Mike Waltz, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth

Dear Commons Community,

The most important part of the Signal snafu remains the fact that the secretary of defense posted sensitive information about a forthcoming strike in a Signal chat organized by the national security adviser that inadvertently included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

The hunt for accountability, to the extent it occurs, will rightly focus on the security breach and whether laws were violated.

But there’s a lot more to this story and some interesting lessons to be learned from the dynamics of the national security team President Donald Trump has built for his second term.

Here some key points to consider from the 18-person group chat courtesy of CNN.

JD Vance loathes Europe

We already knew that Vice President JD Vance does not hold Europe in high regard after he lectured European officials about democracy and free speech during this year’s Munich Security Conference.

That disdain entered the “Houthi PC small group” when Vance opposed striking the Houthis in Yemen because, in his view, it would benefit Europe more than the US.

More European than American trade travels through the Suez Canal, Vance argued, and he said he worried Americans wouldn’t understand why the US was striking in Yemen. It’s a valid concern for a White House that promised “America first” foreign policy.

Vance opposed the strike. He wasn’t sure Trump understood the situation

“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” Vance said, according to the posts.

Take your pick of European policies Vance might be referring to.

Trump is in the midst of threatening steep tariffs on European goods, misidentifying the European value-added tax structure as a tax on Americans. The strikes, on the other hand, were meant to open up shipping routes relied on by Europeans (and multinational corporations such as Tesla).

Trump has criticized European countries for not spending enough on their own defense and promised to stop subsidizing their security.

“I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Vance said in the chat.

Vance also mentioned a possible spike in oil prices at a time when Trump has promised to bring oil prices down.

Instead of immediate strikes, Vance suggested waiting a month to give time to explain to Americans why they were necessary.

Who tells Trump about concerns?

We know that Trump was involved in discussions about the strikes because he is quoted as saying they would be most valuable to “send a message.”

We don’t know if he heard about Vance’s opposition.

In one extremely telling post, Hegseth said he understood the concerns and would support Vance raising them with Trump.

“I fully share your loathing of European free-loading,” Hegseth said later. “It’s PATHETIC.” But then he argued the US should carry out the strikes because it was the only country “on our side of the ledger” that could make them happen.

There’s some interesting phrasing in a statement Vance’s spokesman gave to Goldberg.

“The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said.

Does that mean Vance expected someone else to raise the concerns?

Vance’s team wants you to know he does not disagree with Trump

“Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy,” his spokesman told Goldberg. “The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”

This story should put to rest any doubts about how important a voice Stephen Miller is in the White House. Presuming he is the “SM” in the group chat, he essentially ended the conversation the day before the strike by channeling Trump.

“As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return.”

Trump’s administration expects the US to be compensated

Perhaps the most intriguing mystery is what the US expected in return for these strikes and how or whether that demand was transmitted to Europe and Egypt.

Here’s what Miller said:

“We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

Did the Europeans and Egyptians know these strikes were coming or were they expected to “remunerate” after the fact? What is the going rate for drone strikes against Houthi rebels shutting down shipping lanes?

It was Hegseth who may have posted the most sensitive information

The error in organizing the chat was national security adviser Mike Waltz’s, but the larger violation may have been by Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

Waltz referred to emailing details to the group’s “High side” accounts, which means their email system for sensitive data, suggesting he realized some information should not be placed on Signal.

Goldberg did not reprint all of the messages sent by Ratcliffe and Hegseth, but he wrote that one in particular from Hegseth was “shockingly reckless” because it included “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

Both Hegseth and Ratcliffe have since said they did not post classified material.

Hegseth is quoted as pushing for the strikes against the Houthis, which killed 53 people, according to the Yemeni health ministry. But the deadly strike was not about the Houthis, Hegseth said.

“I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered,” he said. At another point, Hegseth argued the messaging around the strike needed to focus on Joe Biden and blaming the former president for failure to more forcefully address the issue.

Top government officials love emoji too

Before the strike, at least two officials used a prayer emoji, according to Goldberg.

After the strike, as the Cabinet officials congratulated each other, they used the same emojis anyone else might use in a text message.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s emissary to Ukraine and Middle East peace talks, posted five emoji: two hands praying, a flexed bicep and two American flags.

Moments of DC hypocrisy

Hegseth, who appears to have posted the strike plan to Signal, twice refers to the importance of operations security, or OPSEC.

“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” he sends to the chat that included a journalist.

And, of course, for those who remember the email server scandal that hurt Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, there is now a role reversal as Democrats call for accountability while many Republicans are doing the opposite.

