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Americans across the country feel that our economy is broken, as stagnant wages and rising prices make it increasingly impossible to get by. In reality, the system is working exactly as designed. 

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Trump administration is quietly considering a rule change that could make it easier for polluters to build facilities—including certain gas plants and diesel generators that power data centers—with little to no notice to the public. On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing […]

The White House has admitted in court that it deliberately canceled federal grants to states that didn’t vote for President Trump.In court documents filed last week, and first reported on by The New York Times, Trump administration officials confirmed they terminated $7.5 billion in clean energy grants in October “based solely” on political criteria, focusing on states with Democratic leadership that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. The admission came in a lawsuit filed by California researchers challenging the cancellation of Biden-era funding in multiple federal agencies.At the time, the White House said it was slashing the grants, passed during the Biden administration, to prevent tax dollars from being wasted. Office of Management and Budget director and Project 2025 architect Russ Vought called the money “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” and singled out projects in 16 blue states: “CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”Only one month ago, Energy Secretary Chris Wright angrily insisted to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the cuts “did not involve politics in the decision-making of our review process,” calling any accusation that the funding cancellations targeted certain states for political reasons “bullshit.”But last week, a Department of Energy lawyer conceded the obvious.“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators,” the attorney wrote in a court filing, confessing that the grants were not terminated “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”Similar green energy grants in Republican-led states that voted for Trump in 2024 were left untouched, despite the Department of Energy recommending their cancellation, the government said in the filing. The Trump administration is coming clean now, it said, because it wanted to avoid the government having to participate in the discovery process for the lawsuit.That process could lead to the government having to hand over much more damaging internal documents to the lawyers representing the researchers. It’s not just about clean energy grants. The Trump administration has also held up other federal funding for states that didn’t support the president, such as FEMA disaster aid and childcare funding. While the court’s decision on this lawsuit is still pending, no matter how the judge rules, Trump is not likely to end his belligerent attempts to use federal funding as punishment.

Republicans are urging the president to sidestep negotiations with Tehran and instead pound Iran even harder.Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker told The Hill Thursday that he encouraged the president to continue hitting the country through multiple conversations over the course of the week.“I’ve expressed publicly and privately my approval of finishing the job, and realizing that negotiations were getting us nowhere,” Wicker said. “I’ve made it clear that Iran, in my judgment, has no intention of negotiating in good faith or keeping a promise and that it’s pointless to pretend that they are a trustworthy negotiating party.”Wicker added that he believed the U.S. could “keep the [Strait of Hormuz] open on our terms” and that the strait is “the key to a successful conclusion of hostilities.”Texas Representative Ronny Jackson, a close friend of Trump’s who also served as his first-term physician, told The Hill that the military needs to attack Iran “as hard as we possibly can right now.”“I would do everything I possibly can right now to turn them around. So that’d be my thought,” said Jackson, who has positioned himself to be the next chair of the House Armed Services Committee.“I just think maximum pressure from the air and maximum security of the strait—anything they have that they could possibly use to cause problems in the strait needs to be destroyed,” Jackson added.Trump made clear this week that he intends to ramp up the unyielding conflict. In an ominous Truth Social post Thursday, Trump pledged to hold Tehran “responsible” for attacks carried out by Yemen’s Houthis the night before against Saudi Arabian ships. Hours later, Trump told Axios that he was “considering a massive attack.”“Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it,” the president told the digital outlet.The unending Iran war has deeply frustrated Trump, according to administration officials who spoke with The Wall Street Journal late Thursday. Trump has tried to find an off-ramp from the conflict in the months since he threatened to obliterate Iran’s “entire civilization,” but he has been repeatedly unsuccessful in doing so.But while MAGA war hawks urge him on, some of Trump’s advisers are reportedly concerned that the ongoing hostilities could harm Republican election odds in November, a failure that could transform his final two years in office. Trump pursued war against Iran following an unusual Situation Room meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump then went to war without congressional approval, and without formally addressing the American public regarding his intent.Americans, meanwhile, have suffered. The war has killed at least 18 U.S. service members, and taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs.

The Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee recommended keeping the state at the front of their primary calendar.