For the past few months, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has been embroiled in a growing list of scandals and allegations of harm. Miller’s ex-wife, the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), has accused the Republican congressman in legal filings of being an absentee father, abusive husband, and having a history of violence and misconduct towards women dating back to his high school days. Miller has repeatedly denied these allegations.

As Mother Jones’ Abby Vesoulis reported in July:

For instance, one of [Emily] Moreno’s legal filings in their ongoing child custody case asked Miller to comment on the accusation that he pushed a female peer down a set of stairs during his high school years.

“Why did you not pursue a defamation lawsuit against [redacted] for alleging you pushed her down a flight of stairs?”

Miller’s response: “OBJECTION; relevance, scope of admissible evidence.”

According to Politico’s 2021 report, “Miller pushed a girl out the door of his room and she fell down some stairs after he became enraged when she resisted his attempts to touch her, according to three people who were there and many more who heard about the incident in the aftermath.”

Miller categorically denied to Politico that the altercation took place. But reached for comment this month, the woman in question told Mother Jones that while the event “happened 20 years ago,” it remains “one of the more traumatic nights of my life.”

Vesoulis recently traveled to Ohio where she and our producer got a chance to speak with Miller directly following a family court hearing between him and his ex-wife. While visiting, Vesoulis made a stop at the public library in the town that Miller grew up and attended high school in. She wanted to see if there was anything more to be learned from his old high school yearbooks.

“We’re going to flip through all these yearbooks and we could find nothing,” says Vesoulis, sitting in one of the library’s study rooms. “We could find something interesting.”

Interesting, indeed. Here’s what she saw:

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on AI use for elementary and middle school students on Wednesday. 

The decision, which comes a week before New York City public schools begin the year, “includes all software that uses student-facing generative AI.” Elementary and middle school students—about 600,000 students in total—will receive screen-time restrictions that loosen over advancing grades, ranging from zero to 45 minutes per day. Companion chatbots will also be prohibited for all grade levels. 

The city is also introducing biannual AI critical thinking training for high schoolers that cover determining what is and is not AI, impacts on careers and future skills, and AI-related biases, among others, along with limited pilot programs for a few classes per high school that incorporate AI tools into students’ learning “under the direct supervision of a trained educator.” 

“Children need their teachers and human connection in order to learn and in order to grow. And they need to develop skills alongside their peers, build relationships with their teachers, and wrestle with tough problems on their own,” Mayor Mamdani said in a Wednesday press conference. “The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but that it is necessary. We do not see it that way.”

The new policies will not apply to cases such as assistive tools to help students with disabilities, those who are multilingual learners, and students in career programs like computer science. 

Other school districts have considered AI policies and guidance—such as screening AI tools prior to incorporation into the classroom—but, according to Tech Policy Press, few so far include enforceable, school system-wide rules. 

New York City’s policies permit teachers to use AI to plan lessons and operational tasks.

United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew expressed support for the policy’s limits to screen time but told the Associated Press that it left “many questions unanswered,” including around the implementation of “AI safeguards” in software.

“Let’s start at the source, rather than expect school communities or individual educators to figure out after the fact if what their school uses fits the new policy,” he said.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump this month announced plans to rescind a landmark rule that has protected old-growth forests in the US for 25 years. If finalized, the rollback is expected to benefit the companies that Tom Schultz, chief of the US Forest Service, represented in his previous roles as a timber industry lobbyist and executive, according to research by consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen.

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, more commonly known as the “roadless rule,” was adopted in 2001 to limit development in roughly 45 million acres of national forest. Industry interests and Republican representatives have long lobbied for the rule’s rescission, which would open up those swaths of untouched land to road construction, drilling and logging.

In a statement, Schultz described the move as “the best way to restore the balance, reduce wildfire risk, and secure the long-term health of our forests and neighboring communities.” But studies suggest it could put 400 threatened and endangered species at risk and imperil ecosystems.

Industry interests will be the main beneficiaries of the change, advocates fear.

In an emailed statement, a Forest Service spokesperson, who did not provide their name, noted that Schultz had also held positions in Idaho and Montana government.

“Chief Schultz’s appointment reflects the administration’s recognition that the Forest Service’s current challenges require leadership with broad federal land management experience, not just internal tenure,” the person said.

Schultz is the first-ever Forest Service chief who did not previously work within the agency itself. Before Trump tapped him for the job, he served as president of the Federal Forest Resource Coalition, a trade association representing companies that purchase timber from the federal government, and was also vice-president of resources and government affairs at Idaho Forest Group, a major lumber manufacturer.

