Bye, Felicia

She broke Scaramucci's record by almost 6 days.

ICEhole

When government needs a veil of secrecy to conduct public policy is a strong indicator of creeping authoritarianism.

ICE has quietly used this warehouse as a detention facility all summer, neighbors say

ROXBURY, N.J. — On a warm morning on Sept. 4, masked immigration agents rolled into Dover, N.J.

Footage of the raids rippled across social media, sent people into hiding and reignited rumors that had been circulating for months: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were taking people to a nearby warehouse.

D.E., who requested NPR use his initials only, stands near the location two blocks from his home, in which he was violently arrested by ICE officials without a warrant, in Long Branch, NJ. D.E., 44, who has had a brain tumor growing in his head for years, was denied medication by ICE officers, and as a result, suffered from several seizures.

The warehouse in Roxbury was one piece of a billion-dollar plan by the Department of Homeland Security to detain migrants as part of President Trump's mass deportation efforts.

That plan to convert warehouses into detention centers faced fierce backlash and legal challenges from residents and immigrant advocates. It was largely abandoned, and in several sites, including Roxbury, the government is legally forbidden by a court order from converting them to a detention facility, pending environmental assessments.

But an NPR investigation has found signs that the New Jersey facility is being used. And the state's Office of the Attorney General says it is looking into similar reports.

Contractor says he was told Stephen Miller wanted facilities to be "cruel"

In early 2026, Homeland Security bought 11 warehouses to turn into ICE detention facilities. They spent about a billion dollars on these.

NPR spoke to an official at a government contractor whose company was approached to convert several of the warehouses into ICE facilities. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the government.

"No one that we spoke to at DHS was for this idea whatsoever. The deputy director told us point-blank that they had pushed back very hard on it. Everybody knew warehouses are horrible places to put people," he says.

At a meeting with a deputy director at DHS, he says, his company proposed an alternative: FEMA-style camps in Texas that would be more humane.

He says that idea was swiftly shot down. While White House adviser Stephen Miller was not at the meeting, they were told that this was not what Miller wanted.

The contractor says his understanding from that meeting was that "Miller did not want the facilities that were comfortable. He did not want facilities that were humane. We were told point-blank that that was not what the administration wanted."

"Steve Miller certainly seemed to make that point to everyone that he wanted it to be cruel. This was what Miller had stated to the DHS at that time, to the DHS director and deputy director. What surprised me was just how adamant the people were that it was going to happen. Damn the consequences. I would say in 25 years of working with the U.S. government, I've never been in that position before."

In a statement to NPR, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said the contractor's comments were "false hearsay allegation(s) from someone who has never even met or talked with Stephen Miller." Bis also said that Miller "has never made any remarks to anyone about wanting illegal aliens to have worse detention facility conditions. It simply isn't true and this is defamatory."

The White House did not respond to repeated requests to speak to Miller directly.

DHS is holding on to the strategically positioned warehouses

Early on, the warehouse plan was met with protests in both conservative and liberal towns. Several state attorneys general filed lawsuits to halt construction, based on environmental concerns.

"It very quickly became an absolute boondoggle," says Michael Wriston, a former military intelligence analyst who co-founded Project SaltBox, a watchdog group that tracks ICE's expansion. "It was really about the optics of people being kept in these cages and these large warehouses. They wanted a lot of what they called B-roll to play on social media, but they didn't do any due diligence of making sure that they conformed with environmental policy or that the construction wouldn't disturb local water tables."

A DHS official who served during Trump's first term, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared government retaliation, says that while they were not in the meeting the contractor described to NPR, they had often heard higher-ups in the administration wanting to make a point of showcasing difficult conditions immigrants were being held in.

Then, with the departure of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in March, there was a shift: Her replacement, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, sought to do less showy immigration crackdowns. Today, Homeland Security is selling several of the warehouses.

But they're still holding on to a few, including in Hagerstown, Md., Surprise, Ariz., and Roxbury, N.J. "These locations are very critical to ICE's deportation agenda," says Wriston, "because they fill in the gap in places where ICE does not have a robust detention network. They don't have a lot of jails there." They are also located in areas where there are no partnerships with the police who can house detainees in local jails.

In Maryland, Arizona and New Jersey, following lawsuits from each of the state attorneys general, DHS has either agreed or been ordered by a judge to halt the conversion of the warehouses into detention centers, pending environmental impact assessments. But throughout the summer, in the towns surrounding the Roxbury warehouse, rumors started to bubble.

A summer of arrests and rumors

Over the summer, there was a historic surge in ICE arrests: around 100,000 people in July and August.

In New Jersey, the rumor mill started churning. The Roxbury warehouse is located in a wooded area, on a road right off Route 46. Project NINJA (No ICE in North Jersey Alliance), a coalition that opposes ICE detention expansion, says several neighbors reported vehicles, often in a caravan, speeding up the road.

"They're holding people in that warehouse," one woman says in a WhatsApp group in the town of Dover, which is about 15 minutes from Roxbury. "I have a co-worker who was taken there. They hold them there and at night they take them somewhere else." The message was forwarded to NPR by Dover Council Member Sandra Wittner.

