Tuesday, December 9, 2025
■ Today's Top News
Amid a cost-of-living crisis, millions of low-income borrowers may now be forced to spend several hundred more dollars a month paying for student loans.
By Stephen Prager
As student debt exacerbates the financial struggles of millions of Americans, the Trump administration has taken a major step toward killing the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program.
On Tuesday, the Department of Education announced that it had reached a settlement with the state of Missouri to end the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program, which allowed more than 7 million mostly low-income Americans to reduce their federal student loan payments.
Rather than setting monthly payments based on income, the SAVE program bases them on how much borrowers earn and the size of their families, which is referred to as an income-driven repayment option, or IDR. SAVE cut most enrollees’ monthly loan payments in half and left 4.5 million of them, mostly those earning between 150–225% of the federal poverty level, paying $0 per month.
In March 2024, a coalition of 11 states led by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach sued in federal court to stop the SAVE plan. The next month a similar lawsuit was filed by another coalition of seven states led by Missouri’s former attorney general, Andrew Bailey.
In February, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the states, blocking 8 million borrowers from accessing lower payments under the program. Now President Donald Trump’s administration which aggressively opposes student loan forgiveness, has agreed to settle the lawsuit, effectively killing SAVE.
“For four years, the Biden administration sought to unlawfully shift student loan debt onto American taxpayers, many of whom either never took out a loan to finance their postsecondary education or never even went to college themselves, simply for a political win to prop up a failing administration,” said Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent. “The Trump administration is righting this wrong and bringing an end to this deceptive scheme. The law is clear: if you take out a loan, you must pay it back.”
The settlement also includes a provision requiring that, for the next 10 years, the Department of Education notify the state of Missouri at least 30 days in advance before instituting broad-based student debt relief.
As the Debt Collective, a membership-based debtors’ union, explained in a post on social media: “30 days is enough notice that Missouri will find standing to sue for relief before it even happens. So not only is Trump gutting the SAVE plan, they’re essentially putting a moratorium on cancellation for the next 10 years with this agreement.”
“What Republicans admit is that the executive administration does have authority to cancel federally held student debt,” the group added. “They just want to make it so that it will be administratively and practically impossible to deliver it because of this technicality. It’s stealing in advance.”
SAVE was already slated to end in 2028 following July’s passage of Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which replaced it with a pair of less generous income-based repayment plans that require many debtors to pay hundreds more per month. The deadline to switch to one of the new plans will now move up, though the administration has not yet clarified when borrowers will have to switch.
The Debt Collective predicted that the end of SAVE “means many more debtors will likely be forced to default on their loans,” which the group added “is bad for millions of families and our economy.”
According to an analysis of federal student loan data from the American Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, more than 12 million borrowers in the US are already in default or otherwise behind on their student loan payments.
Since their introduction, former President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness policies have been chipped away at bit by bit through litigation. In 2023, the conservative US Supreme Court struck down the administration’s plans to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of Americans, ruling that the plan exceeded the administration’s executive authority. A year later, it halted SAVE as well while it considered the merits of the Missouri lawsuit.
The group Protect Borrowers, which supports student loan forgiveness, argues that SAVE is “not a novel use of executive power,” noting that Congress gave the Education Department the authority to create IDRs in 1993 and that several other programs have been created since.
“This settlement is pure capitulation—it goes much further than the suit or the 8th Circuit order requires,” said Persis Yu, the group’s deputy executive director and managing counsel. “The real story here is the unrelenting, right-wing push to jack up costs on working people with student debt.”
A September survey by Data For Progress found that student loans make it more difficult for many borrowers to keep up with other bills amid a growing cost-of-living crisis: 42% of respondents said their debt payments had a negative impact on their ability to pay for food or housing. More than a third, 37%, said it had a negative impact on their ability to cover healthcare costs for themselves or their dependents, while the majority, 52%, said it had a negative impact on their ability to save for retirement.
“While millions of student loan borrowers struggle amidst the worsening affordability crisis as the rising costs of groceries, utilities, and healthcare continue to bury families in debt,” Yu said, “billionaire Education Secretary Linda McMahon chose to strike a backroom deal with a right-wing state attorney general and strip borrowers of the most affordable repayment plan that would help millions to stay on track with their loans while keeping a roof over their head.”
If the Office of Legal Counsel opinion “seeks to dress up legalese in order to provide cover for the obvious illegality of these serial homicides, the public needs to see this analysis,” said one attorney.
