politics

SACRAMENTO — David Crane is a gifted investment banker who shared his expertise with government until he was dumped from a state board that invests teacher retirement funds.

Lawmakers bounced him from the board, one of the biggest players on Wall Street, after he repeatedly questioned whether state pension funds could earn enough to keep paying retirement benefits to teachers and other politically powerful employees.

Democratic legislators, who receive millions in campaign donations from teachers unions and other government labor groups, said it wasn’t Crane’s job to meddle in investment forecasts. California’s numbers are in line with those of other states, they note, and its pension investments have beat projections over the last 20 years.

But Crane, a close friend of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, represents a cadre of market gurus who see investment profits flattening. They worry that state pension systems are heading down the same path as corporate retirement plans that hit trouble after failing to meet rosy earnings projections.

Several government pension plans are already deep in the red. Standard & Poor’s reported in February that 13 states are likely to have less than 75% of the cash needed for promised benefits.

In Crane’s corner are such financial heavyweights as investor Warren Buffett; John C. Bogle, founder of investment giant Vanguard Group Inc.; and William Bernstein, author of “The Four Pillars of Investing.”

The stakes are huge — especially for California, which has more than $350 billion in retirement funds covering teachers and other public employees. Falling short of the nearly 8% return that state money managers project for those funds could create deficits of tens of billions of dollars.

Taxpayers would have to ante up; retirees’ benefits are locked in by contract. Elected officials could be forced to raise taxes, cut services or borrow money. California’s teacher retirement fund already has a projected $20-billion shortfall.

“It is a very real problem,” Bogle said. “The financial consequences are staggering.”

A decade of returns at the rate Buffett has set for retirement plans at his companies — 6.4% — would leave California short more than $90 billion. That is more than the entire state budget for health and human services this year, and several times what the state is spending on its university system.

The Legislature has spurned such restrained forecasts.

Lawmakers in June rejected Crane’s appointment to the teacher retirement board by Schwarzenegger, after he had served almost a year. State Senate leader Don Perata (D-Oakland) said the job of trustees is “only to protect members’ benefits” — not to worry about the long-term effects of the benefits on the state budget.

Crane, who helped build a San Francisco investment firm that has arranged $250 billion in financings, said at his confirmation hearing: “Bless them if they can make it” to 8%. “I would assume a lower number. And I think there is a lot of evidence to back up my view.”

Bogle said he thinks California officials “are dreaming.”

Opponents of Crane, a Democrat, called him the operative of an administration eager to undermine the political power of public employee unions. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, campaigned last year to eliminate pensions for all new government workers and replace them with 401(k)-style accounts. The unions fought him, and he dropped the issue.

Many labor leaders and pension officials characterize as bogus the alerts being raised about the funds’ soundness.

“This is another way that folks who would like to see these benefits go away can undermine the plans,” said Pat Macht, spokeswoman for the California Public Employee Retirement System.

Macht notes that state pension investments have yielded returns averaging 9.2% over the last decade. That includes the 12 months that ended June 30, when profits on state investments exceeded 12%.

Stanford University professor William F. Sharpe, who won a Nobel Prize in economics, helped California develop its forecasts. And the state’s assumptions are in line with the predictions of economist Roger Ibbotson, whose predictions over the last 30 years have been uncannily accurate.

But author Bernstein, who is also a portfolio manager for wealthy individuals, is troubled that those who question the state’s numbers are brushed aside as partisans.

“This is not a right- or left-wing issue,” said Bernstein, a Democrat. “This is an issue of whether or not you can add.”

Bernstein notes that as the outlook for domestic stocks dims, California and other states are moving more of their money into risky places, such as high-tech start-ups, real estate and hedge funds. Returns on such investments are erratic, he said, and could easily fall short of standard stock market index funds over time.

Meanwhile, as corporate America has scaled back retirement benefits in recent years, California has headed in the opposite direction, enhancing benefits through legislation and contract negotiations with public employee unions. The result is the most generous public pensions of any state.

Under former Gov. Gray Davis, who received millions in campaign donations from unions, retirement packages for state workers were sweetened.

Davis signed legislation that based the pensions for many California workers on the highest annual income they earn while government employees; other states use an average of the top three years of earnings.

In addition, the age at which some employees could begin collecting was dropped to 50, and annual retirement payments were increased substantially.

When Schwarzenegger ousted Davis in the 2003 recall election, he made changing the pension system a centerpiece of his agenda, highlighting what he characterized as runaway costs.

Yet the 18 labor contracts negotiated by his administration have left in place most of the benefits the governor said the state can’t afford; the few concessions that union officials traded for pay increases did little to lower future retirement costs.

Long-serving state employees in California “can receive more annual income in retirement than when they worked,” according to a legislative report released last year.

The report said that when Social Security payments are factored in, “It takes just 20 to 30 years of work (that is, less than a full career) to have retirement income … equal to working pay.”

A typical 55-year-old government employee who earns $60,000 and has worked for the state for 20 years is entitled to $25,000 a year, plus Social Security and lifelong healthcare benefits. In most other large states, the pension for the same employee, if eligible at 55, would be less than $15,000 a year — thousands less in some states — plus health benefits.

Defenders say the state is well positioned to cover these costs.

“Reasonable people disagree about what the markets can do long-term,” said John Meier, a managing partner at Strategic Investment Solutions, a San Francisco firm that helps the state make projections.

Forecasts are made through a collaboration of actuaries, economists and investment experts from state government and private firms. They gauge the historical returns of various investment types, the outlook for growth in those places and the assumptions being used by other institutional investors.

“Our organization and a lot of other organizations believe that

Arizona and Virginia project an 8% return. Colorado and Pennsylvania anticipate 8.5%.

That’s all fine, said Zvi Bodie, a professor at Boston University School of Management, but there are no guarantees — and there’s the rub. Some experts are predicting a period of long-term market instability, he notes, and the state can’t afford to be off by a percentage point or two.

“Every study we have of stock market behavior says one thing we know for sure is: We don’t know for sure,” he said. “It is risky. There is no free lunch here.”

Bodie says the pressure for state number-crunchers to project strong earnings indefinitely is intense.

Optimistic projections free lawmakers from having to pull billions of dollars out of other state programs to increase the taxpayer contribution to the pension funds.

Meanwhile, officials at the California State Teachers Retirement System announced at a recent meeting that they are poised to raise investment in such risky areas as high-tech start-ups by roughly 67%.

“If they lose money, someone is going to have to bear that risk,” said Olivia S. Mitchell, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School’s Pension Research Council. “Politicians today have promised benefits without explaining what will happen down the road if the system runs short.”

Times staff writer Dan Morain contributed to this report.

California and three other states sued the Trump administration Wednesday over its plans to slash $600 million from programs designed to prevent and track the spread of HIV, including in the LGBTQ+ community — arguing the move is based on “political animus and disagreements about unrelated topics such as federal immigration enforcement, political protest, and clean energy.”

“This action is lawless,” attorneys for California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota said in a complaint filed in federal court in Illinois against several Trump administration departments and officials, as well as President Trump himself.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding had been allocated to disease control programs in all four states, though California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said California faces “the largest share” of the cuts.

That includes $130 million due to California under a Public Health Infrastructure Block Grant, which the state and its local public health departments use to fund their public health workforce, monitor disease spread and respond to public health emergencies, Bonta’s office said.

“President Trump … is using federal funding to compel states and jurisdictions to follow his agenda. Those efforts have all previously failed, and we expect that to happen once again,” Bonta said in a statement.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the named defendants, has repeatedly turned his agency away from evidence-backed HIV monitoring and prevention programs in the last year, and the Trump administration has broadly attacked federal spending headed to blue states or allocated to initiatives geared toward the LGBTQ+ community.

The White House justified the latest cuts by claiming the programs “promote DEI and radical gender ideology,” but did not explain further. Health officials have said the cuts were to programs that did not reflect the CDC’s “priorities.”

Neither the White House nor Health and Human Services immediately responded to requests for comment on the lawsuit Wednesday.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said the cuts would derail an estimated $64.5 million for 14 different county grant programs, resulting in “increased costs, more illness, and preventable deaths,” the department said.

Those programs focus on response to disasters, controlling outbreaks of diseases such as measles and flu, preventing the spread of diseases such as West Nile, dengue and hepatitis A, monitoring and treating HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, fighting chronic illnesses such as diabetes and obesity, and supporting community health, the department said.

Those cuts would also include about $1.1 million for the department’s National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Project, which is focused on detecting emerging HIV trends and preventing outbreaks.

Dr. Paul Simon, an epidemiologist at the UCLA Fielding School and former chief science officer for the county’s public health department, said slashing the program was a “dangerous” and “shortsighted” move that would leave public health officials in the dark as to what’s happening with the disease on the ground.

Considerable cuts are also anticipated to the City of Long Beach, UCLA and nine community health providers who provide HIV prevention services, including $383,000 for the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s community HIV prevention programs, local officials said.

Leading California Democrats have railed against the cuts. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the move was an unlawful attempt by Trump to punish blue states that “won’t bend to his extremist agenda.”

“His message to the 1.2 million Americans living with HIV is clear: their lives are not a priority, political retribution is,” Padilla said in a statement.

The states argue in the lawsuit that the administration’s decision “singles out jurisdictions for disfavor based not on any rational purpose related to the goals of any program but rather based on partisan animus.”