"But, you know, it's like third- and fourth-hand accounts," says Wittner. "It just didn't seem probable at the time because of the court order. But it kind of made you scratch your head a little bit."

Then the morning of Sept. 4 happened.

"We were taken to the Roxbury warehouse"

A woman says she was driving to work when she saw a raid taking place in Dover. She decided to follow the car carrying people who were detained. "I just needed to know, is he going to Roxbury?"

She took video as she trailed them up Route 46. She asked that NPR not use her name because what happened next made her fearful of what the government might do.

She says the car she was following turned onto the woodsy road that leads to the warehouse.

She says she waited to see if there was any more movement.

"And then maybe five minutes after that, a white Dodge Durango started kind of circling around me," she says. "And then on his last loop, he started filming me. He had a yellow case on his cellphone. After that, a black Tahoe started doing the same thing. I was on a public sidewalk, and it was intimidating. It was really intimidating. I'm scared. But I am more scared for our community."

Councilwoman Wittner says she strongly suspects ICE is using the Roxbury warehouse: "The immigration enforcement activity happened in Dover between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m." Wittner points to the woman who was able to follow the vehicle up Route 46: "The last vehicle entered the warehouse road at 8:25 a.m."

Meanwhile, footage of the raid started circulating on social media.

Back in Dover, another woman says she saw the videos as she got her kids ready for school. NPR viewed the videos and confirmed their authenticity.

In one of them, a worker is cornered against a wall by two masked agents. She says she was thunderstruck.

"That's my father," she told NPR.

She asked that we not use her name because she fears being targeted.

At 8:25 a.m., she says, she got a call from her father. He's 59, she says, and he sounded disoriented. He told her he was handcuffed in some kind of jail.

She found it strange, she says, because the Roxbury warehouse would be the only place he could have been taken in that short a time span.

She also discovered a friend of hers had been picked up.

She hasn't been able to speak to her father since then, and neither has NPR. But NPR located her friend in Honduras, where he's been deported. He requested anonymity, because he fears repercussions for his loved ones who are still in the U.S.

"I was picked up on my way to work, on Friday, Sept. 4. The agents loaded me into a van. They took us to Roxbury," he said.

He says he and the other people detained were handcuffed and held in the parking lot for several hours. He counted nine other men with him. "I just went into a state of shock," he says. "I signed my deportation papers. The next morning I regretted it. But I was scared. Eventually, they transferred us to a real facility."

In a statement to NPR, DHS did not respond to a question about whether it was holding people at the Roxbury location. But it did give NPR a statement it has previously sent about ICE detention, saying DHS upholds strict standards and that immigrants can choose to leave detention by being deported.

"We need our Congress members to conduct an oversight visit yesterday"

The activists at NINJA say ICE's actions violate the legal order. The order lists several actions ICE can take with the site — mainly upkeep — but nowhere on that list is detention an acceptable action, they say.

Harvard professor Andrew Mergen, a former attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice Environment & Natural Resources Division, says ICE may technically not be violating the court order, which stipulated it would not convert the place into a detention center pending an environmental assessment.

Ultimately, Mergen says, the situation shows the limitations of using environmental claims. "The community is acting here to prevent people from being detained," says Mergen. "And the administration seems to have cleverly elided that intention, by sort of saying, 'Well, we're not going to build this facility, but we're going to use this space in furtherance of detention.'"

He says he understands the frustration: "It's just infuriating if what you are trying to do is say 'No. Not here. Not here.' "

Wittner says since the raid, she's heard from other close relatives or close friends of two men who were picked up that day, who say they were inside the Roxbury warehouse.

She says the situation is unacceptable: "We need our Congress members to conduct an oversight visit yesterday, quite honestly. We need our state to aggressively pursue this investigation and demand to get inside."

She says DHS has had time "to go in and clean up their mess if they, in fact, got caught doing something that they shouldn't have."

Meanwhile, in Dover, the streets where the raid happened remain deserted.

At an empty diner at lunchtime, a waitress who did not want to be named because of the climate of fear in town says one of the workers who was taken used to come here for a bite.

Then she leans over and asks: "Do you know where they took those men?"

Playin' At War

Overheard

I live in Texas, and I know a very MAGA woman who just had a miscarriage. She's planning to leave the state tomorrow so she can see an OB/GYN for a D & C.

In spite of it going against everything I believe in, I'm very tempted to report her so I can get that bounty money. Because fuck her - she voted for this.

Do Nothing

Jim Acosta

Keep your damn hands off the Kennedy Center, asshole.

Government Stoopid

Is there a truly plausible reason for Kash Patel to change the regulation that disqualifies FBI recruits for bestiality?

Does he maybe know somebody who shouldn't be in his organization? Might he's been close with them? Maybe they're just good buddies with an Epstein-type kid-fucker who also has a kink for farm critters or something.

Could be its just a variation on DARVO. Who the fuck knows with this gang.

Between Ouch And Boing

"Trade wars are easy - and they're easy to win." --Donald Trump, 2024 campaign

US Trade Deficit Widens in July; Capital Goods Imports Hit Record High

WASHINGTON, Sept 3 (Reuters) - The U.S. trade deficit widened sharply ⁠in ⁠July as strong domestic demand ⁠boosted imports, positioning trade to exert another drag on economic growth in ​the third quarter.

