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Russell Vought Shuts Down Another $11 Billion Worth of Projects in Blue Cities
The administration had already paused more than $28 billion worth of infrastructure funding, virtually all to Democratic congressional districts.
Oct 17, 2025
Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget announced Friday that he would cut another $11 billion from federal projects in blue cities.
"The Democrat shutdown has drained the Army Corps of Engineers' ability to manage billions of dollars in projects," Vought wrote on social media. "The Corps will be immediately pausing over $11 billion in lower-priority projects and considering them for cancellation, including projects in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore."
Vought's post did not specify which projects would be halted, stating that more information would be "soon to come" from the Army Corps of Engineers. Many of the Corps' major projects involve infrastructure and water maintenance, as well as environmental restoration and cleanup efforts.
As the government shutdown enters its third week, the Trump administration has plainly stated its goal of using it to punish Democrats and liberal cities. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that of the more than $28 billion worth of projects frozen during the shutdown, $27.24 billion of it has come from Democratic-leaning congressional districts.
Among those frozen funds are $18 billion for infrastructure projects in New York City, including the Hudson River Tunnel and Second Avenue Subway, and $8 billion slated for climate-related projects exclusively in blue states.
Vought, an architect of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 agenda, has also been in charge of President Donald Trump's efforts to use the shutdown to carry out mass layoffs of federal workers. A federal judge halted that effort Wednesday, describing it as "both illegal and in excess of authority and... arbitrary and capricious." Prior to the ruling, Trump had said that those laid off by his administration were "gonna be Democrats.”
This is not the first time the administration has used the Army Corps of Engineers as a political tool. As Aidan Quigley, a reporter for Roll Call, noted on social media, it "has been prioritizing red states over blue states for Army Corps of Engineers projects under the current continuing resolution."
He reported that in the 2025 full-fiscal year stopgap spending law signed in March, "nearly two-thirds of Army Corps of Engineers construction funding is going to red states, a sizable shift from former President Joe Biden’s final budget request and the initial fiscal 2025 House and Senate Energy-Water appropriations bills, which were all closer to an even split."
The report noted that "funding for projects in California, which would have received over $125 million in Biden’s budget request and both chambers’ appropriations bills, has been zeroed out under the new corps work plan."
Brendan Duke, the senior director for federal budget policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, pointed out that the Trump administration's shutdown plan published last month stated that the Corps' projects would not be affected by the shutdown because 97% of their funding does not come from annual appropriations.
"Why on Earth would any projects need to be paused, much less considered for cancellation?" he asked.
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As Planet Burns, US Banking Agencies Ditch Climate Risk Rules
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently warned that due to climate disasters, "there will be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage, there won’t be ATMs, banks won’t have branches."
Oct 17, 2025
Federal regulators have rescinded a set of guidelines for large banking institutions to consider the financial dangers of the climate crisis when making decisions about business strategy, risk management, and strategic planning.
On Thursday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Reserve Board announced that they would immediately withdraw their interagency Principles for Climate-Related Financial Risk Management for Large Financial Institutions, a framework that required financial institutions with $100 billion or more in assets to consider climate risks.
The guidelines were first issued in 2023, which was, at the time, the hottest year on record. That year, the US experienced a record number of weather and climate-related disasters—including a massive drought across the south and Midwest, historic wildfires in Hawaii, and major flooding events across the country—that caused at least $92 billion worth of damage.
In October of that year, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said: "Banks need to understand, and appropriately manage, their material risks, including the financial risks of climate change."
The OCC, meanwhile, explained that "financial institutions are likely to be affected by both the physical risks and transition risks associated with climate change." This included both the risks to the safety of people and property "from acute, climate-related events, such as hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and heatwaves, and chronic shifts in climate," as well as changes due to "shifts in policy... that would be part of a transition to a lower carbon economy."
But these concerns have not carried over to the administration of President Donald Trump, who recently referred to climate change as a "con" and has sought to purge the federal government of any acknowledgement of the scientific consensus that it is being caused by human fossil fuel usage, which he has moved to aggressively expand.
In a joint release Thursday, the agencies said they "do not believe principles for managing climate-related financial risk are necessary because the agencies' existing safety and soundness standards require all supervised institutions to have effective risk management commensurate with their size, complexity, and activities," adding that "all supervised institutions are expected to consider and appropriately address all material financial risks and should be resilient to a range of risks, including emerging risks."
Elyse Schupak, policy advocate with Public Citizen's climate program, criticized the withdrawal of the guidelines, calling it "an irresponsible and politically motivated move in the wrong direction."
"The increase in the frequency and severity of climate disasters and the rapidly escalating property insurance crisis mean the agencies should be working harder to understand and mitigate climate-related financial risks faced by banks and the financial system—not backtracking," she said. "Effective bank regulation requires looking squarely at all risks to supervised institutions, including climate risks, and addressing them before they have destabilizing effects. This approach, rather than politics, should guide regulator action."
The move comes as the globe is reaching the point of no return for the climate crisis. Global temperatures have already soared to between 1.3°C and 1.4°C above preindustrial levels and are expected to pass the 1.5°C threshold within the next five years, at which point many of the worst effects will become unavoidable. These effects include more frequent heatwaves, sea level increases, more frequent severe storms, and aggressive droughts.
