Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 New in The Lever: Which corporate Democrat is cosplaying as progressive?

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• New data from the Low-Wage 100.

• Which state is keeping Big Tech’s secrets?

• CBS’ clear-cut Islamophobia.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

👀 Corporations who’ve aligned themselves with the Trump administration are looking to curry favor with Democrats, suspecting they could be investigated should the House flip in November.

🤖 President Donald Trump spoke out in support of data centers, saying that U.S. communities should “let Data Reign” — or risk ending up “backwards and poor.”

🚨 ICE targeted people with no criminal records as part of a surge in new arrests, according to government data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Race to the bottom. CEOs at the 100 lowest-paying corporations on the S&P 500 saw their average compensation increase 41 percent between 2019 and 2025, while their workers’ median pay rose only 20 percent. For reference, the inflation rate for this period was 26 percent. A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies finds that the average worker at companies on the “Low-Wage 100” made $36,571 in 2025 — less than one percent of CEOs’ $17.5 million pay average. The average CEO-median worker pay ratio at these firms was 614-to-1 in 2025, compared to 574-to-1 in 2019. At least 36 billionaires owe their massive wealth to companies on the Low-Wage 100 — including Walmart, DoorDash, Tyson Foods, Estee Lauder, and Carvana.

💸 During this time, the Low-Wage 100 approved more than $718 billion in stock repurchases — a common ploy to enrich top shareholders, including CEOs, who often receive a big portion of their compensation in stock awards.

☝️ A 2024 survey of likely voters indicated 80 percent at least somewhat supported a policy that would raise taxes on companies that have a CEO-median worker pay ratio of more than 50-to-1.

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Corporate media check. Trump-allied CBS News is tying a high-profile Muslim Senate candidate to 9/11 and demanding he answer for past comments. In what appears to be a case of Islamophobia, CBS News tweeted an article detailing Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s (D) past remarks on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with the caption, “As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack.” In the accompanying article, CBS scrutinizes a now-deleted post from El-Sayed made on September 11, 2021, where he said this: “Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”

🤔 CBS also mentioned unrelated statements made by El-Sayed during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which he compared virus death tolls to the September 11 attacks while arguing for a comprehensive federal response plan.

💬 “Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks,” a spokesperson for his campaign told CBS recently. “Mike Rogers’’attempts to misrepresent Abdul’s beliefs are bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders.”

🍊 Reminder: CBS was purchased by Trump administration allies Larry and David Ellison and is now helmed by Bari Weiss, a right-leaning political commentator.

Secrets kept. Data center backlash has hit Michigan’s pivotal U.S. Senate race, pushing Republican candidate former Rep. Mike Rogers to flip and offer a late-stage endorsement of a statewide construction pause on the controversial projects. However, new reporting in The Detroit News is shining light on how lawmakers in the state representing both parties have deferred to Big Tech when it comes to data center projects: In 2024, just months before Michigan Democrats lost power of the state House, they expanded special data center tax breaks, creating a “tax-free runway” for the state’s largest data center projects until 2050. The law also contained a provision blocking the Michigan Economic Development Corporation from disclosing information about which companies are using these tax exemptions — leaving the public completely in the dark.

🤔 A pro-data center Michigan Democrat who helped pass the 2024 legislation told The Detroit News that he was “unaware” of the non-disclosure provision at the time of the law’s passing. “At this point, I think what we need to do is make sure this whole process is as transparent for people as possible,” said state Rep. Joey Andrews.

💰 Even before the 2024 law was passed, companies in Michigan made tax-free purchases on $212 million worth of data center equipment in the previous four years. Companies that have taken advantage of the sales tax break include those that previously lobbied Michigan state lawmakers on data centers and other issues, like Google.

👺 Across the country, Big Tech has used non-disclosure agreements, shell companies, and other tools to keep details of their data center plans hidden from the public.

DAY IN DATA

Workers’ share of the pie keeps getting smaller. (Financial Times)

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

Truth to power. Senate Democrats will reportedly soon force a vote on a resolution that would order the Trump administration to hand over information about Israel’s human rights abuses in the occupied West Bank. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and 10 other Democrats introduced the legislation, which centers on at least nine U.S. citizens killed in the West Bank since 2022. That includes the high-profile assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, a prominent Palestinian-American journalist who was shot by an Israeli soldier in 2022, even though she was wearing a visible press vest. The Israel Defense Forces apologized for her death but did not cooperate with the U.S. government’s investigation.

🚨 “We’ve seen ongoing human rights violations on the West Bank, but we’re going from bad to abysmal,” Van Hollen told The New York Times. In 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel is breaking the law by allowing settlement activity in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Congress: Stop ICE’s Online Surveillance Dragnet. ICE is using taxpayer dollars to monitor, identify, and intimidate people for criticizing immigration enforcement online.

Add your name to a petition demanding Congress investigate ICE’s online surveillance dragnet before more people are targeted for speaking out.

Read & Sign The Letter

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🐜 Bug life. A National Geographic photographer spent three years following giant anteaters in Brazil to document the threats they face from urbanization.

🛸 I want to believe. Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than it’s telling the public, the highest percentage on record, according to Gallup.

🎮 Playing hooky. Corporate productivity is set to take a hit this November, as gaming enthusiasts across the country plan to use their vacation days to stay home and play Grand Theft Auto VI, the popular franchise’s first new release in 13 years.

Originally posted by LeverNews.com

🔥 New on Lever Time: The quiet billionaire building a new Democratic machine.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• The beef between ranchers and the White House.

• Uncharacteristic caution from Big Tech.

• A rhinestone mandate from heaven hits Texas.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

🌎 The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the visas of up to 200,000 people seeking asylum in the U.S., the largest mass revocation in history.

🛑 Ghislaine Maxwell’s petition to reverse her conviction and leave prison was denied by a federal judge.

🏁 Meta settled a lawsuit — filed by 47 states, U.S. territories, and Washington, D.C. — alleging that Facebook and Instagram harm children, agreeing to pay at least $12 billion and impose new limits on underage users.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Beefing. Members of the GOP are breaking with the White House after President Donald Trump waved additional tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef. American ranchers feel the move is a “betrayal,” with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association accusing Trump of “undercutting American farmers and ranchers with inferior product” — even as industry experts hypothesize the imports won’t save Americans much money at the grocery store. “We might see a quarter to 35 cents [less]” in consumer savings per pound, one livestock economist told NPR. Republican lawmakers, especially in states with large agricultural economies, are offering rare rebukes of Trump over the issue: “This hurts!” tweeted Sen. Mike Rounds (R) of South Dakota.

🐄 Concerningly, during an interview with Glenn Beck this week, Trump and the right-wing media personality discussed retracting regulations on U.S. beef ranchers to make it easier to compete with foreign imports. “You’re saying, with less regulation, you think that the ranchers and farmers would do a very good job of processing the beef?” Trump asked while Beck decried “insane” inspection requirements. “This is a very big thing you just told me, though, because you just gave me a very good idea,” Trump added. “OK, good, good, very good. I love the call. I love this call.”

💢 The import controversy comes as Tyson Foods, one of the largest U.S.-based meat processors, is laying off more than 3,000 workers and shutting down two of its facilities in Utah and Illinois — even as skyrocketing prices have already doubled the company’s profits this year.

🥩 Meanwhile, Brazilian giant JBS — the largest meatpacker in the world, responsible for 25 percent of beef sales in the U.S. — is expanding its empire by continuing its practice of buying up American meat processors. The company is seeking to purchase the rest of Colorado-based meatpacker Pilgrim’s Pride after previously acquiring 82 percent of the company.

📢 Share this newsletter on Bluesky, Reddit, LinkedIn, X, Substack, Mastodon, and Facebook.

Prepare the floodgates. This week, Bill Gates issued a stark warning about rapidly evolving artificial intelligence technologies, arguing that political leaders and business executives are wholly unprepared for the coming economic disruption, cyberattacks, surveillance, bioterrorism, and social upheaval. “The transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” Gates wrote in a new blog post. In a separate interview with Semafor, Gates said he’s in a “state of shock” over the “insane” lack of foresight from government leaders and tech executives. “The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead,” he wrote. On the economy, Gates said, “Many jobs will disappear forever.” He predicted the backlash against job losses will “make the data center thing look like nothing.”

📉 This comes as new studies indicate AI is affecting women and young people’s ability to find work. A Stanford University study found that entry-level workers seeking the most “AI-exposed” jobs have far lower employment levels than their peers. And new research from LinkedIn found women are having a harder time landing new AI jobs than men, further exacerbating the gender gap in the tech sector.

🤖 The Microsoft founder urged lawmakers to develop a framework for integrating AI into society, arguing that it shouldn’t be left to the AI companies to regulate themselves. He proposed new taxes on AI tokens and robots so companies are not incentivized to use AI to avoid payroll taxes on their human workers. “A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net,” he wrote.

🚨 Gates said other tech leaders share his urgency, including Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman and Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis. Those three were among the hundreds of signatories on a 2023 statement arguing that addressing the risk of extinction from AI should be a “global priority.”

🤷 Nvidia, a key AI tech provider, reported record earnings and forecasted a 70 percent growth in revenue next fiscal year, potentially up to $1 trillion annually. The company says demand for its computer chips driving the AI boom is higher than ever.

DAY IN DATA

Is Trump selling out the strategic oil reserve to the highest bidder? (Source: Bipartisan Policy Center)

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

Dolly looking down. A federal judge struck down a 2023 Texas law restricting drag shows, dealing a blow to state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), who is running for Senate. U.S. District Judge David Hittner, an 87-year-old Reagan appointee, declared Senate Bill 12 to be “an unconstitutional restriction on the First Amendment.” Hittner determined the law was unnecessarily broad and could criminalize “other common public occurrences,” including swimming, cheerleading, dance contests, karaoke, musicals, art exhibitions and “dressing in potentially provocative costumes at comic book conventions.”

♥️ The judge had simple advice for anyone who might be offended by drag shows: “Just don’t go,” he wrote.

💅 In the ruling, Hittner referenced Dolly Parton, the legendary performer and queer icon who died at the age of 80 this week. The judge argued that Parton’s status as a “voluptuous sex symbol” could’ve subjected her to civil and criminal penalties under the law. Drag performer Brigitte Bandit, a Parton impersonator, was one of the plaintiffs challenging the Texas law. Parton showed her support for Bandit by giving her a signed rhinestone guitar in 2023.

🕺The judge also noted that some people were once offended by “Elvis’s signature hip gyrations” and “shamed Miley Cyrus for ‘twerking’ on stage during a live performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards.”

TAKE ACTION

Take Action: End Corporations’ Predatory Surveillance Pricing. We cannot allow companies across the economy to utilize AI-driven predatory practices that compromise our privacy.

SIGN NOW: Tell your representatives to create legislation putting an end to these predatory pricing practices.

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DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

😸 Cat at work. A construction crew in Ohio rescued a tiny kitten from inside a machine, and now it’s part of the crew.

🔮 A rock as big as a garage. Step inside the Crystal Cave off Lake Erie, the world’s largest geode.

🐧 Aww. Puffins are thriving in Maine and drawing big crowds of tourists eager to spot the elusive birds.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🗳️ This is Midterm Madness, the only newsletter you need to stay up to date on election news. Key race updates, money trails, numbers that cut through the spin, and campaign moments that say more than official talking points ever will — from The Lever team to your inbox, every Wednesday.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• The YouTuber unraveling Michigan’s Senate race.

• House leadership’s “screw-you” to Democratic voters.

• The candidate who can’t stop putting her foot in her mouth.

