New York Times: The Most Corrupt President Ever

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2026 //
4

How much corruption will Republicans in Congress tolerate? All of them were hiding under their desks or running for their lives on January 6, 2021. How do they feel about the rioters of that infamous day getting a reward for their efforts to overturn the Constitution? How do they feel about handing out money to the people chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” And rewards for those who beat the Capitol Police officers? I watched the events from start to finish. It was a shameful day in our history.

The New York Times editorial board published the following editorial yesterday. The headline: “There Has Never Been an Example of Presidential Corruption Like This.“

Has there ever been an episode of presidential corruption so blatant and threatening to constitutional order? Certainly not in modern times. President Trump’s Justice Department is using taxpayer money to create a $1.8 billion political slush fund. Ostensibly set up to compensate those who the department claims have “suffered weaponization and lawfare,” it will in fact reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.

The fund manages to combine three of Mr. Trump’s most alarming behaviors. One, it is an obvious form of corruption, coming from a president who has used his office to enrich himself, his family and his allies. Two, the fund continues his pattern of using the Justice Department as an enforcer to punish his perceived opponents and protect his friends and allies. Three, the fund is his latest attempt to rewrite history about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

It is worth pausing to put the fund into the larger context of Mr. Trump’s political project: He is destroying pillars of American democracy to empower himself. He claims elections are legitimate only if he wins. He uses federal law enforcement to investigate and prosecute his perceived enemies. He purges his party of officials who defy him. He describes members of the other party and civil society as traitors and enemies. He incentivizes his supporters to break the law on his behalf and rewards them when they do. He directs his allies to change election rules to keep his party in power.

Mr. Trump’s project has not yet succeeded, at least not fully. Many Americans — in the judicial system, in Congress, in state governments and elsewhere — continue to stand up for democracy and oppose his autocratic ambitions. By now, though, nobody should have illusions about what he is attempting to do.

The fund’s existence is a story of political self-dealing. It is nominally the product of a flimsy personal lawsuit that Mr. Trump filed this year against the Internal Revenue Service, which he oversees, over the leaking of his tax returns during his first term. That lawsuit led to an absurd negotiation, in which the lawyers on one side worked for Mr. Trump the citizen and those on the other side worked for Mr. Trump the president.

Adding to absurdity, the government lawyers reported to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, who previously worked as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. A federal judge in Miami helping to oversee the case, Kathleen Williams, pointed out that the two sides were not adversaries, which called into question the process. Even Mr. Trump acknowledged the situation shortly after filing the suit by saying, “I am supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”

Yet the talks proceeded because Mr. Trump’s Justice Department was in charge. Unsurprisingly, they led to a deal that was extremely favorable to him.

In exchange for the president’s dropping the suit against the I.R.S., both he and his supporters will receive government handouts. For Mr. Trump, the handout comes in the form of permission to have cheated on his taxes. The government has granted himand his family immunity from ongoing audits of his tax payments. He has a long history of using questionable accounting maneuvers, and the audits could have cost him more than $100 million, experts have said. Now they will cost him nothing.

For his supporters, the handouts will come from the slush fund. The Justice Department will tap a permanent stream of revenue that Congress created in 1956, known as the Judgment Fund, to settle lawsuits against the federal government. As Paul Figley, a former Justice Department official, noted, the new fund appears to be both legal and at odds with Congress’s intent. “It’s horrible policy,” Mr. Figley told The Times.

The department has allocated $1.8 billion for what it calls, in an Orwellian flourish, an Anti-Weaponization Fund and invited applications from people who have been targeted for “political, personal or ideological reasons.” Mr. Blanche — who holds his position as acting attorney general largely because of his willingness to use federal power in service of Mr. Trump’s personal whims — will appoint a five-member board, with congressional leaders given input on one of the five. Mr. Trump can fire any of the members at any time.

To understand who is likely to receive payments, look at who has previously received settlements from the Justice Department. Michael Flynn, who was briefly Mr. Trump’s national security adviser in 2017, received $1.25 million, even though he pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents. The family of Ashli Babbitt, who participated in the Jan. 6 riot, and whom federal agents shot as she and others approached the House floor, received nearly $5 million, even though investigators cleared the shooters of wrongdoing. The Trump administration is paying off people who committed violence and crimes, as long as they are Trump allies.

The fund’s timeline is the giveaway of how Mr. Trump plans to use it. The Justice Department said the fund would stop processing claims on Dec. 15, 2028, weeks before the president is to leave office, ensuring the money is distributed while he still holds the power to fire anyone who objects. The window is precisely the window of Mr. Trump’s authority.

Even some of Mr. Trump’s usual defenders are unhappy. Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, meekly said that he was “not a big fan” of the fund. Brian Morrissey, the Treasury Department’s general counsel, resigned within hours of the announcement, seven months after the Senate had confirmed him.

Providing payoffs is only part of the point. Another, according to Mr. Blanche, is “ensuring this never happens again.” What, exactly, is “this”? The evenhanded enforcement of the law.

The Trump administration has already fired federal agents who did their duties by investigating the president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Mr. Trump has issued blanket clemency to more than 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters, some of whom may soon receive payments. His Justice Department secured an indictment of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on dubious charges as retribution for his role in the investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s Russia ties. The fund continues the effort to turn law enforcement into a tool of raw political power.

The fund also encourages future lawlessness on Mr. Trump’s behalf. It sends the message that he will use his power not only to shield people who break the law from accountability but also to shower benefits on them. Just as punishment is a deterrent, rewards are an incentive.

After President Richard Nixon’s abuses in the Watergate scandal, Congress and the executive branch built rules and traditions to ensure that federal agencies, especially the Justice Department, operated in the public interest, rather than that of the president. Mr. Trump has tried to break this system. Once he is gone, it will need to be rebuilt, and better than before. He has exposed and exploited its flaws and gaps. Unless they are filled, Mr. Trump’s corruption and perversion of justice risk becoming the norm.