It should also be pointed out that the Trump administration is currently arguing in federal court that it does not have to share information about deported suspected gang members with a federal judge because to do so would jeopardize state secrets.

In sum, a bunch of incompetents are heading American foreign policy!

Tony

Dear Commons Community

Donald Trump announced last weekend that federal special education operations, currently spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Education, will move to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As reported by K-12 Dive, Education Week and other news media.

“It’s going to be a great situation. I guarantee that in a few years from now… I think that you’re going to have tremendous results,” said Trump, while seated in the Oval Office of the White House. Trump also said he would move federal student loan and school nutrition program oversight from the Education Department to the Small Business Administration.

Trump did not say when or how the transitions would occur. Additional information from the Education Department about logistics concerning the transfer of responsibilities was not available Friday afternoon.

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, in a Fox News interview, said funding for the federal special education law — the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — was in place before the creation of the Education Department in 1979. McMahon added that before the Education Department was created, special education programming was housed in what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, “and it managed to work incredibly well.”

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote on the social media platform X that HHS, “is fully prepared to take on the responsibility” of supporting students with disabilities. He added, “We are committed to ensuring every American has access to the resources they need to thrive. We will make the care of our most vulnerable citizens our highest national priority.”

The Education Department oversees the distribution of about $15.4 billion for supports to about 8.4 million infants, toddlers, school children and young adults with disabilities. The department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilatives Services and Office of Special Education Programs also conducts monitoring, provides technical assistance to states and districts, and holds states and districts accountable for compliance to IDEA.

The president’s comments come after he signed an executive order during a White House event directing McMahon to shutter the department to the “maximum extent appropriate.”

At the Thursday signing of the executive order, Trump said the low academic performance of U.S. students required a shakeup at the federal level.

He and his administration have also cited the desire to reduce federal bureaucracy in order to give more decision-making power to the state and local levels.

But public school supporters have vigorously denounced the Trump administration’s moves to dismantle the Education Department, which have already included reducing the workforce by half and canceling research and teacher preparation grants. At least one group — Democracy Forward — says it is planning legal action to stop the department shutdown.

Chad Rummel, executive director of the Council for Exceptional Children, said in a statement Friday, “IDEA is an education law, not a healthcare law, and belongs at the Department of Education.”

CEC is a nonprofit for professionals who work in special and gifted education.

Rummel added, “Moving IDEA programs to HHS would de-emphasize the purpose of IDEA to provide a free and appropriate public education and other critical activities to infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities, and challenge the federal role to provide evidence-based research, personnel preparation, and technical assistance to advance the field of special education.”

National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues said in a Friday statement, “This is not a minor bureaucratic reorganization — it is a fundamental redefinition of how our country treats children with disabilities.” The National Parents Union is a 1.7 million membership organization with more than 1,800 affiliated parent organizations in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

“We must call this what it is: an effort to dismantle protections, disempower families, and turn education into a battleground for profit-driven insurance corporations,” Rodrigues said. “We will not allow it.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Under severe fiscal stress, Wisconsin’s private colleges are cutting majors and retrenching staff in an effort to survive the financial headwinds plaguing many in institutions of higher education,

Some are upending the liberal arts at the core of their identity as they add and expand programs like computer science, artificial intelligence and health care.

The changes come after a particularly rough set of years for the state’s network of private, nonprofit colleges: In the last two years, two institutions, Cardinal Stritch University in Fox Point and Northland College in Ashland, have either closed their doors or announced they’ll do so this spring. A third, Holy Family in Manitowoc, closed in 2020.

Those challenges are driven by many of the factors that challenge higher ed in general: In Wisconsin, there’s just a smaller pool of high school students to pull from, as birth rates have consistently dropped over the last 30 years. And the high schoolers that exist are less likely to go to college than their peers a decade ago. In 2015, about 63 percent of high school graduates in Wisconsin went to college; now, it’s 51.7 percent.

A bustling job market that is willing to pay a living wage right out of high school isn’t particularly helpful to college enrollments in general. (High school graduates in Wisconsin make an average of $33,700 a year.) The sticker shock of tuition at a private college, which can range from $30,000 to $40,000 per year before scholarships, also gives some prospective students pause.

“It’s a tough time in higher education. I don’t think anybody could dispute that,” said Eric Fulcomer, president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. “What you’re seeing in the Wisconsin private colleges is comparable to what we’re seeing in the Midwest, and it’s what’s happening at (Universities of Wisconsin). The challenge is, we don’t have that backstop of state funding. And so, when our schools get into a situation where things aren’t tenable, they end up closing.”

