It’s week thirty-one of the Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar, where we highlight the latest slate of corporate corruption that’s shaping the Trump Administration, its agenda, and the material impacts of that corruption on real people. Our first thirty issues can be found here, and follow us on Bluesky and X for more updates on this work.
We are almost through our first summer of what is sure to be a long and ruinous four years. This past week, while Trump tightened control of his invasion of Washington, D.C, gargantuan wildfires ravaged lands in Colorado and Florida. Over in Texas, state Republicans completed step one of their plot to distort the electoral map ahead of the upcoming midterm elections, sending the newly redrawn maps to the Texas State Senate. D.C. residents are far from the only victims of our ever growing police state, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to kidnap and terrorize community members across the country.
SELLING HEALTH TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER
Who Really Cares If Your Food Is Safe Anyway? Not the Trump Administration. This week ProPublica published a bombshell report evidencing the magnitude of the Trump Administration’s cuts to the country’s basic health and healthcare oversight apparatus. Thousands of our foremost scientists have left the federal workforce, and those who have stayed lack the resources necessary to actually do their assigned jobs. Per the report, “food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens” and agency scientists are unable to buy the basic equipment (like gloves and saline solution) necessary to study infectious diseases. What’s more, 3000 scientists and public health specialists are now absent from the crucial medical infrastructure that keeps people safe. An additional thousand regulators and safety inspectors have also disappeared.
What’s the inevitable consequence of this? People will die. That’s not an exaggeration; the CDC estimates that some 48 million people get sick from foodborne illnesses every year. Worse, 128,000 of those people are hospitalized, and 3,000 die annually. Those numbers reflect the reality of our modest, but inadequate, inspection regimes and inspector capacity prior to these cuts. Now, in the absence of a dedicated workforce protecting you and me, we can only expect these numbers to intensify.
Will this matter politically? The assignment of political blame for needless suffering will only happen if people discuss before, during, and after illness the possibility (and sometimes probability) that the precautions our government used to take on behalf of society to prevent this type of pain are no longer happening. We all must discuss what Trump, Musk, Vance, and the rest of our BigTech owned quasi-fascist government is and is not doing, and who will bear the brunt of their callous campaign against everyday people.
The Supreme Court’s Rubber Stamp Back At It Again. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump Administration to continue blocking nearly $800 million in research funding to the National Institutes of Health as litigation against the move unfolds. The move is a blow to our collective wellbeing. As public-health advocates such as the American Public Health Association note, allowing the cuts to stand will result in “incalculable losses in public health and human life.” A Reagan appointee earlier this year ruled that the cancellations were “arbitrary and discriminatory,” and noted that there was overwhelming evidence of racial discrimination, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and discrimination against women’s health issues in the administration’s determination of what research projects to cut. What will be the result? Crucial research into things like breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV prevention, suicidality, and more will be halted in its tracks, likely setting the country’s scientific and medical apparatus back years.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Yet, these cuts will devastate the patients and their families relying on new research and relying also on ongoing hope for the development of new interventions. This research, which could have been (and long was), a crucial project of government, will now be intentionally made to fail our communities, not because the research did not bear anything meaningful, but because a bunch of extreme kooks are engaged in a war on science borne out of greed and their own pathetic insecurities.
SYCOPHANTS GALORE
Political Prosecutions And Problematic Prosecutors. The Trump Administration continues to rely on procedural tricks to ensure that its loyalists and sycophants of choice occupy U.S. Attorneys’ offices across the country. The result is that the top federal law enforcement officer in districts as diverse as Nevada, LA, New Jersey, and more, seem more interested in aiding the interests of the President and his cronies than upholding the principles of the basic rule of law. Already, that’s playing out via abusive prosecution regimes, such as Alina Habba’s prosecution of Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) for attempting to visit an immigration detention center in New Jersey.
People committing complex white collar crime, who already benefitted from Merrick Garland’s light touch, must be rejoicing about the effective cessation of any federal policing focusing on their fraud and get ever richer schemes.
Trump’s DOJ: A Lobbyist's Land Of Opportunity. Roger Alford, a fixture of the MAGA ecosystem across both Trump administrations, has turned whistleblower on the pay to play schemes unfolding on antitrust issues within the Department of Justice. Alford alleges that certain lobbyists buried within the DOJ have been engaging in a pattern of “selling merger clearance to the highest bidder” via “boozy backroom deals” that literally sell out the public interest at personal profit. The likely consequence: fewer economic rights for all of us while corporate profits continue to swell.
Democrats seeking “kitchen table issues” should be aware that corrupting the government to get mergers through or other anticompetitive behaviors leads to lower quality, higher prices, and greater barriers to entry for small business.
A Lesson In Inventing Pretexts. In his latest broadside against the Federal Reserve, Trump sicced Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte on Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. In a bid to get Cook to resign, Pulte has presented heretofore unsubstantiated claims that she engaged in mortgage fraud. It’s another reminder of the erosion of agency independence in this regime and the latest example of Trump loyalists prioritizing enemy attacks over their responsibility to the public.
And while people altogether have grown accustomed to far too much hypocrisy…of course the hypocrisy here (we will not stand for Ken Paxton erasure!) is truly staggering.
Resource Updates This Week Include:
A map from the Impact Project tracking federal policy changes and its impact in states, cities, and localities: The Impact Map.
Read our Henry Burke and Dylan Gyauch-Lewis also for the American Prospect: What Trump Learned From Silicon Valley
ICYM our Newsletter from earlier this week, Kj Boyle wrote: During Back to School, Send Team Trump to the Principal’s Office
For more on our work tracking the Trump-Musk administration, visit TheRevolvingDoorProject.org/DogeWatch
And if you’ve got any tips on DOGE personnel or updates to any of our DogeWatch trackers, reach out to us at revolvingdoorproject@protonmail.com.
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