In the meantime, Americans should be cleareyed about what the president is doing. He is taking their money and showering it on criminals.

Categories Corruption, Education Reform, Trump

New York Court Reverses DOGE Cancellation of $100 Million for NEH Grants

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2026 //
2

Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern Districy of New York issued a ruling restoring $100 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that were canceled by Elon Musk’s DOGE team. The judge said the cancellations violated the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, and furthermore that DOGE lacked the statutory authority to act. Judge McMahon ordered the reinstatement of every grant to writers, scholars, and researchers. The DOGE censors did not actually review the grants but used ChatGPT to identify words that the Trump administration had banned, especially those associated with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).

Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of the decision was the judge’s ruling that DOGE had no authority to cancel these grants. In fact, DOGE had no authority to fire thousands of civil servants or to terminate entire agencies, like USAID.

She wrote:

On the central ultra vires question, Judge McMahon was unequivocal: “It is not that DOGE misconstrued a statutory provision conferring authority on it; it is that Congress conferred no authority on DOGE at all with respect to the awarding, continuation, or termination of NEH grants.”  

The Authors Guild, one of the plaintiffs, reported on the decision;

May 7, 2026—A New York federal court in a 143-page decision today held for the Authors Guild plaintiffs on every count in its case on behalf of individual writers and scholars against DOGE and the NEH for DOGE’s April 2025 mass cancellation at the National Endowment for the Humanities. It ordered the reinstatement of every grant terminated, delivering a complete victory to the Authors Guild and more than 1,400 writers, scholars, and researchers whose awards were abruptly eliminated.  

Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs on all three of their claims, finding the terminations violated the First Amendment and the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment and were carried out by DOGE without any statutory authority to act.  

The court issued a permanent injunction enjoining the administration from giving effect to the mass terminations and requiring the government to rescind every termination notice and restore all affected grants and certified the Authors Guild’s lawsuit as a class action covering all approximately 1,400 affected grantees. 

“Today’s ruling makes clear that no administration—regardless of its priorities—is free to defy the statutory purposes of federal agencies and that or to cancel grants based on viewpoint discrimination,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild. “Not only did DOGE have no authority to cancel the grants, it used an AI chatbot to invent pretextual reasons to do it anyway. Writers and scholars had structured their lives around these awards—taking leaves of absence, giving up other income, making commitments—because the government had entered into a legally binding obligation. That obligation must be honored. We are gratified that justice was done, grateful to our amazing legal team at Fairmark Partners, and we will be watching closely to make sure every one of these grants is restored.”  

Background 

In early April 2025, DOGE officials terminated more than 1,400 NEH grants awarded to scholars, writers, research institutions, and other humanities organizations totaling over $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds—the largest mass cancellation of previously awarded grants in the agency’s nearly 60-year history—with no individualized review, no notice, and no opportunity to appeal.  

Discovery revealed that a DOGE official had used ChatGPT to generate “DEI rationales” for termination, submitting thousands of grant descriptions to the AI tool with a single standardized prompt, without defining the term or understanding how the tool interpreted it. They didn’t take any steps to ensure that the system wouldn’t discriminate on the basis of race, sex, or other protected categories. DOGE also searched for grants containing keywords like “gay,” “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), “indigenous,” “tribal,” “melting pot,” “equality,” and similar terms. It did not search for analogous terms like “white,” “heterosexual,” or “Caucasian.” 

The results were, in the court’s account, irrational: Studies of ancient Jewish texts, the persecution of Uyghurs in China, the plastics industry, and American women in Paris in the early 1900s were all flagged as DEI. The NEH’s own acting chair told DOGE many of the rationales “mischaracterized” the grants but was overruled. His own email to DOGE acknowledged: “Either way, as you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects.”

Two Consolidated Cases

The result of this landmark ruling was actually two separate lawsuits that were quickly consolidated into one. On May 1, 2025, the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Historical Association filed the initial suit, ACLS v. McDonald, challenging DOGE’s mass terminations. Eleven days later, the Authors Guild filed its own suit, The Authors Guild v. NEH, in the Southern District of New York — structured as a class action on behalf of all approximately 1,400 affected grantees. On May 14, Judge Colleen McMahon consolidated the two cases, noting they were “substantially identical,” and the litigation proceeded jointly from there.

Because the Authors Guild’s suit was structured as a class action, Judge McMahon’s order applies not just to named plaintiffs but to all 1,400-plus writers, scholars, and researchers whose awards were canceled, making yesterday’s ruling a victory for everyone DOGE targeted. 

Ruling 

On the central ultra vires question, Judge McMahon was unequivocal: “It is not that DOGE misconstrued a statutory provision conferring authority on it; it is that Congress conferred no authority on DOGE at all with respect to the awarding, continuation, or termination of NEH grants.”  

On the ChatGPT-driven process, she wrote that it “would hardly be surprising if ChatGPT inferred, from DOGE’s repeated requests, that Fox and Cavanaugh were looking for reasons why grants could be characterized as DEI—and therefore terminable—and supplied ‘rationales’ simply in order to satisfy the user’s perceived demand. The utter lack of reasoning behind so many of its ‘rationales’ certainly suggests as much.” 

“We are extremely pleased with Judge McMahon’s ruling reinstating the more than $100 million in NEH grants that were cancelled by DOGE last April.,” said Jamie Crooks, Managing Partner of Fairmark Partners, LLP  “While we are still evaluating her detailed, 143-page opinion, the bottom line is clear: Judge McMahon agreed with the Authors Guild and the other plaintiffs that these ‘DEI’-based cancellations violated the First Amendment and Equal Protection, and that DOGE did not have the authority to order these grants terminated.  The Court’s order that the grants be reinstated will allow our clients and the hundreds of other scholars and institutions in the class to continue performing their important scholarly work, and it’s also a vindication for the rule of law and basic principles of constitutional law.”  