In addition to the human toll, these entail considerable financial damage. In December 2024, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that if the Earth continues to warm at current rates, the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) will be 4% lower than if temperatures had remained stable.
It predicted that sea level rise—projected 1 to 4 feet by the turn of the century—would cause anywhere from $250 billion to $930 billion worth of losses to property owners, mortgage lenders, insurance companies, and the federal government. Other untold costs, it said, would be borne as a result of heightened mortality from heat, declines in available food and water, increased rates of illness, and forced migration due to unlivable conditions.
Testifying before Congress earlier this year, Powell noted that banks and insurance companies have been pulling out of coastal areas at risk of flooding and places prone to wildfires due to the financial risk.
State Farm had recently canceled thousands of policies in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles shortly before it was hit with massive wildfires in January. He warned that as climate change worsens, financial institutions will deem it too risky to serve large portions of the country.
"If you fast forward 10 or 15 years," Powell said, "there will be regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage, there won't be ATMs, banks won't have branches, and things like that."
Schupak said: "For the Federal Reserve, capitulation to the politics of climate denial championed by the Trump administration is a threat to both its legitimacy and efficacy, which will be hard to repair."
"Powell has admitted that the Federal Reserve has done the 'bare minimum' on climate," she continued. "Now it will do even less, putting the banks it supervises and the broader financial system at risk."
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More Than 170 US Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents, Some Abused or Detained for Days: ProPublica
"Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents," the investigation found.
Oct 17, 2025
More than 170 US citizens have been detained by immigration agents against their will since President Donald Trump returned to office in January, according to a new investigation by ProPublica.
The reporters examined every publicly available case they could find in which citizens were detained by immigration officers.
"Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents," they wrote in the report published Thursday. "They've had their necks kneeled on. They've been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched."
"About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones," continued the report.
The findings fly in the face of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's recent assertion, in a ruling that allowed the Trump administration to use racial profiling to carry out its mass deportation agenda in Los Angeles, that "if the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go."
Video evidence from Los Angeles has shown immigration officials carrying out what appear to be large, indiscriminate roundups of random groups of Latino people.
Meanwhile, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who has been at the helm of Trump's "Operation Midway Blitz" in Chicago, has acknowledged in an interview with a local news station that immigration enforcement decides whether to detain people based on "how they look," and suggested that the white reporter interviewing him would be less likely to be detained.
ProPublica's report bolsters the accusation that the administration is carrying out explicit racial profiling. The investigation found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship, almost all of whom were Latino.
And while immigration officials are allowed to arrest citizens who obstruct their operations or assault officers, it found that the 130 cases in which Americans were accused of doing so "often wilted under scrutiny." In nearly 50, it said, charges were never filed or the cases were dismissed, while only a small number have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.
Citizens who have been detained have often faced severe mistreatment at the hands of officers:
Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed, and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative.
In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn't given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery.
In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)
The investigation also found that at least 20 of the detained US citizens were children, including two with cancer. Another four were held, with their undocumented mother, for weeks without access to a lawyer. They were released following the intervention of Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), but still remain without their mother, who has not been accused of a crime.
In many cases, agents were found to have ignored proof of citizenship. In one case, they tackled an Alabama construction worker, Leonardo Garcia Venegas, to the ground even as he shouted that he was a citizen. When officers took out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to US citizens, they dismissed it as fake and held Garcia in handcuffs for over an hour. Agents later detained him a second time and dismissed his REAL ID again, while also holding two other workers with legal status.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called ProPublica's report "absolutely shocking."
" ICE does not have the authority to detain US citizens during immigration enforcement—full stop," she said. "The Trump administration is out of control, violating the rights of American citizens. They must be held accountable."
ProPublica's investigation focused on the detention of US citizens, but Kavanaugh's contention that legal immigrants are also "promptly released" is also flagrantly untrue. While there has not been a comprehensive effort to aggregate the number of green-card or visa holders detained or deported, there have been numerous documented cases of them falling into the grasp of immigration enforcement without any clear justification.
Earlier this week, the BBC reported that 48-year-old Paramjit Singh, a green-card holder who has a brain tumor and a heart condition, has been in ICE detention for over two months and has been denied the medical care he needs, despite there being no active cases against him. Another green-card holder in Kentucky, Vicente Castillo Flores, who has lived in the US for over 30 years, was detained by ICE earlier this month at a toll booth despite showing agents his work visa. According to Newsweek, the agency has not provided a reason for why he was detained despite his legal status.
The ProPublica reporters noted that their investigation was undertaken because "the government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans." They said the number of US citizens held in detention was likely even higher than what they reported.
Their report is the latest in a long line of reports that have revealed an extraordinary lack of accountability and transparency for ICE and Trump's immigration enforcement agenda, which has mainly gone after people without criminal records despite Trump's claims to the contrary.
Last month, an investigation from the Miami Herald found that over 1,000 detainees held at Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' detention facility had mysteriously vanished, with no record of where they went, leading the Florida Immigrant Coalition to describe it as "an extrajudicial black site."
Three individuals have died in ICE custody just over the past two weeks, bringing the total number up to 23 this year, the highest number in 20 years.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called ProPublica's report "an outrage."
"Every single Republican needs to answer for this," she said. "We can't let this administration sweep this kind of gross abuse of power under the rug."
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