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2025-04-25 23:23:47

The Department of Justice has restored two previously canceled grants supporting victims of violent crimes, including domestic violence, following a Mother Jones report on Thursday that highlighted the critical roles the programs played for survivors.

The DOJ informed the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) and the National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) on Thursday night that officials would restore the grants they previously canceled on Tuesday. Those cancelations were reportedly part of mass cuts to grants worth more than $800 million, according to Reuters, that supported victims of gun violence, addiction, and domestic violence. The terminations came as especially ironic in light of President Donald Trump’s campaign trail pledge to “protect women” if re-elected and to offer “unending support to every victim of crime” per a proclamation he issued for National Crime Victims’ Rights Week earlier this month.

Mother Jones was the only news outlet to report on the NNEDV grant cancelation, which supports an email hotline that offers personalized legal information for survivors in English and Spanish. The canceled, and since-restored, $2 million, three-year grant was intended to “increase awareness of and enhance access to its Spanish email hotline services.” On Tuesday, NNEDV officials learned that the remainder of the grant, about a half million dollars, was cut. A spokesperson previously said that while the NNEDV hoped to keep the services going with alternative funding, they would wind up being  “drastically reduced.”

In a statement provided to Mother Jones on Friday, Stephanie Love-Patterson, the organization’s president and CEO, said that while officials are “relieved and appreciative” that the grant cancelation was reversed, “the concerns and heartache remain, as this highlights the vulnerable state of services for survivors, which will affect those who need them most.”

As I reported yesterday, advocates and lawmakers are also concerned that further cuts could be coming from the Office of Violence Against Women at the DOJ, which scrubbed funding opportunities from its website in February. The latest reversals follow restorations of other canceled grants to shelters that support survivors’ pets, as I previously reported.

Mother Jones was one of several news outlets that reported on the NCVC grant cancelations on Thursday, which were also reversed. The restored grants include one that supported its VictimConnect Resource Center, a helpline that provides emotional and logistical support to survivors; a spokesperson for NCVC said Thursday that the helpline would indefinitely shutter Friday at 5 p.m. EST as a result of the cancelation of the $2.8 million grant. Another grant, which supported programs for crime victims around the country, was also restored, according to an NCVC spokesperson. A third canceled grant, used to create a resource guide for lawmakers and advocates who want to observe the annual National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, was not restored, the spokesperson added.

“We’re celebrating at NCVC today, but the reality is that our partners in the field, all of whom also provide vital victim services all around the United States are still facing a funding crisis,” Renée Williams, NCVC CEO, said in a statement Friday. “There are thousands of great people in our country who have dedicated their careers to ensuring that victims don’t have to find justice alone. As a society, we owe it to victims and providers to make sure those services remain available.”

Spokespeople for the DOJ did not immediately respond to questions Friday morning.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously bragged about the mass cuts in a post on X, calling the canceled grants “wasteful,” was noticeably silent about the about-face on Friday.

2025-04-25 18:19:00

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

China will continue to push forward on the climate crisis, Xi Jinping has said while appearing to criticize the “protectionism” of Donald Trump’s tariff policies.

The Chinese president was attending a closed-door virtual meeting with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and about a dozen other heads of state and government to discuss the climate crisis.

Xi told the meeting that China would “not slow down its climate actions,” according a draft of his remarks. He did not name the US or Trump but made apparent reference to them while noting that China had “built the world’s largest and fastest-growing renewable energy systems as well as the largest and most complete new energy industrial chain.”

Xi said: “Although some major country’s persistent pursuit of unilateralism and protectionism has seriously impacted international rules and the international order…as long as we enhance confidence, solidarity and cooperation, we will overcome the headwinds and steadily move forward global climate governance and all progressive endeavors of the world.”

After the meeting, Guterres said no government or fossil fuel interest could hold the world back from pursuing a clean energy future. “The world is moving forward, full speed ahead,” Guterres said. “No group or government can stop the clean energy revolution. Science is on our side, and the economics have shifted.”

Guterres did not mention Trump directly but the actions of the US president clearly overshadowed the meeting. The Guardian understands that the US administration was not invited to the online summit.

