Far from “unconditional surrender” or the “total and complete victory” President Donald Trump claimed would result from his unilateral decision to launch a war against Iran, the protracted U.S. military action is reportedly winding down with a memorandum of understanding between U.S. and Iranian officials that includes lifting U.S. sanctions, unfreezing Iranian assets, ending the U.S. blockade, reopening the Strait of Hormuz with Iran still in control, creating a $300 billion reconstruction fund, and the promise of further negotiations to end Iran’s nuclear program. 

In other words, the provisional agreement to end the war that has cost $30 billion and 13 U.S. lives appears to more or less restore the status quo before the war started. The biggest achievement of the outlined deal is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t closed until the U.S. started bombing. Details of a proposed effort to keep Iran from building a nuclear weapon are still not figured out. Iran’s hardline regime is still in power.

None of this sounds like a win to Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who has repeatedly tried and failed to get her colleagues to pass a War Powers resolution to assert congressional warmaking authority, end the bombing and stop what she calls Trump’s illegitimate and “100% unnecessary” war.

“We have no assurances that war won’t continue, and no evidence that Americans are any better off today than they were before this all started,” Baldwin said in a press call Wednesday, calling the Iran war “a disaster for Wisconsinites.”

Baldwin is not alone. According to an April Marquette University Law School poll, 63% of Americans said there was not sufficient reason to start the war, and 68% said they disapproved of the way Trump has handled it.

Even Wisconsin’s Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, an ever-dependable Trump ally, told Bloomberg Television this week, “I don’t like the final outcome here. I’m sure President Trump doesn’t like the outcome. He would have liked unconditional surrender. It didn’t happen.” 

Johnson threw in a loopy tangent, blaming “gun control” for the inability of the Iranian people to overthrow their country’s brutal regime, calling it “a good lesson for the American people.” 

But Baldwin and Johnson appear to be mostly in agreement that, unproductive as it was, it’s better to wind down the war than to continue pushing forward with a costly and fruitless military adventure.  

“Look, peace is unequivocally a good thing, and something I have been fighting for since this president launched this unnecessary war,” Baldwin said Wednesday.

Speaking to Bloomberg on Tuesday, Johnson said: “If you’re going to recognize reality and realize that they still had a stranglehold over the straits and you want to open the straits up, there’s got to be some give and take.” 

So there it is: without knowing the details, Johnson supported Trump’s deal to end the war because it got Iran to reopen the strait it closed because Trump started the war in the first place. As for Iran’s nuclear program, “We can always go back in, the minute they make a move toward their nuclear sites, we can bomb them again,” Johnson asserted, echoing Trump.

“I don’t know what’s in the memorandum of understanding,” he added.

Being left in the dark about the details did not appear to trouble Johnson. Baldwin, in contrast, made it a point of her press conference, noting that Trump had repeatedly declared victory in Iran only to have the war continue.

“We need to make sure that whatever is in this agreement is real and also good for the American people,” she said, flagging the surge in gas prices that cost the average Wisconsin family $378 more since the war started as well as a huge hike in fertilizer prices that has taken a heavy toll on farmers.

The Iran nuclear deal Trump tore up, negotiated under the administration of President Barack Obama, included intrusive inspections that ensured Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity was not advancing, Baldwin noted. “I can’t see possibly how we could end up with a stronger deal curtailing Iran’s nuclear program 60 days from now than we did back in 2015 after months of multilateral negotiation,”  she said. “But again, Trump ripped up that deal, and we’re going to possibly, probably end up in a much worse place when we finally see this wind down and end.

Asked whether it still makes sense to push Congress to step up and pass a War Powers resolution, Baldwin answered, “absolutely.”

“When this president brought us into his war of choice, we weren’t under attack, we weren’t under any imminent threat of attack from Iran, he brought us into an illegal war.” Ever since then, Democrats have been introducing War Powers resolutions. 

“At first we had one Republican join us, then two, then three, then four. We are going to carry on until we are able to bring this to a close,” Baldwin said. 

Unlike Johnson, she was not reassured by Trump’s assertions that if the deal doesn’t work out, the U.S. can just start bombing again.

“I think it’s quite possible that some of my Republican colleagues who had previously joined us were taking the president’s word that a deal to end the war, an agreement to end the war, was upon us, and around the corner. I think they’ll soon find out that that’s not the case,” she said.

No matter how many conflicting assertions Trump makes about the war, it’s up to Congress to do its job. 

The days of ground beef and chicken legs are long gone at the Ritenour Co-Care Food Pantry just outside of St. Louis. The nonprofit has swapped out those staple proteins for cheaper ground chicken and hot dogs as it faces higher food costs and surging demand.

“We have to adapt just like everybody else,” Executive Director Angela Gabel said about rising grocery prices.

Last year, Ritenour spent about $120,000 on food. The pantry budgeted $180,000 for this year, though Gabel said that may not be sufficient.

And the number of people looking for food has increased: The pantry signed up seven new families on a recent weekday morning and expected to add 15 by the end of the day. Gabel said more people are traveling further to visit multiple food pantries each month to stock their shelves.

Families are facing rising grocery prices at the same time that many of the most vulnerable are losing access to the nation’s largest food assistance program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. More than 4 million Americans lost SNAP benefits between February 2025 and this February, according to analyses of the most recent federal data. The numbers are expected to increase as states whittle the rolls further as required by the broad tax and spending law President Donald Trump signed last summer, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“I’m absolutely terrified,” Gabel said. “We will absolutely do our best, but I think we were meant to supplement SNAP or to help in emergency situations. I just don’t think we can replace the government.”

After One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 100,000 Tennesseans’ lose SNAP food aid

Since the fall, states and counties that administer SNAP have been notifying residents who rely on food stamps that they must meet new work requirements or lose their food assistance. The federal tax and spending law ended exemptions to work requirements for older adults, homeless people, veterans and some rural residents, among others. The changes will put more pressure on states, likely leading to further benefit cuts as they reevaluate eligibility and begin paying for more program costs. The new rules also will further stress the already-stretched charitable food system.

Gina Plata-Nino, SNAP director at the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit working to combat hunger, noted that children, older adults and people with disabilities are most reliant on the program. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated the average benefit per person this year would be $188 per month, or $6.17 per day.

“And a majority of them are making less than $1,100 a month,” she said. “So when you lose your SNAP benefit, it really does exacerbate your situation of having to choose between shelter, food, and other basic needs.”

Rising need for food

National data on hunger is limited since the Trump administration terminated the annual Household Food Security report last year. But other measures indicate that more people are missing regular meals.

In May, the federal Reserve Bank of New York found a “remarkable” increase in food insecurity across the country, with more people struggling than during the peak of the pandemic. Its national surveys last October and this February found more households dipped into savings accounts, relied on food donations or had trouble finding enough food to eat or had kids who missed meals.

Democrats and anti-hunger advocates have been urging Congress to rescind SNAP cuts for months. Current negotiations over reauthorizing the federal farm bill, which includes SNAP, have put the issue front and center in Congress. The House has passed a version of that legislation that won’t reverse the cuts.

Republicans have downplayed the effect of the changes and defended the SNAP cuts, arguing they are aimed at rooting out fraud and abuse.

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican, said he was raised in “abject, rural poverty,” by a single mother who relied on food stamps, subsidized lunches and government cheese.

But in late April, he urged support of the farm bill that cements cuts to the food stamp program.

“We do have to know that there is a tremendous amount of fraud that takes place in SNAP,” he said on the House floor, “and we want to make sure that every single dollar that is allocated to go to a hungry child or a veteran or one of our senior citizens goes to them.”

Last week, 23 state attorneys general wrote to Senate leaders who are now considering the farm bill, saying the Senate has an opportunity to “reverse course and reaffirm a bipartisan commitment that no American should go hungry because they cannot afford food.”

In Nebraska, where SNAP participation has dropped by about 11%, state lawmakers this year proposed legislation to ask the federal government for waivers from some of the new restrictions. Those bills, which did not advance, sought to protect benefits for veterans, former foster youth, homeless people and refugees.

But the problem demands a federal response, said Megan Hamann, the senior community organizer for food and nutrition access at Nebraska Appleseed, an advocacy nonprofit that works against poverty and discrimination.

“We’re going to be working with patchwork solutions in the meantime,” Hamann said. She described “a real reckoning as a result of loss of federal support and programming that has for a long time in our state and others offered stability and consistency that is no longer present.”

She said putting food on the table has become a widespread challenge for many in Nebraska as the price of housing, utilities and other everyday necessities squeezes household budgets.

“I talk to people on the daily who say, ‘I’m worried about the price of groceries, I’m worried about the price of gas, I feel like everything except for my wage is going up,’” she said.

Though generally focused on housing, the Omaha organization Restoring Dignity has launched a new food assistance program to help refugees who lost SNAP benefits late last year.

“A big chunk of what we do now revolves around food,” said founder and executive director Hannah Vlach.

Community donations allow Restoring Dignity to provide grocery store gift cards to those refugees. But the organization, which generally serves about 5,000 refugees per year, is helping only about 200 of the most vulnerable.

“Right now we’re just focused on the families who absolutely will be evicted and will be on the streets if they don’t get any assistance,” she said, “and I have no idea how those other families are surviving.”

Vlach emphasized that the federal government has specifically sanctioned the arrival of refugees her organization serves, many of whom served with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“This can’t become our new normal — this just can’t,” she said. “It’s unethical, it’s immoral.”

States triaging needs

West Virginian Raine Gibbons said she relies more on cheap staples such as pasta and pasta sauce, trimming the amount of meat and treats she buys.

She said her family of five recently saw a reduction in monthly SNAP benefits, which now provide just over $300 per month.

Gibbons supervises an in-home education program for parents at one of the state-run Family Support Centers, which provide parenting classes, baby supplies such as diapers and emergency food aid.

Aside from grappling with higher prices and reduced SNAP eligibility among clients, the West Virginians who rely on those 57 federally funded centers face an uncertain future because of unresolved state contracting issues.