NEH award recipient Bill Goldstein said, “I am—and all of the plaintiffs will be— forever grateful for your brilliant, tireless, and effective work on our behalf. And on behalf of the First Amendment and what remains and must endure of the rule of law. The stakes are that high, and you made our rights and that right clear. Congratulations on your victory, and thank you for ours.” 

Given that the administration has ignored other judicial orders, including the preliminary injunction in this case, we cannot say whether NEH will in fact reinstate the grants and pay out the money owed under those grants. The court emphasized that its decision addresses only “the legality of the Government’s decision to terminate” the grants and that it is requiring the government to “rescind the termination notices,” but clarified that it does not “require[] the immediate payment of grant funds” or “adjudicate[] any contractual entitlement to money.” The reason for that it that claims seeking payment of money owed by the federal government must be brought in a separate court—the Court of Federal Claims. Here, Judge McMahon noted that securing payment of the grant funds “might well require a separate suit in the Court of Federal Claims”—though she did not outline a specific process. For now, we are reviewing the decision with our attorneys to determine next steps, including any possible action in the Court of Federal Claims. As always, our goal is to ensure that grantees receive the payments they are owed as promptly as possible.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Justice

Jan Resseger: Reviving NCLB WILL NOT Improve Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2026 //
1

Jan Resseger, social justice warrior, strongly dissents from those who want to bring back the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

She writes:

Defining schools by their achievement test scores is reductive. Of course we want our children to learn to read, to enjoy and understand literature, to master math, and to study history and the sciences, but a fixation on comparing school districts’ test scores blinds us to the human relations that constitute a classroom, to the social formation of children that happens at school, and to myriad other ways of thinking about what students are accomplishing at school. The temptation then is to define schoolteachers as producers of test scores and forget about all the other ways they help our children learn and grow.

Because test scores provide a simple, universal measure, we grab onto it and give it more weight than all the other factors we can’t so easily measure. Kevin Welner, a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado and director of the National Education Policy Center identifies family income, a factor entirely outside of school, as the most significant variable affecting a school district’s aggregate test scores: “Those of us who work in or with schools never question the enormous impact that a teacher or school can have on a student. But this essential truth coexists with another truth: that differences between schools account for a relatively small portion of measured outcome differences. That is, opportunity gaps in the U.S arise primarily outside of schools. This should not be a surprise. Poverty, concentrated poverty, and racialized poverty are pervasive features of America.  School improvement efforts cannot directly help children and their families overcome decades of policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economical inequality.”

Last week, the NY Times’ Claire Cain Miller, Frencesca Paris and Sarah Mervosh reported on a major new demographic study documenting a widespread decline over the past decade in U.S. students’ standardized test scores: “Something troubling is happening in U.S. education. Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago… A report on the new data describes a decade-long ‘learning recession.’… Education experts say there is no single reason for the declines. But the timing provides some clues. Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990—then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic then accelerated learning declines, especially for the poorest students. Some pandemic effects have lingered. Student absenteeism, for example, remains higher than pre-pandemic… Test scores in low-income districts fell furthest, but affluent districts—the types of places families move to for the schools—also lost ground.”

The reporters do acknowledge a number of factors that may correlate with dropping scores, but they seem to lean toward blaming a lot of the problem on the end of No Child Left Behind. They are mistaken when they declare that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESEA), NCLB’s replacement, ended test-based school accountability. In fact that 2015 law just made the states, not the federal government, agree to impose sanctions on the schools that had been unable significantly to raise test scores.  The reporters quote Brian A. Jacob, a professor at the University of Michigan, who believes NCLB’s fading influence has been one cause of test score decline: “It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement… There’s evidence that school accountability does change behaviors of teachers and administrators and probably parents and students.”

A prominent retired professor of education, Diane Ravitch pushed back immediately on what she understood as the bias of the recent NY Times article: “I reject the claim that scores have stagnated because of the easing of  No Child Left Behind-Race to the Top pressures. Sure, they increased the pressure on students, teachers, and principals, but their negative effects undermined the quality of education. Picking the right bubble on a standardized test became the goal of education.  Campbell’s Law says that when a measure becomes the goal, it loses its value as a measure. Social scientist Donald Campbell wrote that ‘the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’ “

Ravitch names a number of experts who have evaluated the damage wrought by the No Child Left Behind Act’s strategy: to punish schools and teachers who, supposedly, weren’t working hard enough to make all students reach test-score proficiency by 2014.  The most prominent is Daniel Koretz, the Harvard University expert on standardized testing, who, in 2017, published The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. Koretz not only explains Campbell’s Law, but he shows how the pressure of test-based accountability corrupted what happened public schools across the country when the federal government threatened mandatory closure, or mandatory privatization or charterization of so-called “failing schools.”

