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2026-04-28 23:20:13

One of the Trump family’s biggest crypto plays is in turmoil. Investors are furious. The value of its digital tokens is tanking. And no one seems to know what exactly is going on with its finances.

When it was unveiled 20 months ago, World Liberty Financial was pitched as a firm that would provide a new, blockchain-based way to bank. But it has yet to launch a consumer platform to do much of that, and the price of one of its few offerings—a digital asset that would ostensibly let owners vote on the company’s big financial decisions—has cratered in recent weeks, losing 50 percent of its value since January. And now, following a nasty war of words, the company is being sued by one of its major investors: erstwhile Trump-crypto super-fan Justin Sun.

But amid the chaos, World Liberty Financial (or WLFI, for short) has emerged as one of the Trumps’ most effective sources of enrichment during the 47th president’s second term in office. They’ve reportedly raked in more than $200 million by selling shares in the company and the tokens it produces. And even if the price of these assets falls, buyers still might be getting something valuable: the opportunity to put money directly into the first family’s pockets.

For a lot of folks older than Barron Trump (the company’s official “DeFi visionary”, all this is pretty baffling stuff. So let’s explain it, starting from the beginning.

What exactly is World Liberty Financial, anyway?

World Liberty Financial was founded by the Trump family and a small group of associates—including the Witkoff family—in 2024, at the height of the presidential campaign, as a decentralized finance, or DeFi, company. DeFi refers to crypto-based financial services platforms that, in theory, take all of the traditional operations of a big bank and move them onto the blockchain, the digital ledger behind well-known crypto products like bitcoin.

The Trumps initially held as much as 86 percent of the company, but in 2025, shortly before Trump’s inauguration, they sold a big chunk to the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ ruler. But the Trumps still control the company and the majority of the digital governance tokens that it has issued.

But what does WLFI actually do?

Supposedly it’s going to free the world from meddling, controlling, and woke banks—and from Wall Street financiers. The idea behind DeFi is that most of the transactions that people currently do through banks—lending and borrowing money and transferring funds, for example—can be carried out on the blockchain more cheaply and transparently.

When the Trumps announced they were establishing World Liberty, they leaned hard into the idea that they would be liberating the masses from the “financial elites.”

Despite the dramatic imagery, that hasn’t yet happened; the company’s website still says its app is “coming soon.”

Are companies like WLFI really going to revolutionize the economy?

Perhaps one day, but some experts are skeptical. Corey Freyer, director of investment protection at the Consumer Federation of America, says that the whole concept of DeFi is suspect. Theoretically, it offers a human-free way of banking, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to scale a totally anonymous and automated experience in a user-friendly way, he explains.

“There are these huge, huge tech barriers to getting into DeFi that make it, even for the crypto-curious, ultimately, too complex,” says Freyer, who was the chief crypto adviser to Gary Gensler, President Joe Biden’s crypto-skeptical chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. “What it has become useful for is money laundering and illicit financing.”

World Liberty Financial hasn’t been accused of participating in any such crimes. It hasn’t done much of anything at all, other than issuing two kinds of crypto assets. (More on those below.)

So that means the Trumps aren’t making much money from this project?

LOL.

World Liberty Financial has been extraordinarily lucrative for the Trump family. Shortly after the company launched, it began selling something called WLFI tokens. These tokens are digital assets that (again, in theory) allow the holder to vote on key decisions made on how to run the company. They’re not exactly cryptocurrency, but—like a meme coin or an NFT (both of which Trump also markets)—they can be resold. In other words, they have some value as long as someone is willing to buy them. And some people are always willing to buy what Trump is selling. In total, the sale of the tokens has raised more than $550 million, and Trump and his family personally collected a portion of that—the president’s last financial disclosure listed his take at $57 million, as of June 2025.

The Trump family has also cashed in another way: through sales of the company’s privately held stock. While the aforementioned WLFI tokens offer holders some voting rights, they don’t convey an ownership stake in the company itself. If you want a share of the business, you have to buy the company’s actual stock. These shares aren’t publicly listed, and when the company was created, the Trump family owned as much as 86 percent of them. But four days before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan—the brother and national security adviser to the UAE’s leader—paid $500 million to purchase 49 percent of the company. According to reports, the Trump family cleared at least $187 million from the sale.