The lawsuit asked the court to declare the cuts unlawful, and to bar the Trump administration from implementing them or “engaging in future retaliatory conduct regarding federal funding or other participation in federal programs” based on the states exercising their sovereign authority in unrelated matters.

WASHINGTON — The sudden and surprising airspace closure over El Paso, Texas, stemmed from the Pentagon’s plans to test a laser for use in shooting down drones used by Mexican drug cartels, according to three people familiar with the situation who were granted anonymity to share sensitive details.

That caused friction with the Federal Aviation Administration, which wanted to ensure commercial air safety and the two agencies sought to coordinate, according to two of the people.

Despite a meeting scheduled later this month to discuss the issue, the Pentagon wanted to go ahead and test it, prompting the FAA to shutter the airspace. The laser was used at some point, one of the people said.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said earlier that a response to an incursion by Mexican cartel drones had led to the airspace closure and that the threat had been neutralized. Drone incursions are not uncommon along the southern border.

Officials at the White House, FAA and Department of Transportation did not respond immediately Wednesday to request for comment about the dispute. The Pentagon said it had nothing to add to its statement that largely mirrored Duffy’s comment.

The FAA had originally announced a 10-day closure of the airspace, confusing travelers at the airport in the border city with a population of nearly 700,000 people. The order was lifted a few hours later. No Mexican airspace was closed.

Duffy said in a post on X that the FAA and the Defense Department “acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion. The threat has been neutralized and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region.” Duffy said normal flights were resuming Wednesday morning. He did not say how many drones were involved or what specifically was done to disable them.

Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat whose district includes El Paso, said neither her office, the city of El Paso nor airport operations received advance notice. She said she believed the shutdown was not based on Mexican cartel drones in U.S. airspace, saying that “is not what we in Congress have been told.”

Pentagon officials declined to comment on Escobar’s remarks and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office referred questions to the FAA.

“I believe the FAA owes the community and the country an explanation as to why this happened so suddenly and abruptly and was lifted so suddenly and abruptly,” Escobar said during a news conference. The shutdown had been expected to create significant disruptions given the duration and the size of the metropolitan area around El Paso.

“The information coming from the federal government does not add up,” Escobar said.

Cross-border drone activity is not new

Rep. Tony Gonzales, whose district covers an area that stretches for about 800 miles along Texas’ border with Mexico, said cartel drone sightings are common.

“For any of us who live and work along the border, daily drone incursions by criminal organizations is everyday life for us. It’s a Wednesday for us,” Gonzales said.

Asked about the drone explanation provided by U.S. officials, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said she had “no information about the use of drones on the border.” She noted that if U.S. authorities have more information they should contact Mexico’s government.

Steven Willoughby, the deputy director of the counter-drone program at the Department of Homeland Security, told lawmakers in July that cartels are using drones nearly every day to transport drugs across the border and surveil Border Patrol agents.

More than 27,000 drones were detected within 1,600 feet of the southern border in the last six months of 2024, he testified, mostly at night. Homeland Security has said agents have seized thousands of pounds of methamphetamine, fentanyl and other drugs in recent years that cartels were trying to fly across the border using drones.

Mexican officials head to Washington

El Paso is hub of cross-border commerce alongside Ciudad Juárez. The Mexican city is home to about 1.5 million people, and some of its residents are accustomed to taking advantage of facilities including airports on both sides of the border. That easy access to the U.S. has also made Juarez, like other border cities, attractive to Mexico’s drug cartels seeking to safeguard their smuggling routes for drugs and migrants headed north and cash and guns moving to the south.

El Paso International Airport said in an Instagram post after the closure was announced that all flights to and from the airport would be grounded through Feb. 20, including commercial, cargo and general aviation flights. Local newscasts showed stranded travelers with luggage lining up at airline ticket counters and car rental desks at the El Paso airport hours after flights were grounded.

The airport posted later Wednesday morning that its operations had resumed and encouraged travelers to contact their airlines for the most up-to-date flight information.

Mexican defense and navy secretaries planned to meet with Northern Command officials in Washington on Wednesday in a meeting scheduled to be attended by representatives of several other countries, Sheinbaum said during a news conference. Sheinbaum said the Mexican officials would “listen” in the meeting and that her government would look into “the exact causes” of the closure.

‘This was a major and unnecessary disruption’

El Paso Mayor Renard Johnson said at a news conference that he didn’t hear about the closure until after the alert was issued and he called the failure to communicate that to the city unacceptable.

“Decisions made without notice and coordination puts lives at risk and creates unnecessary danger and confusion,” Johnson said. “This was a major and unnecessary disruption, one that has not occurred since 9/11.”

The airport describes itself as the gateway to west Texas, southern New Mexico and northern Mexico. Southwest, United, American and Delta all operate flights there, among others.

A similar 10-day temporary flight restriction for special security reasons remained in place Wednesday morning around Santa Teresa, N.M., which is about 15 miles northwest of the El Paso airport. FAA officials did not immediately explain why that restriction remained in place.

U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, a Democrat, said in a statement: “Keeping our communities informed and safe is critical. I’m demanding answers from the FAA and the administration about why the airspace was closed in the first place without notifying appropriate officials, leaving travelers to deal with unnecessary chaos.”

Shutdown and restart creates confusion for travelers

The airspace closure upset travel plans on both sides of the border.

María Aracelia was pushing two roller suitcases across the pedestrian bridge from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso on Wednesday morning. She had a round-trip flight to Illinois scheduled for the afternoon.

After receiving a text at 4 a.m. telling her about the 10-day closure, she scrambled to try to find other options, even how to get to another airport. Then came a notification that the El Paso airport had reopened.

“This is stressful and there isn’t time to make so many changes, especially if you need to get back for work,” Aracelia said.

Kim, Finley, Jalonick and Lee write for the Associated Press. Lee reported from El Paso, Texas. AP writers Jim Vertuno in Austin, Texas; Josh Funk in Omaha; Darlene Superville, Mike Balsamo and Konstantin Toropin in Washington; Kathy McCormack in Concord, N.H.; María Verza in Mexico City, and Christian Torres Chávez in Ciudad Juarez contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Wednesday to provide $90 million to Planned Parenthood, a move intended to help offset the losses from recent federal cuts targeting abortion providers.

“These cuts were designed to attack and assault Planned Parenthood,” said Newsom, speaking at a news conference near the Capitol. “They were not abortion cuts; they were attacks on wellness and screenings and they were attacks on women’s healthcare.”

The Republican-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” signed last year by President Trump, blocked federal Medicaid funding from going to Planned Parenthood. More than 80% of the nearly 1.3 million annual patient visits to Planned Parenthood in California were previously reimbursed by Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid.

Sen. John Laird, who authored the legislation for the funding, Senate Bill 106, said the measure showed that California won’t back down. “This is us standing up to the immediate cut that was in that bill,” said Laird, (D-Santa Cruz). “This is how we are fighting back.”

Jodi Hicks, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, thanked legislators for their support and said the organization could not survive without support from the state. She said Planned Parenthood would always fight against federal attacks but “needed an army” this time to stand beside them.

During the news conference, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom expressed frustration with reporters for asking off-topic questions and said the media should be more concerned about women’s issues.

“All of these questions have really been about other issues,” she said. “This happens over and over and over again — (and we) wonder why we have such a horrific war on women in this country.”

Planned Parenthood offers a range of services, including abortions, birth control, cancer screenings and testings for sexually transmitted diseases. A coalition of states, including California, filed a lawsuit last year against the Trump administration over the cuts to the nonprofit. The states argue in the ongoing lawsuit that the measure violates the spending powers of Congress by singling out Planned Parenthood for negative treatment.

Senate Bill 106 has drawn ire from Republicans, who question why funding is going to Planned Parenthood when many hospitals in the state need more financial support.

“For rural Californians, this conversation is about access to care,” Sen. Megan Dahle (R-Bieber) said in a statement from the Senate Republican Caucus. “Hospitals are cutting services or facing closure, forcing families to drive hours for life-saving treatment. State lawmakers should prioritize stability for these communities.”

Feb. 11 (UPI) — Gallup will stop measuring and publishing presidential approval ratings this year, the analytics firm announced on Wednesday.

The company said in a statement that it is getting out of tracking the approval ratings of politicians to focus its research on “issues and conditions that shape people’s lives.”

“That work will continue through the Gallup Poll Social Series, the Gallup Quarterly Business Review, the World Poll and our portfolio of U.S. and global research,” a spokesperson for Gallup said.

Gallup’s Presidential Job Approval Rating has been used to measure the public’s sentiment toward the president’s overall performance and performance on certain issues for decades. It began to report presidential approval ratings in 1938.

President Donald Trump‘s approval rating has fallen to 36% in his second term, Gallup’s December poll said. His average approval rating during his first term was 41.1%, lower than any president since Harry Truman, who was in office from 1945 to 1953.

Trump’s immigration enforcement and tariff policies are among the areas that the public has most disapproved of during his second term.

Gallup said that ending its presidential approval ratings was not in response to political pressure from the White House.

“This is a strategic shift based on Gallup’s research goals and priorities,” Gallup said.

“Hi, I think we’re under attack.”

This movie begins with the relatable sense of astonishment the people in Caracas and La Guaira felt as US helicopters hit the ground to whisk away Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores to a Brooklyn jail. A proper opening to a situation that has not ceased to dazzle us and to overwhelm with more questions than answers: Venezuela at the wee hours of January 3. 

