent hoarding of Venezuela’s oil wealth does further damage to Trump’s claim that his intervention was meant to benefit its people, as well as the US.
“The bottom line is that this arrangement is not proving advantageous to Venezuelans,” Rodríguez said. "The picture now coming into focus is that the intervention has been, as its critics have long accused such actions of being, little more than a pretext for extracting economic wealth that rightfully belongs to the people of Venezuela."
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Trump’s Military Spending Request Is Really Big Money
Any self-proclaimed deficit hawk who is not all hair on fire about Trump’s budget demand is a lying hypocrite who only uses concerns about the deficit to argue against programs they don’t like.
Jul 23, 2026
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office.
This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget. This spending request dwarfs sums that are often the subject of major debates in Washington.
For example, last year Democrats pushed to have the enhanced subsidies in the Affordable Care Act exchanges extended. This would have cost $30 billion a year, one twentieth of what Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth are demanding.
People may recall Elon Musk gleefully putting the US Agency for International Development into the “wood chipper” last spring. While ending this program is expected to lead to 4 million additional deaths over the next four years, it only saved around $35 billion a year. That is less than 6% of the increase in military spending that Trump is asking for.
Is the argument that in just 18 months in office, Trump has made the world so much less safe that we have to increase the defense budget by two-thirds?
The annual cost of extending the enhanced child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half, was around $100 billion a year, less than one-fifth of Trump’s proposed increase. And the annual appropriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was $550 million, less than one thousandth of the additional spending for the military that Trump is demanding. (It’s in the chart, just small to see.)
People need to know that Trump’s military spending request is really big money, compared to almost anything else that ever comes up for public debate for Congress. Unfortunately, because of incompetent or corrupt budget reporting, few news accounts make any effort to put these huge numbers in a context that makes them understandable for their audience. As a result, most people will probably have little idea of what is at stake with this military request.
Any self-proclaimed deficit hawk who is not all hair on fire about Trump’s budget demand is a lying hypocrite who only uses concerns about the deficit to argue against programs they don’t like. We got along fine with the former level of military spending, which almost everyone, including Donald Trump in his first term, considered adequate.
Is the argument that in just 18 months in office, Trump has made the world so much less safe that we have to increase the defense budget by two-thirds? Most of us knew that making our former allies into enemies was not a good idea, but Trump is placing a huge price tag on this mistake. And remember, this is Trump’s own number, not his critics’.
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‘ICE Is Her Running Mate’: Maine Democrats Spotlight Collins' Support for Rogue Trump Agency
"Susan Collins is directly responsible for handing ICE a blank check," said a top Maine Democratic official.
Jul 23, 2026
With Troy Jackson securing enough delegates to become the Maine Democratic Party's nominee for the US Senate at an unprecedented convention this coming weekend, party strategists and leaders have intensified their efforts to tie incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins to the Trump administration's grave abuses.
In an interview with The New Republic published Thursday, Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, singled out Collins' votes to fund US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a significant vulnerability.
Anti-ICE protests in Maine erupted earlier this month after the fatal shooting of 25-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastian Guerrero, who was killed by federal immigration agents in front of his six-year-old daughter during a traffic stop.
While Collins lobbied the US Department of Homeland Security to pause traffic stops in the wake of the shooting, President Donald Trump rebuffed her request and said the stops should continue.
Murphy-Anderson told The New Republic that Collins can't escape blame for ICE violence given her role in voting to hand the agency a record amount of money.
Last week, days after Guerrero was killed by a federal agent, Collins declined to say she regretted voting for additional ICE funding.
" Susan Collins is directly responsible for handing ICE a blank check," said Murphy-Anderson. "This is front and center now in our communities. And we are going to hold her accountable in November."
While attacking Collins' votes to fund ICE won't be the entirety of Maine Democrats' strategy for taking on Collins, Murphy-Anderson emphasized that the shooting of Guerrero is "viscerally" affecting voters "across broad segments of our electorate."
