HIGHLIGHTS

JUMP: EDUCATION | INFRASTRUCTURE | PUBLIC SERVICES | THE REST

First, the Good News

1) National: Protests are sweeping the nation against the possible privatization of USPS. Postal workers held rallies in Ohio (Lima and Cleveland), Des Moines, St. Louis, Santa Fe, Philadelphia, Indiana, Detroit, San Diego, San Franciscoand many other towns and cities. Mother Jones reports that “although other unions representing postal workers are also hosting protests across the nation,  employees and retirees were not the only people at the rally—I talked with Cindi, a New York resident not affiliated with USPS who showed up in solidarity. ‘The Postal Service is American. It’s a public good. It’s not here to make a profit and we all depend on it,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing like getting a letter in the mail—a real letter from somebody that you love.’”

2) National: Author and activist Jennifer Berkshire gave a terrific interview to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on Friday to discuss, among other things, the threat to public education and to eliminate the Department of Education. Berkshire says “the Department of Education provides 10% of education funding around the country, primarily to low-income schools and rural schools. And when you think about the real focus of the efforts of the Trump administration to weed out what they would call woke or DEI, this is really it. It’s anything that the government does to make the country more equal. That’s why they’re going straight at these programs, and it’s also why public education as an institution is so vulnerable right now.”  [Video, about 13 minutes].

3) National: The New York Times has published a major front page exposé by Eric Lipton (who has spent the past year writing about SpaceX and its work for the federal government) on how Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts. “The boost in federal spending for SpaceX will come in part as a result of actions by President Trump and Elon Musk’s allies and employees who hold government positions. Supporters say he has the best technology,” Lipton reports. “‘We will never know if SpaceX would authentically win competitions for these awards because all of the offices in government intended to prevent corruption and conflicts of interest have been beheaded or defunded,’ said Danielle Brian, the executive director of Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that tracks federal contracts.”

4) National: A new report from the State Innovation Exchange (SiX) outlines a half-dozen ways states can create a good jobs economy. The report, “How State Spending Can Create a Good Jobs Economy,” was written by Karla Walter, Senior Fellow of Inclusive Economy at the Center for American Progress with support from, among others, In the Public Interest’s Research and Policy Director Shahrzad Habibi. “State governments support millions of jobs across our economy by spending hundreds of billions of public dollars to purchase goods and services and grow local economies,” the report begins. “Yet jobs created through this spending too often pay poverty wages, have poor working conditions, or do little to ensure residents benefit.””

5) National/New Resource: From The New Yorker Radio Hour: “Across the federal government, the number of federal workers fired under Donald Trump and DOGE currently stands at over a hundred thousand. Some of those workers have turned to a website called We the Builders. It was created by federal workers associated with the U.S. Digital Service as a resource for employees who have lost their jobs, who are afraid of losing their jobs, or who have a whistleblower complaint.  The Radio Hour’s Adam Howard spoke with two of the site’s creators: Kate Green, who recently left the federal government for a job in the private sector, and a web developer who identifies himself as Milo—using a pseudonym, since he is still employed in the government.  ‘Both the beauty and the tragedy is that the work the government does is largely invisible,’ as Milo put it. ‘You don’t always know that it is USDA inspectors who are working in the slaughterhouses, who are making sure that work is being done in a safe and sanitary fashion … But they give a damn about making sure that food is safe. If that goes away, that’s not immediately visible to people. And they don’t necessarily know that these people have lost their jobs or that food is going to be less safe until people get hurt or worse. And so, we want to make sure that people start to understand what the cuts in these programs actually mean.”

6) National: Apprenticeships are bringing new workers to heritage industries, says The Hechinger Report. “Around the country, community colleges are stepping in to run apprenticeship programs for heritage industries, such as logging and aquaculture, which are too small to run. These partnerships help colleges expand the workforce development programs central to their mission. The partnerships also help keep small businesses in small industries alive by managing state and federal grants and providing the equipment, courses and staff to train workers.”

