HIGHLIGHTS
JUMP: EDUCATION | INFRASTRUCTURE | PUBLIC SERVICES | THE REST
First, the Good News
1) National: In the Public Interest has a new issue brief examining the concept of “efficiency,” under which Trump and Musk’s assault on the public sector is being marketed—not least to build support for the wholesale future privatization of public services and infrastructure. “‘Efficiency,’ reduced to cost savings alone without consideration of effectiveness, doesn’t lead to ‘more and better’ service—whether within public agencies or outsourced private contractors, the brief says.
“Advocates for outsourcing or privatizing public services currently offered by governments often argue that the private sector is ‘more efficient’ and a better deal for government—and taxpayers. When governments turn to the private sector to provide greater efficiency in the provision of public functions, it is often based on an assumption that the contractor can provide the public good or service for a lower cost. But, outside the smart efficiencies already mentioned, what would make the private sector provider offer the good or service at a savings to government? That is the central question that must be asked during every conversation about whether to privatize or outsource a good or service. If a private contractor promises to provide the same service for less money, what gets lost? What is reduced and where? Given that a private company must also make a profit in order to stay in business, that puts an additional strain on the calculus.”
The brief offers specific recommendations for preventing extractive efficiencies in government contracting:
- Conduct an “efficiency analysis” for contracting proposals
- Ensure that governments have the ability to choose high-road contractors
- Hire and train efficiency monitoring staff
- Maintain accurate and transparent public records about government spending
The brief also says “governmental entities should perform an impact analysis that examines the social, economic, and environmental impacts of a proposed contract, especially for contracts that could have broad impacts on the community. When government contractor cuts corners, these impacts can ripple beyond immediate service provision.”
The concept of public benefit efficiency is virtually absent from the Trump/Musk crusade, which is so opaque about its methodology that it amounts to “trust us.”
2) National: Next month, Bianca Tylek and Worth Rises will be releasing their new book—The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits, “a meticulous exposé of who profits from incarceration, culminating in a compelling case for abolition.” The book is “based on years of research by the criminal justice organization Worth Rises—best known for campaigns that have revolutionized prison telecom and made prison and jail communication free in cities and states around the country. The Prison Industry maps the range of ways in which private corporations, often with their government partners, make money off incarceration. It further details the gross extraction of wealth from incarcerated people and their families, who have been brutalized by overpolicing, mass incarceration, and mass surveillance.
“Chapters on labor, telecom, healthcare, community corrections, and more explore the origin story of privatization for each sector and how much money is in it for the corporations involved. Stretching far beyond private prisons to look at all the sectors that benefit from incarceration, the authors illuminate the methods used to extract resources from public coffers and communities, which corporations are most active and how they partner with governments, and the harms these profit-based approaches to justice cause people, families, and communities.
Ultimately, The Prison Industry makes a compelling case for dismantling the prison industry and prison abolition more broadly. It serves as a tool for the tearing down of our wholly oppressive carceral system—the ashes of which we can use to create a better world built on care, not cages.”
The official book launch will be on April 10, both online via Zoom and in person at the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. “Piper Kerman, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Orange is the New Black, will host a fireside chat between Worth Rises Executive Director, Bianca Tylek and Abolitionist Law Center Executive Director Robert Saleem Holbrook, offering a deep dive into the complex dynamics of the prison industry and its far-reaching consequences on communities. This engaging conversation will also explore how Worth Rises challenges the prison industry and the successes it has had in doing so.”
3) National: Two judges on Thursday blocked the Trump administration’s firing of probationary employees at federal agencies, The Wall Street Journal reports. “Bredar, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, said his order would remain in effect for 14 days, giving him time to consider a request by the state attorneys general for a more permanent injunction. Bredar declined to order reinstatement of probationary employees at three agencies—the Department of Defense, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Archives—on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence that terminations within those agencies were unlawful. The American Federation of Government Employees and other groups brought the California lawsuit on behalf of tens of thousands of probationary employees who, they said, were fired last month at the direction of the Office of Personnel Management.” [Sub required]
4) National: Writing in The Conversation, Nathan Meyers, a PhD Candidate in Sociology at UMass Amherst, says Trump’s DOGE campaign accelerates a 50-year trend of government privatization. “The privatization trend risks eroding democratic accountability and worsening racial and gender inequalities. That’s because, as my prior research finds, public sector unions uniquely shape American society by equalizing wages while increasing transparency and civic participation. Given that the public sector is highly unionized and disproportionately provides employment opportunities for women and Black workers, privatization risks undoing these gains. As Trump’s administration aggressively restructures federal agencies, these changes will likely proceed without public input, further entrenching private sector dominance. This stands to undermine government functioning and democratic accountability. While often framed as inevitable, the American public should know that privatization remains a policy choice—one that can be reversed.”
