EFFICIENCY DEPARTMENTS Although New York City Mayor Zorhan Mamdani’s pursuit of government efficiency at City Hall has lately been written about as if it’s some sort of unexpected quirk of an otherwise progressive agenda, a push to make government more responsive to the needs of people and make every dollar count in doing so belongs neither to the right or the left. Despite this, it’s even been depicted as if it’s a page taken from the efforts of Elon Musk.
But this is not your billionaire’s DOGE. As has been pointed out this week in Jacobin, unlike Musk’s desire to take a chainsaw to programs and dismantle government, Mamdani’s goal is to make government not smaller, but better:
While last year’s “efficiency” crusade inside the federal government was driven largely by a zeal to cut as much as possible — budgets, staff, regulations, etc. — Mamdani’s push for efficiency is ultimately motivated by the opposite impulse: to prevent austerity measures that inevitably degrade services and hurt working people.
FED ED VOUCHER GUIDE Dedicated readers of this newsletter may recall last week’s newsletter advocating that states opt out of the budget-busting, disaster-waiting-to-happen federal voucher program, and another newsletter announcing the release of a brief containing questions states should ask when they’re deciding whether to opt in or not.
The federal voucher program presents public education-undermining aspects that are unique to its existence as a national program: As a tax deduction, it’s administered through the Treasury department, not the remaining fragments of the Education department. But it also adheres to some of the principles of all vouchers that use public funds for private schools.
You’ll find great background information for all of this in a new Federal Tax Credit Voucher Program Resource Guide issued this week.
The Racist Beginnings of School Vouchers, a recent article from the National Education Association, provides some context on the history of vouchers.
YOSEMITE SCAM The parks and resorts subsidiary of Delaware North, one of the largest hospitality and entertainment companies in the world, provides hospitality services in seven national parks and three state parks. In 2016, after it lost a $2 billion bid to renew its contract to operate Yosemite’s hotels and restaurants, the company sued and argued that the private company held intellectual property rights to a number of names connected to the park–including “Yosemite National Park.”
Earlier this month, President Trump nominated Scott Socha, president of Delaware North’s parks and resorts division, as director of the National Park Service.
“The nomination of an outsider with business ties to the agency he’d oversee comes at a pivotal moment for the service, which lost a quarter of its staff under the so-called “department of government efficiency” civil sector purge and which has been the subject of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to erase mention of historical events from its sites that portray Americans in an unfavorable light, such as regarding slavery,” The Guardian reports.
HOUSES BUILT ON SHAKY FOUNDATION An idea with roots in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 made its way into the One Big Beautiful Bill as a plan to make more than a quarter of a billion acres of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land eligible for sale to be developed for housing. While the provision was dropped before the bill passed, it still has its vocal proponents. However, a recent article in Scientific American explains “Why privatizing public land won’t solve the housing crisis.”
“These hundreds of millions of acres of public land are neither accessible nor safe enough to solve our affordable-housing crisis: most parcels lie hours from any urban center, and their wildfire risk is enormous. If development somehow ever happens on these lands, it won’t house working-class families but will line the pockets of corporations and speculators, effectively imposing a regressive tax on the rest of us.”
Jeff Hagan
Communications Director