Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
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Following FBI Raid in San Jose, We Say Anti-War Activism Is Not a Crime! Sign Onto the Call Now
>>> Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
In April 2025, San Jose anti-war activist Alex Dillard was subjected to the execution of a federal search warrant. FBI agents raided his home and seized his personal electronic devices, seeking evidence of alleged ties to Russia and implying that he may have been acting as a foreign agent.
We, as the broad progressive people's movements in the U.S. and around the world, as well as members of the San Jose community, stand in solidarity with Alex against these attacks. We assert that these accusations are entirely baseless. They constitute a clear act of political retaliation against Alex's First Amendment-protected beliefs, activities, and associations.
This incident is not isolated. It reflects a broader pattern of repression by federal agencies against activists, journalists, and organizers who speak out against U.S. imperialism, war, and systemic injustice. From the surveillance and harassment of the Black liberation movement to the targeting of Palestinian solidarity organizers, the U.S. government has repeatedly sought to silence dissent through intimidation and legal persecution.
We condemn this latest act of FBI repression in the strongest terms. Such tactics are designed to instill fear, disrupt organizing efforts, and criminalize activism. But we refuse to be intimidated. Our community stands united in defense of the right to dissent and to challenge U.S. militarism, corporate greed, and state violence—no matter how aggressively the government attempts to suppress these voices.
We call on all allies, activists, and organizations committed to justice to sign onto this solidarity statement and to remain vigilant and to push back against these escalating attacks. The government’s efforts to conflate activism with "foreign influence" are a transparent attempt to justify repression—but we will not allow these tactics to silence us. We will continue to speak out, organize, and resist. Solidarity, not silence, is our answer to repression.
Activism is not a crime. Opposing war and genocide is not a crime. Hands off our movements!
Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) California Rolls Back Its Landmark Environmental Law
Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers scaled back a law that was vilified for its role in California’s housing shortage and homelessness crisis.
By Laurel RosenhallSoumya Karlamangla and Adam Nagourney
Laurel Rosenhall reported from Sacramento, Soumya Karlamangla from San Francisco and Adam Nagourney from Los Angeles, Published June 30, 2025, Updated July 1, 2025
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Monday signed two bills to scale back environmental restrictions as the state faces a severe housing shortage. Credit...John G Mabanglo/EPA, via Shutterstock
California leaders on Monday rolled back a landmark law that was a national symbol of environmental protection before it came to be vilified as a primary reason for the state’s severe housing shortage and homelessness crisis.
For more than half a century, the law, the California Environmental Quality Act, has allowed environmentalists to slow suburban growth as well as given neighbors and disaffected parties a powerful tool to stop projects they found objectionable.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills, which were written by Democrats but had rare bipartisan support in California’s divided State Capitol, that will allow many development projects to avoid rigorous environmental review and, potentially, the delaying and cost-inflating lawsuits that have discouraged construction in the state.
Democrats have long been reluctant to weaken the law, known as CEQA, which they considered an environmental bedrock in a state that has prided itself on reducing pollution and protecting waterways. And environmentalists took them to task for the vote.
But the majority party also recognized that California’s bureaucratic hurdles had made it almost impossible to build enough housing for nearly 40 million residents, resulting in soaring costs and persistent homelessness. In a collision between environmental values and everyday concerns, Democrats chose the latter on Monday.
“If we can’t address this issue, we’re going to lose trust, and that’s just the truth,” Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said in a news conference. “And so this is so much bigger in many ways than the issue itself. It is about the reputation of not just Sacramento and the legislative leadership and executive leadership, but the reputation of the state of California.”
Discussions about changing the environmental law have repeatedly surfaced at the State Capitol over the past decade, only to be thwarted by opposition from environmentalists and local governments. This year was different.
Mr. Newsom threatened to reject the state budget unless lawmakers rolled back CEQA, which is pronounced SEE-kwa. Democrats were also aware that voters nationwide had blamed the party last year for rising prices.
“This has created a different political environment,” said Mark Baldassare, survey director for the Public Policy Institute of California. “Voters have been telling us in our polling for quite a while that the cost of housing is a big problem, but maybe for the elected officials the election itself was a wake-up call.”
Mr. Newsom is nearing the end of his second and final term in office having made little progress on housing and homelessness, which were central to his first campaign in 2018. He has been skewered for the prevalence of homeless encampments throughout California and for a dip in population, driven in part by people seeking lower-priced homes in other states.
The governor, who may run for president in 2028, recognized that Democrats had to shift course on pocketbook issues.
“We’ve got to get out of our own damn way,” he said last week.
The changes are, by any measure, a pivotal moment for the environmental movement, and they may have implications beyond the borders of the nation’s most populous state. California has long been at the vanguard of pioneering environmental measures, and other Democratic-run states could similarly look for ways to encourage more housing construction.
Environmentalists flooded a legislative hearing room on Monday, saying the sweeping changes could hurt sensitive ecosystems and make it too easy to build manufacturing sites that could cause more pollution. Some Democratic lawmakers expressed concern that the legislation could threaten habitat for certain species of butterflies, bears and bighorn sheep.
“Jeopardizing those whole ecosystems, I think, is a risk that we don’t want to take,” said State Senator Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat.
With its requirements for extensive review and public disclosure of potential environmental ramifications, CEQA was viewed as the strictest measure of its kind in the nation.
As governor, Ronald Reagan, a Republican, signed the environmental act into law in 1970 at a time when his party was much more aligned with environmental protections than it is today. It reflected a consensus among the state’s leaders over the need to protect a vast array of wildlife and natural resources — forests, mountains and coastline — from being spoiled by rising smog, polluted waterways, congestion and suburban sprawl.
But CEQA has been described even by some environmentalists as a good law that produced unintended consequences. The law was initially written to apply principally to government projects; a 1972 court decision expanded it to apply to many private projects as well.
One of the bills signed on Monday will exempt from CEQA high-density projects as long as they are not on environmentally sensitive or hazardous sites. The other bill will create sweeping changes that are aimed at accelerating legal review and that will exempt numerous types of development projects, from farmworker housing to child care centers. The legislation will also make it easier to rezone areas to allow for more housing in some cities.
The changes could, for instance, make it easier to convert a vacant shopping center into condos and apartments by reducing government hurdles.
Republicans have long blamed CEQA for California’s problems, arguing that it was bad for the state’s business climate. It was notable that Democrats, led by Mr. Newsom, moved the party away from the kind of measure that has long been central to Democratic thought.
“It is so critically important for California to show that we can get things done to make people’s lives better and more affordable,” said State Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat who wrote the bill to exempt several types of projects from environmental review.
California legislators have become increasingly motivated to combat the state’s housing shortage as homelessness and the cost of living have become serious concerns for residents. In recent years, the Legislature has passed hundreds of bills to expedite housing production, and has tried to push cities to build more homes, usually tinkering around the edges of the environmental act.
“The crisis has metastasized to such a level that our constituents are demanding it,” said Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, a Bay Area Democrat who wrote the bill to encourage more high-density housing projects.
Christopher S. Elmendorf, a property law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has closely followed the CEQA battles in the State Capitol, said the reforms were “huge,” the biggest since the mid-1970s.
Mr. Elmendorf said he viewed Mr. Newsom’s shift partly as a testament to how much housing has risen as a priority for California voters. But it also reflects a broader reckoning for Democrats nationwide after Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024. Democrats are re-evaluating whether they are aligned with the needs of the electorate, he said, which has opened the door for considering positions that were once off-limits.