The trade shortfall increased 24.4% to $88.6 billion, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census ‌Bureau said on Thursday. Economists polled ‌by Reuters had forecast the deficit at $90.0 billion.

The deterioration was flagged by data last week showing ⁠an import-driven surge ⁠in the goods trade deficit in July.

Domestic demand soared in the second ​quarter, a combination of both strong consumer spending and business investment in artificial intelligence. Demand is, however, being satiated with imports, helping to widen the trade deficit.

Imports increased 2.8% to $399.3 billion in July. Goods imports shot up ​3.7% to $320.6 billion. Imports of capital goods jumped $14.4 billion to a record high $140.3 billion, reflecting ⁠strong ⁠increases in computers, computer accessories ⁠and semiconductors, likely ​related to the AI buildout.

But imports of industrial supplies and materials, which include petroleum, dropped $1.8 billion. ​

Crude oil imports fell $1.8 billion ⁠amid lower prices.

Exports decreased 2.1% to $310.7 billion, with goods shipments dropping 3.0% to $201.0 billion. They were led by an $8.7 billion decline in industrial supplies and materials, mostly crude oil as well as nonmonetary gold, which is excluded in the calculation of gross domestic product. Capital goods exports, however, increased $1.9 billion. Consumer ⁠goods exports rose $1.7 billion, lifted by pharmaceutical preparations.

The goods trade deficit widened 17.3% to $119.6 ⁠billion in July. When adjusted for inflation, the goods trade deficit increased 12.7% to $106.4 billion. Trade subtracted 1.14 percentage points from GDP growth in the April-June quarter. The economy grew at a 1.5% annualized rate last quarter.

Imports of services decreased $0.6 billion to $78.7 billion in July, pulled down by charges for the use of intellectual property. Imports of transport services fell but those of travel services increased. Exports of services dipped $0.4 billion to $109.7 billion amid declines in travel, financial and transport services. Charges for the use of intellectual property rose ⁠as did exports of other business services.

Despite aggressive tariffs on imports, the United States posted record goods trade deficits with Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia. The goods trade balance with Switzerland swung into deficit, while the shortfall with Canada decreased $3.7 billion ​to $3.2 billion in July. The U.S. and Canada are embroiled in a trade ​war.

Iran Update

I get the feeling Trump is bored with it, and he's leaving it all up to his underlings so he can just blow it off, thinking that gives him some kind of plausible deniability as he skates away. Of course, he'll blame Hegseth or the generals or Barbra Streisand, or whatever the fuck.

The problem Hegseth's got now is that he's losing what little support he had. He's firing everybody with the brains and the guts they have to have to serve at those upper levels, so whoever's left will likely just pull the levers they're told to pull and the greatest military force in the history of the galaxy will just fizzle out with a resounding pffft.

And the bigger problem is that nobody can get thru to either Hegseth or Trump that this war is a waste of time, energy, money, material, and people. Continuing it is a perfect example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Anna Connelly

This shit is not normal.

Sarah Matthews

Calling All Recalls

Breaking the government is the point. And punishing people is meant to rally them to the cause.

"See? The government's all fucked up. And there's no fixing it, but you can stop your suffering by supporting us as we replace it with a corporate plutocracy."

OK, so it's not quite as bad as all that - not yet anyway - but I think it's healthy to maintain my very low confidence in this MAGA gang. IMO, it's more than justified, and it's likely to get worse before we have a real chance to make it better.

Lettuce. Blueberries. Eggs. Jalapeños. Why are there so many food-safety scares this summer?

Bill Marler's business is booming — and that's not great for the rest of us.

Marler is a food safety lawyer, defending people who've been sickened by foodborne illness. He has been doing this for 33 years, with such high-profile wins that he's become a towering figure in the food safety world.

This year, he's so slammed with foodborne-illness cases that, for the first time in years, he's expanding his team — hiring another lawyer and a couple of paralegals. "We just have too much shit to do," Marler said.

This summer alone, Americans have been warned about a massive Cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce — 10,930 confirmed illnesses, 454 hospitalizations, and two deaths — plus Salmonella in jalapeños and eggs and E. coli in frozen blueberries. Then there are the recalls: bread that may contain metal fragments, fruit bars that may contain glass, and foods pulled for possible bacterial contamination or undeclared allergens.

By August, the FDA's 2026 public health advisories had covered what felt like everything, from cheese to infant formula.

"As a consumer, you're looking at this like, well, what the hell's safe to eat?" Marler said.

America is having a headline-grabbing food-safety summer. Some of that is perception: We're better at finding outbreaks, and recall counts can be misleading.

But long-standing vulnerabilities in our food system — compounded by cuts to the public health infrastructure designed to catch problems — are also at play. Whether it represents something more significant is harder to say.

"It's real, and it looks bad," Marler said.

Recall counts can be misleading

This summer looks more exceptional than it actually is, said Craig Hedberg, a professor and foodborne-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota.

"Certainly the magnitude of the cyclospora outbreak is unprecedented, but in terms of all of the things that are going on with food, it's not all that unusual," Hedberg said.

