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The country’s poultry and swine processing plants, already incredibly dangerous workplaces, are poised to get a green light from the Trump administration to vastly speed up the work. In February, the Agriculture Department released two proposed regulations to increase evisceration line speeds for hogs, chickens, and turkeys. The swine plant proposal removes the current maximum of 1,106 hogs an hour and instead imposes no limit at all, allowing companies “to determine their own line speeds,” which has never happened before. The proposed poultry rule, meanwhile, allows all chicken plants to run at 175 birds per minute, a limit that has only applied previously to plants involved in a pilot program. Turkey processing plants could increase from 55 to 60 birds per minute.The rules, which come after the meatpacking industry has repeatedly lobbied for the ability to run lines as fast as possible, will almost certainly lead to more worker injuries. Workers will be left with chronic pain or amputated digits and limbs, but they will make these companies more money. “More meat, more profits,” noted Kathleen Fagan, an adjunct professor in the Case Western University school of medicine and a former medical officer at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. The effects of this new rule will not only be felt by workers; it also threatens to let more foodborne pathogens infect Americans’ meat.The industry, which is already made up of highly profitable conglomerates, has unsuccessfully tried for this before. Under President Barack Obama, it pressed for higher speeds overall; instead, the administration allowed 20 poultry plants to run faster as a pilot program. Under the first Trump administration, the industry petitioned to get rid of “arbitrary line speed limitations,” but rather than accede to that demand, more plants were allowed to apply for waivers to join the pilot and increase their speeds. Now that these companies have cozied up to the second Trump administration, they are on the verge of getting what they’ve long sought. Pilgrim’s Pride, a subsidiary of Brazilian behemoth JBS, donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, while Tyson donated $1 million. The proposed rules are “just doing the industry’s bidding,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a fellow at Georgetown University who worked at OSHA for six years.The administration is also misusing the findings of federal research into worker safety in poultry and swine plants, according to the two scientists who led the research, to argue that faster line speeds won’t hurt workers. In their public comments, the scientists state that “the results of our study do not support the Proposed Rule” in both poultry and swine. They argue that, until the high risk of injury and pain in these plants is mitigated, the agency “should not allow or facilitate increased line speeds.”“They’re looking at part of the research, and they’re ignoring other parts,” said Carisa Harris-Adamson, associate adjunct professor of environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley and one of the lead scientists. “That’s unfortunate, because it means that no matter what the results would have been, they were likely to use them in the way that they wanted: to eliminate line speed regulations.” In these studies, researchers went into poultry and swine plants, some operating at elevated line speeds, to evaluate the impact on workers. In poultry, they found, 81 percent of workers were at high risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, and they were at higher risk if they had a higher piece rate, or had to handle more bird parts per minute. Forty percent of workers reported moderate to severe upper extremity pain from the work over the previous year. The researchers also found that 46 percent of swine plant workers were at high risk of musculoskeletal disorders, which was associated with higher piece rates, while 42 percent of swine workers reported pain. These findings were “measured objectively, quantitatively,” Harris-Adamson noted.The injuries and chronic conditions were “related to the work they were doing, and it really had to do with how fast they had to work and the repetitive jobs,” said Fagan, who was “unceremoniously” kicked off the study at the behest of the industry before it was completed. Workers whom she and the other researchers interviewed would tell them they had no health issues before they began the work and that symptoms would improve at home and then worsen on the job. “It’s just too fast,” she said.The studies found that, in poultry, there were similar hazards to worker safety in plants running at 140 birds per minute, or bpm, as at 175 bpm, which the administration is claiming in its proposed rulemaking means that the higher speeds are just as safe. But what the research found, Harris-Adamson asserted, was high levels of risk in both settings. “That was misconstrued to say there’s no difference between the two and therefore we’re going to allow them to run faster,” Harris-Adamson said. “They’re ignoring the fact that there’s high hazard at both speeds.”In the study of swine plants, meanwhile, all of the plants were operating at high speeds. One was found to have high rates of injury, while another had lower. The administration “essentially averaged those two,” Harris-Adamson said, to say there’s no difference. “That’s really faulty logic.” Lower levels at one plant don’t excuse the higher levels at the other, she said. “There was a clear increase in hazard for some workers.”