HIGHLIGHTS
JUMP: EDUCATION | INFRASTRUCTURE | PUBLIC SERVICES | THE REST
Above image: See item #24
First, the Good News
1) National: State attorneys general are suing “to stop the dismantling of three federal agencies that provide services and funding supporting public libraries and museums, workers, and minority-owned businesses nationwide. In March, the Trump administration issued an Executive Order that would dismantle federal agencies created by Congress that collectively provide hundreds of millions of dollars for programs in every state. As a result of this Executive Order, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) – one of the targeted agencies—has placed almost its entire staff on administrative leave and will cut hundreds of grants for state libraries and museums. The lawsuit filed by Attorney General Frey and the coalition seeks to stop the targeted destruction of the IMLS and two other agencies targeted in the administration’s EO that millions of Americans rely on, especially those in underserved communities.”
2) National: In the Public Interest’s Jeff Hagan pushes back against “decommission creep—when the war against the federal government comes for the National Park Service.” The sign says, “As of April 2, the following restrooms are closed until further notice.” Hagan writes, “Defunding USAID, which has few constituencies to fight for it, carried little political risk. But the National Park Service is the most popular federal agency with the public, and the Cuyahoga Valley park has enjoyed a half-century of bipartisan support. But as of yesterday, it has three fewer restrooms. With DOGE on a binge to sell off public lands and slash services, who knows where the cuts will end? This could be the beginning of a trial period to see how far DOGE can go before the public pushes back. But anyone who, with a sense of urgency, has walked a mile or biked a few to get to a restroom knows the meaning of a stress test. Musk and DOGE may find out they’ve picked the wrong people to, well, piss off.”
It seems that at least some in the administration are getting the message of public disgust. “Despite staffing cuts, a funding freeze and low morale plaguing national parks across the county, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order Thursday hindering the ability of individual parks to limit or reduce their hours – and park advocates are not happy. The order decrees that parks “remain open and accessible” by requiring individual parks to consult with the director of the National Park Service and the assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks before enacting any closures or reductions to operating hours and visitor services, including trails and campgrounds. It comes on the heels of individual parks implementing changes as a result of the mass layoffs and hiring freezes enforced by the Trump administration this year: Workforce shortages caused Arches National Park to close its famous Fiery Furnace hike, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks to cancel the ranger program and limit visitor center hours, and Yosemite National Park to temporarily delay its coveted summer campsite reservation system, to name only a few examples.”
3) National: Researcher Brett Heinz has written a terrific piece, “Rule by Contractor,” in The American Prospect, on the role of contractors in determining government priorities and policy. “DOGE is not about waste and efficiency—it’s about privatization,” writes Heinz. “One important aspect of this strategy has gone largely unexamined: the elevation of government contractors like Musk into government policymakers. Musk has acquired much of his tremendous wealth from the government he is now dismantling. Tesla Motors relied on significant support from the Department of Energy, which was criticized as government waste by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. SpaceX continues to receive billions of dollars each year in contract awards from NASA and the Defense Department, representing one of the company’s largest streams of income. Overall, Musk’s business ventures have benefited from more than $38 billion in government support, not including a new contract from the Federal Aviation Administration to upgrade its information technology systems…
“Unlike a business, a government has responsibility for the well-being of its citizens. Arbitrarily firing thousands of workers to save a few pennies might pass as wisdom when running a website, but it has disastrous results for government. DOGE’s current trajectory would paralyze democratic governance, leaving space for private contractors to fill the void and charge more money for worse work. When the man in charge stands to benefit from this outcome, one cannot help but ask if that was the point all along.”
