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Andrea Deutsch stands in her pet store in Narberth, Pa. Deutsch is one of the millions of people who receive federal aid to help them pay their health insurance premiums on an Affordable Care Act exchange. The extra help is set to expire at the end of 2025, and states say they don’t have the money to replace it. (Courtesy of Andrea Deutsch)

Andrea Deutsch, the mayor of Narberth, Pennsylvania, and the owner of a pet store in town, doesn’t get health care coverage through either of her jobs. Instead, she is enrolled in a plan she purchased on Pennie, Pennsylvania’s health insurance exchange.

Deutsch, who has been mayor since 2018, is paid $1 per year for the job. Her annual income, from Spot’s – The Place for Paws and her investments, is about $50,000. The 57-year-old, who is diabetic, pays $638.38 per month for health care coverage — about half of the $1,272.38 she’d owe without the enhanced federal subsidies Congress and the Biden administration put in place in 2021.

But that extra help is set to expire at the end of 2025. It would cost an estimated $335 billion over the next decade to extend it — a step the Republican-controlled Congress and the Trump administration are unlikely to take as they seek budget savings to offset potential tax cuts.

States say they don’t have the money to replace the federal aid. In Pennsylvania, for example, doing so would take about $500 million per year, according to Devon Trolley, the executive director of the state’s exchange.

“That is a significant amount of money, an insurmountable amount of money,” Trolley said.

The disappearance of the federal help would make coverage unaffordable for millions of Americans, including Deutsch. She said it would be a struggle to pay double what she is paying now.

“You try not to go bankrupt by the end of your life,” Deutsch told Stateline. “You need assets to take care of yourself as you get older and to have a little bit of security.”

Enhanced subsidies

The 2010 Affordable Care Act included some subsidies to help people purchase health insurance on the exchanges created under that law. Under the enhanced subsidies that started in 2021, some people with lower incomes who qualified for the original subsidies have been getting bigger ones. And those with higher incomes, who wouldn’t have been eligible for any help under the original rules, are now receiving assistance.

Thanks to the enhanced subsidies, people making up to 150% of the federal poverty level, or $22,590 for an individual, are now getting free or nearly free coverage. And households earning more than four times the federal poverty level, who didn’t qualify for subsidies before, are getting some help.

The enhanced aid also has helped push ACA marketplace enrollment to record levels, reaching more than 21 million this year. Southern states that have not expanded Medicaid as allowed under the ACA have seen the most dramatic growth in marketplace enrollment since 2020, according to KFF, a health policy research organization. The top five states with the fastest growth are Texas (212%), Mississippi (190%), Georgia (181%), Tennessee (177%) and South Carolina (167%).

If the enhanced subsidies go away, premium payments will increase by an average of more than 75%, according to KFF. Some people, like Deutsch, would see their payments double.

Given those premium hikes, millions of Americans would no longer be able to afford the coverage they’re getting on the exchanges, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. CBO estimates that enrollment would drop from 22.8 million in 2025 to 18.9 million in 2026 to 15.4 million in 2030. Some of those people would find coverage elsewhere, but others would not.

Edmund Haislmaier, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Republicans view the expiration of the enhanced subsidies as “an opportunity to rework and address some of the basic flaws in the ACA.”

Before the ACA, Haislmaier said, many self-employed people, such as small-business owners and freelancers, were able to find their own private insurance at competitive prices. But the health care law destroyed that market, he said, leaving such people with a selection of expensive and subpar plans.

Haislmaier said it would take time for the Trump administration to determine how it wants to change the ACA — which President-elect Donald Trump unsuccessfully tried to repeal during his first term — but that “you can do that in a way that preserves access and preserves subsidies for the lower-income people who were the primary focus of the ACA.”

States’ limitations

But Jared Ortaliza, a research associate at KFF, said letting the enhanced subsidies expire could result in higher premiums for everyone. That’s because higher prices likely would prompt many healthier people to forgo insurance, he said. Their departure would leave only chronically ill people on the exchanges, and the cost of their care is higher.

“If sicker enrollees need coverage because they need care, they’ll still choose to buy it, potentially. And if the market were sicker as a whole, that could drive premiums upward as well,” Ortaliza told Stateline.

Ortaliza said states might consider keeping premiums down through so-called reinsurance, or reimbursing insurers for their most expensive enrollees. Theoretically, they also could try to replace the expiring federal aid with their own money.

But few if any states have the financial flexibility to do that, said Hemi Tewarson, executive director of the nonpartisan National Academy for State Health Policy.

“There might be a couple states who don’t have current state subsidies that might add that, but that will be very nominal,” Tewarson told Stateline, adding that officials from different states have been discussing potential solutions. “They are all assuming that they would just have to absorb the loss of coverage across the population.”

Trolley, the head of the Pennsylvania exchange, said her state is working to provide its own subsidy to make the marketplace plans even more affordable. But even when fully implemented, it would spend only $50 million on that help, a tenth of what it would need to replace the federal aid.

Two-thirds of the 435,000 Pennsylvanians who purchase insurance on the marketplace joined after the enhanced federal subsidies were put in place in 2021. If they expire, Trolley said, she worries that 100,000 or more exchange participants will leave.

Jessica Altman, executive director of California’s exchange, said her state is in a similar situation. California currently receives $1.7 billion annually in enhanced subsidies from the federal government and spends an additional $165 million of its own money to keep costs down.

California estimates that if the subsidies expire, monthly premiums for the state’s enrollees would increase by an average of 63%. More than 150,000 people would no longer be eligible for federal help, and between 138,000 and 183,000 would disenroll, the state estimates.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

The December Farm Foundation Forum, Tax Year 2025: Potential Impacts and Opportunities for Farmers and the Agriculture Sector, covered the possible outcomes and impacts for farms and the greater agricultural sector from potential changes to taxation policy in 2025 and beyond. Some key aspects discussed included the impact of expiring tax provisions, and specific issues like estate tax and bonus depreciation. 

The conversation was moderated by Todd Van Hoose, president and CEO of Farm Credit Council, and included input from Mark Albright, public affairs specialist in tax outreach partnership and education at the Internal Revenue Service; Kent Bacus, executive director of government affairs at National Cattlemen’s Beef Association; Tia McDonald, research agricultural economist with USDA Economic Research Service; Paul Neiffer, agribusiness and business advisor with Farm CPA Report; and Elizabeth Swanson, national tax senior manager with Pinion. 

Below are some of the main points presented by the panel. 

1. Expiring Tax Provisions: Expiring tax provisions, including key provisions from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), will impact farm households. These include the child tax credit, earned income tax credit, estate tax exemptions, and bonus depreciation, set to expire by the end of 2025. 

2. Impact on Tax Liabilities: Expiring provisions are expected to increase tax liabilities by nearly $9 billion, with $650 million coming from the estate tax exemptions. The most significant increase will come from the expiration of changes to federal income tax rates, the removal of the state and local tax cap, and the reinstatement of the personal exemption. 

3. Qualified Business Income (QBI) Deduction: The QBI deduction, which allows farm businesses to deduct 20% of their income, will be affected by expiring provisions. Larger farms benefit more from this deduction, but moderate-sales farms face the highest percentage increase in taxes due to the expiration of this provision. 

4. Estate Tax and Exemptions: A major concern for farm households is the estate tax exemption, which will be halved in 2026, potentially leading to higher estate tax liabilities for farm families.  

5. Concerns Over Bonus Depreciation: The phase-out of bonus depreciation, which allows faster write-offs of equipment costs, poses a risk to farm businesses that rely on capital-intensive equipment. The expiration could lead to significant tax burdens unless replaced with alternative provisions. 

6. CTA Compliance and Penalties: The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) mandates reporting beneficial ownership information for entities like LLCs. Failure to comply with CTA filing requirements can result in significant penalties. However, on December 3, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas entered a preliminary injunction suspending enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) and its implementation of regulations nationwide. 

7. IRS Resources for Farmers: Various IRS resources are available to farmers, including the Farmers Tax Guide, tax tips for farmers, and an online Agricultural Tax Center. These tools help farmers navigate tax complexities, especially regarding crop insurance, disaster payments, and updated provisions like mileage rates and self-employment tax thresholds. 

The two-hour discussion, including the audience question and answer session, was recorded and is archived on the Farm Foundation website.  

Please note: This summary was created with the help of ChatGPT. Please refer to the recorded session for full details. 

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Tabitha Crowe’s first child was due in February 2025, but she had a miscarriage in August. (Courtesy of Tabitha Crowe) 

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth installment of an occasional States Newsroom series called When and Where: Abortion Access in America, profiling individuals who have needed abortion care in the U.S. before and after Dobbs. The first installment can be found here, the second installment is here, the third is here, the fourth is here, and the fifth is here.

By Sofia Resnick

Tabitha Crowe said she woke up around 4 a.m. one Thursday in August covered in blood. She was visiting her parents in southern Louisiana when she started miscarrying her first pregnancy. She said her mom and dad drove her to a nearby hospital while she fought dizziness from the blood loss in their back seat.
“I didn’t even know I could bleed that much,” Crowe told States Newsroom.

Over the course of the next few days, Crowe said she passed baseball-sized blood clots and experienced extreme pain and dizziness in two different hospitals, while never being offered a common miscarriage procedure, even after she requested it.

An estimated 10 to 20% of known pregnancies in the U.S. end in miscarriage. In about 80% of miscarriages, women are able to expel the pregnancy tissue naturally over a period of one to eight weeks, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. When intervention is necessary in the first trimester, ACOG recommends abortion medications or procedures such as vacuum aspiration or dilation and curettage (D&C). Later in pregnancy, recommended termination procedures include dilation and evacuation (D&E), which has a high safety record but is condemned by anti-abortion groups and banned in some states.

But increasingly, women say they are being denied routine miscarriage care in states like Louisiana, where doctors face imprisonment if they perform an abortion unless a woman is at risk of dying, and where common miscarriage drugs are now more difficult to access. Doctors in Louisiana and Texas have also reported a rise in patients whose pregnancies are no longer viable receiving more risky and invasive terminations, such as Cesarean sections and inductions, in lieu of abortion procedures. It’s a change in practice some doctors involved in the anti-abortion movement endorse.

And in cases like Crowe’s — where death might not be imminent but failing to intervene could increase the risk for infection or other issues — some doctors are telling patients to finish their miscarriages at home.

“I think they were waiting for me to get in bad enough health,” said Crowe, who attributes her experience to Louisiana’s abortion ban, though she said no medical staff mentioned the law or responded to her requests for a D&C.

But waiting for patients’ conditions to worsen can sometimes be fatal, according to an ongoing investigation by ProPublica, which has reported on five deaths linked to abortion bans, most recently a young mom in Texas who spent hours in the ER but was never offered a D&C that could have saved her life.

As stories emerge linking abortion bans to adverse health effects, some state health departments are working to make these stories harder to learn about.

In Georgia, officials recently dismissed all 32 members of the state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee following ProPublica’s reporting that the committee linked two women’s deaths to Georgia’s six-week abortion ban. The state said it would reset the committee through a new application process and is considering measures to ensure patient confidentiality.

In Texas, ProPublica reported that at least three women have died because of delays in care caused by the state’s abortion bans. Despite these reported deaths, Texas’ Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee said it wouldn’t examine any pregnancy-related deaths from 2022 and 2023, the first two years after the state’s near-total abortion ban took effect, according to the Washington Post.

Idaho, shortly after banning abortion, disbanded its Maternal Mortality Review Committee in 2023 after members recommended expanding Medicaid. The recently re-established committee is now backlogged and focused on publishing 2023 data in January before tackling 2022 data. The committee’s last report, based on 2021 data, showed the state’s maternal mortality rate had doubled in recent years and most of the deaths were preventable.

Crowe said her experience has moved her to speak out for better reproductive health care.

“For me to have a miscarriage for the first time, it’s already a very scary process,” said Crowe, who said she eventually got the care she needed outside of Louisiana. “You go to a hospital, you expect care, you expect some type of answers on what’s going on. And I didn’t get that.”

‘I had a sense it was because of the abortion laws’

Crowe and her husband, Noah Holesha, live on the Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle. Crowe said her husband is in the Army and she was medically discharged from the military in 2023 and now works as a caretaker. The two married in 2022 and were expecting their first baby in February.

But on the way to LSU Health Lallie Kemp Medical Center in Independence, Louisiana, on Aug. 8, Crowe said she felt she would never get to meet this baby. Two weeks earlier, her 10-week-old fetus only measured 6 weeks. Now in the emergency room, Crowe said medical staff gave her pain medicine, cleared her blood clots, and discharged her to finish miscarrying naturally.

Two days later at her parents’ house, Crowe said she woke up with 10 out of 10 pain.

“I was in excruciating pain again, like screaming and crying pain,” she said.

She said her parents took her back to Lallie Kemp, where they transferred her to St. Tammany Parish Hospital Emergency Department in Covington, about a 45-minute drive, because it was the nearest hospital with a dedicated OB-GYN unit.

“Lallie Kemp Medical Center complies with federal patient privacy laws and therefore cannot discuss specific patients’ care,”  Dr. Matloob Rehman, the hospital’s medical director, said in an email. “Lallie Kemp is a small, rural hospital without a full complement of specialists, including obstetrical surgery. If a patient is in need of such care, it is Lallie Kemp’s practice to refer or transfer the patient to a hospital that can provide such services.”

At St. Tammany, Crowe said she spent the day receiving pain medicine and transvaginal ultrasounds and having her vaginal canal cleared of clots. Medical records Crowe shared with States Newsroom indicate she was given misoprostol to evacuate her uterus, which Crowe said she was not aware of. She said the ultrasounds were still showing she had not completed the miscarriage. Crowe’s cousin had recently miscarried, so she and her family knew to ask for a D&C.