“It’s really, really stressful,” Gibbons said. “It’s so hard to stay present and be the parent that you want to be when you’re worried about those daily struggles of just how to feed your family.”

Gibbons said SNAP is not a luxury, but an essential support for many families.

“It’s really what’s keeping families like mine — who do work outside of the home, who do have a full-time job — afloat to be able to feed our families and our babies, and try to just get through this economy.”

California lawmakers are trying to help fill some of the federal void in their state. Democratic Assemblymember Alex Lee is pushing to add $100 million to a state program that doubles the purchasing power of SNAP when used for fresh fruits and vegetables. Separate pending legislation would petition the federal government for a waiver, allowing California to maintain an exemption from work requirements for former foster youth.

In California, nearly one-third of all families with young children struggled to put food on the table between July 2024 and January 2026, according to survey results from the Stanford University Center on Early Childhood.

“States are in a position of trying to triage what is the most important need for families, when really families have all of these needs that are considered pretty basic,” said Abigail Stewart-Kahn, managing director of the center. “It puts states in an untenable position to try to make decisions of which gaps to fill and for whom.”

Stewart-Kahn said many families face immediate decisions of which bills to pay and which needs to forgo, but that the parental stress and childhood distress will have long-term consequences for society.

“Every time we make a policy change that potentially increases stress in the lives of a child, we are deciding as a society that we’re okay with harming their healthy development, so that the next generation will struggle further with everything from educational attainment to mental health challenges,” she said.

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

Gov. Tony Evers, lawmakers and advocates celebrated Juneteenth on Wednesday, praising the progress the U.S. has made toward racial equality while also committing to continue to work to expand opportunity. 

Juneteenth marks the official end of slavery in the United States. While the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, enslaved people on plantations in Texas were not notified until June 19, 1865 when Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay to tell more than 250,000 enslaved Black people there that they were free. 

“As we celebrate the critical progress that we’ve made, we also commit to continuing our work to build a more just, more equitable and a freer state and country for all,” said Evers, who is serving his final year in office. “Especially when there are those that would rather rewrite history than learn from it and as leaders in D.C. try to sow division and hate, we must remember that there is more that unites us than divides us and our diversity is our strength.”

Juneteenth was made a federal holiday in 2021 under a law signed by former President Joe Biden, although President Donald Trump’s administration removed the holiday, along with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, from the list of fee-free days at national parks. In 2025, Trump said on Juneteenth that there were “too many nonworking holidays in America” that were costing the country “billions of dollars.”

At the flag raising, community leaders delivered remarks about the significance of Juneteenth and honored Michael Johnson, CEO of the Dane County Boys & Girls Club, who died earlier this month. Participants conducted a libation prayer and performed songs to celebrate freedom.

“For over 160 years, this day has been recognized across the nation to celebrate the true end to slavery in the U.S.,” Evers said, crediting former Sen. Spencer Coggs and Rep. Marcia Coggs, who proposed the first bill to recognize the holiday, as well as Stubbs, Annie Weatherby-Flowers and other advocates for getting the state to recognize the day. “Unfortunately, it took us another two decades for us to get it right and become the 32nd state to formally recognize Juneteenth. We’re not turning our backs now.”

Wisconsin has recognized Juneteenth since 2009, but Evers first raised the Juneteenth flag over the state Capitol in 2020. Wednesday’s was his seventh and final flag-raising. He called the holiday a “reminder that the human spirit cannot be silenced and freedom will always triumph.” 

The Juneteenth flag includes a star in the center to represent Texas, the Lone Star State, as well as a nova to signify a new beginning and freedom for Black Americans. The red, white and blue colors represent that enslaved people and their descendants are Americans and shall be forever free.

Camden Hargrove, an alderman from the city of Menomonie and the first Black, openly trans man elected to public office in Wisconsin, said the flag is a “symbol that reminds us all of our responsibility — our responsibility to make sure all children have equal opportunities, our responsibility to build each other up so we can all thrive, our responsibility to protect and expand democracy.” 

The flag will temporarily replace the Progress Pride flag, which Evers raised over the Capitol on June 1, because there isn’t enough room on the East Wing flag pole for more than three flags. The U.S. flag and Wisconsin state flag will continue flying alongside the Juneteenth flag. The POW-MIA flag will also continue flying on the North Wing flagpole. 

The Juneteenth flag will stay up until June 21. 

Other elected officials at the celebration included state Treasurer John Leiber, a Republican, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, state Rep. Shelia Stubbs (D-Madison), state Sen. Dora Drake (D-Milwaukee), who chairs the legislative Black caucus and state Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee).

Drake said the day is more than just a holiday.

“It is a reminder of the ongoing struggle for liberation even beyond bondage,” Drake said. “Juneteenth was only the first barrier. We had to overcome retaliation against Reconstruction by the institution of Jim Crow, followed by mass incarceration and institutions meant to prohibit the advancements of African-Americans and now the attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion.” 

Evers called the late Boys & Girls Club CEO Johnson a “force for good,” saying that he was always looking for new ways to lead and to support families and communities. 

Johnson’s daughter, Micayla, said in remarks that her dad dedicated his life to advancing the ideals that Juneteenth are about: freedom, resilience and the ongoing pursuit of opportunity for everyone.

“We understand that freedom is not merely the absence of barriers, but the presence of opportunity, education, mentorship, and hope,” she said. “He worked tirelessly to open doors for young people and families, particularly those who had too often been denied access to resources and pathways for success. He believed that every child, regardless of background or circumstance, deserves the chance to dream, achieve, and thrive in doing so. For him, this work was never simply a profession, it was a calling.”

She added that her father’s impact is “a testament to the belief that when we invest in people, strengthen communities and expand opportunities, we move closer to the future that Juneteenth calls us to build.”

A survey of more than 3,800 people nationwide who gave birth in 2023 and 2024 found those using Medicaid described worse outcomes than those on private insurance, that access to care remains limited for some, and that women often feel unheard and disregarded during pregnancy and labor and delivery.

The Listening to Mothers survey, conducted by the nonpartisan nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families, was released earlier this month. The partnership says the survey is the largest of its kind, and it’s the fourth time the organization has published this type of survey since 2002. The organization says its survey represents approximately 90% of the childbearing population, defined as those at least age 18 who gave birth in a U.S. hospital to a single baby whom they lived with.

The survey highlighted what it called “hard-won gains” in policy changes, such as the expansion of Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months postpartum in all but one state, as well as expanded state paid leave programs and new investments in maternal health and perinatal quality. But it said those gains are threatened by hospital maternity units closing in many states, as well as deep cuts to Medicaid programs at the state and federal levels.

Report: Arkansas child well-being improves in some areas but lags behind overall

“While preventing catastrophic outcomes rightly commands attention, surviving childbirth is the floor and not the ceiling,” the survey said. “Extensive evidence shows that precious few childbearing families are getting the care and support they need to truly thrive.”

Most respondents — 61% — said they received prenatal care by eight weeks’ gestation, which is earlier than the generally accepted recommendation to see a provider before 10 weeks. About 19% said they saw a provider between nine and 11 weeks, while 21% didn’t see one until after 12 weeks, which is past the end of the first trimester. About 1% said they received no prenatal care at all.

Among those respondents, 25% indicated they were unable to receive prenatal care as early as they wanted to, and about one-third of those were covered by Medicaid. The most common reasons for receiving care later were that no earlier appointments were available and that the provider wanted to see the patient at a later gestation. Others said they had to find a clinic accepting new patients or accepting Medicaid, or they had to wait to be enrolled in Medicaid.

Medicaid patients also had higher rates of complications such as high blood pressure and gestational diabetes during pregnancy, and higher rates of mental health issues such as depression and substance abuse disorders. 

About 43% of respondents said they received less than optimal care during pregnancy because their knowledge and experiences were not valued, while 42% said their providers did not respond in a timely manner to requests for help, and 40% said they generally felt unheard by providers.

About 6% of respondents said some kind of discrimination played a role in those feelings, with the most common area being discrimination based on race, including a lack of respect for the pregnant patient’s culture. American Indian and Alaska Native groups were most likely to report a lack of respect for their culture.

Stateline reporter Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@stateline.org.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against a transgender healthcare nonprofit Wednesday, accusing it of misleading and coercing parents over gender-affirming treatment for their children. 

The FTC’s complaint against the World Professional Association of Transgender Health is the latest in a series of legal actions from the Trump administration against organizations that provide gender-affirming treatment or work on transgender healthcare issues. 

“WPATH deceived parents and children about the medical and scientific basis for such services, as well as their medical necessity, safety and efficacy,” a senior FTC official, who wished not to be identified, said in a call with reporters Wednesday.

The FTC was joined by Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska and Texas in the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Texas. Another senior FTC official on the call Wednesday said that the suit is seeking to prevent the nonprofit from making “future false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims to parents and children.” 

The suit alleges that the association’s standards of care, which are widely adopted by healthcare providers, were crafted with the specific goal of guaranteeing that insurance companies would cover the treatment as medically necessary, in turn generating profit for the association’s members. 

But the association described the complaint as “baseless,” and said in a statement Wednesday that it’s just another example of the Trump administration’s attempts to “interfere with Americans’ rights to seek and obtain the healthcare that should be decided between a patient and their physician.”

The guidelines are informed by established scientific standards, expert consensus, and patient-centered values, the association said, adding that it supports individualized patient care, rather than a “one size fits all” approach.  

The association also said the FTC is not a medical provider, and as such, has no right to interfere with individualized medical decision-making and doesn’t have jurisdiction over WPATH or its speech. It said the states’ claims have similar factual and legal flaws.

WPATH likes its chances

The lawsuit comes after the association filed its own suit against the FTC in February, seeking to block an investigation which it described as being part of an “all-of-government campaign to undermine access to gender-affirming care and attack the First Amendment rights of medical organizations.”

