Jeanmarie Grimsley @grimss2

Yesterday I told you the government is pulling 900 ocean monitoring instruments out of the water. Here is the part that should make every American angry, regardless of where you stand on climate. Congress voted to fund this network. Not once. Twice. The Trump administration proposed cutting it by 80 percent in 2025. Congress restored the money. Proposed the same cut in 2026. Congress restored the money again. So the administration labeled it a "descope" and ordered the instruments pulled anyway. That is not a budget disagreement. That is an executive branch telling the legislative branch that its votes do not matter. The public paid for this infrastructure. Congress protected it. One office in Washington decided the public should not have it. This is the pattern I document in 𝑾𝒆 𝑨𝒓𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒂𝒅 𝑮𝒖𝒚𝒔. It is not about left or right. It is about who decides what Americans are allowed to know about their own planet. Who should make that call?

As grocery prices continue to rise nationally, the House passed an appropriations bill that would cut $141 million in funding for a program that helps pregnant women and children purchase healthy foods. wapo.st/4ocfEIf

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” - The Usual Suspects The greatest trick DeSantis ever pulled was convincing Floridians that local government is the problem and state government is the solution. If your mayor, sheriff, and county commission have to fly to Tallahassee every year to ask permission to fund basic services, the state didn’t shrink government. It just moved it farther away and gave you less control.

A state audit revealed millions in voucher overpayments. Auditors recommended stronger oversight. Lawmakers didn't act. Now, taxpayers may never recover those funds, yet FL is set to spend another $4.5B on vouchers next year. Accountability matters. 🔗 bit.ly/3RN7WbB

Yesterday Donald Trump tripled the size of his personal political army inside the government. Illegally. And almost no one noticed. Here's what happened: He signed an order converting ~8,000 of the most senior career officials in government into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all. These aren't rando's. They're the directors, chiefs of staff, and the people who write the rules or decide who gets federal money, i.e. the lieutenants right below his political appointees. Until yesterday, they answered to the law. Now they answer to him. A president normally gets ~4,000 political appointees. People he can bring into government and fire at will. I was one of them at DHS. You serve at his pleasure, full stop -- so if you're gonna speak truth to power, you're prepared to quit (or get fired if he doesn't like it). The rest of the federal government is PROTECTED from firing if they tell the truth. But Trump just stripped those protections. Adding 8,000 more people to his personal army. Overnight. Without asking Congress. With the stroke of a pen, those people now serve at the pleasure of the president. They're "his" people, whether they like it or not. And the chilling effect is real. An official who can be fired this afternoon for "subversion of presidential directives" (the order's own words) doesn't need to be hand-picked to know what's expected of him or her. The threat does all the work. By the way, this order is illegal. The law only lets Trump reclassify jobs when "necessary" in exceptional circumstances. And this blows an 8,000-person hole in the merit hiring / firing system created by Congress. Without permission, Trump has created a whole new category of stormtroopers inside the Executive Branch. If this doesn't get challenged in court, you're going to see the U.S. government become a very different place. Here's the full story: bit.ly/4dQN5N2

This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it. More than half the donors to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months. And here’s the part that should make your blood boil. Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence. The White House won’t even release the full donor list. They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it. Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price. We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us. wapo.st/3QmJjSz

Trump’s budget director Russ Vought is the most dangerous person you’ve never heard of. And he just proposed turning every federal grant into a loyalty test. His plan would make funding for cancer research, housing, transportation, and public health depend on one thing: whether it “advances the President’s policy priorities.” Not whether it works. Not whether Congress authorized it. Whether it pleases Trump. This is the appropriations power. It belongs to Congress and to the people. To my Republican colleagues: where are you? Congress passed this funding. You voted for it. Vought is telling you to your faces that your votes do not matter, that he and his enablers will override the law whenever it suits them. Every day you stay silent, you give away the institution you were elected to defend. Grow a spine. This is not about left or right. It is about whether Congress still exists as a coequal branch, or whether we have quietly surrendered the purse to an unelected hack who holds the Constitution in contempt. History will remember who stood up and who looked away. nytimes.com/2026/06/02/us/…

The U.S. savings rate has fallen by more than half in 2 years.   That makes millions of Americans vulnerable to shocks like the Iran War.   My @Morning_Joe Chart.

