Mother Jones

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

For a few weeks each summer, the Sebasticook River in Benton, Maine, is paved with flashing silver scales, so thick it seems you could almost walk across. The alewives have returned for their annual migration.

On a mid-May weekend, Benton held its annual Alewife Festival on the riverbank. With the tunes of a local steel drum band in the background, families made fish-themed crafts, sampled smoked alewives, and watched the migration in progress. Below Benton Falls Dam, fishermen hauled alewives into their boats one full net at a time.

Looking at this scene, it’s hard to believe that 35 years ago, fewer than 800 alewives were making this trip upriver. Last year, they numbered 9 million.

The story of Maine’s alewives is a conservation success decades in the making—and unmatched on the rest of the Atlantic coast.

Like Benton, several Maine towns hold spring festivals or 5K runs to celebrate the alewives’ return. In the coastal town of Penobscot, it’s the biggest event of the year, according to Bailey Bowden, who heads the local alewife committee.

Bowden, age 60, is a ninth-generation resident of Penobscot, population 1,100. He first learned about alewives from older relatives when he was around five years old. There’s something special about this fish, he said.

“It’s pretty impressive to see a brook full of fish, thousands and thousands of these fish that you can just reach down into the water and catch them with your hands,” said Bowden, who sports a dark ponytail and a gray beard under his Alewife Harvesters of Maine cap.

The alewife, or river herring, doesn’t sound like a source of such enthusiasm. The name supposedly comes from the fish’s rotund silver bellies, an unflattering comparison to female tavernkeepers. 

The species lives mostly in the Atlantic Ocean, from Newfoundland to South Carolina, but in early summer the adults migrate as far as 100 miles inland to spawn in ponds and lakes. 

“This is a right that towns have had forever…It was a pretty big slap in the face to lose the right to harvest this fish.”

Alewives aren’t considered a game fish, though some people do catch and smoke them. But they are a linchpin for Maine’s river ecosystems—one that basically disappeared from many of those rivers for decades.

They act as a “biological conveyor belt” of nutrients between the ocean and inland waters, said Rustin Taylor, the executive director of the Alewife Harvesters of Maine. Seals, otters, bald eagles, ospreys, pollock, trout, and other carnivores eat alewives. The fish fed generations of Native communities and colonial and industrial American towns. The Passamaquoddy tribe’s name for the species, siqonomeq, translates to “the fish that feeds all.”

Today, lobster boats use alewives as a favorite and affordable bait, said Taylor, 47, who spent 12 years as part of a lobstering crew. “Maine fishermen are very lucky to have that resource,” said Taylor, whose home in Somesville, near Acadia National Park, overlooks the local alewife run, which he helps to steward. 

Part of the alewives’ charm is that “they swim up right into the heart of your town,” said 32-year-old Anne Zegers, the sea-run fisheries monitoring coordinator for Manomet Conservation Sciences, and a coordinator of the Gulf of Maine River Herring Network.

Alewife festivals, Zegers said, are a chance to celebrate alewives’ role in local ecosystems and economies and to talk about conservation. Plus, their migration coincides with returning warm weather, which after a long Maine winter is reason enough to hold a party, she said.

Taylor recalls seeing alewives in childhood, “before they disappeared in Somesville” during his teenage years. “I remember being mesmerized,” he said.

But even then, he was only seeing a remnant of the tens of millions of fish that once made the annual trip up Maine’s rivers. 

Beginning in the 1700s, dams created a series of aquatic roadblocks. Alewives can wriggle their way through shallows and rocky water, but they can’t make the giant leaps required to cross significant gaps. Instead, they get trapped downstream as easy pickings for predators, Zegers said.

As far back as colonial Maine, some dams were built with chutes or other methods to allow migration, but not all were well designed or maintained. It wasn’t enough to sustain the fish’s population. Dams downstream of Benton, for instance, decimated the town’s alewife harvest by the 1840s.

Even some modern dams had the same issues. In the town of Phippsburg, a fish channel from the 1980s sat more than 2 feet above the water at low tide, blocking migration for more than half of every day, said Troy Wallace, the town’s alewife committee chair. 

Overharvesting also hit alewife populations. In the 1950s, at the height of fisheries activity, Maine’s town harvests and offshore commercial fishing contributed to a nationwide catch that averaged about 170 million pounds per year, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC).

Alewife populations spiraled downward. Several rivers that had once supported millions of fish dwindled to fewer than a thousand.

“It takes a village to help the fish.”

Some communities took a hands-on approach to try to keep their alewife runs going. Bowden remembers scooping buckets of fish and depositing them upstream of Penobscot’s dams as a teenager.

Maine progressively placed more limits on commercial harvests from the 1960s through the 1990s, hoping to counter the downward trend. More and more harvests closed or became infrequent.

At their lowest in 1994, Maine’s town harvests caught only 150,000 pounds of alewives, down from more than 3 million at their peak.

In 2012, the ASMFC instituted a moratorium on all commercial alewife fishing on the Atlantic coast until states could demonstrate sustainable management plans. Local harvests also had to prove their sustainability before they could resume.

“This is a right that towns have had forever,” Bowden said. “It was a pretty big slap in the face to lose the right to harvest this fish.”

Since the 1990s, dam removals and fish channel construction have gradually reopened sections of the state’s rivers to migration.

“Some of those dam removals have led to incredible restorations of alewife migrations much faster than anticipated,” Taylor said.

Ecologically speaking, dam removal is the best method for reviving alewife migration. Taylor described removal of two dams on Maine’s Penobscot River as “probably one of the premier success stories of our time” for fish conservation. The effort started in 1999 and was completed in 2016.

When removal isn’t an option, bypasses are the go-to solutions.

In Benton, engineers built the fish equivalent of an elevator on the local hydroelectric dam in 2006. A large bucket dips into the downstream side of the river and attracts alewives with an artificial current. Every five minutes, the bucket closes and lifts to meet a chute at the top of the dam, where the fish are dumped out to continue upstream.

During the Alewife Festival in May, attendees got to observe buckets of alewives being lifted past the once-impenetrable barrier.

Towns with smaller dams can often get by with less-sophisticated solutions. In Penobscot, the fishway is a series of rocky pools that gradually change the elevation. Phippsburg replaced its inefficient 1980s channel with a similar rock-pool solution in 2025, said Wallace, a 54-year-old father of two who has been on his town’s alewife committee for 14 years. 

Designing an alewife highway comes with challenges. Downstream access is critical, since alewives don’t die after spawning, unlike salmon.

Both adults and juveniles can get trapped if a channel is poorly designed or if a drought lowers water levels, said Theo Willis, the Department of Marine Resources (DMR) sea-run fish restoration coordinator. 

Last summer’s drought in Maine led to mass die-offs of alewife spawn, Zegers said. 

About five years in advance of a fish-access project, the DMR must stock alewives in the pond or lake so the next generation will return to spawn. Willis described it as the “secret sauce” of successful alewife conservation. The state stocks more than 3 million fish annually.

Sometimes the challenges come from people, not fish. Businesses and private landowners can be resistant to modifying or removing their dams, requiring years of lobbying and negotiations. Citizens who have spent decades enjoying an artificial lake may not want to see it disappear.

“Getting people to realize that a different landscape, a flowing river landscape, is not the wrong landscape is probably one of the biggest challenges we face,” Willis said.

“We’ve gone from losing the fish completely in a lot of river systems…and now we have some of the largest populations in the globe.”

Zegers said removal has become “much more palatable to a lot of communities” as dams age and upkeep becomes more expensive.

A fish channel also requires ongoing maintenance. Every spring, people like Bowden, Taylor, and Wallace are out in the streams resetting rocks, replacing worn infrastructure, cleaning debris, clearing beaver dams, and filling cracks in concrete. 

“It takes a village to help the fish,” Taylor said.

Plus, there’s the cost, which can outstrip municipal budgets.

In Phippsburg, Wallace said the original plan to replace the fish channel in the mid-2010s would have cost more than $1 million, beyond what the 2,000-person town could afford. The rock pools installed last year instead cost about $200,000, half of which was covered by donations. Penobscot’s fishways and related projects have cost at least $6 million in grants and donations, Bowden said.

Nonprofits like the Nature Conservancy have funded some of these projects, including in Phippsburg. The state budget, federal grants and congressional discretionary spending usually cover most of the costs for major projects, according to the DMR. The 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act were windfalls for Maine’s migratory fish, with more than $60 million to fund 23 public-private projects.

The DMR still has a laundry list of dam removal and fish access projects for the near future, Willis said.

Today, Maine’s alewife population is looking better than it has in decades—and better than populations on most of the Atlantic coast.

“We’ve gone from losing the fish completely in a lot of river systems due to damming and pollution, and now we have some of the largest populations in the globe,” Taylor said.

In 2025, more than 20 million alewives were counted migrating in Maine, Zegers estimated from River Herring Network data. Benton Falls Dam, at 9 million fish, was the largest run in the state and one of a handful of sites with more than a million fish. Most runs range in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Penobscot had 169,000 alewives enter its two ponds to spawn last year, according to the River Herring Network. “It was definitely a cool thing to see these fish swimming where I watched them 30 years ago,” Bowden said.

In their wake come the eagles, seals, and other creatures searching for a meal. When alewives are running, the river downstream of Benton Falls Dam has the largest number of bald eagle sightings anywhere in New England, according to the DMR. In Penobscot, Bowden once counted 42 eagles in a half-mile area.

“Growing up, it was rare to see an eagle,” he said. “It’s just incredible how many eagles there are now.”

South of Maine, states aren’t seeing the same positive trend, and in some cases their populations are declining, according to the ASMFC. The commission still considers alewives to be significantly depleted.

Zegers said scientists aren’t sure of the cause, since other states are also pursuing dam removal and fish access. It may be because of differences in ocean fishing activity, she said, so fewer Maine alewives are caught at sea. Warmer oceans may be driving the fish north, away from their spawning grounds.

Or, it could just be that Maine’s alewife runs were bigger to begin with, so even a diminished population was still large enough to recover, she said.

With alewives on the rebound in most of Maine, the state is now expanding towns’ harvesting rights. It is one of only five states that have gotten federal approval for sustainable river herring fisheries. 

As of last year, 25 Maine municipalities have been granted the ability to commercially harvest alewives, according to Maine DMR data. 

In 2024, 2.5 million pounds of alewives were commercially harvested in Maine, all through local catches. Most former fisheries off the coast, which were historically the largest harvesters, remain closed, according to the DMR.

While harvesting alewives may seem contradictory to conservation, Taylor said they actually work in tandem. Harvesters’ knowledge of their rivers makes them the “canary in the coal mine” when something’s amiss in the migration, he said.

They also are active in cleanup and maintenance of their local fish channels, since that improves their future catch. 

“There needs to be an incentive to have this stewardship take place, and either that comes from the profit of an alewife harvest or it’s going to have to come out of local taxes,” Bowden said. 

Today, the Maine DMR and ASMFC maintain more control over harvests than in the 1950s. Towns manage their own harvests, but the state sets limits on when, where, and how much they can catch to make sure enough fish are reaching spawning grounds.

“We have seen enough abuses of over-harvests that the awareness is strong enough now that that’s not going to work out well.”

A town must track populations for 10 years to show at least 235 fish per acre in its spawning pool before getting approval to harvest. The DMR also studies scale samples to estimate the age, size, and gender ratio at each run.

Six municipalities are actively collecting data to reach that 10-year benchmark, including Phippsburg.

Wallace said Phippsburg’s run has been unpredictable. The town saw peak migrations of 50,000 to 60,000 fish each year in 2018 and 2019, followed by three years where fewer than 10,000 were counted. “We just never had what [the DMR] wanted to see for a fishery,” Wallace said.

Bowden, who is Penobscot’s contracted harvester, believes requiring a decade of data is too much, and that towns should be allowed incremental quotas as they continue to track populations. “Counting fish for 10 years is a drag, for sure,” he said.

When he first started working on restoring his local harvest, Bowden only needed five years of data. As the state gradually increased that threshold, he felt like the goalposts kept moving even though Penobscot’s run had reached healthy numbers. “The whole point was I want to catch a fish. That was where this all started. It was just ridiculous government red tape that I couldn’t, because the fish were there,” he said.

Taylor said some towns lost interest in their alewife work when the requirements changed.

Penobscot was allowed a small pilot harvest program in advance of the 10-year threshold, but last year was the town’s first full commercial harvest in more than 50 years. 

“It was a great feeling knowing that we were finally able to reclaim our rights to the fishery,” Bowden said.

Even as Maine’s alewife population trends upward, Zegers said their future is complex. 

The fish still contend with declining numbers in other states, plus threats like fishing on the open ocean and climate change–driven droughts. This summer, Zegers said several towns have reported lower-than-usual migration numbers. It will take time to figure out why.

There are “so many things to keep you up at night,” she said.

Meanwhile, Taylor said he feels reasonably optimistic. Since many harvesters grew up during the days when alewives had all but disappeared from their hometown rivers, he thinks this generation is likely to avoid the errors of the past.

“We have seen enough abuses of over-harvests that the awareness is strong enough now that that’s not going to work out well,” Taylor said.

Community awareness seems to be heading in the same direction, he said. After all, what other fish inspires so many parties in its honor? “Maybe people take care of things once it’s been lost and regained a little bit,” he said.

Sam Bankman-Fried was once called the “crypto king.” But in November 2022, his company, FTX, imploded within a matter of days. All around the world, customers of the cryptocurrency exchange were suddenly cut off from their money. 

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“I tried to withdraw an amount, you know, and it would spin and say, your, your withdrawal is pending,” says Tareq Morad, an investor from Canada. “I remember myself doing that around 7, 8 o’clock at night, checking back, going to look: Okay, did it go through? Did it go through? No. No. No.”

Meanwhile, inside the company, employees were panicking. “All that we were told was there’s been a run on the bank and, somehow, money is missing and we don’t know who to trust,” remembers Caroline Papadopoulos, part of FTX’s accounting leadership at the time. 

This week on Reveal, through prison interviews with Bankman-Fried, his parents, FTX insiders, and customers, we take you through the frantic week of FTX’s collapse and the controversial and less well-known bankruptcy that followed. At a cost of nearly $1 billion, it has become one of the most expensive in history. 

Read the FTX bankruptcy estate’s on-the-record statement to Reveal. 

This is an update of a show that originally aired in September 2025.

On Monday,  Ulises Peña López, represented by Disability Law United and Pangea Legal Services, sued the US government and private prison contractors GeoGroup and CoreCivic over his arrest by ICE officers and his following treatment in ICE detention facilities. Peña López was deported to Mexico in October 2025 after spending six months in ICE detention.

Before his arrest, Peña López, a carpenter, already lived with disabilities due to a mini-stroke, which was diagnosed in August 2024, and was managed before his detention. The lawsuit contends that after ICE officers detained Peña López in February 2025 in Sunnyvale, California, they took him to an alleyway and beat him until he lost consciousness and required CPR.

His wife, Aby, and their young daughter witnessed part of the beating by ICE, according to the lawsuit.

Peña López’s ongoing symptoms, the lawsuit says, include new and worsening “headaches, weakness and numbness on his right side, eye pain, hearing loss, insomnia and nightmares, blurry vision, back pain, and difficulty walking.” Peña Lopez is unable to work to support himself, according to an interview with the NPR afilliate KQED.

“What I want more than anything, I can’t get back: to recover my health, to be with my wife and daughter, and to be able to work again,” Peña López told KQED.

The lawsuit filed for Peña López’s complaints cites the Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which mandates that places receiving federal funding, like ICE detention centers, accommodate disabled people, among other laws. Peña Lopez’s wife and children are also part of the lawsuit due to the distress his arrest and subsequent treatment caused them.

During Peña López’s eight months in ICE detention in facilities operated by GeoGroup and CoreCivic, the lawsuit says, López received inadequate medical care and was also mocked by employees for his disability.