He is one of dozens of former extractive industry insiders Trump has placed in key environmental positions. Energy secretary Chris Wright was CEO of fracking company Liberty Energy, while interior official Tyler Hassen was an oil executive. Forty-three former fossil-fuel employees and 29 former corporate executives held administration positions, an October analysis from Public Citizen and corporate watchdog Revolving Door Project found.

Schultz has long been critical of the roadless rule. As it was being considered in 2000, he said: “It’s going to be very difficult to actually generate revenue from state trust lands that could be encompassed within a roadless designation.”

The American Forest Resource Council (AFRC), a timber industry trade association on the West Coast that includes the Idaho Forest Group, has recently directly advocated for the rescission of the roadless rule. In comments to the federal government last year, the lobbying group said the “one-size-fits-all” policy unnecessarily prevents “active forest management”—intentionally thinning forests through practices including logging—which it says is the best way to mitigate wildfire risk.

Since his appointment, Schultz has echoed these calls. “Active forest management is not an option. It’s essential,” he said in the announcement of the proposal to rescind the roadless rule, which also referred to the policy as “one-size-fits-all.”

“Active forest management is central to the Forest Service’s multi-use mission—not an industry agenda,” the Forest Service spokesperson said.

In a statement, Nick Smith, spokesperson for the AFRC, said: “There is broad bipartisan support for increasing forest health treatments—thinning, prescribed fire, and even logging—to reduce the size and severity of wildfires and make forests more resilient to climate change.”

A recent analysis of the Forest Service’s own data found that wildfires were nearly three times as likely to start near roads, raising questions about the administration’s claim that expanding road access will reduce wildfire risk, said Lois Parshley, climate research director at Public Citizen. “But from the industry’s perspective, it will also open up new possibilities for logging,” she said.

Asked about Parshley’s concern, the Forest Service spokesperson said that repealing the roadless rule “allows safer use and maintenance of existing roads that first responders have long said they need to reach fires quickly.”

“Forest‑treatment science is clear: thinning plus prescribed fire reduces wildfire severity by more than 60 percent—and up to 72 percent compared to untreated areas,” they said. “Access enables treatment; without access, prevention and response suffer. Gates and seasonal closures can be used to manage public traffic while preserving routes that firefighters and forest managers may need.”

The AFRC’s comments say that “strategically placed and maintained roads are essential for safe and effective wildfire response,” and that in “nearly every major wildfire over the past 15–20 years,” the Forest Service has identified a lack of road access as a key barrier to effective response, Parshley said. That argument also appears in Schultz’s rationale for repealing the rule, she noted. In the administration’s announcement, he said the roadless rule “has frustrated land managers and served as a barrier to action—prohibiting road construction, which has limited wildfire suppression and active forest management.”

Smith of the AFRC said that “millions of roadless acres have burned across the west since the rule’s adoption in 2001.”

“Federal lands are far more likely to burn than private lands, which typically have far more roads,” he said. “According to the congressional budget office, a wildfire on federal land is on average five times the size of one on nonfederal land nearby.”

Critics dispute the logic that the roadless rule is bad for wildfire management, arguing that roads can increase the risk of human-caused fires.

Since Schultz came into the Forest Service in February 2025, the American Forest Resource Council has spent more than $210,000 advocating to expand harvesting in national forests, lobbying records show. Meanwhile, the Idaho Forest Group increased its spending on lobbying in 2026 and reported advocating to support “efforts to advance forest management,” including with the agency now run by its former executive, Parshley found.

Smith of the AFRC claimed that “the amount of money AFRC spends lobbying Congress and federal agencies in support of policies to improve the health of federal forests and nearby rural communities is dwarfed in comparison to the many anti-forestry NGOs.”

Idaho is exempt from the roadless rule; it has its own regulations on roadless areas developed with the federal government. But the proposal to kill the roadless rule is just one industry-backed change to forestry that the Trump administration has put forth. As the head of the Federal Forest Resource Coalition, Schultz in July 2022 delivered testimony before Congress in which he suggested roadless areas were limiting the industry, saying: “nearly half of the National Forest System [is] off limits to management.”

Though he did not call to overturn the policy specifically, he advocated allowing states to manage more Forest Service timber sales, expanding exemptions from environmental review processes, and changing stewardship contracting rules to support logging and wood-processing infrastructure.

The Trump administration has since adopted or advanced each of those proposals, Parshley found in a report earlier this year. And Schultz has directly helped implement them, she found. For instance, in December 2025 he personally signed an agreement with Idaho’s governor to double federal timber sales from the state’s national forests. “That directly benefits his former employer the Idaho Forest Group,” she said.