Jackson on Tuesday targeted Collins' votes for ICE in a social media post.
"Susan Collins lied to Mainers," Jackson wrote. "She helped destroy Roe v. Wade, she advanced Trump's $990 billion Medicaid cuts, and she gave ICE $70 billion continue its rogue terror campaign."
Susan Collins lied to Mainers. She helped destroy Roe v. Wade, she advanced Trump's $990 billion Medicaid cuts, and she gave ICE $70 billion continue its rogue terror campaign.
Together, we will replace her with a Senator who gives a damn about working people in this country. pic.twitter.com/2B8VmQJsuB
— Troy Jackson (@TroyJackson207) July 21, 2026
Maine Democrats' plan to make Collins' support for ICE an anchor around her neck drew praise from Nicholas Grossman, professor of international relations at the University of Illinois.
"Anti-ICE is pro-freedom," Grossman wrote in a social media post. "That stance is moral, patriotic, and a political winner. Susan Collins' pro-ICE votes are an electoral liability she didn't have in previous races. And an ICE officer with a history of domestic abuse recently killed an innocent man in Maine. Definitely campaign on that."
Adam Gurri, founder and publisher of Liberal Currents, said that pinning ICE's actions directly on Collins was a smart tactic to undermine her image as a "moderate" Republican.
"We can’t let her play this game she’s been doing her whole damn career," wrote Gurri, "where she gives her vote to every evil policy but then play acts being the mediator for how the policy is deployed."
Journalist Jason Sattler argued that Collins' support for ICE funding opens up a new line of attack on her.
"ICE is her running mate," Sattler wrote.
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With New Rules, Trump Accused of 'Coordinated Dismantling of the Medicaid Program'
One advocate warned that new Medicaid rules issued by the Trump administration would have "disastrous impacts on individuals and healthcare systems."
Jul 23, 2026
The Trump administration earlier this week unveiled a new rule that advocates said would make it harder for states to fund their Medicaid programs, compounding damage caused by expanded work requirements and other changes enacted under the 2025 Republican budget law.
The law bars states from creating new provider taxes—levies on hospitals and other healthcare providers—and limits existing ones. The new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rule, which is open for public comment until September, would codify the GOP law's changes.
Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA, said Wednesday that the CMS rule "goes beyond the harsh restrictions already imposed by Congress to further narrow the options that states have to fund Medicaid services and providers."
"Along with Congress’ other restrictions on taxing healthcare providers—restrictions that gut Medicaid funding in all states—CMS estimates this new proposed rule will cut $198.7 billion in state Medicaid funding over 10 years," Wright noted. "This rule comes at a time when states are already under significant budgetary pressure to foot the bill for the cost of implementing complex and unnecessary work reporting requirements; in tandem with a proposed rule that slashes Medicaid provider payments and further eliminates state flexibility."
“Taken together," Wright warned, "these three rules serve as a coordinated dismantling of the Medicaid program, including its eligibility systems, payment structures and financing mechanisms, with disastrous impacts on individuals and healthcare systems."
The Republican budget measure, which President Donald Trump signed into law last summer, includes roughly $900 billion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade. Millions of Americans have lost Medicaid coverage since the GOP law took effect.
Earlier this week, the entire House Democratic caucus implored CMS to "reconsider" its recently published Medicaid work requirement rule, warning it "will create an undue burden for beneficiaries with serious healthcare needs and put people at risk of losing coverage, while also creating significant implementation challenges for states."
"This rule will require beneficiaries to frequently prove and verify their exemptions in order to maintain coverage, which will cause confusion, create bureaucratic burdens for patients seeking care, and, as a result, will lock patients out of lifesaving treatments," the lawmakers wrote. "Forcing vulnerable patients to exhaustively document their symptoms simply to maintain access to basic
healthcare is both imprudent and inconsistent with federal law."