China’s presence was key. It is unusual for Xi to take part in such meetings but China appears to be attempting to position itself on the world stage as a stable and predictable superpower, a leader to developing countries, an economic partner and a counterweight to the unpredictability of Trump.

The global trade war launched by the US president is hitting the US economy hard, with stock markets plummeting and bond investors seeking other havens for their money.

China has responded by putting controls on some of the minerals and other materials that are critical for clean energy technology such as electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and batteries.

China is snubbing a separate summit to be held on Thursday and Friday in London, hosted by the UK government and the International Energy Agency, to discuss the future of energy security. The US will be represented at the London meeting by Tommy Joyce, the acting assistant secretary for the office of international affairs at the US Department of Energy.

The White House was forced to deny this week that there were plans for new restrictions on the activities of nonprofit organizations that advocate for action on the climate crisis, after widespread rumors of a fresh executive order in the offing.

Guterres told journalists on Wednesday that China, Brazil, the EU, and the other countries and blocs present—including the heads of government of the countries currently chairing the African Union, the Asean group of Asian and Pacific countries, and the Alliance of Small Island States—had expressed “a unifying message” of support for climate action.

He said: “Our world faces massive headwinds and a multitude of crises. But we cannot allow climate commitments to be blown off course.”

At the high-level UN meeting on Wednesday, countries affirmed the collective agreement to put forward their national plans on greenhouse gas emissions by September, before the next UN climate summit, Cop30, which will take place in Brazil in November.

Guterres also urged countries to provide more climate finance to poor and vulnerable nations and set a roadmap for how to deliver the $1.3 trillion a year promised to the poor world by 2035 at last year’s Cop29.

2025-04-25 18:00:00

When we think of “organizing” we tend to think of protesters—of scruffy and earnest demonstrators taking on giant corporations, of people with cardboard signs standing in the cold or the sun. But, really, organizing is any concentrated attempt of the (relatively) small and many to stand up to the mighty and the few, and the last few days have seen some of the most unlikely and potentially effective organizing in a long time.

In this case, the small and many were not people used to thinking of themselves that way. Instead, they were university presidents and boards of trustees—almost without exception, people of real distinction and power in their communities. I’ve served on university boards and broken bread with hundreds of college presidents (the price of lecturing to their students), and I know the breed: they tend toward the cautious and the conciliatory, but they have big reserves of local influence. They are, invariably, pillars of the community.

And so when Trump decided to try and crumple those pillars, they decided to stand up, circulating a letter that’s now been signed by more than 400 college presidents. It was—perhaps only after the Hands Off demonstrations and Tesla takedowns—the most effective response yet to the creeping fascism in the Oval Office.

Everyone took their lead and their nerve from Harvard, where president Alan Garber and board chair Penny Pritzker pushed back hard a week ago against the administration’s attempt to basically take over the university in order to enforce something called “viewpoint diversity.” Harvard’s sharp response obviously stunned the White House, which had doubtless been lulled by Columbia University’s pathetic capitulation; as is often the case with bullies, Trump started looking for a way to back down, with his people eventually claiming that they had sent Harvard their diktat “by mistake.”

But by that time, the damage had been done—other educational leaders saw both the danger and the opportunity to confront it. For the first time, really, since James Conant in the Second World War, Harvard’s leaders have been serving the role they should as leaders of higher education. The extraordinary privilege of these places comes with the implicit promise that when the chips are down, they’ll actually stand up: that’s why Harvard’s Memorial Chapel is lined with the names of men who went off to die as officers in the world wars. In recent years, the Ivies have been too content to be finishing schools for Morgan Stanley; now perhaps they’re remembering their obligations.

The letter these hundreds of presidents have been signing is not strident or impolite; it acknowledges that there’s always room for improvement in any institution, but it definitely gets the point solidly across: “As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”

The list of signatories is wonderful to read—I’ve been on the majority of these campuses over the years, and so they summon up memories. Grinnell College, in the cornfields of Iowa, where my beloved aunt and uncle taught Latin and Greek to five decades of young scholars; St. Lawrence College, near the Canadian border, where I once gave a June graduation speech in a swirling snowstorm (shortest address ever!); Warren Wilson College, the North Carolina work school where I spent a day working alongside the livestock crew.