Summer is typically a busy season for foodborne illness, he said, and outbreaks involving foods like sprouts, berries, and produce recur year after year. What's truly extraordinary in 2026 is cyclospora — "an order of magnitude bigger than anything we've seen in previous years."

Recall counts can also exaggerate the number of distinct problems. Jennifer McEntire, founder of Food Safety Strategy, a consulting firm that works with industry groups, pointed out that when a single contaminated ingredient is used in many foods, each finished product may trigger its own recall.

"This makes the recall numbers look high, even though the number of 'root causes' may be much lower," McEntire said.

Take California Dairies, which recalled certain bulk batches of powdered milk and buttermilk in April due to potential Salmonella contamination. These products had been sold to wholesale distributors and manufacturers, triggering downstream recalls.

That meant the recall rippled across the sector, with over a dozen products pulled from shelves — from potato chips to ranch seasoning.

We're finding issues we couldn't find before

There's another reason today's food-safety problems may be more visible: We're better at finding them.

"We clearly have better tools and are using them more effectively to identify outbreaks," Hedberg said.

In the last five to 10 years, public health laboratories have increasingly used whole-genome sequencing to link seemingly isolated Salmonella or E. coli cases by their genetic fingerprints.

That means some of what appears to be an increase in foodborne illness is actually better surveillance. "We're finding ones that may have been missed previously," said Melanie Firestone, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, who studies foodborne-disease surveillance.

Those tools, however, aren't as readily available for Cyclospora, in part because the parasite can't be grown in a lab; investigators rely more heavily on finding common exposures among sick people.

Our food system has changed — and one mistake can go a very long way

The food system itself has also transformed. Americans can now buy fresh produce year-round, including fruits and vegetables.

"Foods don't go out of season. We just go to the season where they're being produced, and we bring them in," Hedberg said.

Still, a food system optimized for year-round availability, convenience, long supply chains, and massive distribution networks can also amplify failures.

Marler points to the massive 2006 E. coli outbreak linked to bagged spinach, a crisis so consequential that he said the leafy-greens industry came to refer to it as its "9/11."

Investigators traced the spinach to a single 20-acre farm that had a wild-pig invasion. Not every crop was infected, but harvesting and processing allowed it to spread. The bags were then shipped around the country, turning what Marler argued might once have been scattered illnesses into a national outbreak.

Ultimately, when something does go wrong, the modern food system can make it go spectacularly wrong.

"The reality is that with a lot of our fresh produce, once contamination occurs, we have limited ability to decontaminate the produce items," Hedberg said.

Parts of our safety net weakened

One explanation for the increased number of headlines about food safety has loomed particularly large this summer: the Trump administration's DOGE cuts.

In 2025, the administration cut thousands of jobs across federal health agencies and billions of dollars in grants to state and local health departments.

Those cuts landed on a public-health system that was already stretched. "Our public health systems have been chronically underfunded for a long time, and we're seeing that worsen," Firestone said.

In a statement, the FDA said that "frontline FDA investigators are critical to the FDA's mission and were exempt from past workforce reductions."

The agency said that while there are more foodborne illness clusters in 2026 than in previous years, it is "constantly working to improve laboratory detection of foodborne illness," such as Cyclospora. "Still, Cyclospora remains a challenging agent and epidemiology, and traceback are key elements of an outbreak investigation."

Food safety cuts predate the Trump administration. In 2012, under the Obama administration, the USDA's Microbiological Data Program ended after its funding was eliminated. The program had sampled and tested selected fruits and vegetables for foodborne pathogens, reporting its findings to federal and state public health agencies — proactive surveillance, rather than waiting for reports of infections to crop up.

Some food-safety hazards, Hedberg said, are well understood and "just require constant attention on the part of producers to be able to prevent."

So, should I be scared of my groceries?

Hedberg doesn't think this summer should change the way Americans eat. "Most of the food moving through the system is free of contamination," he said.

Fresh produce remains an important part of a healthy diet, and he cautioned against allowing a single enormous outbreak to distort our sense of risk.

That doesn't mean accepting outbreaks as inevitable.

Thirty years ago, hamburgers kept Marler incredibly busy: more than 90% of his E. coli cases involved them. Today, he said, it's practically zero. "That's because of government intervention and industry stepping up."

After the deadly 1993 Jack in the Box outbreak, regulators and the meat industry introduced new rules, testing, and other safeguards that made hamburger substantially safer.

So, is this summer unusually riskier? The Cyclospora outbreak is. Beyond that, many of the problems are familiar ones. And the hamburger example shows that which foods pose the biggest risks can change substantially over time.

Hawk

It won't be long before they can just give us a list of foods they haven't fucked up yet.

From the FDA website:

Overheard

Big Ag companies finally got the de-regulation from their coin-operated politicians, but they couldn't play it cool, even for little while. They immediately went with, "Yeah - now that we're free of all that cumbersome safety monitoring, we're gonna fuck up your food with shit, pesticides, and various industrial materials like glass and heavy metals. And why do we do this? Because fuck you, that's why."

Aaron Parnas

Wait just a damned minute - I've got questions.