The lawsuit alleges that staff’s verbal abuse was particularly cruel at Golden State Annex, operated by GeoGroup. Detention staff reportedly told Peña López that “motherfucker, you don’t get to be asleep” and “you’re never gonna walk again.”

During Peña López’s transfer to California City Detention Center last August, the lawsuit says, “detention staff denied Ulises timely administration of his daily medication, violated his disability rights, and subjected him to unnecessarily harsh conditions,” such as not getting adequate medical care. At the facility operated by CoreCivic, Peña López also struggled to get his medications. As a result, Peña López’s health worsened before he was deported.

A spokesperson for CoreCivic told Mother Jones that while the company does not generally comment on active litigation, “we can share that the safety, health and well-being of the people in our facilities is our top priority.”

For Peña López’s lawyers, this lawsuit represents not only a pursuit of López, but also of others mistreated by ICE.

“This lawsuit seeks accountability for the physical and emotional harms our clients suffered, but it also joins a growing wave of lawsuits challenging abusive ICE enforcement and detention practices,” said Elena Hodges, co-director at Pangea Legal Services, which is representing Peña López and his family, said in a press release.

“We hope this case will send a powerful message to immigrant communities that they are not alone,” Hodges, said, “and that ICE officials and private prison contractors are not above the law.”

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

Life has colonized every corner of the planet by evolving ingenious survival strategies, but these are increasingly being overwhelmed by destructive human activities, this year’s red list of endangered species has revealed.

Many snails, limpets and clams have adapted to life at crushing depths in the oceans on hydrothermal vents where water temperatures can reach 450 degrees C (842 F). But an assessment for the red list found that two-thirds of the hundreds of mollusk species found only on deep sea vents were at risk of extinction because of deep-sea mining.

“There is a clear path out of the biodiversity crisis: Nature conservation works.”

Mining for diamonds has put another extraordinary creature at risk of disappearing—the desert rain frog. Most frogs rely on water for survival but the bulbous desert rain frog has evolved to need almost none. It hides from the southern African sun by burying itself deep in the sand, coming out only at night to hunt insects.

However, dwindling species can be saved, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which produces the red list, said. The new list shows the numbat, a stripy, termite-eating marsupial from Australia, has come back from the brink thanks to protection from feral cats and foxes.

“Life on Earth has adapted to survive in the most hostile and unusual habitats [but] as pressures on biodiversity mount across the planet, even the creatures with the most ingenious survival strategies are under threat,” said Dr Grethel Aguilar, the IUCN director general. “But there is a clear path out of the biodiversity crisis: Nature conservation works. By protecting the astounding range of biodiversity on this planet, we can preserve a welcoming environment for humans and wildlife alike.”

An IUCN update in April declared emperor penguins officially in danger of extinction owing to the mass drowning of chicks as sea ice is melted by the climate crisis.

More than 200 species of mollusk are known to live only on hydrothermal vents, where water heated by volcanic rocks jets out from the seabed. Many have been discovered only in the last decade but already face extinction.

“This global assessment reveals that [vent] mollusks are one of the most highly threatened of all animal groups.”

The exploration and extraction of deep-sea minerals throws up sediments that smother the animals. One snail, Lirapex felix, is classed as critically endangered because of mining activity in the Indian Ocean.

However, more than 30 vent species are not in danger, as they live in marine protected areas where mining is not allowed. These include an ornately shelled snail, Provanna exquisita, that lives only in the Mariana Arc of Fire national wildlife refuge in the Pacific Ocean.

“This global assessment reveals that [vent] mollusks are one of the most highly threatened of all animal groups,” said Prof Julia Sigwart at Senckenberg Nature Research, the IUCN red list partner that coordinated the assessment. “It provides important information as the International Seabed Authority meets in Jamaica this month.” The IUCN voted for a moratorium on deep-sea mining in 2021.

The desert rain frog is classed as vulnerable owing to diamond mining and energy infrastructure expansion into its range along the west coast of South Africa and Namibia. There is further pressure on the frog because of rising demand from the exotic pet trade following a viral video of the species squeaking its distress call.

The good news on the numbat comes after decades of conservation work, which has helped numbers rebound from a low of just 300 in the late 1970s to between 2,000 and 3,000 today. The numbat has moved from endangered to near threatened on the red list.

The impact of feral cats and red foxes has been reduced by baiting and predator-proof fencing, as well as captive breeding at Perth zoo and translocations from healthy groups. As a result, at least five more self-sustaining populations have been established. However, the species occupies only 0.04 percent of its original range across southern Australia, meaning continuing conservation work is essential, experts said.

Another five Australian marsupials have been confirmed as extinct on the red list, with no sightings for at least 60 years. The crest-tailed, southern, northern, and little mulgaras were rat-sized carnivores, while the little bettong was a rabbit-sized jumping marsupial. They are likely to have fallen prey to feral cats and foxes. More than 40 modern mammal extinctions have been recorded in Australia.

“The [numbat] assessment shows that long-term conservation effort works; without it, invasive cats and foxes will continue to drive Australia’s small marsupials and native rodents to extinction,” said Prof John Woinarski, co-chair of the IUCN species survival commission group on Australasian marsupials and monotremes.

“Continued management is vital not only to maintain the numbat’s unique evolutionary line as the last surviving member of the Myrmecobiidae family, but also to support its role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem, as digging for the termites it eats increases rain penetration into the soil, helping protect woodlands,” he said.

The IUCN red list includes 175,909 species of which 49,505 are threatened with extinction, although many species have yet to be formally assessed.

One fall night in 1979, two best friends went to a small club in their hometown of Washington, DC, to see a band. The show was so extraordinary, the band so singular, that decades—and thousands of shows—later, even at “AARP age,” as one of them now puts it, they still talk about it. They were especially taken with the lead singer, a lanky, glamorous Frankenstein-esque character who, by the show’s conclusion, was up on the bar, crooning merrily as he punched through ceiling tiles while the club owner looked on and laughed. 

“I’ve never recovered from that show,” Henry Rollins recalls. “I’ve never gotten better. Ian and I talk every Sunday. We’ve been best friends for 52 years. We talk about that time we stood next to each other and watched the Cramps.”

Rollins, now 65, was a frontman for the legendary Southern California punk band Black Flag and later the MTV mainstay Rollins Band. Since retiring from music, he’s been a spoken word artist, radio host, actor, journalist, and TV presenter. The best friend he mentioned is Ian MacKaye, who fronted Minor Threat and Fugazi and co-founded and still co-owns Dischord, one of the most influential DIY record labels of all time. Their friendship is the stuff of punk legend; they also worked at Häagen–Dazs together as teens. And like so many punks and rockabilly fans—and millions of other freaks and weirdos—Rollins and MacKaye fell fast and hard for the Cramps. 

The Cramps were the brainchild of singer Lux Interior (Erick Lee Purkhiser) and guitarist Poison Ivy (Kristy Marlana Wallace), who met as art students in Sacramento in the early 1970s, when Ivy caught a ride with Lux and a friend while hitchhiking. They became partners in life and art for the next 37 years, and the only two continuous members of the band until Lux’s death in 2009.

Poison Ivy and Lux Interior, September 1994.Bertrand Alary/Dalle/ZUMA

The Cramps coined the word “psychobilly” to describe their music—a louche, wild, leering, slithering blend of surf rock, nascent punk, mutated doo-wop, and blues-derived guitar. This they combined with bizarro-Americana lyrical matter: teenage werewolves, bikini girls with machine guns, Elvis, witchcraft, B-movie horror flicks, insanity, lust, death, and the beyond. Lux and Ivy were the Cramps’ most memorable visual elements: tall, thin and cadaveresque, he would moan and writhe across the stage, often wearing high heels and lingerie—their song “I Want to Get In Your Pants” was, as Lux cheerily told interviewers, about his love for wearing women’s clothes.

Onstage, Ivy would stand watchfully nearby—lithe, implacable and feline, with curly red hair and a constantly changing selection of vinyl, latex, and animal-print garments. (She’d previously worked as a dominatrix, she once said, and between that and being in the Cramps, she eventually developed a latex allergy and had to retire her collection of such garments.) She often played a Gretsch 6120, an enormous, hollow-bodied electric guitar, and is rightfully included in Rolling Stone’s list of best guitarists of all time, often cited as central in shaping the “primitivist” rock-and-roll style.  

By the time Rollins and MacKaye first saw them, the Cramps had played a show at Napa State Hospital, a mental health facility, that became an instant legend. They brought the house down to the extent that about a dozen patients were inspired to escape during the show. (“Those people at Napa hospital were less unusual than some of the crowds we’ve played,” Lux wryly observed to Dick Porter, whose book Journey to the Center of The Cramps is considered the definitive work about the band.) The patients found the Cramps fairly unusual, Porter wrote, screaming “Ward T” at the stage. Ward T was, the band later learned, was the section for lifers, “the ward no one comes back from,” Lux told Porter. 

The Cramps after their legendary show at Napa State Hospital, June 13, 1978.Ruby Ray/Getty

The Cramps came to an abrupt end in 2009 when Lux, then 62, died suddenly and unexpectedly from an aortic dissection. Poison Ivy withdrew from the public eye: no interviews, no reunion tours with a stand-in singer, no reissues of Cramps records. Even so, the band’s legend continued to grow, attracting new generations of fans. Wednesday star Jenna Ortega had a surprise viral moment last year when her titular character, the Addams Family’s sullen Goth daughter, did an appropriately weird little dance to the Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck.” Bootleg albums and merch have proliferated. (Full disclosure: I may have a few off-brand Cramps shirts in my closet.) You can even buy a beer named after one of their most beloved albums, with a can that’s “a nod” to (translation: completely lifted from) the cover art.

“I’ve never been more excited about a record and I’m not even on it!” Rollins told me. 

Earlier this year, Rollins and MacKaye began working with a small group on a secret project: reviving the Cramps’ own Vengeance Records and starting a new business, Cramps Inc. The first order of business for the reformed Vengeance Records is to release a 1977 album that had, until earlier this year, been sitting unheard on tapes in Ivy’s Los Angeles garage. Titled Gravest Gravy, it was produced by Alex Chilton, a beloved producer, songwriter, musician, and co-founder of the iconic indie band Big Star. The album will be released on August 21, and Cramps Inc. intends to reissue at least nine other Cramps records.

MacKaye and Rollins are not being paid for this—in a meeting with Ivy, Rollins says, he told her, simply, “I would just love to be your archivist.” Cramps Inc. will also release merchandise—including t-shirts and highly sought-after colored-vinyl pressings of Gravest Gravy—to help Ivy benefit from the wildly popular, and mostly illicit, market for Cramps merch.

Henry Rollins. Courtesy Ross Halfin/Vengenance Records Ian MacKaye at Dischord Records HQ. Courtesy Pat Graham/Vengeance Records

“Of course Ian and I are going to work for free,” Rollins told me via Zoom. “No money was ever offered or asked for. I don’t want a dollar. I’ve got the bucks. Isn’t this what you spend money on? What would you rather do? Do fentanyl or work with a Cramps catalogue?” 

Releasing an unheard Cramps album required listening to every mix of every song on Gravest Gravy and trying to decide which were the best, a task Rollins says he undertook “with fear, trepidation and awe.”

“This is not a small deal,” he says. “You’re now speaking for a band. One of the best bands ever, a band that means so much to me.” After listening to every version, he adds, “I sent my notes and mixes to Ian, whose ears I trust more than anyone I know.” (MacKaye offered his own notes, and adjusted the levels on a few songs, though they both found Chilton’s work nearly unimpeachable.)

“I’ve never been more excited about a record and I’m not even on it!” he says. “We’re not on the cover. We’re in the fine print at the bottom and that’s the way I want it to stay. When you go to the Smithsonian and see the big T. Rex bones standing up, you know that’s a team of expert people who put that up in a dark night and vanished like dew on the hood of the car. You don’t know their names. That’s what it’s all about. Me and Ian, we don’t need a hurrah.”  

Larry Hardy and Henry Rollins.Courtesy Robyn Ginsburg/Vengeance Records

Besides Rollins and MacKaye, the group reviving Vengeance Records includes Larry Hardy, owner and operator of In The Red Records and longtime friend of Ivy and Lux, and Jimmy Maslon, a producer who made some of the Cramps’ music videos. Poison Ivy is described as the “major beneficiary” of the project, which Rollins says is being undertaken with her full permission, although she’s not deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of Cramps Inc. (She also is still not doing interviews, even if you all but beg, and have been pestering her PR reps intermittently for a decade.)   

“I listened. I paid attention. I read. I’m always trying to lose my primordial tail and the glistening gills that throb on my neck.”

“If you’ve ever been in a band, it’s a very intense relationship,” Rollins explains. “You get to know your bandmates more than you really want to. I’ve been in bands with people I love like family and you hope you never see them again. For Ivy, the Cramps were the past, and when she remembers them, it comes with a lot of memories.” 

It doesn’t immediately make sense that Rollins would be such a diehard fan of The Cramps, who inhabited a completely unique sector of the music world: outside gender, genre, and preconceived notions about what a “rock” band should look or sound like. By contrast, Black Flag, Rollins’ most famous band, became singularly associated with the violence of the 1980s Southern California hardcore scene, which was often incredibly hostile to women and nonwhite people. Rollins recalls women getting their shirts torn off at Black Flag shows and a disturbing influx of neo-Nazis and skinheads who were more than happy to pay a cover fee for the chance to beat up Black or Hispanic fans, sexually harass women, and sieg heil the stage. 

The band didn’t want violent thugs at their shows, Rollins says, but he’s not surprised they were attracted. “Did Black Flag set up a permission structure? Perhaps. Wittingly? No.“

Henry Rollins with Black Flag in 1983.Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times/Getty

“I’m sure our very presence, we bore some responsibility,” Rollins adds. “Could we have been better actors in that scene? I’m not sure. I’m not sure if there’s more we could’ve done. It’s been so long ago. I can’t accurately tell you.”

Rollins says he responded to Nazis at Black Flag shows by mocking them. “I would call things out. I was the fake comedian. I’m getting sieg heiled by a bunch of overweight Anheuser-Busch fans between songs, and I said, ‘You can’t make Army boot camp, much less the Third Reich.’ The audience is laughing. The security has to get around me because now those eight knuckleheads want to beat me up. I made an enemy of those people very fast. I didn’t just let it go.”

Rollins also keeps an eye on the so-called manosphere, and “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate, viewing them as targeting the same kinds of young, impressionable, angry, horny young men who used to populate Black Flag shows. “They’re being sold a bill of goods,” he says, bluntly. “What I beg young men to do is listen to and believe women.”

He’s had to do so himself, he adds. “I listened. I paid attention. I read. I’m always trying to lose my primordial tail and the glistening gills that throb on my neck.”

The meathead and white supremacist presence at Black Flag shows seemed to peak in 1986 or so, Rollins says, and those people didn’t come to shows for his next project, the Rollins Band, at all. “Either the tickets were too expensive or they hated the music. They simply stopped showing up.” 

“In times of trouble, art gives us the backbone to keep fighting… Keep your eyes on the ball and have a beat.”

Since retiring from music, Rollins has slipped comfortably into a role as a music archivist, moving to Nashville about three years ago to try to open a punk rock museum. Given the expense of owning or leasing a building, the “museum” is much more likely to be a series of pop-up events, Rollins says, with one planned for “later this year,” although he’s not yet ready to provide details. Besides the Cramps, he’s also now working with the “estates” of other great bands, he says. “That’s equally bitchin’ news for another time.” 

Having known Poison Ivy since the Black Flag days, Rollins says, he’s happy to be part of any structure that allows her to benefit from the Cramps’ legendary status while living the quiet, private, deeply spiritual life she wants. “I don’t need to speak to Ivy,” he says. “I need to work for the Cramps.” 

“We’ll be the historians,” he adds. “We’ll do the heavy lifting.”