4) California/National: Capital & Main reports that “a California high school transgender athlete was recently thrown into the national spotlight after the president of a nearby school board doxxed her. Cerise Castle spoke to residents of Jurupa Valley, where Trump won by a slim majority in November, and many of them have united in support of AB Hernandez. (…) Nereyda Hernandez said she wished the governor had stopped the conversation when her daughter was mentioned. Jurupa Valley City Councilmember Carmona agreed. ‘Bringing in a minor, a minor of color into this worldwide debate or discussion … is a major challenge and it’s problematic,’ Carmona said. ‘We have a family that’s been harassed and attacked by extremists on one side targeting a child.’ Newsom’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the Hernandez family’s concerns.”
5) New York/National: The New York Times reports that “The New York State Education Department on Friday issued a defiant response to the Trump administration’s threats to pull federal funding from public schools over certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a remarkable departure from the conciliatory approach of other institutions in recent weeks. Daniel Morton-Bentley, the deputy commissioner for legal affairs at the state education agency in New York, wrote in a letter to federal education officials that ‘we understand that the current administration seeks to censor anything it deems “diversity, equity & inclusion.” But there are no federal or state laws prohibiting the principles of D.E.I.,’ Mr. Morton-Bentley wrote, adding that the federal government has not defined what practices it believes violate civil rights protections. The stern letter was sent one day after the federal government issued a memo to education officials across the nation, asking them to confirm the elimination of all programs it argues unfairly promote diversity, equity and inclusion.”
The Times reports that the Trump administration letter “presents the clearest threat yet to the country’s largest source of federal funding for K-12 schools—Title I, which supports low-income students. (Federal dollars account for about 8 percent of total K-12 education funding.)” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading Black studies and legal scholar, “said the administration was reaching well beyond established legal precedents, and argued that schools should not rush to accept the administration’s interpretation that civil rights law allows curriculum restrictions. She warned against what she called ‘anticipatory obedience—the idea we are going to give more than we are being asked to because we want to be safe.”
Jennifer Berkshire, a prominent public education advocate, says, “Would be really helpful to know what is now banned for school districts. Anything focused on closing the achievement gap? Equity focused funding? Inclusion for special ed students? (…) I think the Trump Department of Education has a much broader definition of what’s banned than people realize. Basically anything that tries to equalize outcomes for students is now off the table. And since that is why we have public schools you can see why we might have a problem.”
6) Texas: Legislation creating a statewide emergency communication system has advanced in the Texas House. The bills, filed by Ken King, cover separate issues. “However, both were filed in response to the devastating wildfires last year that engulfed the Texas Panhandle. More than 1 million acres burned, 15,000 head of cattle and three people died. House Bill 13 would create the Texas Interoperability Council, which would be tasked with creating and coordinating the implementation of a statewide plan for the use of emergency communication. The council would set up a network that connects all first responders and state agencies. They would also administer a grant program to help local governments purchase the equipment and construct the infrastructure needed to connect to that system.”
7) Wisconsin: The Daily Cardinal (University of Wisconsin–Madison) reports that “Madison immigrant organizations are taking extra steps to protect their clients who are increasingly concerned about their legal rights in the wake of recent federal and state action targeting undocumented immigrants. (…) he Catholic Multicultural Center provides several public services to South Central Wisconsin, including food pantries, employment assistance and legal aid. Laura Green, CMC grants and communications coordinator, told The Daily Cardinal that these services are predominantly used by the immigrant community in the Madison area. One of their services specifically provides affordable legal services to low-income immigrants and refugees. “Eighty percent of the people using [the food pantry] are immigrants… we’ve had times where about 90% of the people in our employment search assistance office are immigrants,” she said. Green said demand has always been high for legal services in the area, but it spiked around President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.”
8) National: Former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has criticized the Trump administration’s effort to gut the U.S. Department of Education. “In the weeks since Trump took office, his administration has cut the department’s staff in half and overhauled much of its work. Cardona, who was education secretary under President Joe Biden, says he believes the effort is a ‘systematic dismantling of public education in an effort to privatize K-12 education.’ ‘Unfortunately, if you privatize it—and you monetize a public good—you’re going to have a system of winners and losers,’ he said. ‘And the gaps are going to be exacerbated.’ Running parallel to privatization, Cardona said, is a federal push by the Trump administration to impose its will on classrooms.” On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed Trump a victory, “allowing the Department of Education to temporarily freeze millions of dollars in grants intended to help states combat K-12 teacher shortages while a legal battle over the money plays out.”