👍 This pop-up newsletter is one of many exclusive benefits we provide to our paid subscribers. Thank you for your support!

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STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are key stories that crossed our desks this week.

🎶 Dolly Parton’s sudden passing at 80 briefly united the political world, provoking outpourings of grief and celebrations of her life from President Donald Trump, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the British royal family.

😴 Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and conspiracy theorist who lost Minnesota’s Republican primary for governor, is withholding the $825,000 he agreed to pay for a hand recount.

📍 The grassroots action group Swing Left is expanding its midterms map into races Democrats previously didn’t think were winnable. They now have 29 House races categorized as “must-flip” districts.

STATE OF THE RACE

Race to the middle. Michigan candidate for U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, and other Democrats have released statements distancing themselves from popular leftist streamer Hasan Piker and disavowing recent comments he made concerning Jewish Americans’ support for Israel. The Searchlight Institute — a new billionaire-backed think tank aiming to push Democrats to the right — also weighed in, taking the opportunity to criticize El-Sayed’s denouncement of antisemitism as “half-hearted.” Until now, Searchlight had stayed relatively quiet in the Michigan race after…

Click here to access the full article.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: This Senate candidate doesn’t care if AT&T spies on you.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• Are taxpayers getting shortchanged by Moderna’s cancer vaccine?

• The Justice Department’s hot take machine.

• Big Oil is asking the Supreme Court for a shield.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are some of the top stories in the country.

🏦 A global bond sell-off has ignited fears of a 2007-style financial meltdown, while the national debt hit $40 trillion for the first time in history.

🚨 A study published this month finds that undocumented migration does not contribute to crime rates.

📺 ABC is suing the Federal Communications Commission under the First Amendment, accusing the Trump administration of a “retaliatory campaign.”

TODAY’S TOPLINES

The cure costs. Moderna’s stock value more than doubled yesterday after the pharmaceutical giant announced breakthrough late-stage clinical trials for its mRNA cancer vaccine. Moderna has partnered with fellow drug manufacturer Merck to develop a new cancer immunotherapy regimen that combines a novel drug, intismeran, with Merck’s existing cancer immunotherapy drug, Keytruda. In trials, melanoma patients who received this experimental treatment “lived longer without their cancer returning or metastasizing” than those who took Keytruda alone.

🤑 The treatment is likely to be a cash cow for Moderna and Merck; state-of-the-art cancer therapies run very expensive. As of May of this year, the list price of a six-week course of Keytruda, approved for sale in 2014, was $24,544. Keytruda is Merck’s top product and the bestselling pharmaceutical drug in the world, racking up more than $31 billion in sales in 2025.

💊 The government could use “march-in” rights to make lifesaving drugs, including Keytruda, more affordable. This would allow regulators to license generic drug companies to produce lower-priced versions of medicines originally developed at taxpayers’ expense — but recent Democratic administrations have ignored calls to use these rights.

💉 In 2023, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) urged the federal patent office to closely scrutinize Merck’s patent requests for Keytruda, arguing that abuse of the system has allowed Merck to maintain a monopoly and keep generic versions from entering the market.

💡

The science behind Keytruda has not always panned out. Regulators blocked the drug from being sold for a kind of gastric cancer after four years on the market when it failed a post-market study, one of hundreds of instances The Lever found of drugs being approved before they’re proven to be effective.

Memo mania. Justice Department lawyers released a handful of internal guidance memos this month giving the Trump administration sweeping new powers to broaden the president’s immigration crackdown, eliminate diversity programs, and shield government officials from investigations if Democrats win a majority in the House. The memos aren’t legally binding, and these new interpretations of the law are certain to be challenged in court. Here’s a rundown:

🪖 A nearly 150-year-old law called the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from acting as civilian law enforcement. But the Justice Department says U.S. military personnel have the power to detain migrants or citizens on or near new militarized outposts along the southern border. Last year, the Trump administration set up six National Defense Areas (NDAs) across hundreds of miles from Texas to California. The new memo says military personnel are authorized to detain anyone who sets foot on or near the areas, “even though substantial portions of the NDAs may be presently unoccupied or have no standing structures on them,” ostensibly for national security purposes.

🤝 The Justice Department also argued that the president can assert executive privilege over communications with “private advisers” outside of government, potentially blocking avenues of investigation into Trump’s potential self-dealing. Historically, the president could assert executive privilege only over communications with other government officials. “Without a promise of confidentiality, the President’s ability to ‘decide and act quickly’ on matters of unrivaled importance would be seriously hindered,” the memo states. This could affect lawmakers’ ability to subpoena the president’s communications as part of their oversight duties.

🔬 The Justice Department is furthermore terminating three of the National Science Foundation’s science, technology, engineering, and math programs, arguing it’s discriminatory to provide opportunities to underrepresented groups in those fields. The memo says the government can only take “race-based action” to correct a specific instance of discrimination, not to address “societal disparities.”

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DAY IN DATA

More Americans between 55 and 64 years of age are still working. (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)

NEWS DIVE

Polluting the courtroom. Dark-money conservative groups and Big Oil interests have quietly mobilized behind a landmark Supreme Court case that could restrict when and how states and municipalities can seek climate damages from fossil fuel companies. At the center of the case is an oil and gas company linked to a major Trump donor and personal ally of Justice Samuel Alito.

Suncor Energy Inc. v. Board of County Commissioners of Boulder County will decide whether states and local municipalities can sue oil and gas companies that knew fossil fuels contributed to worsening natural disasters and hid it from the public. Suncor is partially owned by Elliott Investment Management — a private equity firm led by Trump donor Paul Singer, who has vacationed with Alito — and has attracted the attention of the dark money network associated with Leo Leonard, the billionaire-backed architect of the far-right Supreme Court.

In 2018, Colorado’s Boulder County sued oil and gas companies Suncor and ExxonMobil, alleging that the companies “altered the climate in Colorado” and “concealed and misrepresented to the public what they knew about climate change and the dangers of continued and increasing fossil fuel use.”

Now that the matter is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court on Oct. 5, justices have been deluged with pro-industry amicus briefs from organizations tied to the “fossil fuel industry… and major climate-denial foundations and dark-money networks that have financed opposition to climate science and regulation for decades,” found a new investigation by advocacy group Consumer Watchdog. Such amicus briefs, which outside groups use to weigh in on matters before the court, are part of a broader, clandestine movement to sway Supreme Court justices, said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog.

“Follow the money, and you understand it’s a fossil-fuel-funded and interconnected echo chamber,” Court said in an email. “These groups are financed by the same fossil fuel companies, billionaire investors, and climate denial networks that spent decades disputing the industry’s role in climate change. Now they are asking the Supreme Court to make it harder to hold those companies accountable for deceiving the public.”

Consumer Watchdog found that at least 16 of the groups that filed amicus briefs supporting the oil and gas companies are funded by the Koch Network, a petrochemical-fueled conservative coalition, and nine of the groups received funding from Leo’s dark money machine. Ten of the groups were partially bankrolled by the Sarah Scaife Foundation, a conservative nonprofit that helped fund the Heritage Foundation as it wrote the Project 2025 blueprint to remake the federal government under the second Trump administration.

According a brief from the Atlantic Legal Foundation, a legal group that has received funding from both the Koch Network and Leo-connected groups, justices should reject Boulder County’s lawsuit because “federal law precludes state-law climate-change tort suits” and if the justices rule in the oil companies’ favor, it could “put an end to the growing wave of tort litigation against the fossil fuel energy industry.”

Singer is the CEO of Elliott Investment Management, which holds over $2 billion in Suncor stock. Singer has been involved in Leo’s dark money operations and has paid for joint vacations with Alito. Elliott has used Supreme Court rulings favorable to his interests to pressure federal regulators to abandon financial rules designed to combat fraud, The Lever revealed in 2023.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Your Senators: Reject Trump’s Voter Suppression Bill. President Trump is pressuring Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act after reviving false claims about the 2020 election in a primetime address.

The bill would impose new voting restrictions, including requiring proof of citizenship to register and limiting mail-in voting.

Tell your senators: Reject the SAVE America Act and protect every eligible American’s right to vote.

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DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🦦 Float on. An otter was spotted in the Bronx River for the first time in 100 years, a sign the local ecosystem is bouncing back.

👑 Homecoming. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are relocating to Great Britain after six years in the United States. Maybe they want single-payer healthcare back.

🐶 Little legs, big dreams. These Corgis are really fast.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🗳️ This is Midterm Madness, the only newsletter you need to stay up to date on election news. Key race updates, money trails, numbers that cut through the spin, and campaign moments that say more than official talking points ever will — from The Lever team to your inbox, every Wednesday.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• Sunshine State socialism.

• AIPAC’s shot at redemption.

• Maine’s money showers.

👍 This pop-up newsletter is one of many exclusive benefits we provide to our paid subscribers. Thank you for your support!

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STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are key election stories that crossed our desks this week.

📈 Political ad spending is expected to reach a record high this midterm cycle. But returns are varied: In three high-spend Democratic primaries, the winner was “dramatically outspent” on TV and radio ads.

👁️ The Trump administration will deploy more than 1,000 “election monitors” in swing states this election season.

🗑️ Google rolled out a change to its email platform, making it easier for campaigns to bypass your spam filter.

STATE OF THE RACE

Florida, man. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) clinched one of its most significant victories yet yesterday, when Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon overcame a massive fundraising deficit to win the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. She campaigned on popular democratic socialist priorities such as Medicare for All, a data center construction moratorium, and ending unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel. Market expectations, plus the fundraising disparities, made Nixon’s primary opponent — retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a key impeachment witness in 2019 — look like a shoo-in. Vindman refused to debate Nixon, and as of July, he had outraised her by roughly 16-to-one. The New York Times credited Nixon’s come-from-behind win to…

Click here to continue reading.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: This Senate candidate has a data center problem.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• The plutocracy running the White House.

• Who’s purchasing Spirit Airlines’ data?

• Big relief at Big Bend.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

🤖 Big Tech has committed $3 trillion in expected capital expenditures for artificial intelligence projects that aren’t on their balance sheets.

😷 The National Institutes of Health is holding up hundreds of grants, as layers of political review stall the disbursement of money used for medical research.

📉 Retail sales fell unexpectedly, while the 30-year Treasury yield hit its highest mark in 19 years.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

The plutocracy laid bare. The average U.S. salary is $64,505, but a new report from Public Citizen shows that 57 individuals working for the Trump administration are “ultra-millionaires,” with more than 30 having a net worth of $100 million or more — including eight billionaires. For reference, the Biden administration hired just five individuals who were worth $100 million or more, while the Obama administration hired three. In total, eight people just in President Donald Trump’s cabinet are worth at least $100 million, while all 24 individuals in the cabinet (including Trump himself) have a combined net worth as high as $7.1 billion. Trump is the wealthiest man in his own administration, thanks to his family’s cryptocurrency firm and other business ventures.

🤑 Of the 57 ultra-millionaires working for Trump, 30 donated more than $65 million to his affiliated PACs between 2022 and 2025, with most donations occurring in 2024.

🌍 Seventeen of these 57 people are U.S. ambassadors; the rest have senior positions within the federal government.

📈 Recent polling shows that 92 percent of voters say corruption is a “big problem” in the U.S., while an overwhelming majority support measures that would stop government officials from using their positions for personal gain.

📢 Share this newsletter on Bluesky, Reddit, LinkedIn, X, Mastodon, Substack, and Facebook.