Idaho Forest Group has been contacted for comment.

Under Schultz, the Forest Service has ramped up timber sales. In June, he told senators that the agency had exceeded its timber-sale target. He has also overseen a historic and widely criticized structural reorganization of his agency, moving the agency’s headquarters from the nation’s capital to Salt Lake City, eliminating regional offices and staff and shifting authority over forests to states.

Schultz has made it clear that he aims to weaken regulations. In April, he told Congress that he is “trying to cut through regulation.”

In a company earnings call after Schultz was confirmed, lumber company PotlatchDeltic CEO Eric Cremers confirmed that industry executives maintain direct familiarity with Schultz in his new role, saying: “We know the new Forest Service chief.”

“It’s pretty clear that the industry was excited by their reactions to Schultz’s nomination and then confirmation,” said Parshley.

Tennessee Rep. Justin J. Pearson first caught national attention when he was expelled from the state’s House of Representatives after demonstrating in support of gun law reforms. Today, he’s the Democratic candidate for Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District. It’s an area newly transformed by redrawn voting maps and sprawling data centers, putting Pearson at the center of some of the country’s biggest national fights. 

“The litmus test for America’s future is what happens in the South,” Pearson tells host Al Letson. “And so we need to be paying attention to what’s going on here, because here is where the test cases for autocracy happen. Here is where the billionaires have their testing ground for what else can go on in other parts of the country.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Pearson talks about how redistricting has upended Tennessee and the many ways gun violence has become a deeply personal issue for him. He also looks back at the opposition to his 2023 demonstration for gun law reform, when he was dubbed part of “the Tennessee Three.”

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Last week, DHS finalized its $16.7 million purchase of 6,650 pairs of electric shock gloves from the Kentucky-based company Compliant Technologies. That comes out to about $2,400 per pair, plus some accessories like glove fresheners in case the ICE agents wearing these direct contact electroshock weapons get sweaty. 

Almost as quickly as the contract was finalized, pushback reached the legislative branch in a classic congressional form: a whole bunch of open letters. A group of senators wrote to interim ICE Director David Venturella on August 27, asking him whether there will be any tracking of how these gloves are used. Members of the House Committee on Homeland Security wrote a similar letter August 31. And on that same day, a group of 49 Democratic members of Congress led by Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding that he cancel the shock gloves contract. 

“The decision to equip civil immigration enforcement agents with electric shock gloves continues a deeply disturbing escalation in the militarization of DHS — as well as sustained efforts to shield itself from accountability,” the lawmakers wrote. Their letter cites Mother Jones reporting on how police departments use the gloves to inflict pain while avoiding legal liability. “This Administration continues to outfit ICE and CBP with the tools of an occupying paramilitary force—despite widespread human rights violations carried out by its agents during immigration enforcement actions.”

As I reported last month, human rights organizations suggest that the gloves are not, as Compliant Technologies says on its website, “humane”: 

The technology is unregulated “despite the clear human rights risks associated with its use,” Amnesty International researchers wrote in a 2025 report detailing instances in which electric-shock devices have been used for torture. The report ends with a recommendation that countries “cease use of, decommission and destroy any stockpiles of such prohibited electric shock weapons.” Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture, called the gloves “inherently abusive equipment that facilitates torture.”

On the state and local level, police departments are facing angry communities demanding they cancel their contracts with Compliant Technologies. In Nebraska’s largest school district, after reporting by Nebraska Public Media revealed that school resource officers had used the devices on students, Omaha police were forced to stop wearing shock gloves in the halls of middle and high schools. 

In California, meanwhile, a bill banning law enforcement operating in the state from using wearable electroshock devices passed the legislature Monday night. The ban extends through 2030 and requires the state Department of Justice to study the weapons’ safety. 

“Imagine your family, your friends and loved ones or even yourself being incapacitated by federal, state or local law enforcement who do not have the necessary training to ensure that you don’t suffer from adverse health effects due to being shocked,” said California Democratic Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins, who sponsored the bill, in an August 26 Senate committee hearing.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office is the only California agency known to have purchased Compliant Technologies’ shock gloves. In August, it spent $35,000 on 10 pairs, as well as 10 shock bands to be placed on a detained person’s arm or wrist, as the Sacramento Bee reported. That sheriff’s department opposes the ban, as do numerous other law enforcement agencies. “This is a bad policy from a California law enforcement perspective, and it’s really only gonna be a message to the feds that’s going to fail to land,” California State Sheriffs’ Association lobbyist Cory Salzillo said at an August 26 hearing. 