Edgewood College President Andrew Manion is looking to grow beyond the traditional, 18- to 22-year-old student, as the number of high school graduates decline: He has diversified the college’s programs to include occupational therapy and nursing anesthetics, and Edgewood has made many of its graduate programs accessible online to reach working adults who can’t relocate.

Edgewood, Madison’s only private nonprofit college, also will change its name this summer to Edgewood University, to better reflect the array of programs it provides.

“Any school that is entirely reliant upon traditional-age, undergraduate students right now is struggling to try to figure out where their future revenue is going to come from,” Manion said. “As the number of students declines, the only alternative that those schools would have would be to continue to increase tuition in order to make up for those losses, and that becomes unrealistic for too many students.”

NORTHLAND COLLEGE TO CLOSE DESPITE AGGRESSIVE CUTS AND FUNDRAISING

“Northland College has no sustainable path forward,” Northland College Board of Trustees chair Ted Bristol said.

To avoid closing, various private colleges have resorted to staff and programming cuts, as enrollment numbers drop off and budget shortfalls balloon.

Alverno College in Milwaukee cut 14 programs and three dozen staff last year after declaring a financial crisis. In Mequon, another two dozen Concordia University employees were cut last year to reduce costs.

In La Crosse, Viterbo University will eliminate 13 jobs at the end of the school year, less than 12 months after a prior round of cuts that impacted 25 roles. And at St. Norbert, in De Pere, the proposed cuts of about three dozen tenured faculty and 15 programs would eliminate many liberal arts majors, after its board approved a plan to eliminate a projected $7 million budget shortfall.

Cuts have even come at private institutions that look healthy based on IRS filings and audit reports. Marquette University, which ended 2023 with an overall surplus of $57 million, thanks to sizeable donations, is planning a $31 million reduction in spending by 2031, about 7 percent of its operating budget.

FINANCIAL WOES

Private college IRS filings take more than just tuition and expenses into consideration, Fulcomer said. Those filings also include gains or losses in the stock market, whether they’re tangible gains or not; donations often given for capital campaigns, instead of operating expenses; and spending that might reflect an institution’s investment into starting a program and hiring faculty for it, before it brings in a dime.

Still, far more colleges were in the red for fiscal year 2023, the last year all of the filings were available, than in the previous year. Seventeen colleges reported losses for that year ranging from nearly $88,000 to $13 million. Most ran shortfalls in the $1 million to $7 million range.

The year before, three of the private colleges and universities had shortfalls, with the largest being $3.7 million.

Edgewood fared on the better side when considering losses in 2023, with a shortfall of $565,720. Of colleges in the red, Green Bay-based Bellin College had the smallest loss, at $87,881.

Only four private nonprofit colleges weathered 2023 with a positive balance in their bank accounts, including three Milwaukee -based institutions — the Medical College of Wisconsin, Marquette University and Milwaukee School of Engineering — and Ripon College.

A handful of publicly available audits for fiscal year 2024 show mixed results. While nearly all of them saw increases in their assets, five didn’t earn enough revenue to cover their operating expenses while five others brought in more money than they spent.

ST. NORBERT, A CATHOLIC COLLEGE, MAY NIX THEOLOGY IN LATEST ROUND OF BUDGET CUTS

On college leaders’ chopping block are a wide array of humanities majors — notably, the Green Bay area Catholic college’s theology and religious studies majors.

Nevertheless, in the last two years, auditors only raised the closure alarm at one private college: Northland College, which launched a last-ditch fundraising rally last spring.

The college wanted to raise $12 million to stave off closure but only brought in $1 million. It was enough to stay open another year, but enrollment dropped by nearly half, to 270 students, after the college’s offerings were cut down to nine programs. In February, Northland announced that this year will be its last.

It’s “devastating” to these communities when the local private college closes, Fulcomer said.

“It’s a natural part of the situation we find ourselves in, so schools are working really hard to avoid that,” he said.

UP AGAINST HEADWINDS

While public and private schools face many of the same challenges, there’s a handful of aspects that disproportionately affect smaller private colleges.

Wisconsin’s private colleges have smaller enrollments to begin with, with 52,000 students spread across 22 institutions, compared to the UW system’s 164,000 enrolled at 13. That means fewer students sharing the costs. And when smaller institutions lose students, those losses are more pronounced because tuition makes up a larger portion of budgets than at larger schools.

There are also fewer streams of income available to private colleges than public universities and two-year technical colleges: They don’t get state funding, outside of scholarships given directly to students.