Wait…what?? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

To put it mildly, yes.

Sheikh Tahnoon, sometimes known as the “spy sheikh” for his role in managing his country’s intelligence efforts, has also worked for years as an intermediary in international politics. He has visited the White House and has been involved with high-level regional negotiations—with the Trump administration.

He’s also an extremely influential investor. He chairs the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the emirate’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund. He has his hand in a slew of investments, including in SpaceX, Blackrock, Waymo, Sotheby’s, Savage X Fenty, and the Manchester City soccer club. That’s not all—he’s also spearheading the UAE’s financial involvement in data centers and AI, through which he has invested in OpenAI, TikTok, and Affinity Partners, the investment firm run by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. (In 2021, Kushner also banked a $2 billion investment in this venture from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund).

One thing that World Liberty Financial has accomplished is the creation of a stablecoin called USD1. It’s a kind of cryptocurrency that’s not supposed to fluctuate in value; instead, it’s pegged to the price of the US dollar. Stablecoins—there are quite a few—are potentially useful for investors or currency traders who want to move money between different cryptocurrencies.

The big break for USD1 was a May 2025 agreement between an investment firm owned by Sheikh Tahnoon (who had yet to be revealed as a World Liberty investor) and Binance, the controversial crypto exchange. In that deal—just months into Trump’s second term—the sheikh’s firm used USD1 to complete a $2 billion investment in Binance. The massive transaction gave USD1 instant credibility.

OK, but what’s the difference between WLFI tokens and USD1?

They are both digital assets issue by World Liberty, but they serve two very different purposes. Unlike USD1, the WLFI tokens aren’t pegged to the dollar, which means their value can fluctuate wildly. And overall, that value has fallen dramatically. Also unlike USD1, a WLFI token gives the holder the right to vote on matters related to the operation of the firm. In that way, it’s similar to a traditional share of stock, but, again, unlike a stock, the token doesn’t give you an ownership stake in the company. So a token is only useful if there is something meaningful to vote on.

So what exactly are the WLFI holders voting on?

World Liberty Financial hasn’t held many meaningful votes, notes Molly White, a prominent crypto researcher. She estimates there have been about 10 votes in all. “There have been a [few] but not on anything major,” she says. “They didn’t hold a vote on whether to create the stablecoin, it’s been on sort of minor things.”

Something that arguably should have received a vote, Freyer says, is the Trumps’ compensation. But that detail—written into the company’s founding principals, or protocol—was never subjected to a token-holder plebiscite.

“One thing that’s pretty locked down in the protocols is the share profits that the Trump Organization gets from its participation,” Freyer says, noting the Trumps were guaranteed to get 75 percent of the WLFI tokens to start off with. “In most DeFi protocols, that would be the thing that you can vote on if you don’t like. In this one, it’s untouchable.”

Why has the price of WLFI tokens been collapsing?

WLFI first hit the market last August, at $0.45. That turned out to be its peak price. Since then, it’s fallen more than 80 percent, with a particularly dramatic plunge earlier this month. It’s currently hovering a bit above 7 cents per token.

Some of the recent collapse seems to be linked to investor worries about a series of loans that World Liberty Financial received from friendly companies. In exchange large cash infusions, World Liberty offered up massive amounts of WLFI tokens as collateral. Now investors are trying figure out what’s going on, and their fears appear to be contributing to a downward spiral in the token’s value.

“I think a concern is that it’s not clear why they would do this, and there are potentially concerning reasons,” says Molly White. “What are they doing, and why are they doing it, and is something bad happening? And I don’t think it’s clear.”

Why would investors worry about these loans?

This part gets pretty complicated.

Back when the company and all the tokens were created, there were fairly strict rules prohibiting insiders and early buyers who got big blocks of tokens from selling them off quickly. That’s meant to create stability in the token—to avoid the infamous “rug-pull” danger that crypto traders dread.