• Hegseth can't go anywhere without his mommy?
• Because he's never learned to self-regulate?
• What grade is that little prick in now?
• What in the blue-eyed, buck-naked fuck are we doing?

Lying Liars

The Trump gang just makes shit up.

Medicaid work requirements built on invented evidence will harm the people they claim to help

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued a new Interim Final Rule with comment period (IFC) implementing the Medicaid “community engagement” requirements included in H.R. 1. The IFC is fundamentally defective in both its substance and its analysis.

With respect to the analysis justifying the rule, the agency’s mandated Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) does not conform to the standards required of such analyses, as stipulated in Executive Order 12866 and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-4. It substitutes unsupported assumptions for the best available empirical evidence, counts speculative benefits while omitting well-documented costs, and produces estimates of coverage loss and federal savings that are inconsistent. With respect to the substance of the rule, CMS has added conditions, not required under the statute, that will make it even more difficult than the statute intended for people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders to retain coverage.

These are not technical shortcomings. This rule will determine whether millions of low-income Americans retain health insurance.

H.R. 1 requires certain Medicaid beneficiaries to document 80 hours a month of work or other qualifying activities to retain their eligibility for Medicaid. This IFC sets forth the rules defining which beneficiaries will and will not be exempt from this “community engagement” requirement. Under Executive Order 12866, economically significant regulatory actions, such as this IFC, must be accompanied by an RIA that assesses the costs and benefits of the action. In this case, the key parameter that will drive the costs and benefits of the regulatory action is how many people will become employed or otherwise community-engaged under the threat of losing Medicaid coverage. OMB requires agencies to base regulatory analyses on the best reasonably obtainable scientific, technical, and economic information. CMS acknowledges that it does not estimate this key behavioral response parameter from any such information. Instead, it assigns subjective weights to hypothetical scenarios. In its assessments of costs and benefits, CMS simply assumes that roughly one-third of affected beneficiaries will move into qualifying activities because of the requirement.

That assumption is wildly out of line with a substantial body of empirical evidence. Three distinct, robust lines of research, all consistent with one another, could have been used to estimate the likely impact of the requirement. First, studies of welfare-to-work programs, which condition receipt of cash benefits on employment, generally find small employment effects, with effects of under 5% even in scenarios where the work requirements in the programs are accompanied by childcare, transportation assistance, case management, and other supports—no such supports are included in the Medicaid rule. Second, studies of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion—the converse of the new work requirements—find that gaining Medicaid has little or no effect on employment, implying that withdrawing coverage is unlikely to produce a substantial increase in engagement. Finally, studies of recent work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid—including Arkansas’s Medicaid work requirements waiver—have found substantial coverage losses but no measurable increase in employment.

CMS’ assumption that one-third of those subject to the work requirement will become community-engaged is over six times greater than the largest estimate in any of these literatures. That assumption is an invention from which the agency mechanically generates its estimates of employment, earnings, costs, benefits, and government savings.

Because those estimates carry through the entire analysis, they generate further inconsistencies and distortions. The one-third engagement estimate leads CMS to predict that only about 3.1 million to 3.3 million people will lose Medicaid coverage annually. By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the statutory work requirement would reduce Medicaid enrollment by approximately 5.7 million people. Yet despite this much smaller headcount, CMS simultaneously projects approximately $350 billion in federal savings over 10 years—10% more than CBO’s estimate of $317 billion.

These figures are difficult to reconcile. If CMS expects fewer people to lose coverage but more money to be saved, it must implicitly assume that those losing coverage are dramatically more expensive than the beneficiaries reflected in CBO’s calculation. CMS’s numbers appear to imply average federal Medicaid spending of roughly $11,000 for each disenrolled person, compared with about $5,600 in CBO’s estimate.1 But Medicaid spending is highly concentrated. Many of the most expensive beneficiaries have serious health conditions that should qualify them for exemptions or temporary hardship protections. CMS does not adequately explain how its relatively small group of projected disenrollees can generate such large savings.

The implausible engagement assumption shows up again in the agency’s claims about the IFC’s benefits. Here, the agency claims that those shifted to engagement through the work requirement will become healthier from being induced into employment. The research basis CMS cites for the assumption that work makes you healthy is entirely based on associational studies of the health of workers and non-workers.

Healthier people are more likely to work. Poor health makes it harder to obtain and retain employment. Education, family resources, housing stability, and other factors affect both employment and health. Studies showing that employed people are healthier than unemployed people in no way establish that requiring a Medicaid beneficiary to work will make that person healthier. Indeed, the limited causal research, which relies on changes in retirement rules and other sources of plausibly exogenous variation, has produced mixed results: some studies find benefits from continued work, while others find that working harms health (for example, by increasing the risk of workplace injuries). There is no credible basis for assigning large health benefits to the hypothetical employment increases assumed to be generated by this rule.

At the same time, CMS largely omits the strongest causal evidence in this area: Medicaid coverage improves access to care, financial security, and health. Randomized and quasi-experimental studies have linked insurance coverage to improved treatment and, in several very credible studies, lower mortality. Other research shows that, at least for some populations, access to effective treatment can improve employment. Randomized studies of depression care, for example, have found increases in job retention, hours worked, and employment.