A federal judge in the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the association in May, temporarily pausing the FTC’s probe into the organization.

The association said Wednesday it’s predicting a similar outcome this go-around as well. 

“A federal district court has already found WPATH is in a strong position to prove that the FTC is acting out of pure retaliation as part of the federal government’s relentless and targeted campaign to undermine gender-affirming care by attacking the First Amendment rights and the independence of professional medical organizations,” the organization said in its statement. “We expect the same result when we oppose this latest attack on WPATH and its mission to promote evidence-informed care and guidance for doctors and their patients.” 

WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday read to reporters a 14-point memorandum of understanding with Iran to stop the ongoing war and allow for further negotiations, but did not release the exact text.

The 60-day MOU outlines the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions relief and reconstruction funds for Iran, and the promise of negotiations on Iran ending its nuclear program. Senior administration officials say economic and sanctions relief will only occur if Iran is on “good behavior.”

“If we think that they’re just dragging us along and kind of bull- – – -ting us, then we’ll be very quick to pull the plug on it and go back to tightening the screws on them very, very aggressively,” a senior administration official who did not want to be identified said on a Wednesday afternoon call with reporters.

President Donald Trump told reporters in France he “might” stay in Europe for the ceremonial signing of the memo, but doubted it.

“This is a memorandum of understanding. It’s very important, but it might not be the kind of a document that I should be signing,” Trump told reporters at his final press conference of the G7 summit, a meeting of the world’s wealthiest capitalist economies.

Earlier Wednesday he told reporters at the G7, “If I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head.”

Trump announced Monday he had reached a ceasefire agreement with Iranian officials to temporarily end the war, which has lasted longer than 100 days, but the administration had not released any part of the agreement until Wednesday. Members of the U.S. Senate complained they had not seen the details and some said they wanted to vote on a final agreement.

Iran’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif confirmed in a social media post Monday that a deal had been reached.

Iranians requested the United States not release the text until language was finalized, according to a second senior administration official who added “it was obviously unfortunate we weren’t able to put it out right away.” 

“We were trying to accommodate their domestic messaging and their domestic politics. We’re trying to build trust with them, and that’s what they asked us to do, so we agreed to do it.”

Iran’s Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi warned on social media June 12 against speculation on the deal which “has never been closer” and said details would be shared with the public “in due course.”

Nuclear weapons

The 14-paragraph “Islamabad memorandum of understanding between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which the second senior administration official read on the call, declares an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.”

The White House declined to provide a written copy of the MOU to reporters.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not agreed publicly to withdraw forces from Lebanon, which emerged as a second front of the war that the U.S. launched in tandem with Israel in February.

The U.S. and Iran have 60 days, “extendable with consent” to reach a final deal.

According to the agreement, Iran “reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.”

The document charges the U.S. and Iran to agree on how to deal with Iran’s buried stockpile of enriched uranium, with the minimum arrangement being the “down blending” of the material on site under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.  

“The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal,” according to the MOU.

In 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of a previous nuclear agreement brokered by former President Barack Obama’s administration.

Obama appeared skeptical Saturday of Trump’s nuclear negotiations with Iran.

“It is doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place and had worked for, for a long stretch of time before we, the United States, pulled out of it,” he told ABC News’ Robin Roberts.

Reopening Strait of Hormuz

The agreement also commits the U.S. to “immediately” begin the removal of its naval blockade on Iranian ports, with a full and final stoppage to occur within 30 days.

The U.S. will also have to remove military forces from the vicinity of Iran, meaning the American forces “will return our force posture in the region to that which existed before the conflict started,” according to the administration official.

Roughly 40,000 troops were in the region prior to the war. That number increased to approximately 50,000 after Feb. 28.

For its part, Iran must “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa,” according to the agreement. 

However, the MOU continues: “The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start in considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles, and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days.”

From there, Iranian officials agreed to negotiate a plan with the sultan of Oman and Persian Gulf states on “future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz.”

The war’s de facto closing of the strait has rocked economies across the globe, as 20% of the world’s petroleum exports passed uninterrupted through the narrow waterway prior to the conflict. Oil prices reached $120 per barrel during the height of the conflict but have fallen to roughly $79 this week.

Article 38 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of Sea declares passage through straits a right that should not be impeded, though neither the U.S. nor Iran are party to the international agreement.

$300B in reconstruction funds

In perhaps one of the most “controversial” parts of the MOU, according to the senior official, Iran could see up to $300 billion in reconstruction funds.

The White House official was quick to downplay the prospect of Iran reaping billions of U.S. dollars.

“Note that it doesn’t require us to do anything to, one, to ever pay a cent of money to the Iranians, (and) to ever contribute money to this reconstruction fund,” the official said.

“What it says is that if we get to a final deal, and if the Iranians behave, we will permit the sanctions relief that would allow, for example, the Emiratis to build a power plant in Iran. That’s all it says. If they do what they have to do, we will permit the investment and the reconstruction of their country,” the official said.

Additionally, upon the signing of the MOU, the U.S. Department of Treasury will immediately issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil and other petroleum products, as well as associated activities, including bank transactions and insurance, according to the document.

WASHINGTON — U.S. House and Senate Democrats, mostly from Western states, are demanding transparency from the Interior Department after media reports revealed the Trump administration redirected roughly $90 million in national parks fees to help fund renovations and upcoming celebratory displays in Washington, D.C. 

The administration’s use of fee revenues to pay for fountain repairs, statue upgrades and fireworks shows in preparation for America’s 250th birthday on July 4 diverts money from national parks in desperate need of billions of dollars in maintenance, lawmakers wrote in two separate early-June letters to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.

“The public deserves to know how their park fees are being spent, and Congress cannot conduct appropriate oversight without basic information about these transactions,” Rep. Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico and seven other Democratic representatives wrote in their letter, dated June 12.  

A group of 11 Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Adam Schiff of California, sent a similar letter to Burgum on June 10. 

According to a DOI spokesperson, the National Park Service “has not only been focused on beautifying the district but has also been working on many deferred maintenance projects throughout the country,” pooling money from “endowment funds” and the sale of park passes. 

How the funding stream works

The National Park Service, housed within Interior, gets a portion of its funding from entry fees and visitors’ purchase of recreational passes. Under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, at least 80% of the fee money must go back to the national park where it is collected. 

The remaining 20% is available for overall Park Service use, a policy meant to help support parks that do not charge entry fees or only make a small amount of revenue, according to NPS. Just over 100 parks charge an entrance fee out of the more than 400 that make up the National Park System.  

The National Mall in Washington and various memorial sites are part of the crop that do not charge visitors to enter, meaning it is legal for the DOI to spend leftover revenue on projects in its own backyard. 

But the amount the department has allocated to renovations so far this year appears to greatly exceed how much it has put toward maintaining the district’s public spaces in the past, according to Tony Irish, a former Interior senior attorney under Trump and attorney under earlier presidents who is now senior counsel with the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Reflecting pool repair

Multiple news outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, reported NPS is using at least $60 million in fees paid by parkgoers to fund the repair of nine ornamental fountains across Washington, D.C.

Documents showed an additional $7 million was redirected to help pay for the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, while more will be put toward funding a $1.6 million Fourth of July fireworks display. 

“While other administrations have let the city fall into decay, President Trump has made Washington, D.C. Safe and Beautiful again and we should all be grateful,” the Interior spokesperson said in an emailed statement on June 16.

In their letters to Burgum, lawmakers also demanded clarity on the reported use of revenue from the sale of digital park passes—called “America the Beautiful Passes”—as there is no current law that requires those funds be spent in a specific place. 

“Credible sources with direct knowledge of these matters have now reported to Congress that much, if not all, fee revenue from online America the Beautiful Passes is being used to fund the President’s ‘beautification’ projects in Washington,” they wrote. 

Along with Vasquez, the House letter was signed by Reps. Sarah Elfreth of Maryland, Darren Soto of Florida, Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, Dina Titus and Susie Lee of Nevada, Joe Neguse of Colorado and Jill Tokuda of Hawaii.

Joining Schiff in signing the Senate letter were Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Luján of New Mexico, Angus King of Maine, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Ron Wyden and Jeffrey Merkley of Oregon, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado. 

Delayed park maintenance

Many critics are pushing back against the Trump administration for not channeling fee funds back into the national parks that need them, including popular travel destinations such as Grand Teton and Yellowstone.

“Last month, I was in Joshua Tree exploring one of our beautiful national parks and was again reminded what a treasured legacy these lands represent,” said Schiff in a June 17 statement to States Newsroom. 

“This is just the latest scheme by the President to put himself before the American people, and it will have devastating impacts on parks that millions of people visit every year,” he added. 

The National Park System is backlogged with about $24 billion worth of repairs to buildings and infrastructure, according to NPS.  

Vasquez said New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which runs through his district, “has over $45 million in deferred maintenance” alone. 

“The Administration is choosing to let roads, trails, and wastewater systems in the park fall into disrepair amidst the peak summer visitor season so it can paint statues gold in Washington,” he said in a June 15 statement to States Newsroom. “This is unacceptable, and I am demanding action from the Department of Interior to correct course.”

Irish also said the DOI’s current use of fee revenues for D.C.-area renovations could lead to more money being spent in the long run because of the rush to complete some projects, like the $14 million reflecting pool. Completed just at the beginning of June, the reflecting pool has already amassed clumps of green algae. 

“Not only are we displacing higher-priority needs right now, but we’re still going to have unmet needs in the future at an additional cost to the taxpayer, the fee payers within that,” Irish said.   

Vasquez and his colleagues in their letter asked that NPS restore funding to national parks to help preserve them for future generations. 

U.S. senators went even further, including a list of detailed questions about park funding in their letter for the DOI to respond to by June 23. 

Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hessenbein (D-Middleton) said legislative Democrats, who are seeking to win majorities for the first time in more than 15 years, are talking about their priorities for the next session including school funding and affordable housing. 