But some investors are starting to worry that the World Liberty loan deals could drive down the token price, and that fear seems to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. These loans are indeed complex. Last summer, World Liberty’s founders—including CEO Zach Witkoff, the son of Donald Trump’s special envoy for Middle East peace—entered into a deal with a crypto services company called Alt5, a publicly traded firm. Alt5 said it would sell $1.5 billion in shares of its own company and use the proceeds to buy WLFI tokens. As part of the deal, World Liberty would get shares in Alt5, and World Liberty executives, including Eric Trump, would take over top jobs at Alt5. Neither Alt5 nor World Liberty Financial returned requests for comment.

More recently, World Liberty has started borrowing money from Alt5, using WLFI tokens as collateral. It’s a circuitous and not-entirely-easy-to-follow set of transactions, but it essentially allows World Liberty to get its hands on more cash than it previously had access to.

World Liberty struck a similar deal with a company called Dolomite, in which World Liberty borrowed $75 million from Dolomite and put up WLFI tokens as collateral. The two firms are independent from each other, though one of Dolomite’s top executives is also an adviser to World Liberty. The transaction might be a good deal for World Liberty—cash in exchange for collateral in the form of an asset it just created—but for Dolomite, it seems like a risky bet on the value of WLFI tokens. Indeed, since that deal was consummated, the token price has dropped by more than 20 percent.

In other words, after essentially creating the WLFI tokens out of thin air, World Liberty is now using them as collateral to borrow actual money. Is it a good idea?

“It depends on who you ask,” White says. “Whether you think that’s a genius financial strategy or a very questionable one, it is a very common crypto strategy.”

The fact that these deals were made with companies that have connections to WLFI executives is making some token-holders nervous. White says there are fears in the market that someone is trying to cash in, but, she adds, no one seems to know exactly what is going on.

Earlier this month, World Liberty took steps to shore up confidence, proposing new restrictions on the sale of tokens by insiders. The company has also dismissed concerns about its dealings, saying they are merely the product of “FUD” (crypto/investor speak for “fear, uncertainty, doubt”).

So far, the token’s price hasn’t recovered. But Corey Freyer, the Consumer Federation of America expert, says that the token’s most tangible value may be as a way to ingratiate oneself to Trump. The president receives transaction fees on the sale of tokens, which, in Freyer’s view, makes them something akin to a potential “Starbucks Card for presidential bribery.”

Have any of WLFI’s investors sued?

Funny you should ask.

For months, World Liberty Financial has been engaged in a brutal fight with crypto mogul Justin Sun. Sun has always courted publicity—he is the guy who spent $6 million to buy a banana taped to the wall at Art Basel. (He ate the banana). He runs his own crypto exchanges, which attracted attention—and a civil fraud lawsuit—from the Biden-era SEC. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Sun sided with Trump, and shortly after the election, Sun announced he was purchasing $25 million of WLFI tokens .

In the days before Sheikh Tahnoon’s huge investment, Sun’s purchase was a major deal—the first significant investment in a World Liberty project. Sun followed up with another $50 million in WLFI token purchases. He also became the top investor in the president’s separate $TRUMP meme coin.

By last spring, Sun had established himself as the poster boy for the crypto industry’s full embrace of—and investment in—Trump. That embrace worked out well for the industry. The Trump administration slashed regulations and enforcement. In February 2025, the SEC agreed to put its lawsuit against Sun on hold while negotiating a settlement. A year later, Sun settled the case for a relatively paltry $10 million.

Yet Sun’s friendly relationship with World Liberty Financial didn’t last. Last fall, when he should have been eligible to begin selling some of his WLFI tokens, World Liberty announced that it had frozen a number of accounts, including Sun’s. Since then, Sun has been unable to access his tokens.

The company declined to explain exactly why it took that step, though it has accused Sun of engaging in “misconduct that required World Liberty to take action to protect itself and its users.” The recent turmoil involving World Liberty’s loans and token price gave Sun a renewed opportunity to blast the company, saying he was its “first and largest victim.” World Liberty Financial’s X account posted a mocking response that concluded, “See you in court, pal.”