For every dollar in scholarships the state gives students, Fulcomer said, the institution often is giving $24 in discounted tuition and institutional scholarships.

But the sticker shock prospective students get from seeing price tags in the tens of thousands per year could be a deterrent, even if a financial aid package dials that cost back for them, said UW-Madison professor Nicholas Hillman, who studies college-going and access.

“So a student looking at where to go to college, they see a nonprofit charging $20,000, $30,000 in tuition a year, and they think, ‘Oh, my, might as well, you know, go to the public, because their tuitions are staying low,'” Hillman said.

PIVOTING TO IN-DEMAND FIELDS

Edgewood is giving Beloit College, traditionally a liberal arts college, a step up into nursing through a new partnership. Marian University in Fond du Lac has started a construction management bachelor’s degree after requests from a local company, Fulcomer said.

Viterbo University is adding a data analytics minor and a master’s degree in nursing. Carthage in Kenosha has a new healthcare administration program. Milwaukee School of Engineering is offering minors in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Concordia University is launching a pharmacy program.

“Our institutions are looking at the market — they’re deciding to add academic programs that will bring students to the institution and to meet the workforce needs,” Fulcomer said.

The shift to more industry-based needs is happening elsewhere in Wisconsin’s higher education landscape, too. UW system created many new nursing, engineering and artificial intelligence programs as part of a workforce development plan; many of the technical colleges have set their sights on expanding technology and healthcare programs.

Cuts to some of the liberal arts programs, though, worry students and alumni of private colleges. At St. Norbert College, a Catholic institution, its theology, French, history and art education departments are among those on the chopping block. At Alverno College, it was English, environmental science and media design, along with other science-based majors.

At Edgewood, Manion had to contend with eliminating seven tenured faculty after arriving in 2020, but then turned to figuring out where the college could grow, he said.

“When I arrived, the main issue was not about what else can we cut, but what areas can we grow into so that we can get more revenue?” he said. “It’s always about balancing revenue and expenditures, and you can only cut so much.

Tough times for high education and as the article indicates no saviors are on the horizon.

Tony

Jackie Robinson

Dear Commons Community,

Leonard Greene had an op-ed in The New York Daily News yesterday commenting on last- week’s disclosure that baseball icon, Jackie Robinson, had his U.S. Army record erased from a military website. While it has since be reinstated, it exposed Trump and his racist cronies for what they are. Below is an excerpt from the op-ed.  It speaks volumes.

Tony

—————————————————-

Before Rosa Parks changed history by refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Alabama bus, a righteous Black Army lieutenant was court-martialed for taking the same stand in Texas.

His name: Jackie Robinson.

Robinson is best known, of course, for breaking baseball’s color barrier in 1947.

But on July 6, 1944, Robinson (photo) refused a driver’s order to move to the back of an Army bus.

Although he was acquitted of the six counts against him, including insubordination, the court-martial prevented him from deploying to fight in Europe with his battalion. He received an honorable discharge.

Last week, Robinson, dead for 54 years, suffered another injustice when his Army record was wiped from a military website in a racist and regressive DEI purge.

The erasure followed with President Trump’s order to the Pentagon to scan federal websites for articles, social media posts, photos, news articles and videos to remove any web pages that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion.”

An article detailing Robinson’s military career has since been restored, but the damage was already done.

“We take great pride in Jackie Robinson’s service to our country as a soldier and a sports hero, an icon whose courage, talent, strength of character and dedication contributed greatly to leveling the playing field not only in professional sports but throughout society,” Robinson’s son David Robinson, a Jackie Robinson Foundation board member, said in a statement.

“A recipient of both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, he of course is an American hero.”

Removing Robinson’s record puts Trump in the same company with every white ballplayer who ever threw at, spit at or spiked Robinson because they didn’t want to play with or against a Black ballplayer.

He’s as bad as any parent at a game who called Robinson a n—-r in front of their children, or motel manager who wouldn’t rent Robinson a room on the road.

It’s the most insulting anti-woke move since Florida banned some books with titles about Parks, Henry Aaron and Roberto Clemente.

Among the problems with the DEI attacks and the backlash against affirmative action is the assumption that Black success has been based on racial preference and not hard work and merit.

The reality, though, is that our success has often come in spite of being Black — not because of it.

The Rev. Al Sharpton recalled meeting Robinson as a youth when his mentor, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, brought Sharpton and his mother to a fundraiser at Robinson’s Connecticut home.

“My mother felt like she was in the presence of somebody immortal,” Sharpton said on MSNBC. “That’s who Jackie Robinson was. To take him down in the name of DEI?