Hesselbein said at an event hosted by WisPolitics on Tuesday that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), who is retiring, has had a “stranglehold” for a long time and that she hopes new leadership will lead to “new ideas and a real true willingness to work together to get things done for the state of Wisconsin.” Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) is not running for another term in office either.

As they seek a majority, Senate Dems starting policy discussions 

Hesselbein said Senate Democrats are targeting four seats to flip this year — two more than they need to win a majority. Republicans currently hold 17 of the 33 Senate seats, and half are up for election this year in newly drawn districts. 

The seats include Senate District 5, an open district currently represented by retiring Sen. Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield), Senate District 17, currently represented by incumbent Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green), Senate District 21, an open district currently represented by Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine), and Senate District 25, an open district currently represented by Sen. Romaine Quinn, who plans to run in a different district this year.

Hesselbein noted that in 2024 people said Senate Democrats were “too ambitious” in targeting five seats even with the new maps, yet they won all five in a year when President Donald Trump carried Wisconsin while Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin won a third term.

Hesselbein addressed the public falling-out between legislative Democrats and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers over a tax cut and school funding deal the governor reached with Republicans and most  lawmakers refused to support.

Hesselbein said during the event that it was the “overall package” that made Senate Democrats vote against it and there were no political calculations involved. She said it was “unsustainable.” 

Democrats will have more say in how the state’s $2.5 billion budget surplus is spent because of the deal’s failure.

Hesselbein confirmed that she was not involved in the negotiation process and it was hard to think about “hypotheticals” that would have made her caucus support the deal. This is not the first time Democratic votes have been needed in the Republican-majority Senate to pass a proposal because a handful of Republicans have opposed legislation.

After the deal failed, Evers said he was sure Hesselbein had “people wrapped around her finger by giving them jobs that they want” next legislative session. The majority leader gets to decide who gets which committee assignments in the Senate. 

Sounding the same note as Evers in his unity address at the convention, Hesselbein said that Democrats are moving forward and that there are no hard feelings remaining after her caucus’ rejection of a Evers’ bill. She said her caucus is united in wanting to ensure the financial health of the state.

“Evers has done a good job for the state of Wisconsin,” she said. 

“It’s been good,” Hesselbein said of the relationship between lawmakers and Evers. 

On whether there could be another attempt to get a tax cut and spending deal passed, Hesselbein said “never say never” and that her “door is always open.” She added that no one has tried to contact her recently about the issue.

Democrats’ top priorities 

Hesselbein said some of the big priorities for a Democratic Senate include “funding K-12 education, doing something meaningful for childcare, making sure that no matter where you live in the state of Wisconsin that you can afford a home.” Other issues, she said, are healthcare and the environment. 

Hesselbein said it would be a goal in the next state budget to fund schools so they can make financial  plans while taking some of the burden off property taxpayers.

“People really care about their community schools,” Hesselbein said. “They are sick and tired of these school boards…having to go to referendum over and over because they want to keep the lights on. We have schools closing all over Wisconsin and that’s a big problem.”

Hesselbein called the funding formula “convoluted” and said that some Senate and Assembly Democrats recently started meeting to look at the state’s funding formula, including looking at how other states structure their funding. She said they want to bring in people from the Department of Public Instruction and Bob Lang of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau to help.

“Is there something else that other states do that makes more sense than what we’re doing and what does that look like?” Hesselbein said she wants to ask. 

On specific questions about school funding, Hesselbein was noncommittal. 

“It might be something that we can’t get right now…  but we’re starting to look at that. We’re starting to think of those things right now to figure out what we can do to make it more sustainable and equitable.”

Hesselbein said declining enrollment is a challenge for schools, but a bigger  problem is that the state isn’t adequately funding schools. She said the state “possibly” relies on property taxes too much to fund schools, adding “but how else do you come up with it?” 

“That’s the kind of conversations we’re having right now to figure it out,” she said.

Hesselbein also did not commit to offering free school meals as the state of Minnesota has done. 

“It’s pretty darn expensive. We’re not sure if we’re going to be able to get all the way there,” she said, adding that the caucus is trying to figure out “what do we want to get done and how do we get there.”

Tackling the cost of living, land conservation

Hesselbein said Democrats are beginning conversations with developers and realtors about how to ensure that people can work and afford a home in Wisconsin. 

“We’re just now starting those conversations now to figure out what we can do,” she said. 

The Knowles-Nelson Conservation program is on track to sunset in June. Hesselbein said she is disappointed that Republicans and Democrats could not agree on a bill to reauthorize the program. She said there was only a “30-second” conversation about the popular land conservation program during the negotiations on the rejected tax rebate and school funding package.

“We absolutely need it. Knowles-Nelson has been around for so long and it’s worked so well making sure we have green spaces in the state of Wisconsin to enjoy,” Hesselbein said. “If Democrats are in charge and we have a Democratic trifecta, Knowles-Nelson will be back.” 

Undecided on gov primary 

Wisconsin will also have a new governor next year, who will help shape the state alongside new legislative leaders. 

The seven Democrats who will appear on the August primary ballots include Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, state Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, state Sen. Kelda Roys, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes, former head of Gov. Tony Evers’ Department of Administration Joel Brennan and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.

Hesselbein said it is “exciting” there are so many choices. 

She added that she, like other Democrats, hasn’t made up her mind about who she will vote for in August. She said she also does not know whether she’ll endorse anyone in the primary for governor, noting that she has served with several of the candidates in the Legislature including Roys, Hong, Rodriguez, Crowley and Barnes. She also said she wants to hear them debate. A candidate debate  is scheduled for July 28, hosted by WISN-12.

“They’re all really good people,” Hesselbein said.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany is running on the Republican side with the endorsement of President Donald Trump and the state party. 

Hesselbein said having a competitive primary is a good thing, noting that Evers won a crowded primary in 2018 and went on to win two terms in office. 

“I think it really lets the people of Wisconsin decide who they want to be supporting in the November election,” Hesselbein said. “I think it’s too bad that the Republicans put their thumb on the scale and Trump did in endorsing Tiffany early, I think it would’ve been better for them to have a robust primary as well.”

A federal judge has denied a request by former Milwaukee judge Hannah Dugan to either overturn her December conviction for obstructing an immigration proceeding. In a 32-page decision filed Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman disagreed with Dugan’s attorneys that a recent appeals court decision that immigration enforcement actions are not “proceedings” means  her conviction should be overturned. 

In early 2025, Dugan was in court when she learned of that plain-clothes immigration agents were in the hall outside her courtroom, waiting to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who was appearing for a routine hearing, for being in the country illegally. How to handle immigration enforcement had been a top concern among local judges, following a string of arrests by federal agents in and around the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Neither the county sheriff nor the Milwaukee Police Department participate in immigration enforcement and detention. 

Dugan confronted the agents in her judge’s robes, and directed them to check in with the chief judge. When most of the arrest team went to the office, Dugan went back into her courtroom and called Flores-Ruiz, set a new court date, and then led  him and his attorney out of the courtroom through a non-public hallway. Flores-Ruiz rode down in an elevator with one of the federal agents and was arrested outside after a brief foot pursuit. Dugan was later charged with obstructing agents and concealing Flores-Ruiz from them.

The appeals court decision centered around United States v. Hernandez, involving a man who’d been charged with obstruction after escaping immigration custody. In that case, the defendant argued that executing his removal order was not part of the proceeding, which ended once the final removal order was issued. When Dugan went to trial, the Hernandez case was still on appeal. Adelman instructed Dugan’s jury that “‘pending proceeding’ simply means any process taking place in the manner and form prescribed for conducting business by or before a department or government agency, including all steps and stages in such an action from its inception to its conclusion.” Federal agents testified that there are a number of steps in an immigration proceeding, beginning before an arrest and continuing through removal.

When Adelman approved the jury instructions, which were recommended by prosecutors, he relied on United States v. Hernandez. Adelman said that the instructions proposed by the defense team defined “proceeding” too narrowly. “In the present case, the government alleged that defendant obstructed an arrest (step eight),” Adelman wrote in his decision denying Dugan acquittal or a re-trial. Adelman also wrote that motions for reconsideration serve the limited function of correcting errors of law or fact, or to present newly discovered evidence. “Motions for reconsideration are not to be granted lightly,” Adelman wrote. 

Dugan’s attorneys argued that Adelman originally relied on the Hernandez case in deciding that “proceeding” was broad enough to include obstructing immigration agents from executing an administrative warrant. Now that an appeals court reversed the decision in Hernandez and ruled that  immigration enforcement is not a “pending proceeding” as presented to Dugan’s jury, they said Adelman should reconsider his own decision and grant an acquittal. 

Prosecutors countered that the Hernandez ruling “is neither binding nor persuasive, and thus fails to satisfy the ‘heavy burden required for consideration,’” according to Adelman’s summary of the arguments. 

“The problem for the defense is that this case did not involve some random encounter on the street,” Adelman wrote. “It was a targeted operation, conducted pursuant to agency procedures, including the issuance of an arrest warrant for a specific person.” Adelman also wrote that classifying immigration enforcement as “mere police activity” is inappropriate, as “the FBI, ICE can issue its own warrants and adjudicate and effectuate a removal…without the involvement of a court.”

For those reasons, Adelman ruled that the burden for reconsideration in Dugan’s case had not been met. A new court date for Dugan’s sentencing or other proceedings was not yet available Tuesday in online court records.

A final agreement has been reached to release the remaining beagles housed at the Ridglan Farms dog breeding and research facility in Dane County, finding them medical treatment and new homes. Animal welfare groups praised the settlement. 

Dr. Alka Chandna, vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), called the news “a milestone” which reflects years of “relentless pressure” from people “who refuse to accept a system that breeds dogs and other animals only to confine, mutilate, poison, and kill them in laboratories.”

Ridglan Farms operated for decades, accumulating a long list of complaints from concerned citizens. The facility both breeds beagles which are sold to labs for animal testing and maintains its own research branch. Animal rights groups have spent years bringing attention to what they described as deplorable living conditions for the dogs as well as painful medical procedures without anesthesia. 