“We thought the findings spoke for themselves that at the lower line speeds there was a lot of hazard,” she added. She had hoped the outcome would be efforts to require the industry to increase safety before any other waivers to run at higher speeds were granted.Of the proposed rules, Harris-Adamson said, “Do I think workers will suffer? Yeah, I do.”Higher line speeds don’t necessarily lead to more worker injuries. In the two USDA studies, higher risk of injury was directly correlated with how fast the piece rate was, but higher evisceration line speeds don’t lead to higher piece rates if the work takes longer or more employees are added to handle it. The companies can’t afford to let carcasses pile up after evisceration, however, and adding more workers is “a financial decision,” Harris-Adamson pointed out. “The more staff you have to hire, the more you’re paying.” A plant that received a waiver to run at 175 in 2018, for example, simply reduced the number of days it operated from six to five, cramming more work into less time.Companies are under no obligation to spend the extra profits they’ll generate from faster lines to hire more workers; the proposed rules don’t mandate any mitigation steps. “You’re taking a group of workers who already have high exposure [to risk of harm] at even lower line speed levels and it’s going to be up to their individual employer as to whether they protect their workers or not,” Harris-Adamson said. “If we could trust employers to understand the issues and respond accordingly, we wouldn’t be seeing such high hazards.”Even if companies wanted to hire more workers, it might not be possible. There isn’t necessarily room in the highly crowded plants to add more people on the lines. Poultry and swine processing workforces are majority immigrants, sometimes undocumented and sometimes with Temporary Protected Status, so the Trump administration’s huge increase in immigration enforcement and attempts to end TPS will make those workers scarcer. Without limits or requirements, meanwhile, there will almost certainly be a race to the bottom. “There’s a hugely unfair disadvantage for companies that are trying to do the right thing,” Harris-Adamson said.These problems could at least be mitigated if OSHA were empowered to act. But while the agency put out a standard in 2000 to protect workers from musculoskeletal injuries, Congress rescinded it and blocked the agency from issuing the same rule in the future. “That would have prevented hundreds of thousands of work-related injuries and saved many, many workers from years of pain and suffering,” Fagan said. Congress could still act by passing legislation that instructs OSHA to create a standard to protect meat processing workers.“I am convinced that there will be an increase in work-related injuries, musculoskeletal disorders, and also acute injuries if things go faster—people are going to slip and fall, there will be more amputations and cuts,” Fagan said.The proposed rules also eliminate a requirement in both swine and poultry plants to report back to the USDA on their programs to monitor and document workers’ injuries. “USDA is saying, ‘We don’t have to care about worker safety,’” Berkowitz said. USDA and OSHA currently have a memorandum of understanding that requires them to work together on meat processing worker safety, but Fagan sees this waiving of the reporting requirement as a weakening of that agreement. “It’s a first salvo to cutting ties completely with OSHA,” she said. Indeed, USDA appears to be distancing itself from responsibility for worker safety; in response to a request for comment on whether the rules will increase injuries, a USDA spokesperson said, “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is the Federal agency with statutory authority to promote workplace safety and health.”“The data and science are very clear,” Berkowitz said. “This is going to harm workers.”Then there’s what higher line speeds could do to food safety. The Trump administration argues that there won’t be an impact on food safety and isn’t requiring any heightened monitoring for foodborne pathogens. But Jill Mauer, who was a USDA inspector for 31 years in swine processing plants, and Hallie Varvel, who was a USDA supervisory public health veterinarian, say they couldn’t adequately do their jobs under current speeds. “At current speeds with current staffing levels, they’re not able to observe the animals for food safety and animal welfare purposes,” said Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, who supported Mauer and Varvel in writing their comments.The administration argues that USDA line inspectors in charge can stop the lines if food inspection problems arise. An agency spokesperson tells The New Republic: “[The Food Safety and Inspection Service] protects the public’s health by ensuring that meat, poultry and egg products are safe, wholesome and properly labeled. In its recent proposals to update poultry and swine processing regulations, FSIS is seeking to clarify and streamline regulatory requirements to align with FSIS’ statutory responsibilities while preserving all necessary food safety verification and inspection activities. Further, under these proposals federal inspectors retain the authority to slow or stop lines if food safety or process control is not maintained.”Still, according to Mauer and Varvel, that’s not the reality. “The inspector in charge is under a tremendous amount of pressure to not stop the lines,” Winders said, because it costs the companies money every time workers get paid while meat isn’t being processed. In her comments, Mauer noted that she personally experienced retaliation and extra scrutiny after stopping the line. There often isn’t even an inspector in charge present at the plants, leaving no one with the authority to stop the line. The proposed rule also doesn’t require them to stop the line at any particular time, it only says that they can. “That is no assurance whatsoever that food safety and animal welfare will be protected. There is no backstop,” Winders said.“Based on my direct experience, I believe these high-speed models lead to lower-quality meat products and increase the likelihood that unsafe food reaches the public,” Mauer wrote in her public comments. “At higher speeds, there is less time to observe, less time to react, and less margin for error.” But it might be hard to know exactly how much more illness these rules, if they go into effect, will cause. The Trump administration has significantly weakened the country’s surveillance system for identifying and limiting the spread of foodborne illnesses.“We are going to have more food outbreaks, and some number of Americans are going to die because of this,” Winders said. * This article has been updated.