Opponents of construction projects — neighborhood groups, rival businesses, unions — frequently seized on CEQA provisions to delay or, in some cases, kill all kinds of projects, including housing, office buildings and homeless shelters.
Recent cases have come to symbolize what critics of the environmental law saw as its unintended consequences. In San Francisco, it was used to delay, but ultimately not derail, a bike path. In Berkeley, a neighborhood group used it to block the University of California from expanding the size of its student population, contending it would lead to noise, trash and traffic; the Legislature stepped in and passed a bill overriding a court decision. Another group in Berkeley won a court order blocking construction of a new dorm because students would create “social noise” pollution; the Legislature again passed an overriding law.
As in Berkeley, previous efforts to change CEQA had largely been piecemeal, responding to the crisis of the moment and often with the backing of powerful labor unions. When the Sacramento Kings threatened to move out of the state, the Legislature granted an exemption for the construction of a new arena. Similar exemptions were given for stadiums in San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as for a major renovation of the State Capitol.
Matt Lewis, spokesman for California YIMBY, which supports the new legislation, said a law that had initially been intended to prevent projects like new freeways from plowing through neighborhoods had over the years been “Frankensteined” into a tool to block housing development. And the act, ultimately, has harmed the environment by limiting denser housing, which reduces pollution, he said.
But Kim Delfino, a lobbyist for several environmental groups, said the law would allow the destruction of coastal habitats, forests, deserts and grasslands, and called it the “worst bill” for declining species that she had seen in 25 years of advocacy.
“It blows a hole in our efforts to protect habitat,” she told lawmakers on Monday. “Make no mistake, this will be devastating.”
Still, Robert Rivas, the speaker of the State Assembly, framed the vote as a social issue for Democrats during a news conference after the vote.
“Affordable housing is the civil rights struggle of our time here in California,” he said, “and today we take a transformative step forward in that fight.”
Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, said the changes will speed up the building process because projects in the urban core will be able to skip environmental review, which can take several months. He said it remained unclear how much that will increase total housing production, especially given the inflated costs of construction, insurance and interest rates.
“It’s probably not the full solution,” he said of the changes.
In 2016, Gov. Jerry Brown also proposed exempting urban housing from CEQA. But that attempt failed under opposition from unions, environmental groups and other organizations. Mr. Metcalf, who at the time was leading California’s housing department under Mr. Brown, said that the political winds had shifted in the past nine years.
He said that California’s moves could inspire other Democratic-led states to weaken their environmental regulations to address their housing shortages. Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota and several other left-leaning states have laws much like CEQA.
“I could certainly see it emboldening other governors: ‘If they can do it in California, we can do it, too,’” he said.
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2) Trump’s Deportation Program Is About Control. Even if You Are a U.S. Citizen.
By Chandran Kukathas, July 1, 2025
Mr. Kukathas is the author of “Dialogues on Immigration and the Open Society” and “Immigration and Freedom.”
Andres Gonzalez and Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos
The tactics of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda have shifted from time to time, but the broader objective has remained consistent: to deport as many people as possible and, more broadly, to transform the restrictions and reach of America’s immigration system.
President Trump and members of his administration believe they have a democratic mandate to do this. Their ultimate fear is that outsiders pose a danger to American values — the threat of not just taking our jobs or becoming welfare scroungers but also transforming our society into something different. “America First” means not so much putting Americans first as putting a distinct idea of America and American values first.
Yet the danger to those American values comes not from immigration itself but from immigration control. You cannot control outsiders (immigrants or would-be immigrants) without controlling insiders (citizens). The more vigorously you try to control immigration, the more you end up limiting the freedom of your citizens and violating equality and the rule of law.
This isn’t hypothetical. As Hiroshi Motomura and others have noted, during the Great Depression and in the years following World War II, an estimated two million people were forced to leave the United States. Astonishingly, more than half were American citizens, mostly people who were (or were suspected of being) Mexican. They were blamed for taking jobs and public resources and were deported or self-deported under intense pressure from authorities after targeted raids on neighborhoods.
This number does not include the many others who were wrongfully arrested, detained or incarcerated, often for days and weeks and sometimes for months or years, by the U.S. government. Nor does it include the many immigrants who were legal residents and were wrongly deported.
These statistics do not tell the whole story. To understand how immigration control undermines freedom — and the fundamental values not just of America but of most Western democracies — we need to look deeper.
The popular image of immigration control is border security, but there is more to immigration control than that. Governments everywhere encourage people to cross their borders and enter their countries. The U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office strategy aims to have 90 million annual international visitors — tourists, students, athletes, business travelers, transport workers — by 2027.
Immigration control is not necessarily about restricting entry but about controlling what those who enter do: determining whether they can work, study, reside, buy property, open bank accounts, set up businesses or marry. This is a challenge because many citizens are all too ready to employ outsiders, admit them to schools and universities, sell to them, buy from them or fall in love with them — in short, welcome them.
The only way for a government to prevent this from happening is to control its citizens by limiting their freedom to live as they choose. This means citizens must be controlled with penalties or punishments: fines, imprisonment or violence. They must be inspected, monitored, scolded, threatened and made to be fearful of finding themselves in violation of the law and at risk of being punished.
Citizens will challenge the laws, find ways around them or even violate them if the law limits their freedom to hire, teach, befriend or welcome whomever they choose.
To overpower citizens, governments will have to spend more money — on courts, judges, lawyers, prisons, the police and compensation payments — or find ways around their laws (or both).
In 2016 Denmark criminalized any act that could be viewed as helping asylum seekers, leading to hundreds of Danes being prosecuted for giving strangers a lift or buying them a cup of coffee.
The British government decided over a decade ago that to control movement, it needed to create a hostile environment for immigrants. But what this did was create a climate of fear for citizens, most notably for those who might be mistaken for immigrants. When “Go home” vans began touring selected places in Britain in 2013, many citizens had to ask themselves: How do I prove I am a citizen in my own country?
The question applies to everyone: To control immigration, how much control over our lives should we be ready to accept?
The evidence we have suggests that the number of people affected by such controls is not trivial. For example, British law required any citizen wanting to sponsor a spouse or partner to immigrate to have a minimum annual income of 18,600 pounds, or about $25,000. In 2015 roughly 40 percent of employed British citizens did not earn enough to reunite with their families.
Initially, somewhere around 15,000 citizens might have been unable to reunite with their families each year. The law was changed in 2024, raising the threshold to $39,000, probably making it even harder for poorer citizens who want to come home or bring in their spouses. In only a decade, at least 150,000 citizens were burdened by just this one regulation aimed at curbing immigration.
In the European Union, billions of euros are spent each year on immigration enforcement and the detention of suspected violators in more than 200 centers. And each year thousands of European citizens are caught and detained, some for days and many for longer, including those who struggle to establish their credentials.
Citizens are affected by immigration controls because of the costs they must bear not just in the taxes they have to pay but also in the services that they must forgo as government funds are redirected. Already, the U.S. immigration and border enforcement budget is several times higher than all other law enforcement budgets for the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and similar agencies combined.
The “big, beautiful bill” under consideration by Republicans in Congress would add $175 billion to immigration enforcement. Mr. Trump’s deportation efforts have moved thousands of law enforcement staff members at the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I., the D.E.A. and the U.S. Marshals Service from investigating violent (and other) crime and toward immigration enforcement.