The bill is expected to face legal challenges from the federal government. “Sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from any safety equipment is despicable and a deliberate attempt to undermine and endanger our officers,” a DHS spokesperson told Mother Jones. “To be crystal clear: we will not abide by unconstitutional bans. The Supremacy Clause makes it clear that California’s sanctuary politicians do not control federal law enforcement.” 

Correction, September 2: An earlier version of this post misstated the name of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.

In late 1984, dozens of people in the region of Lake Tahoe, California, would go to the doctor with a variety of symptoms, including debilitating fatigue—the first clearly documented cluster of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would label “chronic fatigue syndrome” towards the end of the ’80s.

Today, that complex condition is known as ME/CFS, or myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. In its more severe manifestations, it can leave people unable to get out of bed independently, needing to be tube-fed. Even in its minor forms, it can be life-altering.

I would know: I received an ME/CFS diagnosis in 2024. It’s not a rare condition—it’s estimated that around half of the millions of people with long Covid may have ME/CFS— but it is still widely misunderstood. Pushing oneself too hard to get “through” it, for one thing, doesn’t help build tolerance, and can instead lead to crashes known as post-exertional malaise.

Duke University cultural anthropologist Emily Lim Rogers looks at the labor it takes simply to exist while sick in her new book Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness, through the lens of ME/CFS. We spoke about the history of the condition, the importance of acknowledging differently racialized experiences of chronic illness, and the compounding exhaustion of being ill.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How has debilitating fatigue been downplayed since the Industrial Revolution, and how does that connect to work?

In the US, we have an idea that it’s normal to be burnt out. Fatigue and burnout are systemically denied from workers’ compensation claims; this is actually not the case in all countries.

The concept of fatigue was initially conceived of as something that could be solved, particularly in the context of an understanding of the body as a machine, in the late 19th century. Fatigue did not enter English-language medical journals until the last decade of the 19th century. The first chapter of the book looks at how fatigue went from a problem that could be solved, and should be worked on—granted, for maximum productivity—to something that just became accepted as part of everyday life.

Stress was a concept that only gained widespread acceptance as a legitimate scientific phenomenon in the 1970s.

When I was looking at people with ME/CFS contemporarily, one might expect to find sort of a paradigm of hysteria [and dismissal on that basis], like women’s chronic illnesses are obviously disproportionately affected by chronic fatigue syndrome. But what I found was that most people were not dismissed as kind of crazy hysterics—though that certainly echoes as well—but from an idea that they were just working too hard.

But then, that’s interesting, because our solution is not, “Maybe we should give these people disability insurance, maybe we should give these people time off work.” Instead, it’s, “You cannot handle the conditions of everyday life under capitalism. You’re just fatigued. You’re just burnt out.”

Now, people with ME/CFS have a qualitatively different type of fatigue than fatigue from work. [But] I think if we were to challenge the idea that some people have debilitating fatigue in addition to other non-specific symptoms, it would fundamentally raise the question of: Should we all be tired all the time in the first place?

You write that “Sick work is not about rehabilitation into the workforce or the reproduction of labor power: It is treading water with a body that has already been rendered unproductive.” That really hit me hard. In what ways do you think the capitalist society we live in degrades the amount of work it takes for chronically ill people, whether they have ME/CFS or another condition, to survive?

Part of my argument is that we call these illnesses “invisible illnesses,” because you can’t necessarily tell that someone’s sick. That’s true, but, for some people, it’s very much not invisible. I would describe these illnesses as invisibleized, more accurately. And part of my argument is that the invisible labor, and the invisibilization of the labor, that it takes to be sick leads to the invisibilization, and minimization politically, of many diseases like ME/CFS.

The work and everyday labor of living with ME/CFS contains this recursive loop of everyday labor of being ill, where you can’t work, but you need to work.

The engine of capitalism, as I describe in the [book], is fatigue: the depletion of bodily capacity to its absolute limit. If all of that is depleted in simply trying to be okay, then you’re already rendered outside the fold of who we think of as a productive worker. Many people, as I show in the book, do have ME/CFS and have to work paid jobs because they have to get health insurance, but they’re barely treading water. And the only reason, for many people, is because work is their only tie to health insurance, which is the cruel irony of this whole system.

You note that some ME/CFS patient activists believe the CDC used the name “chronic fatigue” to downplay its severity.

I read about it in some early reporting on ME/CFS in the ’90s. I think the question of intentionality is maybe less salient than the question of its effect. Fatigue is this term that’s so banal and non-exceptional. We accept it as completely mundane and something that everyone should be: fatigued.