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EU Fines Google for Violating Digital Markets Act With Search Engine, App Store Practices
Regulators announced the penalty as President Donald Trump is considering new tariffs against the European Union.
Jul 23, 2026
A day before President Donald Trump was expected to announce new trade tariffs on the European Union, the bloc's regulators on Thursday announced it had fined Google for anticompetitive business practices related to its search engine and app store.
Google has violated the Digital Markets Act (DMA), said the European Commission, by giving priority to its own services in search results and by preventing app developers from steering customers to cheaper products or app stores other than Google's Play Store.
The commission fined Google €460 million ($524 million) for its breach of search engine rules and €430 million ($490 million) for the app store violation, bringing the total fine to more than $1 billion—a fraction of the tech giant's assets. The fine was announced a day after Google parent company Alphabet reported a quarterly profit of $112.1 billion.
Brussels-based journalist Dave Keating quoted Alexandra Geese, a member of European Parliament representing the Green Party, as saying that "the size of this fine is disappointing and bears no relation to the damage Google has done to the European economy."
"Plenty of people would dodge the fare if the fine were cheaper than the ticket," said Geese.
The fine comes weeks after the European Court of Justice upheld a $4.67 billion fine from 2018 over the unfair advantage it gave to its own apps by pre-installing the apps on smartphones.
Teresa Ribera, the commission's executive vice president for a clean, just, and competitive transition, said Thursday that the DMA promises protections for "fairness, choice, and innovation in digital markets for the benefit of all European citizens.”
“The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine,” said Ribera.
Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, claimed the fine would cause "product degradation" and said the company is evaluating a possible appeal.
The fine, he said, will force Google "to strip away real-time search features Europeans love—like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants—and dismantle safety protections on Google Play."
The company has 60 days to comply with the penalty and could face further fines of up to 5% of its global revenue if it fails to do so.
Google has been fined more than $10 billion euros by the EU for anticompetitive behavior since 2017.
Ribera called on the company to return to the negotiating table with European regulators to determine its full compliance with the DMA.
“It is quite a strong message to Google to say: We expect from you a serious proposal in terms of compliance,” she said. “The intention of our regulation is to ensure well-functioning markets, not to punish anyone. But, of course, in certain cases, we need to come up with sanctions.”
The fine was announced hours before Trump's tariffs against 60 countries were set to expire; the president has threatened new tariffs against the European Union in retaliation for what he and Republican lawmakers view as unfair targeting of US tech companies.
But Ribera told reporters that the European Commission is "bound by the law" and announced the fine despite fears in the EU that Trump could retaliate with higher tariffs than the ones he levied last year.
“I don’t think that any of us being part of the Commission could be respected," said Ribera, "if we could decide whether to do or not to do because someone else is trying to tell us what to do.”
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Who Wants to Be Tied to the Energy of War?
Renewable energy comes without the emissions, without the climate consequences, and without the oil wars that have plagued the last 30-plus years.
Jul 23, 2026
Renewables are not just for highfalutin hippies, they’re cheaper and avoid the volatility of wars and chaotic leaders. We are not living the 1970s oil shock moment; there are alternatives to fossil fuels. Those who embrace renewable energy will be better off—from health benefits for communities to reducing energy shock burdens for households. The reality unfolding during this latest oil war is that many nations really do not want to be tethered to volatile energy resources. And who can blame them?
With yet another peace process collapsing and conflict renewed, the Iran war will continue to create the largest disruption to oil markets since the Covid-19 pandemic. In mere months, it’s increased the costs of oil and gas, food, and everything in-between, amplifying the global cost of living crisis. We’re at the beginning of a very bumpy ride ahead.