The more determined governments are to control immigration, the more they will have to abandon due process and act as if the corruption of the rule of law were justified. Or turn a blind eye to the misuse of power by its agents.
We have to consider what these measures do to a society. They affect America’s core values, particularly liberty and equality. Liberty, because Americans see freedom to live as they choose as central to their way of life. Equality, because liberty is the natural endowment of all, not just some. Americans are not alone in thinking this, but they have said it more loudly and clearly than anyone else.
Proponents of such control will have to persuade at least some citizens that this violation of liberty is warranted and even normal. As the use of power by immigration authorities to stop and search citizens becomes routine and the voices of dissent are suppressed, citizens will even come to accept the militarization of society.
But the efforts at control will be divisive among citizens: Some will accept them as necessary, but others will resist them. So as governments try to normalize the violation of liberty, those who buy this story will look at those who object or resist not as fellow countrymen but as enemies. This is what we are seeing now unfolding on the streets across the United States.
Immigration control will transform America. The more vigorously it is pursued, the more it will turn us into people who do not care about the liberty of others. Worse still, it may turn us into people who do not care about our own.
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3) Taking From the Poor and Giving to the Rich Is Not Populism
By Thomas B. Edsall, July 1, 2025
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
“According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ calculation of the annual dollar change in household income in 2026, the top 1 percent would gain $25,500, the top 20 percent $500; the fourth-highest quintile would lose $1,410 per household; the middle quintile would lose $1,610; the second-lowest quintile would lose $1,720 and the bottom quintile $2,270.”
Mario Tama/Getty Images
“I love the poorly educated,” President Trump declared during the 2016 campaign. His intense support for the “big, beautiful” $4.5 trillion tax-and-spending bill now before Congress shows that he has a unique way of demonstrating his affection.
Republicans are on the verge of enacting Trump’s upwardly distributive fiscal policy measure, which has become an extreme test of the loyalty of his more downscale MAGA supporters, who not only oppose the bill but stand to bear the brunt of its negative consequences.
In its current form, which is changing by the hour, the measure, known popularly as B.B.B., would provide the upper classes, including Trump’s allies and donor base — corporations and the rich — with tax cuts worth approximately $4.45 trillion over 10 years. The measure would offset the cost with the largest reductions in safety net programs in recent decades, if not all time, for those on the lower tiers of the income distribution.
This pared-back social spending would adversely affect a large bloc of rural and exurban Republicans who played a crucial role in putting their party in control of the House and Senate, and Trump in the White House.
“You can very safely say,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, told The Washington Post, that “this is the biggest cut to programs for low-income Americans ever.”
Many of the details of the legislation remain in flux as the Senate continues to vote on amendments. If the Senate approves the legislation, the House and the Senate will still have to come to agreement on a final version for the measure to become law.
The Trump tax-and-spending bill comes in the wake of one of the most significant developments in American politics over the past quarter century: The Republican Party, once the representative of Wall Street and Main Street, has become the party of low-income white America while remaining committed to the trickle-down economic policies of the 1980s.
“The ongoing shift of the class profile of the two parties has radically changed the character of Republican and Democratic areas of the country,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, wrote by email. “Districts represented by Republican members of Congress — as well as counties that supported Trump in the last election — are poorer, more rural, less dense, have fewer college graduates and are more likely to be in areas scarred by deindustrialization.”
The effect of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Hacker argued,
will be to throw millions of Americans off Medicaid and greatly worsen the rural health crisis. The effects will be most devastating for older Americans in areas where Medicaid is the main health insurance lifeline for working families — that is, for Republicans’ base supporters.
Both Steve Bannon and Josh Hawley have made clear that Medicaid is now a core part of the social contract on which needy Republicans rely. The number of Republican-majority counties disproportionally dependent on just the federal programs Trump and fellow Republicans plan to cut has grown by leaps and bounds.
The economic transformation of the Republican electorate is perhaps best illustrated in a September 2024 Wall Street Journal article based in part on data compiled by the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes policies spurring economic growth.
The article documents that the number of Republican-majority counties dependent on the federal government for at least 25 percent of local government expenditures increased from 186 in 2000 to 1,746 in 2020 (an uptick of 838.7 percent). In contrast, the number of Democratic-majority counties dependent on federal payments for 25 percent of their budgets over the same period grew from 131 to 240 (an uptick of 83.2 percent).
In a June 12 report to Democratic House congressional leaders, “Distributional Effects of H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the Congressional Budget Office found that Americans falling into the bottom 30 percent of the income distribution — which now includes many white Republicans — will experience a net loss of income if the bill passes.
The loss would be most severe for those at the very bottom, according to the report:
Resources for households in the lowest decile of the income distribution would decrease by about $1,600 per year (in 2025 dollars) compared with their projected income in C.B.O.’s base line projections. That amounts to 3.9 percent of their income. Those projected decreases are mainly attributable to reductions in in-kind transfers, such as Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps).
Michael Shepherd, a professor in the health management and policy department of the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, wrote by email: “I think it is fair to say the ‘big, beautiful bill’ will in multiple ways be a massive blow to the working-class and rural voters who have become core to Trump’s base.”
Rural Americans, Shepherd wrote,
are several percentage points more likely to be enrolled in Medicaid than nonrural Americans. And older rural Americans are much more likely to be “dual eligible” recipients of both Medicaid and Medicare. As a result, the cuts are more likely to enact harm on Trump voters.
Overall, it is rural communities in states won by Trump, like Kentucky, North Carolina and Ohio (all of which also have two Republican senators), and Trump-majority rural communities nationwide, that will suffer the most from these cuts.
In addition, Shepherd continued,
Nearly 300 rural hospitals face closure in the next couple of years even without the cuts. In Texas, for example, nearly 70 hospitals are on the brink. In Georgia, nearly two dozen in the same boat. Nearly all of these are in Trump-majority counties and Republican congressional districts.
As it stands, over 20 percent of the typical rural hospital budget comes from Medicaid. Cuts of the size included in the B.B.B. will lead to closures in the coming years at alarmingly high rates. About 80 percent of rural hospital closures over the last decade have been in the states that did not expand Medicaid.
With the attacks on expansion states in the B.B.B., it is reasonable to assume that rural hospitals in expansion states will face the problems currently being faced in non-expansion states. In other words, the problem facing rural communities in the 10 states that didn’t expand will become a nationwide problem.
Shepherd’s conclusion: “Everywhere one looks in this bill, you can find provisions that will make life considerably harder and more expensive for the rural and working-class voters and communities who have recently joined the Republican fold.”
In the view of some experts, the adverse distributional consequences of the bill are emblematic of broader policies adopted by Trump and congressional Republicans.
Noam Lupu, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, wrote by email: “I think there’s a more general puzzle here: that Republican policies seem disproportionately to hurt smaller communities and Democratic policies seem disproportionately to help them — even though majorities in these communities vote for Republicans.”
To support his case, Lupu cited an April 17 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities study by Brendan Duke and Gbenga Ajilore, “Republican Agenda’s ‘Triple Threat’ to Low- and Moderate-Income-Family Well-Being.”
“The Trump administration and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress,” Duke and Ajilore write, “are advancing a policy agenda that deeply threatens millions of families’ ability to afford the basics by making it harder for them to secure health coverage, buy groceries or afford everyday goods — all while pursuing expensive tax cuts that are skewed toward the wealthy.”