Frontline, a multiawarded PBS channel specialized in documentaries, came back to Venezuelan recent history to provide a hot take, a bit shorter than an hour, that covers all you need to know from the military incursion to the release and re-arrest of Juan Pablo Guanipa, and the painful wait for the Amnesty Law. Crisis in Venezuela: An Uncertain Future is perfect to gather the most relevant facts of the new context if you are Venezuelan and drowning in a sea of information, or if you are not and need a good synthesis of this mess.

This is the same team that made A Dangerous Assignment, the documentary about Alex Saab and the journalistic research that led to the arrest of Maduro’s moneyman in Cape Verde. Venezuelan filmmaker Juan Ravell directs again, and we get the AP’s Joshua Goodman as a traveling companion, narrating crazy developments like their scoop of the DEA’s investigation into Delcy Rodriguez. The documentary is packed with characters from the Maximum Pressure to Donroe including Biden’s negotiating table. A synthesized pill of Venezuelan contemporary history, with enough time to pack the events of Venezuela’s January in detail—like having professor Francisco Monaldi explain how the reform of the hydrocarbon law means the dismantlement of Hugo Chavez’s oil policy, despite the BS Delcy’s telling the chavista grassroots.

Some scenes about political prisoners and how all this is felt on the terrain will shock you, in a good way. With so many stories and interviews imposing predetermined readings on our country as if it was an empty canvas to project someone’s ideology or stance, this documentary shines with its accuracy and access to sources. Don’t miss it.

New York City, United States – For 14 years, BC Dodge built a career telling other people’s stories as a marketing and communications professional in the nonprofit sector in the Washington, DC area in the United States. But in late 2024, that stable career hit a speed bump.

He was laid off from his job amid a round of restructuring. The news landed without warning. One day he had a job, and the next he was sitting at home, staring at the numbers, trying to figure out how to keep paying the mortgage and putting food on the table.

He is married, and his partner is a teacher, but the math did not work. One salary might cover things for a little while, but not long enough to maintain long-term stability.

So he started applying for new work immediately. Over three months, he submitted 350 job applications. He got six interviews.

After months of searching, something moved.

He advanced in the hiring process for a Washington, DC–based nonprofit, making it far enough to sit across from senior leadership. It felt like he finally caught a break.

Then the ground shifted again. As Dodge was interviewing for a new job, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, was advising the administration of US President Donald Trump on how to shrink the federal government, and that meant cutting funding to agencies that provide contracts and funds to swaths of nonprofit organisations around the country. The effects rippled outward, and Dodge was caught in the crosshairs.

Contracts were cancelled and funding streams dried up. Nonprofits that depend on government support had to pull back and scale down ambitions — those very same nonprofits from whom Dodge sought employment.

“I got a call from HR saying they weren’t going to hire for the position, and that all hiring was on hold. I couldn’t argue with them, because I’d been hearing the same thing from organisations I’d spoken to since I started applying. ‘We were relying on federal funds, and now they’re gone,’” Dodge said.

Then it was back to the drawing board. He began searching yet again, but this time with a cloud of uncertainty looming over the entire industry he works in. Dodge finally took what he could get — part-time work in his field. The pay was well below what he had been earning before, but he accepted it anyway. Some income, he reasoned, was better than none.

The result is underemployment. Underemployment can manifest in several ways, often when workers are seeking full-time work but can only find part-time positions, or when the jobs they work do not fully utilise their skills and training. It is generally associated with industries like restaurants or retail, but it also reaches into fields with fewer resources and shrinking opportunities, including the nonprofit sector, where jobs are increasingly precarious and full-time stability is harder to find because of the wave of government funding cuts in 2025.

The upshot is lower incomes for underemployed workers, sometimes below the cost of living or even pushing them into the ranks of the working poor.

Underemployment has been on the rise, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which has tracked the rate of underemployment since 1978. Today, 8 percent of the US population is underemployed, up 0.5 percent from 2024 and it is up 1.1 percent from 2023.

At the same time, many in the US are seeing their expenses increase.

The impact of tariffs has hit low-to-middle-income earners harder than others. Analysis from the Yale Budget Lab found that lower-income households are paying a higher percentage of their post-tax income on goods subject to tariffs as opposed to higher-income households, all while costs for necessities like healthcare are increasing.

Earlier this year, Congressional leaders failed to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. Premiums increased by an average of 144 percent, according to analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“Some people have lost their jobs and found new ones that pay less, but others have kept their jobs, but their healthcare premiums have increased. Their electric bills have also gone up. Their salaries no longer cover basic living costs,” Jillian Hishaw, a personal bankruptcy lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina, said.

She said that because of increased costs like these and a stalling job market, she is seeing an increase in inquiries about personal bankruptcy filings in efforts by potential clients not to lose their homes to foreclosure.

“In one day last week, 85 foreclosures were filed in Mecklenburg County [where Charlotte is located]. Foreclosures happen daily, but 85 in a single day is unusually high. Two years ago, the daily average was 10 to 20, but now filings are approaching triple digits each day,” Hishaw said.

Shrinking options

The surging economic pressures hit workers across various sectors, including financial and administrative services. An Ohio-based accountant who did not want his name to be published, has worked a patchwork of accounting and administrative jobs over the past few years. In March, he was laid off from a research organisation in central Ohio.

After months of searching, he found new work, but not as an accountant, and the pay falls far short of covering his cost of living.

“I’m working as a sales coordinator, which I really don’t want to be doing, but it was the only thing I could land with how bad things are. It’s not enough to live on,” he said.

The labour market is under strain. Layoffs reached more than 1.1 million in 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, while job creation failed to keep pace, with just 584,000 jobs added. As a result, more workers are settling for underpaid or part-time work that does not meet basic living expenses, including Dodge and the accountant.

Michele Evermore, senior fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance, says that economic uncertainty driven by tariffs and developments in artificial intelligence has put businesses across a wide set of sectors essentially on pause — maintaining the status quo or scaling back.

“People who are already at the margins are getting kicked out entirely, and that’s placing pressure on everyone who is clinging to a job,” Evermore told Al Jazeera.

In January, one of the key measures of underemployment, the number of people who work part-time for economic reasons, such as an inability to find full-time work or had their hours reduced, hit 4.9 million. It was a 453,000 decline from the month before, but is up 410,000 from this time last year, according to the January jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday.

Long-term unemployment jumped 386,000 from this time a year ago to 1.8 million, although it remains unchanged compared with the previous month.

The nonprofit sector has been hit particularly hard in the last year, losing 28,729 jobs in 2025, up sharply from 5,640 losses the year before, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Like the Ohio accountant, Dodge has been searching for new opportunities since he lost his full-time role a year and a half ago. He has applied for 460 jobs and only landed a handful of interviews.

Working weekends, washing dishes

The market is only getting tighter. US employers cut more than 108,000 jobs in January, while employers only announced intentions to hire 5,300 new roles for the month, the lowest on record since Challenger, Gray & Christmas started tracking that in 2009.

“Employers aren’t wanting to make any big investments right now, including increasing salaries to their workforce,” Evermore, who served as a policy adviser in the US Labor Department during the administration of former US President Joe Biden, added.

In December, labour market turnover remained stagnant. Amid economic uncertainty and a slowdown in new job growth, many Americans are hanging on to the jobs they already have. Job openings fell to 6.5 million, down 386,000 from the previous month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labour Turnover Survey (JOLTS).

Hiring and separations, which include layoffs and firings, were unchanged. That followed November’s report, which similarly showed little movement in both new hiring and the number of workers leaving their jobs.

Combined, that means that for the underemployed, finding a new role, either part-time to augment their existing income, or to replace it altogether, is increasingly difficult for people like the accountant.

“I’m also working weekends at a friend’s cafe, washing dishes, and I’m still applying and interviewing for other opportunities. But it’s the same story, no offers. At the same time, I’m debating whether to switch professions or even go back to school, even though I already have a master’s degree,” he said.

That shared distress has also created an unlikely sense of camaraderie among those struggling to get by, even as the outlook remains bleak.

Dodge finds it in late-night scrolls through Reddit, watching strangers narrate versions of the same stalled search.

“I doomscroll a lot,” he said, “getting depressed about the state of politics and the global economy, and taking some solace in knowing I’m not the only one struggling to find viable employment after 12, 13, 14, even 15 months.”

For now, that recognition of others stuck in the same place, hitting the same walls, is enough to keep him moving forward, submitting applications and waiting for a response that might not even come.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year outlook projects worsening long-term United States federal deficits and rising debt, driven largely by increased spending, notably on Social Security, Medicare, and debt service payments.

Compared with the CBO’s analysis this time last year, the fiscal outlook, which was released on Wednesday, has deteriorated modestly.

The CBO said that the deficit for fiscal 2026 – President Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year in office – will be about 5.8 percent of GDP, about where it was in fiscal 2025, when the deficit was $1.775 trillion.

But the US deficit-to-GDP ratio will average 6.1 percent over the next decade, reaching 6.7 percent in fiscal 2036 – far above US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s goal to shrink it to about 3 percent of economic output.

Major developments over the last year are factored into the latest report, including Republicans’ tax and spending measure known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” higher tariffs, and the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, which includes deporting millions of immigrants from the US mainland.