New pipelines that would avoid the Strait of Hormuz altogether are underway. But this type of infrastructure can take up to a decade or more to come online. In the meantime, national petroleum stockpiles are at an all-time low. Governments have a limited amount of time to buoy oil prices and stave off high fuel costs. If the Strait of Hormuz does successfully open and peace is achieved, it could take years for petroleum output to stabilize back to pre-war levels, thanks to destroyed infrastructure. Liquefied natural gas and oil processing facilities have been targets for bombing by both sides—amounting to $58 billion in damages so far.
Adding to this tableau is the reality that the days of so-called "easy oil" are now in the rearview mirror. Shell CEO Wael Sawan recently forecast that oil prices will continue to rise long after peace is achieved due to a combination of energy infrastructure damages and a need to access more expensive, more environmentally risky oil reservoirs. It’s worth calling out here that we’ve already burned through enough fossil fuels to achieve 1.5°C of warming. Every year has been another record-breaking year for global warming and global climate damages to the tune of billions of dollars.
The US and Israeli war with Iran is making renewable energy more attractive, more economically competitive, and may help us achieve our global climate targets to triple renewables by 2030.
In a world where we are witnessing the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels—where renewables like wind and solar are cheaper—just why should nations continue to rely on petroleum?
Before the Iran War, renewable energy was already growing at a rapid speed. It’s now cheaper to employ solar and wind than oil and gas. Now that petroleum costs are more volatile and associated infrastructure is in duress, the pivot to renewables will be inevitable. This March in the US, renewable energy accounted for half of all energy generation. Globally, solar energy is making up the largest share of new energy projects. If oil is the energy of warmongering and dramatic cost fluctuations, perhaps renewable energy could be the energy of peace and economic security.
Spain, China, and others leading on renewable energy power generation have seen costs remain relatively stable during this time. Now other nations are seeking that same stability. Since the war started, many fossil fuel dependent nations increased their renewable energy targets to levels that exceed their national climate goals. Egypt announced a goal to increase renewable energies like wind and solar from 10% today to 45% of energy needs in just two years. This new target overshoots any climate goal Egypt has previously set during annual United Nations climate conferences. South Korea, India, and others have likewise elevated their renewable energy targets to help lessen energy cost burdens for citizens, decrease dependency on the ebbs and flows of oil and gas, and the military whims of chaotic leaders. Now Turkey and Australia are pushing for a commitment at the next UN climate conference for nations to reach 35% renewable energy use by 2035.
The path toward a renewable energy economy will not be easy. Petroleum interests are doing everything possible to wed us all to fossil fuels through a long-established playbook of climate denial, climate skepticism around emissions and renewable energy, and wielding political influence. In the US at least, those actions have paid off. The second Trump administration has been all about tying us to oil and gas. A mere $445 million in campaign contributions to the Trump presidential campaign and related political action committees gifted a windfall of deregulation and incentives to what should be a declining energy industry on the way out.
Many Biden-era renewable energy incentives have been revoked in the second Trump administration, diminishing the potential for America’s solar, battery, and wind manufacturing to compete with China. Instead, incentives and kickbacks for oil and gas companies are everywhere, from opening public lands to reducing environmental reviews and even connecting trade agreements to oil and gas. These actions have not stymied renewable energy uptake. Last year, solar overtook coal in overall global energy consumption for the first time.
While the United States is focused on controlling the energy of the past, China has been laser focused on the energy of the future. A rapid global pivot away from fossil fuels will benefit China’s burgeoning renewable energy industries the most. Today, 80% of all renewable energy—like wind, solar, and battery storage—is manufactured by Chinese companies, with US companies a faraway second at 10% of the market.
The US and Israeli war with Iran is making renewable energy more attractive, more economically competitive, and may help us achieve our global climate targets to triple renewables by 2030. The reality is no one wants to rely on economically toxic energy sources. Renewable energy comes without the emissions, without the climate consequences, and without the oil wars that have plagued the last 30-plus years. Embracing renewable energy today means being more resilient and better prepared to weather future petroleum shocks; all while helping to reduce emissions and lessen climate impacts—a win-win if ever there was one.
