HIGHLIGHTS
JUMP: EDUCATION | INFRASTRUCTURE | PUBLIC SERVICES | THE REST
First, the Good News
1) National: The Nation’s John Nichols interviewed AFGE President Everett Kelley, the head of America’s largest union of federal workers, about Trump’s assault on his members and all of labor. “I do believe that what this administration is trying to do is to put the government in a mission-failure position so that they can contract out these jobs. That would be devastating because [with privatization] it would not be about providing service to the American people. It would be about making a profit.”
2) National: As we celebrated Labor Day, the Rockland County Times reported that in 2025, labor is resilient and united. “Throughout 2025, public employees have faced renewed attacks from corporate-backed groups such as the Freedom Foundation. These groups have poured resources into spreading misinformation to divide and weaken the voices of workers. Yet, what they do not understand is that working people know what is at stake: fair pay, safe workplaces, affordable health care and secure retirements. These are not luxuries. They are rights that generations of workers have fought for, and we will not give them up. CSEA continues to celebrate the diversity and strength of America’s labor movement as we face challenge.”
3) National: In the Public Interest Communications Director Jeff Hagan warns that our precious national monuments are under threat from private commercial interests, and calls attention to a new book celebrating their beauty and importance. “On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its original designation, writer and photographer Matt Witt has produced Monumental Beauty, a lush book documenting with 130+ images the breathtaking vistas and rich wildlife of the monument. ‘I am drawn not only to uncluttered landscape images but also to details, shapes, and colors that reveal the monument’s beauty, up close and personal,’ Witt writes in his introduction. ‘The monument is important for scientific and ecological reasons, but it is also a place to appreciate and immerse ourselves in the natural world.’ (…) But who would be against this?” asks Hagan. “President Trump, during his first administration, targeted national monuments like Cascade-Siskiyou to look for potential commercial opportunities. And Project 2025 specifically singled out Cascade-Siskiyou.”
4) National: Scientists are breathing new life into a NOAA climate website after Trump shut it down. “The website offered years’ worth of accessibly written material on climate science. The site is technically still online but has been intentionally buried by the team of political appointees who now run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Now, a team of climate communication experts – including many members of the former climate.gov team – is working to resurrect its content into a new organization with an expanded mission. Their effort’s new website, climate.us, would not only offer public-facing interpretations of climate science, but could also begin to directly offer climate-related services, such as assisting local governments with mapping increased flooding risk due to climate change.”
5) National: Writing in Common Dreams, Alvaro Sanchez says, “To create shared prosperity, rebuild trust in government. Government needs to deliver for everyone, not just the wealthy. Local government can lead the way. (…) Local governments, in many places but not all, continue to deliver for their residents. They are leading the fight against climate change without federal support. They took charge in their immediate and ongoing responses to Covid-19. And they continue to resist, creating sanctuary cities to protect immigrant communities threatened during the first Trump administration. Today, local governments prepare for a difficult future shaped by the policies of the current Trump administration, including the unnecessary deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles and Washington, DC.”
6) National/Florida: After months of protests and legal action by human rights activists, a federal judge has ordered the closure of the infamous Alligator Alcatraz “detention” camp in the Florida swamp. “‘Defendants rehash the same general arguments about the importance of immigration enforcement they presented during the Preliminary Injunction Hearing,’ U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of the Southern District of Florida wrote Wednesday night. ‘As Defendants provide no new evidence or argument about the particular dangerousness of the detainee population at the TNT site or the need for a detention facility in this particular location, the Court will not repeat the shortcomings of Defendants’ claims here.’”
7) National: The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed a new rule to tighten up regulation of investment advisers who outsource their fiduciary responsibilities to clients. See this article in the March 2023 issue of The Investment Lawyer. “The SEC stated in its proposing release that more needs to be done to protect clients and enhance oversight of advisers’ outsourced functions–advisers cannot just ‘set it and forget it’ when outsourcing.” The author, Genna Garver, is a partner at Troutman Pepper Locke, who provides “targeted, practical advice, to investment advisers and their proprietary investment funds.” Investment advisory services are provided to public entities by many private companies.
8) Idaho/National: The Veterans Administration is set to make upgrades to the Boise Veterans Affairs Medical Center campus. “In Boise, a raft of projects is planned, including the expansion of the current emergency room and replacement of a catheter lab and magnetic resonance imaging facility. A new heating and air conditioning system is set for the biomed facility, an elevator will be replaced, the operating room will see updates, and the VA plans to upgrade the storm sewer system.”