As a result of these changes, the projected 2026 deficit is about $100bn higher, and total deficits from 2026 to 2035 are $1.4 trillion larger, while debt held by the public is projected to rise from 101 percent of GDP to 120 percent — exceeding historical highs.

Notably, the CBO says higher tariffs partially offset some of those increases by raising federal revenue by $3 trillion, but that also comes with higher inflation from 2026 to 2029.

Rising debt and debt service are important because repaying investors for borrowed money crowds out government spending on basic needs such as roads, infrastructure and education, which enable investments in future economic growth.

CBO projections also indicate that inflation does not hit the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target rate until 2030.

A major difference is that the CBO forecasts rely on significantly lower economic growth projections than the Trump administration, pegging 2026 real GDP growth at 2.2 percent on a fourth-quarter comparison basis, fading to an average of about 1.8 percent for the rest of the decade.

Trump administration officials in recent weeks have projected robust growth in the 3-4 percent range for 2026, with recent predictions that first-quarter growth could top 6 percent amid rising investments in factories and artificial intelligence data centres.

CBO’s forecasts assume that tax and spending laws and tariff policies in early December remain in place for a decade. The government’s fiscal year starts on October 1.

While revived investment tax incentives and bigger individual tax refunds provide a boost in 2026, the CBO said that this is attenuated by the drag from larger fiscal deficits and reduced immigration that slows the growth of the labour force.

Jonathan Burks, executive vice president of economic and health policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center said “large deficits are unprecedented for a growing, peacetime economy”, though “the good news is there is still time for policymakers to correct course.”

‘Urgent warning’

Lawmakers have recently addressed rising federal debt and deficits primarily through targeted spending caps and debt limit suspensions, as well as deploying “extraordinary measures” when the US is close to hitting its statutory spending limit, though these measures have often been accompanied by new, large-scale spending or tax policies that maintain high deficit levels.

And Trump, at the start of his second term, deployed a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, which set a goal to balance the budget by cutting $2 trillion in waste, fraud and abuse; however, budget analysts estimate that DOGE cut anywhere between $1.4bn to $7bn, largely through workforce firings.

Michael Peterson, CEO of the Peterson Foundation, said the CBO’s latest budget projection “is an urgent warning to our leaders about America’s costly fiscal path.”

“This election year, voters understand the connection between rising debt and their personal economic condition. And the financial markets are watching. Stabilising our debt is an essential part of improving affordability, and must be a core component of the 2026 campaign conversation.”

WASHINGTON — U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi repeatedly sparred with lawmakers on Wednesday as she was pressed over the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and faced demands for greater transparency in the high-profile case.

Bondi accused Democrats and at least one Republican on the House Judiciary Committee of engaging in “theatrics” as she fielded questions about redaction errors made by the Justice Department when it released millions of files related to the Epstein case last month.

The attorney general at one point acknowledged that mistakes had been made as the Justice Department tried to comply with a federal law that required it to review, redact and publicize millions of files within a 30-day period. Given the tremendous task at hand, she said the “error rate was very low” and that fixes were made when issues were encountered.

Her testimony on the Epstein files, however, was mostly punctuated by dramatic clashes with lawmakers — exchanges that occurred as eight Epstein survivors attended the hearing.

In one instance, Bondi refused to apologize to Epstein victims in the room, saying she would not “get into the gutter” with partisan requests from Democrats.

In another exchange, Bondi declined to say how many perpetrators tied to the Epstein case are being investigated by the Justice Department. And at one point, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said the Trump administration was engaging in a “cover-up,” prompting Bondi to tell him that he was suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.”

The episodes underscore the extent to which the Epstein saga has roiled members of Congress. It has long been a political cudgel for Democrats, but after millions of files were released last month, offering the most detail yet of Epstein’s crimes, Republicans once unwilling to criticize Trump administration officials are growing more testy, as was put on full display during Wednesday’s hearing.

Among the details uncovered in the files is information that showed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had closer ties to Epstein than he had initially led on.

Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) asked Bondi if federal prosecutors have talked to Lutnick about Epstein. Bondi said only that he has “addressed those ties himself.”

Lutnick said at a congressional hearing Tuesday that he visited Epstein’s island, an admission that is at odds with previous statements in which he said he had cut off contact with the disgraced financier after initially meeting him in 2005.

“I did have lunch with him as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation,” Lutnick told a Senate panel about a trip he took to the island in 2012.

As Balint peppered Bondi about senior administration officials’ ties to Epstein, the back and forth between them got increasingly heated as Bondi declined to answer her questions.

“This is not a game, secretary,” Balint told Bondi.

“I’m attorney general,” Bondi responded.

“My apologies,” Balint said. “I couldn’t tell.”

In another testy exchange, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) pressed Bondi on whether the Justice Department has evidence tying Donald Trump to the sex-trafficking crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.

Bondi dismissed the line of questioning as politically motivated and said there was “no evidence” Trump committed a crime.

Lieu then accused her of misleading Congress, citing a witness statement to the FBI alleging that Trump attended Epstein gatherings with underage girls and describing secondhand claims from a limo driver who claimed that Trump sexually assaulted an underage girl who committed suicide shortly after.

He demanded Bondi’s resignation for failing to interview the witness or hold co-conspirators to account. Other Democrats have floated the possibility of impeaching Bondi over the handling of the Epstein files.

Beyond the Epstein files, Democrats raised broad concerns about the Justice Department increasingly investigating and prosecuting the president’s political foes.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said Bondi has turned the agency into “Trump’s instrument of revenge.”

“Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza and you deliver every time,” Raskin said.

As an example, Raskin pointed to the Justice Department’s failed attempt to indict six Democratic lawmakers who urged service members to not comply with unlawful orders in a video posted in November.

“You tried to get a grand jury to indict six members of Congress who are veterans of our armed forces on charges of seditious conspiracy, simply for exercising their 1st Amendment rights,” he said.

During the hearing, Democrats criticized the Justice Department’s prosecution of journalist Don Lemon, who was arrested by federal agents last month after he covered an anti-immigration enforcement protest at a Minnesota church.

Bondi defended Lemon’s prosecution, and called him a “blogger.”

“They were gearing for a resistance,” Bondi testified. “They met in a parking lot and they caravanned to a church on a Sunday morning when people were worshipping.”

The protest took place after federal immigration agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis.

Six federal prosecutors resigned last month after Bondi directed them to investigate Good’s widow. Bondi later stated on Fox News that she “fired them all” for being part of the “resistance.” Lemon then hired one of those prosecutors, former U.S. Atty. Joe Thompson, to represent him in the case.

Bondi also faced questions about a Justice Department memo that directed the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism” by Jan. 30, and to establish a “cash reward system” that incentivizes individuals to report on their fellow Americans.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, (D-Pa.) asked Bondi if the list of groups had been compiled yet.

“I’m not going to answer it yes or no, but I will say, I know that Antifa is part of that,” Bondi said.

Asked by Scanlon if she would share such a list with Congress, Bondi said she “not going to commit anything to you because you won’t let me answer questions.”

Scanlon said she worried that if such a list exists, there is no way for individuals or groups who are included in it to dispute any charge of being a domestic terrorists — and warned Bondi that this was a dangerous move by the federal government.

“Americans have never tolerated political demagogues who use the government to punish people on an enemy’s list,” Scanlon said. “It brought down McCarthy, Nixon and it will bring down this administration as well.”

The head of the powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, blasted Nithya Raman on Wednesday, calling the city council member an “opportunist” for launching a campaign to unseat Mayor Karen Bass after previously signaling her support for Bass.

Federation president Yvonne Wheeler said in a statement that her organization, which represents an estimated 800,000 workers, will “use every tool” in its arsenal to get Bass reelected.

“With Donald Trump’s ongoing war against the people of Los Angeles, our working families and immigrant communities, now is not the time for distractions from a political opportunist — especially one who backed the Mayor’s re-election campaign just weeks ago,” Wheeler said.

Raman, whose district stretches from Silver Lake to Reseda, was announced as one of the mayor’s endorsers on Jan. 27 in a campaign press release listing Bass’ San Fernando Valley supporters. Two days later, she appeared in a second campaign press release as one of Bass’ female endorsers.

Raman launched her own last-minute mayoral bid on Saturday, saying that City Hall is unable to “manage the basics.”

The primary election is June 2, followed by a November runoff if no candidate secures a majority of the vote.

Raman’s campaign team did not immediately respond to Wheeler’s assertions after being contacted by The Times.

In her statement, Wheeler described Bass as a “lifelong progressive” while suggesting that Raman, whose council campaigns were backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and several other progressive groups, falls short on that front.

“You can’t truly be progressive unless you are a true champion of working people,” she said. “Karen Bass is the only candidate in this race who meets that criteria.”

The federation represents about 300 labor organizations in L.A. County, including unions representing teachers, social workers, construction trades and entertainment industry workers. In previous city elections, the group has spent big on its favored candidates, paying for campaign materials, door-to-door canvassers and other expenses.

Raman broke with the labor federation and her colleagues in September, voting against the $2.6-billion expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Before that vote, labor unions said the upgrade would generate much-needed construction jobs at a time when housing production has been down. Raman and Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky warned the project was too financially risky and would saddle the city with significant budget shortfalls starting in 2031 — after Bass is out of office.

“What I fear is that we’re going to have a beautiful new Convention Center surrounded by far more homelessness than we have today, which will drive away tourists, which will prevent people from coming here and holding their events here,” Raman said at the time.