“They did ultrasounds and all that, but they didn’t help make sure that the miscarriage was completing,” Crowe said. “We kept telling them, ‘Hey, can y’all just do this D&C, so like we can be done with this pain?’ They wouldn’t answer.”

Crowe’s sister, a nurse in Texas, where abortion is also banned, suggested in a text that maybe it was because of Louisiana’s abortion ban that she wasn’t being offered a D&C.

“I had a sense it was because of the abortion laws, because by the time they did the canal sweep of blood clots, they didn’t even want to listen that I was in pain anymore. They were like, brushing it off, like, you’ll be fine,” Crowe said. “Even if them not doing it was wasn’t because of the abortion laws, I still didn’t get the treatment that I needed.”

Crowe said she was still dizzy and in pain when St. Tammany released her late on Aug. 10. Her St. Tammany hospital medical records say her miscarriage was completed at St. Tammany, which Crowe disputes. Medical records from the hospital in Florida, where she received the D&C, say the patient had an “incomplete miscarriage with evidence of retained POC [products of conception] on TVUS [transvaginal ultrasound], continued bleeding and anemia.”

The St. Tammany Health System Communications Department declined to comment on Crowe’s account, citing patient confidentiality, and said in a statement: “At St. Tammany Health System, we place our patients and their families’ wellbeing first. Patient privacy rights are established by the Federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In compliance with this act, we are not at liberty to provide information or comment.”

Crowe decided to drive the four hours back to Florida. She said her pain had ebbed, but soon after she got home, her husband rushed her to Eglin Air Force Base emergency department, where she said she received a D&C the following day.

The Eglin hospital did not respond to requests for comment.

Crowe said she was still dizzy in the weeks following, and she was confused and angry, believing — without confirmation — that she was denied health care she needed because of a new abortion law. She said she started reaching out to malpractice attorneys, reproductive rights groups, even President-elect Donald Trump.

“I sent everybody emails.” Crowe said. “I reached out to Congress. I reached out to the office of Trump. I reached out to lawyers. It wasn’t anger that I’ve lost the child — because I had a feeling I was going to lose the child — but it was the anger of they didn’t give their 100% care. I was getting in bad shape, health-wise, because of it.”

Louisiana abortion laws affect miscarriage care

Louisiana was one of the first states to ban abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. And it’s the first, followed by Texas, to reclassify two abortion and miscarriage medications — mifepristone and misoprostol — as controlled substances, even though they haven’t been shown to cause addiction or dependence. In late October, health care workers sued the state, arguing that the new law is unconstitutional and has added barriers to emergency care.

One of the legal advocacy groups representing plaintiffs in that case, Lift Louisiana, co-published a report with Physicians for Human Rights with detailed interviews from patients, doctors and clinicians of how the state’s abortion ban has changed reproductive health care in Louisiana. The report found that some OB-GYN practices are now deferring prenatal care until beyond the first trimester, when miscarriage care is more common. Some clinicians reported an increase in patient referrals from rural hospitals for routine care.

“To avoid the risk of criminal penalties under the bans, nearly every clinician relayed an account

in which they and/or their colleagues delayed abortion care until complications worsened to

the point where the patient’s life was irrefutably at risk,” the report reads.

Crowe said she was grateful she was able to get treated, not a given in Florida, which has a six-week abortion ban and where patients have also reported being denied miscarriage treatment. But she lives on a military base, under federal jurisdiction. With a soon-to-be GOP majority in Washington, D.C., anti-abortion activists are pushing Trump to restrict pregnancy termination at military hospitals.

Though she personally disagrees with abortion after the first trimester, Crowe said she now believes in abortion rights.

“Growing up, I was always pro-life, because I always wanted to have a kid and all that,” Crowe said. “I was also the type that’s like, I’m not going to judge you if you do. Now I’m like … the choice to have an abortion is important because some women … we need this procedure done to save our lives, too. My child was already lost; it lost its life. Because of the abortion laws, you’re keeping me from having my life. … I couldn’t grieve because I was in so much pain.”

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A ‘For Sale’ sign is seen on March 19 in Austin, Texas. Policymakers are watching for indications of what President-elect Donald Trump plans to do to ease housing costs next year after an election where voters were laser-focused on the economy.

Americans hand over a huge chunk of their paycheck for a roof over their heads. Policymakers are looking out for indications of what President-elect Donald Trump plans to do to ease housing costs next year after an election where voters were laser-focused on the economy.

Housing accounted for 32.9% of consumers’ spending in 2023, making it the largest share of consumer expenditures, according to the most recently available data Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that was an increase of 5.7% from 2022.

This year, many Americans still struggle to find affordable housing, whether they choose to rent or buy a home.

There’s a lot economists and housing advocates still don’t know about what to expect from a second Trump term. It’s unclear which campaign promises will find their way into administrative rules or  legislation, even with a Republican trifecta – the GOP will control the White House and both chambers of Congress.

But policy experts, researchers and economic analysts are looking at Trump’s record, his recent remarks on housing, and  Project 2025 – the conservative Heritage Foundation’s 900-page plan to overhaul the executive branch – for a glimpse of what may lie ahead.

Tariffs and the cost of building homes

Trump has spoken frequently of his proposed 60% tariff on goods from China, which he has said would create more manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Tariffs could be as high as 20% on goods from other countries.

But housing economists and other experts say that could be bad news for building more affordable housing.

Selma Hepp, chief economist for CoreLogic, a financial services company, said tariffs are one of her main concerns about the effects of a second Trump term.

“One of the biggest concerns is not just lumber [costs], but the overall cost of materials, which have been going up,” said Selma Hepp, chief economist for CoreLogic, a financial services company.

Construction material prices have risen 38.8% since February 2020, according to an Associated Builders and Contractors’ analysis of October Producer Price Index data.

Kurt Paulsen, professor of urban planning in the department of planning and landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said building costs are already high from tariffs on Canadian lumber that Trump first imposed and that the Biden administration kept and increased.

“It used to be in construction that you would get a bid from a contractor or a subcontractor or supplier and it would be good for 60 days. Now, the bids are good for like five days because you don’t know where prices are going to be,” he said.

Immigration policy and its effect on construction labor

Trump tweeted on Nov. 18 that he is planning to use the declaration of a national emergency as part of his mass  deportation plan.

Besides disrupting lives, Trump’s plan  could have effects on what it costs to build housing, Hepp said.

“There is the cost of labor as well, if we do indeed have all these deportations. That’s a big, big concern,” she said. “A large share of labor in the construction industry obviously comes from immigrants. That is a huge issue for new construction and particularly new construction as it relates to affordable housing.”

Foreign-born construction workers made up 3 million of the 11.9 million people who work in the construction industry in 2023, according to the latest American Community Survey data.

Trump’s ‘not in my backyard’  rhetoric

The former president hasn’t always been clear on where he stands with zoning regulations and making way for more affordable housing in a wide variety of neighborhoods.

In a July Bloomberg interview, Trump spoke critically of zoning regulations and said that they drive up housing costs. But Trump also has a record of tending toward a “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY, approach to housing that maintained some of these zoning regulations. The Trump administration moved to roll back an Obama-era regulation that tied HUD funding to assessing and reducing housing discrimination in neighborhoods.

“He’ll talk about reducing regulations on developers, but he’ll also use this NIMBYism talking about protecting suburbs from low-income housing and you really can’t have it both ways,” said Sarah Saadian, senior vice president of public policy and field organizing at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Paulsen said Project 2025 embraces a pushback against anti-NIMBY approaches to expand multi-family housing.

“What I read in the Project 2025 documents is a clear statement that says every local community and neighborhood should be able to choose the housing it wants to accept or not. The challenge of that is that if every community in every neighborhood can veto housing, then we just don’t get enough housing and prices go up and prices and rents go up,” he said.

A more punitive approach to homelessness 

Last year, homelessness rose to its highest level recorded since the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began collecting this information in 2007. The ending of pandemic safety nets that gave some households better financial stability and a lack of affordable housing supply contributed to the number of unhoused people, the report explained.

Trump has been outspoken on his view that homeless people should be “off our streets.” The president-elect has also proposed putting unhoused people with mental health issues into “mental institutions.”

“There’s a movement that I think is largely reflected in Project 2025 that says, actually, cities need more coercive policy tools to enforce public order and to require that someone who’s camping take a shelter placement even if they don’t want it,” Paulsen said.

Saadian said that given the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which makes it easier to criminalize unhoused populations for sleeping outside, she’s worried about a changing political environment where policies that prioritize stable housing over policing fall out of favor.

“I think all of that just shows a culture shift in the political dynamic here that we’re definitely worried about,” she said.

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The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building pictured on Nov. 25, 2024. (Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education will be far easier said than done.

As Trump seeks to redefine U.S. education policy, the complex logistics, bipartisan congressional approval and redirection of federal programs required make dismantling the department a challenging — not impossible — feat.

It’s an effort that experts say is unlikely to gain traction in Congress and, if enacted, would create roadblocks for how Trump seeks to implement the rest of his wide-ranging education agenda.

“I struggle to wrap my mind around how you get such a bill through Congress that sort of defunds the agency or eliminates the agency,” Derek Black, an education law and policy expert and law professor at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law, told States Newsroom.

“What you can see more easily is that maybe you give the agency less money, maybe you shrink its footprint, maybe we’ve got an (Office for Civil Rights) that still enforces all these laws, but instead of however many employees they have now, they have fewer employees,” Black, who directs the school’s Constitutional Law Center, added.

What does the department do?

Education is decentralized in the United States, and the federal Education Department has no say in the curriculum of public schools. Much of the funding and oversight of schools occurs at the state and local levels.

Still, the department has leverage through funding a variety of programs, such as for low-income school districts and special education, as well as administering federal student aid.

Axing the department would require those programs be unwound or assigned to other federal agencies to administer, according to Rachel Perera, a fellow in Governance Studies in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Perera, who studies inequality in K-12 education, expressed concern over whether other departments would get additional resources and staffing to take on significantly more portfolios of work if current Education Department programs were transferred to them.

Sen. Mike Rounds introduced a bill last week that seeks to abolish the department and transfer existing programs to other federal agencies.

In a statement, the South Dakota Republican said “the federal Department of Education has never educated a single student, and it’s long past time to end this bureaucratic Department that causes more harm than good.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposed a detailed plan on how the department could be dismantled through the reorganization of existing programs to other agencies and the elimination of the programs the project deems “ineffective or duplicative.”

Though Trump has repeatedly disavowed the conservative blueprint, some former members of his administration helped write it.

The agenda also calls for restoring state and local control over education funding, and notes that “as Washington begins to downsize its intervention in education, existing funding should be sent to states as grants over which they have full control, enabling states to put federal funding toward any lawful education purpose under state law.”

Title I, one of the major funding programs the department administers, provides billions of dollars to school districts with high percentages of students who come from low-income families.

Black pointed to an entire “regulatory regime” that’s built around these funds.

“That regime can’t just disappear unless Title I money also disappears, which could happen, but if you think about Title I money — our rural states, our red states — depend on that money just as much, if not more, than the other states,” he said. “The idea that we would take that money away from those schools — I don’t think there’s any actual political appetite for that.”

‘Inherent logical inconsistencies’

Trump recently tapped Linda McMahon — a co-chair of his transition team, Small Business Administration head during his first term and former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO — as his nominee for Education secretary.

If confirmed, she will play a crucial role in carrying out his education plans, which include promoting universal school choice and parental rights, moving education “back to the states” and ending “wokeness” in education.

Trump is threatening to cut federal funding for schools that teach “critical race theory,” “gender ideology” or “other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” according to his plan.

On the flip side, he wants to boost funding for states and school districts that adhere to certain policy directives.

That list includes districts that: adopt a “Parental Bill of Rights that includes complete curriculum transparency, and a form of universal school choice;” get rid of “teacher tenure” for grades K-12 and adopt “merit pay;” have parents hold the direct elections of school principals; and drastically reduce the number of school administrators.

But basing funding decisions on district-level policy choices would require the kind of federal involvement in education that Trump is pushing against.

Perera described seeing “inherent logical inconsistencies” in Trump’s education plan.

While he is talking about dismantling the department and sending education “back to the states,” he’s “also talking about leveraging the powers of the department to punish school districts for ‘political indoctrination,’” she said.

“He can’t do that if you are unwinding the federal role in K-12 schools,” she said.

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday said he intends to tap Brooke Rollins, the president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute, as USDA secretary. In this photo, Rollins speaks during an event on education at the institute on Jan. 28, 2022 in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump Saturday announced his intent to name Brooke Rollins of Texas, the president and CEO of the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute, to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“As our next Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke will spearhead the effort to protect American Farmers, who are truly the backbone of our Country,” Trump said in a statement.

Trump’s statement said Rollins is a graduate of Texas A&M University, with an undergraduate degree in agriculture development.

“From her upbringing in the small and Agriculture-centered town of Glen Rose, Texas, to her years of leadership involvement with Future Farmers of America and 4H, to her generational Family Farming background, to guiding her four kids in their show cattle careers, Brooke has a practitioner’s experience, along with deep Policy credentials in both Nonprofit and Government leadership at the State and National levels,” the statement said.

Multiple news reports Friday had quoted sources close to Trump saying he would name former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a Georgia Republican, as secretary of agriculture.