Poison Ivy plays with the Cramps at the Town & Country Club, London, April 1, 1990.Rudi Keuntje/Geisler-Fotopress/DPA/ZUMA

He means that literally. When Hardy, Ivy’s old friend, discovered that the tapes in her garage “were showing signs of moisture,” Rollins says, they needed to be moved, very quickly, to a climate-controlled environment. Rollins flew from Nashville to LA, rented a cargo van, and drove “30 hours and 45 minutes” back to Nashville, pounding energy drinks, the van sagging under the weight of the tapes. Rollins was pulled over in Arkansas for drifting across the white line. He told the cop, cheerily, “I’m riding the Red Bulls, sir!” and was let off with a warning. 

Gravest Gravy, recorded in 1977, will be released for the first time on August 21 on the revived Vengeance Records.Vengeance Records

“I paid to do this!” Rollins said, referring to financing the trip with his own money, “Because in my mind I owe the Cramps a part of my life.”

It can be hard, at this moment in time, to imagine caring deeply about something like a newly released album, no matter how legendary the band or thrillingly obscure the recording.  The chaos of the second Trump administration has taken its toll on Rollins too. He’s a DC native, after all. He says he wept when Trump paved over the White House Rose Garden. “I try not to let any of this stuff get to me, but that got to me.”

For years, Rollins volunteered with the USO, doing tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt, and visiting wounded soldiers in their beds at Walter Reed. (“You see a person half your age and half their face is gone…You do five hours of that and get back to me.” At the end of a day like that, he says, “I have no appetite. All I can smell is that antibacterial soap.”) He’s particularly outraged by the 13 American service members who have thus far died in the war with Iran. “Every day, Trump and Vance are covered in their blood like a patina.” 

But Rollins also argues that art still matters—even amid the chaos, outrages and endless travails of Trump 2.0. “No one will say ‘bad dog,’ for putting on a record in the middle of all of this horror,” he says.

“If you lose culture in your society, the society dies,” Rollins says. “If you lose your art museums and your galleries, all you have is thugs and fighting and people being mean. In times of trouble, art gives us the backbone to keep fighting. It gives you inspiration…You want to rebel against this awful war and this awful situation we’re in, you don’t take your eyes off the ball. But it’s not bad to have a soundtrack. Keep your eyes on the ball and have a beat.”

Art and culture are “what you have to lose with an administration like this,” Rollins adds. “They hate science. They hate literacy. They hate women. They hate nonwhite people. They hate LGBTQ people. Those aforementioned groups, they make things that make life great. They want to eradicate it and erase it. You can do more than one thing at once. You can entertain many things. And so you can be concerned and fight the good fight, and you can also put a record on and love the Cramps.”

On Tuesday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and a three-decade Houston resident. It was the second ICE-involved shooting this week alone—and since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, federal immigration agents have shot and killed at least ten people.

Now, as hundreds march in Houston and Salgado’s family demands an impartial investigation, DHS is using a familiar playbook: they are blaming Salgado for his own death by asserting he “weaponized his vehicle.”

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, held a press conference Wednesday calling for an independent investigation into his father’s death. “I want to tell you about my dad,” Ronaldo Salgado said. “He was a hardworking family man. He was also a man of routine.” Every day, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo got up before dawn and drove to work on a construction site, just as he had done for 35 years.

“At 6:45 a.m., he should have been picking up the last of his guys before heading to North Houston to finish up construction on some houses,” Ronaldo Salgado continued at the press conference. By 6:55 his father had been shot by ICE agents who followed him in an unmarked car.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said had Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had attempted to evade arrest and “weaponized his vehicle,” echoing the language used in the hours after an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in her car in Minneapolis in January.

DHS, at the time, alleged that Good, too, had “weaponized her vehicle.” Independent investigators disputed that characterization, but the officer who killed Good was never indicted. Before Renée Good, there were Carlito Ricardo Parias and Marimar Martinez. Both were shot at by federal agents in 2025, and were then accused of trying to ram those agents with their vehicles. Both survived. Ruben Ray Martinez, who was shot by an ICE agent in March of 2025, was killed. The agent who shot him in the heart said Martinez was using his car as a weapon.

It’s a narrative that law enforcement agencies frequently employ to justify fatally shooting of unarmed motorists. A New York Times investigation found that US police officers killed over 400 unarmed drivers between 2015 and 2021. In many of those cases, the officers involved said they fired because the vehicle itself was a weapon.

The data shows that ICE is no exception. In 2024, journalist Lila Hassan identified 18 ICE shootings that involved a moving vehicle between 2015 and 2021. Over that same time period, public records show ICE agents shooting at least 59 people total and killing at least 23. Not a single indictment resulted from any of those incidents. Since that study, ICE’s budget has ballooned by tens of billions of dollars—and its internal oversight offices have been gutted. The killings haven’t stopped.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo “did not deserve to die,” Ronaldo Salgado said on Wednesday. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.” Salgado learned of his father’s passing, he said, from a video on social media. He recognized him immediately. “Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out.”

Graham Platner, the scandal-ridden populist Senate candidate from Maine, suspended his campaign Wednesday night. His announcement came two days after a rape allegation against him was made public in a Politico report, and prominent Democrats—many of whom had looked the other way at Platner’s Nazi tattoo and prior abuse allegations—one by one dropped their endorsements.

In an eleven-minute video posted to social media, Platner categorically denied the allegation and lashed out at “the corporate media system and the political establishment,” which he said acted as “judge, jury and executioner.” He insisted that his video was not an admission of guilt—but after nine minutes, he nonetheless said: “I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw.” 

If Platner does file that paperwork before 5:00 PM Eastern Time on Monday, he will be leaving the Maine Democratic Party with just nineteen days to nominate a replacement. The Maine Democratic Party has released a statement saying it will hold a nominating convention before the July 27 deadline.

Devon Murphy-Anderson, the Maine Democratic Party’s executive director, posted a video to social media on Tuesday promising an “open, inclusive, transparent and fair” convention—and accused Platner’s team of trying to “manipulate this process” and select his successor themselves.

The Maine Democratic Party has approved plans for a nominating convention that will involve roughly 600 delegates, most of whom will be local party officials from around the state. They will pick a candidate to replace Platner—who got over 150,000 votes, the most of any Democratic Senate candidate in Maine primary history. Then, that candidate will face off against incumbent Senator Susan Collins in November.

At least eight candidates’ names have been floated to replace Platner: brewery owner Dan Kleban, social worker Paige Loud, former Maine CDC director Nirav Shah, former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, and former political staffer Jordan Wood among them. But in Platner’s Wednesday night announcement, he said he believes his volunteers—not the Maine Democratic Party—should be the ones to choose his replacement. “These decisions need to be made in the open by the people of this state, the people who got us here,” Platner said. “My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine.”

“There is an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm among Maine Democrats, driven in part by many of the dedicated volunteers and supporters who were inspired by Graham Platner’s campaign,” Maine Democratic Party leaders said in a statement. “We look forward to coming together and harnessing that energy around our new nominee as we work to defeat Susan Collins in November.”

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán was a 24-year-old lawyer when he left Cuba for the United States and joined about 1,400 other Cuban exiles, who were known as Brigade 2506, to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the botched 1961 mission to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime.

Always a gifted swimmer, he was a frogman, and when he stepped on the shores of Playa Girón on the southern coast of the island, he was shot in the right knee by friendly fire. When the US government-backed incursion failed —largely due to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to withdraw plans to strike Castro’s airfields—the human cost was significant: about 100 exiles died during the attacks, and Zayas-Bazán was arrested along with hundreds of others. He had served for about a year when the Kennedy administration negotiated for the return of exiles from the island to the US. 

Fast forward more than half a century, and Zayas-Bazán is now a 90-year-old retired professor who taught at East Tennessee State University. His experience has become memorialized in the new Bay of Pigs Museum and Library in Miami’s historic Little Havana, which opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 17, the 65th anniversary of the disastrous invasion. After five years of planning, the 11,000 square foot building was erected on the site of the original Brigade 2506 meetinghouse, a one-story building with a Spanish-tile roof where veterans gathered regularly. At a cost of more than $8 million, the new two-story facility contains numerous glass displays, multiple screens playing interviews of veterans, and a towering mural of the Cuban flag that greets visitors near the entrance.  

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán, a Brigade 2506 veteran and retired professor, stands in the Bay of Pigs Museum and Library, which opened in Miami this year. Laura C. Morel/Mother Jones

The museum has been a rare point of unity for Florida Democrats and Republicans. President Donald Trump stopped at the original house during his 2016 campaign, and the site has also been visited by politicians like Marco Rubio and Florida Sen. Rick Scott. Eileen Higgins, who was elected last year to be Miami’s first Democrat mayor in nearly 30 years, secured funding for the museum. “We’ve got to put party lines aside,” Carlos Luis, the museum president, told me. “This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”

“We’ve got to put party lines aside. This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”

Most of the men involved in the mission were young with no military experience, many of whom received only a few months of training before the invasion. One of them was Luis’s father, René Luis, who ran an accounting firm in Cuba with his family. When the elder Luis was released from prison after 22 months following the Bay of Pigs, he settled in Miami with his wife. They had seven children. Before dinner, Carlos recalled, the family sang Cuba’s national anthem. His father didn’t open up much about his experience, apart from blaming Kennedy for the failed mission, and he died in 2024 without ever setting foot on the island again. “My involvement here,” Luis said, “is the least I can do for my father.”

For Zayas-Bazán, president of the Brigade’s association and a member of the museum’s board, the new building provides a vivid excursion through his memories. Wearing a crisply ironed guayabera, a traditional linen shirt popular in Cuba, he strode through the exhibits, stopping at the front entrance to point out a video playing black-and-white footage of Havana’s waterfront lined with hotels and bustling city streets; his glasses reflected images of a now-vanished Cuba. “This shows what Cuba was like,” he told me. “So that the people can see what Havana was like before 1959”—the year Fidel Castro took control of the island. 

He stopped at a glass display lined with photos from 1962, when hundreds of Brigade 2506 members who had been imprisoned in Cuba returned to Miami. The photos show young men stepping off airplanes and into the arms of loved ones waiting for them on the tarmac. One such photo is of Zayas-Bazán and his then-wife, her smiling face pressed against his chest. In another corner of the museum, he pointed to a collection of items that Brigade 2506 members kept from that era: metal bowls and plates, spoons, rosaries, and tattered books. Zayas-Bazán read Don Quixote while in prison. 

After the invasion, several men were captured and forced into a crowded truck with no ventilation in the blistering heat. The episode was known as La Rastra de la Muerte, the “trailer truck of death,” because nine men of the dozens who were trapped died of asphyxiation. One exhibit focuses on what happened. “As oxygen dwindled,” the display reads, “some prisoners scraped open tiny holes in the walls and moved dying prisoners to them, an act which saved many.” The names of the men who died were listed, and Zayas-Bazán brushed his hand over those of three of his friends who had perished.

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán points out a photograph taken of him and his wife after his release from a Cuban prison in 1962. Laura C. Morel/Mother Jones

As I reported in March, Cuba is in the midst of the worst economic crisis ever to grip the island. Food is scarce, blackouts are constant, the medical infrastructure is collapsing, and inflation is astronomical. In the spring, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed he was in talks with the Trump administration regarding the island’s future, a few months after the US government imposed an oil blockade, further harming the struggling nation. In recent weeks, the situation in Cuba has worsened as the population grapples with water shortages in the midst of the summer’s heat.

The new museum is a reminder for the Cuban exile community of “what could have been” if the Bay of Pigs mission had succeeded, Andy Gomez, one of the leading scholars on Cuba, told me. Without any major changes in the country, he worries that the next generation of Cuban Americans will not travel there and eventually lose ties with the island. “As the Eduardo Zayas-Bazáns of the older generations pass away, that will be another experience that will be lost,” he told me. “It’s important to somehow continue to tell that story.”

And that is what the museum strives to do. Its executive director, Yuleisy Mena, teaches a course about the invasion at the local Florida International University. The museum has also invited teachers from the Miami-Dade County school district to visit. “We have to start getting the next generation ready to take on the baton,” Luis told me. 

The Bay of Pigs veterans were among the first generation of Cubans to leave the island after Castro took power, and today about 200 of them are still alive. After Zayas-Bazán left his homeland more than six decades ago, he became chair of the Foreign Language Department at East Tennessee State University and co-authored Spanish language textbooks. In 1985, he became the first Cuban to lead the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.

After retiring in 1999, he moved back to Miami to be within the Cuban exile community in case democracy returned to the island nation. “I came thinking that there had to be a change in Cuba,” he told me. “I don’t want to return until I can speak my mind without having to worry, until I can go everywhere I want to and see whomever I want to. I refuse to go and be spied on.”

Despite a life filled with professional and personal successes in the US, “I think about Cuba every day,” Zayas-Bazán said. 

For Brigade 2506 veterans like Zayas-Bazán and their families, the end of Cuba’s current government is more than half a century in the making. “I have never felt more optimistic about changes in Cuba than right now,” he told me, acknowledging that any changes may not happen in the near future with the ongoing disputes with Iran and the earthquake aftermath in Venezuela. “We, the Cuban people, have suffered so much in 67 years.”

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

Energy efficiency standards can make it more expensive to construct new buildings, but they save money for residents in the long run. In a new analysis, the Trump administration ignored the second half of that equation—a move that energy experts fear could undermine efficiency efforts nationwide.

Late last month, the US Department of Energy announced it found that if every state adopted the model 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) instead of following a 20-year-old building code, the move would drive up housing construction costs by $9.2 billion annually. It’s a break with decades of DOE analysis, spanning Republican and Democratic administrations, which has reported significant energy and financial savings under each iteration of the code.

“The Energy Department is completely contradicting its own findings,” said Donna Stanley, vice president of communications at the nonprofit International Code Council, which develops the model code. ​“The DOE’s new methodology is a deep mystery.”

The moves to crush efficiency measures could exacerbate the country’s affordability problems.

The DOE did not respond by Monday to Canary Media’s question of why it chose to exclude energy bill savings in its analysis.

The IECC, which is updated every three years, has cut energy use in new homes in half since it was first enacted in the late 1970s. While the code is fuel-neutral, meaning that builders can install fossil-fueled equipment, it still has a positive impact for the climate because it reduces energy demand that would be met at least in part by burning fossil fuels.

Most states adopt the IECC or an amended version rather than create their own rules from scratch. Some states, like Alabama, don’t impose statewide standards. In those cases, local governments may choose to use the IECC themselves; as the city of Montgomery does, for example.

Depending on the code-adoption cycle, there can be a lag of several years before a state or local jurisdiction takes up the latest iteration of the IECC. To date, 10 states have adopted the 2024 code, per the International Code Council.

The DOE’s analysis could have a chilling effect on other states still in the process of locking in the 2024 code, including Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Ohio. Lawmakers who have sought to restrict more-efficient building codes—such as those in the Missouri House of Representatives—could use the analysis as fodder for their arguments, according to Ben Rabe, associate director of codes and policy at New Buildings Institute.

The analysis comes as the Trump administration has sought to squelch energy-efficiency efforts across the country. In 2025, it sued two California cities over their superefficient all-electric codes, and this year it has barred households from using federal home-electrification rebates to swap fossil-fueled appliances for heat-pump options. In May, the Trump DOE also rescinded a Biden-era requirement that new homes meet the 2021 IECC standard to qualify for federal mortgage loans.

The moves to crush efficiency measures could exacerbate the country’s energy-affordability problems, making people spend more at a time when electricity and fuel costs have risen fast.

Adoption of the latest codes would save US homes and businesses $182 billion from 2010 to 2040.

The DOE has done a cost-benefit analysis of every version of the IECC, but this latest one is the first time the agency has tallied only the upfront costs from home construction and ignored the long-term bill savings, said Ted Tiffany, senior technical lead at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group.

That’s like comparing cars based solely on their sticker prices while ignoring fuel costs and maintenance expenses, he added. ​“A cheaper car may cost less on Day 1, but a more efficient vehicle can save money and provide better performance, safety, and last longer over its lifetime.”