Bass supported the project, as did a majority of the council.

Raman also drew the ire of some construction union leaders last month by drafting a last-minute proposal to ask voters to change Measure ULA, a tax on property sales of $5.3 million and up. Raman, who described herself as a supporter of Measure ULA, brought her proposal to the council floor one day before the deadline to take action.

Raman, who backed Measure ULA in 2022, said she now believes it has had unintended consequences, putting a major damper on real estate development and inhibiting the production of much-needed housing.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov did not say why he believed the US would respect the limits set out in New START.

Russia has said it will abide by limits on its nuclear weapons as set out in a lapsed arms control treaty with the United States, as long as Washington continues to do the same.

The New START agreement expired earlier this month, leaving the world’s two biggest nuclear-armed powers with no binding constraints on their strategic arsenals for the first time in more than half a century and sparking fears of a new global arms race.

In an address to parliament on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow was in no rush to start developing and deploying more weapons – backtracking on comments made by his ministry last week that said Russia considered itself no longer bound by the treaty’s terms.

“We proceed from the fact that this moratorium, which was announced by our president, remains in effect, but only while the United States does not exceed the outlined limits,” said Lavrov.

“We have reason to believe that the United States is in no hurry to abandon these limits and that they will be observed for the foreseeable future,” he said, without explaining the basis for that assumption.

US President Donald Trump rejected an offer from Russian President Vladimir Putin to voluntarily abide by the limits set out in New START for another year, saying he wanted a “new, improved and modernised” treaty rather than an extension of the old one.

Russia has also indicated it wants to strike a new arms control agreement.

Washington is pushing for China to be included in the talks, pointing to its growing nuclear arsenal.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China’s nuclear arsenal is growing faster than that of any other country by about 100 new warheads a year since 2023.

However, Beijing refuses to negotiate with the US and Russia because it says it has only a fraction of their warhead numbers – an estimated 600, compared with about 4,000 each for Russia and the US.

As the treaty expired, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said that China would not be joining the bilateral arms-reduction talks.

Moscow says if China is brought into a new deal, then so too should the US’s nuclear allies, the United Kingdom and France, which have 290 and 225 warheads, respectively.

New START, first signed in Prague in 2010 by the then-presidents of the US and Russia, Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, limited each side’s nuclear arsenal to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads – a reduction of nearly 30 percent from the previous limit set in 2002.

Deployed weapons or warheads are those in active service and available for rapid use as opposed to those in storage or awaiting dismantlement.

It also allowed each side to conduct on-site inspections of the other’s nuclear arsenal, although these were suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic and have not resumed since.

Russia in 2023 rejected inspections of its nuclear sites under the treaty, as tensions rose with the US over its nearly four-year war in Ukraine.

But it said it had remained committed to the quantitative limits set down.

WASHINGTON — A grand jury in Washington refused Tuesday to indict Democratic lawmakers in connection with a video in which they urged U.S. military members to resist “illegal orders,” according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department opened an investigation into the video featuring Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and four other Democratic lawmakers urging U.S. service members to follow established military protocols and reject orders they believe to be unlawful. All the lawmakers previously served in the military or at intelligence agencies.

Grand jurors in Washington declined to sign off on charges in the latest of a series of rebukes of prosecutors by citizens in the nation’s capital, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter. It wasn’t immediately clear whether prosecutors had sought indictments against all six lawmakers or what charge or charges prosecutors attempted to bring.

Grand jury rejections are extraordinarily unusual, but have happened repeatedly in recent months in Washington as citizens who have heard the government’s evidence have come away underwhelmed in a number of cases. Prosecutors could try again to secure an indictment.

Spokespeople for the U.S. attorney’s office and the Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

The FBI in November began contacting the lawmakers to schedule interviews, outreach that came against the backdrop of broader Justice Department efforts to punish political opponents of the president. President Trump and his aides labeled the lawmakers’ video as “seditious” — and Trump said on his social media account that the offense was “punishable by death.”

Besides Slotkin and Kelly, the other Democrats who appeared in the video include Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania.

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who represents Michigan, said late Tuesday that she hopes this ends the Justice Department’s probe.

“Tonight we can score one for the Constitution, our freedom of speech, and the rule of law,” Slotkin said in a statement. “But today wasn’t just an embarrassing day for the Administration. It was another sad day for our country,” she said.

Kelly, a former Navy pilot who represents Arizona, called the attempt to bring charges an “outrageous abuse of power by Donald Trump and his lackies.”

“Donald Trump wants every American to be too scared to speak out against him,” Kelly said in a post on X. “The most patriotic thing any of us can do is not back down.”

In November, the Pentagon opened an investigation into Kelly, citing a federal law that allows retired service members to be recalled to active duty on orders of the defense secretary for possible court-martial or other punishment. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has censured Kelly for participating in the video and is trying to retroactively demote Kelly from his retired rank of captain.

The senator is suing Hegseth to block those proceedings, calling them an unconstitutional act of retribution. During a hearing last week, the judge appeared to be skeptical of key arguments that a government attorney made in defense of Kelly’s Jan. 5 censure by Hegseth.

Richer and Tucker write for the Associated Press.

In a previous article, we suggested that the opposition activate street mobilization to secure a safe seat at the negotiating table of the transition—where, for now, only Delcy Rodríguez and Trump seem to have a voice. The goal is not to derail the transition, but to make it impossible to move forward without guarantees that it will culminate in a genuinely democratic regime.

To avoid draining popular energy through a call for street demonstrations around a goal that may seem implausible, the opposition should focus on rebuilding trust within the broader social base through periodic, predictable, and sustained mobilizations. Once a week, for example, on a fixed day. Such a strategy would also serve to test how willing chavismo is to repress, using less combative slogans and instead pushing for modest concessions that the Rodríguez regime might already be prepared to grant.

A possible example of this type of demand was the call for the release of political prisoners loudly voiced by student movement activists, human rights groups and associations of relatives. Mobilizations have become recurrent over the past couple of weeks. The anticipated repression has not arrived, and scenes such as UCV student representatives directly confronting Delcy Rodríguez seem to signal a renewal of Venezuelan society’s defiant spirit. The unexpected announcement of an Amnesty Law and the closure of El Helicoide as a political prison are beginning to feel like hard-won gains for a sector of the country long accustomed to the sterility of its struggle.

These gains, however, have limits. The re-incarceration of Juan Pablo Guanipa as a disciplinary gesture toward the opposition’s leadership continues to reveal the regime’s sensitivities—but also its internal fractures (clashes between moderate and hardline factions) and openings for further struggle.

With the Hate Law still in force, NGOs outlawed, uncertainty over the final wording of the Amnesty Law, the persistence of state-terror structures and other detention centers, one cannot be certain that the current process of political liberalization will not suffer setbacks should the whims of the Executive shift. Even so, these remain victories that inspire other sectors. A group of workers demanding an update to the minimum wage managed to protest outside the Supreme Tribunal of Justice without facing repression.

The opposition must embrace a strategy less rooted in open confrontation and more in applying political aikido to the regime.

There is, however, a glaring absence: political parties and María Corina Machado, who, being abroad, has not managed to forge a genuine connection with these mobilizations. Without party-based political organization behind these demands, there is a risk of missing the opportunity to build a true movement capable of pressuring the government toward re-democratization.

What is lacking is the activation of leadership and a national organization capable of proposing a political program in which these demands can be recognized as interconnected. One where the strength of multiple social sectors affected by state neglect can reinforce one another.

For the opposition, the risk is not only being left behind when the ‘transition train’ departs, but also that the Rodríguez-led economic reforms—encouraged by US oil interests—could generate a new consumption and welfare boom that eventually dampens political protest. If the most skeptical sectors begin to believe that economic liberalization without political liberalization is an acceptable arrangement after decades of social decline, the space for democratic struggle could narrow significantly.

So how can this missing piece in the national political moment be recovered?

In search of political parties

For now, Machado’s return to Venezuela is unlikely without security guarantees. Nor do we believe her physical return is strictly necessary to produce an organized democratic movement. What matters is restoring grassroots organizational structures which, as the example of the Comanditos showed, are possible in our country. Especially when the cost of repression appears to be rising.

In this context, the opposition must embrace a strategy less rooted in open confrontation and more in applying political aikido to the regime. Aikido, as a martial art, centers on using your opponent’s force against them. Politically speaking, the opposition does not need to impose an alternative transition agenda on chavismo at this moment. Instead, it should take the agenda that Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez are proposing and deepen it. Where it sees a small crack open, it should place its foot in the gap until the door opens wide enough to pass through. And chavismo is already offering such an opportunity with the reorganization of the party system.

Jorge Rodríguez, as president of the National Assembly, announced that the PSUV would seek to reform the Electoral Code. A few days later, the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced the temporary suspension of the party registration and revalidation period. One hypothesis is that, in response to US demands for some degree of political liberalization, chavismo may facilitate the normalization of parties previously intervened by the judiciary and lift disqualifications barring political leaders from running for office.

Whether or not this proves true, opposition parties must seize this window of opportunity to reactivate their militant structures by convening neighborhood assemblies, open town halls, and even engaging in dialogue with communal councils to bring the legislative agenda proposed by chavismo itself into public debate.

By targeting the National Assembly as the focal point of mobilization, the opposition would not only pressure the regime but also force the hand of those lawmakers who call themselves opposition.