California dreamin’. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is looking to stage a comeback in today’s runoff special election in California to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) — AIPAC’s first major electoral test since Abdul El-Sayed won in Michigan’s primary on Aug. 4. In recent weeks, super PACs, including ones affiliated with AIPAC, have poured more than $5 million into the race to defeat state Sen. Aisha Wahab (D), who is the first Muslim woman elected to California’s state legislature and has vocally opposed unconditional military aid to Israel. All in all, AIPAC-affiliated PACs account for 75 percent of the outside spending in the race. Wahab’s opponent, Melissa Hernandez, a Democratic Bay Area public transit official, has maintained that Israel has a right to defend itself while criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu’s war.

🚨 The special election race comes after Swalwell resigned due to sexual misconduct allegations.

✅ Wahab was endorsed by the California Democratic Party, while Hernandez has the support of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ campaign arm.

Data hog. Google is reportedly trying to purchase a treasure trove of data from the now-defunct Spirit Airlines to train its artificial intelligence, according to Bloomberg, paying $10 million for Spirit’s old company records at a bankruptcy auction. The data haul includes 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 30 million lines of software code, employee records, flight pricing information, and other business operational data; it does not include passenger profiles or data from Spirit’s loyalty program. Information will be “rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt,” Google said in a statement.

💰 As public internet archives are exhausted, Big Tech is increasingly purchasing old chat messages and emails from failed businesses as “premium training data” for AI.

📚 The push to find fresh data is getting intense. A recent 404 investigation tracked a shipment of rare books only to find that Amazon is buying books en masse to feed them into AI before destroying them.

DAY IN DATA

Six companies reaped more than $80 billion in federal tax breaks in 2025. (Source: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy)

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

Nature is healing. The Trump administration is pausing its controversial border construction activity in Big Bend National Park amid bipartisan blowback. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Rodney Scott landed in Texas on Monday to conduct a “personal, on-the-ground evaluation” of the project, as Republicans, environmental advocates, private landowners, and local law enforcement express concerns the construction will destroy the park’s natural beauty and limit access for the hundreds of thousands who visit every year. The CBP insists it’s not building a wall at Big Bend National Park, which borders Mexico, but “building one new access road, improving existing roads, installing detection technology, and placing vehicle barriers in limited, strategic locations.”

🧱 However, government contractors have been bulldozing a section of the park, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has been under fire for waiving environmental and historical protections limiting construction in the area. One group sued the Trump administration, arguing it lacks the authority to waive such regulations. A second group representing Indigenous people sued on religious grounds.

☑️ Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is among those pushing the administration to consider the concerns of those who oppose the project before moving forward, writing in a letter to Mullin that the “level of coordination and communication” between the government and stakeholders has “not been as fulsome” as it should be.

🗳️ Democrat James Talarico, who is locked in a tight Senate race against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, issued a blistering statement calling the construction “a monument to corruption” that “no Texan asked for.” Paxton has not taken a position on the matter.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Congress: Stop ICE’s Online Surveillance Dragnet. ICE is using taxpayer dollars to monitor, identify, and intimidate people for criticizing immigration enforcement online.

Add your name to a petition demanding Congress investigate ICE’s online surveillance dragnet before more people are targeted for speaking out.

Read & Sign The Letter

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🥒 The champagne of pickles. Searching for the perfect pickle? Head to The Spreewald, a UNESCO biosphere outside of Berlin where the art of pickling cucumbers has been perfected over the centuries.

🌠 I’m sure it’s fine. Astronomers discovered a new kind of astrophysical object that’s about as big as our solar system. They’re calling it a “black hole star.”

📽️ Stay until the end. It’s not just you — the end credits of films have gotten way longer.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: New York just gave Elon Musk the keys to your money.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• Can a DSA candidate pull off another shocker?

• Jeffries double-crosses the base (again).

• How a “millionaire’s tax” in Washington will feed students.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

⚖️ Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty to federal stalking charges and admitted to killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione still faces state murder charges.

📸 Flock Safety says it will strengthen privacy protections — but civil liberties groups are dubious.

🤖 The Congressional office charged with drafting legislation is being inundated with AI slop from the congressional offices and outside groups that write the nation’s laws.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

💰 Liberation Day (for Big Business). The largest companies in the world are raking in billions in refunds after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s tariffs, but there is little recourse for consumers who paid higher prices because of the levies. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that more than 40 S&P 500 companies have received nearly $10 billion in tariff refunds in the past quarter, giving a massive boost to their bottom lines. Apple is among the biggest winners, reporting a $2.2 billion refund that accounted for about 5 percent of its per-share earnings in the most recent quarter. Nike has received almost $1 billion in refunds, while FedEx, Amazon, and General Motors reported $500 million or more. In a court filing this month, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it had processed about 60 percent of the more than 252,000 refund applications and plans to pay out about $129 billion to the companies seeking reimbursement.

🤷 Consumers who paid higher prices under Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs have largely been left out in the cold, as companies have no obligation to return the funds to customers. Nintendo said it won’t refund customers because they agreed to the higher prices at the time of purchase. Amazon said it had “identified a limited set of circumstances where we can trace that we pass specific import charges on to customers” and would “proactively contact affected customers and automatically issue refunds to them.”

🚢 A handful of shipping companies said they could tie the tariff refunds directly to customer purchases. UPS, FedEx, and DHL set up refund portals where customers can request their money back as the companies receive refunds from the government.

👉 Earlier this month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote letters to Target, Apple, Amazon, Nike, Motorola, Walmart, and Energizer, urging them to pass along their refunds directly to consumers. “American consumers — who are paying almost the full cost of these tariffs — have received nothing,” Warren wrote.

📢 Share this newsletter on Bluesky, Reddit, LinkedIn, X, Mastodon, and Facebook.

Sunshine State Showdown. A Florida Democrat known for his staunch support of the U.S.-Israeli allyship is facing an anti-Zionist challenge in Trump’s backyard. Rep. Jared Moskowitz and democratic socialist Oliver Larkin will square off in the Sunshine State’s Tuesday primaries — another swing state test of the ascendant progressive left. Despite Moskowitz outraising Larkin by about $2 million, the two candidates are in a dead heat, with recent polling showing a statistical tie. Moskowitz has also received close to $1 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and another $300,000 from a pro-artificial intelligence super PAC.

💬 “As our cost of living is growing exponentially higher, it is a bitter pill for people to swallow to see that there’s never a question of sending hundreds of millions of dollars for another foreign war,” Larkin has said. “People are no longer separating domestic and foreign policy.”

💡

Listen: Lever Editor-in-Chief David Sirota spoke with Larkin on Lever Time about antisemitism allegations, the Democratic Party’s corporate money problem, and why he thinks Democrats keep losing in Florida.

Zohran’s Guy Goes Corporate. As Lever Daily readers know, last week Yale University found that the Medicare for All Act, which is currently floundering in Congress, would save 114,000 lives and $1 trillion annually if passed. Just days later, CBS News published a poll finding that a whopping 90 percent of Democrats want their elected officials to focus on passing Medicare for All. That didn’t stop House Minority Speaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) from declaring his opposition to it on cable news this weekend. “It’s not legislation that I currently am cosponsoring or that I support,” Jeffries said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

😡 “This whole episode is first and foremost a reminder of the kind of base-betraying behavior a blue-district Democrat like Jeffries feels free to engage in when he hasn’t been facing the threat of a primary in his own party,” Sirota wrote.

🤝 Jeffries, who represents reliably blue neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, did not face a primary challenge, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed him as a potential Speaker of the House. The mayor also spoke out against his ally, City Councilmember Chi Ossé, at a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter meeting as Ossé publicly toyed with challenging Jeffries in a primary. Both Mamdani and Ossé are DSA members.

🤷 “The choice before us is not whether to vote for Chi or Hakeem at the ballot box,” Mamdani said at the meeting, according to The New York Times. “The choice is how to spend the next year. Do we want to spend it defending caricatures of our movement, or do we want to spend it fulfilling the agenda at the heart of that very same movement?”

💡

Read: Sirota wrote about how Hakeem Jeffries’ latest betrayal explains why Democratic voters are so enraged right now.

DAY IN DATA

The Democratic Socialists of America has more than 120,000 members as of July, more than double what it had before Mamdani launched his campaign for mayor. (Source: City & State New York)

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

Free food. All students attending Seattle Public Schools in the fall will receive free breakfast and lunch. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist, and the city council overcame their differences and agreed to use idle money from an affordable housing project to fund the $3.6 million school food program.

🫰 Beginning in 2028, the free public school meals will be funded by the state’s tax on high-earners, assuming it withstands court challenges. Gov. Bob Ferguson (D) signed the so-called “millionaires’ tax” into law in March, imposing a 9.9 percent tax on annual income over $1 million. The tax, which is expected to hit about 20,000 households, will raise more than $3 billion annually for the state.

📈 A recent study from the Journal of the American Medical Association found universal free school meals could lead to better attendance, lower obesity, and lower suspension rates.

TAKE ACTION

Take Action: End Corporations’ Predatory Surveillance Pricing. We cannot allow companies across the economy to utilize AI-driven predatory practices that compromise our privacy.
SIGN NOW: Tell your representatives to create legislation putting an end to these predatory pricing practices.

Sign Now.

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

♟️ Checkmate. Eleven-year-old prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan is the youngest ever British women’s chess champion.

🍎 Fruit function. About 1,000 people showed up in response to an open invitation from a man to eat an apple with him at Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C.

🚘 Hot wheels. Normal cars from the 1990s and 2000s, including Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas, have become collectors’ items for enthusiasts.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: Font sizes might screw over your next vacation.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• How Democrats’ “center” is hunting down socialists.

• The human costs of for-profit healthcare.

• A pass for money laundering.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

🏧 A news outlet and a First Amendment advocacy group are suing President Donald Trump’s media company for selling early access to Trump’s social media posts.

🧤 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers plan to spend up to $20 million on gloves that deliver electric shocks.

🌏 The State Department has revoked more than 175,000 visas in Trump’s second term and established a new task force to end “birth tourism.”

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Red scaremonger. Days after announcing a new $15 million effort to defeat democratic socialism, Third Way, the corporate-backed “centrist” think tank pushing Democrats to the right, is hiring a new Director for “Anti-Extremism.” That person will be responsible for overseeing a takedown of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) by “assembling and updating a database of the DSA’s most extreme ideas and statements,” including a “repository of voting records, affiliations, and issue positions.” The role also involves “recruiting and arming a group of young, diverse spokespeople to fight the DSA from a center-left perspective.”

🎙️ Ultimately, the director will develop a media strategy to “make the case against these extreme forces in American politics” with “a drumbeat of our message in op-eds, television appearances, podcasts, and traditional and digital media engagement.”

👍 The salary range for the position is $140,000 to $150,000, while benefits listed in the job description and on Third Way’s career website include medical, dental, and vision insurance, sick and vacation days, paid parental leave, and long-term disability.

💬 “In other word[s], Democratic Party hacks want to give all the things to one person so that they can destroy an organization that wants other people to have those things, too,” noted political theorist Corey Robin.

💡

Read: Third Way’s campaign could produce exactly the insurgency it fears.

Good policy saves lives. Medicare for All would save 114,000 lives a year and reduce annual U.S. healthcare spending by nearly 20 percent, or more than $1 trillion, according to a new study conducted by Yale University researchers. That includes more than $377 billion saved annually by negotiating down prescription drug costs and $100 billion in avoided emergency room and hospital visits. Additionally, a single-payer system would save the lives of more than 18,000 seniors who can’t afford their medications, 13,000 nursing home patients, and over 62,000 people who are uninsured and underinsured.