For people with ME/CFS, a very different type, a very, very debilitating type of fatigue that does not come proportionate to any exertion, kind of gets buried in that. It’s important to look at the nitty-gritty of the science, why something’s researched or not researched. But zooming out, I try to understand this as very deeply embedded into how capitalism operates for chronically ill people at large.

How have ME/CFS patients been dismissed owing to the lack of clear, consistent biomarkers for the condition? 

Many people would look at people with ME/CFS, especially those very active in the patient activist movement, and say, “Oh, these are a bunch of bougie white women”—and that’s true in terms of who can get a diagnosis. We would say that the bourgeois white woman is so opposite of the figure of the welfare queen, the person who wants a cop-out from work, right?

I think that the lack of biomarkers creates that panic, and biomarkers became the idea of objective proof of illness and became more important in disability determinations in the neoliberal era.

We saw it in the gutting of the social safety net under Reagan, continuing obviously under Clinton, and this is obviously very relevant to what we’re seeing now with all of the cuts in Medicaid. What we have or don’t have [reduced to] biomarkers is political, and how that meets and meshes with actual everyday interactions in the disability determinations office, with health insurance companies, is sort of a distillation of all that. All those sources come crashing in [together] to shape the dismissal of ME/CFS.

As you mentioned, ME/CFS has often been portrayed as a rich white women’s disease, which is just not accurate. Could you tell me about your takeaways from your conversation with Robin, a Black woman with ME/CFS?

Not only was there the shocking anecdote that even a Black doctor would tell her, “No, just keep pushing on,” it raised a larger point. It is always about who has the money, resources, and time to go and get an ME/CFS diagnosis—but there’s also something where it cuts deeper, to who sees themselves as someone who can be legitimately ill.

The portrayal of ME/CFS as a bourgeois white woman’s disease does not help. Many people of color that I talk to didn’t even consider that they might have ME/CFS, so I think people can really internalize: Am I worthy to be ill, or am I not? And should I just push on, or should I not?

US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is set to depart the Pentagon in the next few days, following a months-long feud with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the firings of several top officials and allegedly blocking many of his innovation projects like streamlined technology adoption. 

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the news on Monday.

Driscoll’s resignation after serving for 18 months leaves the US Army effectively without a senior leader. Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in April and has not nominated a replacement.

Hegseth has cut down the number of top military officials in his Defense Department. According to Military Times, since taking his post last January, he presided over the firings and early departures of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, the Army’s vice chief of staff, and the commander of the US Army in Europe and Africa, among others. 

While it’s unclear which firings Driscoll took issue with, Hegseth also fired the only two women serving as four-star officers and blocked promotions for several female and Black Navy officers, seemingly under his anti-diversity push. In early 2025, Hegseth said the firings were “a reflection of the president wanting the right people around him to execute the national-security approach we want to take.”

“Secretary Driscoll has been highly effective in advancing President Trump’s agenda to Make America Strong Again at the Department of the Army by providing outstanding leadership during historic military operations, restoring an emphasis on readiness and lethality, assisting with negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and more,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement. (Noting the emphasis on lethality.) 

Driscoll took his worries about the Army’s future under Hegseth’s leadership directly to President Trump, four people familiar with the discussion told The Atlantic, given the series of firings of top officers. One of the people said that Trump was surprised and expressed concern.

Hegseth is reportedly considering his chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell—who also allegedly abused his estranged wife and children—to succeed Driscoll. As I pointed out on Monday, Parnell criticized the Washington Post’s reporting that cited classified documents in which top military officials stated that the current war in Iran is depleting their ability to defend the US from other threats, baselessly claiming on Sunday that publishing the report was “a crime” and evidence of Trump and Pete Derangement Syndrome. 

This all looks like a move to replace officers who push back on Hegseth’s policies with loyalists.

On Monday, an Obama-appointed federal judge ruled that New York State could not enforce its 2024 Climate Change Superfund Act, a landmark law that would have charged fossil fuel companies $75 billion over 25 years for climate damages from cumulative greenhouse gas emissions. 

In a 63-page opinion, Chief Judge Brenda Sannes of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York sided with 22 Republican state attorneys general, as well as industry groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, and National Mining Association, saying the state’s “sprawling” superfund act was preempted by the federal Clean Air Act and outside the jurisdiction of New York. 