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Voters Are Realizing that Trump Doesn’t Care About Them
Attempting to rig elections, fighting wars nobody wants, and constructing gaudy vanity projects are apparently more important to him than whether his own voters can afford food, housing, and healthcare for their families.
Jul 23, 2026
This month, the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law—without President Donald Trump's signature, exactly as he'd threatened. It's a small, recent example of a much bigger habit: Trump keeps showing voters exactly how little he thinks of them. The bill wasn’t controversial at all. It was negotiated by both parties’ top committee members and aimed squarely at lowering housing costs. But Trump let it sit for weeks rather than sign it, hoping to extract an unrelated voter-suppression bill in return.
At this point, childish behavior from the president shouldn’t be surprising.
In his first inaugural address, President Trump claimed to be the champion of America’s “forgotten men and women.” But it was a lie from the start. He never cared about the poor and marginalized. He cared about cutting taxes for his friends; scapegoating immigrants for the struggles of the working class; and restoring a mythical era of American “greatness” characterized by the supremacy of straight, white, Christian males.
Although his lie was obvious, it was also effective. In 2016, Trump won around one-eighth of voters who’d supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic primaries. In 2024, he significantly increased his share of the Black and Hispanic vote. It might seem surprising that supporters of a democratic socialist would vote for a Reagan-style tax cutter or that minorities would support someone who campaigned on mass deportations, but desperation and repeated betrayals make voters do unnatural things. They (rightly) believed that the establishment of both parties had failed to serve their interests, so they voted for the candidate who portrayed himself as the enemy of that establishment.
Trump is perfectly happy to sacrifice the well-being of Americans, including his own supporters, to serve his own ego.
Thankfully, Americans are waking up. Trump’s approval rating has dropped to around 36% as it’s become increasingly obvious where his priorities lie. One source described as a “White House ally” recently told Politico that Trump “doesn’t care about anything beyond SAVE, Iran, and the ballroom.”
Attempting to rig elections, fighting wars nobody wants, and constructing gaudy vanity projects are apparently more important to him than whether his own voters can afford food, housing, and healthcare for their families.
He doesn’t even try to hide it anymore.
He said that the housing bill he recently refused to sign was just “of minor importance.” A few months earlier, he explicitly said he wants to keep housing prices high, favoring elderly GOP voters sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in unearned equity over young families struggling to buy their first home. These gaffes give Democrats an opening they can’t fail to ignore—and a path forward to lead on housing, which is the No. 1 issue for young voters according to a CNBC survey released in July.
Democrats should skip the smaller fixes, like banning rent-pricing algorithms—that’s kind of like blaming the weather forecaster for the rain, and it’s why Colorado Gov. Jared Polis vetoed such a ban. Instead, they should marshal public and private funds toward large-scale building projects with generous affordable-housing quotas, the approach Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pursuing in New York.
They should also seize on the opportunity that Trump’s highly unpopular war in Iran presents.
Trump revealed his total apathy on this front when he told a reporter in May that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation” when conducting his war with Iran.
In this case, he’s telling the truth. Trump is perfectly happy to sacrifice the well-being of Americans, including his own supporters, to serve his own ego.
All he cares about now is being remembered as “a capital G, Great Man of history,” Jonathan Swan, co-author of the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, explained in a recent interview. "He wants to reshape the world. I don’t think he would have gone to war in Iran in the same circumstances in Term 1. I don’t think he would have rolled the dice on what he did in Venezuela… He wouldn’t have started a trade war with the whole world.” But now that he has no more elections to win, Trump is perfectly willing to show his true colors.
Democrats running for office can seize this opportunity as well by throwing Trump’s “no new wars” campaign promise back in his face and by promising to banish the liberal warmongers who staffed previous Democratic administrations.