9) National: “Under Trump, homeschool statistics are disappearing,” according to The Hechinger Report. “The data collection was nearly finished and ready to be released to the public, but in February, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) terminated the contract for this data collection, which is part of the National Household Education Survey, along with 88 other education contracts. Then in March, the federal statisticians who oversee the data collection and could review the final figures were fired along with almost everyone else at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). As things stand now, this federal homeschool data is unlikely to ever be released.”
10) National: A major organization representing private schools is backing off from a two-decade commitment to discussing diversity. “The National Association of Independent Schools said it would reassess two of its diversity conferences ‘given the rapidly evolving political and legal landscape.’ (…) The announcement from the National Association of Independent Schools was made on Thursday as the Trump administration released guidance threatening to pull federal funding from public schools if they used diversity, equity and inclusion programs to “advantage one’s race over another.” It came as K-12 schools have generally been less inclined than universities during the past two months to change their practices in response to warnings from Washington.”
11) California/National/Think Tanks: Partners for Dignity & Rights have released a new report, Community Schools & Co-governance: Lessons from Los Angeles and San Diego. “In the report we look at community schools as powerful examples of co-governance, where community and government work together to develop and implement policy. Community schools are public schools that include collaborative leadership and active family and community engagement while working to expand learning opportunities and wraparound services for their students. In both LA and San Diego, the community schools initiatives have centered collaborative decision-making between multiple stakeholders, including the district, teachers, students, families, administrators and local community grassroots organizations, jettisoning the traditional top-down approach to decision making, and using the on-the-ground resources and knowledge of the entire community to strengthen their schools.”
12) Think Tanks/National: An organization that appears to support the Administration’s anti-DEI efforts is worried that the Trump administration’s rules for its crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) may be legally void for vagueness. Writing on the website of the Capital Research Center, which studies “unions, environmentalist groups, and a wide variety of nonprofit and activist organizations,” Kali Fontanilla says “the National Education Association (NEA), in collaboration with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s Department of Education on March 5 over a Dear Colleague letter that threatens funding cuts for public schools continuing DEI practices. In response, NEA President Becky Pringle urged the court to ‘block the Department of Education from enforcing this harmful and vague directive and protect students from politically motivated attacks that stifle speech and critical lessons’ (emphasis added). Similarly, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teachers union, is also suing the administration for the same reasons. AFT President Randi Weingarten called the administration’s directive a ‘vague and clearly unconstitutional memo’ and a “grave attack on students, our profession, and knowledge itself” (emphasis added). Notice the pattern? Both lawsuits hinge on the argument that the directive is too vague. And that’s precisely how they will win unless it’s fixed.”
13) National/International: The big beasts of private capital markets, like BlackRock, are quietly taking over public infrastructure and services, the Financial Times reports. “The fruits of Fink’s dealmaking are already being seen: the company earlier this year led a $22.8bn deal to buy 43 ports around the world, including two politically sensitive operations on both sides of the Panama Canal. ‘Assets that will define the future—data centres, ports, power grids, the world’s fastest growing private companies—aren’t available to most investors,’ he wrote. ‘They’re in private markets, locked behind high walls, with gates that open only for the wealthiest or largest market participants.’ Fink conceded that “private markets have been among the most opaque corners of finance”, with fundamental questions over how private investments are valued. It is a point that has concerned regulators, particularly after valuations in several high-profile deals have collapsed unexpectedly, hitting private credit and private equity funds.” [Sub required]
14) National: Fortune reports that “hundreds of federal buildings, some of them historic, are on the auction block as part of DOGE’s effort to privatize everything possible. (…) In the worst-case scenario, the feds are setting themselves up to repeat the mistake the city of Chicago made in the Great Recession when it sold off rights to its parking meters to private investors in a move that was “a disaster,” according to three experts who brought it up, unprompted, as an example of how this type of deal can fail. In the 2008 sale, Chicago received just under $1.2 billion in exchange for 75 years of revenue from its parking meters. Investors raised parking rates soon after the deal, more than doubling them in some cases to $6.50 an hour. That allowed them to recoup the purchase price in just 15 years—with 60 more years left to collect profits. The city lost out on a reliable revenue stream and gave up control of a portion of its own infrastructure. ‘They got hosed,’ said Donald Cohen, author of The Privatization of Everything.”