Billions in spending

Rollins, if confirmed by the Senate, would run a crucial agency that administers roughly $213 billion in mandatory and discretionary funding. The current secretary is Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa.

USDA manages food safety practices, conducts agriculture and conservation research, handles farm management and administers the government’s largest food benefits program for low-income families, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The agency also provides federal grants for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC.

During the first Trump administration, Rollins served in several roles, including with the Domestic Policy Council. She was also director of the Office of American Innovation, and assistant to the president for strategic initiatives, the statement said.

“In these roles, she developed and managed the transformational domestic policy agenda of the Trump Administration, leading to historic achievements for the American people,” according to her biography.

A conservative lawyer, Rollins earned her law degree at the University of Texas. Rollins later served as the policy director for former Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who was the secretary of Energy in the first Trump administration.

Rollins also ran the Texas Public Policy Foundation — a conservative think tank — for 15 years.

Farm bill at a standstill

One big effort for the next secretary is to work with Congress to finalize the delayed farm bill that sets agriculture and conservation policy for the next five years. A big portion of the farm bill consists of the nutrition program, or SNAP.

USDA is also implementing portions of the Biden administration’s climate and clean energy program, known as the Inflation Reduction Act. Over the next five years, the IRA will provide USDA with about $20 billion for conservation programs that mitigate climate change.

Republicans have been critical of the climate law, and have vowed to claw back some of the funds.

Rollins is likely to work closely with former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump says he will nominate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, if confirmed by the Senate, has publicly voiced his plans to influence the agriculture industry. 

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum on Friday was tapped by President-elect Donald Trump as both Interior secretary and head of a new National Energy Council. In this photo Burgum, center, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., right, and Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., left, watch as Trump walks towards the courtroom for his hush money trial at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 14, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement Friday afternoon that his pick for Interior secretary, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, would also coordinate a new council on energy policy is a sign the incoming administration will make energy production a core part of its domestic policy.

Few details of the new National Energy Council were available Friday, as activists and lawmakers processed the surprise 4 p.m. Eastern announcement. But the move likely reflects a focus by Trump and his next administration on energy production, including fossil fuels.

“They’re signaling ahead of time that this is one of their priority areas,” Frank Maisano, a senior principal at the energy-focused law and lobbyist firm Bracewell LLP, said in an interview.

Burgum “will be joining my Administration as both Secretary of the Interior and, as Chairman of the newly formed, and very important, National Energy Council, which will consist of all Departments and Agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of American Energy,” a written statement from Trump said.

“This Council will oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape, enhancing private sector investments across all sectors of the Economy, and by focusing on INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”

Trump said the council’s objective to increase U.S. energy supply would benefit the domestic economy and allies overseas and help power “A.I. superiority.”

“The National Energy Council will foster an unprecedented level of coordination among federal agencies to advance American energy,” Burgum said in a written statement. “By establishing U.S. energy dominance, we can jumpstart our economy, drive down costs for consumers and generate billions in revenue to help reduce our deficit.”

It was unclear what the role of the Department of Energy would be in such an arrangement. The current secretary in the Biden administration is Jennifer Granholm, a former governor of Michigan.

‘Drill, drill, drill’

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump frequently pledged to expand oil and gas production. The issue was one of two he told Fox News host Sean Hannity he would seek to address as a “dictator” on the first day of his administration.

Trump told Hannity during an Iowa appearance in December that he would not be a dictator, “except for day one. I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

Comments like that foreshadowed something like a new council to oversee energy policy, said Lisa Frank, executive director of the advocacy group Environment America.

“President Trump has been very clear that one of his top priorities is to ‘drill, baby, drill,’” Frank said. “I’m not surprised. It was such an important part of his campaign, and it is the case that energy decisions are made by all sorts of different agencies in different ways, and that can be kind of a difficult thing to manage if you’re trying to drive an agenda.”

Under outgoing President Joe Biden, the administration promoted an “all-of-government approach” to climate change, with several departments and agencies across the federal bureaucracy tasked with addressing the issue. White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi was tasked with coordinating a consistent climate approach across the executive branch.

Burgum’s role could be similar, though the aim likely will be much different. 

“This is similar to what the previous administration did, but the previous administration focused on climate,” Maisano said. “It’s just energy instead of climate.”

Another key difference is that Burgum will also be tasked with running an entire, separate Cabinet-level department with a nearly $18 billion annual budget.

Balancing the priorities of the Interior Department — which includes public lands management, protecting endangered species, maintaining national parks and overseeing tribal relations — with an initiative to vastly expand fossil-fuel production could be difficult, Frank said.

“The really tough decisions about balancing those two agendas will lie, to some extent, with Secretary Burgum, if he’s confirmed,” she said. “Do we want more drilling at our national parks? Do we want it on our families’ ranches? Do we want it where you want your kids to hunt? Do we want fracking near the best trout streams? Those are going to be very difficult questions for both him and the American public.”

All of the above

Burgum is seen across the political spectrum as favoring an all-of-the-above approach to energy, meaning he wants to expand both fossil-fuel and sustainable-energy sources. Environmental groups see his record on climate as mixed.

His state ranks ninth in wind-energy production, Frank said, but also last in reducing carbon emissions over the last two decades.

“He’s familiar with all aspects of energy, because as governor of an all-of-the-above energy state, he has to be,” Maisano said.

Some Democrats and left-leaning groups voiced immediate opposition to the selection of Burgum. The U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Democrats sent a series of tweets Friday dubbing the governor “Big Oil Burgum” over ties to the oil and gas industry.

But others were more tempered in their reaction to Burgum’s selection as Interior chief than some of Trump’s other picks for Cabinet positions.

Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director for the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, tweeted Thursday evening that it did not seem likely the Trump administration would roll back expansion of renewable energy.

Trump’s first term saw an expansion of clean-energy projects, Donnelly wrote. Burgum is “not a climate denier” who doesn’t have a record of stifling renewable energy, he added.

“Burgum sucks but he’s not a complete lunatic that I’m aware of,” Donnelly said in an earlier tweet. “Could have been worse.”

South Dakota Sen. John Thune speaks to reporters after being elected Republican leader during a closed-door, secret ballot election held inside the old Senate chamber in the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024. At right is Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican elected as the Republican Policy Committee chair. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom) 

WASHINGTON — Republicans in the Nov. 5 election took over the White House, the U.S. Senate and as of late Wednesday, the House, after calls were made in enough races to project a majority.

They are expressing high hopes for unified control of government. But before they’ll be able to celebrate enacting sweeping changes to the country’s tax code or overhauling the health insurance marketplace, they’ll need to broker agreement between centrist lawmakers and far-right members in Congress.

More often than not, those two factions of the GOP hold significantly different ideas about how to draft legislation and strong opinions about whether to amend it on the floor.

Keeping everyone on the same page will be crucial for Republican leaders once the new Congress begins Jan. 3, especially since they have just three votes to spare in the Senate and a razor-thin majority in the House.

States Newsroom looked at what’s ahead for Republicans as they begin sorting through where to make changes to U.S. law in seven key policy areas:

TAXES

Nearly every Republican politician campaigned on addressing the country’s tax structure, making it one of the first issues the party is expected to take up when the next session of Congress begins.

The GOP will likely use the complicated budget reconciliation process to address the tax code, the same way lawmakers did in 2017 when they passed their signature tax law during President-elect Donald Trump’s first term in office.

That reconciliation process would allow Republicans to avoid the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster that would otherwise require them to get Democratic support. But the process has strict rules and requires a marathon amendment voting session in the Senate that’s often called a vote-a-rama.

Some provisions in Republicans’ original tax law have already expired or will do so in the coming months, giving the GOP incentives to jump through the many hoops that come with the reconciliation process.

Extending the expiring provisions will bring along a hefty price tag, however.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote in an analysis released in late September that extending the individual and estate tax elements in the law would increase the deficit by $3.9 trillion through 2035. Republicans opting to extend or bring back tax code changes for business would likely increase the deficit to $4.8 trillion.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, expressed concerns at the time about lawmakers ignoring or diminishing the deficit impact. 

“There will undoubtedly be efforts to pretend that extending the tax cuts is free – obviously this is not the case,” she said. “Extending policies that are scheduled to expire — and were scored as expiring — would clearly add to the national debt.”

MacGuineas added that lawmakers “should consider carefully which parts of the TCJA are working, which parts aren’t, and if they want to extend some parts, how to responsibly extend them without increasing the debt beyond current law.”

IMMIGRATION

Republicans are expected to hold votes on legislation addressing border security and immigration after much of their campaign for Congress focused on those two areas.

Whether they’ll be able to do that through the reconciliation process with only GOP support or through the traditional legislative process, which requires bipartisanship in the Senate, will depend on how exactly they write the bill and what budget impacts the various provisions will have.

Immigration and border security legislation would fail to comply with a reconciliation rule in the Senate, also known as the Byrd Rule, if it produces a change in federal revenues or spending that is deemed “merely incidental” by the Senate parliamentarian.

While the requirement is vague, it could apply to several items that don’t have big price tags when considered as part of the multi-trillion-dollar federal budget.

For example, Democrats’ efforts to raise the federal minimum wage as part of the reconciliation process in 2021 were deemed “merely incidental” by the Senate parliamentarian and removed from the bill.

Trump has already laid out his wish list for an immigration-related bill he wants Congress to send to his desk.

Trump reposted campaign videos on social media in early September requesting Congress pass legislation to prevent future presidents from using executive authority to grant humanitarian parole — something the Biden administration has used to allow more than 1 million people to obtain work permits and live in the United States temporarily. 

Trump has called the use of parole authority “abuse,” but it’s been used by presidents since 1956, during the Eisenhower administration.

Trump, who campaigned on mass deportations of immigrants without proper legal status, is also expected to ask Congress to foot the bill for his promise to deport more than 13 million people.

Getting any immigration-related policy to the president-elect’s desk will be daunting since it’s been almost four decades since Congress overhauled U.S. immigration law.

“The last big immigration bill was passed in 1986 when Ronald Reagan was president and both houses of Congress were held by Democrats,” according to an analysis from the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. “A smaller bill was passed in 1990 when George H.W. Bush was president and both houses of Congress were still controlled by Democrats.”

Earlier this year, a bipartisan border security and immigration bill was brokered by Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford and Arizona independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

The trio of senators spent months negotiating the particulars of the deal only to have it scuttled after Trump told GOP members he didn’t want the legislation to pass.

That legislation could be used as a starting point if Republicans are unable to move an immigration bill through the reconciliation process and want to get a bill past the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster.

TARIFFS

Tariffs could become one point of contention between Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration.

The president-elect has vowed to stack tariffs of at least 10% on nearly all goods entering the country, raising alarm bells with economists and free-trade Republicans about the impact that would have on consumer prices.

Trump said in mid-October at the Economic Club of Chicago that he hoped to implement tariffs on foreign-made products as high as 100% or 200%.

“The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States, and build a factory in the United States so it doesn’t have to pay the tariff,” Trump said, rejecting the premise that high tariffs could harm Americans.

Mary Lovely, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told States Newsroom in an October interview that imposing tariffs could risk “starting a trade war with the entire world.”

Lovely’s research with economist Kimberly Clausing, also of PIIE, found that Trump’s threats to slap tariffs as high as 20% on all foreign products, combined with his threats of 60% tariffs on all Chinese goods, could cost the typical American household over $2,600 annually.

HEALTH CARE

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said repeatedly during the final weeks of the campaign that he wants to overhaul the 2010 health care law that most people refer to as the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

He hasn’t shared details about what aspects of that law he wants to end or change, but said during a late October interview on Fox Business that he wants to address health outcomes.

“I said the ACA, unfortunately, is deeply ingrained in our health care system now,” Johnson said. “Do we need further improvements? Absolutely. We need to expand quality of care, access to care and obviously lower the cost of health care.”

Republicans used the budget reconciliation process to try to repeal and replace the ACA in 2017, but were unsuccessful, largely due to the late Arizona Sen. John McCain rejecting the bill.

Even with the budget reconciliation process to get Republicans around the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster, it will be extremely difficult for leaders to get the party unified on any health care bill of that magnitude.

Republicans using the budget reconciliation process for tax policy and health care would take up two of the three opportunities they’ll have to adopt budget resolutions with reconciliation instructions during the 119th Congress.

GOP leaders could try for a round three, though once all is said and done with the first two reconciliation bills, Republicans might need to shift their attention toward the 2026 midterm campaigns.

VOTING

Republican lawmakers have argued legislation is needed to bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections, even though it is already illegal and rarely happens. The party is expected to try again next Congress, once it holds a majority in both chambers of Congress. 

The GOP House passed a bill this summer that would have required proof of citizenship to register to vote, but the Democratic-controlled Senate never acted on it.

Trump wrote on social media that he would demand that voter ID laws and proof of citizenship be required for voting, something that Congress would have to pass, although it’s unclear if such legislation could overcome the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

The issue is important to Trump, as Johnson traveled to the president-elect’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida, to unveil the House’s intention to pursue the issue.

SPENDING

Republicans campaigned this year on cutting government spending, but have rarely done so when they held the majority in both chambers of Congress.

The challenge lies in how government spending is approved and how much the various departments and agencies require to function.

During fiscal 2023, the federal government spent $6.1 trillion, with $3.4 trillion going to mandatory programs, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Those programs run on autopilot, so lawmakers don’t need to negotiate the particulars every year the way they do other programs.

An additional $1.7 trillion was spent on so-called discretionary programs, which are funded through Congress’ annual appropriations process. That funding went to programs categorized as either nondefense, which received $917 billion, or defense, which got $805 billion.