Republicans have done everything they can to give themselves an edge in the midterms: racist redistricting, a new court ruling that injects even more money into politics, and contrived fearmongering about communism. But if Democrats can finally convince voters that Trump doesn’t care about them—which shouldn’t be too hard since he’s constantly saying exactly that—we’ll get the blue wave we’re hoping for and then some.
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Our Healthcare System Is Failing; Medicare for All Is the Solution
When everybody has guaranteed access to high-quality care without financial barriers, physicians can focus solely on their patients’ needs and patients can trust that our recommendations are based on science.
Jul 23, 2026
The following remarks were delivered as testimony to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Medicare for All Shadow Hearing on July 22, 2026.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak about our urgent need for Medicare for All. My name is Dr. Diljeet Singh, and as a practicing gynecologic oncologist, I do not exaggerate when I say our healthcare system is in dire straits. Every day in my clinic, I see patients struggling with the cost of healthcare: a woman on chemotherapy who cannot afford her anti-nausea prescription, or a patient forced to choose between an MRI copay and groceries for her family. If you walked through my clinic, you would know that this is no time to be tinkering with unproven reforms or complex regulations. It is long past time for Medicare for All.
I care for a part-time elementary school teacher whose health plan did not cover routine preventive care. Instead of getting regular Pap smears over the years, she arrived in my office with advanced cervical cancer. She underwent radical surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation that fundamentally changed her body and her life—and she still has no guarantee of a cure.
Or consider another patient of mine who works two part-time jobs, with no health insurance. She ignored severe abdominal pain until it doubled her over. In the emergency room, she was told she had a potentially cancerous mass. She came to me for care, and thankfully, it turned out to be a non-cancerous ovarian cyst, cured by surgery. Yet, even in this best-case medical scenario, she still owes thousands of dollars. A treatable, curable medical problem absorbed her children’s college savings and her retirement money.
When the drive for profit outweighs patient health, professionals and patients alike are betrayed.
I am speaking to you today as president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), an organization of more than 25,000 health professionals nationwide. We are working to achieve universal single-payer healthcare—free from corporate middlemen, copays, deductibles, prior authorization, and the risk of medical debt. Similar countries around the world provide care to all while spending only half of what we spend—yet we die younger, face higher maternal mortality, and lose more newborns. We already spend enough money, but at least 35 cents of every healthcare dollar is wasted on insurance administration and corporate profit instead of patient care.
The root cause of this failure is the corporate takeover of healthcare, where financial interests take precedence over the sacred oath we swore as physicians—to prioritize our patients’ health and make evidence-based, patient-centered decisions free from third-party interference.
At PNHP, we conducted a two-year research project speaking with doctors about working in a profit-driven system where financial goals dictate clinical care. We found that doctors, like nurses, suffer from profound “moral injury”—the acute psychological harm caused by systemic barriers that prevent us from providing compassionate, evidence-based care. When the drive for profit outweighs patient health, professionals and patients alike are betrayed, driving clinicians out of medicine in increasing numbers.
Reversing this crisis requires recentering healthcare on patients and aligning with its true mission. The most commonsense solution is single-payer Medicare for All. When everybody has guaranteed access to high-quality care without financial barriers, physicians can focus solely on their patients’ needs and patients can trust that our recommendations are based on science and their healthcare needs—not corporate bottom lines.
Doctors, nurses, and patients understand that we need Medicare for All. Now we need Congress to understand the same thing—and to act with all of the urgency that this moment requires.
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We Are Closer Than We Think to Losing Our Wild Neighbors
You do not need to fire a shot to kill an animal and imperil its entire species’ existence—you only need to take away the place it lives. A Trump administration Endangered Species Act rollback would do just that.
