pelespirit

1. 64% of adult Medicaid recipients already work.

2. Adults on Medicaid who aren’t working have good reasons not to.

3. So, 93% of all Medicaid recipients either already working or having good reason not to.

4. The work requirement kicks eligible people Medicaid because of its burdensome and confusing reporting requirements.

5. When Arkansas enacted work requirements, there was no significant change in employment rates.

6. If Republicans really want to put people to work, they’d make it easier to get Medicaid—not harder.

The Department of Health and Human Services—under the control of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—has canceled millions of dollars in federal funding awarded to Moderna to produce an mRNA vaccine against influenza viruses with pandemic potential, including the H5N1 bird flu currently sweeping US poultry and dairy cows.

Last July, the Biden administration's HHS awarded Moderna $176 million to "accelerate the development of mRNA-based pandemic influenza vaccines." In the administration's final days in January, HHS awarded the vaccine maker an additional $590 million to support "late-stage development and licensure of pre-pandemic mRNA-based vaccines." The funding would also go to the development of five additional subtypes of pandemic influenza.

On Wednesday, as news broke that the Trump administration was reneging on the contract, Moderna reported positive results from an early trial of a vaccine targeting H5 influenza viruses. In a preliminary trial of 300 healthy adults, the vaccine candidate appeared safe and boosted antibody levels against the virus by 44.5-fold.

Several people familiar with the move said the US Department of Commerce had told so-called electronic design automation groups—which include Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens EDA—to stop supplying their technology to China.

The Bureau of Industry and Security, the arm of the US commerce department that oversees export controls, issued the directive to the companies via letters, according to the people. It was unclear if every US EDA company had received a letter.

The move marks a significant new effort by the administration to stymie China’s ability to develop leading-edge artificial intelligence chips, as it seeks a technological advantage over its geopolitical rival. In April, Washington restricted the export of Nvidia’s China-specific AI chips.

In his book Time to Get Tough: Make America #1 Again, Trump wrote that Social Security disability claims—specifically, that “one out of every twenty people in America now claims disability”—stood in the way of making America great. (That figure is actually quite low, considering around that one in four American adults has a disability.)

Note: This article is a good start but it fails to mention the most important actions:

• The removal of funding for USAID. That will cost millions of lives, mostly people of color.
• The forced deportation of POC, some of them US citizens.
• The allowance of white South Africans into the country because they need to be "saved" from discrimination.
• The entire MAGA movement is about racism. ___

The judge said Musk appears to lack the legal authority to direct alterations to the government because he is not a Senate-confirmed official and DOGE was never authorized by Congress.

“The Constitution does not permit the Executive to commandeer the entire appointments power by unilaterally creating a federal agency pursuant to Executive Order and insulating its principal officer from the Constitution as an ‘advisor’ in name only,” Chutkan wrote.

Chutkan said plaintiffs have also sufficiently alleged that they were harmed by DOGE’s “unauthorized access” to “private and proprietary information” and other actions.

Another source if you don't like this one: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-judge-refuses-to-toss-states-lawsuit-against-elon-musk-and-doge

Trump getting booed starts at 1:23 (One hour and 23 minutes).

“Without [this guest worker program], I believe agriculture in the US would decline a lot because people there don’t want to do the work,” Mendez said.

As the fate of the hundreds of thousands of undocumented farm workers remains in limbo amid Donald Trump’s mass deportation threats, and the administration’s H-2A policies are undecided, the future of these guest workers remains unclear. Their numbers grow each year – and they are increasingly central to an industry historically dominated by undocumented workers. The industry isn’t creating new jobs either.

Farmers agree with farm workers like Mendez. They say they cannot attract other workers to their rural fields.

The group, Accountable.US, found that the top 10 richest Republican senators and top 25 richest GOP members of the House of Representatives have a collective net worth of over $1.1 billion and over $1.4 billion, respectively, "allowing them to take advantage of tax breaks granted by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that they are currently seeking to extend."

The richest Republican senator, by a significant margin, is Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who made his money from the nation's for-profit healthcare system before serving as governor of his state. As of mid-May, his estimated net worth was around half a billion dollars, according to the new report.

Nine of the 10 senators—all but Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah)—"sit on five committees instrumental in shaping budget reconciliation," the report points out, as the upper chamber takes up the package following its passage in the House last week.

That program — the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program — began under President Joe Biden in late 2021 as a response to challenges accessing food that were magnified by the pandemic. Its goal was to boost purchases from local farmers and ranchers, and the funding went to hundreds of food banks across the country, including 90 focused on serving tribes.

In March, the Trump administration decided the program did not align with its priorities. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins defended the cut of a half-billion dollars by calling the program a remnant of the COVID era.

The Trump (R) administration has ordered US embassies around the world to stop scheduling appointments for student visas as it prepares to expand social media vetting of such applicants.

An official memo said social media vetting would be stepped up for student and foreign exchange visas, which would have "significant implications" for embassies and consulates.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to hear a Native American group's bid based on religious rights to block Rio Tinto (RIO.AX), opens new tab and BHP (BHP.AX), opens new tab from gaining control of Arizona land needed to build one of the world's largest copper mines - a project situated on land long used for Apache sacred rituals.

The project is 55% owned by British-Australian mining company Rio Tinto and 45% by Australian mining company BHP. Rio Tinto is the project's operator. Both companies have spent more than $2 billion on the project without yet producing any copper.

Conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented, with Gorsuch calling the court's decision a "grave mistake" that would allow the government to destroy the Apaches' sacred site without even at least hearing arguments in their case.

"Just imagine if the government sought to demolish a historic cathedral on so questionable a chain of legal reasoning," Gorsuch said. "I have no doubt that we would find that case worth our time."

The destruction of the sacred site also would violate a 1852 treaty promising that the U.S. government would protect the land and "secure the permanent prosperity and happiness" of the Native American tribe, the plaintiffs said.