Last year, prosecutors found that Ridglan Farms had violated state animal cruelty laws and ordered the facility to shut down its breeding operation. Animal rights groups, fearing that Ridglan would euthanize the dogs if it couldn’t sell them off, stormed the facility earlier this year, breaking into the farm and carrying off  some of the more than 2,000 beagles housed there. A larger group numbering hundreds of people arrived for a second rescue attempt, but was  confronted by local law enforcement using tear gas and rubber bullets. In the aftermath of the raid, the participants were described as violent burglars by Ridglan Farms and Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett. 

Four activists, including lead organizer Wayne Hsiung, were charged with felony burglary, and Ridglan Farms was cited for filling a trench around the facility with manure to deter the crowd, creating  an environmental hazard. As the activists prepared for court proceedings, animal welfare groups worked out a deal to purchase 1,500 of the dogs to find them new homes and medical treatment. 

The remaining dogs were included in the latest agreement to shut down the farm. In a statement, Ridglan Farms said the dogs were sold to Big Dog Ranch, with the remaining dogs to be re-housed by the end of August. The farm called the dogs “happy, healthy animals,” despite reports of sores and other medical and behavioral issues among the rescued beagles. Ridglan highlights that it passed federal regulatory inspections. “Now that transfer plans have been finalized for the rest of Ridglan Farms’ dogs, we ask that the years-long harassment campaign targeting the research facility’s owners, staff, and neighbors comes to an end,” the facility said in a statement. “We also hope Wisconsin’s legal system will hold accountable the individuals who organized and carried out the repeated violent assaults and thefts that have recently taken place at our facility.”

Former Dane County Judge James Troupis and a pair of other former Trump aides pleaded not guilty Tuesday to felony forgery charges for their role in planning the fake elector plot that played an instrumental role in what became the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

Troupis, attorney Kenneth Cheseboro and Trump campaign aide Mike Roman entered the pleas in Dane County Circuit Court Tuesday. The trio is accused of falsifying Electoral College documents to say President Donald Trump won the 2020 election in the state. 

The three men face 11 felony forgery charges which are each punishable by up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine. They argue they committed no crime and were just keeping the president’s appeal options open. 

Prosecutors argue that the three men misled Wisconsin’s 10 Republican electors, telling them the Electoral College votes for Trump were only being cast in case the various court challenges against the election results were successful. Those challenges ultimately failed, but the Electoral College votes were presented to Congress as a pretense to reject the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. 

Troupis has spent months trying to avoid his prosecution. He penned a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice late last month asking for more than $3 million from Trump’s since-scrapped “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate him for the “nightmare” of facing the charges against him. Last week, he filed a motion seeking to have his case moved to Jefferson County Court, arguing he can’t receive a fair trial from the liberal jurors in  Dane County. He’s also filed to have the case against him dismissed because he was pardoned by Trump for any potential federal charges related to the fake electors scheme.

WASHINGTON — U.S. senators from both political parties said Tuesday they had yet to see the text of the deal Trump administration officials struck over the weekend to end the war in Iran, though several indicated any final agreement will require their approval. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said administration officials have signaled they expect to share the text of the memorandum of understanding with lawmakers, though he didn’t know when. 

“Hopefully that’ll happen sooner rather than later,” he said. “But, you know, obviously it sounds like they’re not going public with it until later in the week. So we’ll see.”

Thune said he’s heard the deal sets up a 60-day framework for negotiators to reach agreement on more specifics, including about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. 

“I think at the end of the day the goal here is to make sure that Iran ends its nuclear program and whatever financial incentives they have should be conditioned upon that,” he said. “But we’ll see when we know more.”

President Donald Trump, speaking from the G7 convention in Europe, said he may hold a press conference in “a couple days” to release the text of the memorandum of understanding and appeared ready for a vote in Congress.

“What I would like to do is send it to Congress, saying you shouldn’t approve it. And I will get it approved. Whatever I say, they want to do the opposite,” he said. “It is not working too well for them, by the way.”

North Dakota Republican Sen. John Hoeven said he believes the plan is to vote to approve the Iran agreement at some point. 

“I think anytime you have Congress ratify something, it gives it longevity,” Hoeven said. “You can’t have the next president come in and change it with an executive order. So I think that’s a benefit. I think it helps strengthen it.”

Hoeven said he hasn’t heard from administration officials why they haven’t shared the text of the memorandum of understanding with senators, even in a classified setting. But he said he’s more focused on U.S. enforcement of agreements on Iran’s nuclear program in the long term. 

“The real issue is that we have something that we can enforce and that’s hard with Iran because they don’t honor any agreement,” Hoeven said.  

Is the agreement a treaty?

Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy said he believes an agreement with Iran would represent a treaty and be subject to Senate approval. 

“It sounds like a treaty,” he said. “And if it’s a treaty, it certainly seems like it.”

That would require strong bipartisanship, since the Constitution sets a two-thirds threshold for the Senate to approve a treaty. 

Cassidy added it appears the administration will need the Israeli government — which initiated the attack on Iran with the United States — to stop its war in Lebanon in order to reach a final deal with Iran during the next two months.

“To make a deal, it takes two sides. In this case, maybe three, maybe four because you have Hezbollah and Israel,” Cassidy said, referring to a powerful Lebanese political party and militant group opposed to Israel. “Hezbollah can just stir it up with impunity if they want to under certain circumstances. So you tell me, I mean, it takes two to dance, and so now it takes four to dance. Can you pull it off in 60 days? I don’t know.” 

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said the administration needs to be as transparent as possible about what exactly is in the memorandum of understanding it’s reached with Iran. 

“Minimally, there has to be maximum transparency,” he said. 

Tillis said it “makes sense” for the Senate to approve any final deal, saying President Barack Obama made a mistake when he didn’t have lawmakers ratify the agreement his administration struck with Iran in 2015. That deal was named the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. 

“I’ve said repeatedly Obama made a mistake when he didn’t do the work to have it rise to the level of a treaty, and I believe that we should here,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s only good for two and a half years.”

Tillis said he wasn’t concerned Congress hasn’t received the text of the memorandum of understanding yet, but that it’s imperative the administration share those documents.

“Trust but verify,” he said.  

‘Essentially a surrender’

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said he “doubts” the memorandum of understanding is actually real, but that if it is, lawmakers should expect there are “side deals” the administration may not share. 

“If what’s reported is real, it’s Iran’s terms. I mean, it’s essentially a surrender. But I think that’s the only play we can make at this point,” he said. “We have to end this war and stop wasting money and stop killing Americans and civilians and stop driving up prices. So it’s a bad deal but he’s not going to get a better deal. So we just have to accept the humiliation. But I don’t even know if it’s real.”

West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said that lawmakers need to see the memorandum of understanding so she and others can “express our opinions.”

“But right now we can’t because it’s not fully out there,” she said. 

Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner, D-Va., said he hadn’t seen the text of the memorandum of understanding or been briefed by administration officials. But he does believe the administration needs to submit it to lawmakers within five days, as outlined in a 2015 law. 

“My fear is that the details are not going to be as good as the president represents,” Warner said. 

Law requirements

Congress approved legislation in 2015 that requires any presidential administration to submit the text of a deal addressing Iran’s nuclear program within five days. Those documents don’t need to be sent to every lawmaker but are supposed to go to the congressional leaders as well as eight committees with jurisdiction. 

That transmission creates a 30-day review period for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee to hold hearings and briefings. 

The law created a pathway for Congress to approve a joint resolution of disapproval for any Iran nuclear deal. The House and Senate would likely need the support of at least two-thirds of members in order to override a likely veto from Trump. 

Congress overriding a presidential veto of a disapproval resolution would block the Trump administration from lifting sanctions on Iran, though that seems an unlikely scenario given both chambers are controlled by Republicans. 

A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says a joint resolution of disapproval taking effect “would not invalidate the agreement itself but would affect only the possibility of presidential sanctions relief to Iran; nevertheless, precluding the President from providing such relief would almost certainly result in a dissolution of the agreement by Iran.”

The law, officially titled the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, also clears the way for Congress to approve a joint resolution of approval. 

The CRS report says that “would, upon enactment, allow the President to waive sanctions, apparently even if the review period had not yet elapsed.”

Congress taking no action during the 30-day review period would allow the administration to begin sanctions relief as soon as that deadline passes. 

When SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, began trading on the stock market last week, he became the world’s first trillionaire.

The SpaceX IPO made the world’s richest man even richer, grabbing headlines worldwide. But it is merely the most vivid illustration of a U.S. trend that has been accelerating since 2022.

The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Federal Reserve Board has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. In 1990, the share was 22.5%.

The latest percentage, 31.9%, is likely the largest since the end of World War II, possibly heralding a return to the extreme wealth inequality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is likely to balloon further as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other pro-business policies.

Today’s top 1% consists of about 1.4 million households with at least $12 million in net worth, holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% consists of 67.7 million households with less than $264,000 in net worth.

Using different methods than the Fed, French economist Thomas Piketty has asserted that the richest 1% of Americans held nearly half the nation’s wealth in 1928 and 1929, just before the Great Depression. Their share declined after that, during a period of high marginal income tax rates (the percentage of tax you pay on your last dollar of income) and widespread discomfort with astronomical pay for executives. Instead, corporations plowed their profits into expansion and higher wages for workers.

But the share of wealth held by the top 1% began rising again in the 1970s, according to the Piketty data.

Piketty, who theorizes that unfettered capitalism always leads to high concentration of wealth, told Stateline in an email that “there’s nothing natural about this — it’s all due to policies.”

“If the super-rich capture the state and pay little tax, then it’s easy to accumulate a lot, but history suggests that politics can revert quite quickly,” Piketty wrote.