In a report for the DOE last year, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculated the utility bill savings for people who move into homes built to the new standard. The 2024 model code generates an average life-cycle cost savings of nearly $3,000 per residence over the 2021 code, it estimated, though in specific regions that could rise to almost $9,500. The average payback time for a buyer paying for a home in cash, it found, is 2.5 years. Those who get a mortgage would typically see net savings on their combined home and utility payments in just one year.

The adoption of the IECC’s latest residential and commercial energy codes would save US homes and businesses $182 billion between 2010 and 2040, according to a DOE webpage that was removed shortly before the announcement.

“This is the definition of cost-effectiveness,” Tiffany said.

The DOE’s new analysis also rests on a questionable time-period comparison: It benchmarked the 2024 IECC against the 2006 version. Forty-nine states have already adopted more advanced energy codes for new residential units, according to Tiffany; they’re not building to 2006 standards. The DOE’s comparison really works only ​“for perhaps Arkansas,” he said, which lags the rest of the US in building energy codes.

The agency has estimated the added construction costs for compliance with the 2024 IECC over the 2006 IECC at $14,000 per home. 

“But we’ll save way more than that over the life of these buildings,” Rabe said.

When Donald Trump gets into a loop, it’s hard to get him out. He’ll just talk in a circle until he’s bored and moves on to the next thing. He has fixated on Greenland and ruminated on his reflecting pool. Right now, though, his focus is The Communists. And as a new Reuters analysis reveals, he’s really into it: Over the past two weeks, Trump has brought up communism a full 81 times. 

Communism is an old rhetorical obsession for Trump—who was in first grade when Joseph Stalin died—and his allies. In 2025, he introduced a “National Anti-Communism Week.” He blamed communists for his 2023 criminal indictments. During his 2020 campaign, he accused his opponents of (you guessed it) communism.

It may be a product of his deep relationship with Roy Cohn, a lackey of Red Scare architect Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Trump’s longtime mentor and personal lawyer. 

But over the past week, the president appears to have hit overdrive, sermonizing against communism at fever pitch. And like his Red Scare predecessors, Trump is also using the label to go after immigrants, decrying a “resurgent communist menace” from “newcomers to our country” in a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore—designed by an anti-immigrant crusader and Ku Klux Klan associate—that also characterized communism as “a mortal threat to American liberty” and “the greatest threat” to the United States, surpassing Pearl Harbor, both World Wars, the September 11 attacks, et cetera.

Then Trump really got going: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America,” he continued. “You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. The godless communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions…They don’t want good. They don’t love God, and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion, and they don’t want religion, and they won’t have it, but we will not let them win.” 

The actual communists of the Communist Party USA have spent the past week sending strident press releases to clarify that they are not, in fact, the Democratic Socialists of America.

Maybe Trump’s handwringing over so-called communists isn’t entirely misguided. After all, capitalism hasn’t been looking too good lately. A recent Gallup poll showed that less than half of young Americans feel positively toward our economic system. The libertarian Cato Institute found last week that a majority of Americans under 30 feel positively about socialism, and more than a third report a favorable view of communism. So if communism is a “cancer” that Trump must “cut out fast,” as he threatened to do at an America250 event, he certainly has his work cut out for him.

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the US would continue strikes on Iran for a second night, and—if it had to—seize much of the country’s oil and target electric and desalination plants. 

The desalination plants are part of Iran’s vital civilian infrastructure, and, as I wrote in April, international law experts consider hitting these facilities to be war crimes because of the disproportionate harm targeting them would cause to civilians. 

On Wednesday, Trump also said that the US-Iran ceasefire agreement was over and that he would allow US officials to continue current negotiations to end the war, but they would be “wasting their time.”

Trump’s threats come amid multiple American strikes against Iran since it signed an interim deal with Iran on June 17. The US strikes came in response to Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a passageway that carried about 20 percent of the world’s crude oil and natural gas before the 2026 war began.

In late June, during the first major US strikes on Iran since the interim deal, Trump posted on Truth Social that if Iran continued its strikes, “we will be forced to military complete the job…if that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

As part of the US and Iran’s June agreement, Iran would allow ships to pass through without paying tolls for 60 days. But the country’s leadership has stated that oil tankers passing through the strait must use approved routes. According to a Wednesday report by the Associated Press, the ships Iran struck on Tuesday appeared to deviate from the designated route.

These recent maneuvers put more lives at risk. As of June 10, multiple Iranian government ministries reported that about 3,500 people have been killed in Iran since the war began in February.

Nate Swanson, President Joe Biden’s director for Iran at the National Security Council, told me two weeks ago what he considered the strategy at play here. The US doesn’t seem to be interested in making complex concessions to Iran, Swanson said, and Iran may be unwilling to agree to a deal with Trump specifically, given his support of the Gaza war and his strikes on the country in June 2025.

On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that Iran’s leaders were “scum” and “sick people.” “Based on their actions over the last week or two, they’re not doing a service to the people,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to make a deal with them.”

The Trump administration’s efforts to end the war appear to be going backward. Republican lawmakers criticized the June ceasefire deal with Iran as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” While many publicly blamed JD Vance, whom Trump said was responsible for Iran negotiations, the war is extremely unpopular with his base, which could hurt the GOP’s chances in the upcoming midterms.

Moments after scoring Belgium’s fourth goal against the hapless US men’s national soccer team, Romelu Lukaku ran to the corner flag and joined his teammates in a mocking “Trump dance.” The scene was repeated soon after in the Belgium locker room, this time as they sang the Village People’s “YMCA”—a staple of President Donald Trump’s political rallies. It was a final humiliation on one of the worst days in US soccer history.

It was also a sign of how quickly things have changed—of how toxic the US president’s attempts to rig everything from the economy to soccer tournaments have become. Back in 2024, right after Trump was elected for the second time, his signature dance move was everywhere. NFL stars, third-tier British professional soccer players, and even Team USA’s Christian Pulisic and his teammates were seen celebrating with the stunted boogie. The dance’s cultural emergence was an indicator of Trump’s personal soft power as he reclaimed the White House in the wake of the January 6 insurrection and multiple criminal prosecutions. But now—18 months into a second term marked by chaos, corruption, and war—Trump’s brand has been reduced to a symbol of American failure.

WATCH: Belgium players do President Trump’s ‘YMCA’ dance after eliminating the US from the World Cup pic.twitter.com/dA2rAbDwRR

— Politics Global (@PolitlcsGlobal) July 7, 2026

But as this fiasco makes clear, Trump’s no longer able to convince the world to dance along.

The US men’s national team is not new to humiliation or drama. The team crashed out of World Cup group stages in 1998 and 2006 and failed to even qualify for the tournament in 2018. Its 2022 campaign ended in the bizarre “ReynaGate” controversy. But none of that compares to what happened in the week between the team’s triumph against Bosnia-Herzegovina and its lopsided loss to Belgium on Monday night.  

In the Bosnia-Herzegovina game, US striker Folarin Balogun received a controversial red card just past halftime, leaving the US down a man as it clung to a narrow lead. Throughout the rest of the match, the team showed a fight and grittiness that propelled it to a historic win. But the red card meant that Balogun—the team’s leading scorer—would miss the round of 16 match against Belgium. 

The next day, Trump called Gianni Infantino—the FIFA president who infamously awarded Trump a knock-off “peace prize”—to discuss Balogun’s red card, according to Politico. This was followed by days of lobbying and legal maneuvering as US government and US Soccer Federation officials explored arguments to convince FIFA to overturn the decision. This reportedly included White House FIFA World Cup Task Force Executive Director Andrew Giuliani and Scott Goodwin—a hedge fund founder who personally contributed the salary of US coach Mauricio Pochettino—researching other controversial calls from the referee who dished out the red card. Trump would soon describe the referee as “very suspect.”

Then came Sunday, a day before the Belgium game. Suddenly, FIFA announced that an independent committee had decided to “suspend” Balogun’s red card suspension and he would be allowed to play after all. As news spread about the lifted suspension, fingers started to point to Trump and his close relationship with FIFA—a relationship that Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy laid out in a recent Reveal episode about the World Cup. 

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FIFA’s announcement sparked an uproar. The Royal Belgian Football Association appealed the decision, and Belgium’s coach, Rudi Garcia, portrayed the fight as an existential one for the sport itself. Belgium was “defending football,” Garcia said. Europe’s governing soccer body, UEFA, said FIFA’s move “crossed a red line.”

“Where does this start and where does this end now?” England coach Thomas Tuchel asked reporters as he discussed the implications for other refereeing decisions in the tournament. One reporter asked, presumably jokingly, whether Harry Kane could persuade Trump to reverse a red card issue to an England fullback. “Maybe, yeah,” Tuchel said with a smile.

At the White House on Monday morning, Trump spoke triumphantly about the outcome, acknowledging that he’d reached out to Infantino but insisting FIFA made its decision independently. “All I did: I asked for a review because I didn’t think it was a foul,” the president said. “I didn’t tell him what to do.” Trump said it would be a “big stain” on the World Cup if the best players didn’t get to play. The president was apparently oblivious to the inevitability that it was his own actions that would leave the biggest stain on US soccer and the World Cup itself.

Trump: "I didn't know what the hell a red card was. When I found out, I said, 'You gotta be kidding!'" pic.twitter.com/SsTrMwLVDg

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) July 6, 2026

After the US lost in a 4–1 blowout, Belgian players said the scandal gave them additional motivation, with midfielder Nicolas Raskin stating that “there’s always a justice somewhere in life.” Announcers from around the world mocked Trump’s intervention. The Belgian football association tweeted, “Overturn this.”

It would probably be unreasonable to blame Trump for the US loss on the field. But the president’s attempt to insert himself into the game—and the international blowback it caused—was a far bigger blunder for the sport and the country than the shambolic defending by Matt Freese and Tim Ream.

Another look at Belgium's third goal pic.twitter.com/71ldzuhbAk

— FOX Sports (@FOXSports) July 7, 2026

Trump still has the ability to corruptly wield power. But as this fiasco makes clear, he’s no longer able to convince the world to dance along. After the game, Balogun approached Belgium’s coach and attempted to clean up at least some of the political stain. “It is not his fault,” Garcia told reporters, praising the US forward’s gesture. “He is not the one to blame.”

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

In brief remarks to reporters Monday at the White House, President Donald Trump noted that he was shocked to learn how much energy developing artificial intelligence requires and said his administration is now approving plans for energy facilities to power data centers in “a matter of weeks.” 

After first describing his investment accounts for children, Trump responded to a question on cryptocurrency and said Big Tech leaders racing to develop artificial intelligence have told him they need access to double the country’s existing energy capacity in order to advance technologies and outpace foreign competitors. 

Trump also said that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin had told him tech companies weren’t taking advantage of the administration’s promise to get fast approvals for private power plants supporting AI development. 

“An industry of the future should not be chained to dirty fuels of the past.” 

Trump said he then called Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk to ask why they hadn’t submitted plans for power plants alongside their data center developments. 

“They thought we were kidding,” Trump said Monday. “They can’t believe it, that they’re approved in a period of a matter of weeks.” 

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about how the administration is approving power plant plans in a matter of weeks. 

While the administration has sought to waive environmental protections, expedite permits, and loosen construction rules for gas plants and data centers, there are a slew of state and local requirements both power plants and data centers must satisfy that even in the fastest permitting environments take months. 

Although Trump said it was his idea to allow tech companies to build their own “behind-the-meter” generating units on site to power data, it’s a mainstream practice to ensure they always have access to power. Dedicated power plants for data centers have only grown in popularity as companies race to get the facilities online. 

The president said tech companies can use whichever type of energy they want to use—he specifically mentioned only nuclear, oil and gas—except wind. “We don’t allow wind,” Trump said. “Wind is terrible, it just doesn’t work.” 

Trump has sought to end wind energy, the resource that generates a tenth of the electricity generated in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. 

The race to develop AI, which requires data centers to handle the energy-intensive computing, has resulted in plans for 74 new or expanded methane gas plants across the US, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project, a national nonprofit founded more than 20 years ago by a former director of the EPA’s civil enforcement office.  

These proposed gas-fired plants, which would be dedicated to serving data centers, are expected to generate 143 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power the state of California nearly three times over, according to the report. 

Of those 74 gas plants, 32 are in Texas, 10 are in Ohio, and seven are in Pennsylvania. 

The power plants would also release nearly 662 million tons per year of greenhouse gas pollution, according to the report, which equals the emissions of Australia. This wave of power plants for data centers could also release air pollutants that contribute to smog and lung damage.

Data centers have become very unpopular, prompting some politicians to try and distance themselves from the industry.

Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement that “an industry of the future should not be chained to dirty fuels of the past.” 

“While data centers may be needed to accommodate shifts in technology, the public has a right to transparency and accountability, clean air, and common sense controls to protect water supplies, especially in areas already struggling with water shortages,” Duggan said. Data centers can use copious amounts of water to keep servers cool.

As the data center industry seeks rural parts of the US to roll out the supercomputer warehouses, and the fossil fuel power plants and generators accompanying them, the facilities have quickly become highly unpopular in communities across America. 

Some lawmakers have long been vocal with their concerns about data center construction. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation in March proposing a moratorium on all new data center construction until AI safeguards, including worker and environmental protections, are in place.

Other politicians, who have responded to protests from their constituents with the midterm elections approaching, are seeking to distance themselves from the industry. 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, called for blocking new data center developments in rural parts of the state during a campaign stop in East Texas last week. It’s a step further than his recent calls for data centers to pay for their own infrastructure costs, reuse their water, add new power generation to the state’s independent electric grid and other measures aimed at limiting the impact on residential communities. 

The New York State Legislature passed a one-year moratorium in June on data center permits. If Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the bill, New York would become the first state to restrict data centers in such a way. But Hochul, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year, has said that she believes it should be left up to municipalities.

Monterey Park, California, and Ashville, Ohio, are among the US communities that have passed temporary bans or pauses on new data centers.

The Trump administration announced last month that it would not set nationwide environmental requirements or recommendations for the data center industry. 

While there are technologies and practices that reduce air pollution and water usage, states and communities know what works best for them, EPA chief Zeldin said at a Politico energy summit in June.

By not enforcing federal regulations, said Clara Vondrich, senior policy counsel with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, the EPA gave Big Tech the green light to build polluting power plants and water-intensive facilities without any environmental protection enforcement. 

“Big Tech executives have lobbied hard to ingratiate themselves into the Trump administration’s orbit,” Vondrich stated. “Zeldin made clear that their investment was money well spent.”

When Lucy found out she was pregnant in the summer of 2025, she might have been delighted. Instead, the news added to the uncertainty she’d been facing since that February, when she was among the first crop of federal workers fired by the Trump administration.

Her old bosses at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to rehire her, but human resources offered nothing in writing, and given how the administration had treated her already, she just couldn’t trust the proposal. (She would eventually return as a contractor, hence her request that I use a pseudonym—one former colleague, after all, had been fired for putting up a protest sign.)

The survey of fired federal workers “came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was.”

President Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly that the career workers his minions drove out—roughly 317,000 were fired, quit, or took a buyout since he returned to the White House—are “getting private sector jobs” and making “twice as much money, three times as much money.” Even the judge who ruled those early firings illegal was under that impression. The workers “have moved on with their lives and found new jobs,” he stated last fall. “Many would no longer be willing or able to return to their posts.”

That wasn’t Lucy’s experience. She’d applied for at least 80 positions, resulting in just two dead-end interviews, though her PhD and ample work experience had made her well-qualified. By the time she knew she was expecting, she’d accepted a retail gig without health insurance. Similar stories abounded among her former colleagues.

I, too, left a job at the NIH last year—voluntarily, having seen the writing on the wall. My old workmates and I keep in touch via a group Signal chat, which, in addition to hand-drawn protest signs and pictures of pets, has been populated with tips for job seekers, mutual aid info, and countless employment postings.