7) Idaho: Want to hear a story of how a big project developer and a local community who were at odds over a large single-family housing construction project came together to enthusiastically agree on how Nampa’s community concerns would be addressed, leading to strong community support at the city council meeting and a vote for unanimous approval? Listen to this episode of City Cast Boise. [Audio, about 20 minutes], and read this article, “Neighbors fought Nampa family’s planned development. Then they fell in love with it. How?” [Sub required].

8) Virginia: “Simple justice.” Alternet reports that “A Franklin County jury has awarded $750,000 in damages to two families who were evicted from a Smith Mountain Lake campground after the owner learned one of the family members was Black. The verdict marks the largest fair housing jury award ever secured by the Virginia attorney general’s office, according to a news release by Attorney General Jason Miyares. The case centered on Regina Turner, owner of Lazy Cove Campground, who had rented lakeside lots to families for decades. But in June 2020, she abruptly sought to evict two families after discovering that one of the husbands, Damien Smith, was Black. According to a complaint filed with the Virginia Fair Housing Board, which was first reported by The Washington Post, Turner told a tenant, ‘You didn’t tell me that your friend’s husband is Black… Had I known, I wouldn’t have rented the lot to them. I saw the son, but I figured everyone makes a mistake.’ Miyares hailed the jury’s decision as a critical victory against racial discrimination in fair housing.”

Education

9) National: What does the latest federal funding law (CR) mean for education? Education Week has an explainer [Sub required]. “‘I think it makes it easier for the administration to substitute their own priorities for funding when Congress doesn’t have a statement spelling out what it wants the administration to do,’” said Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a nonprofit advocacy group.” Other key points:

  • Programs without detailed line items could be vulnerable to Trump’s and Elon Musk’s spending cuts.
  • The events of the next few months could have big consequences for future education funding.
  • Districts Can’t Pay Teachers Promised Incentives After Trump Admin. Cuts Funding
  • Public schools in the District of Columbia were spared at the last minute.

10) National: President Trump has issued an executive order that seeks to abolish crucial library and museum service. “As the American Libraries magazine explains, ‘The president cannot fully eliminate IMLS without congressional approval, but his order takes every possible step in that direction. The order calls for the elimination of IMLS, by limiting budget requests from the agency to only the funds needed to shut it down. Otherwise, the administration, through its Office of Management and Budget, will “reject funding requests.’ Trump’s action is intended to cut off a financial lifeline to museums and libraries, already woefully underfunded. Seventy-five staff will also lose their jobs.”

11) National: Writing in The Nation, columnist Chris Lehmann reports on President Trump’s executive order seeking to move toward dismantling the Department of Education, with the aim of “‘Eliminating’ Public Education.” Among the effects was a hobbling of federal oversight of private colleges. “Speaking of educational grifts, one recent success story at the DOE prior to Trump’s return to office was to help rein in the predations of the for-profit college racket. The personnel cuts that the Trump White House has already instituted in the department have effectively wiped out its oversight of this fraud-infested sector. ‘There’s a rule—it’s called the 90-10 rule, under which these schools can get 90 percent of revenue from the government, and in their heyday, the larger for-profit universities got as much as $1 billion in Pell grants and other federal money,’ says Aaron Ament, president of the nonprofit advocacy group National Student Legal Defense Network. ‘In the action announced last week, they have effectively fired every employee at the Office of Student Aid who participated in the oversight of for-profit universities.’”

Writing in 2022, researcher and author Rick Perlstein said, “The education of children must always be somewhat painful for a parent: it does them out of a job. And for conservatives, this invitation for children to think for themselves will always be a virus. It will always feel like ‘indoctrination.’ It will always be some establishment conspiracy arrayed against them. That’s why I don’t think conservatives, at least some of them, will ever stop trying to burn down public education. Sometimes they even admit it: ‘I hope to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we don’t have public schools,’ Jerry Falwell said in 1979, though he denied it when confronted with the quote. ‘The churches will have taken them over again, and Christians will be running them.’”

12) Idaho: Idaho Education News reports that Idaho private schools—where cost is at a premium—have less racial diversity than their public counterparts. “At the Sun Valley Community School, for example, 86% of students were white in the 2021-2022 school year — as compared to 54% in the local Blaine County School District. There are similarly wide racial gaps in other large private schools, including three in the Treasure Valley: Cole Valley Christian Schools, Nampa Christian Schools, and the Foothills School of Arts and Sciences. Those figures are according to a new databasedeveloped by ProPublica that aims to shine a light on demographics in private schools across the United States.”