Another prominent economist who recently studied the wealth of California billionaires, Emmanuel Saez, described the current spike in the share of wealth held by the top 1% as driven primarily by the stock market boom. Saez is director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California, Berkeley.

New taxes proposed

In at least a dozen states, including Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Virginia, lawmakers have proposed new taxes for the wealthiest taxpayers. Some of the proposals would tax annual incomes above a certain threshold while others would tax capital assets, including high-value stocks and real estate.

In California, advocates in April announced they had gathered enough signatures for a November ballot initiative that would impose a one-time tax on billionaires. The state’s billionaires held about $2.3 trillion in wealth as of June 10, assets that could generate almost $101 billion from the proposed tax.

This year, at least 12 billionaires left California. They include Lynsi Snider, who inherited the In-N-Out hamburger chain and moved to Tennessee, and car loan magnate Don Hankey, who moved to Nevada. However, moves into the state and new wealth created 23 new California billionaires this year. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has vowed to stay in California despite a potential $8 billion one-time tax bill.

There are no state-level statistics on the top 1%, though Census Bureau estimates from 2022 show the states with the highest shares of households with more than $500,000 in net worth are Hawaii (48%), the District of Columbia (47%) and Washington state (43%). Hawaii also has the highest average net worth at more than $1 million, mostly because homeowners in that state have an average of $600,000 of equity in their homes. The states with the next highest average net worth are California ($792,000), and Massachusetts ($751,000).

Conservative and liberal experts agree that a soaring stock market and business profits have made it a good time for the wealthy, while middle-class and lower-income people are doing less well, especially as inflation gobbles up wage increases. There’s also widespread agreement that Trump’s tariffs (since struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court) disproportionately harmed lower-income and middle-class people, and that the tax cuts in the broad tax and spending measure Trump signed last summer (commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) will disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

The combined effects of the tariffs and the tax and spending law will help households with the top 10% of incomes most and hurt 70% of households between now and 2034, according to a June 1 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that drew on information from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

Chuck Marr, the center’s vice president for federal tax policy, pointed to the law’s extension of  a deep corporate income tax cut that dates from Trump’s first administration.

“Trump’s whole policy has really leaned into increasing this disparity,” Marr said. “You’ve got AI coming and globalization has shifted income and wealth upward, and instead of pushing back against that, Trump and others have leaned into it.”

Nevertheless, Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the U.S. government’s tax and spending policy is “still highly progressive in that low-income households receive benefits from the high-income households paying taxes.”

“It’s a little less so than it was prior to the passage of the (Trump tax and spending law) and the tariffs, but it’s still the case. It hasn’t changed the story that much,” Pomerleau said.

Marr agreed that the federal tax system is basically progressive, in that it uses taxes on high income earners to pay for the needs of low-income residents. But tax collections are low in the United States compared with other wealthy countries: Of the 20 wealthiest nations, only Ireland collects less government revenue as a share of GDP.

“Compared to other countries, inequality is high because we redistribute so much less money,” Marr said. “It’s a progressive tax system but it doesn’t raise a lot of money.”

Inflation divide

The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, an accounting of national economic conditions released June 3, found a divide in how inflation, which has increased as a result of the war in Iran, has affected American spending.

“Higher-income households remained resilient and less sensitive to price increase, while middle-income households were described as ‘squeezing more life out of every dollar before deciding to spend it,’ and low-income consumers showed greater financial strain,” the report said.

The “squeezing” analogy for the middle class came from a roundtable discussion of hospitality executives in the Kansas City, Missouri, area in late May, said Jeremy Hill, a regional economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Hill said there was a gasp in the room when one high-end restaurant chain executive said the chain could raise prices at will and keep expanding, hampered only by a shortage of high-end chefs to staff locations. Meanwhile, hotels, bars and restaurants serving the middle class are struggling to get people to come in and spend.

“It’s not that they (wealthy people) don’t care about inflation. They’re worried about what it might do to future demand or their own stocks,” Hill said. “But today, it’s not impacting the way they spend.”

The stock market’s recent run has contributed the most to the consolidation of wealth at the top. Rising real estate prices also have also added to wealth, especially for longtime homeowners.

“This has disproportionately helped those who already hold assets while the average American pays higher prices for everyday essentials,” said E.J. Antoni, chief economist for the conservative Heritage Foundation. “In other words, Wall Street got rich while Main Street got inflation.”

White Americans own outsized shares of assets such as stock and real estate, according to the federal statistics. White people are 57% of the population but own 82% of the assets, while Black and Hispanic people, who make up a combined 24% of the U.S. population, have less than 7% of assets. Asians are included in an “Other” category, which is about 9% of population and holds about  11.3% of the nation’s total assets.

By generation, Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 hold almost half of wealth, while Millennials and Gen X hold the lion’s share of liabilities, such as mortgages and consumer debt, that detract from net worth. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) have about 42% of liabilities and Gen X (1965-1980) have 35%, compared with 22% for Baby Boomers.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing for young people to be in debt as they build careers and pay off student loans, said Pomerleau, the American Enterprise Institute economist.

“Doctors with $450,000 in medical school debt might be in the bottom 10%, yes, but that person is going to be in the top 1% of wealth at some point in their lives,” Pomerleau said.

“You enter the labor force with a net liability, but you save over time, that liability is paid down, you’re paying off your mortgage, and that’s when your wealth starts growing.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

May housing starts fell to the lowest level since the pandemic disrupted construction six years ago, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Tuesday. Builder confidence has dropped recently because of higher material and financing costs.

The change threatens to exacerbate housing shortages and disrupt recent progress in most states toward building enough new housing for new residents.  

Starts were down to an annual rate of 1.17 million, the lowest since April 2020, and an 8.5% drop since May 2025. The drop since last year was especially severe in the South, down 15%, and the West, down 11%, but the Northeast saw a 19% increase and the Midwest increased 6%. 

The annual completion rate was down 14.2% from May 2025 at about 1.3 million units, the lowest since January 2022.  

New permits were about the same at 1.4 million, with apartment units up and single-family houses down. However, new apartment permits were down 26% in the Midwest, and single-family houses were down 7% in the West. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Education announced sweeping efforts Tuesday to outsource its special education programs and civil rights enforcement to other agencies, in another major step by President Donald Trump’s administration to dismantle the department.

The Department of Health and Human Services will administer programs under the Education Department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, while civil rights enforcement under Education’s Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, will be transferred to the Department of Justice. 

The move follows 10 earlier interagency agreements, or IAAs, with the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Interior, State and Treasury that transfer several of Education’s responsibilities to those agencies.

The Education Department clarified in fact sheets that in the agreements announced Tuesday, it “will continue to perform all statutorily required duties and responsibilities.”

“The Trump Administration has been clear: as we scale back federal micromanagement when it hinders success, we are equally committed to bolstering the efficacy of federal oversight where it is essential,” U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement Tuesday.

The administration has sought to do away with the 46-year-old department as part of Trump’s quest to return education “back to the states.” That push continues despite much of the oversight and funding of schools already occurring at the state and local levels. 

Congress created the Department of Education, and only Congress has the authority to abolish the agency. 

Special education

On a background call with reporters, a senior department official said OSERS “will maintain its independent statutory functions without interruption to vigorously enforce compliance with all of OSERS programs.” 

OSERS is responsible for administering the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which guarantees a free public education for students with disabilities. The umbrella unit OSERS includes the Office of the Assistant Secretary, Office of Special Education Programs and the Rehabilitation Services Administration. 

The official added that “students will not lose any rights, including their right to a free appropriate public education,” adding that “no agreement can alter the rights that students with disabilities are afforded under federal law.” 

“In coordination with and at the direction of OSERS, HHS will support meaningful stakeholder outreach; grant administration; enforcement, compliance, and monitoring activities; annual performance determinations and assessments; collection, reporting, and analyzing of data for monitoring compliance; and drawdowns of Federal funds,” according to a fact sheet. 

Civil rights oversight

Meanwhile, Education’s agreement with the DOJ is intended to “support and bolster the federal government’s enforcement of federal civil rights laws,” a senior department official said. 

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, is tasked with investigating civil rights complaints from students and families. 

Under the agreement, “OCR will utilize the Civil Rights Division to evaluate, investigate and resolve complaints filed under the laws enforced by OCR,” the official said. 

The official also stressed that under the interagency agreement, OCR “retains management and leadership of OCR in accordance with federal law.” 

Education will also partner with the DOJ on student privacy protection, in which the Justice Department will “review complaints alleging privacy act violations, conduct necessary investigations and recommend potential resolutions,” per a fact sheet.

In another agreement, the DOJ will “provide technical assistance” in training and advisory services regarding the desegregation of public schools, according to a fact sheet.  

‘This isn’t efficiency — it’s chaos’

The announcement sparked fierce condemnation from Democratic members of Congress, labor unions and advocacy groups Tuesday. 

Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, the union representing Education Department workers, said the interagency agreements regarding special ed programs and civil rights enforcement “will leave our most vulnerable students and families who have been shut out of our education system without the services they need and without protection when they face discrimination,” in a Tuesday statement. 

“This isn’t efficiency — it’s chaos,” Gittleman added. “Secretary McMahon is yet again targeting historically underserved students, eroding public trust, and sowing dysfunction for the federal employees who are trying to do their jobs on behalf of the public.” 

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that “instead of helping kids get a great education, this administration is spending its time, energy, and taxpayer resources fixated on where employees sit and illegally trying to shutter the Department of Education,” in a Tuesday statement.

“It’s an outrageous betrayal that undoes decades of hard-won progress for students,” Murray added. “More kids with disabilities will be denied the education they are entitled to by law, and more college students who were harassed or assaulted will go without the justice they are owed.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers unions in the country, said the decision “will have dire, real-world consequences.” 

“Congress — the only body that can legally take such actions — has refused to follow the whims of the White House when it comes to abolishing the Education Department,” Weingarten said. “And parents, educators, students, and the disability and civil rights communities are rising up — and will fight in every way possible to reverse this in the courts, at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion.”