Lucy, whom I hadn’t met prior to reporting this story, figured she wasn’t an outlier in terms of her difficulties finding suitable work. As the anniversary of the so-called Valentine’s Day Massacre approached, the members of one of her Signal chats began talking about designing a survey to assess how ejected workers were really faring.

Among the laid-off workers were plenty of people skilled in collecting and analyzing data—including Lucy, an epidemiologist, who raised her hand to help. “It came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was,” she says.

“I’ve done a lot of different analysis projects, worked with a lot of data. I’ve never done something that was personal like this,” says Christa Reynolds, another fired NIH employee who helped crunch the numbers. “In one way, it was validating. In another way, it just was terrible.”

The data they collected—300 responses across 14 federal agencies and nearly every state—suggested that the fired workers had not, by and large, settled into high-paying private sector jobs. Many struggled to find work, with about 40 percent searching for at least six months. A year after Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut them loose, almost 17 percent remained unemployed.

“Probationary sounds like they’re just out of college,” said a former IRS chief, but “a lot” of the fired workers had “very sophisticated backgrounds.”

And not for lack of trying. Brier Ryver, who also helped design the survey, said they applied to at least 110 jobs after getting fired as a park ranger for a federal wildlife refuge in Florida. Wildlife conservation “is an extremely competitive field,” Ryver told me. Most of their applications were for local government positions, in dozens of states.

“Every single county government and every single state government and every single university has a different website to apply through, so I had to create accounts for every single one,” Ryver says. “I’d stay up till 3 a.m. applying and overthinking and making my materials look as good as I can.”

Seasonal work was a nonstarter—at first. “I need benefits in some way, shape, or form,” Ryver explains. But as rejections piled up, their expectations grew more flexible: “I’m going to take little money over no money.”

In the survey, more than two-thirds of the workers who had found jobs reported taking a pay cut. One interpretation might be that federal salaries were “bloated,” as House Republicans misleadingly put it in a 2024 proposal to slash benefits for civil servants. But a fairer interpretation is that they took what they could get in a hostile job market—even if overqualified. “There are a lot of families who are two-fed households, one was probationary and the other was RIFed,” Lucy notes, using the acronym for “reductions in force,” a.k.a. layoffs.

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The survey focused on probationary employees, whom the administration went after first. Legally, they were easier to terminate because they’d been in their roles less than two years, though many were longtime contractors or seasoned civil servants transferring from other positions. “Probationary sounds like they’re just out of college,” former IRS chief John Koskinen told one of my Mother Jones colleagues as DOGE hit his agency. “A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds…They weren’t 25-year-olds. They were filling important positions.” 

Either way, many of the fired workers shouldered financial risks for the opportunity to serve the public. “I uprooted my life and moved across country to take this new position to a place where I had no community,” one of them, a single mother, wrote in her survey response. Another said their spouse had quit their job to enable the move. Nearly a third of the surveyed workers reported financial losses related to moving or housing instability. Some drew down their retirement savings—nearly one in six took out a loan.

The Federal Harms Tracker, a project of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, estimates that Trump’s layoffs have cost taxpayers more than $70 billion, and that’s not even counting the inevitable fallout when the country’s largest employer sheds more than 7 percent of its personnel. Nearly half of respondents in the probationary workers’ survey said they’d delayed major life events, like getting married or buying a home. “It’s comparable to the pandemic,” notes Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institute who tracks economic indicators in the DC area to study the layoffs’ impacts.

Trump’s firings have been terribly wasteful. “They lost all this money that they spent training us and recruiting.”

A recent report by Loh and her colleagues found that home prices in DC, which boasted the nation’s highest unemployment rate in 2025, have dropped by a quarter compared to 2019, and inflation-adjusted rents have plummeted, though “no tenant feels like the rent went down.” Housing remains expensive relative to incomes, and as fired federal workers tightened their belts, the researchers saw declines in all types of spending.

But the majority of federal workers resided outside the capital, and unemployment spiked in states where they had the biggest presence. Locales with strong federal ties were also vulnerable. Ryver, for example, worked at the only wildlife refuge designated for the protection of Florida’s manatees: “The local economy was very based on manatee tourism.”

Ryver managed the commercial permits that allowed tour groups to operate, and assessed buildings, boardwalks, and other facilities to ensure they were safe for public use. The refuge was understaffed even before DOGE came along. “We were already drowning in work and deferred maintenance,” Ryver says.

Beyond the inevitable deterioration of government services, the firings have been terribly wasteful—a serious brain drain. “They lost all this money that they spent training us and recruiting,” Reynolds explains, and rehiring fired workers as contractors, which happens a fair bit, is generally more costly—and less stable. “I don’t feel secure,” Lucy told me. “I feel like any day they could pull my contract.”

“There can be people who, of course, get new jobs, and they can look fine from the outside, and they can feel better, but the nervous system is really changed,” says Rosalyn Beroza, a therapist who specializes in trauma. “It’s a state where none of the givens held, and you can draw a line between before and after—nothing feels the same afterwards. That’s what has happened to federal employees.”

Beroza, a DC local and daughter of a government scientist, has spent her entire life around civil servants. And so, in early 2025, she began assembling a network of therapists willing to offer free or low-cost therapy to departing federal workers. “The demand was huge,” she says. “I got so many people wanting help, and it was so sad.”

The mass firings were “essentially a natural disaster, because you lose everything. You lose finances, but you also lose your identity, your sense of purpose.”

Russell Vought, director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, had promised to put federal workers “in trauma” and the data suggest he succeeded: In the survey Lucy and her colleagues designed, 95 percent of the fired employees reported new mental health symptoms, including nervousness, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and thoughts of self-harm. “If it weren’t for my family, if it weren’t for my friends, my community around me, I would not be here,” Lucy says.

When I reached out to Reynolds, the mental health stats were the first thing she wanted to talk about, but she wasn’t sure the public would care. “I’ve heard other people be like, ‘Oh, well people lose their jobs every day,’” she says. “It’s hard to explain. Like, this is not a normal job loss.”

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Beroza agrees. “It’s not an overreaction, because of the way that these firings took place,” she says. “It’s essentially a natural disaster, because you lose everything. You lose finances, but you also lose your identity, your sense of purpose, your sense of the future.”

If there were any guardrails, federal workers no longer trust them. “I expected some bad things to happen, but I thought that they would follow laws,” Reynolds recalls. If not, she figured Congress or the courts would step up. But Congress demurred and the courts were too little, too late.

Another survey, conducted last year by the Federal News Network, suggested that 95 percent of federal employees who stayed on have experienced increased anxiety and depression since Trump came back to office. More than four out of five considered quitting for mental health reasons.

In a recent analysis, the Government Accountability Office classified more than three quarters of last year’s federal departures as voluntary. But though opting into the deferred resignation program—Musk’s notorious “fork in the road”—was technically a choice, it wasn’t much of one. “Many people did that because they were told that their jobs were going to be eliminated, so how voluntary is that?” Loh, the economic analyst, asks.

I can relate. A few weeks after Trump returned to office, my government-supplied laptop wouldn’t let me log in. It turned out to be a technical issue, but for 30 minutes I thought I’d been fired. Colleagues had already been placed on administrative leave, articles and educational materials I’d worked on were scratched off federal websites, and I’d been all but prohibited from doing my job.

A third of the fired employees, including people with chronic diseases, said they had delayed medical care. “My life was in danger,” wrote one.

Once my first colleague was axed, I’d been jumpy at every email and increasingly nauseous every day I clocked in. When the password to my work computer was suddenly defective, I mostly felt relief. I put in my resignation a few days later. On paper, my departure was voluntary, though I wouldn’t have left if not for the hostility Musk, Trump, Vought, and the rest leveled at dedicated civil servants.

Like Lucy, despite countless applications, I spent more than six months unemployed, resorted to gig work to pay my bills, and (like one in four fired workers surveyed) began taking a psychiatric medication—in my case to deal with new heights of anxiety. It helped, but that period still haunts me.

Roughly 90 percent of the survey respondents reported that mental health symptoms triggered by their job losses were still affecting them a year later. Ryver recalls “some skill regression” as a result. “It erodes your cognitive abilities, your problem-solving abilities, to have to operate at such high levels of activation,” says Beroza, the trauma therapist.

Many fired federal workers say they wouldn’t go back to working for the government. Lucy, who did so out of necessity, can understand that. Her reinstatement process, too, was anxiety inducing. It lasted half a year, for most of which she couldn’t reach anyone in human resources and had nothing in writing—and no functional health insurance.

Which is why she had to find an obstetrician willing to see uninsured patients. During her first appointment, the doctor couldn’t detect a fetal heartbeat, and Lucy was told to schedule a followup. “Those were the longest two weeks of my life,” she remembers.

Her pregnancy, it turned out, wasn’t viable, which threatened to become a financial blow in addition to an emotional one. Lucy required a procedure the doctor’s office said would cost $5,000 out of pocket. She and her partner hit the phones and eventually learned she could get the same treatment at Planned Parenthood for $650—which still wasn’t easy. “That time would have been a lot less stressful if I had insurance,” she recalls.

In the workers’ survey, a third of the fired employees said they had delayed medical care. Those with chronic diseases reported worsening symptoms, one writing, “My life was in danger during that time.”

DOGE officially came to an end on July 4, according to the executive order that created it. The passing of this expiration date feels weirdly anticlimactic—perhaps because Musk and his underlings haven’t been active in the onslaught for some time now, or because some parts of the government are showing signs of returning to normalcy, at least on paper. Hard-hit agencies, including the IRS, are now hiring, sometimes at rates surpassing the earlier layoffs. Health and Human Services, where Lucy and Reynolds both worked, is looking to add 12,000 workers—20 percent more than it shed.

Agencies are recruiting former federal workers for many of the roles, but the vast majority of those workers are wary—if not shellshocked. When the Partnership for Public Service surveyed more than 11,000 remaining federal workers last fall, 58 percent said they were “less engaged” than a year earlier, and only 10 percent trusted the political leadership—which, as Reynolds points out, has “been upfront about not respecting us and not caring for our work.”

Reynolds doubts the damage this administration has wrought—on institutional knowledge and the trust and dedication of career employees—is reversible. “It gets beyond that personal feeling of hurt for being fired,” she says. Because even if federal agencies are repopulated, it’s hard to be confident they’ll adhere to the public-facing missions that once motivated Reynolds and other civil servants. “The long-term effects” of the layoffs, she says, “are definitely one of the more stressful things for me.”

Last summer, I noticed a shift: I was calmer and happier than I’d been in years.

This was puzzling, since my life didn’t look particularly calm. I was planning a solo cross-country move, and my days were full of bubble wrap and goodbye dinners and Craigslist alerts. But as I packed up boxes in Boston, and then adjusted to life in San Francisco, I marveled at the ­little changes. Feeling content, rather than lonely, on nights cooking a new recipe by myself. Pausing to chat with baristas instead of rushing to order a latte. I couldn’t remember crying out of happiness before, but there I was on a morning walk, eyes welling at the way the sun hit a cypress tree. Friends and family said I seemed lighter. As the summer progressed, I wrote journal entries like, “felt relaxed/happy a lot of the day for no particular reason” and “surprised by how ok I am.”

Since I was a teenager, I’ve grappled with a tangle of anxiety, depression, and insomnia: feeling a knot at the base of my ribs, weeping in the fetal position for no obvious reason, waking up in the middle of the night, simultaneously exhausted and wired. Over the years, I have, as therapists like to say, amassed the tools in my toolbox. I’ve spent countless hours with psychiatrists and therapists, gravitating toward cool grandma types, taking their advice to cultivate a mindfulness practice. I’ve talked to my actual grandma, a vivacious 102-year-old psychologist who has a way of asking pointed questions over ­breakfast. (On insomnia: “Does sex help?”) I’ve tried Prozac and Zoloft and Ambien. I run a few miles every day after work—the best mood booster I’ve found so far. I’ve even tried some of the more out-there stuff, like working with a coach to ask my stomach why it’s so tense.

But when the knot and the crying jags and the inexplicably wired nights persisted, I came to think of them as just how I was built. In the same way that I have dark hair and brown eyes, I thought, I was a person with a low hum of anxiety and bouts of depression.

So it was particularly noticeable when things shifted. It wasn’t that I suddenly transformed; rather, it felt like the temperature of the anxiety came down, and sadness became a feeling that passed rather than a state of being. My Oura ring told me that the quality of my sleep was “Fair” or “Good,” and not the dreaded “Pay attention.”

It took a couple of months for me to realize that these changes dovetailed with another event: the removal of my IUD.

Like many millennial women, I’ve been on hormonal contraceptives for most of my adult life. I got my first intrauterine ­device after graduating from college. I loved that I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant or bother with taking a pill every day. I loved that, like many women with hormonal IUDs, I didn’t get my period. And I loved that, with the exception of when I had to replace it every so often, I didn’t think about having an IUD much at all for the next 14 years.

“I think this is a real thing. I don’t think it was just in your uterus or just in your head,” said Dr. Tamar Gur, adding: “Your experience, unfortunately, is very common.”

One morning last August, I decided to do some digging into whether my newfound equilibrium was related to going off birth control. I’d heard that the pill could cause mood changes for some users, but what I found shocked me: For years, research in well-respected scientific journals has found that people on hormonal contraceptives—especially those using non-oral contraceptives, like IUDs—are much more likely to experience depression, suicidality, anxiety, insomnia, and other psychological effects rarely discussed by the doctors who prescribe them. While the likelihood of ­severe mood changes from hormonal contraceptives is relatively low, even a small increase in risk can have profound consequences when a group of products is used by more than 300 million women worldwide.

“There are subsets of women who are ­exquisitely sensitive to hormonal shifts,” says Dr. Tamar Gur, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who directs the women’s health research program at Ohio State University. “I think this is a real thing. I don’t think it was just in your uterus or just in your head,” she told me, adding: “Your experience, unfortunately, is very common.” Like many doctors I spoke with, Gur often paused midsentence to rephrase what she was saying. “I just want to be so careful with my words, because I don’t want someone out there who would benefit from hormonal contraception to feel scared of it or feel like they’re doomed to experience it.”

Indeed, some important caveats are in order. Again and again, scientists stressed to me that, while some women on ­hormonal contraceptives experience dramatic mood effects, the vast majority do not. Some, in fact, report feeling happier on contraceptives than off them. On top of that, the potential consequence of not using birth control—namely, unplanned pregnancy—can have immense psychological repercussions. And finally, the large studies are observational, meaning they show correlation, not causation. It’s challenging, for ethical reasons, to do randomized, controlled studies on the effects of birth control by placing some participants on placebos, and the science is complicated by the fact that there are hundreds of formulations of contraceptives and little funding to study drugs already on the market. Even my story isn’t exactly linear: My college years were by far my most depressed, and I wasn’t on contraceptives most of that time.

And yet it’s an undeniably jarring experience to realize, at 36, that I may be a significantly calmer and happier person than I thought I was. Did my IUD contribute to or prolong my depression and anxiety? And of the many mental health specialists I saw over the years, why didn’t anyone ask about my birth control?

I’ve been mulling this at a time when birth control is under attack. In October, the Department of Health and Human Services laid off the staff administering Title X, which provides contraceptives and other family planning services to millions of low-income Americans annually. The agency recently released guidance on ­family planning projects it expects to fund in the coming year—with the goal of reducing “overmedicalization” and promoting “natural family planning” approaches.

On social media, misinformation about contraceptives is rampant, with videos on TikTok—generating billions of views—leading some women to come off birth control in favor of “natural” alternatives. Turning Point USA podcaster Alex Clark has called hormonal birth control “poison.” Candace Owens calls it a “Machiavellian, evil design to keep you stupid.” Celebrities from Gwyneth Paltrow to Joe Rogan and Elon Musk have used their platforms to suggest birth control is dangerous.

At virtually every gathering where the subject came up, at least one woman—and often many—told stories of stopping or changing birth control because of the side effects.