13) Idaho: Idaho Education News reports that a new report finds that Idaho’s public school funding fails to account for high-need students. “Idaho’s nonpartisan Office of Performance Evaluations (OPE) last week released its findings on K-12 district characteristics in a report sanctioned by the Legislature’s bipartisan Joint Legislative Oversight Committee. The report found that the biggest funding driver for public schools is district size, not student characteristics or needs. Idaho’s public school formula, for instance, only delivers about half of what’s needed for special education students, leading to an $82.2 million funding gap statewide, and increasing districts’ reliance on local taxpayers to make up the difference.” Read the OPE report.

14) Oklahoma/National: Writing in Vanity Fair, Linda K. Wertheimer has a deep dive on how Oklahoma’s superintendent set off a holy war in classrooms. “Teachers, parents, and pastors are mounting a mass resistance against Ryan Walters’s mandate requiring that public school students learn from the Bible,” Wertheimer reports. “Norman, a central Oklahoman city of about 130,000, is an epicenter of resistance to the Bible mandate that the state superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, announced last June. Opposition here has come from pastors, religion professors, students, parents, teachers, school board members, and the school district superintendent, among others. The prevailing philosophy among Norman residents, who are predominantly Christian, is that they do not want the state—and namely, Walters—mandating how children should be taught scriptures. They want their children to learn from holy books at home or in church.

15) Think Tanks: The Institute on Taxation and Education Policy (ITEP) has issued a report on How the Educational Choice for Children Act Would Use Tax Avoidance to Fuel School Privatization. “The Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 (ECCA) would ostensibly provide a tax break on charitable donations to organizations that give out private K-12 school vouchers. Most of the so-called ‘contributions,’ however, would be made by wealthy people solely for the tax savings, as those savings would typically be larger than their contributions. ITEP estimates that ECCA would spur $126 billion in contributions to private school voucher funds over the next 10 years but would cost the U.S. Treasury more than that—$134 billion—because the tax subsidies being paid out would exceed the contributions made to these funds. Most states would automatically provide additional tax breaks on top of those offered by the federal government, bringing the total loss to public budgets to over $136 billion. In effect, ECCA seeks to harness wealthy families’ interest in tax avoidance and personal profit as a means of bolstering private schools at the expense of public budgets.” [Full report]

Infrastructure

16) National/North Dakota: The Financial Times has a report on major free speech litigation over the clash over the Dakota Access Pipeline. “Aimed at preventing the construction of this 1,172-mile conduit transporting crude from the state’s rich Bakken oilfield to the Midwest, the protests lasted almost a year, from April 2016 to February 2017, and transformed this quiet town into a battleground over indigenous rights and environmental protections that made headlines around the world. While the case has been in the works for eight years, the trial is taking place at a moment of acute political sensitivity. Trump’s return to the White House has transformed the political landscape, emboldening the oil and gas sector while also, critics allege, eroding judicial independence and cracking down on dissent. The case is part of a renewed push by the oil industry to use legal systems to advance infrastructure projects and put opponents on the defensive. It follows recent high-profile litigation by ExxonMobil, which targeted activist investors and Democratic politicians, as well as new state laws aimed at stopping protests near pipelines.” [Sub required]

17) National: Sanai Rashid, metro editor of the Brown Daily Herald (Providence), has an overview of what Amtrak privatization would mean for nationwide rail travel. “Private railroad companies “make tens of billions of dollars in profit a year,” but often pay these margins to their shareholders, rather than investing in infrastructure, [Maddock Thomas ’26, a rail and transportation student researcher] explained. While Amtrak gets prioritized access to railroad tracks as a federal entity, the lack of development and funds private rail companies put into their rail system affects Amtrak too.