“The Climate Act is an unusual and sweeping statute, designed to address the effects of climate change–a ‘uniquely international problem of national concern’,” Sannes wrote. “Thus, the Court finds the Climate Act is ‘simply beyond the limits of state law.’” Her decision follows a July hearing where Sannes sharply questioned whether she was constrained by an earlier 2021 decision in which New York sued five fossil fuel groups for climate damages from climate change, such as sea level rise. Her August 31 opinion relied heavily on this case. 

New York’s climate superfund legislation, passed in 2024, required fossil fuel companies to pay for climate change adaptive infrastructure projects, like upgrades to roads, transit systems, the electric grid, stormwater drainage, and sewage treatment plants, as well as design solutions to mitigate extreme heat. 

Climate litigation experts criticized the legal rationale behind Sannes’ decision. “The [2021] Second Circuit NYC decision is not binding precedent in this case,” said Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and Climate Policy Fellow at Vermont Law School. “It has been severely criticized by other federal and state courts. Judge Sannes should not feel bound by it.” 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration, which over the last year and a half has enacted its deregulatory “energy dominance” agenda and has rolled back a host of environmental rules, like the 2009 endangerment finding, commended the ruling. 

“The Department of Justice is delivering on President Trump’s order to protect American energy from state overreach,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson in a Department of Justice press release. “New York’s law would have expropriated $75 billion from energy companies around the world during an energy emergency and in direct defiance of American foreign policy and federal law. We will continue to fight for affordable, reliable energy for all Americans.” 

Gustafson is head of the recently rebranded Energy and Natural Resources Division, and under his watch, the DOJ filed a similar lawsuit last year supporting attorneys general in New York as well as Vermont, which passed the very first state climate superfund legislation in May 2024. Vermont was first sued by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute in December of that year.

In 2026, 13 other states have considered passing similar “polluters pay” laws. Despite wide public support, organizers in blue states considering their own bills are seeing opposition from state Republicans, business groups, and trade associations. New Jersey Senator Michael Testa released a statement saying his state “should pay close attention” to New York’s ruling. “Our state’s similar bill should go no further. It’s a waste of time and resources.” 

At the time of publication, New York’s Attorney General Letitia James has not yet filed an appeal over Sannes’ ruling. Separately, it is unclear when and how Vermont’s case will be decided, but both decisions may inform how other states draft and pass future climate superfund laws. 

Environmental advocates stress that New York’s ruling “doesn’t bind” other states from passing their own superfund laws, and that the burning of fossil fuels will continue to cause mounting climate damages. “The floods will still come, roads will still wash out, and communities will still need billions to protect themselves,” said Make Polluters Pay Communications Director Cassidy DiPaola in an emailed press release. “Those costs don’t disappear just because fossil fuel companies don’t want to pay them.”

One judge had to build a safe room at home. Others were so scared they wouldn’t let their children play outside; another stopped grocery shopping and couldn’t attend his grandchild’s recital because of a 24/7 security detail. “I can’t leave my house at the same time or take the same routes” every day, the one with the safe room said, fearing that someone might follow behind.

Threats to the federal judiciary have skyrocketed under the second Trump administration, according to a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which interviewed 35 sitting and retired federal judges, many of whom requested anonymity.

Many of the jurists said the job had become more dangerous partly because President Donald Trump and his allies verbally attack them for decisions on high-profile cases, leading to a surge in harassment from other people: After overseeing a contentious immigration case, the judge with the safe room got more than 700 threatening phone calls to their chambers. Others said they were “pizza-doxxed”—someone anonymously had pizzas delivered to their houses with threatening notes inside, including messages with the name Daniel Anderl, a 20-year-old who was murdered in 2000 by a gunman while his mom, Judge Esther Salas, served on the federal bench in New Jersey.

“Threats to federal judges’ safety have always existed,” the Brennan Center authors wrote, “but their scope, frequency, and intensity have sharply increased over the past decade alongside the nation’s deepening political divisions.”

According to the US Marshals Services, the 2025 fiscal year saw a 57 percent uptick in “security incidents of significant concern” for federal judges, and the number was expected to keep rising. In July, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan reported that Supreme Court Police expected a 38 percent increase in threats to Supreme Court justices in 2026, after a 25 percent increase in 2025.

The annual average number of threats and hostile communications toward federal judges, prosecutors, judicial staff, and courts rose from 1,180 incidents in the decade before Trump’s first campaign to 3,810 in the seven years afterward, according to a Reuters report, with the number now at “unprecedented” levels. “In 40 years of judicial service,” US District Judge William G. Young told the Brennan Center, “I have never experienced an executive branch that is so overtly hostile to the federal judiciary—top to bottom.”