5) National: Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) and U.S. Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) have reintroduced bicameral legislation to ensure that “all of the more than 65,000 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees—including frontline Transportation Security Officers (TSOs)— are afforded the same worker rights, protections, and pay system afforded to most other federal workers. The legislation comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s move last week to cancel TSA workers’ current collective bargaining agreement.”
6) International/Canada: The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has joined with UNIFOR protesting the government’s plans to allow private investment in airports. “The union, which represents 18,500 flight attendants across Canada, echoed a statement put out by UNIFOR earlier this week. It warns that private investment in airports could result in ‘downward pressure on wages and working conditions for workers in the air transportation industry’ and states that investors will ‘always seek to cut labour costs and lower cleanliness and health and safety standards in order to increase profitability.’ ‘We don’t need the federal government finding new methods of profiteering in our airports, we need them stepping up to invest in making our airports safer and more efficient,’ says CUPE Airline Division President Wesley Lesosky.” Unifor represents 16,000 members across Canada in the aviation sector, “advocating for the Air Transportation Workers’ Charter of Rights.”
7) National: Writing in In These Times, author and public schools advocate Jennifer Berkshire analyzes The Strange Bedfellows Fighting School Vouchers in Texas. “As a recent study of public opposition to vouchers concluded, ‘overcoming legislative roadblocks’ turns out to have been the easy part. ‘No similar mechanism exists for overcoming opposition among the mass public.’ (…) Voters in these states joined a tradition, now 50 years long, of rejecting vouchers when given the chance. And in doing so they made clear that today’s rapid spread of ‘education freedom,’ particularly across the South, hasn’t been driven by voters but by state legislatures in concert with powerful national advocacy groups and billionaires for whom vouchers are a near obsession. (…) ‘I’ve never seen this level of grassroots conservative energy around an issue before in my life,’ says Suzanne Bellsnyder, a lifelong Republican who spent years working in state politics. A passionate voice for rural Texas, Bellsnyder, who lives 90 miles north of Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle, is in many ways a familiar anti-voucher voice. She fears that just as rural communities have lost businesses, hospitals, even roads, their schools are now threatened, meaning that the viability of towns like hers hangs in the balance. ‘Without public education, rural Texas is ‘toast.’”
8) National: Chaos and confusion reigns as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3 by Trump, The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay says. “‘The idea of having three individuals manage the work that was done by a hundred federal employees supported by thousands of contractors is ludicrous and not humanly possible,’ said Stephen Provasnik, a former deputy commissioner of NCES who retired early in January. ‘There is no way without a significant staff that NCES could keep up even a fraction of its previous workload.’ Even the new acting commissioner of education statistics, a congressionally mandated position, was terminated with everyone else on March 11 after just 15 days on the job, according to five former employees.” [Sub required]
Why is the right wing so hopped up about IES? Well perhaps this piece by The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss provides a clue:
“In another case of ideology über alles, pro-reform members of Congress went so far as to ban rigorous evaluation of Washington D.C.’s voucher program. In spring 2017, the Institute of Education Sciences, which is the independent research arm of the U.S. Education Department, released a study showing that on math standardized tests, D.C. students who used vouchers to attend private schools fell behind their peers who remained in public schools. The research was a randomized controlled trial considered the ‘gold standard’ experimental design. A week later, the Republican-led Congress approved a budget that included ‘a prohibition on the use of the experimental design evaluation method in any future federally funded studies of the D.C. voucher program.’ Given the overall record of charter schools, support in the general public and among minorities has been slipping.”