Minnesota State Senator John Marty was furious with the nonprofit National Council on Problem Gambling, so much so that he couldn’t wait until morning to fire off an angry email. “I am deeply disappointed to see this!” he wrote to an NCPG staffer one night in April 2025, after a Senate colleague shared the draft of an op-ed by Keith Whyte, NCPG’s longtime executive director and one of America’s most prominent advocates for mitigating gambling harm, endorsing an industry-backed bill that would legalize sports betting in Minnesota.Marty, a Democrat and staunch critic of the gambling business, was dismayed: NCPG traditionally remains neutral on gambling expansion, but that hadn’t stopped Whyte from speaking forcefully over the years about dangers associated with the online betting boom. After a 2018 Supreme Court decision, Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, opened the floodgates by declaring a 1992 federal ban on sports gambling unconstitutional, Whyte warned Congress, “This Frankenstein’s monster of advertising, access, and action is unprecedented.” Returning to Capitol Hill six years later—by which point Americans were legally wagering about $150 billion every year—Whyte declared: “The evidence is overwhelming that expanded sports betting has led to increased harm on a national scale.”Yet a few months after delivering that impassioned testimony, Whyte was pushing to legalize sports betting in Minnesota, one of about a dozen holdout states, arguing that people there were wagering with black-market bookies, and a “legal, regulated marketplace is far safer than unregulated platforms that lack basic safeguards.” The Gopher State had previously rejected several sports-wagering proposals, but Whyte’s endorsement—which argued that this bill included the strongest consumer protections in the country—was viewed by some state senators as a game changer.Marty hadn’t noticed the bio at the bottom of Whyte’s op-ed describing his NCPG tenure in the past tense. The NCPG staffer he emailed provided further clarity. “[Whyte] is a paid lobbyist of the Sports Betting Alliance now, so they are paying him for this opinion,” the person wrote. “To say it is frustrating to us is an understatement. Not only because he has changed course from his 26 years at NCPG, but because it leads to mix-ups like this.” (Marty shared their exchange on the condition that The New Republic not identify the staffer.)The Sports Betting Alliance lobbies on behalf of five top sports gambling operators: FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Fanatics Sportsbook, and bet365. After Marty told his colleagues about Whyte’s new affiliation, he said support for the bill collapsed. Minnesota still hasn’t authorized bookmaking, though this past April, Whyte wrote another op-ed, in The Minnesota Star Tribune, urging the state to reconsider.Marty called Whyte’s turn to lobbying, and his efforts to disguise those shifting loyalties, “disturbing,” though he added, “maybe the guy just changed his mind on all this.”Whyte insists that’s not the case, telling me, “I’ve got 30 years of being pretty consistent on these issues, and that’s, I think, what people value.”He describes himself as a “strategic adviser” to SBA, and the organization said he does not provide lobbying services. Yet there’s no doubt Whyte has been dispatched to influence lawmakers nationwide on behalf of the gambling industry: In Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., he’s written op-eds and testified in favor of expanding legal sports betting and online casino gambling, while opposing efforts to curtail those industries or raise their taxes.Recruiting former critics like Whyte is a powerful tool for sustaining the betting business’s meteoric growth.The tobacco industry was notorious for co-opting trusted health experts to vouch for the safety of smoking. Today’s gambling giants are deploying a similar strategy, and Whyte is perhaps the most egregious example, considering he’s leveraging his reputation as NCPG’s longtime leader to advance the interests of sports betting corporations. Some former colleagues feel betrayed. Americans have legally wagered more than $650 billion since that Supreme Court decision, and nearly half of bettors say they’ve felt ashamed after losing a bet. Evidence is piling up of legalization causing more bankruptcies, lower credit scores, and surges in gambling addiction, putting the industry on the defensive more than ever. Recruiting former critics like Whyte is a powerful tool for sustaining the betting business’s meteoric growth.Asked why he’d endorsed Minnesota’s sports betting bill while failing to disclose his ties to SBA, Whyte demurred, “I don’t think I was involved in any of that.” I then sent him the Minnesota op-ed to jog his memory, and he conceded he should have disclosed working for SBA. Later, I asked why he’d supported that bill, proposed by state Senator Nick Frentz, as opposed to one from Marty, which included significantly more aggressive consumer protections, such as banning wagering at stadiums, prohibiting misleading “risk-free” promotions, and requiring sportsbooks to intervene if customers exhibit potential signs of addiction—all issues Whyte has expressed concern about in the past.Whyte said he considered Frentz’s bill more “pragmatic.” But, he added, “Part of the issue was, of course, the industry was behind Frentz’s bill, and that’s the group that I’m working with—the online sportsbook operators.”The nonprofit that became NCPG was co-founded in 1972 by Dr. Robert Custer, a psychiatrist whose pioneering research led to the official recognition of gambling as potentially addictive. The Washington, D.C.