In addition to the Trump tax and spending measure, Duke and Ajilore write, the overall Trump agenda
includes an executive action agenda that unlawfully stops funding for public services and investments, hollows out and politicizes the civil service and undermines basic governance. It also includes sweeping tariffs — the highest in more than a century and eight times higher than they were last year — that will cost low- and moderate-income families hundreds if not thousands of dollars, more than offsetting whatever modest tax cuts they may receive from tax legislation.
Expanding the analysis to include the executive action agenda and tariffs, Duke and Ajilore contend, shows a much larger share of the population losing income than the studies that focused on the Big Beautiful Bill alone. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ calculation of the annual dollar change in household income in 2026, the top 1 percent would gain $25,500, the top 20 percent $500; the fourth-highest quintile would lose $1,410 per household; the middle quintile would lose $1,610; the second-lowest quintile would lose $1,720 and the bottom quintile $2,270.
A separate Jan. 30 study published by the budget center, “President Trump, Congressional Republican Proposals Would Shift Large Costs to States, Inflict Widespread Harm,” by Wesley Tharpe and Meg Wiehe, found that of the 10 states most dependent on federal money in their budgets, eight were red states and two were blue.
What explains this disregard?
Lupu wrote that he generally agrees with the thesis offered in a chapter written by Hacker, Paul Pierson and Sam Zacher in the book “Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality.”
“They have what I think is a very convincing argument about the institutional and party organizational explanations for this phenomenon,” Lupu wrote, adding:
They would say that there are organized interests with very strong preferences about budget cutting that are part of the Republican coalition, and then there are voters in the coalition who stand to lose from these cuts. But with American party politics having become so nationalized and polarized, the party organization became more likely to listen to the intense organized interests because the voters don’t really have anywhere else to go.
That’s effectively what we’re seeing with this bill.
Lupu argued that the current Republican policies on taxes, spending and tariffs represent a dangerous gamble.
“Parties that take their voters for granted eventually do get punished,” Lupu wrote. “I do think a party that consistently hurts its own supporters will eventually lose them.”
KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, has been closely tracking provisions of the bill. In an email, Drew Altman, president and chief executive of KFF, noted that “the Medicaid and A.C.A. (Obamacare) cuts will disproportionately affect MAGA supporters,” adding:
It looks like Republicans are handing Democrats their golden issue but it’s not a slam dunk. Whether MAGA supporters blame Trump and Republicans for the cuts, however, will depend a lot on whether Democrats succeed in holding them responsible. Many of the cuts are wonky and clothed as popular measures like promoting work. They will be implemented piecemeal over time, and many could look to voters like they are coming at them from their governor, their marketplace or insurance plan.
Altman drew my attention to two of his recent analyses published on the KFF website.
On June 10, he wrote:
Nearly half (45 percent) of the people who get their health coverage in the A.C.A. marketplaces and in the individual market — about 10 million Americans — are MAGA supporters or non-MAGA Republicans. What that means is that the policy changes and cuts being made by Republicans to the marketplaces will directly affect their own voters.
However, Altman continued,
The biggest change will actually come from inaction: If Republicans don’t extend the enhanced A.C.A. tax credits this year, the premiums people pay will increase by more than 75 percent on average and result in an additional four million people losing coverage.
All told, the combined impact of the reconciliation changes and the tax credits expiring would result in at least a one-third reduction in marketplace enrollment. Red states that didn’t expand Medicaid will be hit especially hard. For example, 2.2 million people in Florida are expected to lose health coverage from the changes to the A.C.A. and 1.7 million in Texas.
In a separate June 18 report, Altman cited KFF polling showing that many voters are unaware of the effects of the Trump legislation. When they are told of the consequences, the already weak support drops precipitously:
We asked respondents if they had a favorable or unfavorable view of the B.B.B. and then asked two “what if you knew” follow-up questions. Public support for the legislation drops 14 percentage points from 35 percent favorable/64 percent unfavorable to 21 percent favorable/79 percent unfavorable after hearing that the legislation would decrease funding for local hospitals, and three-fourths of the public (74 percent) hold an unfavorable view of the legislation after hearing that the bill would increase the number of people without health insurance by about 10 million.
One of the driving forces behind the growth of the downscale Republican constituency and the emerging economic division between red and blue America is the polarization of voters by education that began in the 1990s as college-educated voters became more liberal and Democratic, while non-college voters, especially whites, became more conservative and Republican.
This process rapidly accelerated in the wake of the 2008-9 Great Recession as blue counties across the nation recovered and returned to steady growth while red counties on average stagnated or declined.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has documented this process in a series of articles.
In a 2019 report, “America Has Two Economies — and They’re Diverging Fast,” Muro and Jacob Whiton showed that in 2008 median household income in congressional districts represented by Republicans ($55,000) was still higher than it was in Democratic districts ($54,000). By 2017, however, income in blue districts rose to $61,000 while in red districts it fell to $53,000.
The same divergent trends could be seen on virtually every measure including G.D.P. growth, educational attainment and population increase.
“Democratic districts,” Muro wrote,
have grown significantly more dynamic in the last decade. Overall, “blue” territories have seen their productivity climb from $118,000 per worker in 2008 to $139,000 in 2018 as recent demographic changes and electoral sorting ensured they became better educated and more urban. Republican-district productivity, by contrast, remains stuck at about $110,000.
In July 2024, the Economic Innovation Group reported a similar sharp acceleration in the economic gap between red and blue counties, beginning in 2008. That year, according to the group’s report, 67 percent of the nation’s “left-behind counties” — defined as “counties that experienced less than half the national population and median household income growth rate” — voted Republican and 33 percent voted Democratic.
By 2020, counties that voted Republican made up 83 percent of the left-behind, while 13 percent of Democratic voting counties qualified as left behind.
By 2024, Muro and his Brookings colleagues found that “President Donald Trump’s winning base in 2,633 counties represents 86 percent of the nation’s total counties but just 38 percent of the nation’s G.D.P. Conversely, Vice President Kamala Harris’s losing base of 427 much-higher-output counties represents 62 percent of the G.D.P.”
Trump is fully aware of the public hostility to the measure. His own pollster, Tony Fabrizio, conducted a survey for the Modern Medicaid Alliance that found “voters overwhelmingly oppose cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts — an unpopular move with swing voters, Republican base.”
In their report to the alliance, Fabrizio and his two partners, Bob and John Ward, wrote:
There is no appetite across the political spectrum for cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts. Medicaid is well liked by most voters, in large part due to the broad impact it has across the electorate and the high level of importance voters place on as many Americans as possible having health insurance. Opposition is high to cutting the program generally and is especially high for cutting funding for CHIP [Children’s Health Insurance Program] and the help Medicaid provides seniors.
This once again raises the question of why Trump is so determined to thwart and deprive the men and women who elected him to the presidency not once but twice.
The answer is that the Big Beautiful Bill reveals Trump’s true colors. He is more committed to surreptitiously gambling on lavish tax cuts for the rich, including himself and his friends, than he is in cementing a populist coalition that could carry the Republican Party to victory in 2026, 2028 and beyond.
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4) In an Attack at Sunset, Israelis Set a Palestinian Village Ablaze
The violence last week in Kafr Malik, in the West Bank, comes amid a surge in assaults by Israeli settlers. It also set off a chain of violence in the area.
By Fatima AbdulKarim, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, July 1, 2025
Fatima AbdulKarim and Daniel Berehulak reported from Kafr Malik in the occupied West Bank.