At a time when abortion is unavailable to many and contraceptives could be next on the chopping block, it can feel like there are only two camps: those who champion birth control, warts and all, and those who criticize it with hopes of making it go away. But there is a quieter third camp: scientists, doctors, and public health researchers who are scrutinizing birth control not to get rid of it, but to make it better.

I hadn’t appreciated just how much support there was for this last group until I started telling women in my life that I was working on this story. Nervous that friends would think I’d gone off some sort of Goop–ey deep end, I came to dinner parties and book clubs prepared to rattle off study stats and assure them that real scientists said this was a thing. I needn’t have worried. At virtually every gathering where the subject came up, at least one woman—and often many—told stories of stopping or changing birth control because of the side effects. I learned of friends who went off hormonal contraceptives after thoughts of harming themselves, or having thoughts of harming others, or spiraling in anxiety. This shouldn’t have surprised me: Roughly a fifth of women stop using birth control or switch methods within the first year because of side effects, many of them mood-related.

While researchers know that some women will suffer from dramatic reactions, they’re still learning who and why. “We’re in the murky middle,” said psychology professor Adriene Beltz, who studies the cognitive effects of sex hormones at the University of Michigan.

Beltz was among the many experts I spoke with who worried, in this political climate, that their research would be weaponized. It can feel, she said, like “you’re either gaslighting the experiences of folks or you’re limiting folks’ options at a time when options are already limited.”

This isn’t altogether a new challenge. When Beltz started her research more than a decade ago, people would ask what she would do if she discovered something negative about contraceptives. Her response: “I would say, ‘Women deserve to know all possible risks and benefits.’”

Vanessa Saba

In June 2011, when I was 21, I showed up to my gynecologist’s office in Minneapolis to discuss contraception. My medical records note that I was leaning toward a Mirena IUD. “Had a tough year depression/anxiety-­wise and is concerned about mood effects with hormonal contraceptives,” the records say. Still, after a discussion about pros and cons, I elected to have it inserted that day.

I don’t doubt any of this, but I also have no recollection of this appointment. It was the summer after I graduated from college, and I’d talked to friends who had IUDs and liked them. My understanding of the devices was that they operated locally, without the far-reaching effects of oral contraceptives. At the time, Bayer, which makes the Mirena, explained on its website that the IUD “delivers small amounts of hormone directly to the uterus.”

The fact that the insertion of an effective, long-acting contraceptive was so unremarkable to me was, in its own way, extraordinary. For millennia, women in ­ancient societies had gone to extreme lengths to prevent pregnancy: inserting acacia gum or crocodile dung in Egypt, cervical sponges made of bamboo tissue paper in Japan, wads of wool in Greek and Islamic cultures. Starting in the 1900s, douches containing Lysol were marketed as “feminine hygiene” products to get around laws limiting the sale of contraceptives.

All of which made the first-ever birth control pill, which hit the market in the summer of 1960, such a game changer. Here was the “magic pill” that reproductive rights crusaders like Margaret Sanger had been dreaming of. Sex before—and after—marriage became less fraught. Women could study and pursue careers without fear of unplanned pregnancy. The pill suppressed ovulation by supplying a constant dose of synthetic estrogen and progesterone (called progestin)—the sexual hormones that rise and fall with each menstrual cycle. Within five years, it had become the most popular form of birth control in the country.

Plenty of women “were happy to have the choice, but they were unhappy that this great new thing came with so many downsides,” said historian Judith Houck, “and that they were told, ‘You should be happy.'”

But as its popularity soared, concerns among patients and doctors grew about troubling complications, from blood clots to strokes and depression. As it turns out, the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the pill had been based on a study of low-income women in Puerto Rico—17 percent of whom reported dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and headaches and three of whom died without further investigation. So strong were the side effects that Dr. Edris Rice-Wray, who oversaw the trial, concluded that while the pill protected against pregnancy, it “causes too many side reactions to be acceptable generally.” Her concerns were dismissed by the male heads of research.

When Congress held a series of hearings about the pill’s potential dangers in 1970, doctors testified about its extreme psychological effects on some of their patients, describing how these women became psychotic or suicidal. One doctor said he was fielding calls from husbands, saying, “Do something about my wife—my God, she’s just turned into a bitch.” No women were invited to speak about their personal experiences, prompting feminist protesters to persistently interrupt the proceedings, calling out questions like, “Why are 10 million women being used as guinea pigs?”

Plenty of women “were happy to have the choice, but they were unhappy that this great new thing came with so many downsides,” said Judith Houck, a historian of women’s health at the University of ­Wisconsin, Madison, “and that they were told, You should be happy.”

The hearings, together with feminist ­organizing, helped push the FDA to require drug manufacturers to include possible side effects in the pill’s packaging. In the following years, drugmakers introduced oral contraceptives with significantly lower doses of hormones and fewer risks. Meanwhile, nonhormonal IUDs, including copper versions, arrived in the ’60s and ’70s, but the disastrous Dalkon Shield—linked to infections, infertility, sepsis, and death—turned Americans away from them for years to come.

Starting in the 1900s, douches containing Lysol were marketed as “feminine hygiene” products to get around laws limiting the sale of contraceptives.

In many ways, that’s how things stayed for the next three decades in the United States. Research into new contraceptives stalled. Pharmaceutical executives concluded that the litigation risks were too high, the products too politically charged. They seemed to assume—correctly—that many women would simply put up with the side effects in exchange for reproductive autonomy. The number of American women on the pill steadily climbed; in 1987, 4 out of 5 women in their mid-30s had used oral contraceptives. By 1990, all but one of the large American pharmaceutical companies that had previously been doing research on new contraceptives had stopped.

“The outlook for new contraceptive development is bleak,” Dr. Luigi Mastroianni, a University of Pennsylvania professor of obstetrics and gynecology, said in 1990. While some Europeans could choose from a variety of implants, injectables, pills, IUDS, and sterilization techniques, “we in the United States make do with the same range of options available 30 years ago.”

That changed in 2000, when the nation’s first hormonal IUD hit the market. The Mirena was a small, T-shaped piece of plastic, inserted into the uterus in a quick outpatient procedure. Like the pill, it offered a steady dose of synthetic hormones—in this case, only progestin. But unlike the pill, patients didn’t have to think about it daily or refill prescriptions. That helped make it far more effective: The rate of unplanned pregnancy in the first year of typical use with a Mirena was 0.2 percent, compared with 9 percent for women on the pill.

Bayer sponsored promotional parties featuring a nurse practitioner passing around a Mirena—the nation’s first hormonal IUD—and a presentation by a fashion stylist.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the field’s leading professional group that issues clinical guidance, soon embraced IUDs. In a 2005 bulletin, ACOG said they “should be considered for all women who seek a reliable, reversible contraceptive that is effective ­before coitus,” adding that side effects were “minimal.” This stamp of approval came despite the fact that the package insert noted that “5 percent or more” of users experienced abdominal pain, back pain, decreased libido, depression, nervousness, or a host of other side effects.

By 2011, ACOG’s guidance was even more effusive, saying that “almost all women are eligible for implants and IUDs.” The logic was simple: IUDs are exceedingly effective at preventing unplanned pregnancy. Doctors often ranked contraceptives in terms of efficacy, with IUDs and other long-acting methods in the top ­category. (ACOG later acknowledged that this approach failed to consider the broader needs and values of the patient, including concerns about side effects.)

After the Mirena, Bayer came out with IUDs with lower doses of progestin, each sounding like a sperm-slaying goddess of war: the Skyla in 2013, the Kyleena in 2016. The company marketed them as a convenient option for busy moms. Bayer sponsored promotional parties featuring a nurse practitioner passing around a Mirena and a presentation by a fashion stylist. “How would you categorize yourself?” the nurse practitioner was coached to ask attendees. “Hot and sexy with a lot of spontaneity or too tired with little time to be intimate?”

In some cases, doctors promoted IUDs with enthusiasm that bordered on overzealousness. In a 2017 study, public health researchers interviewed a dozen primary care providers at clinics in the Bronx. They found that when patients requested to have their IUDs taken out because of side effects, providers often pushed back.

“I never want to have anyone remove their IUD unless they want to have a planned pregnancy and they’re ready for it,” one physician told the researchers. “Every other case, I feel like they should keep it in if they can, obviously.”

Around 2013, epidemiologist Charlotte Wessel Skovlund heard from a friend who’d become depressed after having an IUD inserted. At the time, Skovlund was the data ­manager for Dr. Øjvind Lidegaard, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Copenhagen. For years, Lidegaard had been studying the effects of hormonal contraceptives on rates of heart attacks and stroke. Skovlund approached Lidegaard with a research question: Was it possible, she wondered, that her friend’s IUD and her depression were connected?

Lidegaard was intrigued. The existing research was inconclusive, but over the years, he’d had patients who would return weeks after he’d prescribed hormonal contraceptives, saying their moods had changed and they needed an alternative. “We have always known that some women feel that way,” he told me, “but we have generally considered it to be a little minority of women.”

Teens using progestin-only IUDs were three times more likely than non-users to be diagnosed with depression and to be prescribed antidepressants.

In Denmark, as in several other ­European countries, a national registry tracks residents’ anonymized medical histories, enabling large observational studies. Skovlund, Lidegaard, and a team of scientists decided to embark on a multiyear research project, examining the records of more than a million women between 1995 and 2013.

Their landmark study, published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2016, found that most common hormonal contraceptives were ­associated with higher rates of depression and antidepressant prescriptions—with particularly high rates among those using progestin-­only contraceptives, those who started as teenagers, and those using non-oral contraceptives, like IUDs. At gravest risk were teenagers using progestin-only IUDs like the Mirena, who were three times more likely than non-users to be ­diagnosed with depression and to be prescribed antidepressants.

After the study came out, Lidegaard received “not hundreds, but thousands of emails” from women around the world about their own experiences. One that stuck with him was from an 18-year-old American who had no history of ­mental health problems, but, two days after starting the pill, found herself on the Brooklyn Bridge, about to jump. She was dissuaded by an onlooker. Eventually, she stopped taking the pill at a family ­member’s suggestion and hadn’t experienced depression since. “It’s of course an extreme ­example,” Lidegaard said, “but it illustrates that the sensitivity to these things are so different. For some women, it can be an almost overnight change.”

Lidegaard is quick to note that depression rates among people using hormonal contraceptives, while elevated, are still quite low overall. The Mirena’s package insert today estimates that 6.4 percent of users experience depression as a side effect; similarly, Lidegaard said about 7 percent of women stop using hormonal contraceptives within the first few weeks because of psychological side effects.

On the flip side, contraceptives are used by so many people that a small increase in depression risk can have dramatic impacts. In Denmark, according to Lidegaard’s math, hormonal contraceptives are responsible for more than 1,200 episodes of depression among teenage girls each year.

More studies followed. In 2017, the ­Danish team found that women using hormonal contraceptives—or who even recently used them—were about twice as likely to attempt suicide compared with those who’d never used them. Studies using medical data banks from the United Kingdom found progestin IUDs to be associated with higher rates of anxiety and sleep problems compared with nonhormonal IUDs, and users of oral contraceptives to have higher rates of depression compared with those who’d never taken them.

Critics often note that observational studies should be taken with a grain of salt. It could be that there’s something about the lifestyle of contraceptive users that is ­causing them to be depressed—or to seek medical intervention for depression—rather than the birth control itself. (One scientist joked with Lidegaard that women on contraceptives were probably more depressed because they were more likely to be interacting with men.)

“What maybe the companies would like you to believe is: Oh, it’s just totally local. Nothing is getting out of that uterus,” said Dr. Andrew Novick. “In reality, there is systemic exposure.”

But a 2024 study led by Skovlund suggests that progestin has something to do with it. The researchers looked at the ­depression rates of hormonal IUD users only, separating participants into groups based on which IUDs they used. They found that depression rates were significantly higher among those using contraceptives with the largest dose of progestin. (This is echoed by the package inserts of Bayer’s three IUDs: As the hormonal doses go up—from Skyla to Kyleena to Mirena—so too do the reported depression rates.)

These findings fly in the face of a longtime selling point of IUDs: that they operate locally and therefore their effects should be more confined.

“What maybe the companies would like you to believe is: Oh, it’s just totally local. Nothing is getting out of that uterus,” said Dr. Andrew Novick, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz who studies the impact of reproductive hormones on the brain. “In reality, there is systemic exposure.” Women with non-oral birth control may be more susceptible to mood changes than those on the pill because of the differences in the way the hormones are processed—namely, the pill is filtered by the liver, whereas progestin in IUDs and other non-oral contraceptives makes its way directly into the bloodstream. From there, it binds with hormone receptors in cells across the body, including those in the brain. (A recent Bayer training guide instructs healthcare providers to tell patients that “only small amounts of hormone enter your blood,” though a Bayer spokesperson told Mother Jones that the company consistently has noted the systemic hormonal exposure in IUDs’ product information.)

What happens next is still murky, but some studies suggest that hormonal birth control changes the body’s stress response. Those on contraceptives have blunted cortisol responses to individual stressors, but higher cortisol levels overall—an effect similar to what’s seen in individuals under chronic stress, Novick said.

Additional studies have found that women with a history of depression are more likely to experience mood-related side effects. Also at higher risk are women who start contraceptives as teenagers. That’s notable, since nearly a fifth of American teenage girls use hormonal contraception—often for reasons other than pregnancy prevention, like treating acne or heavy periods.

“Children are not small adults,” said Gur, the Ohio State researcher. They have “wildly different central nervous systems, and so it’s not surprising to me, just as a scientist, that they might respond differently.”

Search “birth control” on TikTok, and you’ll see clip after clip of women bemoaning hormonal contraceptives and suggesting natural alternatives. In a video with 1.6 million likes, a “holistic nutritionist” who posts under the handle “beingwellis­hot,” and who, indeed, has perfect skin and doe eyes, suggests that eating papaya seeds can induce your period to avoid pregnancy. Some influencers promote the oil from neem plants as a natural contraceptive. (“Kills sperm in 30 seconds tops,” promises one.) Others suggest seeds from wild carrots: “You might have birth control growing in your backyard!”

Prominent conservatives, from the late Charlie Kirk to podcaster Alex Clark, have suggested that birth control causes fertility problems. “If you want women to be feminine again, and soft again, and beautiful,” Clark said last year in a conversation with anti-abortion internet personality Seth Gruber, “women need to be ovulating.”

The top 100 TikTok videos about reproductive health received nearly 5 billion views in a single month in 2023.

It’s no secret that what’s so pernicious about misinformation is that it’s often nestled among kernels of truth. The claims above lack evidence, but they’re alongside reels about well-documented birth control side effects: women in crop tops showing weight they’ve gained; teary women talking to the camera; women laid up with back pain.

Birth control TikTok is hugely influential; the top 100 videos about reproductive health received nearly 5 billion views in a single month in 2023, and only 10 percent of them came from medical professionals. A KFF survey the following year found that 1 in 7 women between 18 and 25 made a change to their birth control, or considered making a change, based on something they saw on social media.

In an ideal world, one could turn to medical professionals to separate the signal from the noise. And indeed, in 2024, ACOG unveiled a website aimed at combating misinformation about contraceptives. But rather than diving into the nuance, the organization took a different approach.

On the subject of weight gain, ACOG’s site said “there is no causal link” between birth control and weight gain, with the exception of hormonal injections. Claims about changes in mood or libido, meanwhile, were branded “myths” and “misinformation.”

This all struck me as odd, considering that pharmaceutical companies themselves list changes to mood, libido, and weight as possible side effects for many brands of birth control—disclosures feminists fought for back in the ’70s.

When I asked ACOG about the effects of contraceptives on mental health, I was connected with Dr. Rachel Jensen, a ­gynecologist and ACOG fellow focusing on complex family planning. On average, she said, birth control “has not been shown to cause significant mood changes.” If a patient reports a shift in demeanor after starting contraceptives, Jensen makes sure the cause isn’t something “more severe,” like anemia or thyroid disorders. “I’m all for discontinuing [birth control] or taking a break, but I can’t guarantee that that will fix whatever is going on, because the research that we have doesn’t tell us that birth control would necessarily be causing that,” she said.