In other words, health coverage keeps people healthy and may help people work. Taking coverage away has direct harms and may make employment less likely. CMS’s analysis largely reverses this relationship: it assumes that work produces health while ignoring the possibility that health care produces both work and health.

The rule is especially poorly designed for people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders.

In the original statute, Congress provided exemptions for people with qualifying behavioral health conditions. CMS, however, would require many individuals to demonstrate not merely that they have a qualifying diagnosis, but that the condition significantly impairs their ability to comply with the work requirement.

Standard administrative reporting, such as medical claims, does not contain information on functional ability. That means that meeting the exemption will require a new miniature disability determination. States and clinicians will have to assess functional capacity, collect documentation, and decide whether a particular condition prevents compliance with 80 hours of monthly activities. States conduct such capacity determinations in conjunction with Social Security disability determinations; a costly, challenging process that provides applicants with important procedural protections (but nonetheless makes consequential errors).

Requiring such functional status determinations for people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders is particularly damaging because these conditions can impair memory, concentration, planning, and motivation. People with these conditions are likely to find it particularly difficult to navigate bureaucratic systems. The people most impaired may be those least able to prove that impairment.

The functional status criteria also fail to account for the fact that behavioral health conditions are chronic and recurring. A person with opioid use disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or recurrent major depression may be stable enough to work for one month, experience a relapse the next, miss a reporting deadline, and lose the Medicaid coverage financing the treatment that helped maintain stability and employment. Current functioning while under treatment is not proof that an exemption is unnecessary. It may instead be evidence that treatment is working.

The statute particularly called for an exemption for those participating in substance use treatment programs. The CMS rule places very restrictive conditions on what participation means. In particular, it limits the exemption to care provided by nonprofit providers. However, nearly half of people receiving substance use treatment are served by for-profit organizations, and the share is particularly high among opioid treatment programs providing methadone. That means that patients receiving substance abuse treatment could lose exemption from work requirements because the providers who happen to be available in their communities are for-profit. That will be particularly damaging in rural areas and other places with thin treatment networks.

The IFC is defective in its substance and its design. A defensible Regulatory Impact Analysis would use the following information:

• The extensive causal literature to estimate employment effects,
• Quantify the health consequences of coverage loss, and
• Reconcile its enrollment estimates with its claimed federal savings.

A defensible rule under the statute would:

• Automatically identify behavioral health exemptions using claims, pharmacy, managed-care, and behavioral health agency data;
• Accept attestations from clinicians, case managers, and treatment programs;
• Recognize relapse and fluctuating functioning; and
• Provide rapid reinstatement when illness contributes to noncompliance.
• Instead, CMS’s analysis assumes away the central empirical question, inflates speculative benefits, omits documented harms, and then adds administrative barriers that are likely to exclude precisely the people Congress intended to protect.

Have Buck, Will Pass

The buck stops somewhere else: A look at Trump’s tendency to avoid blame when things go awry

WASHINGTON (AP) — It is among the most famous phrases in presidential history: “The buck stops here.” Except with President Donald Trump, it almost never does.

Concerns about a weak economy and still-high inflation? His predecessor, Joe Biden, saddled him with that, he says, even though the Democrat has been out of office for 18-plus months and despite Trump once promising an immediate turnaround.

The problem-plagued revamp of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool? That was marred by vandalism, the Republican president insists, even though the office of a prosecutor he put in the job has said the damage was due to shoddy workmanship.

The increasingly unpopular war in Iran that has kept oil prices high, Trump’s approval rating low and sent shock waves through the global economy? Actually, this was Trump making up for timid earlier presidents who, he argues, squandered nearly 50 years of opportunities to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Pithy slogans aside, all modern presidents shift responsibility onto others to some degree, frequently blaming the commander-in-chief who preceded them, Congress — or both. But Trump has taken it to a new level, effectively embracing a de facto political strategy of being in charge of everything but responsible for nothing when things go badly.

“Taking responsibility being a characteristic of presidential leadership — or any kind of leadership — is absolutely true,” said Nicole Anslover, a history professor at Florida Atlantic University and author of “Harry S. Truman: The Coming of the Cold War.”

Trump’s tendency to point fingers at others is increasingly in the spotlight before November’s midterm elections, when Republicans are trying to retain control of Congress. His unwillingness to accept blame sometimes leads him to deny that there are problems at all, and could leave GOP leaders in tight races with little reassurance for voters that their concerns are being addressed.

The White House counters that Trump is working to correct long-festering challenges, not simply throwing up his hands and ignoring them.

The president is “rightfully addressing the failures of his predecessors while taking action to deliver big wins for the American people,” spokesperson Taylor Rogers said, pointing to a series of policies that she said Republicans can run on, including tax cuts, efforts to lower prescription drug prices, cracking down on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, increasing domestic energy production and a strong stock market.

Ducking responsibility dates to Trump’s first term

Truman famously kept a “The Buck Stops Here” sign on his desk as president. That came from “pass the buck,” which, according to Truman’s presidential library, dates to frontier times, when poker players would pass a buckhorn handle knife to the person whose turn it was to deal the cards.