9) National: What’s going on with contractors who worked with the Education Department’s IES? Education Week has a deep dive. “At least 40 different organizations had agreements with the U.S. Department of Education’s research branch—the Institute of Education Sciences—abruptly terminated, according to an EdWeek Market Brief review of information released publicly by the Department of Government Efficiency. Organizations hit by the cuts include major players in the education research space, such as the American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences, Mathematica, and the Research Triangle Institute. Some of the agreements were created under mandates from Congress or in response to lawmakers’ requests—a fact acknowledged in their brief line-item descriptions included on the site created by the DOGE, a cost-cutting entity led by billionaire Elon Musk, whose work has been championed by President Donald Trump. Last month, the DOGE announced cuts worth millions of dollars to Department of Education contracts. The move was a significant step toward fulfilling President Donald Trump’s vow to dismantle, or at least greatly downsize, the longstanding federal education agency. A number of contracts that had been cut were added to the DOGE ‘wall of receipts’—a website it says catalogs some of the savings the actions have created. The site compiles cuts across the federal government, including education. It is one of many actions the executive branch has taken to reduce the education agency in recent weeks. Most recently, the Trump administration announced that it will impose massive layoffs to reduce department staff by about half. Terminations of the IES contracts are expected to be especially impactful in the K-12 marketplace, as some research organizations laid off staff members in the wake of the cuts. In addition, school districts rely on scientific evidence to choose high-quality educational products, and many vendors have sought to get their products’ research featured in the federal government’s online clearinghouse. EdWeek Market Brief compiled a list of all the Education Department contracts as of March 5 that the DOGE reported as having cancelled.” [Sub required]
10) National: Student loan borrowers on Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) react to Trump’s plans to limit relief. “Charles Heacock, 52, said he agrees that there’s room for reform across the government — but as a state government employee, he doesn’t think that relief for public servants should be on the chopping block. He has a $60,000 balance on the line. ‘I could go to a private company, a for-profit company, and probably make more money than doing what I do now, but I choose not to, because public service, for me, is what’s important,’ Heacock said.”
23 Senators blasted Trump for freezing the program. “In their letter to Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Wyden and Sanders emphasized, ‘At a time when Americans across the country are struggling to meet the costs of healthcare, food, housing, child care and other basic needs, it is unacceptable for the Trump Administration to take any action that will increase costs or make life harder for everyday Americans.’ In their letter, Wyden and Sanders demanded answers on behalf of the more than 12 million loan borrowers who rely on income-driven repayment (IDR) plans as a way to pay back their student loans and also pay other bills, like rent, groceries, and child care. Gutting IDR plans would lead to millions of borrowers having fewer options to repay student loans and potentially forcing them to stack up debt for years to come. This would be lose-lose for lenders and borrowers alike.”
11) Minnesota: For the first time in years, enrollment has risen at Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools. “‘I’m very, I don’t know, maybe emotional,’ Yusef Carrillo, a St. Paul school board member, said of the district’s numbers. ‘I’m very excited.’ A year ago, Minneapolis credited the arrival of the children of Latin American migrants as a stabilizing force for enrollment numbers then expected to be in greater decline. This year, the number of Hispanic students in the district is up 18%. Nationally, the climate has changed, with President Donald Trump pledging crackdowns on unauthorized immigrants, plus mass deportations. But Minneapolis has reaffirmed its commitment to immigrant families. ‘The district will continue to do everything in its power to protect and defend the students and staff in our care,’ a January school board resolution stated. As for this year’s enrollment boost, Minneapolis said in a statement: ‘Minneapolis Public Schools is excited to see data showing higher student placements at several of our schools. We have been working for many years to attract and retain as many students as we can.’”
12) Ohio: Football over kids? “Ohio lawmakers are debating on spending $600 million to help finance a new stadium for the Browns after Republican leadership called the same amount of money ‘unsustainable’ for public education. Despite Gov. Mike DeWine’s subtle pleas to not give taxpayer money to the multi-billionaire Haslam family, GOP legislative leaders have reacted warmly to the team that lost 14 games last season. (…) I asked Cleveland lawmakers how they felt about the proposal. Minority Leader Nickie Antonio (D-Lakewood) said that $600 million should be going to education. It’s insulting for lawmakers to be thinking about giving the money to billionaires while there are plenty more important problems, she and other lawmakers have said. And DeWine is worried about it, too. ‘The way the state has historically assisted these facilities means that they compete for dollars with education, mental health, and many other vitally important items in our budgets,’ the governor said. ‘We now have an opportunity to stop using our general fund dollars to build or renovate ballparks and stadiums.’”