My own institution, Middlebury College, is between presidents, so we got both the interim president, Stephen Snyder, and his soon-to-be replacement Ian Baucom; our former president, Laurie Patton, who stepped down in January to head the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, not only signed the letter but did much to circulate it, so of course there’s hometown pride for me. But for lots of other people too: by many reports, alumni have been suddenly mailing in checks to their alma maters.

You could, I suppose, call all of these institutions the “elite,” though a tag that covers both Yale and Framingham State, Princeton and Hudson County Community College, doesn’t mean much. But this is a group of people self-selected to care about the idea of education and the future. They’ve been much abused in recent years, when one interest group after another has beaten up on them for being too hard or too soft on Gaza protesters, too accommodating to students climbing walls, too concerned with trigger warnings; the New York Times ran what seemed like a thousand op-eds attacking Harvard’s Claudine Gay last year for not being sufficiently anti-anti-Semitic. It’s mostly nonsense—college administrators are no better than anyone else at dealing with angry protesters; most of their efforts and expertise are about coming up with new degree programs to address the local nursing shortage, or raising enough money to fix the roof on the fieldhouse.

“Colleges and universities,” they write, in words that seem to me both restrained and correct, “are engines of opportunity and mobility, anchor institutions that contribute to economic and cultural vitality regionally and in our local communities. They foster creativity and innovation, provide human resources to meet the fast-changing demands of our dynamic workforce, and are themselves major employers. They nurture the scholarly pursuits that ensure America’s leadership in research, and many provide healthcare and other essential services. Most fundamentally, America’s colleges and universities prepare an educated citizenry to sustain our democracy.”

It’s that last bit, about sustaining democracy, that perhaps has not been their strong suit in recent years: If there’s a reasonable complaint against higher education, it’s that it’s perhaps tried too hard to make students feel comfortable, when a little challenge would be a more useful introduction to the hurly-burly of our current democracy. But challenge is what they’re providing now; this is the college president equivalent of gathering on the quad with candles for a vigil. Their document is designed to send a message to Washington (“back off—we’re unified enough to cause you trouble”) but it’s also a teaching document. It says, when someone questions your honor and your purpose, you better stand up.

It’s a lesson that won’t be lost on decent people.

2025-04-25 06:59:44

Donald Trump’s tariffs are wreaking havoc on the global economy while millions of Americans—including some of his own advisors—are furious.

Even as many voters watch their retirement and education savings vacillate wildly, MAGA World maintains the president knows exactly what he’s doing—it’s just “the art of the deal,” they say. But as our new video explainer points out, history tells a very different story.

Trump loves to reference the times in American history when tariff rates were much higher, pledging to usher in a new Golden Age. Trump’s hero, William McKinley, was the epitome of a pro-tariff president, and is a fixture of his speeches. But even a quick look at the facts doesn’t support Trump’s nostalgia for the 1890s. 

The McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 was both a political and economic disaster. Republicans lost four Senate seats and 86 House seats, and despite Trump’s praise of McKinley as the “tariff king,” the US economy soon plunged into a depression from 1893-96. 

McKinley’s tariff policies aren’t the only red flag in history. Some experts contend that the global economic instability created by America’s tariff policies in the 1930s played a role in increased tensions around the world, including militarism in Japan and the rapid deterioration of Germany’s economy and democracy.

Today’s economy is far more interconnected than ever—and Trump as unpredictable—rendering any prediction futile. What we do know is that Trump is succeeding at one of his objectives: Churning up chaos to get his way.

2025-04-25 04:48:09

On Tuesday night, Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA), received an email from the Office of Justice Programs at the Department of Justice (DOJ) that left her devastated.

The message informed her that a federal grant that supported a pilot program to train victim advocates who staff domestic violence shelters, hotlines and rape crisis centers was being cut. The program, called the Victim Advocacy Corps, began in 2022 and selected 15 students from six colleges and universities that serve minority populations to take part in a year-long, paid fellowship at local organizations, including campus-based sexual assault programs, domestic violence agencies and family justice centers. The DOJ notice claimed the grant “no longer effectuates Department priorities,” which it said were focused on “more directly supporting certain law enforcement operations” and “combatting violent crime.”