“He didn’t get where he got because they had some kind of diversity program. He merited that. And it’s the most racist thing in the world to act like these people who put their lives on the line in the military only got there because somebody did something extra for them. No. They earned it.”

Robinson wasn’t the only former soldier wiped off a military website. The Department of Defense also erased a page honoring Vietnam War hero Charles Calvin Rogers, a Black U.S. Army general and Medal of Honor recipient.

This was after Trump fired CQ Brown Jr., a Black four-star Air Force general, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and replaced him with a retired white three-star general.

Brown had been a supporter of diversity initiatives.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called Robinson “a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”

Still, Robinson, a Republican, endorsed Richard Nixon for president in 1960 before becoming disillusioned with the GOP.

“A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP,” Robinson later said. “It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind — the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy.”

Dear Commons Community,

A case, FCC v. Consumers’ Research, will be heard on Wednesday at the U.S. Supreme Court that threatens federal funding for the Universal Service Fund (USF) which includes the popular E-Rate program for libraries and schools. E-Rate is the commonly used name for the Schools and Libraries Program of the USF, which is administered by the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) under the direction of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The program provides discounts to assist schools and libraries in the United States to obtain affordable telecommunications and internet access. It is one of four support programs funded through a universal service fee charged to companies that provide interstate and/or international telecommunications services.  Below is an excerpt of an article published by CNN that reviews the current status of the case.

Tony

——————————————————————————-

When schools in Kentucky closed for several days last month due to severe flooding, students suddenly began showing up at the Bullitt County Public Library.

They had come for the internet.

To pay for those high-speed connections that some students lacked at home, the county library – like many others across the country – has relied on a federal program that is now poised for a major overhaul courtesy of the Supreme Court.

“Internet access is a luxury,” said Tara O’Hagan, the library’s executive director. “In Bullitt County, there’s literally a digital divide.”

The case, which the justices will hear on Wednesday, could wind up costing libraries, schools and hospitals billions.

At a time when nearly 10% of US households do not have access to broadband internet, one of the leading programs to bridge the divide has been caught up in a broader and decades old separation-of-powers fight over federal agencies. Those cases have found purchase on the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, which has repeatedly limited the ability of the federal bureaucracy to act absent congressional approval.

A conservative “consumer awareness group” is challenging the $7 billion Universal Service Fund, which Congress created in 1996 to offset the cost of phone and internet service for low-income Americans.

It’s a system that critics say is a “bureaucrat’s dream” and a “nightmare for the Constitution.”

To pay for programs like E-Rate, which O’Hagan’s library relies on, Congress requires telecommunications companies to chip billions of dollars into the fund, a cost that is usually passed on to customers. Critics say the system is an indirect tax levied by the Federal Communications Commission and violates what’s known as the nondelegation doctrine – the idea that Congress can’t delegate its power to federal agencies.

Making matters worse, those critics say, the FCC essentially outsources the administration of the fund to a private company.

“Nobody wants to take responsibility for taxes,” said Trent McCotter, an attorney at the Boyden Gray law firm who will argue against the government on Wednesday.

Paying for the program through regular congressional spending bills, McCotter told CNN, would be better for schools and libraries in the long run.

“The Universal Service Fund is facing a widely recognized death spiral of ever-higher rates, with dwindling returns – which will soon implode the program,” he said.

But others say pervasive gridlock on Capitol Hill would jeopardize programs like E-Rate and Lifeline that connect millions of Americans to the internet.

“The impact would be most pronounced and quickest on low-income folks,” said John Heitmann, counsel for the National Lifeline Association, a group that represents companies that connect about 8 million households with phone and internet service subsidized through the fund. “They don’t have the megaphone that corporations have.”

A decision is expected by the end of June.

Curbing the ‘administrative state’

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has in recent years hacked away at the power of federal agencies to act on their own, most recently in a 6-3 decision last year that overturned a 1984 precedent requiring courts to give deference to agency regulations in many circumstances. Federal agency power expanded dramatically after the New Deal, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, and courts had veered too far from exercising independent judgment about whether an agency had violated the law.

That decision came on the heels of a blockbuster ruling in 2022 that embraced the so-called major questions doctrine, which bars an agency from issuing a rule with major economic or political impacts absent explicit approval from Congress.

The “nondelegation doctrine,” which blocks Congress from delegating its authority to agencies – and may also bar agencies from delegating their authority to private entities – is the next target in that campaign.

The high court has not invoked the nondelegation doctrine since the 1930s. It has instead since permitted Congress to delegate authority under certain conditions.