Koretz reminds us that in places where test scores did rise under No Child Left Behind, it may not have reflected students’ academic growth. Test score gains were in many places artificially produced through test prep, the narrowing of the school curriculum, and even cheating: “Cheating—by teachers and administrators, not by students—is one of the simplest ways to inflate scores, and if you aren’t caught, it’s the most dependable.” (The Testing Charade, p. 73)  His book covers the tragic Atlanta cheating scandal, and other examples when teachers read the tests in advance and prepared students to answer specific questions. Koretz describes various kinds of test prep coaching and drilling that were widespread in the NCLB era.  And, “(Teachers) reported that they reduced—sometimes very substantially—the amount of time devoted to teaching science, which was not tested, in order to make additional time for prepping kids in math and reading.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 95-96)

Last week’s NY Times report on the possible causes of an overall drop in test scores over the recent decade also names two other possible causes.  First, a decade ago, as schools began to provide laptops or electronic tablets to their students for online learning, students’ widespread dependence on their smartphones also became epidemic: “Something happened globally around the same time: the proliferation of devices, at home and in school.  Nearly half of American teenagers now say they are online ‘almost constantly,’ compared with just under a quarter who said that a decade ago, according to Pew Research Center.”  Due to the proliferation of devices, our classrooms operate differently, and our children are doing less reading of books for study and enjoyment.

Second, the reporters, explain, there was massive and well documented learning loss during the COVID pandemic: “Immediately after the pandemic, there was hope that students would recover quickly.  The new data shows that scores inched upwards in reading last year, and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022. But it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground…. The biggest losses have been among the lowest-achieving students.”

I have never heard anyone who has been able to trace the extent of long term damage during COVID, when students’ schools were closed and many children were left while their parents were at work to learn remotely on computers. Chronic absence has been a greater problem since COVID, and something schools have struggled to overcome.  No one has been able to assess how long COVID will keep affecting children who were preschoolers and young elementary students back in 2019.

Finally there is one other big factor that could also be related to falling test scores over time: states have been perpetually reducing funding for public schools. According to the most recent research from the Albert Shanker Institute: “There are 42 states (including the District of Columbia) that devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 schools than they did before the 2007-2009 recession. This seems to be a permanent disinvestment in public education.” “(U)nequal opportunity is (also) universal in the U.S. In all states, higher-poverty districts are funded less adequately than lower-poverty districts… We find that 37 percent of white students attend districts with negative adequacy gaps, compared with 75 percent of African American students and 62 percent of Hispanic students. In other words, African American students are about twice as likely as their white peers to attend school in a district with below-adequate funding, while Hispanic students are almost 70 percent more likely to do so, and Native American… students are 50 percent more likely. Similarly, African American students are over 3 times more likely than white students to attend chronically underfunded districts….” These economic factors are likely to have affected students’ learning over time.

Our society will not be able to address our economic, social, and educational injustices through No Child Left Behind-style, test-based public school accountability.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Panel Stacked by Trump Okays His Gaudy 250′ Arch

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
1

In Trump’s ongoing effort to stamp his atrocious taste on the nation’s Capitol, he is pushing full-steam-ahead to gain required approvals for his disgustingly gaudy Triumphal Arch. To make sure that he would gain the support of two review panels, he fired all their members and replaced them with Trump flunkies. Hundreds of letters poured in, overwhelmingly opposing the Arch. No matter. The “Commission on the Arts,” wholly owned by Trump gave their approval without dissent to what will be the largest such arch in the world and the gaudiest.

Luke Broadwater of The Washington Post wrote:

The Commission of Fine Arts on Thursday approved President Trump’s plan to build a 250-foot triumphal arch in Washington, even after the president rejected the panel’s suggestion to remove the large statues of golden eagles and a winged angel atop the structure.

“Washington is not a static city,” the panel’s chairman, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., said before making a motion to fast-track approval of the project. “It must grow to allow the next 250 years of Americans to celebrate their accomplishments.”

He added that the arch was “beautiful.”

Mr. Trump did agree to accommodate some of the panel’s suggested changes, including removing the statues of gold lions that were positioned lower on the arch.

The arts panel, which is filled with Mr. Trump’s appointees, has an advisory role on the design of the project, but no enforcement power. The same panel also fast-tracked approval of Mr. Trump’s $400 million ballroom, bypassing the normal review process on a project that would transform the profile of the White House.

The president has sought to overhaul any entities that might normally stand in the way of his plans to remake Washington, including firing the entire Commission of Fine Arts board and replacing its members with his appointees.

Thomas Luebke, the panel’s secretary, said to the board members before the motion that a project such as the arch would normally undergo an additional review.

“There is a final design that would normally come after this with more documentation of the issues of details, structure, everything else about it,” Mr. Luebke said. But, he added, the panel could also “choose, just like you did with the ballroom, to say ‘We’re done.’”

The future of the arch is still uncertain, however. The plans are scheduled to go next month before the National Capital Planning Commission, which is also controlled by allies of Mr. Trump. The project also faces a legal challenge.

A group of Vietnam War veterans has sued to stop construction of the arch, citing a lack of congressional authority and arguing that the arch would obstruct the view between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. Many critics of the plan have contended that the grandeur of the arch detracts from the solemnity that should be observed at the cemetery nearby.

The architect designing the monument, Nicolas Leo Charbonneau, said Mr. Trump had rejected the suggestion to remove the large statues atop the structure because the arch is a monument for the living, not the dead.

“The intent of the arch is a celebration in America of 250 years of greatness, freedom, and posterity, for which we can only thank the wisdom of our founders and God’s providence,” he said. “While it may celebrate the victories of America in various theories of war and the sacrifice of our fallen heroes, it is not primarily monument dedicated to the dead, but to the living.”

The structure will allow 80 visitors per hour to go inside the arch, Mr. Charbonneau said.

Before the vote, Mr. Luebke informed members that they had received about 600 new messages about the project. Only one letter writer was in favor of the project without major changes, he said.

Mr. Luebke said about half of those writing letters raised concerns about the arch’s closeness to Arlington Cemetery, “that this in fact disrespects the cemetery and military sacrifice,” he said. “The other ones have to do with misuse of public funds, that it’s a gaudy or synthetically incompatible design, that is authoritarian,” among other concerns.

Elizabeth Merritt, deputy general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, testified that her organization “remains extremely concerned about the location, the height, the scale, and the design of the proposed arch.”