To Selib, this rationale made no sense. “Our victim advocacy corps members are providing direct victims services in communities across the country,” she told me by phone on Thursday afternoon. “Cutting these programs puts victims at risk and cuts essential lifesaving services.”

The pilot program also aimed to solve turnover among advocates caused by low pay and an uptick in domestic violence that experts attribute to the pandemic and new abortion restrictions. “I would say quite frankly that our workforce is in crisis,” Selib said. “Our goal with this program was to create a pipeline for the new generation of victim advocates.” Selib had hoped the program would eventually expand nationwide.

Selib’s grant was one of hundreds the DOJ reportedly canceled on Tuesday that supported victims of gun violence, addiction, and domestic violence. According to Reuters, the canceled grants were valued at more than $800 million when they were awarded. In a post on X, Attorney General Pam Bondi bragged about the cuts, alleging the grants were “wasteful” and highlighting a few examples that supported LGBTQ people. She told the Washington Post she has been “a lifelong advocate for victims of crimes against women” and claimed she “will continue to ensure that services for victims are not impacted.”

But experts say that the grant cancelations will, in fact, be particularly devastating for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, who tend to be mostly women and LGBTQ people. These anticipated outcomes are a far cry from Trump’s campaign trail pledge to “protect women” if re-elected and to offer “unending support to every victim of crime” per a proclamation Trump issued for National Crime Victims’ Rights Week earlier this month. (Spokespeople for the Department of Justice and the White House did not immediately return requests for comment from Mother Jones.)

Hundreds of state and national organizations focused on combatting domestic and sexual violence have drafted a letter they plan to send to Bondi, requesting assurance that those services will continue to be funded. “Local, state, and national service providers have been anguished and panicked to receive recent notices terminating their federal grants,” they write. “The terminations of grants, programmatic restructuring, loss of staff, disappearance of [funding opportunities], and lack of communication from DOJ to the field are causing grave insecurity and alarm across the nation” for providers, the draft adds.

Stephanie Love-Patterson, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), said in a statement that the latest cuts “will have devastating, real-life consequences for survivors and their children.” Love-Patterson’s organization provided free legal information for victims, including via an email hotline, for more than 25 years. Its website offers state-by-state information on divorce, custody, and child support laws and its hotline served nearly 6,300 survivors in both English and Spanish last year. Much of that work was funded by a $2 million grant dispersed over three years. On Tuesday, Love-Patterson learned that the remainder of the grant, about a half million dollars, was cut.

A spokesperson said the organization aims to keep services afloat using its other funds, but they will wind up being “drastically reduced.”

The National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) announced that it lost a $2.8 million grant Tuesday that will force it to indefinitely close its VictimConnect Resource Center, a helpline that provides emotional and logistical support. Last year, the helpline supported more than 16,000 victims, according to the organization. “We’re shocked that an administration that claims to care about protecting victims would leave so many vulnerable Americans without access to an essential lifeline,” Renée Williams, the organization’s CEO, said in a statement.

The group also lost a grant to build peer-support group programs for crime victims around the country and another grant the team used to create a resource guide for lawmakers.

Crystal Justice, chief external affairs officer of The National Domestic Violence Hotline, noted that many organizations that received termination notices were already underfunded, and that the Hotline is anticipating a surge in calls due to the cuts. “Reduction in services and support for victims means more women, men and children will be harmed,” Justice said.

It appears that Bondi has sympathy for some victims, though. The DOJ reversed some cancelations of grants for shelters working to accommodate survivors’ pets, NBC News reported. (Many shelters do not allow pets, which can prevent survivors from leaving their abusers.)

About 24 hours after Jennifer Pollitt Hill, executive director of the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence, received a notice Tuesday night that a grant to help local shelters support pets would be canceled, she got word she would get to keep the funds. Then a third, more personal note arrived, from Maureen Henneberg, deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ. That note said shelters supporting pets were “critical..to broadening the safety net for survivors,” and said that Bondi “personally extends her appreciation” to the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence. “Our understanding is that all the pets grants were reinstated as it is a passion area for the AG,” Pollitt Hill told me.