“The president, whoever he is, has to decide,” Truman said during his farewell address in 1953. “He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job.”

The understanding of the phrase has broadened over the years to include taking responsibility for the outcome of tough decisions. Trump used to espouse similar beliefs, saying back in 2013 that in running a business, “Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.”

Accepting the 2016 presidential nomination, Trump said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” But as president, he has often suggested that the solution and blame rest elsewhere.

“The buck stops with everybody,” Trump said in 2019, during a lengthy government shutdown. In 2020, on the same day he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for a lack of COVID-19 testing.

Anslover said Truman took full responsibility for dropping atomic bombs on Japan even though he was not informed that the U.S. was developing such weapons until his predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died.

John F. Kennedy saw his approval ratings rise after he acknowledged he was to blame for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Ronald Reagan said he was sorry for any involvement he may have had in the Iran-Contra scandal even while saying he wasn’t sure he was to blame. “The buck stops here with me,” he said then.

At his final news conference in early 2009, George W. Bush listed a series of mistakes he had made, including failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. His successor, Barack Obama, said, “I screwed up,” after his nominee for health chief, Tom Daschle, withdrew because of unpaid back taxes.

Presidents before Trump “really usually take accountability,” Anslover said.

‘We inherited a total catastrophe,’ Trump says

The president acknowledged in a recent Punchbowl interview that voters are angry, but he said they are not mad at him but at congressional Republicans.

Trump believes his party can hold its congressional majorities after November, but he was clear that if Republicans lose, it won’t be his fault — echoing his comments before the 2018 midterms that he would not accept blame if his party lost control of the House, which it did.

Trump’s approval rating on the economy, once seen as among his strongest issues, has fallen throughout his time in office, from 40% in March 2025 to 32% in July, according to Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research polling. About 6 in 10 U.S. adults say Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions worse, according to Pew Research Center polling.

“The public certainly expects the president to be concerned about, and focused on, making life more affordable,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz said.

Trump instead points to Biden, under whom inflation hit a four-decade peak of 9.1% in 2022 as the pandemic was still roiling the world economy, before declining to 2.7% by November 2024. Last month, pressured by the Iran war, it was 3.4%.

“When we took office, we inherited a total catastrophe,” Trump said at a recent rally, later adding, “I inherited those high prices, just so you understand.”

Andrew Bates, a Democratic strategist and former Biden White House spokesperson, noted that Trump no longer mentions his campaign promise to “immediately end inflation” on Day One.

“He may not remember having made those promises, but swing voters sure as hell do,” Bates said.

Trump has shown the same pattern with Iran and the Reflecting Pool

The president has characterized the Iran war as “a little excursion” or “detour.” To play down how long it has lasted, he frequently notes that U.S. wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan dragged on for years, though the Iran conflict — which he initially said would be over in four weeks to five weeks — is now in its sixth month with no clear end in sight.

Trump has sought to shift blame to the past on the Reflecting Pool, falsely suggesting that Biden and Obama spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” trying unsuccessfully to fix it.

But Trump’s main defense has been vandalism. And, so far, at least four cases alleging that, including the most prominent case against an Olympic canoeist, have been dropped because of a lack of evidence.

Anslover said that, after 11-plus years in politics, Trump has proved he is not afraid to violate norms of presidential comportment. Lots of his core supporters do not seem bothered.

“For many Americans, it has either been a shift in how they view the presidency, or, like with so many things, they just feel empowered to say, ‘These are my priorities. My priority is not the facts,’” she said.

It's The Money, Stupid

The red lights are working overtime, and still unable to flash as brightly and as frequently as the situation seems to indicate.

And as if all this doom-n-gloom isn't enough, the CBO has revised its estimate of the US federal budget deficit, which is projected to reach approximately $2.1 trillion for fiscal year 2026, reporting a 10-month shortfall of $1.8 trillion through July.

So much winning.

The ingredients are coming together for a US financial crisis

Trump could trigger a disaster as markets lose faith in Washington’s economic management

A dangerous view is creeping into the markets that the US has already gone so far down the path of a debt compound trap that it dare not raise interest rates to control inflation.

The US treasury has become acutely dependent on short-term funding from hedge funds, many tapping the $8.3tn (£6.2tn) money market and some operating with up to 100 times leverage. The share of purchases coming from stable lenders such as foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds has been drying up.

Steven Blitz, the chief US economist at TS Lombard, says the Federal Reserve cannot tighten hard without risking a chain reaction. Financing costs would “explode”.

“Raising rates today immediately impacts the cost of nearly 25pc of the federal debt, where issuance is growing fastest,” he said.

The US treasury has to roll over $6tn of debt every three months in an increasingly sceptical market, as well as issuing $2tn of new debt annually to cover the worst structural deficit in US peacetime history.

Annual gross financing needs – the key warning metric watched by rating agencies and bond funds – was 26pc of GDP in 2010. The International Monetary Fund says the figure will reach 45pc this year and is on track for 60pc by the early 2030s on current policies. No great power has long endured at that sort of level.