The nondefense funding goes to several departments, including Agriculture, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Interior, Justice, State and Transportation. Smaller agencies, like NASA and the National Science Foundation, are also funded through nondefense accounts.

Republicans have proposed cuts in the past, but members of the party who understand the federal ledger often explain that if members really want to address the government spending more than it takes in, they’ll have to address Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The math, otherwise, won’t work.

Republicans could make tweaks when they write their reconciliation bills, though they’ll need those to comply with the Byrd Rule and not have a “merely incidental” impact on the federal ledger. 

EDUCATION

Having secured unified GOP control of government, Trump’s sweeping vision to “save American education” could set the stage for significant changes in U.S. education policy.

The president-elect has vowed to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and said he wants to move education “back to the states.” States and local governments bear much of the responsibility for funding K-12 schools, but the Department of Education handles Pell Grants for college students who demonstrate financial need and enforces civil rights cases, among other things.

Congress going along with plans to eliminate the department could have profound impacts on the billions of dollars in funding the agency provides for low-income K-12 schools, special education and federal student aid.

Trump also vowed to roll back updated Title IX regulations on his first day back in office.

President Joe Biden unveiled the final rule for Title IX in April, which strengthens federal protections for LGBTQ+ students and “protects against discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics,” according to the Education Department.

GOP members on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce have criticized the new Title IX rules and are likely to fall in step with Trump’s wishes to roll back the regulations.

Trump has also criticized the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness efforts, dubbing them “not even legal.” He could discontinue the Biden administration’s new student loan repayment plan known as Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE. The plan is currently on pause due to legal challenges from Republican-led states.

Last year, Senate Republicans tried to strike down the rule.

Like Trump, Republicans have focused on “parental rights” in education. House Republicans passed their own bill on the issue last year.

Republicans are likely to continue scrutinizing higher education institutions from diversity initiatives to college students protesting the war in Gaza.

A GOP measure that would bar accrediting organizations from requiring colleges and universities to adopt diversity, equity and inclusion policies as a condition of accreditation passed the House in September.

Shauneen Miranda and Ashley Murray contributed to this report.  

Packages of Mifepristone tablets are displayed at a family planning clinic on April 13, 2023 in Rockville, Maryland. (Photo illustration by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump has several choices to make in the coming months about whether his second administration will keep access to contraception and abortion as it is now or implement changes.

While Trump cannot on his own enact nationwide laws or abortion bans without Congress, he and the people he picks for key posts throughout the federal government will have significant influence on reproductive rights nationwide.

During Trump’s first term in office he barred health care organizations that perform or refer patients for abortions from receiving Title X family planning grants, even though there’s a moratorium on using federal funds for abortions unless it’s the result of rape or incest, or the life of the woman is at risk.

Alina Salganicoff, senior vice president and director for women’s health policy at the nonpartisan health research organization KFF, said on a call with reporters Friday that about a quarter of providers withdrew or were disqualified from receiving federal family planning grants as a result of that policy.

“The Title X program basically funds family planning services for low-income people,” Salganicoff explained. “It’s basically a small program, it’s around under $300 million — but it is a critical program to people who don’t otherwise have insurance.”

Abortions as stabilizing care

Trump will also have to decide whether to leave in place guidance from the Biden administration that says a federal law from the 1980s protects health care providers who perform abortions as stabilizing care during an emergency that would affect a woman’s health or life.

That law, known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, became one point of disagreement between the Biden administration and Republican states that implemented abortion bans or strict restrictions after the Supreme Court ended the nationwide right to an abortion.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra wrote in a letter released in July 2022 that under the federal “law, no matter where you live, women have the right to emergency care — including abortion care.”

EMTALA is at the center of an ongoing lawsuit between the Biden administration and Idaho over that state’s abortion law. Oral arguments in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals are set for early December.

Abortion pill

The future of medication abortion, a two-drug regimen approved for up to 10 weeks gestation that’s used in about 63% of abortions nationwide, will be another area the Trump administration could alter without congressional approval.

Salganicoff said there’s no way to know just yet if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will seek to change prescribing guidelines for medication abortion or revoke the 2000 approval of mifepristone altogether.

“We don’t know whether they’re going to actually review the approval, but I will tell you that it is likely that they will revisit the conditions in which medication abortions, which now account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in this country, can be provided,” Salganicoff said.

The Trump administration, she said, is likely to focus on revisions made during the Biden administration that allow doctors or other qualified health care providers to prescribe the two-drug medication abortion regimen via telehealth and then have mifepristone and misoprostol mailed to the patient.

Salganicoff anticipates anti-abortion organizations will also encourage the Trump administration to address recent findings from the We Count Project, showing 1 in 10 abortions take place after medication abortion is mailed to people in states with bans or significant restrictions from states that have shield laws.

“This FDA protocol is legal to do that, but clearly this is going to be a target,” she said.

Mailing of abortion medication

The Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law from the late 19th century that once banned the mailing of boxing photographs, pornography and contraception, will also be front and center after Trump takes the oath of office on Jan. 20.

The law, which is still on the books despite not being enforced in decades, could potentially allow the U.S. Postal Service to prevent the mailing of abortion medications or any other instrument or tool used in abortions.

“The Biden administration’s Department of Justice did a review and said that they are not going to enforce Comstock,” Salganicoff said. “Project 2025 sees it very differently, and even though President-elect Trump has said that he is not going to enforce Comstock, it’s not clear, and there will likely be a lot of pressure to do that.”

Project 2025 is a policy map for a Trump presidency published by the Heritage Foundation. Trump has disavowed any connection with it, although former members of his first administration helped develop it.

Salganicoff said enforcing the Comstock Act would affect access to medication abortion throughout the country, even in states that have reinforced reproductive rights during the last two years.

“Clearly that’s going to tee up a lot of litigation and challenges,” Salganicoff said.

Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, said during the call that the Trump administration’s possible elevation of people who spread misinformation or disinformation could lead to more confusion about research-based health care.

“I think one thing, particularly with the rise in prominence of RFK Jr., you know, is the potential for misinformation,” Levitt said, referring to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a prominent vaccine opponent who endorsed Trump and campaigned extensively with him.

“We turn to the government for reliable data, public health information and scientific information,” Levitt said. “And there’s the potential now, for the government to be not only not an effective source for health information, but in fact, an accelerant for misinformation.” 

Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, speaks to attendees during a Sept. 25, 2024, campaign rally in Mint Hill, North Carolina. Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s election could set the stage for wide-ranging changes to education policy. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s return to the presidency could set the stage for sweeping changes in U.S. education policy.

Throughout his campaign, Trump has vowed to “save American education,” with a focus on parental rights and universal school choice — offering a sharp contrast to the Biden administration’s education record.

With Trump’s White House victory cemented, here’s a look at where he stands on education:

Getting rid of U.S. Education Department

Perhaps Trump’s most far-reaching plan for education includes his vow to close down the U.S. Department of Education.

The department — just 45 years old — is not in charge of setting school curriculum, as education is decentralized in the United States. The agency’s mission is to “promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”

Trump has repeatedly called for moving education “back to the states,” though the responsibility of education already mainly falls on states and local governments, which allocate much of the funding for K-12 schools.

Funding boosts

Trump has proposed funding boosts for states and school districts that comply with his vision for education, including adopting a “Parental Bill of Rights that includes complete curriculum transparency, and a form of universal school choice,” according to his plan.

He also wants to give funding preferences to schools who get rid of “teacher tenure” for grades K-12 and adopt “merit pay.”

He could also ramp up funding for schools that have parents hold the direct elections of principals as well as for schools that significantly reduce the number of their administrators.

Trump’s plan also includes the creation of a credentialing body to certify teachers “who embrace patriotic values, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but to educate them.”

He is also threatening to cut federal funding for schools that teach “critical race theory” or “gender ideology” and vowed to roll back updated Title IX regulations under the Biden administration on his first day back in office.

The updated regulations, which the Biden administration released earlier this year, extend federal protections for LGBTQ+ students.

The final rule rolls back changes to Title IX made under Trump’s previous administration and then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

A slew of GOP-led states have challenged the measure, leading to several legal battles and a policy patchwork throughout the country.

Student debt and higher education

Trump has criticized the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness efforts,  describing them as “not even legal,” and could let go of any mass student loan forgiveness efforts.

Trump could repeal the administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan, which is currently on hold while tied up in a legal challenge. The sweeping initiative seeks to provide lower monthly loan payments for borrowers and lessen the time it takes to pay off their debt.

Meanwhile, the 2024 GOP platform called for making colleges and universities “sane and affordable,” noting that Republicans will “fire Radical Left accreditors, drive down Tuition costs, restore Due Process protections, and pursue Civil Rights cases against Schools that discriminate.”

The platform also calls for reducing the cost of higher education through the creation of “additional, drastically more affordable alternatives to a traditional four-year College degree.”

Trump has also proposed the “American Academy,” a free, online university that he says would be endowed through the “billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments.”

Project 2025

Apart from the GOP platform and Trump’s proposals, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes a sweeping conservative agenda that, if implemented, could have major implications for the future of education.

Though Trump has disavowed the conservative think tank’s blueprint, some former members of his previous administration helped craft the agenda.

Some of the education policy proposals outlined in the extensive document include eliminating the U.S. Education Department and Head Start, ending time-based and occupation-based student loan forgiveness and restoring the Title IX regulations made under DeVos.

The proposal also states that “the federal government should confine its involvement in education policy to that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states.”

Major teachers unions react to Trump win

“The voters have spoken. While we hoped and fought for a different outcome, we respect both their will and the peaceful transfer of power,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers unions in the country, said in a Wednesday statement.

“At this moment, the country is more divided than ever, and our democracy is in jeopardy. Last night, we saw fear and anger win,” Weingarten said.

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest labor union, said in a statement Wednesday that “this is not the outcome we campaigned for, nor the future we wanted for our students and families, but it is the road through history we now must travel.” 

This article was originally published by CT Mirror.

Donald Trump’s return to power comes against a backdrop of the well-known anti-environmental legacy of his first term. His assertion that climate change was a “hoax,” was followed by the rolling back or outright revocation of more than 100 environmental regulations and policies, as tracked by numerous universities and newspapers at the time.

Blue-state attorneys general let none of this go without a fight — filing dozens of lawsuits and taking other actions on all manner of Trump administration moves, not just those connected to the environment, energy and climate. Connecticut was in the thick of it, especially on climate issues related to air quality and the emissions known to contribute to global warming and climate change.

But the second Trump administration could prove even more challenging for the attorneys general. It arrives with previous experience and a team potentially less prone to the mistakes that often caused failures in court in the first go-round. Trump will also have majorities in both chambers of Congress to bolster his agenda.

There are also the very specific policy and action recommendations in Project 2025, the conservative governing plan developed by the Heritage Foundation with assistance from many officials connected to Trump’s first term. After facing serious blowback to the plan during the campaign, Trump claimed he knew nothing about it, though his campaign website contained some of the same ideas.

Trump has since hired several Project 2025 authors for his new administration including a key architect, Russell Vought, to run the Office of Management and Budget. Vought held that same position for part of Trump’s first administration.

There is also a super-majority conservative U.S. Supreme Court that has already flexed its muscles. It has issued a number of rulings that have effectively closed off avenues for challenges. The Chevron decision in June and the court’s use of the so-called major questions doctrine both generally now restrict what agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department can do without specific direction from Congress.

“It’s changed everything,” said Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, who took office halfway through Trump’s first term, picking up the fight from his predecessor George Jepsen, in conjunction with attorneys general around the country.

“It’s hard to overstate how profound this change is,” Tong said. “It essentially overturns the whole apple cart of regulatory infrastructure in this country.”

“I think we’re expecting a fight on everything. And that regulatory process — in changes in rulemaking — is going to grind to a very slow crawl and in some cases, to a halt. And that was the point of the people that initiated this.”

The Supreme Court rulings were destined to cause difficulties for Connecticut and other states regardless of whether Trump or Harris won. Tong said he and his blue-state brethren had been planning for both contingencies, though he wouldn’t say what the strategies will be.

“We’ve been preparing for the prospect of the Trump presidency for a long time now, and we are very closely coordinated and aligned,” he said. “We are ready.”

Roger Reynolds, senior legal director with the advocacy group Save the Sound called the Supreme Court rulings hugely concerning. “We’re in a really critical place right now. They have a clear anti-regulatory agenda,” he said. “It’s about putting their hands on the scales on the side of the regulated industries.”

Connecticut’s Democratic senate leaders, President Martin Looney, D-New Haven, and Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, sent a letter last week to Gov. Ned Lamont urging him to prepare to combat Trump administration actions that could hurt the state and the region. The request follows California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to hold a special legislative session to ensure there is enough money to take legal action against the Trump administration when necessary. Meanwhile, the governors of Colorado and Illinois are forming a blue state governors’ coalition to oppose Trump administration efforts.

The Biden administration has methodically reinstated many of Trump’s first administration rollbacks and fortified them with both regulatory-enhanced programs and funding, such as in the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure act.

Trump’s own campaign statements and promises as presented in his platform, Agenda 47, as well as Project 2025, could initiate another round of climate change, energy and environmental whiplash.

According to published reports, two of the first administration’s more effective members, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, both former fossil fuel industry lobbyists, are back at work in the transition and could be in line for positions in the new administration.

Within a week of the election Trump named former Long Island Republican congressman Lee Zeldin to run the EPA. He has limited environmental expertise but is a Trump loyalist. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a fossil fuel proponent, was nominated to head the Interior Department and to lead a new National Energy Council. And a fracking company executive, Chris Wright, was named to lead the Energy Department and sit on that council. Wright has said there is no climate crisis.