Dusk was settling over Kafr Malik, a quiet Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank. At the Afeef family’s home on the outskirts, a mother was putting her newborn to sleep in a ground-floor bedroom. Another relative was pulling up outside with her four young children in the car.
That calm was shattered soon afterward when scores of Israelis, many masked, descended on the village by foot and in vehicles, according to witnesses and local officials.
The attackers hurled Molotov cocktails and set homes and cars on fire, the witnesses and local officials said. The Israeli military said in a statement that dozens of Israeli civilians had set Palestinian property ablaze.
The violence in Kafr Malik, northeast of Ramallah, last week comes amid a sharp rise in settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, where about half a million Israelis live among three million Palestinians. Settler attacks injured more than 220 Palestinians during the first five months of 2025, the highest rate in years, according to the United Nations. Settlers killed a Palestinian man on June 19, the U.N. says.
The violence in Kafr Malik set off a chain of confrontations between settlers and Israeli security forces in the area. Soldiers shot and wounded an Israeli youth on Friday, prompting hard-right Israelis to clash with troops outside a military base and burn down a nearby security installation on Sunday, the military said.
Tensions had been building in Kafr Malik for days before the attack. Residents had been grieving for a boy, Ammar Hamayel, 14, whom Israeli soldiers shot and killed in olive groves on the edge of the village two days previously, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The Israeli military said troops fired at “terrorists” who had thrown stones at an Israeli car and at them, hitting one.
One of the first houses to come under attack on Wednesday was that of the Afeefs, home to Afee Afeef, his wife, Nariman, their six children and other relatives.
As Taghreed Jodeh, Mr. Afeef’s sister-in-law, was pulling up in her car with her own children, her nieces and nephews ran out to greet them. By the time Ms. Jodeh had climbed the stairs, the youngsters’ laughter had turned to screams and her car was in flames, she said in an interview. She and her sister raced down to grab the children and barely made it back upstairs as the attackers hurled firebombs in their direction, she recalled.
The attackers threw another firebomb into the bedroom where Mr. Afeef’s newborn nephew was being lulled to sleep, scorching furniture and leaving blackened marks on the floor and walls, the family said. The damage was visible when Times reporters visited on Friday. The baby and his mother were unharmed.
Soon after, Israeli forces arrived and opened fired at Palestinians instead of stopping the rioters, according to multiple witnesses.
The soldiers killed three people, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Their relatives identified them as Murshid Hamayel, 35; Lutfi Baeirat, 18; and Muhammad Naji, 15. Nine others were injured, some gravely, according to the ministry.
In its statement, the Israeli military said clashes broke out during the assault by Israeli civilians and that Israelis and Palestinians had hurled stones at each other. The military said that Palestinians had opened fire at soldiers, prompting return fire and resulting in several dead and wounded. Five Israeli civilians were detained, the statement added.
More than a dozen Kafr Malik residents said that they had not heard shots before soldiers opened fire.
What provoked the initial violence is unclear.
Violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank is not unusual, and settlers had also just marked the second anniversary of a deadly shooting attack nearby in which four Israeli civilians were killed. Graffiti outside Mr. Afeef’s home seen on Friday included the Hebrew words for “vengeance” and “two years,” and partially named two victims of the shooting.
At the core of the violence lies the decades-old competition over land as Jewish settlers who consider the West Bank part of their biblical birthright take territory that much of the world views as the heartland of a future Palestinian state. Most countries consider all Israeli settlement in the occupied territory a violation of international law.
At least seven settler outposts have gone up around Kafr Malik in recent months, Najeh Rustom, the mayor, said. The newest are creeping closer to the village’s land, he added.
The outposts are illegal even by Israeli standards but the government turns a blind eye to many and has retroactively authorized others.
Amjad Shayeb, the deputy mayor, said settler violence was not random: “It’s meant to make people afraid to live in their homes, to step onto their own land.”
Another resident, Shireen Said, said attackers had thrown firebombs at her home and tried to break in. She said soldiers had provided cover for the assault.
The village outskirts, where families once grazed sheep, planted crops or took evening walks, have become dangerous, residents said.
“We don’t know how much more we will have to pay in blood,” Mr. Afeef said. “Still, we will not leave our homes.”
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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5) The U.S. Sends Lots of Plastic Trash Overseas. Malaysia Just Said No Thanks.
No country receives more discarded plastic from wealthy countries, but shipments from the United States are no longer welcome.
By Hiroko Tabuchi and Zunaira Saieed, July 1, 2025
A Malaysian inspector examined a shipment of plastic waste in 2019. Credit...Mohd Rasfan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the shadow of President Trump’s tariff fights, a different kind of trade war is playing out involving candy wrappers and plastic bottles.
On Tuesday, Malaysia, which received more discarded plastic from rich nations than any other developing country last year, effectively banned all shipments of plastic waste from the United States.
That might not seem like a big deal. But the United States has increasingly relied on countries like Malaysia to deal with plastic trash. American scrap brokers sent more than 35,000 tons of plastic waste to Malaysia last year, according to trade data analyzed by the Basel Action Network, a nonprofit group that tracks plastic waste issues.
Last year, after seizing more than 100 shipping containers of hazardous materials sent from Los Angeles that had been improperly labeled as raw materials, the Malaysian environment minister, Nik Nazmi, told reporters that “we do not want Malaysia to be the world’s rubbish bin.” The country’s Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Turmoil in the little-known trade in plastic waste has its roots in a decision by China in 2018, for the same reasons as Malaysia, to ban imports of wastepaper and plastic. Before that, China had for years accepted as much as half of the globe’s discarded plastic and paper.
Western nations have since struggled with a buildup of plastic trash. The United States recycles less than 10 percent of the plastic it discards. (Food and other contamination in plastic waste hinders recycling, and a significant portion of plastic, like chip bags that contain layers of different plastics and other materials, simply can’t be recycled economically.)
The rest ends up in landfills, is burned or is shipped overseas. And while new overseas destinations have emerged, a growing number of countries are starting to say no to trash. This year, Thailand and Indonesia also announced bans on plastic-waste imports.
The world produces nearly a half-billion tons of plastic each year, more than double the amount from two decades ago, and a growing amount of plastic waste is turning up on coastlines and river banks, as well as in whales, birds and other animals that ingest them. Researchers have estimated that one garbage truck’s worth of plastic enters the ocean every minute.
China’s ban “sent shock waves through the global plastic waste trade,” said Tony R. Walker, a professor at the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who researches the global flow of plastic waste. The countries that started to accept that discarded plastic “quickly became overwhelmed,” he said. Much of that plastic trash ends up dumped in landfills or is burned, which releases harmful air pollution, or is simply released into the environment.
People in rich countries may assume the plastic they diligently separate is being recycled, he said, something he termed “wish cycling.” However, instead of going into a recycling stream, “a lot of it gets redirected to waste,” he said.
Malaysia’s amended Customs Act bans all plastic waste shipments from countries that have not signed the Basel Convention, a global agreement that regulates hazardous waste including plastic. That puts the United States, the only major country that is not a party to the agreement, in a particularly tricky spot.
The amended law also sets stringent restrictions on plastic waste imports from other countries, saying they must contain only one type of plastic, with at most 2 percent contamination, to ensure that the imported plastics are recycled and not discarded. That level would be challenging to meet for any plastic waste collected from consumers.
In an email to clients sent on June 20 and shared with The New York Times, Steve Wong, chief executive of the global plastic waste broker Fukutomi, said shipments of scrap plastic to Malaysia had already “come to a virtual standstill.”
Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, an industry group, said the effects of Malaysia’s import policy on plastic waste remained unclear. Nevertheless, “Our industry remains focused on scaling up the use of recycled plastics in new products,” he said. “These efforts support American jobs and drive economic growth, while conserving our natural resources and helping to prevent plastic pollution.”
Malaysia’s ban on plastic waste imports from the United States was prompted by the discovery of hundreds of containers filled with hazardous electronic and plastic waste that had been falsely declared as raw materials in order to bypass the country’s trade control laws, said Wong Pui Yi, a researcher at the Basel Action Network.
But local industry associations have urged the government to lift the ban on clean, recyclable plastic imports, arguing that the imports are necessary to help manufacturers meet their recycled-content targets. Brands like Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have committed to using more recycled material in their products, said C.C. Cheah, the president of Malaysian Plastics Manufacturers Association, and the Malaysian recycling industry could still play a role.
Kate O’Neill, a professor of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley, said Malaysia’s ban could mean that plastic waste starts flowing to other countries that are less able to handle the waste. Monitoring will be important, she said. “The recycling industry still hasn’t caught up with the disruption, so these exports are still needed.”
That’s why experts increasingly say that, on top of investing in recycling infrastructure, policies are needed to help rein in plastic production itself, for example by curbing demand for single-use plastics. Some countries negotiating a new treaty aimed at curbing plastic pollution have also called for caps on plastic production.
That could come from packaging designs that cut down on plastic use, measures like plastic bag bans and overall policies that make manufacturers more responsible for the waste their products generate.
Those policies have been spreading across the United States as well as globally. On Tuesday, a law went into effect in Illinois that prohibits large hotels from providing small, single-use plastic bottles for toiletries like shampoo and conditioner. (Smaller hotels have until 2026 to comply.)
Also on Tuesday, Delaware began prohibiting restaurants from providing foam food containers, plastic beverage stirrers and plastic cocktail and sandwich picks, and requires that single-use plastic straws are only given out at the customer’s request.
Yan Zhuangcontributed reporting from Seoul.
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6) What I Heard on a Suicide Hotline for Trans Kids
By Jason Cherkis, July 2, 2025
Mr. Cherkis is a journalist based in Washington who covers mental health and other subjects. He is working on a book about suicide.
Oyow
The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors and the Trump administration’s decision to end funding for the specialized suicide hotline for L.G.B.T.Q.+ callers are not coincidental. They both speak to a fundamental failure to acknowledge the day-to-day reality of trans people in America.
As part of my research for a book about suicide prevention, I spent about a year working weekends on a hotline. I couldn’t acquire a serious understanding of what it meant to talk someone out of attempting suicide just by interviewing therapists or even sitting next to the people taking hotline calls. I wanted to feel the weight of caring for suicidal people and experience what it was like to help them through a crisis.
What the Trump administration fails to understand is that a common thread running through these calls is the desperate search for just one trusted adult. If the callers had one, there is a good chance they might not have had the need to reach us. One trusted adult could help them figure out how to open up to their families and friends. One trusted adult could get them through a tough night when they feel utterly hopeless.
The national 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline on which I worked is the nation’s main suicide prevention effort. In many areas of the country, it may be the only therapy the callers will ever get. On any given night, I was taking calls from all over America.
Most of my calls came from rural, isolated communities that lacked public transportation. After my standard greeting, calls could quickly get intimate. We had our share of regulars: quiet ladies in nursing home beds, college students alone in their dorms. People would call from their cars after their shifts stocking shelves and dressing window displays or from hallways of a noisy homeless shelter.
Some were unsure if they could trust me. I never could predict how a call would go. I would try at least to stay with the caller as long as they wanted, which could be when their cellphone ran out of juice. Next to my computer, I wrote on a scrap of paper, “Be humble.”
Crisis interventions had evolved a lot since the turn of the 20th century, when the Salvation Army put ads in newspapers for the emergency counseling services of its anti-suicide bureaus. The Maryland-based nonprofit I worked for covered more than just the main 988 line. We covered lines dedicated to Alaskan residents and a help line from New York City that was used mainly by severely mentally ill people seeking shelter. We referred cutters to a hotline addressing self-harm and rape victims to a line specializing in their trauma. Each line carried the promise of expertise on the other end.
Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States, especially for teenagers and young adults. The risk of attempting suicide is even higher among L.G.B.T.Q. young people because of stigma and discrimination. When a call popped up on my screen from the Trevor Project line dedicated to L.G.B.T.Q.+ callers, I waited a beat and took a deep breath. I was all but guaranteed to find someone who sounded much younger than my average caller. The risk of suicide on this line was so great that our supervisors required us to ask callers whether they were having suicidal thoughts in that moment. We were not to assume the gender of the caller. It never stopped being a shock to answer the line and hear a prepubescent voice.
Some had already tried self-harm or made more than one suicide attempt. Many on a daily basis contemplated killing themselves. Gender dysphoria, one explained to me, was like “being tortured in my body.”
My experience runs counter to what the Trump administration has asserted in its decision to end this line. The Office of Management and Budget falsely argued that the phone line was a conduit of indoctrination “where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by ‘counselors’ without consent or knowledge of their parents.”
My callers wished their parents weren’t in denial and didn’t echo right-wing talking points. They wished they didn’t feel so alone late at night. They called from Utah and Arizona and Iowa. That more calls came from rural red states than from urban blue states was not a mere gut feeling on my part. Published data by the Trevor Project links the dozens of recent anti-trans laws with increases in the rates of suicide attempts by transgender and nonbinary youth.
One night, a suicidal trans girl said she had to cut the call short because it was getting to be past her bedtime. I am a cisgender male and a corny dad with a kid similar in age to these callers. Before they hung up, I whisper-yelled into the phone that they could call again anytime.
I also had trans adults calling, just as alone. A colleague got a call from a trans woman inside a psych ward — hospitals were no guarantee of safety. A caller from a rural state out west trying to transition told me, “Somebody has to give me a reason to live.” Telling them “it gets better” seemed not only hollow but false. I couldn’t pretend that the legislatures in the states where my callers lived were going to reverse course (they have not) or that the general anti-trans beliefs among policymakers in their state would change. I could only listen and validate that what they were going through was difficult — in other words, prove that they hadn’t made a mistake in reaching out.
The kids were telling us that to survive, they needed a kinder, safer world. We don’t have to take expensive, showy steps to get there. It can involve as basic a gesture as a middle school teacher wearing a rainbow necklace or a neighbor planting a trans flag in the yard. These are more than performative gestures to someone who feels abandoned.
A community college could open its library — and its L.G.B.T.Q. materials — to surrounding neighborhoods. The librarian could make a point of complimenting someone’s gender-nonconforming haircut or clothing. These kinds of safety signals let kids know where they can go in an emergency.
Surgeries for youth are rare. But hatred, spurred by the Trump administration, is not. Ultimately, the children whose stories of trauma and isolation I listened to had only one question. It was a simple one: Who can I turn to?
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
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7) Trump Withholds Nearly $7 Billion for Schools, With Little Explanation
The money, which was allocated by Congress, helps pay for after-school programs, support for students learning English and other services.
By Sarah Mervosh and Michael C. Bender, July 1, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/us/trump-education-funds.html
The move is likely to be challenged in court and has already been criticized as illegal by Democrats and teachers’ unions. Credit...KC McGinnis for The New York Times
The Trump administration has declined to release nearly $7 billion in federal funding that helps pay for after-school and summer programs, support for students learning English, teacher training and other services.