15) National/International: What effects will the Trump administration’s massive increase in tariffs have on infrastructure investment and privatization? They can potentially lead to increased costs to cover foreign inputs of materials and services; impact the bidding process, risk assessment and mitigation strategies in “public-private partnerships.” To the extent foreign finance is involved in deals and projects, this could lessen competition and reduce the pool of bidders and contractors. They may also create major problems for fixed cost deals and projects, whose contracts would have to be renegotiated in an inflationary environment; it will also reduce the impact that Bipartisan Infrastructure Act (IIJA) funding and financing will have on infrastructure investment (e.g., ATIIP). They will also complicate value-for-money deals.
16) National: The recent intensive focus on the potential demands for electricity infrastructure to service data centers supplying increased demand from artificial intelligence—which had the potential to suck up significant regular public power needs—may be waning. Bloomberg reports that “Microsoft Corp. has pulled back on data center projects around the world, suggesting the company is taking a harder look at its plans to build the server farms powering artificial intelligence and the cloud. The software company has recently halted talks for, or delayed development of, sites in Indonesia, the UK, Australia, Illinois, North Dakota and Wisconsin, according to people familiar with the situation. (…) It’s hard to know how much of the company’s data center pullback reflects expectations of diminished demand versus temporary construction challenges, such as shortages of power and building materials. Some investors have interpreted signs of retrenchment as an indication that projected purchases of AI services don’t justify Microsoft’s massive outlays on server farms.” [Sub required]
17) Arizona: “An alleged fraudulent scheme involving a sports complex has put due diligence in a spotlight,” The Bond Buyer reports. The use of public financing to partially back private sports infrastructure has been controversial. “.According to the SEC’s complaint, the bonds were issued for the benefit of Legacy Cares, an Arizona nonprofit corporation, in August 2020 and June 2021. Legacy Cares issued the bonds via the Arizona Industrial Development Authority, a conduit issuer. Both the $250.8 million of bonds issued in 2020 and the $33 million of bonds issued in 2021 were revenue bonds, which meant that the cash needed to pay interest and principal back to the bondholders was to be from revenue generated by the sports complex, the complaint said. While the limited offering memorandum for the 2020 bonds included financial projections that anticipated revenue as being multiple times the amount necessary to cover the payments to investors, the financial projections “were false and misleading,” the SEC’s complaint said.” [Sub required]
18) Florida: A state Senate bill aims to restore public beach access, overturning a 2018 privatization law. “Private beaches may become a thing of the past in Florida soon. (…) Some local lawmakers say privatizing beaches puts a damper on tourism and hurts local economies… ‘Our rental rates are down 10%, and that may not sound like a lot, but when you’re talking about our county budget, it sounds like a whole lot,’ Anderson said. ‘This is an opportunity to not allow the community to lose 10% of their revenue,’ Trumbull said. ‘Airbnb, their number one location in the country is 30a, and you’re seeing a reduction in the number of groups that are booking, and it’s a problem.’ Beachfront home owners, on the other hand, say letting the public on the sand near their homes will hurt their property values.”