A close review of the nearly 900-page Project 2025 shows that it targets climate change, as well as energy and environmental programs and regulations. The project seeks to cripple the EPA, curtail if not eliminate funding and subsidies for clean and renewable energy programs — including for electric vehicles — as well as eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. And it would eliminate any focus on environmental justice.

It seeks to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which is popular enough among Republicans whose states and districts have benefitted that 18 members of the House Republican Caucus sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson asking that it not be repealed.

Project 2025 also derides the idea of addressing climate change as a policy goal and seeks to remove even the mention of it broadly throughout government.

It contains pointed political statements such as this: “Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.”

And it makes a number of specific recommendations to remove climate change as a consideration, such as with the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: “End the focus on climate change and green subsidies;” and for the Energy Department: “Eliminate political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.”

Project 2025 would privatize the National Weather Service and dramatically reduce the percentage of funding provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for recovery from disasters like the historic flooding Connecticut, and other states, have experienced due to climate change.

During the campaign Trump disavowed knowledge of the plan, although Agenda 47 says some of the same things in far less detail. It reads: “On Day One, President Trump will rescind every one of Joe Biden’s industry-killing, jobs-killing, pro-China and anti-American electricity regulations,” and “President Trump will DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”

The impacts of any of these would likely be felt down to state and local levels.

Connecticut’s biggest worries

If the Trump administration implements the environmental recommendations of Project 2025, Connecticut as well as other states face the possibility that unspent federal funds for climate and energy projects could be clawed back, costing jobs and the economic development around them.

Among 11 bullet points a conservative administration should pursue in energy policy: “Support repeal of massive spending bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which established new programs and are providing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to renewable energy developers, their investors, and special interests, and support the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs.”

There is also the potential that the funding Connecticut and nearly all states have grown to rely on for large energy and electric grid projects could disappear. Project 2025 calls for eliminating and defunding the Grid Deployment Office.

And there could be the kinds of regulatory shifts seen during the first administration when approvals for offshore wind were slow-walked. Trump, who for years has stated his hatred for offshore wind, has threatened to stop all offshore wind projects on day one, referring to subsidies for them as “insane.”

Connecticut and the entire New England grid has been counting on offshore wind development to bolster its energy capabilities in the face of expanding power needs for economic development around data centers and other large businesses, as well as for electrification needs for motor vehicle charging and heat pump conversions.

Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Katie Dykes steered clear of any hand-wringing when asked what she expects from a second Trump administration. She did, however, note that roughly a quarter of DEEP’s budget for both programs and personnel comes from a variety of different federal grants across a number of different federal agencies, EPA being the big one.

“There are a lot of different scenarios that people are contemplating with the new Congress and with the new administration, but it’s early to say what may happen,” she said. “We’re assessing options under different scenarios, but it’s too early to tell what the impacts will be.”

She ticked off a laundry list of programs that recently received federal money and noted the need to get the funds distributed and implemented. “We’re staying in touch with our neighboring states and with project developers to help understand how we can be nimble in the face of any changes that may come.”

And she said DEEP will be collaborating with the state Attorney General’s office and will follow its lead on any steps that need to be taken to protect Connecticut’s mission and interests.

One likely impact for Connecticut is that Trump’s policies will further prolong the now 50-year battle for clean air.

The state continues to face pollution and ozone levels that have long kept it from meeting federal air quality standards. The entire state does not meet 2015 standards and the southern part doesn’t even meet more lenient ones from 2008. That’s even as still tighter standards were issued in February.

The heat of this summer has once again resulted in a large number of bad air days — 23. The result over time has been persistently high asthma rates in the state, especially among vulnerable populations.

A principal cause is pollution and greenhouse gases that blow in from Midwest power plants running on fossil fuels of oil, gas and coal. Connecticut has long contended the situation violates the Good Neighbor provision of the Clean Air Act designed to keep upwind states from polluting downwind ones.

After four years fighting the first Trump administration’s efforts to loosen regulations on both greenhouse gas and standard pollutant emissions, Tong’s office has remained active the last four years, battling red-state attorneys general attempting to thwart the Biden administration’s tighter Good Neighbor regulations. In June, the Supreme Court stayed those regulations and sent them back to the lower courts.

“It’s not great,” Tong said, when asked whether the case is now stuck. “That doesn’t mean I’m gonna fight any less hard than I have. It doesn’t mean that we are any less focused on it. No one’s giving up, and no one’s saying darn it, because we have Lee Zeldin and a six-three conservative court that we should just move on to other things. It’s clean air; it’s foundational and fundamental to public health, so we’re just gonna keep at it. It’s not optional.”

Reynolds at Save the Sound is equally gloomy, saying the current litigation scenario puts everything several years out — again. “It doesn’t mean that it’s not necessarily going to go forward, but it certainly means it’s not going to be implemented anytime in the near future,” he said. “It’s absolutely a fair assessment that we’re not going to see clean air in Connecticut anytime soon.”

And the axis on environmental and climate regulation is likely to flip again as the Trump administration is expected to replace the Biden rules with their own less restrictive ones. The rulemaking process takes time and is likely to set off a whole new wave of court challenges, delaying things even more.

This session, the Supreme Court is taking up a challenge to the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act that requires in-depth environmental reviews for federal projects. A recent federal appeals court ruling curtailed how those reviews can be structured.

There are also hints in Project 2025 that the second Trump administration might try to overturn the so-called Endangerment Finding, which allowed greenhouse gases to be regulated — specifically as part of motor vehicle, power plant and industrial emissions.

All of these could further limit the tools attorneys general and others have for challenging environmental laws and regulations the new administration may want to overturn from the Biden era and before, or may seek to put in place.

Reynolds points out that states still have a lot of power — to approve power plants and review pipelines, among other things. And he notes that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts specifically allow citizen suits if the federal government isn’t complying with those laws. He said that’s been Save the Sound’s bread and butter in upholding environmental regulations.

“That’s why, since the ‘70s, through all the administrations we’ve had, many of which have put a bull’s eye on environmental regulations, we’ve continued to have progress,” he said. “Our strategy is going to continue to be to enforce these incredibly powerful acts, and fight rollbacks and do what we can to get funding for these initiatives, and to get states and municipalities to take the lead.”

Reynolds isn’t the only one talking about states and municipalities taking the lead.

Brad Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation and a former EPA regional administrator, said simply opposing Trump as state and local officials did during the first administration will not be enough this time, based on what Project 2025 espouses and what Trump has already said, because both clearly cater to the fossil fuel industry.

“What we’ll be pushing for is for states to fill in any gaps that are created by Trump’s attacks on federal agencies and the rollback of some standards,” he said. “A major concern in New England is the climate investments that Biden was able to secure in Congress. Those are enormously important to accelerating New England’s energy transition.”

But if the Trump administration embraces Project 2025’s threat to cut funding to clean energy and other climate-targeted programs, tax incentives and entire programs and offices — across all government, not just environment and energy areas — will states have the money to take the lead?

“States may have to come up with additional funding for the energy transition if the federal government goes into full retreat,” Campbell said.

Focus on the states

“Not going to happen this year,” said Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex and co-chair of the Energy and Technology Committee. “The state budgets before Trump won are already out of balance.”

He noted that many state employees — including at DEEP — are paid in whole or part with federal funds. “If you lose 10% of state employees because their funding is cut directly by federal budget changes,” he said. “I don’t know how we make that up, right? I just think it’s going to be a stressful, difficult time.”

Needleman said he still plans to hold a series of meetings before the legislative session begins to formulate policies and initiatives.

“I do not believe that anyone can fight a battle with only a strong defense. I think we need a combination of a sensible offense and a thoughtful defense about the damage that they can do, because we are going to have a target on our back,” he said.  

His co-chair, Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, said he and Needleman are already trying to figure out whether to resurrect some of the major energy, environmental and climate legislation that failed in the last two sessions. The presumption at that time was that the federal government would be at least neutral, if not supportive broadly of climate change initiatives.

“This may further chill our willingness to take on big things,” he said. “I would never throw up my hands and walk away. But coming into the session I was already feeling frustrated, constrained, finding it difficult to do the things that I think we really need to do, which are of bigger consequence, like a lot of this necessary investment in infrastructure.

“Now you layer in on top of it, either federal preemption of any regulatory framework we might choose, or certainly a cessation or diminishment of funding for the things that we’ve counted on the feds for in the past. It’s very hard to figure, what do we do first?”

Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich and ranking member on the committee, said his goal is to make the best policy he can in alignment with his goals of low cost, reliable and environmentally responsible energy.

“Whether there’s a Democratic presidential administration or a Republican one, and there is going to be both in the next 20 years, and policy at the federal level — you make the best of it,” he said. “I haven’t seen, really in any substantial way, that federal policy has helped us meet those goals in Connecticut over the last decade or so.

“The goal is to make policy on a state level. You can’t count on federal policies. We need things to be sustainable on their own. Subsidies will not solve our woes.”

Steinberg offers some ideas for getting money if federal funding decreases or disappears. He suggests collaborations with the business community or investors. He said it might be worth considering something like taxing data center developers to cover the energy burden they bring. Such a tax could be reduced or eliminated if the company installs solar, geothermal, or some other energy reduction mechanism. “Anything to mitigate their energy burden by like a third or 50% before they can escape this tax,” he said.

The point, Steinberg said, is to figure out ways to get things done. It could be opting for low cost solutions in the near term or working with the Green Bank on private funding sources.

“I think that there are things that we must explore doing, even if it’s going to be harder,” he said.

Others said the transition to clean energy in New England is well underway which will help survive another round of Donald Trump.

“There is so much momentum behind clean energy technologies in particular,” said Julie McNamara, deputy policy director climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s two things at once. There will continue to be progress and there will not be as much progress as there could or must have been.

“Certain things will slow or stop because we’re approaching the parts of the clean energy transition where it gets hard. A lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and so we’re starting to need to take those next further steps, the kind of things where It takes real, intentional work to couple policy with economics and a vision for the future.”

But Steinberg warned against the impulse to just wait Trump out. “It is not only not an answer; it would be irresponsible, in my view.”

He said everyone will need to be creative. “But the one thing we cannot lose is our resolve,” he said. “We just need to keep doing it, because we don’t have a choice.”

Connecticut took on Trump on climate before. It will probably be harder to do it again. is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Tesla owner Elon Musk, right, was hardly alone in the tech sector in supporting the reelection efforts by Donald Trump, left. Many Silicon Valley investors and innovators were hoping for a lighter regulatory hand than they have seen under President Joe Biden. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Some venture capital investors, who have funded the tech boom in Silicon Valley and beyond, say they are excited by the prospect of a lighter regulatory environment under a new Trump Administration than they saw under President Joe Biden.

But they warn that Trump policies that will benefit many technology companies may come at a cost to other pro-Trump voters.

The Bay Area bubble of Silicon Valley, which is home to institutional tech giants like Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe, had been previously seen as a left-leaning region, like many other California communities. But the 2024 election was a unique one, venture capitalists and founders say.

“There’s been a significant shift in the valley rightward since the last election,” said Joe Endoso, a Silicon Valley investor.  “And you’ve seen that in the financial flows — in the level of dollars — that were directed towards supporting President Trump’s campaign from the technology sector.”

Endoso, president of financial tech platform Linqto, said some tech industry people who previously voted for progressive issues and candidates this time cast their ballot for Trump. He said he’s heard more concern about potential regulations in the tech industry and negative economic effects under continued Democratic leadership.

This turn toward Trump wasn’t universal in the Valley. The majority of donations from employees at companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft went toward Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, Reuters reported in September. But tech billionaires like Elon Musk and venture capital investors, like Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, poured millions into his campaign.

While Trump didn’t receive unanimous support from the tech sector, many American tech giants and investors are excited about the light-handed approach to tech regulation that’s likely to come in the next four years. Congress has struggled to pass any federal laws around emerging technology like AI, though states have done so on their own on issues like data privacy, transparency, discrimination, and on how AI-generated images can be used.

The Biden administration, however, on its own issued a number of “best practice” guides for emerging technologies and aggressively pursued antitrust cases against some tech giants, including an ongoing case against Google that could force the company to spin off its popular Chrome web browser.

It appears unlikely that Trump will continue the Biden era regulatory and enforcement drives.

Those working in emerging technologies like AI are making advancements so quickly that regulators are unlikely to be able to keep up anyway, Endoso said. The tech industry mindset — move fast and break things, first coined by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — will likely continue under Trump’s administration.

“You’re running through walls and hoping that when the regulations come about, they’re not going to be so, you know, restrictive,” Endoso said. “But you’re not going to sit and wait for the regulators. You can’t afford to.”

Why care about the VC market?

Venture capitalists pour money into many promising startups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, looking for the ones that will create lucrative new technologies or “disrupt” existing ones. Silicon Valley successes include Uber, which received its first round of venture capital investment for just about $1.3 million in 2010, and Airbnb, which started with just a $20,000 investment in 2008. Today, the companies are worth $146 billion and $84 billion, respectively.

Many more, however, fail. High-visibility startups that folded after raising very large sums include streaming platform Quibi, which raised $1.75 billion and ChaCha, the SMS text-based search platform that had raised $108 million.

The high-risk, high-reward nature of the industry makes for a rarified business, and there’s a high barrier to entry. To become an accredited venture capital investor, one must have an income of at least $200,000 a year, or be worth $1 million. The handful of firms pouring the most money into the United States technology market are usually worth billions.