13) National/Arizona: Public lands advocates worry that Trump/Musk DOGE cuts are a precursor to privatization. “‘It is entirely predictable that if you dismantle systems for responsibly managing public lands, causing a collapse in responsible land management, a case can and will be made to privatize those lands,’ said Ethan Aumack, the executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust. ‘Which would be catastrophic.’ Across the West, nonprofits, advocates and philanthropy groups that support public lands and the people who maintain them are warning that diminished operations at organizations including the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management could fuel calls to privatize the nation’s public lands. Their worries come as Trump makes dramatic cuts to the federal workforce with the help of Musk, the world’s richest man and the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. ‘When I look behind the veil, what I’m seeing is an attempt to make federal land management agency jobs even harder to fill, getting rid of people, and then being able to show that the agency is unable to care for these lands, and it would be better in the hands of private interests,’ said Matthew Nelson, the executive director of the Arizona Scenic Trail Association.”
14) National: Are we at risk of runaway global warming? Here’s Tim Lenton, the founding director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter and lead author of the 2008 paper that formally introduced the idea of tipping points within the Earth’s climate system: “The prospects for some kind of bad cascade, I see more as committing to a water world or redrawing coastlines. But if you tip the Atlantic overturning circulation, we know from Earth history, you tip the monsoons in West Africa and in India off, and that would be a catastrophe. So those are the genuine cases of connected or cascading tipping that are actually much more pertinent than runaway warming. The real question we should ask is whether we can rule runaway warming out—because it’s a really bad scenario. It’s been known for a long time, in the broadest sense, that you can create a runaway greenhouse effect, and that’s a really interesting problem to do with why Venus is uninhabitable today.”
15) California/National: The protection of California’s public lands is being threatened by federal policies, KQED’s California Report says. “When Sacramento and Washington, DC, are at odds, California has some ability to insulate itself. It can partially set its own agenda through state laws, agencies, and funding. But that’s not true in about half of the state because half of it is owned by the U.S. government in the form of public lands. In those parts of the state, federal policies apply.” [Audio, about 9 minutes]
16) North Carolina: Gov. Josh Stein has called for the state to sell $4 billion of bonds for school construction. “In North Carolina, general obligation bonds would need voter approval and Stein called for such a vote. ‘Too many of our schools are overcrowded or use trailers or have old, leaking roofs and broken heating and air conditioning,’ Stein said. The state’s students need ‘safe and well-built schools.’ Javaid Siddiqi, president and CEO of The Hunt Institute, said, ‘Gov. Stein’s proposal is a necessary step toward addressing North Carolina’s long-overdue school facility needs. With the average U.S. school building more than 40 years old, students and educators face outdated and inadequate learning environments across the country.’ The Hunt Institute, based in Cary, NC, conducts research, education, events, and hosts forums on education policy.” [Sub required]
17) Idaho: An Idaho nonprofit has found a way to finance workforce housing in a resort town. “It was a low-income housing project in Ketchum, Idaho, that sparked long-time resident Steve Shafran’s interest in workforce housing. The project, which wasn’t his, was completed last year, but Shafran realized it wouldn’t provide housing for teachers, firefighters and healthcare workers targeted, because their incomes were just high enough to price them out. Ketchum, next to the Sun Valley ski resort, is one of many mountain resort towns in the west grappling with a severe shortage of workforce housing, exacerbated by an influx of remote workers and second home purchases that began during the pandemic. Vacation home sales rose 16.4% in 2020, with the sale of second homes in what the National Association of Realtors called ‘vacation counties’ outpacing the market, according to a 2021 NAR report.”