19) Texas: “Water is the new oil,” says a former ranch manager. “In Central Texas, a bitter fight over a $1 billion water project offers a preview of the future for much of the state as decades of rapid growth push past the local limits of its most vital natural resource. On one side: Georgetown, the fastest growing city in America for three years straight, which in 2023 signed a contract with an investor-funded enterprise to quickly begin importing vast volumes of water from the Simsboro Formation of the Carrizo Wilcox Aquifer, 80 miles to the east. On the other side: the cities atop the Simsboro that rely on its water. Bryan, College Station and the Texas A&M University System, a metro area with almost 300,000 people, have sued a local regulator to stop the project. A trial is set for the first week of May. ‘We’re going to fight this thing until the end,’ said Bobby Gutierrez, the mayor of Bryan. ‘It effectively drains the water source of the cities.’”
“We’re following the rules. Why are we being vilified?” said David Lynch, a managing partner at Core Capital investment firm in Houston and a partner in the Upwell project. ‘I think they feel uncomfortable about what’s coming and their reaction is to make us go away.’”
20) International/Denmark/Greenland: A private megacity in Greenland? Insidehook reports that “a startup linked to Peter Thiel wants to build the ‘next great city’ in Greenland funded to the tune of $525 million, Praxis aims to ‘revitalize western civilization. through a techno-libertarian city upon a hill.” Architectural Review says “there is something else, though: Greenland holds great potential for what the political theorist Tristan Hughes calls techno‑colonialism. The masters of Silicon Valley have long sought space for creating new communities based on libertarian ideals. As long as planetary travel remains a dream, the only options have been sovereign countries ceding parts of their territory—resulting in private ‘charter cities’ such as those in Honduras—or setting out for the high seas. Anarcho‑capitalist Patri Friedman [Milton Friedman was his grandfather—ed.] established the Seasteading Institute in 2008, partly financed by tech billionaire Peter Thiel. A company called Praxis, which also gets to play with Thiel money, has promised to set up ‘city‑cryptostates’ (none has materialized so far). One of its founders, Dryden Brown, recently tweeted that ‘Praxis would like to support Greenland’s development by coordinating talent, companies and capital to help secure the Arctic, extract critical resources, terraform the land with advanced technology to make it more habitable, and build a mythical city in the North’. Trump, too, is interested in building what can only be called mythical cities.” [For a discussion of this check out the April 1 edition of the Trillbilly podcast, at 39:51; sub required]
21) National: CEPR’s Eileen Appelbaum breaks down the Trump administration’s mass firing at the Department of Health and Human Services. “Taking a chainsaw to an agency’s workforce—in HHS, reducing it from 82,000 permanent employees to 62,000 and firing 5,200 employees in the pipeline for permanent employment—does not meet the definition of thoughtful reform. Its true purpose appears to be to contribute to the Musk/Trump effort to cut services and programs that Americans rely on in order to pay for massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.”
22) National: Writing in LA Progressive, Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, says “the federal workforce is more racially diverse than the private sector, meaning that those firings will impact minorities particularly strongly. In addition, as most of us already know, DOGE has been targeting the federal staff responsible for enforcing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which people of color and women are more likely to say are important to ensure that they succeed in the workplace. And that’s without even mentioning the way DEI programs allow women who are being sexually harassed or Black employees facing racial slurs to seek redress. People implementing DEI programs are also responsible for ensuring that nursing parents get safe, clean places to pump breastmilk, while protecting many of us — White men included — whose extenuating circumstances (eldercare at home, difficulties entering buildings due to disabilities) would otherwise make work senselessly harder, if not inconceivable.”
23) National: The Wall Street Journal has a story about how a consulting company (Booz Allen Hamilton) that makes nearly all of its money from the government is coping with the cutbacks. “For Booz, which makes 98% of its roughly $11 billion in annual revenue from government-related work, the assignment was existential. Rozanski and his team pulled in more than 100 employees to develop a response, which included more than $1 billion in potential cost savings. Rozanski, 57 years old, is a more than three-decade Booz veteran who has experienced budget showdowns and new administrations before. But the second Trump term is different. (…) The jolts are likely to continue. Booz’s stock is down about 35% since the inauguration, and the Trump administration is expected to demand deeper cuts from the firms.” [Sub required]
24) National: The GEO Group, the private, for profit, prison and detention company, has issued its Proxy Statement, which contains detailed information by GEO on executive compensation. The company’s top 5 executives pulled down over $19 million in total compensation last year. See image at top.