Jul 23, 2026
There is a vision of this country that still exists to anyone who grew up near its wild places: manatees drifting beneath a dock, Florida leafwing butterflies fluttering through the wind, yellow-billed cuckoos migrating in the spring and fall. For generations of Americans, these were not rare sightings. They were proof that people and wildlife could share the same natural inheritance
That inheritance is now under direct threat, and the erosion is no longer incremental. It is accelerating at an unprecedented pace.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration formally rescinded the regulatory definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—a single word that has helped to protect this nation's imperiled wildlife for more than 50 years. For decades, "harm" was understood to include not just the direct killing or injuring of an endangered animal, but the destruction or degradation of the habitat that animal depends on to breed, feed, migrate, or shelter. That understanding was not a bureaucratic technicality. It was the legal recognition of a basic ecological truth: An animal cannot survive the loss of its home and its resources for daily living any more than a person can. Each of these species has a story that will end the same way without habitat protection: not a quick death by bullet but a slow death by a thousand cuts.
Remove that definition, and you remove the government's ability to regulate clear-cutting old growth forest filled with an endangered bird’s nesting sites, draining a wetland key for an endangered frog’s breeding, or dumping pollution into the lagoon where sea turtles and marine mammals graze. You do not need to fire a shot to kill an animal and imperil its entire species’ existence. You only need to take away the place it lives.
Habitat destruction is already the leading driver of species decline in the US, and this rollback removes one of the few legal tools available to slow it.
Congress enacted the ESA in 1973 with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Republican President Richard Nixon signed it, "to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved." In the more than five decades since, the ESA has prevented the extinction of an estimated 99% of the species placed under its protection—one of the most successful conservation records in the world.
Rescinding the definition of harm will eviscerate the ESA. And it does so under the pretense of streamlining obstacles to American economic growth, as if the nation's economy runs on oil, gas, logging, and mining alone. But our national economy—and our national welfare—are inextricably linked to healthy, thriving wildlife and habitats. Wildlife watching, for example, supports a $250.2 billion industry in the US. Commercial and recreational fisheries generate $319 billion in sales and sustain 2.1 million jobs. Hunting and fishing support $400 billion in annual economic value. And the ecosystem services nature provides for free—clean water, crop pollination, flood control, pest suppression—are valued at an estimated $5 trillion a year.
Habitat destruction is already the leading driver of species decline in the US, and this rollback removes one of the few legal tools available to slow it.
Consider the Florida manatee, listed as threatened under the ESA. Manatees lack blubber and cannot fully regulate their own body temperature; in winter, their survival depends on access to water near 72°F. Coastal development and polluted runoff have devastated the seagrass beds manatees depend on and degraded the natural springs that once kept them warm through the winter. More than half of Florida's manatees now survive only because they cluster near the artificial warm-water discharge of aging power plants. Without the harm definition, it will be exponentially harder to protect and restore their foraging and sheltering habitats they need to survive and recover.
The same pattern will repeat across the country. The North American wolverine depends on vanishing high-elevation snowpack at risk of being lost to development and expanding winter recreation. The whooping crane, one of the rarest birds in North America, needs undisturbed wetland corridors to complete its migration. In the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, polar bears depend on undisturbed denning sites; seismic testing, vehicle traffic, and aircraft noise associated with oil exploration can cause mother bears to abandon their dens and cubs. For five decades, the ESA enabled economic activities in the habitats species need to survive and recover, with permitting guardrails to ensure adequate protections. Now that the administration has eliminated those guardrails, it’s open season for industry to sacrifice habitat—and the future of our imperiled wildlife species. Defenders of Wildlife, along with other conservation organizations, has already gone to federal court to challenge this unlawful action.
At the same time, we’re standing up to defend the ESA itself from anti-wildlife members of Congress who favor unfettered logging, mining, grazing, and drilling, no matter the cost to endangered animals—or to our irreplaceable natural heritage. One of the most effective actions concerned citizens can take right now is to call their representative and senators and oppose any effort to undermine this bedrock wildlife law.
We are closer than most people realize to losing the manatees in our canals, the whooping cranes in our wetlands, and the wolverines in our mountains. What remains to be seen is whether we act while there is still habitat left to save.
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