–based organization was run by volunteers until 1998, when it received a grant to hire its first full-time staffer, an executive director. Whyte, then in his late twenties and serving as director of research for the gambling industry’s new trade group, the American Gaming Association, got the job. “It was not uncontroversial to hire someone who had industry connections,” Whyte told me in 2024 for my book Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. “But the folks on the board realized that working with the industry was something that the National Council was going to need to do.”Whyte helped expand NCPG from an annual budget of about $100,000 to more than $5 million by 2024, supporting a staff of 13. About 20 percent of that funding comes from gambling companies, and roughly $2 million comes from the NFL, which, of course, is now heavily invested in gambling. Whyte allowed any company to become an NCPG member as long as it paid dues, regardless of whether it took steps to mitigate gambling harm.Some people noticed a gradual shift at NCPG, including Dave Yeager, who developed a gambling addiction while serving in the military and is now in recovery, helping people across the country with gambling problems. He recently served on NCPG’s board. Though he admires Whyte personally, Yeager told me, “It felt like we started catering to the industry far more than we were catering to serving people who struggle with gambling addiction.”Still, when called upon to discuss the risks of gambling during his tenure at NCPG, Whyte was inexhaustible, giving, by his estimation, about 2,000 media interviews over his time. The executive directorship was hardly glamorous; his office could have passed for that of an assistant professor.His approach, at NCPG and in his consulting, highlights a profound divide among gambling health advocates. Whyte believes sportsbooks can reduce gambling harm by encouraging customers to bet responsibly. Critics of that model say preaching “responsibility” lets gambling operators off the hook for making their products increasingly addictive, while promoting the cruel stigma that gamblers with a mental health disorder really have a character defect.One of those critics is Harry Levant, a recovering gambling addict who serves as director of gambling policy for the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University.“I believe at both the state and federal level in the rank and file there are some wonderful, caring people who desperately want to effectuate change and protect people,” he said. “I believe they are trapped in a system called ‘the responsible gaming model’ that is scientifically flawed, ethically dangerous, and ethically compromised. And I think the single biggest proponent of this model for years was Keith Whyte.”Whyte’s peers in the advocacy world are split about whether he’s sold out. Some said he deserves the benefit of the doubt—that he’s partnering with the industry to advance the same safeguards he supported at NCPG. Others said it’s exactly because he’s so trusted that his lobbying is uniquely damaging, lending legitimacy to discredited industry talking points. His critics said the Sports Betting Alliance’s deal with Whyte reflects a broader industry strategy to neutralize health experts and counter mounting fears of a gambling-fueled public health crisis.Many still wonder why Whyte left NCPG in the first place. The organization released a curt statement in January 2025, thanking him for his service, and he posted cryptically on LinkedIn that “it is time for a new challenge.” NCPG and Whyte declined to address his departure for this story, but multiple people told me the organization’s board of directors voted unanimously to dismiss him, frustrated that NCPG wasn’t growing to meet the moment and concerned that Whyte had become too dominant a presence, unwilling to relinquish more control and visibility to NCPG’s state affiliates.In his final year on the job, public tax filings show, Whyte made $158,224. After he was fired, the SBA offered him a significant raise: $20,000 a month, according to a former colleague who said Whyte shared that figure with them. (Whyte declined to comment.)Whyte told me he’s proud to have consistently occupied