On Wednesday, Sun filed his lawsuit.

2026-04-28 19:30:00

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

The war launched by the United States and Israel on Iran has caused an unprecedented disruption in global energy markets, bottlenecking 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas. We don’t yet know exactly what this means for the fight against climate change. But, thanks to two new reports released last week, we now have the clearest picture yet of the path the world was on before the conflict sent the price of oil soaring—and it was a path where the fossil fuels threatened by the war were less central than ever to meeting growing global energy needs.

The world is entering an “age of electricity,” according to the reports, which come from the International Energy Agency, or IEA, an intergovernmental organization that publishes the world’s most authoritative analyses on the global energy sector, and the think tank Ember. That’s because core economic activities that traditionally involve burning oil and gas—driving cars, heating buildings, and even running industrial processes like steelmaking—are increasingly powered by electricity instead. And, most importantly for the climate fight, an ever-larger share of that electricity is coming from renewable sources. 

The two new analyses confirmed that 2025 was a banner year for renewable energy. Solar power was the single biggest source used to meet humanity’s growing appetite for electricity. New power generation from the broader suite of carbon-free sources—including wind, nuclear, and hydropower—actually exceeded the overall rise in electricity demand, meaning renewables began to displace fossil fuel sources. If this trend sticks, it would mean that the so-called energy transition meant to shepherd humanity out of the climate crisis is no longer theoretical.

“This was a year when the economy boomed, electricity demand grew very healthily—and still all that demand growth was met with renewables,” said Daan Walter, a lead researcher at Ember. 

In 2025, renewables edged out coal in global electricity generation for the first time in more than a century. This progress was fueled by China and India, the world’s two most populous countries that together comprise 42 percent of global fossil power generation. The nations both saw electricity generated by fossil fuels fall in the same year for the first time this century. Like other countries around the world, China and India have been rapidly building out solar, wind, and battery infrastructure. (The cost of batteries fell 45 percent in 2025, an even steeper decline than the 20 percent drop in costs that analysts tracked in 2024.)

There’s another sign that 2025 marked a turning point in the energy transition, according to the Ember report: Unlike in past years, the plateau in fossil fuel use was not tied to a recession. Global economic growth last year was normal, which indicates that renewable energy is driving a structural trend away from fossil fuels when it comes to generating electricity. 

But that doesn’t mean that oil, gas, and coal use are nearing extinction. When it comes to the broader energy economy, rather than just electricity generation, the IEA’s report finds that renewables still aren’t displacing fossil fuels fast enough to force a sustained decline in the world’s use of greenhouse-gas-emitting energy. (This is because not all energy—for instance that which currently powers jets, cargo ships, and many motor vehicles—is generated from electricity.)

As a result of complications like these, global carbon dioxide emissions reached a record high last year, rising 0.4 percent from 2024 levels. The pace of the increase, however, is declining as renewables rise. For years, emissions declines were driven by developed countries like the United States and European Union member states. Last year, however, emissions from advanced economies grew faster than emissions from developing countries for the first time since the 1990s, according to the IEA. 

The trend reversal was driven by the US, where coal demand rose 10 percent last year. Rising natural gas prices prompted power producers to switch back to coal, which had been displaced by fracked natural gas in recent years. Plus, electricity use rose thanks to a harsh winter across much of the eastern part of the country, as well as the rollout of industrial-scale power customers like the data centers needed for new artificial intelligence applications.

But trends in the opposite direction in developing countries played a role, too. In Indonesia, for example, electric cars now comprise more than 15 percent of new car sales—a larger share than in the United States and up from virtually zero in the early 2020s. Many customers are “leapfrogging” gasoline-powered cars altogether and purchasing an EV as their first vehicle.

“The energy transition was conceived as something that is led by the developed world, and the developing world kind of hobbles after at a slower pace,” said Walter. “We’re now seeing ‘leapfrogging’ across the world where actually developing economies are going faster in many ways than developed economies.”