“Arlington National Cemetery is a living memorial that hosts hundreds of funeral services every month,” she said. “The arch, as proposed, would dominate the national cemetery.”

In the lawsuit seeking to block construction of the arch, Vietnam War veterans maintain that Mr. Trump cannot build it without the authorization of Congress. They cite the Commemorative Works Act of 1986, which details a multistep process for authorizing and designing commemorative works in the District of Columbia and says any such work must be “specifically authorized” by Congress.

But in legal documents, the Trump administration has argued that congressional actions in the 1920s connected to the design of the Arlington Memorial Bridge already give it the legal right to build the arch.

Congress at the time authorized “construction of two tall columns surmounted by statues on Columbia Island,” the administration wrote. “Although those columns have not yet been built, the statutory authority to build them remains.”

The Federal Aviation Administration is also reviewing whether the arch could pose an aerial hazard, an evaluation that it requires for all structures more than 200 feet tall. The arch would sit about a mile from a Pentagon heliport and about two miles from Reagan National Airport, one of the country’s busiest flight hubs.

Categories Art, District of Columbia, Ethics, Trump

Rick Wilson: Trump’s Trades Don’t Look Good or Smell Good

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
3

Rick Wilson is a never-Trumper, a former Republican operative who was a founder of The Lincoln Project. He write a popular blog, “Against All Enemies,” where he follows the actions of Trump 47.

He wrote:

Let’s start with a number, because the number is the whole story and the rest is just decoration.

3,700. 

Between January and March of this year, three months, ninety-odd days, one fiscal quarter of a man who is supposed to be running the country, Donald Trump’s required ethics filings disclosed 3,700 stock trades worth somewhere between $220 million and three-quarters of a billiondollars.

Microsoft. Meta. Oracle. Broadcom. Bank of America. Goldman Sachs. Nvidia. Apple. An S&P 500 index fund, because even a degenerate gambler likes a hedge. Municipal bonds, for flavor.

That’s not a portfolio. That’s a casino floor. And the President of the United States is standing in the middle of it, counting cards at the table while the pit boss looks the other way, and the cameras, conveniently, are off.

You are supposed to find this normal now. You are supposed to scroll past it. That’s the entire design. 

So let’s not.

.

Here is the part where I am legally and intellectually obligated to be precise, so pay attention. Precision is the enemy of this whole operation, and they are counting on you being too tired for it.

Insider trading is not “rich guy buys stock.”

Insider trading, as a federal crime, has elements: actual, legally defined moving parts a prosecutor has to bolt together. You need material, non-public information. You need a trade made on the basis of it. You need a breach of a duty of trust. And you need the thing lawyers call scienter, which is a fancy Latin way of saying the person knew exactly what they were doing. (Insider trading rabbit holes are shockingly amusing. I’ve been in one for two days.)

The rabbit hole led me to the Supreme Court last night, because of course it did. SCOTUS, over time, blessed two flavors of this in United States v. O’Hagan, the “classical” theory and the “misappropriation” theory, and federal prosecutors get to reach for the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Rule 10b-5, and the heavy artillery of 18 U.S.C. § 1348, the criminal securities-fraud statute that carries up to twenty-five years in a federal prison. I don’t understand it all, either, but it strikes me that Trump’s legal team will need to be up on these, quite soon.

Now hold that definition in your hand like a ruler, and lay it next to the reporting.

According to the Washington Post‘s reading of these filings, Trump bought Nvidia on February 10. Days later, Nvidia announced a major deal with Meta, and the stock jumped roughly 2.5 percent. He sold Microsoft and Amazon in February, then bought millions more in March, shortly before the Pentagon announced it would put its technology into classified computer networks.

Let me say the quiet part at conversational volume: I am not telling you that is a proven crime. I am telling you that if you fed those two paragraphs to a hundred securities lawyers with no name attached, every one of them would say the same two words before their coffee got cold: “Lawyer up.”

The President of the United States sits atop the single largest pile of non-public material intelligence and information on planet Earth. He knows what the Pentagon is buying before the Pentagon’s vendors do. He knows the tariff rate before the market does, because he is the source of the tariff. Markets are always defined by information asymmetry. For him, the asymmetry isn’t a loophole. It’s the strategy. It’s the job.

A normal person who traded a defense contractor’s stock the week before a classified Pentagon contract would be explaining himself to men in windbreakers with “FBI” on the back. Trump gets a $200 fine. Twice. We’ll come back to the two hundred dollars, because the two hundred dollars is the funniest and darkest detail in the entire file.

Here is the thing that turns this from a scandal into a regime: there is functionally no one on the beat.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency whose entire reason to exist is to walk this exact crime scene, has been hollowed out with the precision of me working a Thanksgiving turkey. Since the administration took over, the SEC has shed the order of 18% of its workforce, dropping from roughly 5,000 employees to around 4,200, the bulk of them walking out the door clutching $50,000 buyout checks dangled by the same government they were supposed to police.

The Enforcement Division and the Office of the General Counsel, the cops and the lawyers, in other words, took the deepest cuts. DOGE set up shop inside the SEC headquarters, occupying actual rooms; nothing good was ever going to come of that. The Philadelphia and Los Angeles field offices were slated to go dark. Enforcement actions against public companies are down roughly thirty percent. The new chairman publicly mused that it’s “good every once in a while to have a house cleaning.” Uh huh.

You do not need a decoder ring. When the man at the top is running a quarter-billion-dollar trading book off privileged information, and the watchdog has been defunded, depopulated, and told to think of mass attrition as spring cleaning, that is not two unrelated news stories. That is one strategy with two press releases.