the “center lane.” The slogan of his consultancy is “Promoting responsible gambling to help prevent gambling addiction.” One of his first clients was the Sports Betting Alliance. Whether he believed in their approach or not, he might have had a hard time declining such a significant payday; public records show he and his wife filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in 2011, having accumulated about $145,000 in unsecured debt, much of it on credit cards. Their repayment plan was completed in December 2016. “Financial decisions from more than a decade ago have no bearing on my current work,” Whyte told me.Last September, he announced he was also consulting for FanDuel. Asked to describe what changes he’s encouraged, Whyte said customers should have to opt out of setting personal deposit limits, as opposed to having to opt in to that tool, and that for “VIPs”—gamblers who receive extravagant perks in exchange for losing staggering amounts of money—deposit limits should be mandatory. He said FanDuel tells him it’s “moving to” making those changes; but asked for comment, the company declined to make that commitment, saying, “Keith brings a valuable perspective and a strong track record in advancing player protection, and we’re fortunate to work with him on a range of responsible gaming initiatives.”He also makes $275 an hour consulting for the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, offering advice on how best to regulate sportsbook advertising, VIP programs, and wagering limits imposed on winning bettors. His contract, obtained through a public records request, includes an elaborate rundown of his credentials but makes no mention of his consulting for the betting industry.A commission spokesperson said Whyte disclosed his work for SBA and FanDuel, and that the commission’s lawyers determined it “did not need to be included in his contract,” adding, “the Commission does not consider his working with sports wagering operators as a conflict.” A Massachusetts law barring the regulator from employing people who have worked recently for a licensee, the spokesperson clarified, “applies to casino gaming and not sports wagering.”Whyte is hardly the first person from a gambling nonprofit to accept industry money. “Maybe people feel that they can contribute to change within as opposed to outside,” said Jeff Wasserman, a Delaware-based lawyer who is in recovery for gambling addiction and previously served on NCPG’s board. “I understand it. Does that make me happy about it? No. It’s disappointing.”He said he takes issue with Whyte trumpeting his NCPG credentials while doing SBA’s bidding. “When you use your past experience to promote something that is contrary to a lot of the principles that you once hopefully had, and certainly advocated for, yeah, that’s pretty scummy.”As betting firms rake in money, they’re upping the pressure on states to legalize new forms of gambling—and deploying people like Whyte to sweeten the pitch. Last year, Virginia’s General Assembly was considering whether to legalize online casino gambling, giving people the chance to risk money on games such as roulette, slots, and blackjack played on their phones. Only about half a dozen states have legalized online casinos, which generate roughly four times as much revenue as sportsbooks and are widely believed to be considerably more addictive. (As a former FanDuel employee once told me, “Online casino is probably, ethically, the worst product they have.”)Brianne Doura-Schawohl, who was once among Whyte’s top lieutenants at NCPG and now lobbies to curtail online gambling on behalf of a variety of groups, testified, as did David Rebuck, New Jersey’s former top gambling regulator; Whyte; and Michelle McGann MacGregor, SBA’s senior policy adviser.At one point, state Senator Bryce Reeves, a Republican, said the legislature had been misled in the past by experts who “didn’t want to disclose certain things about who was paying their bills.” Addressing MacGregor, he asked about Whyte and Rebuck. “I hope you’ll be honest with me … are they compensated by the Sports Alliance or anybody you’re associated with?”“No, absolutely not,” she replied.Asked to explain that response, SBA said Whyte wasn’t testifying that day on its behalf. Whyte echoed that defense, saying, “I wasn’t being paid to represent them at that hearing.”When I shared this with Reeves, he said MacGregor’s denial amounted to “false testimony.”That August day, Whyte had offered a mixed assessment of whether Virginia should legalize online casinos. But this March, he published a full-throated endorsement in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, writing that Virginia’s proposal, if enacted, “would become the gold standard of consumer protections for the United States.” (That bill stalled in the legislature.)Even more audacious was an op-ed he published in April in The Daily Sentinel, a newspaper in Grand Junction, Colorado, one of several states considering bills that would dramatically rein in online betting—in Colorado’s case, by curtailing advertising, promotions, push notifications, certain types of bets, and capping customers to five deposits per day.