9) National/Louisiana: On the 20th anniversary of Katrina and a determined effort to privatize FEMA and NOAA, here are three documents on the effects of Katrina on education and emergency response. The first is an 83-page 2009 report by Sarah LeBlanc Goff of the University of New Orleans, “When Education Ceases to be Public: The Privatization of the New
Orleans School System After Hurricane Katrina.” Second, see articles in the current special issue on Katrina in Black Agenda Report, especially Margaret Kimberley’s “Why We Remember Katrina.” And also, Audrey L. Tanksley’s “Katrina Was Bigger Than a Hurricane,” in the current issue of The Progressive. See also Democracy Now’s excellent retrospective on the disaster and the failed public response, which brings out the heroic efforts of local resident to respond through mutual aid and advocacy.
10) National: A must-read by Jennifer Berkshire. “I won’t lie. If you’re a member of Team Public Education, as I am, it has been a tough summer. And if you, like me, have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of school privatization, it’s impossible to ignore the sense that the future we’ve been warning about has arrived. Five years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote a book called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: the Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School that culminated in a sort of “Black Mirror” chapter called “education a la carte.” In it, we described how the ultimate vision of school privatization advocates wasn’t simply to shift the nation’s youngsters into private schools, but to ‘unbundle’ education into a vast array of products for consumers to purchase on Amazon-like exchanges. Lest you think we were exaggerating, turn your attention to Florida, where, as Sue Woltanski documents, project unbundle has arrived with a vengeance.”
11) National: Center for American Progress researchers Paige Shoemaker DeMio and Weadé James have a terrific, richly footnoted article on “Public Education Under Threat: 4 Trump Administration Actions to Watch in the 2025-26 School Year.” The piece is part of a series. The four actions:
- Government intrusion into K-12 instruction and curricula
- Expansion of private school vouchers
- Diminished federal oversight of and capacity to support state and local education agencies
- Federal K-12 funding cuts and restrictions increase states’ financial responsibility
12) Colorado/National: Colorado Newsline reports that dark money spending could overshadow local priorities for Denver schools. “City Fund’s investment highlighted the DPS ‘portfolio model’ which closes or replaces neighborhood schools that fail to meet standardized test-score benchmarks and then reopens them as charter schools. Since implementing the portfolio model in 2007, DPS closed or replaced dozens of neighborhood schools. Today, DPS has more than 50 charters. The model also weakens union influence ‘by reducing the number of schools whose teachers belong to the union, diminishing the union’s membership—and thus its power and its money.’”
13) Virginia: For $65,000 a year, a teacherless AI private school comes to Virginia, The Washington Post reports. “It is a hard turn from traditional education models of specific subjects, class periods, teachers and homework. Price, who uses the online handle ‘Future of Education’ and has amassed more than 900,000 followers on Instagram, makes videos about the failures of traditional education and promotes her company as the shining solution. Price’s operation is also well-connected, backed by a Texas-based tech billionaire and drawing support from other billionaires and politicians across the country.”
The Texas billionaire is Joe Liemandt; the Alpha school’s co-founder is MacKenzie Price, whose husband, Andrew Price, is the CFO at Trilogy Software and ESW Capital; the hedge fund billionaire and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, Bill Ackman, is also a promoter of the school.
14) National/Think Tanks: Pew is urging governments at all levels to improve their data on water infrastructure needs going forward. “To examine which states are collecting this information and what strategies they are using, The Pew Charitable Trusts reviewed more than 30 state water plans and related documents. Although the range of what is included in the plans varies, at least a handful include data on statewide investment gaps. Surveying or working directly with local or regional representatives was one of the most popular approaches to discerning the size of those gaps. (…) Working directly with local utilities and governments that are familiar with their funding concerns and infrastructure conditions, either through well-designed surveys or by appointing regional representatives to share information and expertise, could give states a more comprehensive picture of water infrastructure funding gaps, especially in communities that may not have the resources to develop long-term planning documents.”
15) National: Are there states with preemptive bans on local rent control? Yes. Here are the 25, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC): Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington.