By Brad Reed
A coalition of US rights organizations is suing the Trump administration to obtain its documentation outlining the legal justifications for its campaign of military strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the New York Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday announced they had filed a complaint under the Freedom of Information Act demanding the release of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that provided the legal framework for the strikes, which many human rights organizations have decried as acts of murder.
The groups said that the Trump administration’s rationales for the strikes deserve special scrutiny because their justification hinges on claims that the US is in an “armed conflict” with international drug cartels akin to past conflicts between the US government and terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda.
The groups argued there is simply no way that drug cartels can be classified under the same umbrella as terrorist organizations, given that the law regarding war with nonstate actors says that any organizations considered to be in armed conflict with the US must be an “organized armed group” that is structured like a conventional military and engaged in “protracted armed violence” with the US government.
Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, accused the administration of warping the law beyond recognition in defense of its boat-bombing campaign.
“The Trump administration is displacing the fundamental mandates of international law with the phony wartime rhetoric of a basic autocrat,” Azmy explained. “If the OLC opinion seeks to dress up legalese in order to provide cover for the obvious illegality of these serial homicides, the public needs to see this analysis and ultimately hold accountable all those who facilitate murder in the United States’ name.”
Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said the American public deserves to know “how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians as lawful and why it believes it can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people committing these crimes.”
Ify Chikezie, staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the Trump administration was making a mockery of government transparency by refusing to release its OLC documentation justifying the strikes, and demanded that “the courts must step in and order the administration to release these documents immediately.”
The administration’s boat-bombing spree, which so far has killed at least 87 people, has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks after it was revealed that the US military had launched a second strike during an operation on September 2 to kill two men who had survived an initial strike on their vessel.
While the September 2 strike has drawn the most attention, Daphne Eviatar, director for security and human rights for Amnesty International USA, argued last week that the entire boat-bombing campaign has been “illegal under both domestic and international law.”
“All of them constitute murder because none of the victims, whether or not they were smuggling illegal narcotics, posed an imminent threat to life,” she said. “Congress must take action now to stop the US military from murdering more people in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.”
The new website, GenAI.mil, describes the "end state" of the project as "a Joint Force where generative AI is fully integrated as a native capability into every aspect of operations."
By Julia Conley
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, currently under fire for treating a deadly ongoing US military operation against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean “like it’s a video game,” as one columnist said this week, announced on Tuesday that the Pentagon is launching an artificial intelligence platform for service members to use on the proverbial battlefield.
“We are unleashing GenAI.mil,” said Hegseth in a video address on the Department of Defense’s (DOD) embrace of AI. “This platform puts the world’s most powerful frontier AI models, starting with Google Gemini, directly into the hands of every American warrior.”
Hegseth, who has claimed the DOD is now called the Department of War, said that “at the click of a button,” service members can “conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed.”
“We will continue to aggressively field the world’s best technology to make our fighting force more lethal than ever before,” added Hegseth.
Jessica Burbank and Drop Site News reported that the custom-made Google AI tool, Gemini, is now available to all military personnel, civilians, and contractors, and includes extensions to tools including ChatGPT, AI assistant Claude, and Grok.
The Trump administration awarded Google a $200 million contract in July to develop AI at the DOD.
“Victory belongs to those who embrace real innovation,” Hegseth wrote in a memo obtained by Burbank. “GenAI.mil is part of this monumental transformation... I expect every member of the department to log in, learn it, and incorporate it into your workflows immediately. AI should be in your battle rhythm every single day.”
DOD employees have been given a “Do and Don’t” list, according to Burbank.
A Pentagon source told Burbank that an “example of ‘don’t’ was, ‘Don’t use GenAI for decisions involving attribution, targeting, or threat evaluation without human validation.’”
“I read that as someone can read what the AI said and be like, ‘Yep it’s good to go shoot that missile,’” added the source. “They are legit going full force into AI.”
GenAI.mil also describes the “end state” that the Pentagon is working toward as “a Joint Force where generative AI is fully integrated as a native capability into every aspect of operations.”
“Our warriors and leaders will leverage AI to achieve unparalleled situational awareness, accelerate planning cycles, and execute operations with a speed and precision that yields information dominance and mission success,” reads the platform.
The launch of Google Gemini comes after Emil Michael, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering, took control of the Defense Innovation Unit, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), and other offices in an effort to accelerate the expansion of AI use in the military.
Between Russia and Ukraine, Michael said, “You have a robot-on-robot frontline now, which we’ve never seen before.”