☠️ The Trump administration’s 2025 “Big, Beautiful” healthcare funding cuts do the opposite. They include cuts to Affordable Care Act premium subsidies and Medicaid eligibility, and the changes are projected to cause more than 51,000 preventable deaths a year, with nearly half attributable to people who lost insurance coverage completely.

✊ Several Democratic candidates have won their primaries this cycle campaigning for Medicare for All, indicating a “resurgence in interest in single payer [healthcare],” according to Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, an organizing group started by Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

🩺 Recently uncovered filings show that in 2024, health insurance industry group Better Solutions for Healthcare made its first-ever donation of $50,000 to Third Way, the same corporate-backed think tank now declaring “war” on the progressive left.

📢 Share this newsletter on Bluesky, Reddit, LinkedIn, X, Mastodon, Substack, and Facebook.

Laundering day. The Treasury Department repealed a rule requiring American companies to disclose their owners to the federal government, effectively gutting a corporate transparency law meant to combat money laundering, tax fraud, and terrorism financing. The Corporate Transparency Act, which stipulates that individuals who own at least 25 percent of a company report to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), has been the subject of legal challenges and an intensive lobbying blitz since its passage in 2021. The Biden-era rule, meant to make it easier for the federal government to hunt down criminals hiding money inside the U.S.’s byzantine corporate accounting structures, had already been sanded down with a carve-out for big banks and investment pools.

🌍 Now, most of the reporting requirements have been eliminated, and prior reports to FinCEN by American citizens will be deleted from the government database. Only foreign individuals with a 25 percent ownership stake in a foreign company operating in the U.S. will be required to report to FinCEN going forward.

🏦 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cast the repeal as a victory for small businesses. The bulk of the reporting requirements had fallen on companies with fewer than 20 employees after former President Joe Biden’s Treasury Department created the loophole for banks and investment vehicles. Lobbying groups representing small businesses spent millions to repeal the rule.

😵‍💫 The Lever reported extensively on how the Corporate Transparency Act could have been an effective tool for regulators to identify foreign oligarchs laundering money through U.S. shell companies.

READING LIST

A collection of topical stories we couldn’t put down.

🍟 He requested his loyalty app data from McDonald’s. They responded with a 515-page dossier on his eating habits. (Source: Wired)

📃 Is there anyone who can respond to this guy’s FOIA requests? Trump is skirting the Freedom of Information Act. (Source: ProPublica)

🪖The Department of Veterans Affairs has been erroneously denying disability claims. Government workers are instructed to race through the backlog of veterans’ claims at an unreasonable pace. (Source: Notus)

DAY IN DATA

Since Trump’s war with Iran began, Big Oil has seen a big payday. (Source: The Guardian)

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House rules. New York City launched an investigation into four prediction market companies, accusing them of conspiring with social media influencers to target minors with “false, deceptive, and unconscionable advertising.” New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin sent a letter to Polymarket, Kalshi, Coinbase, and Gemini Titan, saying she intends to “harness the full power of the Council” to crack down on “deceptive and predatory marketing practices” in order to protect young people from becoming “collateral damage” in the burgeoning prediction markets game.

💰 A Wall Street Journal analysis found the prediction market companies paid influencers who used dummy websites to portray profitable fake trades in their promotional materials, while encouraging people to bet on everything from sports and the weather to election outcomes, drug trials, and U.S. military operations. In addition to incentivizing fraud in political and cultural events, lawmakers say the betting markets are vulnerable to insider trading.

👋 The federal government has been slow to respond to the proliferation of betting markets. While the Trump administration is seeking to “encourage [their] growth and innovation,” it’s fallen on state and local governments to rein in abusive gambling practices. Last week, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Kalshi for running an illegal gambling operation that exposes minors to “serious personal and financial risk.” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) blasted Kalshi for offering bets on drug trials. “There are some lines you don’t cross. Turning cancer patients into a prop bet is one of them,” Hochul posted on X.

📈 A new poll found that 61 percent of Americans view the prediction markets as closer to gambling than traditional investing, and more than a quarter of young men reported placing a bet on a prediction market or gambling platform in the past six months. A Bloomberg study found that more than half of Gen Zers with surplus funds have redirected money from traditional investments to gambling platforms. A quarter of Gen Z now see sports betting as part of “their long-term financial strategy.”

TAKE ACTION

Take Action: End Corporations’ Predatory Surveillance Pricing. We cannot allow companies across the economy to utilize AI-driven predatory practices that compromise our privacy.
SIGN NOW: Tell your representatives to create legislation putting an end to these predatory pricing practices.

Sign Now.

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🌒 Darkness in the daytime. Thousands of people flocked to Western Europe to witness a rare total solar eclipse. See the stunning images here. If you missed the Earth, sun, and moon falling into perfect alignment, you can catch the “eclipse of the century” next August in the Mediterranean region.

⚾ Baseball bribes. Major League Baseball teams are luring fans to the park with next-level schwag. The Chicago White Sox handed out pope hats in honor of their most famous fan, while the Texas Rangers gave away jerseys stained with fake blood to celebrate an infamous brawl.

🖍️ Sketchy behavior. Drawing and doodling have a calming effect on your nervous system.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 New in The Lever: Introducing Democrats’ new billionaire kingmaker.

👀 Watch: The lawless presidency was built by Dick Cheney.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• Why is ICE purchasing detention facilities?

• Did DOGE delay your tax return?

• Can the Trump administration seize unredacted voter data?

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

📬 The U.S. Postal Service reported $2.5 billion in net losses in its fiscal third quarter, an improvement over last year — but not enough to ameliorate the agency’s “severe liquidity crisis.”

📉 The American economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics posted a downward revision of more than 100,000 jobs from prior months. Global food prices hit their highest mark since 2023, and the price of oil spiked past $82 per barrel as reserves run low.

🫠 The average temperature in July for the lower-48 states was the warmest ever recorded.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Locked up and locked in. The Department of Homeland Security spent $2.2 billion in the past two months purchasing four immigration detention centers from a single private prison company. The firm CoreCivic — which President Donald Trump traded stock in as recently as last winter — saw its cash on hand grow tenfold thanks to the lucrative sales (and, in part, to a failed Boston developer with a questionable past). By outright purchasing facilities instead of contracting with privately-owned prisons, the Trump administration could potentially bypass state laws intended to curb abuses and neglect, such as labor violations and inadequate medical care, and claim broad federal immunity from lawsuits.

🤑 “This is more liquidity than the company has ever had, and provides us with significant flexibility to execute our capital allocation strategy and growth plan,” CoreCivic’s chief financial officer recently bragged on a call with investors.

🚨 More than 30 people have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities since October of last year, a 22-year high. For reference, just three people died in ICE detention in all of fiscal 2022.

🩺 To make matters worse, a Guardian investigation published this week details disturbing accounts of force-feeding in ICE detention facilities. The outlet found at least 18 instances in which the Trump administration sought court permission to subject detainees on hunger strike to “involuntary medical procedures,” including force-feeding, which could violate international human rights law.

📢 Share this newsletter on Bluesky, Reddit, LinkedIn, X, Substack, Mastodon, and Facebook.

Please hold. After the Trump administration made sweeping staff cuts at the Internal Revenue Service, taxpayers experienced reduced customer service support, longer phone wait times, and in some cases, refund delays. That’s according to new research published by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan research body that answers to Congress. Individual filers who submitted paper returns waited an average of 30 days for processing — double what is standard — with department staff admitting that two key digitizing systems “were not ready for the filing season start due to the recent loss of experienced IT acquisition staff.”

📎 Millions of taxpayers’ paper check refunds were also delayed by weeks as the IRS juggled workforce cuts with the transition to direct deposit refunds.

☎️ If you called the IRS with a filing question, it’s likely you were placed on hold. Staffing losses meant the agency answered fewer calls and call wait times nearly tripled compared to last year, up to an average of eight minutes.

🤔 The IRS already knows what you owe — tax day shouldn’t be this hard. Learn about the 40-year battle to keep you filing return paperwork on Lever Time.

DAY IN DATA

So much for liberation. (Mark Zandi/Moody’s Analytics)

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Tired of winning. A federal judge slapped down the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) attempt to seize voter data in Illinois in the latest courtroom loss for the Trump administration as it seeks to purge voter rolls before November’s elections. Illinois had complied with a DOJ request to hand over its voter registration database, but it redacted sensitive information, including dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and Social Security numbers. The DOJ sued, claiming the Civil Rights Act of 1960 requires states to hand over unredacted voter records, but the judge disagreed, finding that the law required a legitimate reason for seeking such information, and the DOJ had failed to provide one.

🥶 The Trump administration has filed at least 31 lawsuits seeking sensitive voter data from the states as part of its hunt for ineligible voters and noncitizens. To date, they’ve lost every single case, going zero for 21.

☑️ The DOJ’s demand for voter data is only one element of the administration’s effort to gain more control over the election process, as Trump continues to make false claims about election fraud. The president has said he intends to deploy an “Election Integrity Army” at the polls this fall to “preserve the sanctity of each legal vote.”

TAKE ACTION

Tell Your Senators: Reject Trump’s Voter Suppression Bill. President Trump is pressuring Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act after reviving false claims about the 2020 election in a primetime address.

The bill would impose new voting restrictions, including requiring proof of citizenship to register and limiting mail-in voting.

Tell your senators: Reject the SAVE America Act and protect every eligible American’s right to vote.

Sign Petition

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🐿️ Democracy in action. A group of capybaras strode into a local legislative building in Brazil as lawmakers were preparing to vote. True to their reputation, the world’s largest rodents were totally chill and only there to observe.

🦬 Mile High mammals. Yak ranching is thriving in Colorado, where the intelligent and majestic animals feel right at home in the alpine climate.

📽️ Box office bounce back. The Odyssey crossed the $1 billion mark, making it Christopher Nolan’s most successful film and the highest-grossing IMAX movie ever. It’s the fifth movie of the year to make at least $1 billion, the most since 2019, when nine films hit that mark.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: How font sizes could increase your travel costs.

👀 Watch: Meet the socialist breaking Democrats’ “electability” rule.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• What is ICE doing with DNA?

• Can $15 million defeat democratic socialism?

• Which red state just temporarily banned new data centers?

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

🐶 The Department of Government Efficiency’s claims about delivering government savings were overstated, unreliable, and lacked transparency, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.

⚡ The average American’s household electricity bill hit an all-time high of $217 in July.

🚨 President Donald Trump signed two new executive orders aimed at undercutting birthright citizenship.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Privacy on ice. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is spearheading a massive genetic surveillance effort, capturing the DNA information of nearly 1 million immigrants last year alone, most of whom are not suspected of committing a crime. A new report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology found the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has become the largest contributor of genetic profiles to the FBI’s DNA database. Most of those contributions came from ICE, which submitted the DNA of almost 900,000 people to the FBI in 2025. That’s up from 16,392 people in 2021 — a more than 5,000 percent increase. A person’s DNA remains in the FBI’s system indefinitely, purportedly to help law enforcement agencies solve crimes.

🚸 In June, Democratic lawmakers began demanding answers from DHS after visiting a detention facility in Dilley, Texas, where ICE was collecting DNA samples from all detainees, including parents and children. The Georgetown report found that ICE had collected DNA from children as young as four years old.

🧊 ICE arrested a record 51,000 people in July, the most monthly arrests on record. Some of those arrested are authorized to work in the U.S. or live in a legal gray area as they await approval for green cards or visas.

✈️ Some airlines are starting to push back against the surge of arrests at airports, where plainclothes ICE officers have been coordinating with the Transportation Security Administration to conduct raids in front of frightened travelers. The Wall Street Journal reported on an instance where Southwest Airlines refused to allow an ICE agent to board a plane to seize a passenger.