18) National: Elon Musk and Trump are seeking to privatize and “dismantle” Social Security, Rep. John Larson tells Forbes. Watch the interview; about 30 minutes. Also, watch this: Ranking Dem Rips GOP Refusal to Probe Trump-Musk Push to Privatize Social Security. “It is “a sad morning, a very sad morning, when this committee, the oldest and most continuous in the Congress, neglects its responsibility and essentially holds this hearing today to block any further discussion,” Larson said with his arms crossed. ‘The men and women on this committee are good people—they’re honest and caring people—and that’s why I do not understand why you would relegate this committee to no longer being of significance and resort to saying you will do whatever Elon Musk and Donald Trump tell you to do,’ he continued, raising his voice. ‘Where’s the independence of the committee? Where’s the legislature? We’re an equal branch of government.’”
19) National: Sen. Dick Durbin has a choice question for the new U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi. “Now [if] the Attorney General doesn’t want to recuse herself from deciding whether to grant a contract to detain immigrants to her former client GEO Group, she just needs to check with a political appointee who reports to her. And if Todd Blanche does not want to recuse himself from a decision regarding his former client, President Trump, he just needs to check with a political appointee who reports to him.”
Private, for profit prison companies are expecting to rake it in from providing detention services to the government, The New York Times reports. “Damon Hininger, the chief executive of CoreCivic, which operates private prisons and immigrant detention centers, opened an investor call last month on a buoyant note. ‘I’ve worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career,’ he said, adding that the company was anticipating in the next several years ‘perhaps the most significant growth in our company’s history.’ CoreCivic, GEO Group and some smaller private prison companies are becoming a key cog in the Trump administration’s plan to hold and then deport vast numbers of undocumented immigrants. Already in the past week, CoreCivic and GEO have announced new contracts and executives say they are expecting more.”
20) National: Katya Schwenk has written a nearly 6,000 word must-read investigative piece for Jacobin that looks at the intersection of high tech and the future of imprisonment and monitoring in the United States, “The Ugly Battle for Control of a Prison-Tech Empire.”
Schwenk reports that “over the last decade, Smart Communications has emerged as a new pioneer in the ongoing privatization of prison services, a market that is constantly finding new ways to squeeze pennies out of incarcerated people and their families, one of the poorest demographics in the country. The $10 million yacht called Convict is a floating metaphor for the unchecked profits of the industry. In 2022, reporting from the Appeal revealed that Smart Communications was offering cruises in the Caribbean to sheriffs and jail officials who bought the company’s technology. At the time, Logan claimed that no such cruise had set sail. Yet a trove of court documents now reveals how Smart Communications has — over the course of a decade—wined and dined public officials to build its business. Company executives brought sheriffs to steakhouses and strip clubs in an effort to win contracts.
They offered them all-inclusive hotel stays, spa treatments, and booze cruises. Presiding over it all was Jon Logan, the company’s flashy and volatile CEO, who—all while hosting glamorous yacht parties in Miami—has gone to great lengths to keep the company in his own hands. His parents alleged that this included holding them at gunpoint while demanding his father turn over his company shares. The Lever’s account of Logan and Smart Communications is based on a review of hundreds of pages of court documents that span nearly two decades, internal company emails obtained by us, and interviews with multiple former company employees, including an employee who worked on the Convict. The Lever also spoke at length with Logan, who said he was being ‘publicly crucified over false information’ (including the alleged gun incident) and that his legal battles are being waged to protect the company.”
21) National: The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the nation’s largest federal employee union, is suing to block the Trump administration’s effort to revoke the collective bargaining rights of airport screeners. “The lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act’s prohibition on “arbitrary and capricious” decision-making, as well as breaching their contractual obligations under the 2024 collective bargaining agreement and in so doing, violating union members’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment. The union also brings a First Amendment claim, arguing that the Trump administration’s decision to revoke TSA screeners’ collective bargaining rights was in retaliation for the union’s other lawsuits against the executive branch, most notably their challenge of the mass firing of probationary workers across government. A federal judge on Thursday issued a preliminary injunction in that case, requiring agencies to reinstate tens of thousands of improperly terminated workers. (…) In a statement, AFGE National President Everett Kelley vowed to protect his members’ bargaining and free speech rights. ‘This attack on our members is not just an attack on AFGE or transportation security officers,’ he said. ‘It’s an assault on the rights of every American worker. Tearing up a legally negotiated union contract is unconstitutional, retaliatory, and will make the TSA experience worse for American travelers. These attempts by the administration to silence everyday workers across this country through retaliation and intimidation will not succeed.’”