But conservative groups in particular have argued the permissiveness has perverted separation-of-powers principles, allowing government agencies to take the lead on difficult choices they say should be left to elected lawmakers.

That argument has drawn nods of approval from at least four conservative justices.

Many of the recent appeals dealing with the power of federal agencies have taken on a political sheen, with conservative groups challenging policies embraced by the Biden administration – including student loan forgiveness, environmental regulations and Covid-19 restrictions.

But the politics of this case, FCC v. Consumers’ Research, are more complicated.

The Biden administration appealed an adverse ruling from the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals and the Trump administration hasn’t shown any sign of deviating course. The Justice Department warned the court in a brief this month that “Congress has relied on this court’s longstanding” approach to the issue to enact legislation authorizing agencies to police unfair competition, oversee the securities industry and ensure the safety of food and drugs.

Some of the programs funded through the Universal Service Fund have faced controversies and even some of those advocating for them acknowledge that McCotter has a point about the fund’s long-term viability.

Still those advocates are hopeful that President Donald Trump won’t try to undermine the programs, which have a significant impact in rural communities that supported his reelection.

When Trump announced a new FCC commissioner in a social media post in January, he noted that the agency would work to cut regulations, protect free speech and “ensure every American has access to affordable and fast internet.” The remark, though unspecific, was not lost on advocates hoping to bolster the programs.

And Vice President JD Vance, a former senator from Ohio, was a leading supporter of a similar initiative in Congress, the Affordable Connectivity Program.

That program, though, serves as a cautionary tale for advocates for expanding digital access: Congress let its funding lapse last year.

Disconnecting rural communities?

Librarians and school officials who spoke with CNN are focused on the impact – and their budgets – far more than the politics.

O’Hagan’s said the library spends about $4,000 a month to provide internet to its five branches. That’s an 80% reduction on what it would normally cost – a difference that is covered by E-Rate, one of the programs at issue in the case.

“Without that support, we wouldn’t be able to provide internet access to our most susceptible community members,” she said.

Chase Christensen, superintendent of the Sheridan County School District #3 in northern Wyoming, also relies on an E-Rate program, which pays about 20% of the cost of managing the school’s internal internet network.

“It’s picking up the big chunk and making it a little bit more affordable,” Christensen said. “We can spend those dollars in the classroom instead of spending them on network infrastructure.”

The E-Rate program provided about $3.26 billion in discounts for interconnectivity in 2024, according to a brief supporting the FCC filed by the School Superintendents Association, the National Association of Secondary School Principals and other groups. More than 106,000 schools benefited over the past two years. Sometimes schools use those resources in less than obvious ways.

“A lot of them are using the internet to power security systems or they’re using their internet to control the environment,” said Noelle Ellerson Ng, with the superintendent’s group. “That’s not even about teaching and learning. It’s just about getting kids to schools and getting schools ready for kids.”

Danielle Perry, chief compliance officer for a California-based company called TruConnect, said the Lifeline program helps low-income Americans search for better jobs, attend telehealth visits and stay connected with family – in other words, the same things everyone uses the internet for.

“It’s something that most of us take for granted – never think about it,” she said. “But these are people who just desperately need this program.”

Dear Commons Community,

Science had an article on Friday entitled, “Overseas universities see opportunity in U.S. ‘brain drain‘”. It comments on the movement of  American researchers to universities outside of the United States.  Here is the article in its entirety.

“When Emma saw a posting for a faculty position in the University of Mississippi’s School of Pharmacy late last year, she thought she’d found her dream job. The early-career chemist, who asked not to use her real name to avoid jeopardizing her current role, had already left her home in Europe to pursue an academic career in the United States, and was committed to staying.

But by the time she’d cleared the application process, she started to have major reservations. “Every day I would see news articles on federal workers who were let go, funds being withheld unless [diversity, equity, and inclusion] initiatives were shut down,” she says.

She worried about a lack of future funding, and about ricocheting effects on universities. Last month, “I decided to withdraw my candidacy … despite being offered everything I needed,” she says.

Emma now plans to move back to Europe. She’s not alone: Universities globally have reported seeing an uptick in applications from U.S.-based researchers, who face an increasingly uncertain climate under President Donald Trump’s administration. And some countries and their institutions are already looking to use the opportunity to attract new talent and reverse the steady migration of scientists to the U.S. in recent decades.