This requires political pedagogy from the opposition: demonstrating that this is not simply capitulation, but rather an acknowledgment that the transition to democracy is a gradual process that demands strategy, shrewdness, maturity—and, crucially, organization and active civic commitment as new pockets of freedom are won and the struggle progressively deepened. Such mobilization should aim to re-oxygenate party cadres and lend legitimacy to the proposals that might emerge during parliamentary debates over reform.

Naturally, tensions arise. The opposition deemed legitimate in the eyes of the public earned that status precisely by completely refusing to compete in the 2025 legislative elections, and therefore holds no seats in the Assembly. Conversely, opposition lawmakers that chavismo tolerates lack credibility among the broader opposition base. Yet this doesn’t need to be an obstacle for democratic forces, which can continue to pressure the Legislative branch from the outside. For instance, Machado’s leadership could call mobilizations on the days of parliamentary debate—not to oppose the discussions outright, but to demand that the people’s demands be heard in the reforms to come.

On the one hand, there is clearly no guarantee that all demands will be incorporated or that reforms proposed by the opposition-outside-the-Assembly will translate into effective legislation. But the return in militant energy and organizational capital for political parties may outweigh the legislative outcome itself, since that strengthened organization becomes the new foundation for future mobilizations.

On the other hand, by targeting the National Assembly as the focal point of mobilization, the opposition would not only pressure chavismo but also force the hand of those lawmakers who call themselves opposition yet face credibility issues. Politics is, after all, a game. The moral maximalism with which the legitimacy of opposition leaders is often judged can become an obstacle to recognizing that the Capriles Radonskis of the 2025 Assembly do not need to be wholehearted opposition figures.

One effect of January 3 was that Capriles himself—a detractor of Machado—praised her leadership position, likely driven by political calculation. Yet it is precisely these political interests that democratic forces can exploit. These positioning lines are openings the opposition can deepen, twisting not only the government’s arm but also that of these lawmakers, pressuring them to answer to the organized groups outside the Assembly. Establishing channels of communication with such lawmakers would not contaminate the democratic struggle if approached from a standpoint of strategic pragmatism.

So long as the means employed do not undermine the ultimate objective—the consolidation of a democracy grounded in memory, truth, and justice—the opposition would do well to weigh its alternatives with less moral timidity and greater political maturity.

Is Mike Johnson stupid?

The five-term Louisiana congressman earned a law degree and maneuvered his way to become speaker of the House. That requires a certain mental aptitude.

However, wanting that job, which entails bowing and scraping to President Trump while herding an unruly GOP conference with an eyelash-thin majority, does tend to land on the stupid side of the scale.

But maybe Johnson isn’t stupid. Maybe he’s just willfully ignorant, or uninformed. Perhaps he simply doesn’t know any better.

How else to explain his persistent claim there’s something sinister and nefarious about the way California casts and counts its election ballots?

Just last week, Johnson once again repeated one of the sophistries the president uses to dump all over the country’s elections system and explain away his oft-verified loss in the 2020 presidential campaign.

With an apparent eye toward rigging the 2026 midterm election, Trump suggested Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least “15 places,” which, presumably, would all be Democratic strongholds. Johnson — bowing, scraping — echoed Trump’s phony claims of corruption to justify the president’s latest treachery.

“In some of the states, like in California, for example. I mean, they hold the elections open for weeks after election day,” Johnson told reporters. “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on election day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost. … It looks on its face to be fraudulent.”

Fact check: There was no hocus-pocus. No “holding open” of elections to allow for manipulation of the result. No voting or any other kind of fraud.

California does take awhile to count its ballots and finalize its elections. If people want a quicker count, then push lawmakers in Sacramento to spend more on the consistently underfunded election offices that tally the results in California’s 58 counties.

That said, there are plenty of reasons — none involving any kind of partisan chicanery — that explain why California elections seems to drag on and vote totals shift as ballots are steadily counted.

For starters, there are a lot of ballots to count. Over the last several decades, California has worked to encourage as many eligible citizens as possible to invest in the state and its future by engaging at election time and voting.

That’s a good thing. Participatory democracy, and all that.

More than 16 million Californians cast ballots in the last presidential election. That number exceeds the population of all but 10 states.

Once votes are cast, California takes great care to make sure they’re legitimate and counted properly. (Which is exactly what Trump and Johnson want, right? Right?)

That diligence takes time. It may require looking up an individual’s address or verifying his or her signature. Or routing a ballot dropped off at the wrong polling location to its appropriate county for processing.

In recent years, California has shifted to conducting its elections predominantly by mail. That’s further extended the counting process. The state allows those ballots to arrive and be counted up to seven days after the election, so long as they are postmarked on or before election day. Once received, each mail ballot has to be verified and processed before it can be counted. That prolongs the process.

County elections officials have 30 days to tally each valid ballot and conduct a required postelection audit. That’s been the time frame under state law for quite some time.

What’s changed in recent years is that California has had several closely fought congressional contests — a result of more competitive districts drawn by an independent redistricting commission — and the nation has had to wait (and sometimes wait and wait and wait) for the results to know the balance of power in a narrowly divided Congress.

“For that reason, we get an outsized amount of criticism for our long vote count, because everyone’s impatient,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation.

As for why the vote in congressional races has tended to shift in Democrats’ favor, there’s a simple, non-diabolical explanation.

Republican voters have generally preferred to cast their ballots in person, on election day. Democrats are more likely to mail their ballots, meaning they arrive — and get counted — later. As those votes were tallied, several close contests in 2024 moved in Democrats’ direction.

(In 2022, in Riverside County, Democratic challenger Will Rollins led Republican Rep. Ken Calvert for several days after the election before a batch of Republican votes erased Rollins’ lead and secured Calvert’s reelection. You didn’t hear Democrats raise a stink.)

There are plenty of reasons to bash California, if one is so inclined.

The exorbitant cost of housing. Nightmarish traffic. High rates of poverty and homelessness.

But on the plus side, a comprehensive study — the 2024 Cost of Voting Index, published in the Election Law Journal — ranked California seventh in the nation in the ease of casting a ballot. That’s something to be proud of.

As for Johnson, the evidence suggests the speaker is neither dumb nor uninformed when it comes to California and its elections. Rather, he’s scheming and cynical, sowing unwarranted and corrosive doubts about election integrity to mollify Trump and thwart a free and fair election in November.

Which is much worse than plain old stupidity.

Voting is fundamental to democracy, but here in the U.S. people don’t vote very much. In December, Miami held a runoff election for mayor, and all of 37,000 voters turned out. This was 2,000 fewer people than voted in comparable off-cycle elections in Apizaco, a small city in the mountains of central Mexico. It was no blip: The median turnout in U.S. city elections is 26% of the voting age population. In Mexico, by contrast, turnout rarely dips below 50%, and unglamorous small-town elections attract higher numbers, often more than 70% of the citizenry.

Nevertheless, the United States disdains Mexico as a pale shadow of its own democracy. Mexican elections are written off as corrupt, violent and unrepresentative. This was part-true for much of the last century, when versions of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional ruled without interruption for 71 years. Mexicans were “oriented” to vote by party managers, fined if they didn’t, violently dissuaded from voting for dissidents, disenfranchised with stuffed ballot boxes. Impressive turnouts were coerced. Even today, decades after the arrival of a competitive democracy, the violence persists. Thirty-four candidates were murdered in the 2024 elections.

Yet Mexicans also vote in impressive numbers because they have always cared profoundly about representative politics, and particularly at a local level. Many of those large turnouts in authoritarian Mexico were crowds of everyday people struggling to elect legitimate authorities in the teeth of a rigged system. Those struggles meant that sometimes they won.

Historical outcomes are revealing. More than 200 years of elections in Mexico have given results significantly more diverse and representative than those of the United States. In 2024 Mexicans elected the first female president in North American history, climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum. In 1829 Mexicans elected the first Black president in North American history, mule driver Vicente Guerrero. In 1856 they elected lawyer Benito Juárez as the only Indigenous president in North American history.

The United States was born committed to rule by freely elected representatives. “We the people” is a good start to a piece of political writing and a good start to a country. When the French sociologist Aléxis de Tocqueville visited New England in the 1820s he was struck by how the citizens of small towns argued out their differences and came up with solutions together. The federal republic was a scaling up of those habits. The sum of those people’s beliefs, institutions and bloody-mindedness, Tocqueville wrote, was democracy in America.

The peoples of the United Mexican States, founded in 1824 after gaining independence from Spain, shared those ambitions. Mexico was likewise a federal republic, its rulers elected, its powers divided among executive, legislature and judiciary. As in the U.S., the female half of the population was excluded. But Mexico’s founders were ahead of ours in one sine qua non of genuine democracy: racial equality. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton claimed that “to all general purposes we have uniformly been one people; each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection.” That was a self-evident untruth, because Black and Indigenous peoples were not included.

In Mexico, people of color had some standing from the founding onward. Mexican history has its own wrenching tragedies of race: the slavery of West Africans, the ethnocides of the North, the systematic impoverishment of peoples like the Maya of Chiapas, a eugenic hunger for white migration. But from the colonial outset Black people were acknowledged to be fully human, their enslavers’ abuses punished, their lynching unknown. Many Indigenous peoples preserved their language, lands and governments over centuries. Asians joined them; the first Japanese ambassador arrived in 1614. Mexico was the world’s first great melting pot.