The money was expected to be released by Tuesday. But in an email on Monday, the Education Department notified state education agencies that the money would not be available.
The administration offered little explanation, saying only that the funds were under review. It gave no timeline for when, or if, the money would be released, saying instead that it was “committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the president’s priorities.” The frozen funds are unrelated to the millions of dollars in cuts included in the domestic policy bill that squeaked through the Senate on Tuesday.
“It’s catastrophic,” said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance, a group that works to expand after-school services for students. She estimated that the federal dollars for after-school and summer-school programs — about $1.3 billion annually — support 1.4 million students, mostly lower income, representing about 20 percent of all students in after-school programs nationally.
The move is likely to be challenged in court and has already been criticized as illegal by Democrats and teachers’ unions, who emphasized that the money had been appropriated by Congress and was approved by President Trump in March as part of a broader funding bill.
“This is lawless,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
The administration has taken an aggressive approach to cutting back the federal government’s role in education, including plans to eliminate the Education Department entirely. Though only Congress can abolish the department, the Trump administration has taken an ax to education staffing and funding more broadly as it seeks to whittle down the department.
The administration has suggested that it may seek to eliminate the nearly $7 billion in frozen funding. Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last week that the administration was considering ways to claw back the funding through a process known as rescission. The administration would formally ask lawmakers to claw back a set of funds it has targeted for cuts. Even if Congress fails to vote on the request, the president’s timing would trigger a law that freezes the money until it ultimately expires.
“No decision has been made,” Mr. Vought said.
The withholding of dollars on Tuesday threw school district budgets into uncertainty, with only weeks to go before the start of school in many parts of the country.
Heidi Sipe, the superintendent in Umatilla, Ore., a low-income, rural district, said her district’s after-school program has traditionally gone until 4:45 or 5:30 p.m. and was fully funded through federal dollars.
She recently sent a note to parents urging them to make backup plans, though few exist in her community, where she said there is no Y.M.C.A. or similar alternatives.
In Omaha, Nicole Everingham, who helps manage after-school funding for programs at 42 public schools, said a loss of funding would force her group to consolidate the number of schools that can offer after-school care, and also mean fewer slots for students, because of staffing reductions.
“It completely puts us in flux,” said Ms. Everingham, the development director for Collective for Youth, which helps coordinate after-school programming for about half of Omaha public schools.
Even if the money comes through after a delay, she said, it could disrupt the ability to hire staff by the start of school in mid-August, creating chaos for working parents who depend on after-school programs.
Many school districts also rely on federal dollars to help non-English-speaking students and families, including training teachers and hiring translators.
“Without this outreach, families who do not speak English could be cut off from schools and the support system they need,” said Ana DeGenna, the school district superintendent in Oxnard, Calif.
Several of the federally funded programs have been in place for decades. The 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which support before- and after-school programs, were created in 1994 by federal legislation, and expanded six years later with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Both measures, the first passed during a Democratic administration and the second under a Republican president, were approved by broad bipartisan majorities.
One of the newest programs, known as Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants, has been in place for a decade, supporting many services for issues like mental health and school technology. That law that authorized those grants received broad bipartisan support, including from Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan and Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, both Republicans who are now chairmen of the education committees in their respective chambers.
But criticism about cutting funding for these programs has largely been limited to Democrats.
“Every day that this funding is held up is a day that school districts are forced to worry about whether they’ll have to cut back on after-school programs or lay off teachers instead of worrying about how to make sure our kids can succeed,” Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat who is the vice chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.
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8) Israeli Officials Express Optimism on Gaza Cease-Fire as Netanyahu Prepares to Meet With Trump
It is unclear whether the latest U.S.-backed effort can overcome the most entrenched sticking point between Israel and Hamas.
By Aaron Boxerman and Ronen Bergman, July 2, 2025
Damage from Israeli strikes in central Gaza City on Friday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israeli officials projected cautious optimism on Wednesday over the possibility of a new Gaza cease-fire and hostage release agreement ahead of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting with President Trump next week in Washington.
It was still unclear whether the latest U.S.-backed effort can overcome the most entrenched sticking point between Israel and Hamas: whether a pause in the fighting would actually end the 20-month war in Gaza.
Israel informed the United States on Tuesday that it had assented to “conditions to finalize” a 60-day cease-fire with Hamas, President Trump wrote on social media on Tuesday. During the truce, all sides would try to use the pause to end the war, he said.
The latest effort goes beyond a previous proposal in May by offering more extensive guarantees that mediators, including the United States, would ensure that talks continue during the two-month truce until both sides agreed to an end to the war, according to three Israeli officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.
Hamas had yet to respond to the proposal, which would provide the basis for intensive talks to flesh out details of the accord. But two of the three Israeli officials said they were hopeful that the latest effort might finally give some momentum to the long-stalled cease-fire talks amid rising pressure from Mr. Trump to reach an agreement.
Hamas leaders say they will release the remaining hostages only if Israel ends the war in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu has said that he is ready for a “temporary cease-fire,” but that he will not end the war unless Hamas ends its rule in Gaza and its leaders go into exile, conditions the Palestinian group rejects.
Israel had made new concessions by agreeing to the guarantees, two of the officials said. The precise language was unclear, but Hamas has demanded similar clauses in the past. Israeli officials have rejected them, saying they would effectively turn the temporary truce into a permanent one by default.
Some analysts say Mr. Netanyahu — basking in what many Israelis consider his successful June war with Iran — may now be ready to change course. Mr. Trump has also offered a brief timeline for reaching an agreement, saying he hoped it would be as early as next week.
More than 56,000 people, including thousands of children, have been killed in the war in Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The war began when Hamas and its allies attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. More than 250 others were taken hostage, according to Israel.
Israel and Hamas have agreed to two short-lived cease-fires, both of which saw hostages in Gaza swapped for Palestinian prisoners. During the last truce, which collapsed in mid-March, Israel released more than 1,500 prisoners and Hamas turned over 30 hostages and the bodies of eight more.
Moving ahead with the cease-fire talks could rattle Mr. Netanyahu’s grip on power. His far-right coalition partners, including two senior ministers, oppose ending the war and call for indefinite Israeli rule in Gaza instead.
Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, wrote on social media that a deal to free hostages held by Hamas in Gaza would enjoy “a large majority in the government and among the public.”
Another minister, Amichai Chikli, quickly fired back: “The deal hasn’t been presented to the government yet.”
But buoyed by the recent war with Iran, Mr. Netanyahu might be willing to risk the collapse of his governing coalition, analysts say, particularly if he can capitalize on an end to the war in Gaza to advance Israel’s diplomatic ties with neighboring Arab countries.
A collapse of the coalition would likely lead Israel to new parliamentary elections.
Mr. Netanyahu’s popularity dipped sharply in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks as many Israelis accused him of being responsible for an enormous security failure. But he now performs more strongly in opinion polls than at almost any point since the war began.
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9) How Immigration Could Muddy the Jobs Numbers
Job growth is expected to fall this year, adding to pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. But the slowdown might reflect a smaller labor force, not declining demand from employers.
By Colby Smith and Ben Casselman, July 2, 2025
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in Denver in February. The Trump administration has threatened to deport as many as a million people a year. Credit...Chet Strange for The New York Times
Officials at the Federal Reserve, under pressure from President Trump to restart interest rate cuts after an extended pause, say they are prepared to lower borrowing costs if the labor market weakens.