Tim Shorrock says, “Wow. Organizing the TSA was a huge win for workers, AFGE & citizens who opposed privatization of airport security. I worked on the campaign.”
22) National: Will the Trump Administration Fast Track the Privatization of Medicare? “According to MedPAC, an independent, non-partisan agency that advises Congress about Medicare payment, the federal government pays insurers 20% more for Medicare Advantage enrollees than it pays for similar people in traditional Medicare, at a cost of $84 billion in 2025. To put the $84 billion in context, that’s more than Medicare paid physicians under the physician fee schedule to treat traditional Medicare patients in 2024. The higher Medicare spending for Medicare Advantage enrollees results in $13 billion in higher Medicare Part B premiums paid by Medicare beneficiaries, including those who are not in Medicare Advantage.”
23) National: Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician and scientist, and the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, has weighed in with a major retrospective on the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Mukherjee emphasizes the failures and continuing risks of privatized pandemic response. “Covid was a privatized pandemic. It is this technocratic, privatized model that is its lasting legacy and that will define our approach to the next pandemic. It solves some problems, but on balance it’s a recipe for disaster. There are some public goods that should never be privatized.”
24) National: Outrage mounts up over Trump’s intention to fire at least 76,000 employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Writing last week in Government Executive, Rachel E. Howard says the VA is not waste, it’s a lifeline. “What are these cuts targeted at? If not healthcare and research, then what? Other VA services like processing benefits claims? Job training? National cemetery upkeep? What’s clear is that a “Reduction in Force” would devastate services for over nine million veterans, striking at the mission of this vital institution while betraying the commitment to service members our country made when we first enlisted. I followed in the footsteps of my grandfathers, father, brother and uncles, and joined the military in 2005 at the age of 22. My 14 years as a combat medic in the Army National Guard included multiple national defense missions and deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. A 2012 I.E.D. blast in Helmand Province blew up my truck and injured all occupants, including me, bringing my deployment to an end. After 10 months of surgeries and recovery at Fort Belvoir and Walter Reed, I was left with traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder and permanent nerve damage to my feet and ankles. In the years following, frustrated by mounting medical bills, and, ironically, long wait times in the private health system, I transferred all my health care to the VA. The decision was life-changing. My care team at the VA saw me quickly, understood my military experiences, and had the know-how and resources to treat me.”
25) National: Merrill Goozner has written a compelling story about when a private hospital firm comes to town. “After honing its model in California nearly a decade ago, Prime went on an acquisition spree financed by selling its hospitals to a real estate investment trust, Alabama-based Medical Properties Trust (MPT). Under this private-equity model, Prime pays rent — a new burden that drained resources from ongoing operations. By 2018 MPT held $1.1 billion in what had previously been Prime assets, making Prime its second-largest renter after Steward Health Care. Steward, like Prime, financed hospital acquisitions by selling properties to MPT. Steward declared bankruptcy last May after it could no longer pay rent. Former Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, who collected $250 million in salary and bonuses from the company, was recently found in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before a Senate committee investigating the bankruptcy. Numerous studies have shown that patient experience and outcomes worsen after nonprofit hospitals are acquired by privately owned chains. They sometimes even shut down hospitals whose decline is hastened by sale-leaseback arrangements. (…) Given the looming possibility of massive cuts in federal support for Medicaid, this state [Illinois—ed.] can ill afford any private sector financial engineering that drains badly needed funds from already troubled institutions. ”
26) Missouri/National: Postal workers and their allies have mobilized to fight back against the possible privatization of the U.S. Postal Service. “Across the country, the staple light blue uniform is being traded for these red shirts, reading “fight like hell”. To match, a number of firm chants defend the USPS as it faces the potential threat of being dismantled and privatized. ‘The president mentioned some sort of a merger with a private sector. We are 100% opposed to any sort of privatization,’ says Brian Renfroe. Renfroe is the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers. He visits Biloxi from the association’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. As a Mississippi native, Renfroe knows that the predominantly rural state would be heavily affected by this change. The privatization has the potential to jeopardize nearly 8 million jobs related to the postal industry, decrease service to less densely populated areas, and raise shipping costs. ‘They have lived their entire life getting mail delivered 6 days a week. If even a part of the postal service is privatized that is going to end,’ Renfroe says. The NALC says 200,000 letter carriers deliver 376 million pieces of mail to nearly 169 million delivery points each day. This supports the $1.92 trillion mailing industry. (…) Hundreds of rallies like the one in Biloxi are expected to happen across the country on March 23.”