2026-04-28 18:00:00

Today, the Florida Legislature will vote on a bill that would make it significantly easier for parents to skip their children’s routine childhood vaccinations. The bill would allow exemptions “based on the parent’s religious tenets or practices or conscience,” meaning essentially that parents would no longer need to demonstrate medical or religious reasons for exemptions. Any ideological objection would be considered a valid reason to forgo shots that prevent potentially deadly diseases such as polio, tetanus, and measles.

The proposed changes are the latest salvo in Florida’s war against public health doctrine, from its chafing against pandemic restrictions to its flouting of guidelines around water fluoridation, restrictions for SNAP benefits, and erosion of vaccine requirements. The driving force behind this crusade is state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, whom I wrote about with my former colleague Julianne McShane last year.

During the pandemic, Ladapo quickly made a name for himself with his contrarian approach. On his first day in office in September 2021, he formalized a rule that allowed parents to choose whether to follow school mask guidelines. Later that year, he issued a report recommending against Covid vaccines for healthy children, which flouted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. In 2023, he asked the Food and Drug Administration to stop all Covid vaccines, components of which he claimed could “transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell.” (The FDA called those statements “misleading.”) In 2024, during a measles outbreak, he issued a statement announcing that the state would be “deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance” instead of following the CDC’s 21-day quarantine guidelines. Last fall, Ladapo and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced their goal to eliminate vaccine mandates from state laws.

Ladapo, who didn’t respond to our request for comment for this story, became surgeon general after a career in public health that included MD and PhD degrees from Harvard and tenures at prestigious hospitals. But as our previous investigation uncovered, his approach to vaccine policy may also be informed by a set of beliefs that sit somewhere between libertarianism and new age mysticism. In his memoir, he chronicles his ongoing relationship with a charismatic guru and former Navy SEAL named Christopher Maher, whose treatments profoundly influenced Ladapo’s worldview. In 2019, Ladapo’s wife, Brianna, urged her husband to sign up for sessions with Maher. “Thank the Lord I listened,” he writes in his memoir, “because after working with him, I finally became truly free.” 

[Maher’s] online bio says he has training in traditional Chinese medicine, but the treatments he offers appear to be something else entirely. He describes one of them, “Body of Light,” as “a verbal, energetic, transmutation process that allows the body, brain, and nervous system to locate, transmute, and discharge negative generational stress, tension, and distortion-inducing patterns.” 

Another, which he calls “Sha-King” medicine, “directly addresses complex stress patterns by improving subtle energetic health by shaking (‘sha-king’) the entire body in random, non-specific movements that are out of syncopation.”

Ladapo writes that some of his sessions with Maher consisted of Maher marching up and down his back.

The discomfort I experienced as he stomped on me was intense, and I went from feeling acute pain to feeling a sense of enjoyment, and—as incredible as it must sound—at one point, I even felt like a tiger. Christopher explained that this was my spirit animal. As I learned from him, Ma Xing engages the urinary bladder channel, which is the master channel in Chinese meridian theory. Further, he explained that this channel has access to every aspect of a human being’s behavior and thoughts, including their mind, brain, physical being, spiritual energy, and emotional intelligence.

The sessions were, Ladapo recalls, “the closest thing to a ‘miracle’ I have ever experienced in my life.”

Ladapo writes that his wife is another profound influence on his life and work. She once described herself as an “Energetic Healer, Certified Naturopath, Movement Therapist, and Integrative Health and Wellness Coach.” Brianna has also written a memoir in which she recalls her own journey of transformation with Maher.

The “most profoundly important” lesson she learned from Maher, though, was the revelation that people choose all the things that happen to them, both positive and negative, to fulfill the divine purpose of their soul. “I chose to incarnate into an unhappy family,” she writes, because “that situation best supported the lessons my soul was seeking this time around.” Her family, she realized, “volunteered to play their respective roles in my life for the purpose of triggering my reawakening.”