So the founders of the United Mexican States made no formal distinction among the multitudes they contained. Their leaders in the War of Independence abolished slavery. Their post-independence congress mandated “the equality of civil rights to all free inhabitants of the empire, whatever their origin.” The 1824 Constitution extended the vote to every adult male. All would be free, all equal under law and all voters with a stake in the outcome.

In 1917 Mexicans passed the most progressive constitution in the world following their own revolution. It mandated an eight-hour working day, a minimum wage, equal salaries for men and women, and paid maternity leave. While women didn’t get the vote until the 1950s, they exercised notable power behind the scenes; even the most conservative parties had female organizers and supporters. Progressive social policies inspired leaders across the hemisphere, including Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Three core beliefs inspire Mexicans to vote. They believe that face-to-face freedom, embedded in the power and autonomy of the municipio libre, the free county, is sacrosanct. And they believe that to preserve communal freedom, whether from federal abuse or oligarchs, requires two things, sufragio efectivo y no reelección; in historian John Womack’s translation, “a real vote and no boss rule.”

Historically enough Mexicans — of all political stripes, from conservatives to anarchists — cared about those three beliefs to fight in elections tooth and nail.

Alongside the belief that voting is a duty comes clear-eyed rejection of boss rule. While Mexican Mayor Daleys are historically ubiquitous — they sparked the Mexican Revolution — there are none of the national dynasties that beset U.S. politics. The great dictator Porfirio Díaz left his ambitious nephew struggling to make army captain for eighteen years. Dynastic power befits monarchies, not democracies, and Mexicans know it.

Neither do Mexican politicians enjoy the unfettered power of their American counterparts to buy elections. Parties are publicly funded, under a system designed to promote fairness. Each party gets a certain amount from the state: 30% of that amount is the same for all, the remaining 70% proportional to their success in the previous elections. Private donations are transparent, regulated and capped at a very low level, on paper at least. The system unduly favors incumbents, and illegal, off-books funding is rife. Yet the need for sizable contributions to be covert keeps election results out of the hands of the likes of Elon Musk. A national watchdog and a diverse and competent press ensure it.

Sheinbaum spent $18 million winning her presidential election. In losing New York City’s mayoral election, Andrew Cuomo spent three times as much. A single oligarch, Michael Bloomberg, chipped in $13 million. Mexican elections are sometimes bought and sold, but never with the obscene unconcern prevalent in the U.S. since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.

Republics that endure rely on egalitarian beliefs, hard-nosed pragmatism, unwritten rules of decency and written rules of institutions — and unrelenting struggle against all who break those rules. Democracy relies on people of all races being recognized as fully human and guaranteed access to the ballot. It then relies on those people turning up to vote whenever given the chance. Mexicans have repeatedly demonstrated how deeply they know that across their history, against sometimes heavy odds. Their government documents come stamped with the revolutionary slogan sufragio efectivo y no reelección, a real vote and no boss rule, as a reminder. We could use one ourselves.

Paul Gillingham, a professor of history at Northwestern University, is the author of “Mexico: A 500-Year History.”

Anti-government protesters in Albania hurled petrol bombs and fireworks at police, who responded with tear gas and water cannons during demonstrations in the capital Tirana.

Los Angeles County leaders are pushing forward a measure for the November ballot that would remove their ability to have final say on one of the costliest decisions they make: How much to pay firefighters and sheriff’s deputies.

The supervisors voted 4 to 0 on Tuesday to have their lawyers draft a ballot measure that would give final decision-making power in contract disputes regarding pay and working conditions for public safety workers to a three-person panel, a practice known as binding arbitration.

Supporters say the proposal, which the supervisors are pushing to get on the November ballot, would offer a new tool to smooth over disputes and provide a “reset” after recent tumultuous contract negotiations.

“It incentivizes both parties to come to a fair agreement,” said Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who introduced the measure along with Supervisor Hilda Solis.

The supervisors are expected to vote again on the proposal in the coming months before putting it on the ballot.

Currently, if contract talks hit an impasse, the five county supervisors can, after a complex mediation process, impose a final offer. Public safety workers, who are not allowed to strike, say they have no leverage with which to fight back, giving the county final word.

Under the new proposal, the power dynamics would shift. An arbitration panel would instead make the final decision on some contract disputes for public safety employees, including firefighters, sheriff’s deputies and county lifeguards. The panel would have one arbitrator chosen by the county, one chosen by the union and one agreed to by both sides.

It’s rare for labor negotiations to get to this point. The county said it has imposed contract terms after reaching impasse over negotiations twice since 2001, once with the Union of American Physicians and Dentists in 2001 and Supervising Deputy Probation Officers in 2024.

“The goal is to never have to get to that step,” Horvath said.

Unions say the measure would give them needed leverage and remove political pressure from the thorniest contract questions. Critics say it shifts financial control away from politicians and into the hands of unaccountable arbitrators, which could lead to bloated labor costs.

“Arbitrators aren’t elected, they’re not required to weigh countywide trade-offs like homeless services, healthcare, capital improvements, all of those things,” said Supervisor Holly Mitchell, the only supervisor to abstain from the vote.

Interim County Executive Officer Joseph M. Nicchitta said he viewed it as a potential “seismic change” in how the county handles labor negotiations.

“Because the arbitrators ‘pick a winner’ as between the parties’ final offers, the decision will no longer be a compromise. One side will win,” Nicchitta wrote in a Feb. 9 letter to the board.

Substantial raises mandated by arbitrators, he wrote, “could, among other things, materially and detrimentally increase the County’s day-to-day operating costs, lead to workforce reductions and program curtailments, balloon our unfunded pension liabilities, and damage the County’s credit ratings.”

The decision of who gets final say over wage increases will become increasingly important as county leaders try to steer the government through financial tumult brought on by federal cuts, booming labor costs and billions in sex abuse payouts. Last week, the supervisors unanimously approved $200 million in homeless service cuts to close the budget gap.

Horvath said more than 20 jurisdictions in California use binding arbitration for public safety workers, including the counties of San Francisco and Sacramento.

Public safety unions are simultaneously gathering signatures to get the proposal on the ballot in case the board decides against moving forward. A coalition of public safety unions has started a campaign arguing that binding arbitration would “remove politics from pay decisions” and leave “pay decisions in the hands of neutral experts.”

“They have every intention and probably all of the resources needed to collect signatures to put something on the ballot that gets them this,” Supervisor Janice Hahn said. “This makes sense to work on something that we can have some input in.”

Feb. 10 (UPI) — A grand jury rejected the Justice Department’s effort to indict congressional Democrats for their recent online video telling military members they don’t have to obey illegal orders.

The grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday evening declined to indict the lawmakers, all of whom either are veterans or served in the national intelligence community, The New York Times reported.

The lawmakers are Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, along with Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, and Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania.

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, organized the video, which did not cite any specific orders or provide context. The video was published online after the Trump administration began carrying out deadly aerial strikes on alleged drug-running vessels in the Caribbean Sea in September.

It’s unclear if all or only some of the lawmakers were subject to the grand jury proceedings, according to NBC News.

The news outlet said the effort by U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro is an example of the Justice Department targeting the president’s political enemies.

Slotkin described the grand jury that declined to indict her and her Democratic colleagues as “anonymous American citizens who upheld the rule of law.”

“Today wasn’t just an embarrassing day for the Administration. It was another sad day for our country,” she said in a social media statement Tuesday night.

“Because whether or not Pirro succeeded is not the point. It’s that President [Donald] Trump continues to weaponize our justice system against his perceived enemies. It’s the kind of thing you see in a foreign country, not the United States we know and love.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the effort to indict them was “a despicable, vindictive abuse of power” targeting lawmakers and veterans “because the administration didn’t like the content of their speech.”

In the video published online in mid-November, the six lawmakers all said military members can refuse to carry out illegal orders, and some said that “threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but right here at home.”

Trump called the video “seditious behavior” and suggested George Washington would have had all six hanged for treason.

The six lawmakers later said the FBI had contacted the respective House and Senate sergeants-at-arms to arrange interviews as part of a criminal investigation.

The four House members issued a joint statement in which they accused Trump of using the FBI to “intimidate and harass members of Congress.”

They said that “no amount of intimidation or harassment will ever stop us from doing our jobs and honoring our Constitution.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also tried to censure Kelly and seek to demote, the senator said in a lawsuit.

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has sanctioned two leaders of Pacific island nations for alleged corruption, accusing them both of creating openings for China to increase its influence in the region.

On Tuesday, the US Department of State issued a notice alleging that the president of Palau’s Senate, Hokkons Baules, and a former mayor in the Marshall Islands, Anderson Jibas, had engaged in “significant corruption”.

Neither they nor their families will henceforth be allowed to enter the US, according to the statement.

“The Trump Administration will not allow foreign public officials to steal from U.S. taxpayers or threaten U.S. interests,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott wrote on social media.

The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) also posted its support for the sanctions.

“Corruption that hurts U.S. interests will be met with significant consequences,” it said.

In both cases, the US credited the politicians’ actions with allowing the expansion of Chinese interests in the Pacific region.

The State Department alleged that Baules took bribes in exchange for supporting Chinese interests in Palau, an island in Micronesia that is the 16th smallest country in the world.

“His actions constituted significant corruption and adversely affected U.S. interests in Palau,” the US said in its statement.