Meanwhile, the Revolving Door Project reports that Wall Street bankers are salivating over postal privatization. “Though Trump has yet to make anything official, Big Business is already giddy at getting its hands on USPS’ valuable assets. A leaked February 27 paper from Wells Fargo’s equity research team lays out in disturbing detail how Wall Street and corporate couriers could profit from a privatized Postal Service.”
The Guardian reports that “Trump’s potential plans for the USPS could threaten the agency’s rich legacy of Black employment, from which generations of Black families have secured wealth and benefits through service. “The postal service workforce is more diverse racially [and] ethnically than the labor force in this country as a whole,” said Brian Renfroe, the national president of the National Association of Letter Carriers. The gains in the post office with regards to diversity aren’t accidental. One reason for the high rate of Black employment at the postal office is because the USPS recruits veterans, a large percentage of whom are Black, said Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “They’re vetted and they’re trustworthy,” said Morrissey of veterans. ‘You don’t want somebody messing with mail. The consequences are harsh if somebody does that.’”
27) National: Running government “like a business” endangers crucial functions, says Kendra Copanas of St. Louis. “The call for government to be ‘run like a business’ is based on a dangerous mindset and misplaced admiration for the corporate sector. It has been part of a narrative that has repeated throughout U.S. history and seeks to destroy a federal government that promotes stability, equality and opportunity for all Americans. If President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE were really interested in efficiency, they would have brought auditors and worked with inspectors general and the government accountability office that is already in place to streamline government. Make no mistake: Privatizing essential government functions does not lead to better services, outcomes or savings for taxpayers. Instead, it increases wealth for the already-wealthy and expands inequality. It only benefits a select few at the expense of the many. We must recognize the distinct role of government and resist efforts to turn it into profit-driven entities. Our government is far from perfect, but destroying the foundation of a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ isn’t the answer.”
28) National: ACLU of Pennsylvania and the Education Law Center have sent guidance to Pennsylvania schools in response to U.S. Department of Education threats to cut funding over efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. “The letter makes clear that most programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools not only remain lawful, but that the elimination of these programs could be a violation of existing state and federal law and the First Amendment. The letter also notes that school curriculum is a matter of state and local, not federal, law. As a result, the threats from the Department of Education are mostly unenforceable. ‘If Pennsylvania school administrators were to cave to the Department of Education’s vague demand to end any programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, the chances of such a move ending in a costly nondiscrimination lawsuit are high,’ said Stephen Loney, senior supervising attorney at the ACLU of Pennsylvania.”
Want to hear from ground level what it’s like to pursue racial and gender justice as your full time job? Check out the Chronicle of Higher Education’s, Diversity Officers, Under Siege, Dig Their Heels In: At a Mass Convening, Feelings of Betrayal, Fear, and Courage. “‘They’re trying to make you afraid of fighting.’ Hill Harper, the actor, entrepreneur, and social-justice advocate, paused from his pacing to wipe his brow and lock eyes with members of the capacity crowd of around 1,000 college diversity, equity, and inclusion officers. The critics trying to shut down their work are following a playbook, Harper said during last week’s opening session of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education’s annual conference.
It’s time for those in the trenches to fight back, he said. ‘If you stay in your head and not in your heart, you’ll talk yourself out of this work.’ If anyone needed a wake-up message on this chilly morning in Chicago, Harper’s rapid-fire speech, punctuated by cheers and snaps from the audience, delivered the equivalent of a double shot of espresso. It wasn’t lost on anyone that fighting back carried far more risk to the meeting’s attendees than it did to activists outside academe. Over the past few years, as attacks on DEI have escalated, both in statehouses and the federal government, many of these administrators have gone from being respected members of presidents’ cabinets to feeling shunned and ostracized.” [Sub required]