Yet, the technology being developed and funded by wealthy investors today will shape the next decade of everyone’s lives. Some of the most influential technology in the global economy has been released under President Joe Biden’s administration in the last three and a half years.

Advancements in generative AI and machine learning technology, rapid development of augmented and virtual reality, further adoption of cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, such as internet connected appliances and home devices, along with automation of many industries have already shifted much of American life. ChatGPT, one of the most recognizable examples of generative AI that the public can use, was only released two years ago, but the sector of generative AI is already threatening many American jobs.

Those with writing-focused careers like copywriters and social media marketers, are already feeling the disruption, and experts believe STEM professionals, educators and workforce trainers and others in creative and arts fields are going to see much of their job responsibilities automated by AI by 2030. 

The venture capital market has been a volatile one over the last four years. Though many of Trump’s attacks on Democrats during his campaign cycle centered on the healthy economy under his first term, the COVID-19 pandemic was the single-biggest economic factor to disrupt the venture capital market and others.

The U.S. saw its biggest year for venture capital investments in 2021, but supply-chain issues and the continuing reliance on remote work changed the trajectory of many companies’ plans to go public on the stock market. High inflation and interest rates have kept many investors from deploying capital and many companies from completing mergers and acquisitions since then, although the second half of 2024 is looking up.

The economy quickly became the number one issue for Americans in the presidential election cycle. And though thriving venture capital markets usually benefit those that are already wealthy enough to invest, we’ll likely see a positive correlation in the general markets too, said Scott Nissenbaum, president and CEO of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, an innovation-centered fund in Pennsylvania.

“A thriving, efficient market is good for venture capital. And the flip side is also true,” he said. “We feed into and create the innovations and the efficiencies and the next generation … that create the robust and the boom.”

How investors and founders are preparing for Trump 

Nissenbaum predicts that Trump may remove regulations for technology used by U.S. transportation and military systems, allowing for more tech integration than previously permitted without human safeguards in place. That might look like more flight optimization technology, or more drone usage by military branches. Nissenbaum also thinks Trump will attempt to open up space travel, especially with big backing by Musk, who runs SpaceX.

Health care also has been implementing technology rapidly, and Nissenbaum believes could see some major changes under Trump.

That is of note for healthtech founder Sipra Laddha, an Atlanta-based psychiatrist and cofounder of LunaJoy, which provides in-person and virtual wellness visits for women. The three-year-old company raised venture capital in 2022 and 2023, despite a more challenging fundraising market. Women’s health care companies saw a surge of VC investment in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, an exception to the generally slower investment market at the time.

But she is uncertain about how Trump’s potential cabinet appointees, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was appointed to head the Department of Health and Human Services, will affect LunaJoy’s operation. Kennedy has made health a key issue in his public advocacy and political activity, but he has also espoused eccentric and even false views on issues such as vaccines and pharmaceuticals.

“When women don’t have choices, mental health is significantly worse, and that’s something that goes on, often, for the entire time of that family’s trajectory,”  Laddha said. “So I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen, but you know, those are certainly things that, as a women’s mental health company, we are looking at and watching closely to see what sort of legislation, rules and laws come out.”

When it comes to fundraising early next year, Laddha is optimistic. She’s focused on how fragmented the healthcare industry is right now, and plans to showcase how companies like hers will aim to integrate with larger health systems.

“Our role is to be really as disruptive as possible, and to bring to the forefront the most innovative solutions that we can do while still working within the current framework of healthcare that exists today,” she said.

Some sectors worry about Trump economic policy

While software and cloud-based technologists seem excited by the effects of deregulation, startup founders that make physical products, especially using microchip technology, are wary of Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on imported goods.

Samyr Laine, a managing partner at Los Angeles-based Freedom Trail Capital, specializes in consumer tech and consumer packaged goods. Laine said he feels a sense of relief in ending the “uncertainty” around who will take the presidency the next four years, but he predicts many founders will feel the costly effects of Trump’s planned tariffs, and pass those additional costs to consumers.

Though the existing companies in his portfolio won’t be hit too hard, it’s a factor they’ll be forced to review when considering investments in companies in the future. Those that will incur the additional costs of imported goods will have to adjust their profit margins and might not be as attractive to investors.

“As a consumer and someone who isn’t in the space, not to be like a fear monger, but expect that some of the things you typically pay for, the price will go up,” Laine said.

The effect on work

Although Trump was successful in picking up a significant amount of tech industry elite support this election season, much of his voter base is working class people who will not feel the positive effects of tech industry deregulation.

Endoso, the Silicon Valley investor and founder, says the Trump coalition of tech entrepreneurs and working-class voters represents “a division between the haves and the have-nots.” The usual basis on which people pick their electoral preferences, like race, geography, income and proximity to city life, were “shattered” this time around.

“It was a revolt of the working class, at least in my view,” he said.

The advancements of AI and machine learning, which will enrich the investor class, will have large implications on employment for those working class voters. The vast majority of Americans who are not college educated, and work physical jobs, might struggle to thrive, he said. We’ll likely see overhauls of industries as robots replace and automate a majority of physical labor in warehouses, and self-driving vehicles take over jobs like long-haul trucking and ride services such as Uber and Lyft.

“I think those are important questions to be asking from a policy standpoint, and I think that the intelligent answers shouldn’t be ‘let’s shut the innovation down.’” Endoso said. “That didn’t work in 19th century England. It won’t work here today, right? But it does require our rethinking the definition of work, and the definition of how you … organize a society along lines where you don’t need to have the same level of maybe direct labor input as we had in the past.”

Nissenbaum agreed, saying that AI has already begun to leak into every field and industry, and will only continue to disrupt how we work. As revolutionary as the internet and internet companies were in the late 1990s, the web has become the infrastructure for artificial intelligence to become more efficient and effective at everything it does.

With lighter regulation under a new Trump administration, we’re likely to see AI develop at unpredictable rates, he said. And laborers will definitely be feeling the effects over the next four years.

“You’re not going to lose your job to AI,” Nissenbaum said. “You’re going to lose your job to someone who understands how to do your job with AI.”

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Donald Trump spoke at the March for Life rally in January 2019 during his first term as president. (Mark Wilson | Getty Images)

The 2024 election results created complicated new realities for reproductive rights in the U.S., with Americans even in a few red states overwhelmingly voting to protect the right to have an abortion while also overwhelmingly electing anti-abortion representatives in state houses, courts, Congress and the White House.

With a Republican trifecta coming to the nation’s capital in January, anti-abortion activist groups are planning for the first potentially friendly presidential administration since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated a 50-year federal right to terminate a pregnancy. They aim to end other federal and state protections while vastly expanding restrictions on reproductive health care.

Though many anti-abortion leaders are skeptical of President-elect Donald Trump’s commitment to their cause, they say they are willing to compromise to maintain influence in his administration. Some groups are strategizing how to end-run Trump’s campaign pledge not to enact any federal abortion bans — by heavily restricting medication abortion or trying to ban a common abortion procedure.

“I don’t think we have a champion here for pro-life causes,” said longtime anti-abortion organizer Rev. Patrick Mahoney. “What we have here is someone who will not work against us and try to crush us. We will not see pro-choice federal judges.”

The director of the Christian Defense Coalition and the chief strategy officer of Stanton Public Policy Center told States Newsroom that he is not a supporter of Trump and disagrees with his rhetoric on immigrants. But Mahoney said he is happy Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris lost. The vice president had vowed to try to restore federal abortion rights and throughout her career has advocated for reproductive rights. As California attorney general, she prosecuted anti-abortion activists charged with illegally recording abortion providers about a decade ago.

“We can have an opportunity now to begin the second phase after Roe was overturned,” Mahoney said. “We knew overturning Roe was only a starting line, not a finishing line.”

Live Action president Lila Rose was one of the few prominent anti-abortion leaders who called out Trump before the election, after he criticized Florida’s six-week abortion ban and vowed to veto a federal ban. In late August, Rose told Politico she would write in a presidential candidate and would encourage her millions of followers to do the same if Trump did not change course. On her podcast, the millennial activist recently revealed that she met with Trump and asked him to say he would vote against Florida’s abortion-rights amendment, which he did. Days before the election, Rose endorsed Trump on X.

Live Action did not respond to an interview request.

Nationally, three out of 10 abortion-rights measures failed: Florida’s proposed amendment had the highest threshold to clear, but got 57% out of the required 60% of the vote. It would have reversed the ban that reproductive rights advocates say has decimated abortion access in the Southeast.

Another anti-abortion leader willing to compromise with the incoming president and Congress is Steven Aden, general counsel at Americans United for Life, the policy shop behind many state and federal abortion restrictions. Aden said he was disappointed the Republican Party removed from its platform a previous commitment to a federal ban.

However, he said his group was still able to inject critical language into the current platform that effectively supports states establishing fetal personhood through the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which grants equal protection under the law. The platform also says Republicans “will oppose Late Term Abortion,” a political term used to refer to abortions in the second and third trimesters, the rarest but most restricted types of abortions in the U.S.

“We had direct input into the Trump campaign and framing the pro-life language in the party platform,” Aden told States Newsroom. “The platform language was much pared down, but we believe that the pro-life language preserves the essence of the party’s position on the pro-life issue, and we’re proud of that, and look forward to continuing to work with the incoming Trump administration.”

Federal reproductive rights protections in question

Early into his term, Democratic President Joe Biden began reversing blocks on federal funding domestically and globally for reproductive health organizations that also provide or refer for abortions. Leading up to and following the Dobbs decision, the Biden administration loosened restrictions to the medication abortion regimen, a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, which has become the most common way of terminating pregnancy in the U.S. during the first trimester. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed abortion medication to be obtained via telemedicine and dispensed directly at pharmacies.

Nearly half the country has partially or fully banned abortions. But abortion numbers have risen since before Dobbs, researchers have reported, attributing the increase in part to expanded access to telemedicine abortion and to more people using online abortion clinics that mail abortion drugs from states with so-called shield laws to those with bans.

Anti-abortion groups Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Students for Life of America recently unveiled memos asking the Trump administration to pull regulatory levers that especially target abortion drugs.

Under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, regulations could include:

• The FDA reinstating medication abortion restrictions, such as requiring multiple in-person appointments and revoking telemedicine. Or altogether revoking the 2000 approval of mifepristone.

• Reversing guidelines that under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, emergency departments at hospitals enrolled in Medicare — even in states with abortion bans — must offer pregnant patients the medical treatment necessary to stabilize an “emergency medical condition.” This law is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit deferred by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. In sharp contrast to the mainstream medical community, anti-abortion advocates argue these guidelines are unnecessary and would allow doctors to broadly interpret a health emergency to mean anything.

When asked about stories of alleged denied care, maternal deaths, and doctor confusion related to state abortion bans, Aden chalked up the problem to a misinterpretation of state laws, which he said should be clarified to address these problems, while noting several times, “I’m not a doctor.” Americans United for Life’s recommended health-exception language in part says abortion should be allowed “to preserve the life of a pregnant woman or to address a serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

“That’s a health exception with teeth,” Aden said. “It doesn’t allow for a free-ranging, quote unquote, ‘mental health’ exception that would swallow the rule.”

• Funding a study on the potential health effects of abortion pills in the water system from patients miscarrying in their toilets after taking medication abortion drugs. Anti-abortion leaders like Mahoney said they were disappointed with Trump’s pick for HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has previously said he supports abortion rights. But Mahoney said he’s hoping to appeal to Kennedy’s skepticism of FDA drug approvals. “How do chemical abortions being flushed down the drain affect our water supply? We’re definitely going to push hard on that,” Mahoney said.

• Revoking a rule requiring health clinics that receive federal family planning Title X grants to offer referrals for abortion clinics, which is also the subject of an ongoing federal lawsuit. It is already prohibited to use federal funds for abortions unless the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or has become fatal. Activists also want to defund Planned Parenthood, the largest reproductive health center network, and extend tax credits to anti-abortion pregnancy centers.

Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which manages the country’s largest health programs, is Dr. Mehmet Oz, who opposes abortion.

The U.S. Department of Justice could:

• Enforce part of the 19th century Comstock Act to prohibit the mailing of abortion-inducing drugs. Aden said enforcing this law would likely mean cracking down on online abortion clinics like Aid Access.

• Revoke or refuse to enforce the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act,  enacted because of the sometimes-violent anti-abortion protests of the 1980s and 1990s. One of several activists sentenced to prison for staging a clinic blockade in Washington, D.C., Lauren Handy was also involved in obtaining aborted fetuses outside the same clinic. Trump had indicated he would potentially pardon Handy and fellow blockaders. Activists have said they will also ask the DOJ to investigate the doctor at the abortion clinic from where Handy obtained the fetuses, of whom she and other activists have accused, without evidence, of infanticide.

The U.S. Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs could:

• Revoke policies that expanded abortion access for veterans and members of the Military.

The U.S. Agency for International Development could:

• Reinstate the so-called Mexico City Policy, which barred federally funding international organizations that provide or refer for abortions.

As they brace for the potential impact of Dobbs without a federal safety net, reproductive justice activists are working to expand access and fight anti-abortion laws, while also protecting new state wins. The election results did not change the fact that most people want abortion access, said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, during a recent media press briefing organized by the progressive Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“Donald Trump won the election, but so did abortion, and people need to hold this incoming administration to its word that it would not restrict abortion,” Graves said. “We have to square the idea that millions of people in the United States voted for reproductive freedom … but they also will be experiencing a situation that will become even more dire, and that people will feel scared and hopeless in this period.”