📢 Share this newsletter on Bluesky, Reddit, LinkedIn, X, Substack, Mastodon, and Facebook.

Goliath fights back. A corporate-backed Democratic think tank trying to drive the party to the right is launching a $15 million campaign to fight democratic socialism between now and the 2028 election. Third Way, a “centrist” dark money group, made the announcement days after progressive Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Senate Democratic primary in a massive blow to both the party establishment and outside PACs, which spent more than $60 million on behalf of El-Sayed’s opponent. “It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states,” Third Way president Jonathan Cowan lamented to The New York Times.

💢 According to Cowan, Third Way is preparing for “war” against socialism, declaring it a “mortal danger” to Democrats’ 2028 electoral prospects. Recent polling indicates that one-third of registered Democrats now identify as democratic socialists.

📝 The think tank plans to “make progressives understand the risks” of more controversial elements of the Democratic Socialists of America’s party platform, like reparations for descendants of enslaved people, a 32-hour work week, and defunding the Department of War.

🫏 Groups like Third Way have been encouraging Democratic candidates to drop out of the running for deep-red Senate seats in Montana and South Dakota in order to clear the way for independents. “Beating the MAGA Republicans is priorities one, two, and three. Who we beat them with is pretty far down the list,” Matt Bennett, cofounder of Third Way, told Politico.

DAY IN DATA

Miss Bidenomics yet? (Source: Heather Long)

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Big Tech backlash. Last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ordered a pause on new data center construction, as voter anger toward the resource-intensive projects sweeps the nation. Texas will now require proposed data centers to pass multiple audits before connecting to the electric grid. The governor’s office said it’s been deluged by new requests to build data centers, which could “endanger the reliability and stability of the Texas electric grid.”

🔌 Abbot said that more than 90 percent of new requests to connect to the Texas electric grid came from data centers, and that if they were all approved, it would require the use of “more than five times Texas’ record peak electricity demand.”

💪 Progressive lawmakers and candidates were among the first to raise the alarm about the harmful effects of artificial intelligence infrastructure, which strains water and electrical resources. New polls show the anti-data center sentiment is spreading quickly across the political spectrum.

💨 Big Tech has its eye on West Texas, where locals “are already breathing some of the dirtiest air in the country, and the data centers are poised to make it worse.” Read The Lever’s recent reporting on the AI boom and toxic air here.

TAKE ACTION

Take Action: End Corporations’ Predatory Surveillance Pricing. We cannot allow companies across the economy to utilize AI-driven predatory practices that compromise our privacy.
SIGN NOW: Tell your representatives to create legislation putting an end to these predatory pricing practices.

Sign Now.

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🖥️ Nostalgia bait. The owners of Myspace are looking at relaunching the beloved website, promising to be an “antidote” to the dominant, algorithm-driven social media platforms.

🦆 Quack medicine. A golden retriever named Barley suffered from debilitating seizures until his New York family adopted Louie the duck. The unlikely friendship between the dog and the duck has helped Barley heal.

🧓 No (age) limits. Scientists have begun human trials on a substance that reverses the aging process in cells.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: Trump is giving Big Oil the chance to cash in on public oil reserves.

👀 Watch: The master planners couldn’t have predicted this.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• Chaos at FEMA ahead of peak hurricane season.

• What Iran war spending could pay for instead.

• Green investments stay greenlit.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

⚖️ The state of New Mexico is suing the federal government for files related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, accusing the Justice Department of withholding evidence pertaining to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch compound.

📈 New job openings fell to the lowest point in three months, and a new survey of the manufacturing industry found inflation fears are worse than they were at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

🛩️ The Pentagon reportedly jammed the GPS of a civilian medevac plane that later crashed over New Mexico, killing everyone on board.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Hurricane Trump. A blistering new report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the Trump administration’s gutting of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has left the nation ill-prepared to deal with new natural disasters, as wildfires rage across the country and the peak of hurricane season approaches. The report said FEMA shed more than 2,500 employees this year, while hiring only 134 new employees, bringing the total workforce to less than 22,000 people (down from more than 25,000 in 2025). Those staffing cuts have resulted in a “loss of institutional knowledge and experienced personnel” that has “exacerbated long-standing workforce challenges,” the GAO said. The audit found FEMA to be rudderless after then-acting administrator David Richardson rescinded the agency’s strategic plan last year. No new plan has been put forward.

🤷 The GAO said FEMA officials feel as if they’re “wandering around in the dark” and that there’s “no overall strategic direction on which to base workforce planning.” The agency has effectively been without a permanent leader since President Joe Biden left office. Trump fired the first person he appointed as acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, last year, only to renominate him this year (although Hamilton still hasn’t been brought before the full Senate for a confirmation vote).

🚨 The Trump administration has also been redirecting FEMA personnel and resources away from its core mission in order to support its immigration raids and deportation efforts, according to an investigation led by House Democrats and based on testimony from whistleblowers.

🚒 The GAO report comes as wildfires rage across the Pacific Northwest, with thick smoke hanging over large swaths of Oregon and Washington. Trump this week authorized federal disaster assistance for the fires that have ravaged Spokane, Washington. Meanwhile, hurricane season peaks in September and runs through October, and in a sign of the times, a jet charter company is now offering private evacuation flights out of Florida.

📢 Share this newsletter on Bluesky, Reddit, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X, Substack, and Facebook.

Trade-offs. The Trump administration told Congress last month that it had already blown through more than $37 billion on the war in Iran, and said $67 billion more is needed to replenish weapons. That’s like asking for about $518 in taxpayer revenue from every American household, according to the progressive policy research center Issue One. Munitions, operational costs, fuel, drones, and other expenditures account for roughly $54.3 billion of the new budget — but plans for the remaining $13 billion remain completely undisclosed to the public.

💃 For reference, $67 billion would be enough to construct more than 100 new White House ballrooms or renovate over 4,000 reflecting pools.

🎒 Munitions requests alone total $21 billion, the same amount of money it would take to offer free lunch every day of the school year to 4 out of 5 public school students — or provide every registered vehicle in America with one tank of gas.

🍏 Meanwhile, the $17.3 billion in military operation costs could cover a full year of groceries to every resident of South Carolina.

DAY IN DATA

$5.4 million

The approximate cost of containing New Mexico’s 2025 measles outbreak. (Source: Reuters)

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Going green. A federal appellate court has blocked the White House from taking back funding for green projects allocated by the Biden administration. The D.C. Court of Appeals temporarily barred Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency from rescinding roughly $20 billion doled out to “green banks,” which would then invest funds into environmentally-friendly projects, including clean energy and climate change-resistant infrastructure.

TAKE ACTION

Take Action: End Corporations’ Predatory Surveillance Pricing. We cannot allow companies across the economy to utilize AI-driven predatory practices that compromise our privacy.

SIGN NOW: Tell your representatives to create legislation putting an end to these predatory pricing practices.

Sign Now.

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🪲 Insect indexing. Scientists in Brazil are taking inventory of the estimated 40,000 insect species living in a small piece of the Amazon rainforest.

🌊 Cowabunga. Thrill-seeking dogs are catching waves and finding their flow states at the World Dog Surfing Championship in Pacifica, California.

🍻 Beer booty. Divers discovered 162-year-old bottles of Guinness in a shipwreck off the coast of England. They’ve launched “Project Jurassic Beer” to rebrew the beer so it tastes exactly how it did when the ship went down in 1864.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: Democrats’ middle lane is collapsing.

🎧 Listen: Have you read Barack Obama’s kill list?

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• Is Flock watching you?

• FIFA and Josh Kushner’s red card.

• How does Trump keep winning?

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the biggest stories in the country today.

🥬 Michigan reported its first two deaths from the cyclospora outbreak, which has sickened more than 11,000 people across the state.

🤨 Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche agreed to scrap the proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund as part of a deal to advance his nomination, although a provision giving President Donald Trump and his businesses blanket immunity from tax crimes remains in place.

📈 Amazon’s market cap surpassed $3 trillion for the first time.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Surveillance nation. The company behind a nationwide network of surveillance cameras is under fire, as police are accused of misusing the artificial intelligence-powered technology to spy on Americans and help carry out President Trump’s immigration raids. Flock Safety’s license plate cameras, the black boxes and solar panels positioned on the sides of roads across the U.S., have been deployed by police departments ostensibly to solve crimes and find missing people. But at the beginning of Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were found to be secretly coordinating with local police to use Flock. And now, dozens of police officers have been accused of stalking or spying on acquaintances, family members, and significant others. (You can view a map of Flock cameras in your community here.)

🚨 Last week, the Savannah Police Department put four officers and two staffers on leave and referred them for criminal prosecution after they were caught using the Flock cameras to track the movements of people in their lives.

📸 Flock, which is based in Atlanta, has sold its technology to police departments as a powerful crime investigation tool. However, an investigation by the Atlanta Community Press Collective found that the Atlanta Police Department’s crime clearance rate has remained relatively steady over the past five years, even as the number of “public safety” cameras in Atlanta spiked from 3,300 in 2021 to more than 28,000 in 2026.

🤦 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) documented the many times Flock has lied to or misled government officials and the public about how the technology is used by law enforcement and its potential for abuse. “The urgent takeaway for government officials and police departments is that they should be extremely hesitant to believe anything Flock tells them about its company, its products, or its commitment to safety and privacy,” the ACLU said.

📈 Flock’s growth has coincided with a major influence campaign in Washington. The company’s lobbying expenditures increased tenfold between 2024 and 2025, and they may ramp up again soon: Just yesterday, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) proposed legislation that would ban federal funding from going toward automated surveillance systems like Flock.

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Red card. After resounding public backlash, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was forced to abandon plans to create a $20 billion commercial spin-off of the global soccer governing body and sell it to investors — including a member of the president’s extended family. The lead investor in the failed deal was Thrive Eternal, the venture capital firm of Josh Kushner, who is the brother of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The sale was practically dead on arrival after being firmly rejected by regional soccer confederations in Europe, North America, and Asia.

⚽ The Kushner family has had their eyes on sports and gaming: After helping oversee negotiations with the kingdom during Trump’s first term, Jared Kushner’s private equity firm partnered with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to purchase Entertainment Arts, which produces professional sports-branded video games, including, at one time, for FIFA.

🍊 Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, is a longtime supporter of Trump. FIFA rents office space in Trump Tower, and last year, Infantino created a special “FIFA Peace Prize” award for the president after he lost out on a Nobel prize. “Apparently the fake Peace Prize and giant lease with Trump Tower weren’t enough,” quipped Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) at news of the now-defunct deal, arguing that it completed a “kickback hat-trick.”

⚖️ In 2020, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of Jared and Josh, after he pled guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign contributions in the mid 2000s.

🗳️ Today, Democratic primary voters in Michigan will head to the polls as establishment-endorsed Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and progressive Abdul El-Sayed vie to represent the Great Lakes State in the Senate.

🔍 Read The Lever’s reporting on what you need to know about this party reckoning.

✉️ If you haven’t yet, upgrade your account to receive our Midterm Madness newsletter tomorrow with election results, analysis, and key insights.

READING LIST

Topical stories from newsrooms we admire.

🤝 Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams was heckled over the weekend while trying to sell data centers in Wisconsin. (Hell Gate)

⛵ Federal Communications Commission officials are accused of accepting luxury gifts from Paramount as the company sought approval of its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. (ProPublica)

👮 ICE collected the genetic data of nearly 1 million people last year, including from young children and people never charged with a crime.(Wired)

DAY IN DATA

Trump is buoyed by party loyalists. (I&I/ TIPP)

TAKE ACTION

Tell Your Senators: Reject Trump’s Voter Suppression Bill. President Trump is pressuring Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act after reviving false claims about the 2020 election in a primetime address.