Scott Bessent, the poacher-turned-gamekeeper now in charge of the US treasury, has been concentrating ever more borrowing on short-term bills. It is a way to keep a lid on the spiralling interest cost of the US national debt, which has quadrupled to $1tn in a decade, now exceeds the US defence budget and is fast heading towards uncharted waters above 4pc of GDP.

But trying to defer America’s fiscal reckoning by monkeying with debt instruments is the trick used by broken hegemons through the ages. It is a Faustian pact.

We know how worried Bessent is about soaring bond yields – approaching a two-decade high – by the way he intervened alongside Japan earlier this month to halt speculation against the yen. He activated an obscure mechanism known as the FIMA Repo Facility to let Japan pawn a chunk of its $1.1tn of US Treasuries in exchange for dollar loans rather than selling these bonds on the open market.

He joined the action by mobilising the treasury’s holding of euros, without first telling the European Central Bank – a shocking breakdown of central bank etiquette. All this screams desperation.

Hedge funds have become the marginal buyers of US debt, doubling their share to 9pc of total US Treasury purchases over the last four years. They have been borrowing with extreme leverage on the repo market – a core part of financial plumbing – in order to extract arbitrage gains.

Both the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements have warned that this structure is an accident waiting to happen. It amplified a spiral of forced selling and a near meltdown of the US Treasury market in the Covid panic of March 2020. The critical point is that the whole US financial and fiscal system has never been so sensitive to short-term interest rates.

Kevin Warsh, the untested new Fed chairman, faces an invidious choice. The indecent manner of his appointment degraded his credibility before he even started. Markets know that Trump persecuted his predecessor for refusing to cut rates and refusing to become the infamous Arthur Burns of our age. They also know that Warsh’s billionaire father-in-law is a close Trump confederate and a key author of the Greenland grab.

Warsh struggled to articulate a coherent intellectual argument after the most recent policy meeting for why he was not raising rates. He could not explain how he intends to bring stubborn US inflation back towards the 2pc target when it is clearly going the other way.

“Sternly staring at inflation until it melts before our withering gaze is not an option,” said fellow Fed board member Christopher Waller.

Warsh faced the unusual rebuke of three voting dissenters and some have been outspoken to the point of contempt. The market verdict has been lapidary.

Warsh argues that AI is deflationary and therefore overrides the Phillips Curve, making it possible to combine blistering growth with low inflation. I am friendly to this line of thinking but it is not entirely convincing coming from Warsh, who used to be a chest-beating “inflation nutter”. Many suspect that he has latched on to this idea as a pretext for doing Trump’s bidding.

Reports that he talks to Trump “all the time” confirm the fears. Jerome Powell’s working code was always that the proper level of intercourse between the US president and the Fed chairman is “zero”.

The Dornbusch adage in the markets is that fiscal and financial crises take longer to happen than you think possible but then happen faster than you ever imagined.

We know that US federal debt is compounding at a rate of 3.5pc of GDP each year. The mechanical rise in entitlements – ie, middle-class welfare – has been part of the landscape for a long time. Trump 1.0 tax cuts, Covid and Joe Biden’s Rooseveltian New Deal together pushed the envelope a lot further. Trump 2.0’s One Big, Beautiful Bill tests the limits.

The IMF forecasts a US general government deficit of 7.4pc of GDP or higher every single year from 2026 to 2031. Now Trump wants to raise the Pentagon budget by 60pc and fritter away $275bn on his “golden fleet” of Trump-class battleships – an idée fixe ever since he watched the 1950s telly series Victory at Sea.

It takes a serious trigger to detonate a crisis of financial confidence in a great power with deep economic strengths and a world reserve currency. Military overstretch is usually to blame, the cause of imperial Spain’s default in 1575 and Britain’s convertibility crisis in 1947.

The ingredients for some sort of American financial crisis are falling into place, disguised for now – but also compounded – by the AI bubble. The global market no longer has full faith in the management of the US treasury and the Fed.

The US has stopped upholding free trade and open navigation, switching sides to become the chief instigator of piracy and world disorder. It has squandered much of its arsenal on an ill-planned war that it cannot end without accepting humiliation and that has shown the US to be a weaker military power than we all thought. It has further wrecked US alliances and largely played into the hands of Xi Jinping’s revanchist China.

The disaster is nearly complete. Now we await the US mid-term elections. Should the democratic transfer of power in Congress be obstructed by meddling with the results in swing states, we may have our trigger.

Here It Comes

Plutocracy rising.

A fully coin-operated government is one of the main goals of this latest iteration of the Daddy State.

They're intending to strip down the government to three main functions:

1. Defend commercial interests abroad
2. Keep the domestic rabble in line
3. Settle contract disputes

That's it - everything else is strictly Fee-For-Service. And of course, we need to leave the way open for "entrepreneurs" to step in and sell us "insurance" against the disasters that their fuckery is already causing.

And won't it be so fucking peachy when the fire departments and emergency services are run by the Suits and the Bean Counters, the same way health insurance is being run now. Where they'll have almost as many people working to deny your claims as they do people who're supposed to be saving your ass from the hurricanes and wildfires.

Yup - gonna be loads of fun.

JoJo From JerZ

Trump's gotten away with it, so why am I supposed to think it's anything but a free fly zone?