As election officials across the country steel themselves for the midterm elections in less than five months, President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail threatens to upend their preparations.

The executive order instructs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t provide lists of voters or meet other requirements. It has created a sense of deep uncertainty and concern among election officials as they consider how to comply, according to a review of court documents and interviews with election officials and experts on election administration.

The March 31 executive order, and a proposed Postal Service rule published June 2 that would put the order’s requirements into effect, raise serious logistical and procedural challenges for those running elections, they say. Rural areas with limited resources are especially at risk, but jurisdictions of all sizes could be forced to scramble.

The executive order is the latest step taken by Trump to assert control over state-run elections, along with the stalled SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documents proving their citizenship. The Justice Department, under Trump’s control, is also trying to obtain state voter rolls.

“This is just another death by a thousand cuts that clerks have been experiencing since the 2020 elections,” said Barb Byrum, the Democratic clerk of Ingham County, Michigan, which includes Lansing.

First-ever national voter list

The order and the rule require states to provide lists of mail-in voters if they want the Postal Service to deliver ballots, marking the first time the federal government has created a national voter list. 

Mail ballot envelopes must meet certain design standards. And federal agencies have to compile lists of voting-age citizens to share with each state in an effort to root out noncitizen voters.

But Democratic states and voting rights groups argue the executive order — and the accompanying proposed rule — represent an illegal overreach by Trump because states administer elections under the U.S. Constitution. Trump and his Republican allies say the restrictions are necessary for election security and to combat noncitizen voting, which occurs extremely rarely.

The Postal Service didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom. The agency has said the rule “will facilitate the faithful execution of federal law.”

Multiple lawsuits have been brought against the order, but a federal judge in Washington, D.C., in May declined to halt it, partly because the Trump administration hadn’t taken enough action to implement its requirements. Another federal judge in Massachusetts is weighing a separate request to block the order.

With the executive order still in effect, at least for now, election officials and experts who work with them are taking the ramifications of it and the proposed Postal Service rule seriously.

“We don’t have a national voter registration list. We don’t have, currently, a list of sanctioned, authorized voters to vote by mail at the federal level,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at Election Center, operated by the National Association of Election Officials.  “That’s a big, big change in the way elections have always been conducted.”

Sweeping changes very quickly

In court papers filed in May, local election officials and local governments representing 26 jurisdictions across the country warned the executive order would “severely disrupt” local election administration and force the implementation of sweeping changes within months. Implementation of the order’s requirements will largely fall on local election officials, they argued.

Byrum was among the officials to sign onto the brief, along with others in Boston, and counties in Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Under the executive order, states that want to send ballots through the mail must provide the Postal Service with lists of voters they intend to provide a mail ballot. Local election officials will play a large role in helping states develop these lists, according to the court papers, and will have primary responsibility to help voters address any errors.

And Trump wants it all in place before November. The executive order’s proposed timelines “present a logistical nightmare for local election officials,” the officials warn.

“The general rule is don’t make changes before a big election because there’s always something you didn’t think about,” said Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, a nonpartisan organization for election officials in jurisdictions of at least 250,000 people.

The proposed Postal Service rule says the agency would launch a portal where states would submit voter lists and make updates. But a number of questions remain, said Lopez, who previously spent a decade administering elections in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

The portal poses the potential for bottlenecks in the election system and it’s unclear what would happen if it was ever offline. The United States has a decentralized election system, with states each running their own elections. By contrast, the Postal Service portal would create a single point of failure, raising concerns about the security of information on tens of millions of voters.

Additionally, while every state maintains a voter registration list, there is no nationwide standard for the formatting of that data. It’s unclear whether the portal will accept data in a variety of formats — the proposed rule only says the Postal Service wouldn’t alter the data provided by states.

“It looks a little different across the country and therefore normalizing the data will be a process,” Lopez said.

Struggle for small, rural counties

The Department of Justice initially said in a court document that the Department of Homeland Security planned to obtain voter data from the Postal Service before backpedaling a few days later. Still, Homeland Security continues to have “preliminary conversations” about data sharing, the Justice Department said in a subsequent court filing.

DHS operates the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system that can scan voter data to identify possible noncitizens. The Justice Department has sued 30 states in an effort to force them to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal data such as dates of birth, driver’s license and full or partial Social Security numbers, for the purpose of running the information through SAVE.

The proposed Postal Service rule also imposes standards on ballot envelopes that states must meet if they want to send ballots through the mail.

Envelopes must include an election mail logo, be automation compatible and have a bar code that allows for tracking. These are already considered best practices — and many jurisdictions across the country already follow them — but the rule would make them mandatory.

Election offices in small, rural counties may struggle to comply. In many places, a single person is in charge of elections and may not even be on the job full time, Patrick said. 

“There’s rural offices all across the country, some of them don’t have their own computer in their office — they are sharing it with the tax assessor or whatever — they don’t have the ability to generate those serialized tracking codes, intelligent mail bar codes,” Patrick said. “Because they’re physically hand-writing these envelopes out or they’re using a rubber stamp with their address on it.”

Neither the executive order or the proposed Postal Service rule include any federal funding for implementation, something that would likely have to be appropriated by Congress.

Some Republican states have championed the executive order. A dozen GOP state attorneys general filed court documents defending the order and arguing that it “will enhance the security of absentee voting.”

“It is vital to the strength of our republic that we ensure only American citizens vote in our elections and that mail-in and absentee ballots are secure and reliable,” South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said in a statement earlier this spring.

But Matt Crane, a Republican who is the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the executive order and the proposed rule mark an overreach by the federal government into duties best left to states and local governments. 

The biggest reaction among Colorado clerks, he said, has been, “why?”

“No offense to our friends at the post office,” Crane said, “but I trust our processes more than I trust theirs.”

Ahmet Kerem Korkaya, a 28-year-old pro-Palestine activist from Milwaukee, pled not guilty Monday to federal charges that he and seven other students at the University of Michigan conspired to commit acts of vandalism, harassment and threats targeting university officials, local businesses, and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit in an effort to get the University of Michigan to sever ties with Israel. Online court records show that Korkaya, who appeared before Magistrate Judge Kimberly Altman for the Eastern District of Michigan, was released on bond. 

A grand jury indicted Korkaya and the other activists including 23-year-old Zainab Aliasgar Hakim; 21-year-old Amatullah Aliasgar Hakim, 28-year-old Paige Elizabeth Feyock, 22-year-old Jonathan Hongru Zou, 24-year-old Mariam Muhammed Odeh, and 24-year-old Colin Hunter Weger — all of Michigan — as well as 23-year-old Alexander Matthew Sepulveda of Illinois.

Korkaya was a student at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where he was studying medical science, with a focus on cancer and tumor immunology, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. He also conducted research at the University of Michigan in 2023 and 2024, and holds bachelor’s and master degrees from two different universities.

In a press release, the Department of Justice points to public social media posts and activist demonstrations carried out by the group demanding that the University of Michigan enact a “full and complete divestment” from Israel and any businesses supporting Israel. The federal government asserts that when the university didn’t respond the way the group wanted, it engaged in tactics such as occupying university buildings, spray-painting buildings and disrupting university events. 

Some demonstrations involved using red paint to write messages on buildings, to simulate blood staining the hands of demonstrators and on white sheets representing the bodies of some of the at least 75,000  Palestinians killed in Israel’s war on Gaza. Although these were common tactics used by student activists who mobilized across the nation to condemn Israel’s attack on Gaza in late 2023, prosecutors have framed the actions as intimidating. 

Prosecutors also accuse the group of researching home addresses, photographs, business ownership and other details of university leaders. Korkaya and others are accused of discussing ways to “kill,” “torment,” “terrorize,” or “get” these people and their families. The group is also accused of carrying out nighttime actions where businesses and homes were spray-painted with pro-Palestine and anti-Israel messages. Prosecutors highlight that some of the incidents involved the spray-painting of a red upside-down triangle which the government claims is associated with Hamas. The Jewish Federation of Detroit was among the buildings spray-painted, prosecutors say. The group is also accused of throwing jars of noxious chemicals into the homes of people they targeted.

The allegations and evidence were not enough to persuade judges to keep members of the group behind bars as court proceedings continue. In considering the government’s claims that the activists pose a  danger to the community and a flight risk, U.S. District Magistrate Judge Anthony Patti said that the alleged actions were “terrorizing, but not terrorism,” Michigan Advance reported, in a separate hearing last week. 

That hearing was protested by about 50 people, who held signs that said: “Drop the Charges” and “Divest Don’t Arrest. Protesters described the arrests as “witch hunts,” asserting that pro-Palestine activists are being unfairly painted as terrorists by the federal government.

The indictments represent the latest move by the Trump administration to target pro-Palestine activism. In January 2025, shortly after returning to office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the deportation of international students who attend pro-Palestine protests. Just a few months later at least 300 students had their visas revoked for “destabilizing” college campuses, and federal agents arrested Palestinian student activists including Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi. This year Salah Sarsour, the president of Milwaukee’s Islamic Society and an outspoken Palestinian activist, was also arrested by federal immigration agents and sent to an Indiana detention center. 

“Our justice system must carefully distinguish between alleged criminal acts and constitutionally protected political advocacy,” Dawud Walid, executive director of the Center for American Islamic Relations Michigan chapter, said in a statement about the arrests.

NSPM-7, a national security order signed by Trump, directs law enforcement members of regional  Joint Terrorism Task Forces  to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” groups and individuals with ideologies harboring themes of “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” 

Numerous law enforcement agencies participated in what the government called a “multi-state operation” in order to arrest Korkaya and the others. Among the participants were FBI field offices in Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee, as well as 12 local law enforcement agencies including the Milwaukee Police Department, the Michigan State Police, university campus police and public safety, and the Michigan Intelligence Operations Center, which is one of the nation’s Fusion Centers originally designed for homeland security and counter-terrorism functions. 