The bill would impose new voting restrictions, including requiring proof of citizenship to register and limiting mail-in voting.

Tell your senators: Reject the SAVE America Act and protect every eligible American’s right to vote.

Sign Petition

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

😻 Cat wheels. Gelato, a teacup-sized kitten who experienced a spinal injury, gets around on a makeshift wheelchair made of toys.

🃏 Mahjong mania. Teens are powering a resurgence of a 200-year-old Chinese game.

🕸️ Bug balm. Scientists are using spider silk to deliver drugs throughout the body and to treat burn wounds.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: This anti-LGBTQ pastor just appeared in a new Democratic primary campaign ad.

🎧 Listen: How do we make sure Democrats’ pick for 2028 isn’t Barack Obama 2.0?

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• What makes a Democrat “electable?”

• AI chatbots tell their bosses’ secrets.

• The Homeland Security chief’s tax write-off.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

🏥 Hospitals say they’re treating a higher number of uninsured patients following the GOP’s cuts to the Affordable Care Act.

⚠️ The war in Iran is pushing prices higher on everything from beer and automotive parts to paint, paper, soap, and mayonnaise.

🚨 The families of four teenagers who died by suicide are suing Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, describing “years of escalating harms.”

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Electability politics. Democratic Senatorial candidate Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) recently dismissed concerns about corporate and special interest influence in her primary race as “campaign finance zoomies.” “We’ve got to be really honest here. Who’s benefiting from this level of infighting?” Stevens asked. “It’s the Republicans who already have all their dark money all lined up ready to go.” The race between Stevens and progressive challenger Abdul El-Sayed has become the most expensive primary race in Democratic Party history, with more than $60 million in outside spending pouring into the battle, 90 percent of which benefits Stevens.

✅ In addition to her corporate backers, Stevens has the support of a slate of Democratic Party lawmakers, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (Mich.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), and outgoing Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, who tout her general “electability” over El-Sayed’s.

💬 At a rally in Grand Rapids, The Lever’s David Sirota asked El-Sayed whether party leaders actually doubt his electability — or fear what would happen if he wins. He said that, “I think folks are more worried about me being elected than they are anything about me being unelectable,” and that “I’m not going [to Capitol Hill] to make friends. I’m going there to get stuff done.”

📹 Watch the full exchange between David Sirota and Abdul El-Sayed here.

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Alexa, what are you hiding? Columbia Law School conducted research on Amazon and Walmart by simply asking their artificial intelligence shopping chatbots questions — and those chatbots ended up revealing company secrets. “Made in USA” tags indicating that a product was manufactured domestically are often misapplied, but according to the retailers’ own chatbots, Amazon and Walmart intentionally choose not to follow regulations requiring that they detect and police such fraud from their suppliers, even though they can easily do so using their own AI technology. This is because the associated regulatory penalties cost less than following the law, resulting in “a business calculation, not a legal one.”

🤖 “Enforcement gaps exist because the legal risk has been historically low — the [Federal Trade Commission] pursues relatively few cases against retailers,” Sparky, Walmart’s chatbot, revealed. “So the practical pressure to build proactive compliance systems has been limited.”

📉 By Sparky’s own admission, “Made in USA” label fraud hurts domestic manufacturers by “undercut[ting] the premium” those companies actually create. “It’s a classic race-to-the-bottom dynamic where lax enforcement penalizes the compliant players most,” Sparky reported to researchers.

🇺🇲 More than 70 percent of American consumers report intentionally purchasing USA-manufactured products, with 65 percent saying that they’re willing to pay more.

DAY IN DATA

Money shower. Source: (Mother Jones)

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

Sorry, Gavin. This weekend, the California Democratic Party endorsed a November ballot measure instituting a billionaires tax on the state’s richest residents, defying Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who’s been working tirelessly to kill the tax. Key yes votes in support of the measure were reportedly whipped by Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.), despite the fact that she declined to publicly back the one-time, 5 percent tax on wealth exceeding $1 billion.

🗳️ The California Democratic Party also voted in opposition to resolutions that sought to undermine the tax.

🤝 “This endorsement puts to rest the idea that California Democrats are not united by the billionaire tax — they are,” said Dave Regan, the union leader who spearheaded the initiative to get the measure on November’s ballot.

🎧 Hear more from Regan about how he’s fighting Democratic oligarchs here.

NEWS DIVE

Off the hook. As his agency rips apart immigrant families, slows labor growth, and delivers massive windfalls to questionable private operators, the new Homeland Security chief just used a legal loophole to score a lucrative tax break on the sale of millions of dollars of controversial investments he accrued while serving in Congress. Newly released government ethics documents show that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has received a tax break on up to…

Click here to continue reading.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Democrats: Don’t Help Republicans Cut Social Security. Social Security should be expanded, not cut. But Democrats could help Republicans do the opposite.

A new Senate proposal would create a “bipartisan” commission to fast-track changes to Social Security. That’s exactly how benefit cuts get dressed up as “reform.”

Tell Democrats: Oppose any commission that could open the door to Social Security cuts — and make the wealthy pay instead.

Add Your Name Now

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🍿 Power couple. Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey combined for the biggest collective weekend in box office history. Newlyweds Tom Holland and Zendaya star in both movies.

📚 Em dash death knell. Novelists and journalists are changing their writing styles to avoid being mistaken for AI.

🍻 Closing time. Bars are increasingly catering to Gen X’ers because young people aren’t showing up to drink.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

👀 Watch: Oligarchs exploited 9/11 to build an all-powerful presidency.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• How Trump is turning his immigration crackdown into cash.

• What happened to reforming FISA?

• The investors betting on Elon Musk’s downfall.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

🏢 Wealthy renters in New York City are moving into rent-stabilized apartments meant for the city’s lowest earners.

🖥️ Microsoft paid an effective federal income tax rate of 2.4 percent while posting record income of over $100 billion for its fiscal year 2026.

⛈️ President Donald Trump overruled his own agencies when he denied disaster aid requests to four states run by Democrats.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

ICE economy. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts are proving lucrative for those hired to carry out the Trump administration’s deportation and detainment efforts — and for President Trump himself. The stock price for the private prison company GEO Group has more than doubled since February and sits near its all-time high after announcing a five-year deal for ICE to use its facility in North Carolina. GEO now has more than $2 billion in ICE contracts, with hundreds of millions of dollars pouring in during Trump’s second term in office, and a former GEO Group executive was tapped to be ICE’s acting director in June. A second private prison operator, CoreCivic, has similarly seen its revenue and stock price spike since 2025, thanks to the $650 million in ICE contract obligations from last year alone.

🤑 Trump is heavily invested in GEO and CoreCivic, with his investment managers going all-in on 29 trades split between the two companies just since his second term began. This comes as NBC News reports that ICE plans to sign new contracts for detention facilities in Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami and Denver in the coming months.

🥊 The financial stakes have provoked backbiting and lawsuits from companies fighting over the ICE contracts. CSI Aviation, a deportation flight contractor, sued the federal government after rival firm Salus Worldwide Solutions was given a $915 million contract to execute “self-deportation” flights, calling the award “unlawful, rushed and noncompetitive.” Salus’s owner William Walters donated $10,000 to a super PAC with ties to former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem before his company was awarded the contract.

✈️ Meanwhile, the Trump administration is expanding its deportation and detainment efforts. About 132,000 immigrants have participated in, and 70,000 have signed up for, the administration’s controversial “Project Homecoming,” which provides free plane tickets and $1,000 to those who voluntarily leave the country. And ICE is increasingly coordinating with the Transportation Security Administration to conduct shock raids at airports, where plainclothes officers are seizing immigrants who exist in a legal gray area, such as those with valid work permits but expired visas that might be in the process of getting extensions or green cards.

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New director, same Section 702. On Tuesday, the Senate approved Trump’s pick to replace Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Jay Clayton, the former chair of the $1 trillion private equity firm Apollo Global Management, has received a warmer welcome on Capitol Hill than the acting head of national intelligence, businessman Bill Pulte — and the change has led some Democrats to give up their fight to reform the agency’s sweeping surveillance powers, according to NOTUS. Democrats held up the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which sets guidelines for the collection of foreign intelligence from U.S. soil, over concerns about Pulte’s lack of qualifications and a controversial part of the bill, Section 702. The measure permits warrantless electronic searches of foreigners, but has also been used on Americans.

🔍 Section 702 of FISA technically lapsed in June, though a court ruling means intelligence is still being collected.

💬 “When Bill Pulte is no longer the acting [director of national intelligence], I think there’s a path forward for FISA,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) told NOTUS. But not every Democrat is on board: According to Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), the White House “made matters worse by bringing in Pulte, and that shook [his] confidence about what they’re going to do with Clayton or anybody.” He continued, “It doesn’t redress the underlying problems we had about the role of privacy and the role of the courts.”

💰 Clayton comes from the Justice Department’s “top dog” New York office, where, despite his lack of prosecutorial experience, he was tapped to oversee the release of federal records related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This came despite Epstein’s financial links to Apollo and Clayton’s ongoing connection to the firm; records reviewed by The Lever earlier this year showed that Clayton still held more than $1 million in Apollo holdings.

💡

Read more of The Lever‘s reporting about Clayton, Epstein, and Apollo here.

Betting against Elon. Just weeks after its fast-track admission to the Nasdaq and blockbuster public debut, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company SpaceX has accrued $26 billion in shorts — or bets that the company won’t succeed — accounting for roughly 35 percent of the company’s tradable stock. Short sellers, who profit when a stock’s price drops, are down more than $200 billion so far in 2026. But Musk’s companies stand against that trend; SpaceX short-sellers have profited $7.3 billion since the stock went public, making it the second most profitable short so far this year — second only to Tesla.

📉 Shares of SpaceX have fallen well below their initial public offering price, causing the company to shed more than $1 trillion in value (though in the last few days, SpaceX has seen its share price pop again). Aggrieved investors are reportedly taking to Reddit to share their disappointment.

💬 Musk — who was briefly made a trillionaire during the SpaceX debut — is aware of the shorts, but says they won’t work out. “The survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” he posted recently on social media.

DAY IN DATA

Crash and burn. (Source: The New York Times)

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

Tuning out. Liberal Americans are increasingly abandoning corporate media and instead getting their news from an ascendant consortium of independent news outlets, podcasts, and social media accounts. These shifting consumer habits and the increased influence of this new media apparatus are having a real-world impact on the direction of the Democratic Party as it seeks a path back to power. The Lever is among the news outlets mentioned in an Associated Press report about independent outlets with a growing audience that are changing the political conversation.

📺 Liberals are still more likely than conservatives to trust legacy media, but the anti-establishment sentiment gripping the left and skepticism over the traditional media’s coverage of the war in Gaza, among other issues, has pushed progressive news consumers toward outlets and commentators they find more trustworthy.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Your Governor and State Leaders to Prepare For El Niño Danger. Scientists warn that an exceptionally powerful El Niño could arrive within months. State and local leaders must act now to prepare for heightened risks of flooding, wildfires, and other extreme weather.

They should immediately:

• Reinforce riverbanks and other flood defenses.

• Increase funding for emergency response.

Sign And Send The Letter

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🕴️ Style and substance. Will “suit socialism” save us all?

💪 Taking up arms. Matt Damon’s biceps in a key fighting scene in The Odyssey actually belonged to this 4-foot-6 woman who played his stunt double.