Jibas, meanwhile, stands accused of “orchestrating and financially benefitting from” schemes to misuse the Bikini Resettlement Trust, a US-backed fund designed to compensate those negatively affected by nuclear bomb testing on the Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands.

The trust was worth nearly $59m in 2017, when the first Trump administration decided to hand control of the main resettlement fund to local authorities and relinquish its authority to audit.

Since then, the fund has emptied precipitously. As of February 2023, the trust had plummeted to a mere $100,000, and payments to Bikini Atoll survivors and descendants have ceased.

Critics have blamed Jibas, who was elected in 2016 to lead the Kili, Bikini and Ejit islands as mayor. He campaigned on having more local autonomy over the fund.

But reports in The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets accused him of misappropriating the funds for purchases including vacations, travel and a new pick-up truck.

In Tuesday’s announcement, the State Department connected Jibas’s alleged abuse to the spread of Chinese power in the Pacific and an increase in immigration to the US, two key issues in Trump’s platform.

“The theft, misuse, and abuse of the U.S.-provided money for the fund wasted U.S. taxpayer money and contributed to a loss of jobs, food insecurity, migration to the United States,” the department wrote.

“The lack of accountability for Jibas’ acts of corruption has eroded public trust in the government of the Marshall Islands, creating an opportunity for malign foreign influence from China and others.”

Both Palau and the Marshall Islands were US territories, occupied during World War II and granted independence in the late 20th century.

They both continue to be part of a Compact of Free Association with the US, which allows the North American superpower to continue military operations in the area and control the region’s defence.

They are also part of a dwindling list of countries that maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan’s government, much to the ire of the People’s Republic of China.

Only about a dozen remain, and they are largely concentrated in Central America, the Caribbean or the Pacific islands.

But China has sought to pressure those smaller countries into rupturing their ties with Taiwan and recognising its government in Beijing instead.

The Asian superpower – often seen as a rival to the US – has also attempted to expand its sphere of influence to the southern Pacific, by building trade relations and countering US military authority in the area.

Baules, for example, is among the local politicians who have advocated for recognising Beijing’s government over Taipei’s, and he is a vocal proponent for increased ties with China.

Those shifting views have placed island nations like Palau and the Marshall Islands in the midst of a geopolitical tug-of-war, as the US struggles with China to maintain dominance in the region.

In other parts of the world, the US has also used sanctions to dissuade local officials from seeking closer ties with China.

Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino, for instance, has accused the US embassy in his country of threatening to strip local officials of their visas, as the US and China jockey for influence over the Panama Canal.

Similar reports have emerged in neighbouring Costa Rica, where officials like lawmaker Vanessa Castro and former President Oscar Arias have accused the US of revoking their visas over ties to China.

But there have been other points of tension between the Pacific Islands and the US in recent years.

The Trump administration has withdrawn from accords designed to limit climate change and quashed international efforts to reduce emissions, straining ties with the islands, which are vulnerable to rising sea levels.

Still, the US State Department framed the sanctions on Tuesday as an effort to ensure local accountability and defend US interests in the region.

“The United States will continue to promote accountability for those who abuse public power for personal gain and steal from our citizens to enrich themselves,” it said.

“These designations reaffirm the United States’ commitment to countering global corruption affecting U.S. interests.”

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom is heading to a conference of world leaders in Germany later this week as part of his ongoing effort to use the global stage to urge investment in California’s climate-related initiatives and challenge President Trump’s isolationist policies.

Newsom will appear at the Munich Security Conference to talk about trade and jobs and tell foreign leaders that “California is a stable and reliable partner,” he said Tuesday during an unrelated event.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leading the official U.S. delegation to the conference, while Democratic leaders Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York are also expected, according to news reports.

The three-day event focuses on the intersections of trade, economics, security and foreign policy, and is expected to draw business leaders and heads of state.

Vice President JD Vance’s appearance at last year’s gathering caused a stir after he argued that European’s immigration policies are too relaxed and European nations are too reliant on the United States.

Ahead of the gathering, conference organizers released a report Monday that found that the “world has entered a period of wrecking-ball politics. Sweeping destruction — rather than careful reforms and policy corrections — is the order of the day.”

Newsom told reporters that he will appear on several panels, and suggested he will focus in part on staying competitive with China when it comes to new technologies and job growth.

“China is cleaning our clock as it relates to low-carbon green growth. They are cleaning our clock in terms of not just electric vehicles, because it’s not about electric power, it’s about economic power,” he said.

“It’s about exports, manufacturing, jobs — and this country is walking away,” he continued. “We are walking away from science and we are walking away from common sense.”

“Gavin Newscum is traveling to another international conference to whine about climate policies instead of doing his job as the governor of California?” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers, using President Trump’s derogatory nickname for the governor. “Nothing new to see here.”

Newsom is in his last year as California governor and is considering running for president in 2028. He last month traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he criticized world leaders for not challenging Trump’s aggressive posture when it comes to his threats to acquire Greenland, as well as his tariffs.

Newsom also attended the U.N. climate policy summit in Belém, Brazil, in November.

L.A. County voters will be asked this June to hike the sales tax rate by a half-cent to soften the blow of federal funding cuts on the region’s public health system.

The county Board of Supervisors voted 4 to 1 Tuesday to put the sales tax on the ballot. County officials estimate it would generate $1 billion per year to replenish the shrinking budgets of local hospitals and clinics. The tax, if approved by voters this summer, would last for five years.

The supervisors say the increased tax — a half-cent of every dollar spent — would offset major funding cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is expected to slash more than $2 billion from the county’s budget for health services over the next three years.

“Millions of people look to us to step up even when the federal government has walked away,” said Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who introduced the ballot proposal along with Supervisor Hilda Solis.

The tax was pushed by Restore Healthcare for Angelenos, a coalition of healthcare workers and advocates, who argue it is necessary to ward off mass layoffs of healthcare workers and keep emergency rooms open.

Mitchell said she was trying to make sure supervisors learned their lesson from the closure of Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in 2007, which ripped a gaping hole in the health system for South L.A. residents who had to travel farther to more crowded emergency rooms.

“People died as a result of that,” she said. “I don’t want to go back there.”

Supervisor Kathryn Barger cast the lone no vote, saying she believed the county should look to the state for help rather than taxpayers. She also said she was concerned the tax money was not earmarked for healthcare costs but rather would go into the general fund, giving officials more discretion over how it gets spent.

“We are not, as a whole, credible when it comes to promises made, promises broken,” she said.

Members of the audience hold up signs inside the county Hall of Administration, where supervisors discussed how to replenish more than $2 billion in federal funding cuts to the county healthcare system.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

As part of the tax hike, voters would be asked to also approve the creation of an oversight group to monitor how the money is spent. The supervisors also voted on a spending plan for the money, which would have the largest chunk of funds go to care for uninsured residents.

Los Angeles County currently has a sales tax of 9.75% with cities adding their own sales tax on top. If the healthcare hike passes this summer, the sales tax would be more than 11% in some cities. Palmdale and Lancaster, some of the poorest parts of the county, would potentially have the highest sales tax of 11.75%.

County public health officials painted a grim picture of what life looks like for the poorest and sickest residents if new money doesn’t flow into the system. Emergency rooms could be shuttered, they warned. Contact tracing and the daily testing of ocean water quality could slow down. Tens of thousands of health workers could lose their jobs, they said.

“The threat is real already,” said Barbara Ferrer, the head of the county Department of Public Health.

Some on Tuesday condemned the measure as well-intentioned but ill-formulated. The California Contract Cities Assn., a coalition of cities inside Los Angeles County, argued a larger sales tax would “disproportionately burden the very residents the County seeks to protect.”

“My phone has been blowing up,” said Janice Hahn, one of two supervisors who said the Citadel Outlets, a large shopping mall in City of Commerce, called to say they were worried shoppers were going to start crossing county lines.

With the effects of the federal cuts expected to be felt across the state, other California counties have already started to look to consumers to replenish government coffers. Last November, Santa Clara County voters approved a similar sales tax measure to raise money for the public health system.

Feb. 10 (UPI) — The National Park Service removed a Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City.

The monument is in Greenwich Village, and it commemorates the Stonewall Inn, a Manhattan gay bar that was the epicenter of the 1969 Stonewall riots. The Stonewall uprising kicked off a new battle for gay rights.

Former President Barack Obama made Christopher Park, across the street from the bar, a national monument in 2016. The NPS has flown Pride flags since it became a monument.

A spokesperson for the parks service cited new rules requiring that “only the U.S. flag and other congressionally or departmentally authorized flags are flown on NPS-managed flagpoles, with limited exceptions,” the spokesperson told NBC News. “Any changes to flag displays are made to ensure consistency with that guidance. Stonewall National Monument continues to preserve and interpret the site’s historic significance through exhibits and programs.”

Gay City News first reported the removal, which took place Monday.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he was outraged by the removal and vowed to protect the LGBTQ+ community in the city.

“New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history,” Mamdani said in a post on X.

“Our city has a duty not just to honor this legacy, but to live up to it,” he said. “I will always fight for a New York City that invests in our LGBTQ+ community, defends their dignity, and protects every one of our neighbors — without exception.”

State Sen. Erik Bottcher emphasized the importance of the flag.

“The flag is more than just a flag, it represents the rich history of our community; it represents our struggle, it represents the rainbow of people within our community.”

In February 2025, the Trump administration removed mentions of “queer” and “transgender” from the website of the monument.