Arguments for a national abortion ban

Aden said AUL would support a federal “dismemberment” bill, referring to a proposed ban on a common second-trimester abortion procedure known as dilation and evacuation, or D&E. This procedure involves dilating the cervix and removing the contents of the uterus, typically performed beginning around 12 weeks. It would be a way to effectively get a 12- or 15-week ban without calling it that.

Despite its safety and efficacy record, the D&E procedure has been banned in several states, over the objection of the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. It’s part of an old anti-abortion playbook, which under Republican President George W. Bush resulted in a federal ban on another later abortion procedure — dilation and extraction, or D&X — by reframing it as “partial-birth” abortion, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 2007’s Gonzales v. Carhart decision.

Abortion foes describe D&Es as a gruesome procedure, or as Aden puts it, “tearing 13-week-old humans apart limb from limb.” Anti-abortion doctors recommend more risky and invasive procedures like C-sections, even when the abortion is medically indicated.

If D&Es are banned, there would be fewer options for later abortions, which are sometimes necessary, said reproductive-health legal expert Rachel Rebouché, dean of Temple University School of Law in Philadelphia. She noted that some of the U.S. Supreme Court justices have indicated support for abortion restrictions for reasons of preserving fetal dignity rather than preserving maternal health.

“That litigation, from the anti-abortion perspective, depends on saying the fetus is a person with rights that attach at a certain point, if not from conception,” Rebouché told States Newsroom. “Dobbs opens the door wide open for those kinds of regulations. … But the question is, is there a role for the federal government to enact a nationwide ban that would curtail the rights of states that have not gone the way of Idaho or Texas or others?”

Aden said that for now AUL will be more focused on the incremental approach to abortion restrictions, as well as calling for expanded child and prenatal tax credits and other social supports. The attorney, who was 11 when Roe was decided in 1973, is expecting another half-century of litigation over abortion with the hopes that one day the U.S. Constitution gives personhood rights to the unborn, regardless of the stage of that pregnancy. Aden said a so-called Human Life Amendment is likely impossible in the near term, needing approval from two-thirds of both houses of Congress. He said U.S. culture is not there yet.

“It would require a cultural sea change in the way that the majority of Americans view human life in the womb,” Aden said. “That’s our second generational goal. Having won our first generational goal of overturning Roe, we’d love to see the day when every life is welcomed and protected in law. And if that’s through a constitutional amendment, then we’re here for that.”

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Environmental advocates are concerned about the second Trump administration's effect on Wisconsin water quality. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump frequently talked about slashing environmental regulations on industry, freeing them up to do as they wish because climate change is a “hoax.” 

With about 70 days until the second Trump administration takes office, environmental advocacy groups in Wisconsin are preparing for how they’ll respond to the actions of the Trump-led Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Agriculture and the Interior as they try to protect the state’s air, water and natural resources. 

Howard Learner, president of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, says the first Trump term had negative effects on the environment, but the difference this time around is that Wisconsin and its midwestern neighbors have Democratic governors, attorneys general and liberal majorities on their state Supreme Courts.

“For the next few years in Wisconsin, there’s a Democratic governor, a Democratic-appointed Wisconsin [Department of Natural Resources] (DNR), a Democratic attorney general and a Democratic majority Supreme Court,” Learner says. “Where previously a number of DNR issues got tied up by the Republican majority, the current Supreme Court has given DNR more latitude to be protective of the environment. So there’s an opportunity for the states to be stepping up if the federal government is pulling back, and Wisconsin should seize that opportunity.” 

Many environmental advocates are also still in “wait-and-see” mode, wondering which party will win control of the U.S. House of Representatives and which members of Congress will control the body’s committees. 

Sara Walling, Clean Wisconsin’s water and agriculture program director, points to areas where there’s broad bipartisan consensus and there isn’t need for concern — largely the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a multi-agency collaboration to protect the largest freshwater lakes in the world. 

“Over the years, since its initial authorization, and then its reauthorization several times now, including during the Trump administration, both parties have really supported Great Lakes Restoration funding and those programs, so we fully expect that it will be intact and continue to be authorized moving forward,” Walling says. 

But she adds there are questions about the level of funding for projects such as cleanup efforts in the Milwaukee River estuary. She also says it’s unlikely progress will continue for starting a similar large-scale restoration project with the Mississippi River. 

Walling says she’s concerned about  the Trump-led EPA’s reliance on scientific research conducted by industries the agency regulates. 

“Generally speaking, the Trump administration in the past, and I don’t see any of this changing going forward, does not tend to rely on science when making a lot of its decisions at the EPA level,” she says.

Walling expects the incoming president’s administration to reject Biden administration EPA provisions “that have really been very heavily supported by really expansive scientific studies,” she says. “There’s a lot of initiatives that the EPA has been undertaking that are really a science-driven exploration of any environmental issue, to use that science as the backing for potentially new regulations.” 

Walling says that the pesticide and agricultural industries are areas where Republicans have complained about what the scientific research has found, and the Trump-led EPA and USDA may swing the pendulum back toward using research conducted by the companies themselves that ignores potential harms to the environment. 

Gussie Lord, the managing attorney of the tribal partnerships program at Earthjustice, says that for Wisconsin’s Native American tribes, the environmental concerns of the Trump administration focus largely on the construction of the Enbridge Line 5 oil pipeline in northern Wisconsin and the delisting of the gray wolf, once again allowing the animal to be hunted in the state. 

“We don’t know for sure what’s going to happen or what their priorities are going to be, but we can look at the previous Trump administration and the things that have been said by his advisors and former advisors, and we can surmise that there’s going to be a focus toward more extractive industry practices, including mining, oil and gas,” Lord says. 

Lord says protections under the National Environmental Policy Act, wetland protections under the Clean Water Act and subsidies for green energy are all at risk of being reduced. He also considers it likely that the new administration will approve federal permits for Line 5.

On Friday, Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who represents much of northern Wisconsin, wrote in his weekly email newsletter about “tapping into America’s clean oil and gas resources” and that removing the gray wolf from the federal endangered species list is a priority under the new administration

“I am committed to passing my legislation that will return gray wolf management back to the states, allowing us to protect our communities and rural livelihoods,” he wrote. 

In the previous Congress, Tiffany was a member of the House Committee on Natural Resources and chairman of the subcommittee on federal lands. During his last term, he allied with right-wing anti-conservation group American Stewards of Liberty to oppose conservation projects in northern Wisconsin. 

American Stewards of Liberty (ASL) played a role in developing Project 2025, the policy plan written for the Trump administration. The president-elect said during the campaign the document wasn’t going to reflect his administration, but Trump allies have touted it as a playbook for his term in the days after his victory. 

Charlie Carlin, director of strategic initiatives at Gathering Waters, which focuses on land conservation in Wisconsin, says ASL’s ideology becoming a main aim of the federal government’s environmental policy is worrying. 

“If we take seriously that Project 2025 is essentially a guiding document for what the next Trump administration looks like, then I think we need to be really concerned about the future of permanent land conservation, kind of across the board,” Carlin says. That extends to agricultural land and working forest land as well as natural and wildlife areas, he adds.

ASL and Tiffany have been outspoken in their support for extractive industries, and Carlin says he’s worried about the trade-off  the Trump administration appears likely to make. 

“I think it’s incredibly concerning — what’s the long term sustainability of both the landscape and the economy of northern Wisconsin if the levers of federal government are used to incentivize extraction [which] in northern Wisconsin is likely to be open pit mining,” Carlin says. 

“There’s potentially a major short term economic gain for the wealthiest — for the people who are the owners of those mining companies, or folks who invest in those companies.” he adds. “But then what suffers there is both water quality and forest land cover for the long term. So maybe you get 10 years or maybe a generation worth of revenue … extracted as you’re mining, and then you’re left with many generations of poison water or impaired water quality.” 

He adds that short-term gain could result in a long-term loss in more sustainable industries, diminishing property tax values for communities in the region.

“If you strip the timber off of the land in order to dig a big hole to extract minerals, then what you don’t have is the regular annual income that supports loggers and that supports the truckers and that supports the mills,  and also, that land base supports the outdoor recreation economy and the second-home economy that provides so much of the property tax base up north,” Carlin says. “And so what you’re talking about is this sort of short term blitz that is going to benefit a very few people at the consequence of the long term environmental and economic health of the entire region.”

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The Biden administration has enacted the most consequential federal clean energy and climate policy in U.S. history, giving the nation a fighting chance at reducing greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to deal with the climate crisis. Former President Donald Trump, who has won the 2024 presidential election, has pledged to undo that work.

Though Trump’s executive powers will allow him to slow the energy transition in a number of ways, the extent to which he rolls back Biden’s clean energy accomplishments will be dictated in part by whether Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives. The GOP flipped the U.S. Senate, but votes are still being counted in key House races as of Wednesday morning.

Here’s what clean energy and climate experts say is most likely to be lost under a second Trump administration — and what might survive.

What Trump has said about energy

Trump’s rhetoric presages a worst-case future. He has called climate change a hoax and the Biden administration’s climate policies a ​“green new scam.” He has said he wants to repeal the landmark Inflation Reduction Act and halt the law’s hundreds of billions of dollars of tax credits, grants, and other federal incentives for clean energy, electric vehicles, and other low-carbon technologies.

Trump has also made ​“drill, baby, drill” a call-and-response line at his rallies, pledging to undo any restraints on production and use of the fossil fuels driving climate change. U.S. oil and gas production is already at a record high under the Biden administration.

“He has pledged to do the bidding for Big Oil on day one,” Andrew Reagan, executive director of Clean Energy for America, said during a recent webinar.

“Oil and gas lobbyists are drafting executive orders for him to sign on day one,” Reagan added, citing news reports of plans from oil industry groups to roll back key Biden administration regulations and executive orders.

A Trump administration would be all but certain to reverse key Environmental Protection Agency regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, light-duty and heavy-duty vehicles, and the oil and gas industry, all of which analysts say are necessary to meet the country’s climate commitments. It’s also almost sure to lift the Biden administration’s pause on federal permitting of fossil-gas export facilities.

Trump has also promised to withdraw the U.S. from international climate agreements (again), including the Paris agreement aimed at limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

“We know that Trump would take us out of the Paris agreement, and that would be the last time his administration uttered the word ​‘climate,’” Catherine Wolfram, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and former deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics in the Biden administration’s Treasury Department, told Canary Media. ​“Losing that global leadership would be one of the greatest losses of a Trump presidency.”

What will happen to the Inflation Reduction Act? 

Trump won’t have the power to enact all of his promises on his own. Some of the decisions must be made by Congress, including any effort to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act or to claw back unspent funds from that law or the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

Complete repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act would be highly disruptive to a clean energy sector that has seen planned investment grow to roughly $500 billion since the law was passed in mid-2022.

It would also undermine clean energy job growth, which has increased at roughly twice the pace of U.S. employment overall. A recent survey of clean energy companies found that a repeal of the law would be expected to lead to half of them losing business or revenue, roughly one-quarter losing projects or contracts, about one-fifth laying off workers, and about one in 10 going out of business. 

“We found that especially rural areas and smaller rural communities would experience the largest negative impacts of repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act,” Shara Mohtadi, co-founder of S2 Strategies, said in an October webinar presenting the survey data. ​“These are the regions of the country that have seen the biggest uptake in the economic benefits and the manufacturing jobs coming from other countries into the United States.”

Indeed, most of the investment and job growth the IRA has spurred has taken place in states and congressional districts represented by Republicans.

These on-the-ground realities have driven expectations that large swaths of the law’s tax credits would be likely to survive even with Republican control of the White House and both houses of Congress. Trump would face pushback within his own party to undoing the law entirely.

In an August letter to current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), 18 House Republicans warned against repealing the clean energy and manufacturing tax credits created by the Inflation Reduction Act, which have ​“spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country — including many districts represented by members of our conference.”

“Prematurely repealing energy tax credits, particularly those which were used to justify investments that already broke ground, would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing,” the 18 House Republicans wrote. ​“A full repeal would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return.”

Republicans would need a roughly 20-seat majority to overcome opposition from these party members opposed to a full repeal, said Harry Godfrey, head of the federal investment and manufacturing working group of trade group Advanced Energy United.

“I don’t envision Republicans holding the House with 20-plus seats,” he said.

Godfrey also doubted that a Trump administration would be eager to undermine the domestic manufacturing boom that the law’s tax credits have spurred. He noted that at the October 1 vice-presidential debate, J.D. Vance, the Republican Ohio senator and Trump’s running mate, emphasized the need for the U.S. to ​“consolidate American dominance” in key energy sectors and industries now dominated by China.

While Vance went on to falsely accuse the Biden administration of failing to bolster U.S. industries against China, the goal of emphasizing domestic competitiveness could lead Republicans to avoid undermining progress in that direction, he suggested.

How Trump’s second term could derail the clean energy transition is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

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A scene from the nine-day march to the Wisconsin State Capitol in 2022. Marchers, organized by Voces de la Frontera, demanded immigration reform from the federal government. (Photo | Joe Brusky)

As an undocumented American I have been holding my breath throughout this campaign season. I am fortunate to have Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, but like millions of other immigrants, I’m not just worrying about health care reforms or economic policies. We are fighting for our lives, our loved ones, and the dream of one day belonging to the only place millions of us call home. This election feels like a perilous moment in time where everything is hanging in the balance. 

Each campaign rally, debate, and potential policy change announcement feels personal. Each candidate’s words either threaten or bring solace. 

There is a blend of excitement and fear but overall dread. The deep lingering fear of deportation on the horizon and the impact of living in constant uncertainty, but on the other hand there’s a spark of possibility that finally one of these candidates will do right by us. That maybe, just maybe a pathway to citizenship is within reach. Every time that hope grows, it is shadowed by the possibility that things might never change or worse, regress.