This is the part that should raise the hair on your neck, regardless of your party. The genius of the grift is not that it’s hidden. It’s that it’s legal-adjacent by demolition. You don’t have to break the law if you can fire the people who enforce it and starve out the ones who remain. The cop didn’t miss the robbery. The cop took the buyout, and the robber signed the check.

Fine. You want to know how this plays as an actual case. Put on the prosecutor’s jacket for a second, because the honest answer is more damning than the cartoon.

It would be hard.

Not because the conduct smells clean. It reeks. 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

WSJ: Trump Made Over 3,700 Stock Trades in First Quarter of 2026

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
4

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump made thousands of stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026. In many instances, actions he took as president directly affected the price of the shares he bought or sold.

Previous Presidents put their assets into a blind trust or invested only in bonds.

Before he entered the White House, President Trump was a real-estate developer and speculator. Lately, his fortune has been wagered on some Big Tech stocks.

Money managers for the president made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, including million-dollar purchases of Nvidia, Dell and other Big Tech stocks. Trump’s managers pared his holdings in Microsoft and Amazon with sizable sales in the quarter. 

Canny investors should read Trump’s account on his social media site “Truth Social.” If he praises a company, it’s likely that he just bought the stock and is encouraging others to join him.

Bloomberg reported that experienced traders were stunned by the sheer number of trades on behalf of Trump.

President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.

The transactions, spelled out in more than 100 pages of documents filed Thursday with the US Office of Government Ethics, list purchases and sales in broad ranges, making it hard to calculate an exact value. But the volume of trading — more than 40 per day over a three-month period — stands out as much as the potential dollar value.

“This is an insane amount of trades,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management, in an interview, adding that it looks more like something done by “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” that buys and shorts securities than a personal account…

The disclosure reignites conflict-of-interest concerns that have shadowed Trump’s terms in the White House. Critics have regularly accused him of mixing his official duties with his business interests. Unlike his predecessors, Trump didn’t divest or move his assets into a blind trust with an independent overseer. His sprawling business empire is managed by two of his sons and operates in several areas that intersect with presidential policy.

At the same time, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner helps manage billions in investments for Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while simultaneously serving as a “volunteer” envoy for the president on issues affecting the war in Iran and the Middle East in general…

The president’s disclosures spurred questions from some on Wall Street who expressed surprise at the trading volume.

“I’m baffled,” said Eric Diton, president and managing director at The Wealth Alliance. “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”

The billionaire president’s stock trades were no doubt made to protect the best interests of the American people.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Hey, Hey, DOGE Boys, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
4

Back in the midst of the War in Vietnam, protestors used to torment President Lyndon B. Johnson by chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Johnson became President after President Kennedy’s assassination, then was elected by a landslide in 1964. He had an ambitious domestic agenda, which sailed through Congress, but then got ensnared in pursuing the war, which was a disaster.

As soon as Donald Trump was re-elected, he invited his billionaire friend to slash the federal government. Trump created a fictional “department” called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Vivek soon left to run for governor of Ohio.

Musk and his little group of computer nerds ransacked the agencies, fired thousands of career employees, and copied confidential files from Social Security and the Treasury Department. Throughout this daring attack on our government, Republican majorities in Congress remained silent.

One of the first agencies killed by Musk was U.S. AID, which supplied food and medicine to impoverished people around the world. Musk celebrated his success and told the world that he had used a jeweled chainsaw to kill a program that saved lives and that bought billions of dollars of grain from American farmers.

It’s been reported that DOGE saved very little money, that many government agencies that lost employees had to rehire some, pay severance to others, and that dramatic savings never materialized.

And now we know that whatever savings were realized by Musk’s brief foray have been totally wiped out by the cost of the war in Iran.

What remains of the work of Musk and his DOGE?

Millions of deaths in countries where people died because U.S. AID stopped sending aid. Not only did people die of starvation and preventable diseases, but violence followed the AID cuts.

Science Advisor, published by Science magazine, reported:

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was once the world’s largest provider of foreign aid. Between 2021 and 2024, the agency—which operated in more than 100 countries—is estimated to have saved some 91 million lives, about a third of which were children under five. But just days after President Donald Trump took office in 2025, his administration began rapidly dismantling the organization. The sweeping cuts dealt a “ tectonic” blow to clinical trials around the globe, devastated agricultural research, and triggered a “ bloodbath” for HIV/AIDS relief programs. According to one study, this sudden removal of foreign aid could lead to more than nine million preventable deaths by 2030. Now, new research published in Science suggests that the destruction of USAID has also unleashed a wave of violent conflict across Africa.

Scientists merged two datasets, one that mapped worldwide foreign aid disbursements and another recording violent events. Cuts to USAID, the team reports, were associated with significant increases in violent conflict, armed clashes, protests and riots across a large swath of Africa. The effects began immediately after USAID withdrawal, persisted for months, and were most pronounced in areas that had previously relied the most on aid from the United States. “With the USAID shutdown, there was a rapid increase in the likelihood of violence, the severity of violence, and the lethality of violence,” study co-author Austin L. Wright told 404 Media.

As economist Axel Dreher wrote in a related Science Perspective, the findings reveal “the effect of a sudden and unexpected disruption,” which, beyond just removing resources, can open the door to civil unrest by interrupting ongoing initiatives and eroding trust in local governments. “A sudden cut can be destabilizing even if the aid program being cut was inefficient or unsustainable in the long run.”

Here is a link to the full paper.

Categories Cruelty, Elections, History, Musk, Elon

Harrison Ford’s Commencement Address at ASU: “Go Change the World.”

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
2

Harrison Ford delivered a stunning commencement speech to the graduates of Arizona State University. Today is the first day of the rest of their lives. He urged them to make a difference.

In an inspiring speech to the class of 2026, actor Harrison Ford admitted to the mistakes of his generation, before calling on young people to change the world.