Amtrak not owning its own infrastructure often causes it to face delays for freight trains and results in the company not receiving the amount of funding that other national rail services do. But, while Thomas does not think privatization is a solution to Amtrak issues, he does not see it as a real threat. The idea of privatizing Amtrak “comes around fairly often, but it’s not super politically viable,” Thomas said, noting that the rail system is “something that a lot of Americans, especially in red states, use, because we have fewer alternative options, especially outside of big cities.” Still, Thomas believes the transportation sector in the country deserves more attention and funding.”

In an editorial, the Baltimore Sun says privatizing Amtrak won’t put U.S. high-speed rail on track. “Now, let’s be clear. China has a great high-speed rail service, its passenger trains are regarded as the fastest in the world with the latest version, the CR450, expected to operate at 248 miles per hour. Amtrak Acela trains peak at about 150 mph, which is pretty pokey by world standards. But here’s something the fastest passenger train systems from the Shanghai Maglev to Germany’s Intercity Express (ICE) and France’s Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) have in common: They are state-owned, not operated strictly as for-profit companies. We’ll admit that Amtrak is in a “sad situation” but that’s because the United States has chronically under-invested in rail—often with the claim that Americans prefer to travel by car or plane, a self-fulfilling prophecy when energy-efficient passenger rail isn’t a readily available, affordable, comfortable and fast alternative. In Baltimore where it takes an awfully long time to replace an aging rail tunnel, we understand this all too well. Privatization only makes it tougher to expand your network, compete with freight lines for right-of-way, design and build better train sets and on and on. It is estimated that China has invested $1.5 trillion in high-speed rail over the last quarter-century. Last year, Amtrak’s operating revenue was $3.6 billion.”  [Sub required]

18) National: Why are public lands important? ADEC ESG, an “impact investing company,” has a summary:

  • Recreation and health
  • Wildlife and habitat management and conservation
  • Cultural or historical preservation
  • Economic benefits
  • Opportunities for public-private partnerships

Inside Climate News reports that public opposition to the privatization of public land is growing. “‘I’m shocked to learn that after decades of work to protect Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, the White House is attempting to alter it without talking to anyone in the community,’ Casey Glaubman, Mount Shasta city councilmember and Mount Shasta Avalanche Center executive director, said in a statement. ‘This move jeopardizes the area’s exceptional outdoor recreational opportunities and crucially important reserves of fresh, clean water. Tribal nations, local elected officials, business leaders, and local sportsmen have all strongly supported the designation and were engaged in a years-long process to make it happen. Everyone in our community agrees that this landscape deserves permanent protection.’”

19) National: KPFA’s Against the Grain program delves into the issue of racism and property taxes. “While the wealthy disproportionately own real estate in the U.S., in many locales the properties of low income homeowners and especially homeowners of color are assessed and taxed at levels higher than their actual market value. On average, African Americans and Latinos pay more than ten percent higher taxes than whites for similar properties. Property law scholar Bernadette Atuahene discusses what she calls predatory governance, in which states and municipalities increase their coffers by unfairly taxing or fining people of color. Resources: Bernadette Atuahene, Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America Little, Brown and Company, 2025 University of Chicago’s Property Tax Fairness Portal Detroit’s Coalition for Property Tax Justice.” [Audio, about 27 minutes]

20) Idaho: City Cast Boise had a program discussing the threats to Idaho’s public lands and the response. [Audio, about 24 minutes]

21) Utah/National: A massive art installation protesting federal and Utah state public land policy has appeared on Corona Arch. “I’m really concerned about the ongoing push for state ownership of federal lands,” said Zeppelin Zeerip. “We’ve seen throughout history that when states own public lands, they are more apt to sell them off and privatize them. In the video, Zeerip and his advocacy group refer specifically to Utah’s recent failed Supreme Court lawsuit associated with the ‘Stand for Our Land’ campaign that sought to transfer control of 18 million acres of federal land over to the state. Fourteen other states signed amicus briefs in support of the suit, and while it has not yet been refiled at a lower court, decision makers have suggested they may do so in the future. There are no laws explicitly prohibiting this protest on BLM lands, which is where Corona Arch is, but any damage or defacement could result in prosecution.”