On social media, influencers warn about the dangers of contraceptives and promote “natural” alternatives, from carrot seeds to papaya.

When I asked why the group lists mood changes from contraceptives as a “myth,” she acknowledged that some IUDs are known to be associated with depression. “I think our goal here is to talk about the aggregate,” she said. “Most people do not experience mood changes based on the studies that we have.”

A few days after our conversation, an ACOG spokesperson emailed to say that our interview had sparked an internal discussion; the group, she said, had decided to remove changes in mood and libido from the list of birth control myths. “As the statement is written, it does not feel patient-­centered or inclusive of experienced symptoms that may not be borne out in the data,” she wrote in mid-November.

The “relentlessly positive framing” of birth control by medical organizations can come off as “medical gaslighting,” says biological anthropologist Kathryn Clancy.

Two months later, the website was indeed updated—but not by much. According to the new language, it was no longer a myth that birth control leads to mood changes; rather, it was a myth that birth control “routinely” causes mood changes. These myths “frighten people away from well-studied, clinically proven, safe, and effective choices that can improve their health and their lives.”

The “relentlessly positive framing” of birth control by medical organizations may come from a desire to protect access to contraceptives, but this “toxic positivity” can come off “as medical gaslighting,” said Kathryn Clancy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois who wrote ­Period: The Real Story of Menstruation. “What I don’t think sometimes these doctors realize is how it reads to a patient who has had a negative experience—which is a very large number of people who’ve been on hormonal contraception,” she told me. When they feel dismissed by mainstream medicine, she said, many flock to the internet for birth control advice. Charlatans on social media are “stepping into a place where there is medical mistrust,” she said, “and until we address those, there will always be people who take advantage and then come up with bananas things.”

So, how should doctors talk with patients? Dr. Aaron Lazorwitz, a gynecologist and pharmacogeneticist at Yale who studies how genetic differences shape patients’ responses to birth control, stresses the importance of transparency. “The biggest thing is being open and honest about what we know and what we don’t know,” he said. “‘Here are the potential side effects you could ­experience. I can’t tell you what you’re going to experience beforehand, unfortunately. We have to closely monitor how you do, and if it’s not going well, I need you to tell me.’ That’s the biggest thing.”

This sounds basic enough, but it’s not particularly common. One survey in 2021 and 2022 found that 83 percent of women said their provider never mentioned the possibility of psychological side effects during contraceptive counseling.

There are signs of change. Lazorwitz said he hears more mentions of mood and contraceptives on social media. Reporters are asking him about it. He likens the issue to pain during IUD insertion—a topic that was rarely discussed by doctors until a surge of complaints about it on social media and in news stories prompted ACOG to release new pain management guidelines last year. The groundswell “really forced providers who weren’t talking about it to start talking about it more,” Lazorwitz said. “I imagine that something like that may be coming up with mood symptoms and birth control as well.”

Vanessa Saba

When I spoke with Dr. Neill Epperson, chair of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz, I started with my own story. She laughed a knowing laugh.

“Yeah, the good old progesterone IUD,” she said. Then she told a story about a patient who was stable, got an IUD, and came back to her office with suicidal ideation. “And I said to her, ‘You need to take it out,’” Epperson recalled. “‘I know you just put it in, but you need to take it out.’ And within days, it was resolved.”

Some medical disciplines may downplay the mental health effects of contraceptives, but reproductive psychiatry, the emerging subspecialty that Epperson helped pioneer, is the exception. Reproductive psychiatrists focus on how the dramatic hormonal fluctuations across women’s lifespans can affect ­mental health—including mood changes from menstruation, pregnancy, the postpartum period, and menopause. (­Notably, women are about twice as likely to ­experience depression as men.)

Hormonal contraceptives are psychotropic medicines, Epperson said, because they affect your brain. Too often, doctors don’t treat them as such—and don’t even ask patients whether they’re on birth control when asking for lists of medications. “I think that’s wrong,” she said. “I think you’re really ­remiss in your evaluation of that patient.”

We don’t quite know how the menstrual cycle affects mood, a former senior NIH official said, let alone when you add contraceptives to the mix.

Epperson’s interest in the subject was sparked in the early 1990s, when she was one of the only female psychiatry residents in her program at Yale. She was referred a patient who, she was told, had postpartum depression—a condition that Epperson admits she “knew nothing about.” The symptoms didn’t fit Epperson’s limited understanding of the disorder; the patient was having intrusive thoughts of harming her kids and was so distressed that she was spending less time with them. Epperson started wondering whether hormones were having a more complicated impact on patients’ mental health than she’d learned in her training.

Epperson was stepping into a research void. Until the ’90s, reproductive-age women were mostly banned from clinical studies, and until 2016, female animals were routinely left out of preclinical studies—in part because scientists worried that hormonal fluctuations would complicate scientific findings. The result is that scientists know little about the impact of hormonal changes in women. Public funding structures have compounded the research gap. A recent National Academies report found that many women’s health conditions are not prioritized by any of the 27 branches of the National Institutes of Health—leading the authors to call for a new institute dedicated to women’s health.

The basics that remain unknown are myriad: We still don’t know what triggers a pregnant woman’s body to deliver a baby. We’re not entirely sure why hormonal IUDs work. (Bayer says it’s “most likely” by thickening cervical mucus, inhibiting sperm movement, and thinning the uterine lining, but “it is not known exactly how these actions work together to prevent pregnancy.”) When I asked a former senior NIH official about the safety of contraceptives, she told me to back up: We don’t quite know how the menstrual cycle affects mood, she said, let alone when you add contraceptives to the mix. This information gap has ramifications far beyond reproduction. A 2024 ­Nature study, for example, suggests that breast cancer treatment may be more effective during certain parts of the ­menstrual cycle.

Reproductive psychiatry is still a relatively young field, with fewer than 20 fellowship programs across the country. I didn’t know it existed until I started reporting this story, and I’ve since wondered if my life would have been different if I’d talked to someone like ­Epperson years ago. Was it possible that my mood improved because my IUD was removed?

“Yes,” she said. “That is quite, quite possible.”

I had my IUD taken out last summer on something of a lark, after learning from a friend that she uses Natural Cycles, the first app cleared by the FDA to be used as contraception. It works by tracking basal body temperature—in my case, using my Oura ring—to identify fertile periods.

This is, to be clear, far from a full-throated endorsement for using fertility awareness apps. They’re not as effective at preventing pregnancy as hormonal contraceptives—with failure rates between 2 and 23 percent—in part because they rely on the user consistently wearing a temperature-­tracking device, remembering to check their fertility status before sex, and using protection during potentially fertile periods, which happen to be when women’s sex drives are at their peak. They’re also pricey: I paid $499 for my Oura ring, in addition to annual fees for Oura and Natural Cycles.

When I signed up for 28, the Peter Thiel–backed fertility awareness app, it promised me fewer PMS symptoms and a “sexier body” in 90 days.

Despite all this, fertility awareness technology is booming. About 1 in 5 women ages 18 to 25 reported using menstrual tracking methods like Natural Cycles as contraception in 2024. The menstrual health app market, already worth $1.7 billion in 2024, is expected to triple by 2030. The apps appeal to a wide and eclectic range of users, from wellness influencers to MAHA supporters and women who are simply sick of the side effects of other contraceptives.

Chelsea Polis, a principal scientist at the reproductive think tank the Guttmacher Institute, said fertility awareness apps, while not as effective as other options, can be a tool to avoid pregnancy. The problem is, they’re supported by lots of people who want to get rid of the other tools, too, from hormonal contraceptives to abortion.

For some proponents—think free birthers, trad wives, and anti-vaxxers—womanhood means living as “naturally” as possible, rejecting not just hormonal contraceptives, but also other trappings of modern medicine. A period-tracking app backed by Peter Thiel, called 28, recommends cycle-­based health plans and sells an herbal supplement, Toxic Breakup, to help women discontinue hormonal ­contraceptives. The app features close-ups of dewy, bikini-­clad models meditating on the beach. (When I signed up, it promised me fewer PMS symptoms and a “sexier body” in 90 days.) Brittany Hugoboom, the ­conservative influencer who co-created 28, has said, “We wanted users to feel like a fertility goddess.”

Screenshots from 28, the Peter Thiel–backed fertility wellness app.

“There are so many other things that are being stripped away and constricting choice and wellbeing, and this is being thrust forward,” Polis said, “like, ‘Here’s your choice for contraception, this is what you should use.’”

But what she’s hoping for—innovation in contraceptives—is slow-moving at best.

The pharmaceutical industry continues to have little appetite for investing in new forms of birth control. Typically, pharmaceutical companies spend around 20 percent of their sales revenue on the research and development of new products, but for contraceptives, that figure is just 2 percent. There were only about 25 industry-funded clinical trials for new contraceptives between 2017 and 2020—in comparison, there were more than 60 clinical trials for hair thinning.

One big reason for the discrepancy: ­liability. Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies develop drugs to treat a medical condition. But contraceptives aren’t necessarily treating an illness—rather, they’re temporarily stopping the reproductive cycle. “What you’re doing with a contraceptive is suspending a function that is very important to people and trying to guarantee that you will give it back,” said Heather Vahdat, a public health researcher. “If your job is purely risk analysis, that’s crazy cakes.” There’s a pervasive sense, she said, that the products are good enough and women should quit their complaining: “That’s where the misogyny starts to eke in a little bit.”

As public funding has remained stagnant and private investment has fallen, philanthropy has filled the gap. The largest donations have come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which made up an estimated 44 percent of all contraceptive research and development in 2022—far more than the NIH and three times more than industry. Last year, the foundation announced plans to spend $2.5 billion on women’s health by 2030. About a fifth of that will go toward research into new hormonal and nonhormonal contraceptives, though they’ve estimated that the latter is likely decades away.

And then there’s the Male Contraceptive Initiative, which, as the name suggests, supports innovation in birth control for men. The products furthest along in the clinical trial process include a hormonal gel that men rub on their shoulders and a polymer that is injected into the vas deferens, with an effect similar to a temporary vasectomy. (MCI funds the latter.) Vahdat, who directs the initiative, said the products could be on the market in about five years, though she’s hesitant to make any promises. “They’ve been saying male birth ­control is around the corner for like 50 years, so there’s a lot of exhaustion,” she said.

What if men across the globe took contraceptives that caused some of them to experience bleeding, pelvic pain, back pain, and headaches? And what if some small but meaningful fraction of those men experienced depression?

Research has found that there’s overwhelming interest across the globe in male contraceptives, not just from disgruntled women, but from men, too. Vahdat recalled men whom she’d talked to over the years: the husband in a Delhi slum who said he wished he could take a pill so his wife wouldn’t have to; the Bay Area high schooler who wished he could take something to protect himself from the ramifications of an unintended pregnancy; the man in the Frankfurt airport who, seeing Vahdat’s shirt reading “Male Birth Control Now,” came up and hugged her. 

It’s not a new thought experiment, but a telling one all the same, to imagine what might happen were the gender roles ­reversed. What if men across the globe took contraceptives that caused some of them to experience bleeding, pelvic pain, back pain, and headaches? And what if some small but meaningful fraction of those men experienced depression?

A version of this thought experiment played out in an actual experiment, between 2008 and 2012, during a male contraceptive clinical trial. More than 300 men across the world received hormonal injections every eight weeks. The injections were overwhelmingly effective at preventing pregnancy, and overall, men were satisfied with them—more than 4 out of 5 participants said they’d use the product if it were available. But the injections caused frequent side effects, like acne, muscle pain, increased libido, and emotional changes. Nearly 5 percent of the participants reported mood swings, and nearly 3 percent reported depression. One man attempted suicide. After that, the scientific review panel cut the study short, determining that the risks outweighed the benefits.

This concern over participant side effects draws a sharp contrast to the early birth control studies for women. “I think there’s a case to be made,” Vahdat said, “that I don’t know that female contraception would pass through today’s drug development.”

I’m still surprised by the lightness I’ve felt since my IUD was removed—still half-­convinced that this version of myself is a yearlong aberration rather than my baseline. My period has come back, and with it, PMS: when progesterone is peaking and, I’ve learned, I’m far more likely to feel down and anxious and to wake up wired in the small hours.

I mean this in a purely matter-of-fact way, not a woo-woo, Fertility Goddess–worshipping one: There’s something ­reassuring about getting my period. I like being able to anticipate and understand my moodiness, rather than constantly searching my psyche for an underlying cause. For now, this system works for me, but given the failure rate of fertility awareness tracking, I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it or ­eventually try something else.

Some of the experts I spoke with—women who’ve spent years studying the effects of contraceptives on the brain—were similarly lost when it came to their own birth control use. Without more clinical research to guide them on which contraceptive might suit them best, they had taken to testing the available options on themselves, like reluctant guinea pigs in their own tiny experiments. One postdoctoral research psychologist said she’s tried seven or eight different contraceptives to see how they would affect her. “Because I’m a ­researcher, I’m interested in trying out that kind of thing,” she said. “But, man. That’s a process to go through, right?”

A public health expert who recently switched to an IUD said she’s thrilled that she doesn’t have the bleeding that she had on other forms of contraception, but she’s been worried about her own mood. “The bar is so low,” she said, that she finds herself thinking, “Well, I’m not bleeding out my eyeballs, so this is a great method.”

One epidemiologist told me that she recently came off contraceptives and was shocked at how much better she felt. Now she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t want to get pregnant, but she also doesn’t want to feel depressed. “I feel so good,” she said, “and I’m terrified of screwing something up.”

Last month, the Supreme Court issued a number of landmark opinions involving transgender rights, campaign finance, executive power, and immigration. Those decisions were issued in the traditional way many of us recognize: pages and pages of arguments and citations, with each justice on the record voting yea or nay. But over the last decade, the court—led by Chief Justice John Roberts—has increasingly relied on a fast-track way of making decisions that was once rarely used. It’s known as the shadow docket.

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Few reporters have done more to shine light on the shadow docket than New York Times investigative journalist Jodi Kantor. Along with her colleague Adam Liptak, Kantor recently published a number of previously undisclosed memos detailing the shadow docket’s unprecedented expansion under the Roberts court.

“So many major decisions about presidential power are being made on the shadow docket,” Kantor says. “And the question for the Supreme Court is why they’re doing business in this way and why in a lot of these decisions they are not writing opinions.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Kantor talks to host Al Letson about what’s driving the Roberts court to bypass the traditional ways of issuing decisions and how that’s affecting public trust in the court. Plus, Kantor looks back at her Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting on sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein that helped set off the #metoo movement and argues that obituaries for the movement almost 10 years later are dead wrong.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

The Department of Homeland Security has purchased two privately-run detention facilities from the for-profit prison company CoreCivic, the company announced Monday, in a move that may serve to shield the facilities from state oversight.

DHS bought the two Southern California prisons, Otay Mesa Detention Center and California City Detention Center, for about $1.5 billion on Monday. But the facilities will still be operated by CoreCivic employees, meaning the company will still generate income, over and above the sale price, from both prisons. 

California law requires that privately held detention centers be subject to oversight by local and state authorities, as well as members of Congress. 

Now that DHS owns the buildings, finding out what’s going on inside of them is likely to become harder.

“It seems like a very clear attempt to evade oversight and accountability,” said Alexa Van Brunt, a civil rights attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center. “If they own the building, then there is a very good argument that a state law cannot trump federal ownership,” Van Brunt explained. That sets up a potential oversight battle between California’s state government and the Trump administration. 

DHS said as much. “ICE can not rely on local state and county partners for detention space in California,” where “politicians continue to push legislation to outlaw or make private prisons financially infeasible,” an agency spokesperson said in response to a request for comment. “Now, with federal ownership of these detention centers which are crucial to ICE’s detention network on the west coast ICE retains the detention capacity needed to arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens,” the spokesperson concluded.