Even children, she writes, choose the harm that they experience. In fact, some children opt for “lives of sacrifice,” an insight that emerged from a vision she had of herself as a young mother with three children, each of whom she was forced to watch get burned alive at the stake. She and her daughters had chosen for that to happen to them “in that specific way, in order to highlight the atrocity of that practice [of burning people at the stake] and encourage its retirement.” 

As Julianne and I wrote, Brianna’s beliefs offer a possible explanation for Ladapo’s approach to vaccine policy.

If you believe that people—including children—choose their own suffering for obscure reasons connected to reincarnation and energetic vibrations, you might not be so concerned with the potential harms of ushering in a new age of infectious disease. Ladapo’s book also helps explain his thinking. If vaccines and masks are not considered prudent treatment and prevention efforts but, instead, manifestations of fear, it’s much easier to disparage them.

It’s impossible to know for sure what informed Ladapo’s thinking on parental exemptions and vaccines. But it’s clear that the policies he’s helped shape could transform the state’s, and country’s, relationship with preventable illnesses. Florida’s bid to loosen restrictions on vaccine exemptions comes as cases of measles are increasing across the country. Nationwide, there were 1,792 confirmed cases as of last week, making this the largest outbreak of the disease since the US declared it eradicated in 2000. With 153 cases this year and last, Florida has the fourth-highest case count of all states, behind South Carolina, Utah, and Texas. That number could surge if the Florida Legislature passes its new bill and more parents opt out of vaccination.

2026-04-28 05:22:08

First Lady Melania Trump kicked off the backlash against Jimmy Kimmel on Monday.

Donald Trump and Karoline Leavitt soon followed. 

Then came the Trump administration’s army of right-wing supporters. 

In a skit that aired last Thursday, the talk show host made fun of Trump, his family, and his supporters in a parody version of the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner, during which it’s traditional to roast the politicians in attendance.

In the bit, Kimmel took aim at the president over his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump’s physical appearance and widely-panned documentary from this past January, and Stephen Miller’s white supremacism. 

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” the first lady posted on X in a rare public statement on Monday morning. “Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand.” 

The president escalated his wife’s condemnation, posting on Truth Social three hours later, insinuating a connection between Kimmel’s remarks and the shooting at Saturday’s dinner and heaping pressure—for the second time since taking office—on ABC and Disney, who owns the network, to fire Kimmel. 

“Jimmy Kimmel, who is in no way funny as attested to by his terrible Television Ratings, made a statement on his Show that is really shocking,” Donald Trump wrote. “A day later a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents Dinner.”

At Monday’s White House press briefing, Karoline Leavitt similarly tied Kimmel’s jokes to the shooting: “We as Americans must recommit ourselves to resolving our differences peacefully.”

“The deranged lies and smears against the president have led crazy people to believe crazy things, and they are inspired to commit violence because of those words,” Leavitt continued. “It is not just the media, it is the entire Democratic Party.” 

Several far-right content creators also weighed in, including MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, who wrote on X that the host had wished “death on President Trump and his supporters time and time again.” (Johnson’s claim came without evidence or reference to specific remarks of Kimmel’s, and does not appear to be tethered in fact, however remotely.)

Last year, the right pressured ABC to drop Jimmy Kimmel after the host argued that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points from the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

But comedy is legal again, right? And free speech is good and shouldn’t be subject to federal censorship, and hate speech isn’t acceptable?

2026-04-28 04:14:01

On Monday, the US Supreme Court heard arguments over Bayer AG’s efforts to shut down the thousands of lawsuits alleging its product Roundup, a weedkiller containing glyphosate, causes people to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.

Bayer, a German company which bought the American agrochemical giant Monsanto, has spent the better part of a decade fighting more than 100,000 lawsuits from plaintiffs seeking “billions and billions” of dollars. Glyphosate has been linked to cancer in numerous studies, but the Environmental Protection Agency maintains that it is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” President Trump, meanwhile, has declared glyphosate “critical to national defense,” and signed an executive order to boost production of the weedkiller.

In court today, Bayer is seeking a ruling that would give it legal immunity from lawsuits by cancer patients and their families. Some of those same cancer patients showed up in front of the Supreme Court to protest today—as did an improbable cast of characters.