France has been among the fastest off the blocks. Aix Marseilles University launched an initiative earlier this month called a Safe Place for Science, which will invest as much as €15 million to support about 15 researchers. The offer has so far attracted more than 50 applicants, says a university spokesperson, and the institution “has already welcomed one researcher” for a visit. Another French university, Paris-Saclay, tells Science it might extend or launch new initiatives to support U.S. researchers. And France’s research minister recently asked universities for “concrete proposals” on how to lure researchers from the U.S., according to Agence France-Presse.

Offers in some other countries have been more direct. After the Trump administration threatened to terminate $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University (see story, p. 1245), Yi Rao, a neurobiologist at Peking University, former president of Capital Medical University, and prominent Trump critic, contacted researchers at the institution to offer his help. “I was shocked to learn of the vast cancellation of grants and contracts,” he wrote in an email seen by Science, adding that “if any good scientist … wants to have a stable position for conducting scientific research, please do not hesitate to contact me.”

Many major foreign research institutions told Science they have no plans to actively recruit U.S. researchers, or didn’t reply to questions. But even universities that aren’t specifically recruiting that group could feel the effects of a wave of researchers looking to leave the country. The University of Barcelona, for example, has observed a spike in applications from the U.S. this year, largely from European researchers considering returning to the region, a school spokesperson says.

At the University of Lausanne, oncologist Johanna Joyce, president-elect of the European Association for Cancer Research, says unsolicited applications to her lab from U.S.-based scientists have risen fivefold since January. “The future for so many scientists in the U.S. and around the world has rapidly become very uncertain.”

Some policy experts say national governments should be doing more to attract U.S. talent. Danielle Cave, director of executive, strategy, and research at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has pushed for Australia to offer fast-track visas to top U.S. scientists, an idea also under discussion in Norway and other countries. Not capitalizing on the situation “would be wasting a unique opportunity,” she says.

Researchers could face a sobering reality once they try to nail down roles abroad, however. In Canada, where there have been loud calls for research institutions to take up U.S. émigrés, higher education is facing debilitating cuts, notes Richard Gold, director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy at Mc-Gill University. McGill recently announced it would slash CA$45 million and more than 250 jobs to address a funding deficit. In the United Kingdom, many universities are also cutting jobs and 72% could be operating in deficit by 2026, according to a report from the country’s higher education regulator.

For now, the situation for U.S. academics remains rife with uncertainty, with some Trump administration actions blocked by judges or partially reversed. The full effects of its policies are unlikely to be seen until the fall, when university admissions and faculty transfers ramp up. But if large numbers of academics working in the U.S. do decide to leave, Gold doubts other countries will be able to absorb them all. The end result, he warns, could be an exodus of talent from global science. “My biggest fear,” he says, is that “we’re going to lose a cohort of researchers.”

Young researchers should seriously consider opportunities outside the U.S.

How sad!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Cerebral Entanglements:  How the Brain Shapes Our Public and Private Lives, by Allan J. Hamilton.  The author is a professor at the University of Arizona and has received awards for his work in neurosurgery.  I found it a good book mainly because the author knows his topic well.  He gets into the weeds at times when discussing the workings of the most complex organ in our body.  The book’s sixteen chapters covers an array of topics including consciousness, affection, trust, romance, religion, etc.  I thought his concluding chapter on the brain of the future was the most interesting.  In the Epilog, Hamilton provides concerns about the perils of unfettered artificial intelligence.  

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times.

Tony

———————————————————–

The New York Times

Review of Books

Can Understanding the Brain Make Us Better People?

By Deborah Blum

Deborah Blum is the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at M.I.T. and the author of “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Quest for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”

Feb. 12, 2025

CEREBRAL ENTANGLEMENTS: How the Brain Shapes Our Public and Private Lives, by Allan J. Hamilton

The human brain! It’s amazing! A master conductor of our emotional symphonies, a supercomputer of intelligence, a treasure inside the “temple” of the skull, where it gloriously shimmers “vivid, vital, jewel-like.” I mean, is it any wonder we’re such a special species?

Sorry: I had to get that out of my system. Books built on hyperbole seem to bring out the worst in me. And “Cerebral Entanglements,” a new book by the surgeon and medical consultant Allan J. Hamilton, is so breathlessly excited about our brains and how they work, about the dazzle of new insights and technologies, that occasionally this reader felt compelled to take a break and fan herself.

Image

On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys hearing the brain described as “the holy of holies,” the chemistry of human relationships as “finding treasure on the map of love” and happiness as “a good wine,” then disregard my reaction.

Obviously, I’m not that kind of person. Still, in the interest of fairness, I’ll also tell you that Hamilton’s tour of all things brain does have its charms and virtues: a friendly writing style, a core of moral decency and a wide-ranging wealth of research to back up his points.