Public Services

22) National: Bloomberg columnist Patricia Lopez says DOGE’s Real Goal Is Privatizing Government. “It shouldn’t shock anyone that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently revealed a larger agenda that sheds light on the Trump administration’s seemingly indiscriminate cuts to federal workers and agencies. President Donald Trump’s overarching goal, Bessent said, is to ‘reprivatize the economy.’ That casts Elon Musk and his unofficial Department of Government Efficiency in a new light — as the vehicle for slashing agency functions to a skeletal state and outsourcing the rest to what would be a much more lightly regulated private sector. Musk himself at a recent Morgan Stanley conference suggested that the government privatize ‘as much as possible.’ The DOGE cuts so far are not enough to make a dent in the national debt or offset Trump’s proposed tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor do they make government more efficient, which would require a thoughtful assessment. There is no evidence that the ‘fraud, waste and abuse’ Musk claims to have discovered amount to anything more than spending with which he and Trump disagree. But as a means to push the nation closer to mass privatization of services? Now the cuts make sense. There is little need of a robust National Weather Service if forecasting is going to be farmed out to private companies. Ditto for the U.S. Postal Service, which Trump has long wanted to privatize despite the fact that it is protected by the Constitution.” Citing ITPI Executive Director Donald Cohen’s book, The Privatization of Everything, Lopez gets to the heart of the matter. “The problem with privatization is that it seldom works. Private companies operate under different parameters from the federal government. Their primary goal is to maximize profit.” [Sub required]

23) National: Democracy Now! reports on the GEO Group: ICE Issues New Contract for GEO Group as NLRB Drops Detainee Abuse Case Against the Prison Co. “The private, for-profit company GEO Group has announced a new contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement that will see the reopening of a shuttered Michigan prison to start detaining immigrants and asylum seekers. The North Lake facility in Baldwin would become one of the largest ICE jails in the country, with a capacity of at least 1,800 people. North Lake closed in 2022 as part of President Biden’s executive order to end the use of private prisons by the federal government. Detention Watch Network said in a statement, ‘The perverse financial incentives are glaring as GEO Group stands to generate in excess of $70 million in annualized revenue from North Lake, at the expense of people’s lives.’ GEO Group’s stock value has soared since Trump returned to office. This comes as the National Labor Relations Board has dropped a case accusing GEO Group of retaliating against immigrant detainees who protested over low pay and dangerous working conditions. Detainees are paid as little as $1 a day for their labor.”

ProPublica reports that “despite its soaring fortunes, the $4 billion company continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live. At the 1,575-bed detention center GEO runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, detainees once prepared meals, washed laundry and scrubbed toilets, doing jobs that would otherwise require 85 full-time employees, the company estimated. The state’s minimum wage at the time was $11 an hour. (It’s now $16.66.) In 2017, Washington sued GEO to enforce it, and in October 2021 a federal jury ruled unanimously in the state’s favor. This year, GEO and Washington are back in court—for a third time—as the company tries to reverse the earlier decision that sided with the state. GEO has brought in contract cleaners at the Tacoma facility while the case plays out, keeping detainees there from paid work and from having a way to earn commissary money.”

24) National: Finally saying the quiet part out loud. Billionaire Wall Street private equity CEO Larry Fink wants to partly privatize Social Security. The last time this was seriously pushed, Forbes reports, “Americans were unconvinced that turning a guaranteed benefit into a market gamble was worth it. Critics warned that diverting payroll taxes to Wall Street could force benefit cuts or balloon the deficit to pay current retirees. Spooked by the risks, the public balked – and since 2005, the notion of privatizing Social Security has been essentially political poison.”

25) National: “Move fast and break things” comes to the mortgage market. Preparing to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage giants, despite widespread warnings, the Trump administration has shaken up the leadership of the institutions. “On Monday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency overhauled the boards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two national mortgage behemoths that are expected to exit government control during President Donald Trump’s second term. The sudden shake-up installed FHFA Director Bill Pulte as chairman of the two companies and fired the majority of their existing board members, shrinking both boards in the process. Pulte also added new board members, including Christopher Stanley, a SpaceX engineer who’s also part of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service effort to cut spending. (Stanley resigned from the board on Tuesday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.) The moves didn’t usher in rapid changes, and the companies were already under government control since the housing meltdown of 2008. But the shift did mark a notable kickoff in the highly anticipated showdown over Fannie and Freddie’s fates. Stanley’s role also temporarily inserted DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, within the mortgage industry’s top tier, where housing experts say he could have pushed to access personal information about borrowers and others. The stakes are high because the multibillion-dollar firms are essential to the funding of 30-year mortgages and together guarantee about half of existing home loans.”