🦅 Aerial attack. A red-tailed hawk knocked a police drone out of the sky in Denver.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🗳️ Welcome to Midterm Madness, the only newsletter you need to stay up to date on 2026 election news. Key race updates, money trails, numbers that cut through the spin, and campaign moments that say more than official talking points ever will — from The Lever team to your inbox, every Wednesday.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• The Israel critic AIPAC is hoping to KO twice in a row.

• Faultlines in Michigan’s hotly contested primary.

• An appellate trial that could take down Citizens United.

👍 This pop-up newsletter is one of many exclusive benefits we provide to our paid subscribers. Thank you for your support!

Spread The Love — Gift A Lever Subscription

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top election-related headlines in the country this week.

📩 The White House asked the Supreme Court to allow the president’s executive order limiting mail-in voting ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

🗓️ Democrats have set a new presidential primary schedule for 2028: South Carolina, then Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan, and Virginia.

📜 Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) introduced a new bill to prohibit candidates from using campaign funds to settle allegations of sexual misconduct.

STATE OF THE RACE

Round two. AIPAC is once again going big to shut down former Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in the state’s Democratic primary next week, as the progressive Squad member seeks a comeback in Missouri’s first congressional district. Bush was narrowly defeated by Rep. Wesley Bell (D-Mo.) in 2024 in what became one of the most expensive House primaries in history. In that race, AIPAC spent over $8 million to defeat Bush as it sought to make a…

Click here for the full article.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

👀 Watch: Are we living in a world that only movies could have predicted?

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: Meet the woman running to become America’s first socialist governor.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• Which major U.S. airports are privatizing their security?

• Is the FDA actually banning direct-to-consumer drug ads?

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

🚨 Johnson & Johnson has agreed to pay $5.5 billion to resolve tens of thousands of cases alleging its baby powder caused ovarian cancer.

👷 Employers are concerned they will face a labor shortage after the Supreme Court paved the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for more than one million immigrants currently living and working legally in the U.S.

🛥️ The Pentagon’s deadly, extrajudicial military strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean have failed to curb cocaine smuggling into the U.S.

SPONSORED

If you want to understand the roots of America’s unfinished battles over race, democracy, and political power, They Stole A City is essential reading.

In a groundbreaking nonfiction history, New Yorker Staff Writer Lauren Collins delivers a full accounting of the long-term effects of a shocking act of racial terrorism and the only successful coup d’état on U.S. soil.

Get Your Copy Now

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Frisky business. Three U.S. airports signed onto a new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) initiative putting private contractors in charge of security screenings, as the Trump administration seeks to outsource federal functions and throttle government worker unions. The Tampa International Airport, Des Moines International Airport, and Charleston International Airport have opted into the TSA’s new Gold+ program, a voluntary, public-private arrangement that the government says will “redirect funds” to “investable partnerships” that give outside operators control over the technology and screening process at airports. More than a dozen, mostly smaller airports have already been participating in a similar Trump administration program that allows private contractors to conduct routine TSA security screenings under federal oversight. That public-private arrangement is similar to what was in place before 9/11.

✈️ The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents 47,000 TSA agents, warned the new program is a “major departure and step backwards” from the security protocols put in place after 9/11. AFGE President Everett Kelley said “changes of this magnitude” should require an act of Congress and buy-in from “the flying public, the local airport authorities, and TSA employees themselves.”

👷 This is not the first time the Trump administration has targeted TSA workers. In 2025, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem abruptly stripped TSA workers of their collective bargaining rights and canceled an agreement signed the year before. The AFGE sued, and a judge sided with union workers, granting a preliminary injunction.

🚨 Dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and privatizing the TSA were major initiatives in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy recommendations for Trump’s second term in office. In that document, Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump Homeland Security official whose appointment was found to be illegal, called for breaking up the agency “to reduce overhead and achieve more limited government.” Last year, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) introduced the “Abolish the TSA Act,” which calls for “the rapid transfer of all aviation security activities and equipment to qualified private screening companies.”

📢 Share this newsletter on Bluesky, LinkedIn, X, Substack, and Facebook.

Infected airwaves. The Trump administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are pumping the brakes on a campaign promise to ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements. Kennedy could do so easily by reversing a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 1997 policy memo; instead, he’s using the traditional regulatory process to pursue a federal rule that would require pharmaceutical companies to disclose all of a drug’s safety and risk information in the course of an advertisement. This requirement could force pharmaceutical ads off the air by rendering them “untenably long,” according to NOTUS, but its future remains uncertain. While senior FDA officials said the rule is “on the priority list,” they offered no definitive timeline for its enactment.

📺 In the United States, one of only two countries that allows direct-to-consumer ads, television ad spending by pharmaceutical firms reached over $6 billion last year, and drug advertisements are the third-biggest category for regular TV and streaming ad spending. While drugmakers see considerable returns on paid advertising, patients can fall victim to inappropriate or excessive prescriptions.

💊 A letter sent to the FDA last week by consumer advocacy group Public Citizen urged the agency to ban direct pharma ads because they “offer no measurable public health benefit” and instead “undermine informed medical decision-making.”

🤑 A collection of 30 free-market groups also recently wrote to the FDA making the opposite case. They argue that “consumers do not need government bureaucrats gate-keeping medical information” and that a direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ad ban would “crush competition and keep patients in the dark.”

READING LIST

A collection of topical stories from independent outlets we support.

🤝 Meet the anti-Trump lawyers helping engineer the president’s takeover of mass media. (Source: BIG)

💰 James Carville’s attacks on the progressive left are paid for by centrist billionaires. (Source: Sludge)

🛒 American taxpayers spend roughly $2 billion annually to provide Medicaid benefits to Amazon and Walmart employees. (Source: Popular Information)

DAY IN DATA

“Congress budgeted billions for big transit projects. Trump isn’t spending it.” (Source: The New York Times)

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

Warming up. Pakistan has met its exploding energy demands by turning to solar power, according to new research by the clean energy-focused Ember think tank. Between 2023 and 2025, Pakistan’s total electricity demand rose by 21 percent — and the country rose to the challenge entirely with solar power.

☀️ In those two years, Pakistan produced 27 gigawatts of solar energy, “the same as all the operating coal, gas and oil plants built in Pakistan ever.” These investments saved the country more than $12 billion in oil and gas imports by February of this year.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Your Senators: Reject Trump’s Voter Suppression Bill. President Trump is pressuring Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act after reviving false claims about the 2020 election in a primetime address.

The bill would impose new voting restrictions, including requiring proof of citizenship to register and limiting mail-in voting.

Tell your senators: Reject the SAVE America Act and protect every eligible American’s right to vote.

Sign Petition

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

💋 Love language. Some species of apes offer comfort to each other through hugs, kisses, hand-holding, and back-pats, just like humans do.

🍴 Going bust. A handful of old-school hotels in Las Vegas are fighting to keep the cheap buffet alive, even as businesses increasingly cut back on the perks that once made the city a draw for budget-conscious travelers.

🐵 Baby’s first birthday. Thousands of people from around the world sent birthday cards to Punch, a baby Japanese macaque who celebrated his first trip around the sun at a zoo near Tokyo. Punch, who does not have a family, went viral after a picture emerged of him clinging to an orange orangutan doll.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: The health insurance industry’s favorite governor just waged war on Medicare for All.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• The lawmakers playing both sides of the Iran war debate.

• ICE’s concerning purchase of mercenary software.

• What states are doing to stop the White House from interfering in their elections.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

🛥️ The 1,500 largest public companies in the U.S. spent about $600 million last year on executive perks, including travel on private jets, sports tickets, booze, and getaways at company-owned resorts.

💻 Regulators in the European Union hit Google with a $1 billion fine and accused the company of anti-competitive business practices.

🧑‍🚒 The U.S. has already burned through most of its wildfire fighting resources for the year, as out-of-control fires burn across Colorado, Oregon, and Washington.

SPONSORED

If you want to understand the roots of America’s unfinished battles over race, democracy, and political power, They Stole A City is essential reading.

In a groundbreaking nonfiction history, New Yorker Staff Writer Lauren Collins delivers a full accounting of the long-term effects of a shocking act of racial terrorism and the only successful coup d’état on U.S. soil.

Get Your Copy Now

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Talk is cheap. Last week, the House passed the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), approving $1.15 trillion in military funding for fiscal year 2027 — a nearly 30 percent budget hike. The bill passed 216 to 212, with six Democratic defectors joining the GOP: Reps. Don Davis (N.C.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Adam Gray (Calif.), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.). These six Democrats’ support for the expanded military budget comes despite the fact that they’ve voted twice for war powers resolutions directing President Donald Trump to end his war on Iran — including legislation passed last week, just one day after the NDAA vote.

🇮🇱 Five of these six Democratic defectors have accepted a collective $47,500 from pro-Israel PACs which are hawkish on Iran so far this election cycle. (Golden is not running for reelection).

🪖The NDAA is now in the hands of the Senate — but lawmakers are already expressing doubt about a controversial section establishing a joint U.S.-Israeli initiative for weapons research and manufacturing. “There’s nobody here who’s more of an ardent supporter of Israel’s right to exist and ability to defend themselves, but I don’t think we should integrate our military with anybody, not even the Bahamas,” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) recently told Drop Site News.

🗳️ House leadership also attached the Trump-championed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act — a completely unrelated bill which would require proof of U.S. citizenship to vote — to the must-pass NDAA. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) has warned that the SAVE Act is “dead on arrival here.”

📢 Share this newsletter on Bluesky, LinkedIn, X, Substack, and Facebook.

I(CE) spy. A Democratic U.S. Senator is again demanding answers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following the agency’s “purchase and use of a powerful commercial spyware” capable of covertly accessing encrypted “messages, photos, location data, microphones, and cameras” on mobile devices. In 2024, a $2 million ICE hardware and “perpetual license software” contract was awarded to Paragon Solutions (now RedLattice), a cyberintelligence firm co-founded by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak known for its military-grade spyware product, Graphite. However, the contract was paused by the Biden administration because of a 2023 executive order banning federal spyware contracts that pose a threat to universal human rights or national security.

🔍 In October 2025, the Trump administration revived the Paragon/RedLattice contract, but by January of this year it was “close[d] out.” ICE acting director Tony Lyons admitted in April that the agency was using Graphite to target “foreign terrorist organizations” involved in the distribution of fentanyl. Homeland Security officials have since insisted that ICE has “no relationship” with the maker of the software, and won’t confirm or deny whether the agency still has access to Graphite.

👀 A recent letter sent by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) warned that the use of Graphite represents “one of the most significant expansions of [Homeland Security] and ICE’s surveillance ambitions to date.” The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, on which Peters serves as the ranking member, has made multiple requests for documents and information related to ICE’s use of the Graphite software, but received no response.

📱Graphite’s potential for misuse by government officials is not theoretical: In a scandal that eventually led the Italian government to cancel its contract, the spyware was allegedly used to track investigative journalists.

DAY IN DATA

U.S. income inequality is nearly off the charts. (Source: Our World In Data)

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

United front. A collection of states are banding together to block the Trump administration from using grant funding to exert control over their elections. Twenty-five states and D.C. have sued the White House, arguing that it is illegal for the president to condition Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds on demands that states change their election procedures or assist with immigration enforcement.

📜 The coalition, led by Rhode Island, California, Illinois, and New Jersey, argues that the federal government’s use of threats to manipulate how states administer elections is unconstitutional. “Congress never gave DHS or ​FEMA authority to rewrite state election law,” their lawsuit reads.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Democrats: Don’t Help Republicans Cut Social Security. Social Security should be expanded, not cut. But Democrats could help Republicans do the opposite.