16) Idaho: Can Idaho’s public lands survive Trump’s budget axe? “Public lands shape everyday life in Idaho, from weekend hikes to wildfire safety. But as Howl podcast host Heath Druzin explains, President Trump’s new proposal to slash the budgets of the agencies that care for them could have devastating consequences. What could these cuts mean for the future of our favorite outdoor spaces?” [Audio, about 20 minutes
17) Maryland/Virginia/National: An exchange of opposing views on the expansion of 495/270, a very hot issue in recent years in the DMV, ran in recent weeks in Maryland Matters. Gary V. Hodge, president of Regional Policy Advisors, says“Maryland commuters don’t want to be exploited by toll-road profiteers, or held hostage and manipulated into paying high tolls on highways that fail to deliver on the promise of congestion relief.” Ken Reid, an “activist for new highways,” says “we have used HOT lanes in Virginia for more than a decade, and they enable motorists to pay market rate for using them and get a congestion-free ride in return.”
18) Michigan: Labor leaders say the state department of transportation is shifting work to private firms, the Detroit Free Press reports. “Officials in the union representing Michigan Department of Transportation technicians and inspectors say their numbers in state government have continued to shrink under Whitmer, while work farmed out to private contractors has grown. They say it’s a costly trend that threatens public oversight of quality control and is one that other states have taken steps to reverse. ‘It’s not privatization; it’s profitization,”said George Heath, an MDOT inspector and former SEIU 517M president who currently serves as the union’s negotiations chair. He said he is “very disappointed” in Whitmer’s approach to fixing Michigan’s roads.
19) Tennessee: At a public hearing, Knoxville residents pushed back on the threatened privatization of the Tennessee Valley Authority. “Mike Arms, executive director of the Association of Tennessee Valley Governments, which represents local governments in the Tennessee Valley region, said that there are over 150 local power companies distributing TVA’s power.
An opponent of privatization, Arms spoke of the schools, homes, libraries and even Friday night lights of football that depended on TVA’s ‘affordable, reliable power.’ He also noted TVA’s help with economic development, navigation, flood control, disaster relief and recovery, tourism, recreation, land management and even help for school robotics programs.”
20) National: Urbanize Atlanta reports that “a recent spate of federal funding retractions won’t impact a project geared toward making Atlanta streets safer and fast-tracking multimodal access between downtown and the Beltline, officials tell Urbanize Atlanta. Promising local impacts in cities and rural communities across the country, grants from the federal program Safe Streets and Roads for All, or SS4A, were announced in February 2023.”
21) National: Are we seeing the further privatization of government statistics? Bloomberg reports that “private-sector companies are beefing up their alternatives to US government statistics, seizing a moment of uncertainty around federal data.One platform is providing its data free to the public, a major break from what’s otherwise largely been a for-profit enterprise. Others are investing in their statistics and publishing them more frequently, responding to client demands for real-time information at a time when government policy, and the economy at large, are rapidly changing.”
22) National: The top officials of the Center for Disease Control resigned after Trump fired the agency’s director, Susan Monarez, “citing what they described as growing political interference in the agency’s scientific work, particularly regarding vaccines.” Read their powerful letters of resignation. “I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” wrote Demetre Daskalakis, MD, MPH, director of the National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “The recent change in the adult and children’s immunization schedule threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people.”
Regarding privatization, the CDC has attracted criticism for a number of “public-private partnerships” it has, as well as the role of the CDC Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit authorized by Congress to raise funds for CDC from the private sector. Public interest advocates say this erodes public trust, poses a risk to essential services, and, e.g. in the case of partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, raises conflict of interest issues.
23) National: Rolling Stone has a detailed story by Michael Embrich on Trump’s union busting at the Veterans Administration. “This is privatization by attrition, pouring billions into for-profit, expanded community care programs while hollowing out the VA’s direct-care system. At the end of the day, the only ones left holding the bag are veterans—particularly those who are most vulnerable, including those who rely on Medicaid to supplement their VA care and those who have no major hospitals or health care facilities within their area.The unions are part of what keeps the VA strong.”
24) National: @ASIAN_MOUTH says “Donald Trump is no friend to Veterans. He has gutted the Department of Veterans Affairs, made it impossible for them to hire, affected patient care, and now the @DeptVetAffairs has paid $2 BILLION to private health insurers? They are trying to privatize Veterans healthcare.” VA says it has “nearly 90,000 contracts worth more than $67 billion.”
