Trump’s stealth de-regulation: stop enforcing the laws on corporate abuse

Enforcement Inaction

By Philip Mattera, director of the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First for the Dirt Diggers Digest

The Trump Administration has declared war on business regulation, both overtly and covertly. Most visible has been the barrage of executive orders that cripple or eliminate rules without going through the normal review procedures. 

Since the beginning of this month, Trump has put his Sharpie to orders that instruct agencies to unilaterally repeal regulations they deem unlawful and to insert sunset provisions into others.

There is also a quiet form of deregulation stemming from the fact that many agencies have scaled back their enforcement activities. It is difficult to determine how much of this is being caused by operational disruptions linked to DOGE-instigated layoffs and how much stems from deliberate decisions to abandon cases, but the result is a sharp drop-off in the number of announced fines and settlements.

Let’s focus on the agencies that normally handle the biggest cases. Not surprisingly, the most dramatic decline has come at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Elon Musk has targeted for elimination. Since Trump took office, the agency has announced only one new resolved case. On January 30 the payment service Wise was ordered to pay a $2 million fine for misleading customers.  

Yes, you did

Donald Trump posts his ultimate insult to Pope Francis on his "Truth Social"

 

House passes Rep. Spears bill to clarify local zoning opinions

Legislation is part of Speaker Shekarchi’s 2025 12-bill housing package 

The House passed legislation introduced by Rep. Tina Spears to allow those purchasing property to rely on the zoning certificates or opinions they receive from local officials.

The legislation is part of House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi’s (D-Dist. 23, Warwick) 12-bill package of legislation regarding housing issues, his fifth comprehensive suite of housing bills since becoming Speaker in 2021.

“The specific zoning status of a parcel can be complex and difficult to understand for property owners and prospective buyers,” said Representative Spears (D-Dist. 36, Charlestown, New Shoreham, South Kingstown, Westerly). 

“That’s why it’s so important that the zoning opinions issued locally are reliable enough for owners and buyers to make informed decisions about their development plans for their properties. This bill ensures that they will be, removing an unneeded area of ambiguity in our state zoning law.”

The bill (2025-H 5795) would allow purchasers to reasonably rely on zoning opinions issued by local officials. Presently, when a current or prospective property owner obtains a zoning certificate, the certificate is for instructive purposes only and not binding; this amendment would remove the non-binding nature of zoning certificates to allow property owners to rely on the municipal determination of the legality of the present use.

The bill now heads to the Senate for consideration.

Thanks to anti-vaxxers, US goes from measles-free to widespread infection

Vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives over the past five decades.

Mary Van Beusekom, MS

Without a 5% higher measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination rate, measles may revert to endemicity in the United States within 25 years, while a 10% decline in vaccination could lead to 11.1 million cases of the highly contagious illness in that timeframe, according to predictions from a simulation model published in JAMA. 

Also, the World Health Organization (WHO); UNICEF; and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance warn that burgeoning outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases threaten to reverse years of progress.

And a study published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) details the ongoing US measles outbreak, which has reached 800 cases.

Measles resurgence looming

The JAMA study, led by Stanford University researchers, involved creation of a large-scale epidemiologic model of the importation and dynamic spread of the vaccine-preventable infectious diseases measles, rubella (German measles), polio, and diphtheria in the United States using childhood vaccination rates from 2004 to 2023. 

Trump denies disaster aid, tells states to do more

Red states shocked that Trump is screwing them, too

Turn-downs include Arkansas, West Virginia, North Carolina

by Alex Brown, Rhode Island Current

You're on your own, Arkansas. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Colin Murphey)

In the wake of recent natural disasters, state leaders across the country are finding that emergency support from the federal government is no longer a given.

Under President Donald Trump, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has denied federal assistance for tornadoes in Arkansas, flooding in West Virginia and a windstorm in Washington state. It also has refused North Carolina’s request for extended relief funding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

While it’s not uncommon for the feds to turn down some requests for disaster declarations, which unlock federal aid, state leaders say the Trump administration’s denials have taken them by surprise. White House officials are signaling a new approach to federal emergency response, even as Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threaten to shut down FEMA altogether.

South County Hospital loses its "A" rating for patient safety

This is on management's heads

By Will Collette

South County Hospital was once the jewel in the crown of Rhode Island health care, consistently topping the charts that rated hospitals.

But that's no longer the case. South County Hospital's safety grade has dropped to a "B," putting in the bottom ranks among Rhode Island hospitals.