If you want to hear his speeech in full, here it is on YouTube (17 minutes).

Here is the report of his speech by KTLA:

He kicked off his commencement address Monday at Arizona State University by admitting he didn’t always make the best choices when he was young. “I was squandering my life in riotous living,” the 83-year-old said of his college years. He found himself in a drama class looking for an easy A grade, but fell in love with acting. 

“Hiding in character, costume and makeup, I had a freedom, a bravery I had never felt before – and I got an A!” he joked. “I was, I realized, present for possibly the very first time in my life. My passion had led me to community.” 

Ford pursued acting, he told the students, while working carpentry jobs to pay the bills and support his family. Even after the success “Star Wars,” when things got easier, something still wasn’t quite right.

“The load lightened. I had freedom, opportunity, but something was still missing.” He had found passion for acting, but not purpose in life. 

That changed in the 1980s, Ford said, when he discovered the nonprofit Conservation International. As he continued starring in episodes of “Star Wars,” the “Indiana Jones” series, “Blade Runner” and more, he found his true purpose in activism on behalf of the environment. 

“Humanity is a part of nature, not above it,” he continued, making a plea for environmental justice, social justice and protecting indigenous communities. “These communities have long understood that the trees, the mountain, water, soil are not commodities, they are relatives to be cherished.

“We can all play a role by embracing that wisdom in our day-to-day lives, by loving the planet, by honoring nature’s authority, her generosity, the bounty she affords us, the justice of her example,” he said. “Because the world you’re stepping into, the world my generation left you is a real mess.”

“Find a place for yourself,” he continued. “Whatever talent or ambition you have, find some way to put it to work. Build something that didn’t exist yesterday. Stand up for someone who can’t stand up for themselves. Bring people together that weren’t talking before. That’s leadership. That’s what moves the needle. 

“Your generation has far more power than you may realize. And if you harness that power, if you find your leadership, your issues, your voice, the world will not be able to ignore you.” 

He ended with a few more inspiring final words: “This is your time. Own it. Enjoy every second of it. Because what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing that you haven’t fully lived it. Congratulations. Go change the world.” 

The student body cheered as Ford exited the stage. Arizona State said more than 14,000 undergraduates graduated this year.

Categories Courage, Creativity, Environment, Ethics

John Thompson: Let NCLB Die, It’s Done Enough Damage

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
7

This week, a report by the Education Scorecard, led by Sean Reardon at the Stanford group; Thomas Kane at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard; and Douglas Staiger at Dartmouth proclaimed that we are in a decade-long “learning recession.” It found that 83% of state reading scores declined from 2015 to 2025. 

While I respect the Scorecard’s skills in compiling test score patterns, due to my time as an academic historian, an education researcher, and an inner city teacher, who witnessed the extreme harm done to students by the No Child Left Act of 2001 and the 2010 Race to the Top, I must challenge many of the conclusions that are being drawn from the test score patterns that Reardon, Kane, Staiger, and their partners present.

For instance, Thomas Kane told NPR that around 2013, “‘school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement.’” When I read this statement, my response was that Kane must be living in a different world.So many districts are still looking over their shoulders prioritizing accountability metrics, not real learning.

Kane then claimed that accountability-driven mandates due to the NCLB and the RttT produced gains that “‘may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half-century that nobody knows about.’” That statement has been refuted by numerous studies including RAND’s research which concluded that the failure of attempts to improve learning through high-stakes testing added to the proof,  “that one does not fatten a hog by weighing it.”I believe the test-driven teacher evaluations that Kane pushed were the most destructive education policy that I’ve ever heard of, and were a major factor in undermining teaching background information and reading for comprehension.Their test results patterns, I argue, actually support the opposite of the defense of NCLB and the RttT; it was the full implementation of high stakes testing, not the rejection of those failed policies, that was one of the top two causes of the sharp decline in literacy.

On the other hand, I agree that a main reason for the decline is the failure to manage social media, and that chronic absenteeism is a major factor.

But, first, I want to explain the political reasons why reading outcomes in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS), and the Oklahoma City Public School System (OKCPS) fell so far. Secondly, I want to help defuse the “blame game,” and push back against the ramping up of unfair criticism of urban schools that is likely to get worse.  

Reardon previously led the research by the Equal Opportunity Project which found that the TPS’s 3rd through 8th grade growth rates were the 7th lowest in the nation from 2009 to 2015.

TPS students had gained only 3.8 years of learning over five years. Moreover, the OKCPS students only gained 4.4 years.

The TPS had had better schools than Oklahoma City, and we repeatedly visited Tulsa to learn from them. But, in 2010 they received a Gates Foundation grant for evaluating teachers, that Kane and Staiger helped create. Then, I frequently visited Tulsa and listened to both teachers and frustrated consultants as they complained about the damage being done to teaching and learning. Not surprisingly, it became much harder to recruit or retain teachers.

Now, the TPS, when compared with around 10,000 schools with similar demographics, “ranked higher than 1% of districts nationwide in average reading performance during the 2022-25 school years.” 

Also, data from American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus showed that the TPS’s chronic absenteeism rate was 48.2%, compared to the nation’s 31.9% chronic absenteeism rate for similar schools.

Similarly, the Scorecard said, “Oklahoma City ranked higher than 0% of districts nationwide in average reading performance during the 2022-25 school years.” Its students performed 3.93 grade levels below the 2019 national average. Moreover, chronic absenteeism was 42.8% compared to the national rate of 33% for similar districts. 

But, before Oklahoma City’s educators in high-challenge schools are blamed, the extreme segregation they face must be taken into account. Oklahoma County has 14 school districts.  along with magnet, charter, and private schools. School choice resulted in neighborhood schools with intense concentrations of students from extreme, generational poverty, who have endured multiple traumas (known as ACEs), thus driving down the OKCPS’s test scores. 