“Cerebral Entanglements” sprawls across many different fields that investigate how we (and our busy brains) engage with the world: neuroscience, endocrinology, history, culture, psychology, moral philosophy — well, you get the idea. New technologies allow us to visually illuminate the brain as it encounters myriad issues and challenges. This means, Hamilton argues, that we are the “first generation to be able to image and quantify human thought” — an idea to justify some exuberance, you might say — and in the 300-odd pages of his book, he does his best not to miss a single thought of importance.

Of this bounty, I particularly liked his compassionate exploration of the way children’s brains are altered by trauma and neglect. Hamilton underlines the impact of such experiences by citing studies that show a negative effect even on fetal development if a pregnant woman is exposed to violence. There’s an insightful look at what brain imaging and neurochemistry research has shown us about how grief, loss and depression can reshape the brain, changing both its physical structure and chemical function.

The book includes a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) depictions of the brain as it responds to situations ranging from stress to injury. These are fascinating and powerful. I studied and restudied one of a patient suffering from PTSD, the image red as a bomb on a timer, lit by brain regions sparking with fear and rage.

But despite such examples — or as Hamilton puts it, such “heady stuff” — I did not find myself swept away by his assurance that we are now drivers at the wheel of the brain car, so to speak. When he writes that the brain is “the master editor of reality,” I’m not sure exactly what he means. Similarly, when he proposes that imaging technology now allows us to “see wisdom’s shape and form,” it’s unclear to me that we’ve learned how to define wisdom, to see it clearly or even to practice it in a meaningful way.

Although Hamilton is prone to such sweeping statements, he also occasionally admits some limits. In a section on the subconscious, he acknowledges that “the brain rarely works the way we think it does or should.” Later, while examining the mind-body connection, he writes, “We think we have sound logical explanations about the way the brain should be organized but we are almost always wrong.”

Yes, the human brain is beautiful, remarkable and powerful. And it’s true that researchers have brought us closer than ever to mapping its structure, deciphering the chemistry and electrical signals that zing through our nervous systems, helping us better understand what drives human behaviors at their best and worst. But the brain has yet to yield all its mysteries.

In his conclusion, Hamilton expresses the hope we can use our hard-acquired knowledge of the human self to reinforce our more compassionate behaviors, and, possibly, bring more kindness to a world that desperately needs it. This reviewer, cranky as she may be, hopes for the same.

Dear Commons Community,

Under threat from the Trump administration, Columbia University agreed to implement a suite of policy changes yesterday, including overhauling its rules for protests and conducting an immediate review of its Middle Eastern studies department.

The changes, detailed in a letter sent by interim president, Katrina Armstrong, came one week after the Trump administration ordered the Ivy League school to implement those and other changes in order to continue receiving federal funding, an ultimatum widely criticized in academia as an attack on academic freedom.  As reported by The Associated Press.

In her letter, Armstrong said the university would immediately appoint a senior vice provost to conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of its regional studies programs, “starting immediately with the Middle East.”

Columbia will also bar protests inside academic buildings and the wearing of face masks on campus “for the purposes of concealing one’s identity.” An exception would be made for people wearing them for health reasons.

The Trump administration pulled $400 million in research grants and other federal funding, and had threatened to cut more, over the university’s handling of protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The White House has labeled the protests antisemitic, a label rejected by those who participated in the student-led demonstrations.

As a “precondition” for restoring funding, federal officials demanded that the university to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years.”

They also told the university to ban masks on campus, adopt a new definition of antisemitism, abolish its current process for disciplining students and deliver a plan to ”reform undergraduate admissions, international recruiting, and graduate admissions practices.”

Columbia said it had agreed to do many of those things, including adopt a definition of antisemitism.

Sad day for American higher education!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

British satirical magazine Private Eye took aim at President Donald Trump’s so-far unsuccessful attempts to broker an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and his adulation of Russian President Vladimir Putin —with its scathing new cover.

The main headline read: “Russia Demands To Keep Captured Territory.”

A photograph below showed Putin declaring in a speech bubble: “Including the White House.”

Trump boasted during the 2024 presidential election campaign that he would end the conflict in Ukraine on his very first day back in the White House.

That didn’t happen.

Since returning to office, Trump has falsely claimed that Ukraine was to blame for being invaded and attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator.”

Private Eye is a long standing bi-weekly satirical publication, written by credible journalists exposing corruption and inept politicians. Its front covers are always poignant. Like this one.

Most poignant!

Tony