The Milwaukee Police Department also maintains a Fusion Center. The department would not comment on whether it was involved in gathering intelligence related to Korkaya’s arrest. The FBI office of Milwaukee also wouldn’t comment on whether the arrests are related to NSPM-7, directing the Examiner to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Michigan, which has not responded to a request for comment.

The United States has a shortage of the only first-line medication recommended for pregnant women with syphilis to prevent passing it to their baby, even as congenital syphilis rates have been skyrocketing.

Last July, drug manufacturer Pfizer issued a voluntary recall of brand name Bicillin L-A, or penicillin G benzathine — a long-acting injectable of the antibiotic — warning of particulates, or foreign material, in some batches. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says supplies won’t return to normal until December 2027.

In the United States, there’s only one manufacturing plant that makes this injectable penicillin, run by Pfizer’s subsidiary, King Pharmaceuticals, in Michigan. The FDA has allowed the temporary importation of an alternative, Lentocilin, from Portugal.

But because Lentocilin isn’t a permanent solution, and penicillin is difficult and complex to manufacture, experts are concerned that the shortage will worsen infection rates and the disparities associated with congenital syphilis, which occurs when the infection is passed on to developing fetuses and newborns. State health departments told Stateline they are guiding providers to prioritize the medication for pregnant patients with syphilis and their babies, and are connecting patients with the drugs if clinics lack them.

Bicillin L-A has seen intermittent shortages throughout the past decade, said Elizabeth Finley, interim executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. In one survey of health departments across 13 states during a 2023 shortage, the group found widespread challenges in getting the drug in order to treat pregnant patients.

But last year’s recall has created “a shortage that is more significant than we’ve experienced in the past,” Finley said.

Some health centers lost their entire stock of Bicillin in the recall, Finley and others told Stateline. The drug has no generic alternative.

Congenital syphilis can have devastating, irreversible effects. Babies born to women with syphilis can be stillborn or die as a newborn. The infection also can cause serious complications in babies, such as bone deformities, deafness or blindness.

“The biggest fear with the Bicillin shortages has always been that somebody could not get treatment before delivery,” Finley said. “There’s really no length of exposure to syphilis that is safe for a fetus.”

Indigenous babies have had the highest rates in recent years, disproportionate to their share of the population, followed by Black babies.

“It’s really a tragedy, because it’s totally preventable,” said infectious disease physician Dr. Kelly Johnson, medical director of the California Prevention Training Center at the University of California, San Francisco. The center offers training and consultation to medical providers in Arizona, Hawaii, New Mexico and Nevada, as well as in California, where congenital syphilis cases rose almost fivefold over the past decade. Under the recall, California had to return nearly 20% of its Bicillin L-A stock.

In recent years, congenital syphilis cases have more than tripled, with nearly 4,000 cases nationwide in 2024 alone — the highest number reported in a single year in three decades.

A federal report showed lack of timely testing or proper treatment contributed to 90% of the nation’s cases. Black and Indigenous women disproportionately lack access to prenatal care, where they could get tested and treated for syphilis. Almost 90% of South Dakota congenital syphilis cases between 2020 and 2023 were in Native American babies, despite Native Americans making up just 11% of the state’s population.

National and state guidelines instruct providers and health departments to prioritize pregnant syphilis patients for their remaining stocks of Bicillin L-A. Non-pregnant syphilis patients can take the antibiotic doxycycline, although that drug’s regimen — two pills a day for up to four weeks — can be harder for patients to adhere to, experts say.

“It’s much more difficult as a clinician or as a public health person to know if people actually complete their (doxycycline) treatment,” Johnson said.

Experts say it’s unclear whether the shortages have been contributing to the rise in congenital syphilis cases. “But I suspect it certainly could make it worse,” Johnson said. “The longer this goes on, the harder that it’s going to be.”

In South Dakota, which had the highest rates in the nation, cases decreased slightly last year, from 40 in 2024, to 37 in 2025. This year as of April, only one case has been reported, though data for congenital syphilis can lag.

Mississippi has seen a gradual drop in cases over the past couple of years, said Dr. Tami Brooks, medical director of the state’s health department. Mississippi and other state health departments told Stateline they connect patients with Bicillin or Lentocilin when a health care center reports it has a pregnant patient but no supply.

Bicillin L-A can also be used for other infections, such as strep throat. Dr. Tanya Fitts, immediate past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Mississippi chapter, said one of her patients had suffered a rare complication of strep throat. For the past five years, the now 18-year-old has had to take daily oral penicillin to keep symptoms at bay, instead of the recommended monthly Bicillin L-A injection, Fitts said.

“We haven’t been able to order it for many, many years,” Fitts said, adding that the price of the drug outpaced what her clinic was getting paid from insurance companies.

In a statement to Stateline, Pfizer said demand for Bicillin L-A is exceeding supply, though it said health providers may request the drug for a pregnant syphilis patient. The company did not answer Stateline’s questions regarding details of the recall nor the manufacturing process, saying it doesn’t disclose details about product supply chain.

If a drug is expensive but has limited use, manufacturers don’t have a lot of financial incentives to make it, said infectious diseases clinical pharmacist Katherine Yang, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Pharmacy.

“The more niche a drug is, the less likely it is to have multiple manufacturers and generic products once it is off patent,” Yang said. “It does speak to the vulnerability of our drug supply chain, when there are very limited manufacturers.”

Bicillin L-A is typically sold by the 10-dose box, even if a clinic only needs a few doses — costing thousands of dollars, said family medicine physician Dr. Megan O’Connell, of the Cherokee Nation. She’s the chief public health officer of the Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board, which offers epidemiological support, care and advocacy for 18 tribes across Iowa, North and South Dakota, and Nebraska.

Patrick Fonge, pharmacy director at the Navajo Health Foundation’s Sage Memorial Hospital in rural Arizona, told Stateline wholesalers have increased prices.

“(Bicillin L-A) is not available in the market, but some vendors, some distributors, do have it in their warehouses and then now triple the price or quadruple the price to make profit,” Fonge said. According to one wholesaler, the average wholesale price for Bicillin at the 1.2mu concentration showed about $4,870 for a 10-dose box, he said. “We don’t have extra (in our) budget for Bicillin.”

Fonge puts in orders for the Lentocilin instead, through the federal Indian Health Service, which pays for the medication.

“It’s clear to us that a single U.S. manufacturer that makes this drug in a singular factory is a challenge,” said Finley, of the National Coalition of STD Directors. “We’re talking about the U.S. not being able to make the drug penicillin. Which is ridiculous.”

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

People who carry out mass public shootings often display observable warning signs long before an attack, but those signals are frequently fragmented across friends, family members, coworkers and institutions, making them difficult to piece together, according to a new study from the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a nonpartisan public policy think tank.

The report, which analyzed a sample of 171 mass public shootings in the United States between 1999 and 2024, such as those at workplaces, schools or shopping malls, found that these attacks are rarely sudden or unpredictable. Instead, researchers describe them as the result of cumulative stressors, concerning behaviors and communications of intent that, if connected, could offer opportunities for earlier intervention.

An overwhelming majority of perpetrators, nearly 86%, communicated violent thoughts or intentions to at least one other person before carrying out an attack, a pattern researchers refer to as “leakage.” These disclosures most often occurred through in-person conversations or text messages and were typically made to people within the perpetrator’s immediate social circle, including friends, family members and coworkers. 

On average, warning signs were spread across more than two different groups of observers, meaning no single person had a complete view of the escalating threat, according to the report.

The researchers also found that perpetrators tended to experience multiple overlapping stressors rather than a single triggering event. On average, people had five distinct stressors prior to an attack, including mental health challenges, job-related difficulties and family problems. Researchers also identified an average of 6.6 concerning behaviors per perpetrator, including suicidal ideation and other forms of emotional distress or aggression.

Planning often unfolded over an extended period. The report’s authors found that perpetrators spent an average of nearly 10 months preparing for attacks, including researching locations and studying prior mass shootings. 

Firearms were most often obtained through legal channels, with nearly 60% purchased from federally licensed dealers. About one-third of perpetrators had at least one factor that would have legally prohibited them from possessing a firearm, according to the report.

Researchers also found that nearly two-thirds of perpetrators had prior contact with law enforcement, underscoring what they describe as missed opportunities for intervention when warning signs appeared across different systems but were not fully connected.

“Warning signs are regularly present, observable, and known to people in the perpetrator’s social network long before the first shot is fired,” Jaclyn Schildkraut, the executive director of the consortium and lead author of the report, said in a news release. “By understanding how these indicators cluster and by building robust pathways for everyday bystanders to report what they see, we can connect the dots and intervene before a crisis turns into a tragedy.”

The report argues that improving communication between schools, law enforcement, mental health providers and community members could strengthen efforts to identify and respond to potential threats. It also highlights the need for clearer pathways for reporting concerning behavior and better systems for assessing risk when multiple warning signs emerge across different settings.

Alongside the findings, the consortium is developing an open-source database and training tools aimed at helping threat assessment professionals and community members recognize pre-attack behaviors and communication patterns. 

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to weigh in on the issue of whether some immigrants with criminal records can be detained indefinitely.

The court accepted a case, Genalo v. Black, from New York state involving a legal immigrant from the Dominican Republic arrested by immigration enforcement after an assault conviction and held for 21 months during deportation proceedings. 

An appeals court ruling in the case found that an “unreasonably prolonged” detention requires a bond hearing in which the government must show “clear and convincing evidence” that the immigrant would be a flight risk or a danger to the community if released. 

The Supreme Court on Monday also asked attorneys for arguments about whether the immigrant’s 2020 release makes the case moot. 

Indefinite Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention for immigrants either with criminal convictions or a record of illegally crossing a border has become legally controversial. Some appeals courts have upheld the Trump administration detention policy, while others have declared it unconstitutional. 

Individual judges have mostly ruled that non-criminals in immigration detention are entitled to a bond hearing or should be freed outright. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.