The purchase could also protect the detention centers from legal attacks. As Katya Schwenk of The Lever put it in March, when the plans were first reported, federal ownership may help ICE evade not only state monitoring but “some lawsuits tied to alleged abuse, including labor violations.” 

One such lawsuit concerns Otay Mesa: Owino v. CoreCivic, ongoing since 2017, is a massive class-action suit alleging forced labor practices there. It’s one of many attempts to curb or regulate ICE detention in California: just this week, the state sued to stop the construction of a new detention center outside the town of Gilroy. 

“California created oversight for private detention facilities because we have seen too many abuses, including deaths, behind closed doors,” said state Sen. María Elena Durazo, who co-sponsored legislation to strengthen state oversight. “It is shameful for any government agency to try to sidestep basic health and safety protections for people in its custody. If the federal government believes that purchasing these facilities allows it to avoid oversight, that is unacceptable.”

CoreCivic representative Ryan Gustin did not respond to questions about how federal ownership of the facilities might impact oversight. “Asset transactions of this nature are not uncommon for government,” Gustin said in a written statement. “We have previously completed facility sales to government partners, and operating government-owned facilities is a well-established model within our business.” 

Other firms are indeed exploring the model. George Zoley, CEO of GEO Group—the other major ICE detention contractor—said on an earnings call in May that “as some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership,” as The Appeal’s Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg reported.

If the federal government owns the buildings, it will “provide stronger credibility in the courts,” Zoley added, such that “states can only have very limited involvement in those policies and programs.” 

ICE facilities across the country, both privately and publicly owned, have been slammed with lawsuits over detainee mistreatment, forced labor, health code violations, and deaths in custody. At least 21 people have died in ICE custody this year, according to data collected by lawyer and journalist Andrew Free, as the number of people detained by ICE skyrockets from around 45,000 last year to more than 63,000 as of this week. Denying state officials the right of inspection makes investigating those deaths—as UN human rights chief Volker Türk demanded this week—far harder. 

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) conducted oversight visits at Otay Mesa when it still belonged to CoreCivic—and, like lawmakers in other states, was sometimes denied entry.

“Too many people who pose no threat to public safety and should not be in detention are nevertheless being held in unacceptable conditions with inadequate access to medical care, legal counsel, clean water, nutritious food, and other basic necessities,” Padilla said. “Whether these facilities are operated by a private contractor or owned by the federal government, my expectations remain the same.”

Setareh Ghandehari, of the advocacy group Detention Watch Network, described the purchase as one facet of ICE’s mass expansion of incarceration: converting warehouses into detention centers, buying existing jails, and contracting to build new ones, all of which will “intensify the already cruel and inhumane conditions in ICE detention and streamline the agency’s ability to target and dehumanize immigrant communities to achieve its stated goal of ‘Amazonification’ of mass detention and deportation,” Ghandehari said. 

“There still will be avenues for accountability,” Van Brunt, of MacArthur Justice, said. Even without the right of inspection, ICE-owned detention centers could be sued on constitutional grounds. But this purchase “does make it harder for people to get in those detention facilities at the state level and find out what’s actually going on,” Van Brunt continued. “It makes it much more of a black box, and it makes the people who are held there much more vulnerable to abuses and to poor conditions.”

During his 2015 State of the Union address, then-President Barack Obama announced what he promised would be an ambitious public health project. “Tonight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier,” Obama said with confidence. “We can do this.” He was met with applause. 

That announcement introduced the National Institutes of Health’s “All of US” initiative, designed to organize and provide to researchers the health data of up to a million Americans who opted in to donate their blood, general electronic health records, and more. People’s names are replaced with a code before researchers access their data, and NIH asserts that only a few people have access to the list of codes that correspond with names. As of late June, data from nearly 750,000 participants is available to researchers who are studying such diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, as well as overall health patterns like sleep.

Since then, proponents of the program have highlighted how it has addressed urgent issues. A 2022 study from the University of California, Irvine, study that used the NIH data, for instance, was the first to find that Latino immigrants have higher rates of liver cancer than Latino people who were born in the United States. In a 2024 speech, the head of the All of US initiative said that 87 percent of its participants belong to “underrepresented groups in biomedical research,” such as Latino and Black people.

“Palantir is not a company that is pro–public interest or welfare, or public health.”

What many participants may not know is that the defense technology and data giant Palantir, which has deep links to both the intelligence community and the Trump administration, is one of the firms involved with the project—the same Palantir that the Trump administration has tapped to gather information for ICE and which already worked extensively with the Department of Defense.

Palantir’s involvement with All of US is a matter of public record; it has been announced in press releases. However, experts I spoke with about the firm’s connection to the massive federal health data project have raised ethical concerns about what it means for a company involved in Trump’s deportation machine—a choice that has reportedly troubled even some of Palantir’s own employees—to manage such sensitive information. 

Palantir’s involvement with All of Us was announced in 2023, through its role in the Center for Linkage and Acquisition of Data, which is now hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The company was brought in by an NIH awardee, the University of Colorado Anschutz, a major medical research center. An NIH press release from October 2023 announcing the center boasted that the sub-awardees were “comprised of leading academic, data, security, and software organizations.”

“That it was approved during the Biden administration only underscores how much unfortunate buy-in the tech industry has across both Democrats and Republicans,” said Anita Chan, chair of Indiana University Bloomington’s department of information and library science and author of a 2025 book that looks at the use and misuse of data.

“Palantir’s CLAD role is limited and non-research: no participant interaction, no study administration, no scientific analysis,” an NIH spokesperson said in response to a request for comment, adding that “data aren’t owned by Palantir or available for independent use, and can’t move into external corporate databases,” and that Palantir “doesn’t control the data, use it independently, or decide how it’s shared or analyzed.

“To be clear, there’s no partnership with Palantir,” the spokesperson said, emphasizing that the firm was a subcontractor.

A University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill spokesperson noted in response to a separate request for comment that “Protecting privacy is a top priority for the university while using technology in research,” and that “Every action on the data is captured in tamper-proof audit logs, and because the data stays inside this controlled environment, it cannot be copied out, sold, or used for any purpose” not approved by the research project.

Palantir’s involvement in the sphere of personal health data is fairly expansive. In 2020, near the end of the first Trump administration, NIH awarded Palantir a contract to work with data related to Covid, a database that has also been used for Long Covid research. Palantir also has a contract worth the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars with the UK’s National Health Service to create a health data platform.

“[It] is concerning to have one company that has such a large role in [handling] so many different kinds of data,” Center for Genetics and Society executive director Katie Hasson told me. “I don’t think people hoping to benefit public health by sharing their genetic data were really thinking that that’s the kind of company that would be handling their information.”

Kenny Morris, of the American Friends Service Committee, which is running a campaign to encourage divestment from Palantir, said he was concerned that the company was “involved in health data at all,” citing its relationships with the Israeli military, which has used Palantir technology in Gaza, the US military, which has employed it in attacks on Iran, and the Department of Homeland Security, which relies on Palantir’s “ImmigrationOS” and other software to help carry out the dictates of Palantir stockholder and White House deputy Stephen Miller.

A still from a March 2026 protest in New York City against Palantir. Camara Porter/AdMedia/Zuma

A Palantir spokesperson said that the firm was “not in the business” of storing, collecting, mining, or selling data: “We don’t ‘use’ data from customers for other efforts,” the spokesperson said. “In all cases, our customers control and retain their own data. We are simply the software that helps them make sense of it. And in all deployments of our software, we strictly uphold our enduring commitment to protecting privacy and civil liberties.”

All of Us has been able to attract a diverse set of participants through the outreach of community engagement partners, including the Asian Health Initiative, the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, and the American Association on Health and Disability. (The University of California, San Francisco’s hospital system reached out to me in 2024 to ask if I wanted to participate Palantir’s potential involvement wasn’t mentioned.)

“I don’t know if all of the hospitals or institutions that have been involved in recruiting people into the study at various times would necessarily even know” about Palantir’s involvement, Hasson said.

There are many questions about how visible Palantir’s involvement is, including if any hospitals disclose it to patients and if researchers are acutely aware of Palantir’s involvement, despite the public press releases. Sample consent forms for patients on NIH’s website do not mention Palantir.

“Palantir is not a company that is pro–public interest or welfare, or public health, or sort of traditional obligations of democratic institutions and states,” Chan said. “Its vision of civic accountability is non-existent.”  

A woman who dated Graham Platner said he sexually assaulted her, allegations that followed the stories of several other women who reported abuse at the hands of Maine’s democratic nominee for US Senate. 

The woman, Maine resident Jenny Racicot, provided substantiated details of the alleged incident in a Monday Politico report. 

“These allegations are troubling, serious, and false,” Platner responded in a Monday statement. “Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue.”

While several Democrats have begun dropping their endorsements of Platner as their US Senate nominee following Racicot’s credible rape allegations, many have not, as of Tuesday morning.

The Democrats who have pulled their endorsements since Monday did not do so after several women detailed Platner’s abuse in a June New York Times report. Some even campaigned for Platner. Perhaps they believed the Democratic nominee’s repeated denials. Perhaps they simply didn’t care.

They did not rescind their endorsements when reports revealed Platner’s tattoo with Nazi paramilitary organizations, including Adolf Hitler’s SS police. Perhaps they believed Platner when he dismissed it as just a design he got while drunk with fellow US Marines during his third deployment, or were satisfied when he said he later covered the tattoo. Perhaps they simply didn’t care.

Prominent voices across the “left–of–center” political spectrum backed Platner—from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to the hosts of the popular podcast Pod Save America (Both Sanders and Pod Save America have since called on Platner to drop out of the Senate race). Some called the allegations against Platner politically motivated. Many justified their endorsements with Platner’s so-called progressive values and the idea that the party must oust Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to have a better chance at winning a majority in the November midterms.

“We all say Democrats should fight harder, but what does it mean to fight harder?” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said at a June campaign event for Platner regarding the effort to flip the Senate. “To me, it means you show up when an ally who challenges power is under attack.” The event took place one day after the New York Times report, which detailed Platner physically assaulting one woman he dated, Lyndsey Fifield, and trapping her in a bedroom during an argument and saying he would rape or kill people he considered a threat.

One only has to look at the reaction to Platner’s Monday announcement that he would continue his campaign, taking time “to reflect on the best path forward.” Considering his denial of “non-consensual behavior,” Platner’s statement suggests public relations strategizing rather than accountability. The Senate nominee and others have spread conspiracy theories that political opponents are actively coordinating the allegations.

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But this perspective only considers the good abusive men like Platner can contribute and dismisses the people they abuse. It treats survivors with disdain, devaluing what they add to their communities. It slams shut any pathway to speak out and denies survivors personhood by condemning them for even daring to exercise the right to speak. It forces survivors to feel like they should stay silent due to fear that it could hurt others.

“One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,” Racicot told Politico. “I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person.”

As many have stated, Platner already hurt his chances of becoming a senator with his abuse. The Democratic Party must reckon with how it continued to support an abusive man and prop up a system that allows those in power to skirt responsibility and actively harms survivors.

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

Donald Trump has blamed everything—from “national security” issues, the deaths of birds and whales, and cancer—in his decades-long campaign against windfarms. But as the Trump administration continues to undermine the industry, what worries workers most are their jobs.

Since taking office for a second term, Trump has issued an executive order aiming to halt all wind-energy leases and permits, attempted to issue stop-work orders on wind projects under construction, and paid more than $2.6 billion in settlements to buy out wind energy leases. And hundreds of workers have been affected.

Thomas Kilday, a furnace electrician with IBEW local 99 in Providence, Rhode Island, was in the midst of a four-week shift onboard a vessel off the Atlantic coast working on the Revolution Wind Project in August last year when the Trump administration issued a stop-work order on the project.

“No one really knew what was going on. We didn’t know what it meant for us. We just knew that everything was up in the air,” said Kilday. “You plan your whole life around being gone for 28 days, and to come out here and have it thrown up in the air, worrying what does this mean for me, for my pay for the next four weeks, what’s going to happen? There’s a lot of uncertainty.”

Construction on the project is done on shifts of 28 days on and 28 days off, with workers residing on a vessel on the ocean and taking helicopters to work on the turbines.

“What the Trump administration is doing is just throwing money away for the sake of their ideology.”

A federal court granted an injunction to block the stop-work order in September last year. In December, the Trump administration issued another 90-day stop-work order, citing national security, before a second judge issued an injunction in January.

When the second stop-work order was issued, Kilday was celebrating Christmas with his family and preparing for another four-week shift. “That was really difficult,” he said. “I just spent a bunch of money on Christmas gifts for my family, and it was not what I wanted to be thinking about. Six months out of the year we’re away from home, and for what little time we do have at home, not to be able to just focus all of that time and energy on our families, it’s tough. It’s not a great feeling to be worried about your job when you’re supposed to be home.”

“We’re proud of the work that we do out here, and we want to be able to continue to do it. We think it’s important work,” added Kilday. “When I’m at home, and I drive down my street, I look up at those power lines. I helped create the power that’s running through those power lines, and I’m proud of that.”

Revolution Wind announced in March that it began delivering power to New England, citing the work of more than 1,000 local union workers, and is expected to power more than 350,000 homes and businesses. The project’s construction is over 90 percent complete.

In June, the Trump administration abandoned an effort to try to halt all wind projects and leases across the US, giving up a challenge in court to a judge tossing Trump’s executive order to freeze all permitting and leasing for wind projects.

Instead, the Trump administration has opted to buy out wind project leases.

Trump’s Department of Interior has completed four deals so far to cancel wind project leases, paying energy corporations a sum of more than $2.6 billion, including paying $765 million to Invenergy to abandon four wind projects in California, New York, and Maine and nearly $900 million to Bluepoint Wind and Garden State Wind to cancel offshore wind leases in New York and California.

“I think it’s a foolish policy that the Trump administration is engaging in trying to buy out these leases,” Pat Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, told the Guardian. “These projects are not only helping to reduce our carbon emissions, they’re providing good-paying union jobs for thousands.”

Crowley said that workers would have had long-term job stability from working on these projects. He noted the Trump administration had lost in court in its attempts to issue stop-work orders on five wind projects in the Rhode Island area.

“It’s a personal vendetta… Good union jobs—we shouldn’t be trying to take those off the table. That just doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

“We’re five for five taking on the Trump administration,” he said. “What the Trump administration is doing is just throwing money away for the sake of their ideology.”

Will Gonzalez, a construction laborer with the Laborers’ local 385 in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, worked on the Vinyard Wind 1 project off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, a project the Trump administration attempted to halt in January. The project is now completed and fully operational.

He criticized the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind turbine projects, claiming the opposition from Trump stems from his experiences trying to stop a wind turbine project near his golf course in Scotland, losing an appeal in December 2015. “It’s a personal vendetta,” said Gonzalez. “Good union jobs—we shouldn’t be trying to take those off the table. That just doesn’t make any kind of sense. Families obviously need good jobs…Why take those jobs away?”

Gonzalez said he and his co-workers were leaving training and certifications unused because of the halting of wind power projects. “All of us that worked on that Vinyard Wind 1, obviously, we would have loved to segue right into another project,” he said. “We’re fully trained, ready to go, willing and able, so it directly affected us. But you move on. You [have] got to move on. You can’t sit and dwell on that, because that’s not going to pay the bills.”

The White House directed comment to the Department of Interior.

A spokesperson for the department denied the cancellation and stop-work orders of projects had had any impact on jobs, even on projects under construction when halted. The spokesperson did not respond to a question asking for clarification and did not comment on Trump’s prior animus toward wind turbine projects involving his golf courses.

“No jobs were eliminated because none of these leases were operational or supporting employment,” the spokesperson said. Rather than waiting years for the projects to materialize, they added, the Trump administration is prioritizing investments in existing infrastructure and functioning supply chains that can create jobs now and deliver economic benefits faster. “This approach puts more people to work more quickly, using proven, affordable, and reliable energy rather than relying on projects tied to leases that were not producing jobs in the first place.”