Consequently, in 2015, suburban and exurban schools Edmond, Mustang, Moore, and Yukon were ranked higher than the national average by 1.6; .6; 1; and .8 years. By 2024, their scores declined by the same or by lower rates as similar national schools. So, it’s hard to make the case that the lack of teacher accountability, as opposed to segregation by choice, drove those drops in reading. 

At the risk of sounding too nerdy, the historian in me needs to recall the chronologies for test score gains and decreases. I argue that the most meaningful reading metric is the 8th grade NAEP, which had been improving incrementally from 255 in 1971, to 263 in 2012, before it fell to 260 in 2020, and to 256 in 2023. 

Both my experiences in the classroom, and the reading of the data, support the narrative that it took a while for the destructive policies of both interconnected reforms to be put in place, but when that happened, both laws drove meaningful learning down.    

On the other hand, some claim that the reversal of the most punitive parts of RttT caused that decline. But those changes didn’t occur until 2015, after 8th grade reading scores were already in decline. Even so, in Oklahoma, the conservative Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) blamed State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister for the drop in state reading scores because she ended the practice that made us second in the nation in retentions. 

Getting back to today’s national discussion about literacy, one data-driven scholar, Brian Jacobs, was cited for supporting NCLB despite its problematic features. He said, “It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement.” 

But, if you follow the link to his research, it concludes, “Our results suggest that NCLB had no impact on reading achievement for 4th or 8th graders.” And it gives virtually no evidence that it didn’t undermine learning about science, history, arts, and music.    

Reading the news coverage of the Education Scorecard brings me back to three sets of memories. During the early 1990’s, our school superintendent bragged about implementing the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk. So many of my students who grew up in that era would thank me for teaching in a meaningful manner, and then complain that they had previously been “robbed of an education” by its testing.

Secondly, at the turn of the century, I repeatedly talked with smart, sincere data experts about methodological problems when using their metrics for real world policies, as opposed to economic theory. I repeatedly heard the reply that their job was to show that data-driven accountability can improve teaching. If I’m right, they would say, they would run some more controls (presumably after the policies were in place). But it wasn’t their job to predict what will happen if those policies are adopted.    

Thirdly, as the RttT was implemented, my students from the poorest elementary and middle schools would repeatedly thank me for showing them respect by teaching them in a meaningful manner. And, they kept volunteering that they had been “robbed of an education.”

It is also important to remember that the majority of OKCPS students are Hispanic, and remember that the OKCPS probably would have collapsed if it had not been for immigration. Now, when ICE is terrorizing immigrants, we must come together in support of our threatened students in order to reduce its contribution to chronic absenteeism. 

And Oklahoma has long ranked near the nation’s top for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and near the bottom for children’s wellness.

Moreover, I don’t recall talking to a parent who doesn’t see the need to help young people control, and not be controlled, by their digital devices.

And I almost never talk to a parent, a student, or an educator who doesn’t want to cut back on high-stakes testing and test prep.

So, I agree we need to take the Education Scorecard seriously, but we should use it as a diagnostic tool to help us come together for the team efforts required for bringing back the joy of reading.   

For instance, I agree with Elaine Allensworth, the executive director of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, who responded to the Scorecard saying we should not panic, but “We need to really start asking questions about what we can do to support students so they feel engaged in school.”

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Why Trump Wanted Immunity from Audits

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2026 //
4

The New York Times explained why Trump wanted immunity from audits by the IRS. Before his first presidency, Trump appears to have had a tax liability of nearly $80 million. The IRS claimed that he used the same business failure twice to decrease his tax debt.

The new exemption from audits that he gave himself saves him what he owed, which would now be nearly $100 million. It’s not clear whether he will ever again be audited by the IRS.

The Times reported:

A tax audit that President Trump has been fighting since his peak earning days as a television celebrity was most likely wiped away in this week’s settlement with the Justice and Treasury Departments.

The agreement, part of a resolution to an unusual lawsuit that Mr. Trump and his sons filed against the Internal Revenue Service, frees the president from a potential adverse ruling that could have cost him more than $100 million, according to an analysis of his tax returns in 2020 by The New York Times.

Two years ago, Mr. Trump’s middle son, Eric Trump, acknowledged to The Times that the audit remained active. During his father’s first term in office, the matter was put on hold, records obtained by The Times showed.

It is unclear whether the matter was placed on hold again during the president’s current term or was resolved. If it was still pending until this week, the increased interest and penalties would have grown significantly.

Mr. Trump has always argued that he did nothing wrong in the way he filed his tax returns.

The audit dated back to a $72.9 million tax refund that Mr. Trump claimed, and received, starting in about 2010. The total reflected all the federal income tax he had paid, plus interest, for 2005 through 2008, his greatest earning years as the star of his reality show, “The Apprentice.”

Mr. Trump justified the refund claim by declaring huge business losses — a total of $1.4 billion from his core businesses for 2008 and 2009 — that tax laws had prevented him from using in prior years, The Times previously reported.

Records obtained by The Times did not itemize the business losses. But two of the largest-scale projects of Mr. Trump’s career — his long-failing casinos and his money-losing tower in Chicago — appeared to be behind the biggest numbers. In both cases, Mr. Trump made the argument that his interest in those projects met the tax code definition of worthlessness.

In 2008, with sales on his new Chicago condo-hotel tower lagging far behind projections, Mr. Trump claimed that he had so much debt on the project that he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.

The I.R.S. has argued that he, in effect, tried to write off the same losses on the Chicago tower twice.

During his first campaign, Trump contended that it was “smart” to avoid taxes. He may be the first billionaire to skip them altogether.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, Trump
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