In contrast, the following hospitals scored an A:

• Newport Hospital, Newport
• The Miriam Hospital, Providence
• Landmark Medical Center, Woonsocket
• Rhode Island Hospital, Providence
• Westerly Hospital, Westerly.

For many years, South County received "A" ratings from the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade for patient safety. That's a very important metric since it measures your chances of leaving the hospital alive. Anything less than an A is simply not good enough.

What changed? Management. 

CEO Aaron Robinson, who assumed leadership in 2020, earns around a million dollars and seems more concerned with saving his job than saving patients' lives. 

He and his captive hospital board are actually suing critics of his management practices in a nearly unheard-of SLAPP suit against the group Save South County Hospital.

It gets worse when you look at the various criteria. The ratings show that hospital staff are not to blame.

South County's score in this category was 120 points out of 120

South County Hospital staff also scored highly for "Practices to Prevent Errors:"

That's the good news. The bad news comes when you closer at the rest of the criteria and scores for patient safety.

Infections

South County Hospital's problems are even worse than the table below shows. The footnotes red-line SCH's response to the request for MRSA infection data with this: 1. Declined to Report: The hospital was asked to provide this information to the public, but did not. Data on blood infections was also "not available."

Surgical problems

SCH apparently could not or would not report on deaths from treatable complications. The three red-lined categories are disturbing: blood leakage, kidney damage and accidental cuts and tears.

Safety problems

In this category, two items are red-lined while only two of the seven items are in the green. 

One of them, "harmful events," is described by Leapfrog this way: "Patients can experience complications and potentially harmful events following a surgery, a procedure, or childbirth."

The red-lined score for "collapsed lung" was personally chilling since I sent four days in SCH for pneumonia in 2023. I had a great experience with a good outcome, largely due to the excellent staff. 

To be clear, I love South County Hospital and my relationship with them stretches back 50 years to my friendship with their long-time CEO, the late Donald Ford. I want them to succeed and thrive and regain their top ranking once again.

As a first step, they need to drop their frivolous harassment suit against Save South County Hospital. They should be talking and listening to critics, not suing them. Can SCH achieve a turn-around under CEO Aaron Robinson? I doubt it, but Robinson's leadership is an issue that needs to be negotiated in good faith.

Hospitals can be turned around. Westerly Hospital suffered poor ratings and nearly went out of business. Now, as part of the Yale-New Haven Hospital system, they seem to be thriving with ratings to prove it. 

Just in the past month, I had two operations to remove cataracts at Westerly Hospital and was impressed at their quality of care. If Westerly Hospital can change, there is certainly hope for South County Hospital.

What the well-dressed MAGAnut is wearing

It's up to us

Federal Funding Woes Stunt Rhode Island Climate Research

Rhode Island programs find they can no longer count on feds to keep existing commitments, never mind future support

By Colleen Cronin / ecoRI News staff

At first, the federal government didn’t outright cancel a project Brown University professor Stephen Porder was working on, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Long before they canceled the program,” Porder said, “they just stopped responding and paying any bills, which, of course, shuts down any work that you can do because you can’t front, you know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Porder is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, as well as environment and society, at the Ivy League institution. (“My professor title is like five words too long,” he joked.)

He is also Brown’s associate provost for sustainability, although he spoke to ecoRI News only in his capacity as a professor, not as an administrator at the Providence university.

For a long time, his research focused on tropical rainforests and agriculture, but recently it has come to include more work on sustainability, he said, including his work on the USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities grant program.

Eventually, in mid-April, the Trump administration canceled the grant program altogether, just one part of the millions of dollars of spending that has been stalled or outright axed by the federal government because it includes climate and environmental research.

“USDA Cancels Biden Era Climate Slush Fund, Reprioritizes Existing Funding to Farmers,” the headline on the USDA press release stated, announcing the cancellation of Porder’s grant and many others.

Trump's next target: generic drugs

The drug plans for most Americans require use of generics instead of brand names so expect big price hikes

By Sasha Abramsky, Truthout

Over the last couple of weeks, even as tariffs have wreaked havoc on markets around the world, President Donald Trump and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have repeatedly teased the notion of slapping hefty tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals. Lutnick has said these are likely to be introduced before the summer.

Trump’s rationale for placing tariffs on medical drugs is, like most of his other major policy initiatives, framed around national security: It makes no sense, he says, to be reliant on other countries for supplies of medicines.

Certainly, in the long run, it would be a good thing for the U.S. to have the capacity to make more of its own medicines, not least so that in a pandemic, when supply chains break down, people can still access medications stateside.

However, whatever the merits of that argument, Trump’s plan will make a bad situation worse. One can’t simply will the infrastructure and supply chains for the production of large amounts of medicines into existence overnight.