“Restricting legal, licensed operators isn’t the right strategy,” Whyte wrote, arguing that “the primary responsibility rests with the individual to make informed choices about their gambling.” He criticized the “common misconception” of using increasing calls to problem-gambling help lines as evidence of rising gambling problems.All of this contradicts statements Whyte made in recent years. In 2021, he warned of “a race to the bottom leaving families burdened with gambling-related addiction,” and as evidence of that harm cited “a rise in calls to gambling help lines.”In 2024, he told me that “advertising is such a big thing” contributing to gambling problems. But when asked for this story about the risks of excessive advertising, he said, “I don’t give it as much weight, and I never have.”Whyte has been adament that sportsbooks can’t be trusted to self-police, and that states must impose tighter guardrails. But one of SBA’s “core objectives” is to “defend against market restrictions.”Over the years, he’s been adamant that sportsbooks can’t be trusted to self-police, and that states must impose tighter guardrails. But one of SBA’s “core objectives,” as its president, Joe Maloney, articulated in March, is to “defend against market restrictions in legalized jurisdictions.”I asked Whyte how advancing that mission is compatible with his values.“In my work with SBA, they have supported good RG [responsible gaming] regulations,” he said.That will be tested this year, as Congress considers a proposal to allocate one-third of revenue collected by the long-standing federal excise tax on sports betting—25 cents for every $100 wagered—toward gambling addiction research, prevention, and treatment.At NCPG, Whyte was a staunch supporter of an earlier version of that bill, which the gambling industry fought to defeat. At the time, Whyte told me it was a damning reflection on sportsbooks that they’re so opposed to government funding of gambling research.“They want to count the revenue,” he had said. “They do not want to count the bodies.” By NCPG supporting federal funding for research, Whyte added, “We’re on the right side of history.”When we spoke recently, he pledged to support this latest bill. In a statement, Maloney said, “The federal excise tax should be repealed, not repurposed.”I asked Whyte if SBA’s opposition to federally funded research might make him reconsider working for the group.Almost whispering, he replied, “It would.”

The post Ken Paxton Wanted to Crack Down on Forum Shopping. Now Lawyers Say He’s Improperly Seeking Out Favorable Courts. appeared first on ProPublica.

Jon Rainwater for Common Dreams You know their names. Renee Good was 37 years old, a poet, a mother of three, when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer named Jonathan Ross fired three shots into her car on a January morning in Minneapolis. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner has ruled her death a homicide. Evidence indicates she was still alive when […]

Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich appears to have found the perfect way to answer a reported ICC arrest warrant request for war crimes: announce more war crimes. According to Common Dreams, Smotrich said the ICC prosecutor had secretly sought a warrant tied to the forced expulsion of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. His […]

A new bipartisan bill would impose sanctions and freeze assistance in response to the country’s political crisis.

Republicans can afford to lose only three votes and still pass the legislation.

The EPA’s new plan would repeal federal drinking water limits for four PFAS compounds and delay “compliance deadlines” for two of the most studied and dangerous ones, PFOA and PFOS, until 2031. 

Donald Trump just endorsed MAGA nutjob Ken Paxton in the Texas GOP primary for Senate, potentially killing off establishment incumbent Senator John Cornyn. As GOP senators absorbed this news, reporters described them as “visibly dismayed” and “stone-faced.” Senator Lisa Murkowski openly declared that Trump has now put the seat “in jeopardy,” asking: “How does that help strengthen the president’s hand when we lose a state like Texas?” Translation: Trump has screwed himself and his party in a big way. This might cost them the seat, and at a minimum it makes it much harder to hold. So is Texas actually gettable for Democrats? We talked to Democratic operative Sawyer Hackett, a veteran of Texas races. He explains why Paxton is much weaker than Cornyn, why a perfect storm of conditions in the state could bring about the unthinkable, what Democrat James Talarico’s path to victory looks like, and what could still go wrong for Democrats. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.