There's a difference between cutting taxes and changing who controls government. Florida is not debating a tax cut. Florida is debating a fundamental redesign of how local government is financed. #DefendDemocracy floridatrident.org/the-property-t…

Under Amendment 3, “we can make it work, we will just have to charge a fee for LITERALLY everything.” Say no to Amendment 3; say no to the FEE state of Florida.

Holly Bullard @HollyBullardFL

a week ago

“We can make anything work, we’ll just have to charge a fee for literally everything,” said George Kruse, a Republican on the Manatee County Commission. Thank you for being honest with taxpayers @GWKruse

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The blast radius nobody is talking about. Once the dust settles, Floridians may discover they did not merely change a tax system. They changed the balance of power between local communities and the state itself. And unlike a tax bill, that is a change that will be far harder to reverse. floridatrident.org/the-property-t…

Family wealth generated while holding office. We are not angry enough about this.

Screwworms coming back into the U.S. cattle herd/stock is going to potentially devastate the industry and jack up meat prices. Worst part is, this was preventable. Trump & DOGE pushed funding cuts on/destroyed agencies that were directly responsible for fighting this pest

Jonathan Richie @JRichieTX

4 days ago

NEW: state Rep. Don McLaughlin says New World Screwworm within 1 mile of Texas border and urged state leaders to set up response modeled after Operation Lone Star. Says the federal government is "failing to take seriously a threat that could devastate our livestock industry."

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Science gasps for breath. They are removing all the ocean monitors to understand changes in currents and climate, and the excuse is a master class in obfuscation & double speak . (1/2) nytimes.com/2026/06/01/cli…

Beyond defunding public schools, this headline gets to why DeSantis wants to eliminate property taxes in Florida. It would also strip local governments from crucial revenue, making them more dependent and controlled by Florida’s state government.

In the US, spending on data center construction now exceeds spending on public transportation infrastructure — including airports, marine terminals, and all mass transit.

THREAD 👇

Silicon Valley Fodder @Playerinthgame

4 days ago

26/ OK, but also! Musk's IPO filing shocked Wall Street by revealing SpaceX holds 18,712 Bitcoin (worth over $1.3 billion) as a treasury reserve asset. Normally, companies keep their backup cash in ultra-safe investments like bonds but SpaceX's is tied up in Bitcoin. Cool, so...

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$100 billion. That’s our estimate of the cost of the Iran War to American households. That’s nearly $750 per household. This includes the additional U.S. military costs and the higher energy and other prices resulting from the war. This is a big economic blow, but deficit-financed tax cuts have cushioned it. Until now. As of May 16th, the bigger tax refunds Americans have received this year no longer cover the higher costs of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel caused by the war. The financial pressure is thus mounting quickly, particularly on already hard-pressed middle and lower-income households. With the saving rate about as low as it ever goes, unless the war ends soon and energy prices come down, they will have little choice but to rein in their spending, weighing further on the already sagging economy.

Let me get this straight. Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, got caught lying about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Democrats grilled him about it and finally got him to agree to testify before the House Oversight Committee. Four weeks later, Lutnick wrote a $5 million check to the super PAC that funds House Republicans, including members who sit on that committee. Then he showed up for a closed-door interview where, despite pushback from Democrats, no cameras or recordings were allowed. This is the most corrupt administration in American history and it’s not even close. nytimes.com/2026/05/22/us/…

“The $250k homestead exemption would cost school districts $5 billion annually, according to .. the nonpartisan (FPI).FPI also said in many fiscally constrained rural counties, due to the lower assessed value of properties,a $250k homestead exemption is close to full elimination”