The most recent round of cuts are the latest challenge facing domestic and sexual violence service providers across the country. Earlier this month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s purge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) led to the elimination of the team working on efforts to prevent sexual and intimate partner violence in the Division of Violence Prevention, as my colleague Kiera Butler reported. The steady depletion of a critical pot of money for providers has also put lifesaving services for survivors in peril long before Trump resumed office, I reported last year.

Even more devastation could be coming. In February, the DOJ’s Office of Violence Against Women scrubbed funding opportunities from its website, leading advocates to worry that those funds could also be cut. More than 100 House lawmakers drafted a letter they plan to send to Bondi on Thursday requesting the DOJ “clarify the status of these grants as soon as possible and take swift action to ensure funding remains available to support survivors and the organizations that serve them,” NBC News first reported.

Selib, who oversaw the pilot program of young victim advocates, is also worried.

“When we cut these services,” she said, “frankly, all Americans are at risk.”

Correction, April 24: A previous version of this story misreported the name of Attorney General Pam Bondi.

2025-04-25 03:29:55

A federal judge on Thursday blocked key parts of a sweeping anti-voting executive order issued by President Donald Trump in March. Voting rights advocates described the order as “an astonishing and unprecedented voter suppression” effort that would upend how Americans register to vote, how they cast their ballots, and how their votes are counted.

District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, found that Trump lacked the power to unilaterally change election rules. “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States—not the President—with the authority to regulate federal elections,” she wrote.

For that reason, she blocked the centerpiece of Trump’s executive order—a requirement that voters show documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Trump ordered the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent agency created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, to mandate that information on a federal voter registration form.

Democrats and voting rights groups who challenged the order, including the League of Women Voters and League of United Latin American Citizens, argued that Trump lacked the authority to force the EAC to require proof of citizenship. The order, if enforced in full, would prevent tens of millions of Americans from registering to vote.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 9 percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents like a birth certificate or passport. Trump’s order could disenfranchise many more people than that because it does not specify that birth certificates or naturalization papers can be used to determine US citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote. And because driver’s licenses in most states don’t specify citizenship, those without access to their birth certificate would have to use a passport to register to vote, which 146 million Americans don’t have.

“If this policy were implemented, it would block tens of millions of Americans from voting,” Eliza Sweren-Becker of the Brennan Center told me in March. (The House passed a bill in April, the SAVE Act, that would also require proof of citizenship to register to vote, but it currently lacks the 60 votes necessary to pass in the Senate.)

Judge Kollar-Kotelly agreed that Trump did not possess the power to unilaterally change how Americans registered to vote. “Neither the Constitution nor any statute explicitly grants the President the power to dictate the contents of the Federal Form,” she wrote. “On the contrary, both the Constitution’s Elections Clause and the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act] vest control over federal election regulation in other actors, leaving no role for the President.”

In a partial victory for the administration, the judge declined to block other parts of Trump’s executive order, including one provision that gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Government Efficiency enhanced power to search for alleged non-citizen voters on state voter lists. (Non-citizens on such a list are exceedingly rare.) Another provision that was not blocked penalizes states that allow ballots to be counted after Election Day, so long as they are postmarked by the day of the election.  

“On the present record, challenges to those provisions are premature or properly presented not by these plaintiffs but by the States themselves,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote. “In fact, many States are already bringing those challenges elsewhere.” Nineteen states, led by Massachusetts, have sued the administration over the executive order, which could lead to further provisions being blocked in subsequent litigation.

Voting rights groups celebrated Thursday’s order.  

“President Trump’s attempt to impose a documentary proof of citizenship requirement on the federal voter registration form is an unconstitutional abuse of power,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “If implemented, it would place serious and unnecessary burdens on everyday Americans and strain already overburdened election officials. This executive order is part of a broader attack on our democratic elections by promoting baseless nativist conspiracy theories. Today, the court blocked a key strategy of this attack. And we will keep fighting to ensure every eligible voter can make their voice heard without interference or intimidation.”