We can’t take a day off from  the dreadful reality of living day-to-day as an undocumented person in a country that has increasingly polarized views on immigration regardless of who’s in office. Many of us have been here for years, working hard, contributing to Medicaid and Social Security funding with no security for ourselves. Yet in some corners of this nation we are still viewed as outsiders. We live in constant fear of our families being separated, and the grumbling feeling that we are somehow “illegal” and as if our existence is a crime.  We hope to finally be seen  as human.

The heaviest burden is waiting for the next administration to change everything for us, not knowing if whoever is in office  will truly follow through for better or worse. There’s a part of us that wonders if we’ll ever be able to celebrate a concrete win. And so we wait, quietly and carefully, trying to believe that hope will be justified. 

Watching from the sidelines, we know that a path to citizenship would not only change our lives but would be an affirmation that we are finally a part of American history. And so we wait, with a knot in our throats, our future hanging on the outcome. Knowing that no matter what happens, we will keep fighting to belong in a place where we call home.

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Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Eric Hovde in the 2024 Senate campaign debate | Screenshot via Youtube

This year’s race to represent Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate presents  a stark contrast between incumbent U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and challenger Eric Hovde.

Baldwin, a  two-term senator who previously served in Congress for more than a decade and in state and local office before that, faces Hovde, a banker whose only political experience was a failed Republican primary run for the same seat 12 years ago.

Baldwin points to the results of her lifelong work in politics — successful legislation addressing health care coverage, veterans, manufacturing and human rights, and also ambitious measures that have not passed yet.

Hovde is dismissive of Baldwin’s record and depicts his business background as an asset he can use in Washington to benefit Wisconsin. Combative during their only debate on Friday, Oct. 18, as well as in public interviews, he has  taken a leaf from the playbook of former President Donald Trump, both in style and in the subject matter that he highlights.

Whether control of the Senate remains with the Democrats or shifts to the Republicans could turn on the outcome of the Wisconsin race, one of a handful getting close scrutiny in this election.

Negative campaigning has been commonplace for decades, but it’s especially prominent in the Baldwin-Hovde race.

“There’s a lot of mud being slung,” says Lilly Goren, political science professor at Carroll University in Waukesha. “It’s not as if we haven’t had mudslinging in Wisconsin politics before, but it feels like there’s a little bit more going on.”

Heavy attacks

From the moment Hovde entered  the race, Democrats have pounced on the bank owner’s California connections, starting with his Orange County mansion and his high profile in the Southern California community, where a local publication named him among the county’s “most influential people.” In press releases, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has taken to calling him Eric Hovde (R-Laguna Beach).

Hovde defends himself as a Wisconsin native and still a legal resident who  maintains his voting registration in Madison. At the debate he pulled out a utility bill to prove he has a local address.

Democrats have pushed for Hovde to declare that if elected he would remove himself from SunWest bank, which operates in California but moved its headquarters a few years ago to Utah. In September, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that Hovde said he would “step away” from the bank and was considering whether to put his assets in a blind trust if he goes to Washington.

Hovde, meanwhile, has pushed back with accusations that Baldwin’s partner, Maria Brisbane, an investment and wealth management adviser, puts the senator in a conflict of interest in connection with Baldwin’s Senate oversight roles.

The Senate’s ethics rules don’t address such a relationship, however. When Hovde raised the matter during the debate, Baldwin retorted that “Eric Hovde should stay out of my personal life, and I think I speak for most Wisconsin women that he should stay out of all of our personal lives.”

Reproductive rights

That response alluded to an issue that Baldwin has highlighted repeatedly: abortion and reproductive rights. During a rally with vote canvassers earlier in October, Baldwin recalled that Hovde “celebrated when the Dobbs decision came down” in June 2022 overturning the nationwide right to abortion enshrined in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision a half-century ago.

Referring to positions Hovde took in his 2012 GOP primary campaign, she added, “Previously he said he was 100% against abortion, and we have to take him at his word.”

Hovde has endorsed the Dobbs decision outcome for leaving the legality of abortion up to individual states. But he has also appeared to soften somewhat his earlier statements of opposition, saying several times, including in last week’s debate, that “women should have a right to decide early on in their pregnancy,” but not defining what period of time that would involve. 

Under Roe, abortion could not be regulated by the state during the first trimester. Later in pregnancy, abortion restrictions were permitted.

During the debate, Hovde accused Baldwin of supporting abortion  late in pregnancy, “where a baby can be born healthy and alive,” calling such abortions “unconscionable.” Baldwin quickly shot back, “Eric Hovde, that does not happen in America and it’s very clear that he has never read Roe v. Wade.”

Baldwin has authored legislation to codify the Roe decision. “I’m pushing to have that be the law of the land. Your rights and freedom should not depend on your ZIP code or the state in which you live,” she said.

Notwithstanding the wide range of other subjects that have surfaced in the race, Goren, the Carroll University professor, said in an interview that she’ll be watching how abortion and reproductive rights in the post-Dobbs era continue to play out at the ballot box.

“This is an issue area that both campaigns are focusing on in different ways,” she said. Wisconsin’s 1849 feticide ban — interpreted as an abortion ban for the first year and a half after Roe was rolled back until a Dane County circuit judge ruled that it did not apply to elective abortions — has given the topic new urgency  for many women in the state.

Farm bill clash

When asked whether he would support passing the 2023 farm bill during the debate, Hovde answered, “Well, I’m not an expert on the farm bill because I’m not in the U.S. Senate at this point.” Then he launched  into a call for farm bills “to get back to farmers” and to address the “regulations that Senator Baldwin and her allies continue to push on them.”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Dan Bice called Hovde’s answer “the worst moment” of the debate.

For Baldwin, it offered a target that allowed her to promote her recent endorsement by the Wisconsin Farm Bureau — the GOP-leaning group’s first endorsement of a Democrat in nearly two decades.

Wisconsin farmers have told her “they’re very eager to have Congress pass a new farm bill,” she said. The hold-up, she added, was that the Republican-controlled U.S. House has “basically eviscerated nutrition programs. Farmers support nutrition programs because it means purchasing their goods.”

Citing one of Hovde’s key talking points — calling for a cutback in federal spending to 2019 levels — she added that it would “cut the U.S. Department of Agriculture by 30% — that is not standing up for our farmers.”

Incumbent’s resume

Challengers typically deploy “career politician” as an epithet, but for Baldwin the term is both accurate and a point of pride. She readily traces some of her key legislative victories through that history.

Earlier this year, marking the passage in 2022 of the PACT Act, giving veterans exposed to toxic chemicals in conflicts  going back to the Vietnam War greater access to federal benefits, Baldwin recalled her introduction to the issue through a staffer when she was still in the U.S. House.

Likewise, she frequently points to the key role she played in shaping the  Affordable Care Act (ACA).

“It was my provision that allowed young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance till they turned 26,” Baldwin said during the  debate, repeating a campaign talking point.

Among her most recent trophies is language in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that for the first time empowers Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs. The act also imposes caps on the out-of-pocket expenses Medicare recipients must bear and limits their cost of insulin to $35.

“We need to build upon the Affordable Care Act, and we need to build upon our efforts to negotiate lower prescription drug prices,” Baldwin said during Friday’s debate.

While health care has been among her top concerns, she also directs attention to other parts of her lawmaker’s resume.

Economy and rebuilding U.S. industry

When President Joe Biden’s administration and allies in Congress drew up the CHIPS and Science Act to support the return of technical manufacturing from overseas to the U.S., particularly in the computer chips that gave the legislation its nickname, Baldwin turned to a 2019 Brookings Institution industrial policy report.

Drawing on that document she pitched the inclusion of a “technology hub” program that would direct federal funds to support the development of specialized advanced domestic production projects.

After the bill was enacted, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. worked with Bio-Forward, a consortium of industries and institutions in the state, to propose a tech hub focused on the emerging science of tailoring medical diagnosis and treatment to the individual genetic profiles of patients. Baldwin championed the Wisconsin entry for a competitive tech hub grant, then joined an event in August to show off one of the participating businesses.

Those and other major initiatives that emerged from Congress and the White House in the first two years of the Biden administration exemplified a vision that government has a role to play working with the private sector for economic development.

The CHIPS and Science Act’s objective to revitalize domestic tech manufacturing was in the service of national and economic security in the U.S. “That takes a government investment to be able to do that,” said Lisa Johnson, Bio-Forward’s executive director at the August event.

She also has introduced her share of bills that haven’t made it out of even one house of Congress, but in some of those she’s found a measure of victory. In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission finalized a rule aimed at curbing stealth investors who try to grab control of struggling companies out from under the owners and management in order to make a quick buck.

The rule had its origins in legislation that Baldwin sponsored in 2017 after the shutdown of a paper mill in Wisconsin’s Marathon County led the village where it was located to dissolve. While the bill didn’t advance, some of its language made it into the new SEC rule.

Baldwin’s office enlisted the support of the mill’s displaced executive, who praised the persistence and patience of the senator and her staff in seeing what became the new rule through to enactment.

The story reflects Baldwin’s success at allying with a wide range of constituents with a wide range of concerns — as well as with lawmakers across the aisle, like Republican Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, with whom she’d cosponsored the original legislative proposal.

“I fight for Wisconsin and only Wisconsin,” Baldwin told the debate moderators, “which means I’ll work with Republicans or Democrats, Republican administrations or Democratic administrations — to get the job done for Wisconsin but also stand up to them.”

Tying Baldwin to Biden

Hovde’s campaign has been largely built on three arguments: that the major federal legislation signed by Biden and championed by Baldwin has been not just ineffective but harmful; that immigration is out of control and hurting the country; and that Baldwin has been an ineffective politician with nothing to show for her 12 years in office.

Along with those critiques, he’s presented himself — the scion of developers in Wisconsin and the owner of a $3 billion bank in California, where he owns a $7 million home in Laguna Beach — as an experienced business operator who can bring a fresh face to Washington.

In his arguments on the economy and on immigration, Hovde has been largely in step with Trump. Hovde, who received Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement, spoke from the stage at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, even before handily winning his party’s nomination as the designated Senate candidate, and has appeared at numerous other Trump events.

In those public appearances, including last week’s debate, Hovde has attacked the incumbent almost constantly — shaking his head as she answered the questions posted by Wisconsin journalists at the event, then accusing her of lying repeatedly without offering specifics.

Wisconsin Democrats, meanwhile, have run TV ads citing more than a dozen instances in which independent fact-checkers have accused Hovde of lying in ads and public statements.

Hovde has railed against the signature bills Biden helped shape and signed — pandemic relief, the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act.

At the debate Baldwin used Hovde’s opposition to the latter law to charge that Hovde “opposes efforts to negotiate the price of prescription drugs, saving patients and Medicare money.”

Provisions capping the out-of-pocket drug costs for Medicare patients and forcing drug companies to negotiate prices were part of the Inflation Reduction Act, she observed.

“My opponent would have voted against that measure. He’s said that many times,” Baldwin said. “We are seeing real reductions in prices that will save both patients money but will also extend the solvency of Medicare.”

Hovde took sharp offense to the assertion that he opposes negotiating drug prices, without addressing his opposition to the law that has made drug price negotiation possible. “I think drug prices are wildly too high and I’ll actually do something about it,” he said, without specifying what his response might be.

Inflation and immigration

Hovde has zeroed in on the 2021-22 inflation spike, blaming it primarily on the Biden legislation. “That’s why inflation got ignited,” he said at Friday’s debate, blaming Baldwin for “reckless spending.”

In addition to attacking Democrats on the economy, Hovde has echoed Trump’s campaign in criticizing Biden for ending a series of Trump executive orders restricting migrants.

At Friday’s debate, Hovde threw out figures for migrants in Biden’s first three years in office that added up to 10 million — a number that far exceeds any official estimates from federal agencies or non-government organizations that track immigration policy. He added, “We don’t know how many come in but it’s flooded our streets with fentanyl. We have criminals that have entered into our country and it’s created a humanitarian crisis.”

Political ads supporting Hovde have attacked Baldwin on the immigration issue.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, however, cartels mainly seek to move the drug across the border with the help of U.S. citizens. 

Baldwin has endorsed a bipartisan bill that the Biden administration reached with a group of conservative Republican senators but that the U.S. House Republican leaders killed at Trump’s urging.

Hovde has defended killing the bill, calling it a sham. “It wasn’t going to change any of the asylum laws or immigration laws at all,” he said.

Baldwin countered that the defunct legislation was “the toughest border bill that we’ve seen in years,” with provisions to add 1,500 border patrol agents along the Southern U.S. border. It also included technology to scan incoming vehicles for fentanyl.

She charged that Trump, with Hovde’s support, “wanted the political issue” of the immigration controversy. “They wanted the chaos,” she said. “They didn’t want a solution.”

With the attacks and counter-attacks, what started as a 7-point lead for Baldwin in the polls has narrowed considerably, with some polls showing the two neck and neck.

Despite that, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay political scientist Aaron Weinschenk says he believes a Hovde upset is unlikely. Baldwin easily won her last reelection bid in 2018, including in Republican areas like rural Richland and Lafayette counties, which Trump carried in the last two elections but which voted for Baldwin by more than 10 points. 

Baldwin “is pretty popular in Wisconsin,” Weinschenk said. “She’s like threaded the needle in appealing to people and you know different parts of the state that maybe you’d think of as being pretty Republican. It might be narrower than previous races, but I’d be surprised if she lost.”

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