But Mr. Trump’s own immigration policies risk making it much harder for those policymakers to know whether that is happening, putting a divided central bank in an even more fraught position as it debates when and by what magnitude to lower borrowing costs.
The Trump administration in recent months has moved to revoke the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and has conducted high-profile immigration raids at work sites in Los Angeles and other cities. It has stepped up security at the U.S.-Mexican border and has publicly threatened to deport as many as a million workers a year.
The full effect of those policies is not yet clear. But virtually all analysts expect the immigrant population to grow much more slowly this year, and perhaps even to fall. That could leave employers who rely on immigrant labor scrambling to fill positions, potentially pushing up wages and causing shortages of certain goods or services.
A shrinking immigrant labor force could pose a big problem for the Fed, making it harder to tell whether a slowdown in job growth is the result of falling demand for workers, fewer available employees or both. The shrinking pool of workers could also present another source of inflationary pressures beyond tariffs that officials would have to navigate.
“The Fed is in a challenging position,” said Betsey Stevenson, a former chief economist at the Labor Department who is now a professor at the University of Michigan. “They need to be really careful that what they’re seeing is actually weak labor demand and not contracting labor supply caused by Trump’s policies, and that’s tricky.”
The Labor Department on Thursday will release its monthly snapshot of hiring and unemployment, which is expected to show a continued, gradual cool-down in the pace of job growth. Many forecasters expect a further, perhaps sharper decline in hiring in the second half of the year.
Ordinarily, such a slowdown — at least, if accompanied by moderate inflation — would be a clear signal to the Fed to begin lowering borrowing costs to stimulate demand and head off a recession. But this time, a moderation may simply reflect slower growth in the labor force.
“Our sense of whether a monthly jobs number is good or bad needs to adjust,” said Jed Kolko, an economist who served in the Commerce Department during the Biden administration.
A Fuzzy Target
In gauging the health of the job market, economists typically compare monthly payroll figures with the “break-even” pace of hiring: the theoretical level of monthly job growth that is just enough to keep up with growth in the labor force.
Anything below this break-even rate will cause the unemployment rate to rise, as people entering the labor force struggle to find jobs. Job growth above that point will cause the unemployment rate to fall. If job growth remains above the break-even rate for long enough, companies will have to compete for a dwindling supply of available workers, leading to faster wage growth and, ultimately, risking higher inflation.
The break-even rate can shift over time in response to demographic patterns, like the aging of the baby boom generation, or societal trends, like rising college attendance. In recent years, however, it has moved around much more than usual, first in response to the coronavirus pandemic — which temporarily pushed tens of millions of people out of the labor force — and then to big swings in immigration.
In the years before the pandemic, most estimates put the break-even rate at around 100,000 jobs per month. That figure ballooned to perhaps 200,000 during the immigration boom early in President Biden’s term, allowing employers to keep adding jobs at a rapid pace long after many forecasters had expected the country to begin running out of available workers.
Now, pretty much every economist agrees that the break-even rate is lower, and will fall further as Mr. Trump’s immigration policies take full effect. But precise estimates vary widely, from as few as 50,000 jobs per month to as many as 150,000.
That means that if this week’s Labor Department report meets forecasters’ expectations of a gain of roughly 110,000 jobs, economists will not agree on whether that exceeds the break-even rate.
“It’s just really hard to take payroll growth as a reliable signal of the health of the economy anymore,” said Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab.
Looking for Other Evidence
As a result, Mr. Tedeschi and other economists said, they pay less attention to monthly job growth and focus more on the unemployment rate, which offers a more direct measure of whether there are enough jobs for all the workers who want them.
“The unemployment rate will end up being a much more useful measure,” said Wendy Edelberg, an economist at the Brookings Institution who has studied the impact of immigration on economic data.
Economists will also be paying attention to other measures, including the number of job openings, the applications for unemployment insurance and the rate at which workers quit their jobs. Many will also be watching for signs that wage growth is picking up, which would indicate that the labor market is heating up, even if job growth is slowing.
But those indicators are also imperfect. The unemployment rate is based on a monthly survey of households that is generally viewed as less reliable than the much larger survey of businesses that is the source of payroll figures. The most reliable wage numbers are released only four times a year. And the different measures often tell conflicting stories, especially over short periods.
That raises the risk that Fed officials will disagree about how to interpret the job market’s signals. And even if they do reach a consensus, they could have a hard time communicating their thinking to investors and the public, said Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank.
“I have been worried that it’s possible there could be some gap between the Fed’s perception of what is a good jobs report and what the market’s perception on what a good job report is,” he said.
Politics and Division
Political pressures will only add to the Fed’s challenges.
Mr. Trump has subjected Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, to an onslaught of attacks in recent months for not acquiescing to his demands to lower borrowing costs. On Monday, Mr. Trump penned him a handwritten note accusing the Fed of costing the country a “fortune.”
Mr. Powell has so far shrugged off these attacks, saying the labor market remains strong even as demand for workers has gradually cooled.
“The labor market is not crying out for a rate cut,” he told reporters after the most recent policy decision in June, when the central bank voted unanimously to hold interest rates steady for a fourth straight meeting.
Speaking to lawmakers roughly a week later, he said that while the Fed did not currently see weakness in the labor market, “if we did, that would change things.”
But fissures between officials have already started to emerge. While the bulk of the Fed’s policymakers have endorsed the central bank’s wait-and-see approach to further interest rate cuts — with many projecting no reductions this year — two Trump appointees have recently made the case for a move as early as this month.
If job growth declines further, pressure to cut rates will almost certainly intensify. But if the slowdown is the result of reduced immigration, rather than reduced demand for labor, such a move could be a mistake, leading to an increase in inflation, some economists warn.
“If they see monthly payroll employment growth slow a lot, their first thought should be that probably reflects a big decline in labor supply and so it’s not on the face of it signaling that we’re in recession or about to enter recession,” Ms. Edelberg said.
In a report published on Wednesday by the American Enterprise Institute, Ms. Edelberg and two co-authors estimated that the break-even pace of job growth could fall as low as 10,000 jobs per month by the end of the year. That suggests that job growth is all but certain to decline significantly in coming months. But Ms. Edelberg said many Americans — and even many economists — were still likely to be alarmed by the slowdown.
“Good luck with telling people that a payroll growth figure of 30,000 is nothing to be worried about,” she said.
Weighing heavily on the Fed is the mistake officials made in the aftermath of the pandemic, when they underestimated the severity of the price pressures stemming from the global economic shutdown and inflation soared to the highest level in roughly four decades.
Inflation has since moderated but has yet to return to the Fed’s 2 percent target. And Mr. Trump’s policies on both trade and immigration have stoked anxiety that inflation will accelerate again.
Letting inflation get out of control again is a “bigger mistake” than causing the economy to slow a bit too much, said Seth Carpenter, a former Fed economist who is now at Morgan Stanley. The Fed can always play catch-up by lowering interest rates more aggressively, he said.
Mr. Carpenter expects a cooling economy to lead to less demand for labor, pushing up unemployment even as the supply of workers also ebbs. Still, he expects the Fed to stay on hold for the remainder of the year before lowering borrowing costs more significantly throughout 2026.
Ms. Stevenson warned that the Fed’s credibility was on the line if it ended up having to flip-flop on its policy decisions — for example, lowering interest rates in September only to raise them again six months later.
“If you can see the potential to move in either direction, just wait for more data,” she said.
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