26) National: One of the backstops of responsible contracting in government is under attack. Will this lead to more bloated Tech Contracts? “Earlier this month, all of the employees at 18F, a unit of government technologists under the General Services Administration, awoke to a surprise. The entire department — which helps build, buy, and share technological products across government agencies — discovered they’d been placed on administrative leave. 18F, named after its headquarters at 18th and F Street, plays crucial roles across the federal bureaucracy: It’s the team behind the IRS free tax filing system. It launched in 2014 under the Obama administration, emerging from the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which sought to bring more “technologists” into the federal government. Following the disastrous implementation of healthcare.gov, 18F became a permanent home for government digital services.”

27) National: Government Executive reports that the Trump administration is appealing a court order blocking the firing of members of independent government boards. The ruling, by a three-judge panel, “reinstated ousted Biden appointees to the Merit Systems Protection Board and National Labor Relations Board in a case that ultimately seems likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

The judges were respectively appointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Earlier this month, the trio allowed for Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger to be removed while the court heard the Trump administration’s appeal of a similar district judge ruling that blocked Trump’s firing of the special counsel. Following that decision, Dellinger decided to drop his lawsuit. Trump on Feb. 10 attempted to fire MSPB board member Cathy Harris, whose term expires in 2028. Harris represents one-third of the federal employee appeals board that has experienced a surge in cases as a result of the president’s mass firings and layoffs of civil servants. A district judge on March 4 stopped the removal, agreeing that the president can only remove an MSPB member for ‘inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.’”

28) Hawaii/Indiana/National: Veterans and their families and neighbors are speaking out against cuts to federal support for them, which could have devastating effects, especially in the area of mental health and patient privacy. “Dr. Kedson said clinicians have warned that the orders compromise patient privacy, but he has seen little response from the agency’s leadership. ‘They’re doing it because these are the marching orders coming out of the current administration,’ he said. ‘People are trying to make something that is really untenable work.’ Dr. Lynn F. Bufka, head of practice at the American Psychological Association, said the ‘longstanding presumed practice for the delivery of psychotherapy’ requires a private location, like a room with a door and soundproofing outside the room.” These cuts are taking place against a background of intensified privatization of the VA.

The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports that “dozens of veterans, Department of Veterans Affairs employees and community members gathered Friday in front of the state Capitol to protest cuts by the administration of President Donald Trump. The VA has laid off more than 1, 000 workers since Trump took office and has plans to lay off 80, 000 this summer. (…) A study of 2003 recruiting data by the Heritage Foundation found Pacific Islander—including Native Hawaiians—joined the Army at a rate 249% higher than that of other ethnic groups. But the places they call home have long been underserved. Hawaii veterans routinely travel long distances to get services, sometimes traveling inter­island for appointments, and have contended with long wait times. Veterans in Guam, CNMI and American Samoa have even more hurdles to accessing care and benefits.”

Writing in the Indianapolis Star, Dr. Raja Ramaswamy says “As someone who has worked within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care system in Indianapolis, I have seen firsthand the dedication of the medical professionals who serve our veterans. I have also seen the immense challenges they face, including staffing shortages, long wait times and an ever-growing demand for care. Now, with the decision to slash 80,000 jobs from the VA, those challenges will worsen. Indiana’s 400,000 veterans will pay the price.”