25) National: Americans overwhelmingly oppose privatizing the U.S. Postal Service, according to a new report. “According to a polling memo prepared by prominent opinion research firms Hart Research Associates and North Star Opinion Research, when respondents were informed that the Trump administration wants to privatize postal services, ‘they oppose the idea by greater than two to one: just 26% favor privatization while 60% are opposed.’ Privatized mail service means that mail delivery would be provided by private companies rather than a public postal service.”
26) National: MedPage’s Joedy McCreary reports that “advocates worry that the founder of a private equity firm tied to one of the nation’s largest hospital bankruptcies could affect the U.S. military health system in his new Pentagon role. As deputy secretary of defense, Steve Feinberg brings no military experience but deep private-equity ties to a position overseeing care for millions of service members and their families.”
27) California: SEIU 521 says “Santa Cruz County is moving to gut public health clinics by outsourcing labs & X-rays — cutting off essential care for thousands of patients. This is privatization and outsourcing, plain and simple. We need investment in services, not short-sighted cuts.”
28) Missouri: In a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Bartholomew criticizes proposals to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. “Has anybody compared sending anything through FEDEX and UPS with using the USPS? The USPS is fixable if there is a political will to do it and if a talented somebody will step up with that desire and a devoted sense of duty and service to the public and the nation.”
29) New Mexico: Rev. Mike Angell, writing in the Santa Fe New Mexican, says, “At the Torrance County Detention Facility, CoreCivic has overseen repeated crises:
- Sewage flooding cells, leaving people living in human waste.
- Medical neglect, with detainees reporting untreated illnesses.
- Use of solitary confinement against hunger strikers.
- Obstructed legal access, including retaliation against those seeking counsel.
These are not one-off incidents. A class-action lawsuit accuses ICE and CoreCivic of keeping the Torrance County Detention Facility open despite dangerous conditions simply to preserve funding. Researchers from Colorado College reached the same conclusion: Torrance and the Cibola County facility both routinely violate national detention standards. Their recommendation was blunt—shut them down and release detainees.”
30) Oregon: Randy Stapilus has written a useful article explaining the difference between various regimes for public vs. private liquor sales.
31) West Virginia: See you in court over privatization, says a resident at the John Manchin Senior Health Care Center in Fairmont. “A letter of intent to file civil action was sent to Gov. Patrick Morrisey and Department of Health Facilities Secretary Michael Caruso Tuesday from Garcia Law on behalf of a resident at the John Manchin Senior Health Care Center in Fairmont. A $60 million sale of the Marion County facility – along with the Jackie Withrow Hospital in Raleigh County, Larkin State Hospital in Mason County and Hopemont Hospital in Preston County – was announced by Morrisey earlier this month.”
32) International/Austria: In Austria, “government health care can look a bit like a spa,” says The New York Times. “All of the patients were there because of heart problems of varying severity, from irregular heartbeats to heart attacks, and the purpose of their stays were to convalesce, form better habits and leave as healthier, more relaxed versions of themselves. Visits last several weeks, and the average cost is around 5,000 euros, or about $6,000. But many of the patients pay only a small fraction of the cost.”
33) National: The Financial Times has an in-depth report on “the booming business of Trump’s deportation flights. Companies are jostling for billions of dollars to fly immigrant detainees out of the U.S.” The FT reports that “a record infusion of cash in the upcoming fiscal year could provide an even greater windfall. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arm currently has an annual ‘transportation and removals’ budget of $721mn. But under Trump’s new budget, the agency plans to spend an extra $3.6bn a year on removal transportation—a predicted six-fold annual increase from today and four times what ICE requested in its own funding proposal.”But “firsthand accounts from ICE Air passengers and personnel describe it as chaotic, disorganized and under strain. Passengers are shackled on long flights with limited food or bathroom breaks, causing flight attendants to raise safety concerns. Military aircraft are supplementing private charters, and federal air marshals have been seconded from their normal commercial air duties to provide security.”
34) National: WPFW’s The Collision podcast with Dave Zirin and Chuck Modiani discussed the resistance to Trump’s militarization of Washington, DC. [About an hour]
35) International/United Kingdom: We Own It, the anti-privatization campaigning group, says “this government promised a wave of insourcing: It’s time for them to deliver.” Labour promised “the biggest wave of insourcing of public services in a generation.”