Make America Healthy Again influencers like “The Food Babe” and “The Glyphosate Girl” streamed from DC Monday—but more mainstream figures like Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) spoke at the rally outside the Supreme Court, too, as did environmental activists with groups like the Center for Biological Diversity.

On the legislative end of things, meanwhile, Representatives Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are teaming up against Bayer’s lobbyists, who are attempting to pass a provision in the 2026 Farm Bill that would permanently prevent state and local governments from issuing warnings about the risks of pesticides, giving Bayer even greater legal immunity.

“This is not to grant farmers immunity. This is to grant corporations immunity,” Massie said earlier this month. “If farmers contract cancer from this chemical, if this makes it into the Farm Bill you won’t be able to sue.”

As the Farm Bill moves through Congress and the Roundup case moves through the Supreme Court, government agencies are still using massive amounts of glyphosate, including, as a new investigation by my colleague Nate Halverson reveals, in America’s forests.

2026-04-28 03:40:55

In March 2024, the Food and Drug Administration under President Joe Biden introduced a new rule that would have banned, after decades, the use of electric shocks on disabled children as a form of punishment. A ban on forcibly shocking kids—which the American Academy of Pediatrics says causes “long-lasting adverse physical and psychological impacts,” was set to come into force last year—but the Trump FDA kicked the can down the road, giving itself more time to decide whether its new leadership was on board.

Now, two years later, the FDA’s website claims that a decision will be made in the coming days on whether or not to follow through.

Massachusetts’ Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC), the focus of a 2007 Mother Jones investigation, remains the only known US institution to use electric shock devices to control—and punish—disabled youths in its care, many of whom are autistic or have mental illnesses, like schizophrenia.

The FDA’s new rule, if finalized by the Trump administration, doesn’t prohibit all types of shock therapy. Electrical stimulation may still be used voluntarily for things like smoking cessation, for example, and the rule won’t affect the electroconvulsive therapy devices used to treat conditions like major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. But the types of devices used by JRC would be banned from the market.

“We know from the testimony of survivors and experts that this torture inflicts injuries, trauma and lasting harm,” Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said.

The FDA banned involuntary shock for self-injurious or aggressive behavior in 2020, but was overruled the following year by a federal appeals court panel that questioned the agency’s authority to institute such an order.

The House of Representatives then passed legislation in 2022 that would have banned using the supposed treatment to control the behavior of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, but the bill never cleared the Senate. In September 2023, Massachusetts’ highest court ruled that JRC could continue shocking children in its care.

Proponents of shock therapy claim that it calms people with intellectual and developmental disabilities who are engaging in the behaviors at issue. But there is no evidence that supports this claim, according to the FDA, and shock therapy can have side effects. “These devices present a number of psychological risks including depression, anxiety, worsening of underlying symptoms, development of post-traumatic stress disorder, and physical risks such as pain, burns, and tissue damage,” Owen Faris, former acting director of the FDA’s Office of Product Evaluation and Quality, said in a statement in March 2024.

During the rulemaking process, nearly 800 people and groups submitted comments. Most favored reinstating the ban. “Autistic people need help, not punishment,” wrote River Bradley, an autistic person who submitted comment, “and they are getting punished for things like not taking off their coat and for screaming out in pain from being shocked.” One parent of an autistic person noted that the stimulation devices “used at the JRC are much more powerful than the taser I carried” as a police officer—and that the criteria for shocking kids in the institution’s care were much looser.

As Mother Jones previously reported, several “students” died while receiving shocks at JRC. Dr. Matthew Israel, the center’s founder, resigned in 2011 after being accused of interfering with an investigation. Authorities were looking into an incident in which a person called the center impersonating a supervisor and demanded that two students be shocked. Administrators gave one teen 29 electric shocks and the other 77.

JRC’s practices have garnered international attention. Back in 2012, a UN special rapporteur on torture called for an investigation of its practices, telling the Guardian, “The use of electricity on anyone’s body raises the question of whether this is therapeutic or whether it inflicts pain and suffering tantamount to torture in violation of international law.”