The Brennan Center report is striking for the sheer number of examples of harassment, and the candidness of judges who were interviewed. (Another report, also released on Monday by researchers at the law schools of University of California, Berkeley, and New York University, showed even more examples.) Some judges were victims of swatting—someone anonymously called the police to report a crisis at their home, triggering an armed response. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently recounted how her teenage son opened the door to discover police vehicles outside after someone falsely reported gunfire.

Others have received hate mail or faced intense online harassment: The judge with the safe room was inspired to build it because someone had posted their house’s floor plan on the internet. District Judge John Bates was threatened with an online image of a noose after Elon Musk posted photos of him and his wife. A May 2025 study found that online posts calling for violence or impeachment of judges increased 324 percent between May 2024 and March 2025.

Since Trump returned to office, more than 850 lawsuits have been filed to challenge the administration’s policies—and judges have at last partially blocked those policies in more than 150 cases, according to the Brennan Center. Judges said that for a while, cases involving the January 6 attack on the Capitol were the most likely to elicit threats, but lately immigration cases are the most dangerous. Many worried for their families. “We sign up for this. We are public servants,” Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida, told the Brennan Center. “But our children don’t sign up for this.” Some judges wouldn’t let their kids go on social media, and others asked their loved ones to take different routes home.

Most of those interviewed said they needed more security. Some paid out of pocket for extra protection at home, and noted that security at courthouses had been underfunded. In 2021, the US Marshals Service, which protects federal judges, did “not have the resources or proactive threat detection capabilities” that it needed, according to an audit. Funding for federal court security stayed flat between the 2023 and 2025 fiscal years, but in February Congress increased it from $750 million to $892 million, the full amount requested by the judicial branch. “This was a positive and necessary development,” the Brennan Center wrote.

But other problems remain: The administration has reassigned some marshals from their judicial security jobs to immigration enforcement and other duties, and judges fear Trump will withdraw even more resources. Last week, my colleague Pema Levy reported that the Supreme Court is taking matters into its own hands and building up its own police force. The justices “keep ruling for Trump,” she wrote, “but don’t trust him to keep them safe.”

What will all of this do for judicial independence? Though judges told the Brennan Center that they would not be influenced in the courtroom by the growing threats outside it, some said it was hard to ignore the pressure, and they questioned how long they can keep living like this. Would they need to retire early?

“How many qualified great candidates are we losing because they are afraid to step into this arena?” said Judge Salas, whose son was killed by the gunman in 2020. Another judge added, “If this gets too bad, I’m going to stop.”

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Summer is supposed to be the best time for fresh produce. Corn on the cob at the cookout. Berries plucked right from the vine. Salads on the cafe patio while you take an extra long lunch break because the weather and the food is that good.

But this year, summer’s harvest brought something much different than the flavorful dishes we’ve come to expect. Since May, the United States has seen more than 17,000 lab-confirmed cyclosporiasis cases. Before this summer’s massive outbreak, the country had never recorded more than a few hundred infections in a single year from this parasite, which can cause watery and at times explosive diarrhea.

And that isn’t the only bug invading Americans’ digestive tracts.

One person died from a listeria infection traced to ricotta cheese. Close to 100 people came down with salmonella from recalled eggs, while more than 400 people have gotten sick in a separate salmonella outbreak involving jalapeños. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration issued its highest urgency warning for frozen blueberries believed to be contaminated with E coli.

And now several dozen people across 15 states have become ill after eating alfalfa sprouts in a new outbreak that involves salmonella and E coli. Four of them have been hospitalized.

It’s gotten so bad that one Washington Post columnist argued we should stop eating lettuce altogether. Experts have told me they were worried people might actually completely stop consuming vegetables—vital to any healthy diet—for fear of contracting cyclosporiasis and enduring a month of watery diarrhea. I personally avoided the bagged salad kits that provided me with many easy lunches on a workday.

While this spate of foodborne illness is especially bad, the worst may be yet to come.

It’s only natural to look for somebody to blame. Culpability has understandably fallen on the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who helms the US Department of Health and Human Services—especially after his deep staffing cuts at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the two federal agencies most responsible for investigating and responding to disease outbreaks. Those cuts have slowed the response, and officials have struggled to communicate with the public clearly in a fast-moving crisis.

While our government officials are partly to blame, the problem is bigger than Trump and Kennedy, or even this one summer. While seasonal changes will always play a role—the warmer months, when people eat more fresh produce and consume more food that’s been sitting out at unsafe temperatures, typically have more foodborne illnesses—the underlying factors contributing to these outbreaks are becoming more potent. The food supply is more and more globalized. And the planet continues to warm, allowing these pathogens to spread to more and more farms all over the world, including in the US.