[Source: GEO Group Proxy Statement March 20, 2025, p. 38]
25) Maryland/National: The Center for American Progress sponsored an online discussion titled Research in Ruin: Slashing the NIH Will Stifle Development of Lifesaving Medical Treatments and Harm the Economy. “The recently formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, along with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., threaten to set U.S. health research back decades, which will undermine our nation’s progress in developing breakthrough therapies and protecting Americans’ health and well-being. In addition to halting research, Kennedy and other members of the administration are breaking their promise to follow scientific evidence and instead are spreading false information about the causes, prevention, and treatment of diseases such as measles.”
26) Ohio: Writing in Cleveland.com, Brian Pearson, Executive Secretary of the North Shore Federation of Labor in Cleveland, says “a dangerous agenda is unfolding—one that seeks to gut these essential services, strip federal workers of their rights, and hand government functions over to private interests that prioritize profits over people. Musk’s reckless push for privatization aims to weaken labor protections, cut public services, and drive -up costs for working families—all while billionaire-backed lawmakers set the stage for massive tax breaks. At the heart of this fight is the role of unions in protecting workers. Federal employee unions ensure fair wages, job security, and safe working conditions. They fight back against efforts to erode collective bargaining rights, preventing corporations and anti-worker politicians from turning government jobs into low-wage, precarious employment. When unions are strong, workers have a voice—one that holds the powerful accountable and pushes back against reckless privatization schemes. That’s exactly why Musk and his allies want to weaken unions.”
27) Think Tanks: The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has a new resource on the impact of state tax cuts. “States have gone on a tax-cutting spree in recent years. More than half have slashed income taxes for wealthy people and corporations, in some cases by extraordinary amounts. Communities are starting to feel the combined effects of large tax cuts, costly new school voucher programs, and other factors such as expiring federal fiscal aid. Our new resource, Tracking the Fallout of State Tax Cuts, covers the story as it unfolds and traces the impact of these decisions on critical goals like reducing income inequality, advancing racial equity, and protecting democracy.”
28) National/Think Tanks: State tax revenue is becoming more volatile, Pew reports. “In this analysis, The Pew Charitable Trusts calculates a short-term and long-term volatility score for overall state tax revenue and for major tax revenue streams (at least 5% of tax revenue on average over the last decade) for each state. The analysis removes the estimated effect of state tax policy changes to focus on the underlying volatility of revenue that is often influenced by factors outside of policymakers’ control. Examining the shift in volatility between the latest period and the longer-term trend can help policymakers identify the extent to which recent tax revenue fluctuations have deviated from historical norms. Policymakers should assess the factors contributing to these deviations—overall and for particular revenue streams—and examine whether they are temporary or likely to last into the foreseeable future without policy action.”
29) National/New Report: The Government Alliance on Race and Equity has produced a report on How State Agencies Can Lead the Way in 2025 and Beyond. “We need racially equitable governance and public administration from the local to the federal level. The Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) supports jurisdictions at local and state level to develop, protect, and strengthen their racial equity work. Join GARE at www.racialequityalliance.org. By working in coalition with local and state governments, we can create a whole-of-government approach for advancing racial justice across the entire country. (…) Public agencies in all fifty states have the responsibility and power to push back against federal authoritarianism. This guide equips practitioners in state agencies with menus of strategies and actions to block attacks against equity and justice, and to build programs and policies for a multi-racial democracy. The urgency of this moment calls for clear, focused, and coordinated responses to protect our communities, and to stand firmly against discrimination, oppression, and exclusion. We hope to spark ideas that strengthen defensive responses, encourage proactive strategies, and inspire courageous actions that shine the light for just and equitable governance.”