29) New York: Déjà vu all over again? More than a decade ago, the so-called CityTime irresponsible contracting scandal rocked the world of the New York City municipal IT system (questions hang over the state too). Writing in New York Focus, Zachary Groz explains How Eric Adams’s MyCity Portal Became a $100 Million Question Mark. “The mayor enlisted an army of contractors to build a one-stop benefits platform. Two years and $100 million later, the website is a skeleton of what it was supposed to be. The project, called MyCity, began with a splashy announcement—and then proceeded largely in secrecy, using an army of dozens of private contractors and resisting attempts at oversight. The project has no public roadmap for buildout or completion, a runaway budget, and a trail of missed deadlines. Its most-touted functionality so far is a child care subsidy portal—but child care providers and advocates have told New York Focus and testified to the City Council that it mostly hasn’t been helpful. And as money for MyCity continues to pour in, funding for the vouchers themselves is set to dry up. Meanwhile, the agency behind the project has been given access to troves of sensitive data pulled from four of the city’s biggest agencies. That’s core to its primary function as a one-stop shop to manage benefits — but the agency’s leaders have speculated that it could also be used to track and make predictions about users, modify their benefits, offer them incentives based on behavior, and automate services using artificial intelligence. After an oversight hearing late last year went nowhere, City Council members are calling for the agency to be audited.” 

30) Upcoming Event: The Columbia Business School will be hosting a book talk on April 25 on The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits. “Join us to celebrate the release of The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits, the highly anticipated book by Bianca Tylek and Worth Rises, a non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to dismantling the prison industry and ending the exploitation of those it touches. Based on years of research by Worth Rises, The Prison Industry maps the range of ways in which private corporations, often with their government partners, profit off of incarceration. Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia Journalism School and staff writer at The New Yorker, will host a conversation with Worth Rises Executive Director, Bianca Tylek, and U.S. Prisons Program Director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Johnny Perez. Their conversation will offer a deep dive into the complex dynamics of the prison industry, the false ethics of carceral capitalism, and their far-reaching consequences on communities. Attendees will receive a free copy of The Prison Industry, and all guests are invited for continued conversation in a reception to follow the panel event. Event Speakers:  Jelani Cobb, Dean, Columbia Journalism School and staff writer, The New Yorker (Moderator);  Bianca Tylek, Executive Director, Worth Rises;  Johnny Perez, Director, U.S. Prisons Program, National Religious Campaign Against Torture.” [Register here]

All the Rest

31) National: Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica “have obtained a draft version of a proposed lawsuit being floated to attorneys general in several states, revealing new details about who’s involved and their efforts to advance legal arguments [for calling a national constitutional convention—ed.] that liberal and conservative legal scholars alike have criticized, calling them ‘wild,’ ‘completely illegitimate’ and ‘deeply flawed.’ (…) “They realize they will never get to 34 honestly now, so they are talking about a new math,” said Nancy MacLean, a historian whose book “Democracy in Chains” discusses the dangers of a convention. Some convention opponents, like Super, refer to this as the “fuzzy math” theory.”

32) National: Writing in Sludge, Donald Shaw says, “A surge of U.S. House members have recently snapped up shares in Palantir Technologies, a data analytics firm with deep ties to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, just as it’s poised to benefit from the administration’s plans to outsource and privatize much of the federal government. Congressional transaction filings reveal a striking uptick: lawmakers with direct influence over defense and national security—sectors where Palantir rakes in hundreds of millions in contracts—are suddenly betting on its stock. Records from the Capitol Trades website show that prior to Trump’s inauguration, only one lawmaker reported buying Palantir stock in the previous three years. Since January 20, however, at least five members have acquired shares. Palantir, co-founded by key Trump ally and Vice President J.D. Vance mentor Peter Thiel, relies on U.S. government contracts for more than half of its revenue.” [Sub required]

33) National: Erik Prince, brother of former pro-privatization education secretary Betsy DeVos, wants to privatize Trump’s deportation program. “Prince is the most famous mercenary of the contemporary era and the founder of the now defunct private military company Blackwater. For a time, it was a prolific privateer in the “war on terror”, racking up millions in US government contracts by providing soldiers of fortune to the CIA, Pentagon and beyond. Now he is a central figure among a web of other contractors trying to sell Trump advisers on a $25bn deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants. In an appearance on NewsNation, he immediately tried to temper that his plan had any traction. ‘No indications, so far,’ said Prince about a federal contract materializing. ‘Eventually if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector.’”

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