As the weather finally begins to cool down, I’ve been asking myself an uncomfortable question: What if diarrhea summer never really ends?

Our globalized food supply chain has a lot to do with our food safety—and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Americans expect access to any produce they want year-round, even produce that isn’t in-season locally, or that may not grow anywhere in the US at all. We source food from all over the world: Most cyclospora outbreaks originated with foods grown in other countries. This year’s crisis was eventually linked to iceberg lettuce from Mexico.

And as the New York Times recently documented, the sometimes international trip from the farm to the store for a bagged salad kit offers multiple moments for potential contamination, including tainted irrigation water, local wildlife excrement, and poor storage practices, making it possible for dangerous pathogens to take hold before a person even buys their groceries.

Warming temperatures around the world are also helping those bugs spread. Humidity is essential for salmonella and warmer summers will mean more humid-favorable conditions for the bacteria to grow. E coli likewise will thrive as temperatures rise. Cyclospora has historically been found in subtropical climates, so for a long time, infections from food grown inside the United States were unheard of. Not anymore.

“Climate change has allowed pathogens like cyclospora…to expand from the tropic, subtropic lines into areas more north and south of that tropic line,” said Joseph Eisenberg, a professor of epidemiology and global public health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

“With respect to the US, we’re starting to see new infectious diseases in southern Louisiana, Texas; that also increases the presence of cyclospora in food systems in other countries,” he said. “It suggests that, through climate change, we might potentially start seeing it be endemic in the United States at some point.”

And indeed, cyclospora was found in farms in Florida in 2020. This is a problem that is going to become worse, not better, given the expected trends in global warming in the decades to come.

“It wasn’t until about within the last 10 years we started to see cases from domestic origin,” Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, told me. “Before, there were predominantly cases due to international travel or importation of products because it used to be endemic in some tropical or warmer climates.”

“It’s clear that now,” he said, “it’s become established in the domestic environment.”

To make matters worse, at the same time conditions for foodborne illness are ripening, the US government has been sharply cutting its ability to monitor for and respond to these outbreaks.

At the beginning of the second Trump administration, as part of the widespread government staffing cuts, the FDA laid off 3,500 workers. Between the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture, which also oversees food safety, and several related agencies, more than 11,000 workers have been lost, a 22 percent cut, according to the Partnership for Public Service. And the CDC, which helps respond to outbreaks once they start, has lost about a quarter of its workforce from January 2025 to October 2025, according to Reuters; by this summer, CBS reported, the number of scientists tracking food parasites at the agency dropped from 11 to three. Meanwhile, the administration has been rushing to hire 2,200 people in the middle of the crisis.

“There have been a lot of federal cuts. There have been cuts around CDC surveillance, around state and local public health. You’ve lost people,” Dr. Anurag Malani, vice chief of staff at Trinity Health’s Ann Arbor, Michigan, campus, told me. “The ability to do what you need to do to keep citizens safe and to keep the public safe, we don’t have as many people doing that as we used to.

The federal government also shut down several national monitoring programs for foodborne illness in 2025—including for the cyclospora parasite specifically. The state and local agencies that surveil for and respond to food outbreaks have also faced staff cuts because they depend on the federal government for their funding.

“It’s hard when there is one larger entity kind of controlling all of that,” Dr. Kathleen Linder, the hospital epidemiologist at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Ann Arbor, told me in July. “Local health departments are having to do more on their own than they would have had to do in the past just because of decentralization at that level. It has been very hard to get updated information. The information has been lagging a little bit behind.”

Food safety is hard enough to tackle on its own. Part of the reason we experience regular outbreaks of cyclospora is that it can successfully infect people even when only very little of it is present, and because we can’t grow it in a lab to study it.

But the US has made things harder by cutting these important programs. Rebuilding the staff and capacity to do this work is not likely to happen under the Trump administration, and former FDA officials have described a “brain drain” for the food safety programs that won’t be easy to reverse in the next administration.

But something will have to be done if we’re ever to escape the food recall cycle. Despite the name, food has historically been neglected by the “Food and Drug” Administration, and better food safety could require serious restructuring and investment in these capabilities. And foodborne illnesses aren’t the only kind of infection that climate change will make more likely: The United States is also seeing the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue. Responding to those new threats is going to require a rebuilt and potentially reimagined federal public health apparatus.

If there is any good news in the short term, it’s that there are a lot of great recipes for grilling your vegetables to eliminate any pathogens hiding in our side dishes at next summer’s cookouts. It sure seems like we’re going to need them.