The U.S. has a good base for manufacturing branded medicines — those under patents — but generic drugs are overwhelmingly produced overseas. Last year, according to the United Nations trade database, the U.S. imported a whopping $213 billion worth of pharmaceutical products.

In reality, if Trump slaps tariffs on pharmaceuticals made in India and other global hubs for medicine manufacturing, patients in the U.S. will have to pay more for their generic medications. Or manufacturers will simply choose to export their drugs elsewhere, resulting in shortages of medicines; that’s what has happened in post-Brexit Britain, where at times even basic drugs have been in short supply in recent years, and where growth in medication imports has been lower than for any other G7 nation.

Since many insurance formularies either don’t cover the non-generic patented drugs made in the U.S. or charge patients huge co-pays for these medications, even if the supply could be ramped up to cancel out the hit to generics, the price tags would likely be unaffordable for tens of millions of people.

Multi-billion dollar taxpayer rip-off

Here’s what Musk got in Trump’s first 100 days

by Lisa Needham

The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency have proven universally horrible— unless you’re the world’s cringiest billionaire. While Elon Musk and his rabid pack of lost boys at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been busy making the country worse for everyone, the first 100 days have given him stratospheric returns on the roughly $260 million he spent to buy a president. 

Starlink Broadband: Some chunk of $42 billion

The former Biden administration dedicated $42 billion in Broadband Equity Access and Deployment grants to bring high-speed internet to rural, underserved areas. This is a yearslong project, and it’s been centered around fiber-optic internet, which is cheaper in the long run and faster than Musk’s satellite internet service, Starlink. Also, like all Musk companies, Starlink overpromises and underdelivers, which is partly why the company didn’t receive a $885 million grant from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund in 2023, when the Federal Communications Commission determined that Starlink “failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service.”

Of course, simply having a worse, more expensive product should be no bar to Musk making money, so the government is now rewriting the BEAD rules to eliminate the “extreme tech bias in favor of fiber,” as Trump’s pick to oversee BEAD put it. It’s unclear how much of that $42 billion Starlink could see, but the company already receives billions from BEAD. And when it comes to money, too much is never enough.

Starlink for the FAA: $2.4 billion

Not content to force Starlink on rural areas alone, Musk appears to be on the verge of forcing Starlink on the Federal Aviation Administration, again with your tax dollars. The government had awarded $2.4 billion to Verizon to upgrade a communications platform, but now it looks like that may be diverted to Starlink instead. Do not ask how the government can shuffle billions from one company to another like this. It can’t, but it seems like it’s going to. 

Trump’s aggressive actions against free speech speak a lot louder than his words defending it

Free speech? Sure. But you might be arrested, deported, have your funding cancelled or have your license revoked

Daniel Hall, Miami University

Harvard University took the extraordinary step of suing the Trump administration on April 21, 2025, claiming that the pressure campaign mounted on the school by the president and his Cabinet to force viewpoint diversity on campus violated the Constitution’s guarantees of free speech.

“Defendants’ actions are unlawful,” Harvard’s lawsuit states. “The First Amendment does not permit the Government to ‘interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.’”

Yet in his first term, President Donald J. Trump declared that free speech mattered.

Trump issued the “Executive Order Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” on March 21, 2019. In it, he expressed the importance of free inquiry and open debate to education and directed federal officials to use the federal government’s funding of higher education to ensure that universities promote free inquiry.

Channeling free-speech champions Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, Trump wrote that “free inquiry is an essential feature of our Nation’s democracy.”

As a professor of constitutional, criminal and comparative law, and as a citizen who enjoys his liberty, I agree.

Free speech is fundamental to human progress. Scientific, medical, technological and social advancements all rely on the free flow of information. Robust discussion and disagreement are equally important to maintaining a healthy constitutional republic.

In the words of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

The First Amendment’s free speech and press clauses protect all forms of expression – oral, print, digital and artistic – from governmental interference or punishment.

Of the many types of speech, political speech is the most protected.

On the first day of his second term in office, Trump issued another free speech executive order. It affirms the administration’s commitment to free speech, directs that tax money is not used to abridge free speech and instructs federal employees to “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.”

In a vacuum, Trump’s orders appear to bode well for free speech.

But what is important is free speech reality, not rhetoric. Three months into his second term, where does Trump stand?

The many interconnected orders, letters, statements and actions of Trump’s White House make an assessment of any positive effects difficult. On the other hand, the Trump administration has clearly violated and chilled free speech on many occasions.

Epidemic out of control!

May 4 rally - join the Resistance!