A new Senate proposal would create a “bipartisan” commission to fast-track changes to Social Security. That’s exactly how benefit cuts get dressed up as “reform.”

Tell Democrats: Oppose any commission that could open the door to Social Security cuts — and make the wealthy pay instead.

Add Your Name Now

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

📖 Dog treats. Eleven-year-old Nehemia Turner read for more than 100 hours to shelter animals as part of the nonprofit “Pawsitive Reading” program.

👰 Newfangled nuptials. Newlyweds are increasingly using QR codes to plan and execute their weddings.

🃏 Role play. The 33-year-old Magic: The Gathering card game is more popular than ever, part of a renaissance in physical games and puzzles.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

📹 First watch: One corporation controls 35 percent of all bowling revenues.

👀 Now read: Meet the kingpin behind private equity’s takeover of your local lanes.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• Which employers are relying on SNAP to subsidize wages.

• The AI influence war.

• An antitrust icon’s new job.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

🏥 The Trump administration is withholding $1 billion in Medicaid funding from California and Minnesota over “suspected fraud and noncompliance.”

🚁 A Secret Service agent on JD Vance’s detail is suspected of leaking the vice president’s “inappropriate” use of taxpayer-funded protection and has been put on leave.

🗽 NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani says he doesn’t have the authority to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when the Israeli prime minister makes an appearance at the U.N. General Assembly next month.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Poverty wages. While they enjoy lucrative tax breaks and unprecedented profit, some of the wealthiest corporations in the U.S., including Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s, and Home Depot, are also among the top employers of adult Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program beneficiaries (formerly known as food stamps). To qualify for SNAP, these employees (assuming they live in a one-person household) make $1,696 a month or less — meaning taxpayer-funded benefits are effectively subsidizing these corporations’ low-wage offerings.

🛒 According to new research by Congress’ independent research arm, seventeen of the 50 largest Fortune 500 companies were also among the top 25 employers of SNAP enrollees in at least two states. These employees are concentrated in the sectors of transportation, dining, and retail — and 70 percent work full time.

🍼 The Trump administration’s new SNAP work requirements and funding cuts have kicked 4 million people off their federal food aid since last July — including 1.5 million children, according to analysis from the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

🍅 New, steep penalties imposed by the White House on states that make mistakes when handing out SNAP aid have led to intensive paperwork requirements and “bureaucratic chaos.” As a result, hungry people who’d otherwise qualify for SNAP are choosing private food banks instead.

Escaping containment. Artificial intelligence companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the 2026 midterm elections, as Big Tech battles the progressive candidates seeking to impose new industry regulations. One exception is the AI company Anthropic, which announced this week it would drop an additional $20 million into a super PAC advocating for government oversight and transparency of AI, bringing total investment to $40 million. Still, that pales in comparison to spending by the anti-regulations super PAC Leading the Future, which is funded in part by OpenAI President Greg Brockman and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That group has amassed at least $125 million, with Brockman and his wife combining to give $25 million to both Leading the Future and Trump’s PAC, MAGA, Inc.

💵 Super PACs working on behalf of the AI industry, crypto, and AIPAC have combined to spend more than $180 million so far this year to defeat progressives or elect Democrats that are sympathetic to their causes. For example, Leading the Future spent millions to defeat Alex Bores, a former Palantir engineer who ran for the Democratic nomination in New York’s 12th Congressional District. Bores, who campaigned on new AI safeguards, finished second in the crowded field of candidates.

🤯 All told, the network of PACs battling over the direction of the industry has pledged to spend $265 million this cycle. Moreover, the largest tech, social media, and AI companies combined to spend $41 million on lobbying the federal government in the first half of the year, up 8 percent over 2025. That big-spending model paid off in 2024 for the crypto industry, which was rewarded with industry-friendly regulations that Trump signed into law.

📉 There are growing fears that the U.S. economy is overly dependent on the AI boom, which has accounted for about half of the S&P 500’s gains this year. Americans, and liberals in particular, are increasingly turning against the data centers that power the industry. A new Politico poll found that 41 percent of voters would oppose a data center being built near where they live, up from 28 percent in January.

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DAY IN DATA

Six of the largest tech firms have collectively hired one lobbyist for every 1.5 members of Congress. (Source: Issue One)

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

We love Lina. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed former Federal Trade Commission chair and antitrust crusader Lina Khan to the city’s economic development agency. While serving in the Biden administration, Khan was the architect of several popular consumer protection rules, including junk fee bans, “click to cancel” requirements, and limits on noncompete agreements.

🌉 As chair of the NYC Economic Development Corporation, Khan will help approve and oversee major projects; the public-benefit, nonprofit organization is behind the development of the Hudson Yards mixed-use development, the High Line elevated linear park, and the city’s ferry system.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Your Senators: Reject Trump’s Voter Suppression Bill. President Trump is pressuring Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act after reviving false claims about the 2020 election in a primetime address.

The bill would impose new voting restrictions, including requiring proof of citizenship to register and limiting mail-in voting.

Tell your senators: Reject the SAVE America Act and protect every eligible American’s right to vote.

Sign Petition.

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🚂 Let it all out. A shiny, 1.2-million-pound steam locomotive named Big Boy is bringing grown men to tears at stops across the country.

🏀 Score. An Oregon teen’s $3 thrift store find was actually a Lakers jacket worn by Wilt Chamberlain during the 1972 NBA finals.

🦬 Up in the air. The man who went viral for getting tossed by a bison at Yellowstone National Park is OK but recovering from several bone fractures. He says to trust the tape, because bison “move faster than you could ever imagine.”

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🗳️ Welcome to Midterm Madness, the only newsletter you need to stay up to date on 2026 election news. Key race updates, money trails, numbers that cut through the spin, and campaign moments that say more than official talking points ever will — from The Lever team to your inbox, every Wednesday.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• House Democrats’ losing streak

• The backward logic behind a popular tax measure

• Musk’s broken election promise

👍 This pop-up newsletter is one of many exclusive benefits we provide to our paid subscribers. Thank you for your support!

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STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the key election stories that crossed our desks this week.

💰 The DNC is on the defensive as Republicans outraise Democrats by more than $100 million and President Donald Trump’s MAGA, Inc. super PAC reports a $400 million war chest.

🏃‍♀️ Sen. Darlene Graham (R-S.C.), who was picked, with Trump’s blessing, to temporarily replace her late brother Lindsey, is running to succeed him for a full six-year term.

😬 New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) revealed yesterday that the state removed more than 6,000 noncitizens erroneously placed on voter rolls following a software malfunction.

STATE OF THE RACE

DCCC doom. Yesterday, Democratic Rep. Greg Stanton (Ariz.) defeated a primary challenge from progressive activist Kai Newkirk after raising approximately 14 times more money than his opponent. Stanton, who represents Arizona’s solidly blue 4th District, was criticized for supporting continuing U.S. aid to Israel, as well as the anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act. While Newkirk swore off corporate PAC donations, Stanton accepted thousands in gifts from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), JPMorgan Chase, defense contractors, Big Tech, and…

Click here for the full article.

Originally posted at LeverNews.com

🔥 ICYMI in The Lever: Freshly off the hook, the Winklevoss twins are returning the president’s favor.

👇 Further down in this newsletter:

• Whose pockets your gas money is lining.

• The data center showdown in the desert.

• A billion-dollar victory for human creators.

STORIES TO GO

In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.

🛑 A judge has paused the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, pending state antitrust litigation.

🏛️ A federal appeals court ruled that New Jersey’s ban on assault weapons is unconstitutional, the first time such a court has struck down a state ban on semi-automatic guns.

🎩 Labour Party leader Andy Burnham promised to “bring back hope” as he became Great Britain’s seventh prime minister in the past 10 years.

TODAY’S TOPLINES

Gusher. The Trump administration’s escalation of the war with Iran once again has Americans paying more at the pump, leading to a massive windfall for oil companies — even as the industry slashes jobs and reaps the benefits of reduced wartime regulations. After briefly dropping in June, the price of a gallon of gas hit $4 this week, up from $3.14 one year ago, as affordability becomes a major issue in the 2026 midterm elections. The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies reportedly raked in more than $30 million in excess profits every hour when gas prices spiked at the start of the war. And in the coming weeks, U.S.-based oil firms are expected to report their best quarterly profits in years.

📉 Still, despite increased production, employment in the oil and gas industry has fallen sharply, with Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Imperial Oil collectively shedding tens of thousands of jobs. In 2016, U.S. oil and gas extraction jobs employed 187,300 people. By June of 2026, that number had fallen to 114,500.

🫠 Under pressure from the U.S., the European Union will waive penalties for oil and gas companies that violate methane emissions laws for the next three years. The European Commission said the fee waivers are necessary to “avoid supply disruptions” caused by “the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.”

🏗️ The Center for Climate Integrity released a new report this month detailing how the oil and gas industry colluded to promote the lie of natural gas as a clean alternative to oil, “despite knowing that it is a significant source of air pollution and a major contributor to climate change.”

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Cash draw. Arizona’s primary elections are today, and a four-term congressman is vastly out-fundraising his opponent in hopes of avoiding the same fate as Democratic incumbents ousted by progressives this cycle. Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.), who until now has never faced a primary challenge, amassed at least $2.1 million for his reelection bid — roughly 14 times the amount raised by his Democratic opponent, activist Kai Newkirk. Stanton has accepted donations from major corporations including UnitedHealth Group, Google, SpaceX, and Fox. But Newkirk — perhaps best known for interrupting the Supreme Court in protest of Citizens United — swore off all corporate PAC money.

🏜️ In drought-prone Arizona, water-and-electricity-intensive data centers have become a central topic of debate. Stanton has remained hawkish on the artificial intelligence boom, while Newkirk supports a moratorium on data center construction. An affiliate of Leading the Future, a pro-AI political action committee funded by Big Tech, dropped more than $225,000 on outside advertising to back Stanton.

🇮🇱 Like other Democratic primary battles, Israel has also been a prominent topic of disagreement. Stanton is a staunch supporter of the U.S.-Israel alliance and accepted more than $100,000 in direct and earmarked contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) this cycle.

🗳️ Newkirk, meanwhile, has completely sworn off AIPAC funds and even filed an election interference complaint with the Arizona attorney general, alleging illegal Israeli interference in his race.

DAY IN DATA

The grift is unprecedented. (Source: Steve Rattner)

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT

Checks in the mail. A federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion payment to settle a class action copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors and publishers whose work was used to train artificial intelligence. The company will pay $3,000 for each of the approximately 500,000 works listed in the suit.

✍️ It’s the largest copyright infringement settlement in U.S. history, though on the core issue of fair use, now-retired U.S. District Judge William Alsup sided with Anthropic, determining that the company can use copyrighted text to train its AI models.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Your Senators: Reject Trump’s Voter Suppression Bill. President Trump is pressuring Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act after reviving false claims about the 2020 election in a primetime address.

The bill would impose new voting restrictions, including requiring proof of citizenship to register and limiting mail-in voting.

Tell your senators: Reject the SAVE America Act and protect every eligible American’s right to vote.

Sign Petition

DOOMSCROLL DISTRACTIONS

🧁 A sweet discovery. Scientists found a sugar molecule in a dust cloud outside of our solar system, which could offer clues about how life on Earth got started.

🤿 Old ladies for clean waters. These seniors have collected 6,000 pounds of trash from Cape Cod.

🍸 Just a nip. Smaller bottles of booze are all the rage.