“The explosion of capabilities has been enormous, and we’re just catching up to that,” he added. “Now we can take CDAO and actually try to use it to push the capability into the department for actual use cases.”
Drop Site co-founder Ryan Grim commented that Tuesday’s announcement points to “Hegseth ushering in the apocalypse.”
The launch of GenAI.mil comes as the Trump administration continues to escalate tensions with Venezuela, with President Donald Trump signaling that the US could soon launch land strikes in the South American country and elsewhere in Latin America.
Climate scientist Daniel Swain called it "a deliberate effort to misinform."
By Stephen Prager
The Trump administration has removed all references to human-caused climate change from Environmental Protection Agency webpages, as well as large amounts of data showing the dramatic warming of the climate over recent decades and the resulting risks.
According to a Tuesday report from the Washington Post, one page on the “Causes of Climate Change” stated as recently as October that “it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land,” a statement that reflects the overwhelming consensus in peer-reviewed literature on climate.
That statement is now nowhere to be found, with those that remain only mentioning “natural” causes of planetary warming like volcanic activity and variations in solar activity.
“The new, near-exclusive emphasis on natural causes of climate change on the EPA’s website is now completely out of sync with all available evidence demonstrating overwhelming human influence on contemporary warming trends,” explained Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, who posted about the changes on social media.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which examines tens of thousands of studies from around the globe, found that virtually all warming since the dawn of the industrial era can be attributed to human carbon emissions.
Pages about the catastrophic results of climate change have also been scrubbed: One of them allowed users to view several climate change indicators, like the historic decline of Arctic sea ice and glaciers and the increased rates of coastal flooding due to rising sea levels. That page has been deleted entirely.
Another page, which answered frequently asked questions about climate change, now no longer includes questions like, “Is there scientific consensus that human activities are causing today’s climate change?” “How can people reduce the risks of climate change?” and “Who is most at risk from the impacts of climate change?” The page provides no indication that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon, instead only discussing natural factors.
That page links to another that has since been deleted. It once provided extensive information about the risks climate change poses to human health, “from increasing the risk of extreme heat events and heavy storms to increasing the risk of asthma attacks and changing the spread of certain diseases carried by ticks and mosquitoes.” Another deleted page discussed the impacts of climate change on children’s health and low-income populations.
“This is, I think, one of the more dramatic scrubbings we’ve seen so far in the climate space,” said Swain. “This website is now completely incorrect regarding the changes in climate that we’re seeing today and their causes... It’s clearly a deliberate effort to misinform.”
During his 2024 campaign for reelection, President Donald Trump and his affiliated super political action committees received more than $96 million in direct contributions from oil and gas industry donors, according to a January report from Climate Power. Since retaking office, he has moved to dramatically expand the extraction and use of planet-heating fossil fuels while eliminating investment in clean energy and electric vehicles.
Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, “Deleting and distorting this scientific information only serves to give a free pass to fossil fuel polluters who are raking in profits even as communities reel from extreme heatwaves, record-breaking floods, intensified storms, and catastrophic wildfires.”
Cleetus said that the purging of climate information from EPA sites was a prelude to “the likely overturning of the endangerment finding, a legal and scientific foundation for standards to limit the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change and threatening human health.”
In July, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled a proposal to rescind the 2009 finding, which determined that climate change endangers human life and serves as the legal basis for greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act.
Undermining climate science is core to that effort, which Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, said at the time, “could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules.”
Shortly after Zeldin announced the rule change, the Department of Energy cobbled together a “Climate Working Group” comprising five authors handpicked by Secretary Chris Wright to produce a climate report that disputes the IPCC’s findings and the scientific consensus on climate change.
The report did not undergo peer review and omitted around 99% of the scientific literature the IPCC relied on for its comprehensive findings. A group of climate scientists that independently reviewed the paper found that it “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics.”
Cleetus said Tuesday that “EPA is trying to bury the evidence on human-caused climate change, but it cannot change the reality of climate science or the harsh toll climate impacts are taking on people’s lives... This isn’t just about data on a website; it’s an attack on independent science and scientific integrity.”
"The Warner Bros. merger was already suspect, but now Trump’s family is getting in on the act," said one Democratic senator.
By Jake Johnson
The revelation that Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is playing a key role in Paramount Skydance’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery underscores the extent to which the current administration’s open corruption “is fundamentally distorting economic and governmental policymaking at the direct expense of the interests of the American people,” a watchdog group said Tuesday.
Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partner, is listed in a regulatory filing as one of the organizations financing Paramount’s $108 billion bid for Warner Bros., which owns CNN. Ethics experts say Kushner’s involvement represents another glaring conflict of interest on top of preexisting concerns about the bid, stemming from Trump’s relationship with Paramount CEO David Ellison and his billionaire father, GOP megadonor Larry Ellison.
“America is devolving into a caricature of crony capitalism,” Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement Tuesday. “Factions aiming to shrink media competition are fighting over who can show the greatest fealty to Donald Trump. Paramount seems to have won the prize, bringing in presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner—whose investment vehicle is flush with Saudi funds, deposited only because of his personal relationship with Donald Trump—as a partner.”
“A working antitrust policy would block the merger of Warner Bros. Discovery with one of the existing media goliaths. It would never be influenced by personal connections to the president,” Weissman added. “This case underscores that the corruption pervading the Trump administration isn’t just about making Trump and his family and hangers-on ever richer. That corruption is fundamentally distorting economic and governmental policy making, at the direct expense of the interests of the American people.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said that “the Warner Bros. merger was already suspect, but now Trump’s family is getting in on the act.”
“Paramount already had deep ties to the White House,” he added, “now Trump’s family will directly profit if they win.”
Asked Monday about Kushner’s financing role, Trump said he has “never spoken to him about it.”
Paramount, which the Trump administration reportedly favored to take over Warner Bros., announced its bid for the company days after the streaming behemoth Netflix and Warner Bros. leadership reached an $83 billion acquisition deal. The president immediately criticized the Netflix agreement and pledged to intervene in the federal review process.
“The blurred line between running the government and the family’s business interests is expanding each day,” Scott Amey, general counsel with the Project On Government Oversight, told Reuters.
Antitrust experts and advocates have argued that both of the proposed mergers are likely illegal and should be blocked.
Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project, said Monday that either merger “would further deepen the media consolidation crisis that is eroding our creative economy and freedom of expression.”
“Paramount specifically would be well-positioned to manipulate the news to please the president, which David Ellison made clear it intends to do in an interview earlier today,” said Stoller. “There is a reason that policymakers and workers in Hollywood have come out against each iteration of this deal. Rather than allowing further consolidation in the industry, policymakers must reregulate the market with prohibitions on vertical integration.”
"If we choose to stay on the current path—powering our economies with fossil fuels, extracting virgin resources, destroying nature, polluting the environment—the damages would stack up."
By Brad Reed
A new report from the United Nations Environment Program has found that addressing the global climate emergency would deliver major economic benefits, in addition to creating a cleaner and more habitable planet.
The seventh edition of the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO), released on Tuesday, estimates that making up-front investments in climate action now would begin to yield global macroeconomic benefits starting in 2050, potentially growing to $20 trillion per year by 2070 and $100 trillion by 2100.
The report, which was the product of nearly 300 multi-disciplinary scientists across more than 80 countries, argues that a total of $8 trillion in annual investment from this year until 2050 would be needed to achieve its climate goals. But, the report stresses, the cost of inaction would be far greater.
“If we choose to stay on the current path—powering our economies with fossil fuels, extracting virgin resources, destroying nature, polluting the environment—the damages would stack up,” the report warns. “Climate change would cut 4% off annual global GDP by 2050, claim many lives, and increase forced migration.”
Other likely consequences of inaction, warns the report, include “Amazon forest dieback and ice-sheet collapse,” along with the loss of “hundreds of millions more hectares of natural lands.” The report also projects that global food availability will fall if the climate crisis is not addressed, and that increased air pollution will cause an additional 4 million premature deaths per year.
The report recommends a rapid move away from fossil fuels, as well as a drastic rethinking of agricultural subsidies so that they no longer “directly favor activities that have significant harmful effects on the environment, including on biodiversity.”
Robert Watson, a co-chair of the GEO assessment, said in an interview with the Guardian that the climate crisis cannot simply be seen as an environmental issue given that it is now “undermining our economy, food security, water security, human health,” and also creating national security problems by increasing “conflict in many parts of the world.”
In an interview with BBC, Watson also accused US President Donald Trump’s administration of sabotaging the report by refusing to even accept its conclusions about the damage being done by human-induced climate change.
“The US decided not to attend the meeting at all,” he explained. “At the very end they joined by teleconference and basically made a statement that they could not agree with most of the report, which means they didn’t agree with anything we said on climate change, biodiversity, fossil fuels, plastics, and subsidies.”
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