McMahon confirmed as Secretary of Education

Posted on March 4, 2025

The Senate voted along party lines on Monday evening to confirm Linda McMahon as the next Secretary of Education. McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive and wealthy Republican donor, served as the administrator of the Small Business Administration in the first Trump Administration. She now leads a department that President Trump has proposed eliminating.

A former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and chairman of America First Action, a pro-Trump Super PAC, McMahon has been a longtime ally of President Trump. She launched two unsuccessful campaigns to represent Connecticut in the Senate and previously served on the Connecticut State Board of Education for one year. She has also served as a trustee at Sacred Heart University for over a decade.

McMahon told reporters during her confirmation process that she “wholeheartedly” agrees with President Trump’s mission to dismantle the “bureaucracy in Washington” and return education to the states. She added that her goal is to make the Education Department “operate more efficiently,” not to defund programs. Her confirmation, however, comes in the midst of an aggressive government overhaul project, led by Elon Musk, that has targeted the department and its employees. On Friday, employees in the department were given an offer of up to $25,000 if they agreed to retire or resign by the end of the day. President Trump has also told reporters that he hopes McMahon will “work herself out of a job.”

McMahon will now take over leadership of the department of over 4,200 employees in charge of sending federal money to schools, administering college financial aid, and managing federal student loans.

Federal Funding Freeze Rescinded

Posted on February 3, 2025February 3, 2025

A controversial memo released by the Trump Administration last week has been rescinded after a federal judge in Rhode Island temporarily blocked it. Just over a week after the inauguration, the new administration announced that it would temporarily halt federal payments to ensure that they were ideologically aligned with the administration’s priorities. The order caused wide-spread concern before U.S. District Chief Judge John McConnel of Rhode Island granted the request for a temporary restraining order sought by a coalition of Democratic-led states, preventing the now-rescinded memo from taking effect. Links to the documents can be found below.

Temporary Restraining Order

Original Office of Management and Budget Memo

Trump Picks Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH

Posted on December 11, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to be his Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH is the nation’s leading public research agency. Research supported by the agency has led to more than 100 Nobel Prizes and over 99 percent of the drugs approved by federal regulators from 2010 to 2019. The agency gives out roughly $25 billion in research grants to universities each year. The UW is one of the top recipients of NIH grant funding.

Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, gained prominence during the pandemic for his criticism of lockdown procedures. According to his Stanford colleagues, Bhattacharya has been described as warm and intellectually curious, and supportive of their pursuits. It wasn’t until the Covid pandemic that Bhattacharya gained national prominence and attracted controversy. During the pandemic, Dr. Bhattacharya called for “an absolute revamping of the scientific community,” and has promised to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.”

In October 2020, along with two fellow academics, he co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. The declaration called on public health officials to roll back Covid lockdowns. The proposal advocated for “herd immunity” as the most effective way for handling the pandemic and advocated for a new approach that would “allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally and build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” The declaration sparked an intense negative reaction from the public health establishment.

Since the pandemic, Dr. Bhattacharya has often found himself in conflict with many of the organization’s leaders. Following his authoring of the Great Barrington Declaration, he accused the government of working with social media companies to suppress his views, though a recent Supreme Court ruling found that this claim was false. Still, Bhattacharya has argued that his experiences in recent years have taught him that agency officials, notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, have amassed too much power.

He recently told the Washington Post that he would “restructure the NIH to allow there to be many more centers of power, so that you couldn’t have a small number of scientific bureaucrats dominating a field for a very long time.” To do so, he proposed term limits for scientists running various research centers and shrinking the number of institutes from 27 to 15. He also has said that one of his main goals would be working to rebuild public trust in the American public health establishment, which he has lost “almost all confidence in.”

Other potential priorities floated by Bhattacharya include reducing the amount of NIH grant money that pays for publication in journals, funding studies to replicate the work of scientists in order to root out fraud and encouraging a more open discussion of scientific ideas by publishing studies alongside comments by named reviewers.

Bhattacharya will need to be confirmed by the Senate before officially taking the post.

Debate Opens on NDAA

Posted on December 11, 2024

This week, the House officially voted to open debate on the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The NDAA, passed annually by Congress for the past 60 years, provides authorization of appropriations for the Department of Defense, the nuclear weapons program under the Department of Energy, and other defense-related activities. While the NDAA does not actually appropriate any money, it provides Congressional authority and guidance for the various agencies including policy initiatives and how funding should be used, thus playing a crucial role in setting defense priorities and making organizational changes to military agencies.

The bill authorizes $896 billion in spending, including a 14.5 percent pay raise for junior enlisted troops.

While typically one of the more bipartisan bills, this year’s NDAA includes a controversial provision that led to Democratic opposition in the vote to open debate. The compromise version of the bill, which was introduced on Sunday, includes a measure that would prohibit Tricare from covering gender dysphoria treatments “that could result in sterilization” for children under 18. The provision is based on an amendment added by Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) to the Senate version of the bill.

Many Democrats, including the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), have voiced their concerns about the inclusion of this amendment, casting doubt on its ability to pass with a razor-thin Republican majority in the House. Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) said on the House floor that “military families deserve healthcare that they need, and this included gender-affirming care options for their children.”

Democrats have asserted that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) included the measure in order to appease his right flank ahead of January’s Speaker election. In a statement, Johnson defended the move, asserting that the legislation “included House-passed provisions to restore our focus on military lethality and to end the radical woke ideology being imposed on our military by permanently banning transgender medical treatment for minors and countering antisemitism.”

A number of other controversial proposals were not included in the final bill, including Section 220 the “Prohibition on Award of Research or Development Contracts or Grants to Educational Institutions that Have Violated Certain Civil Rights.” Section 220 was opposed by most higher education institutions as well as by the Department of Defense.

With the bill now coming to a vote this week, many Democrats will be faced with a difficult decision. While gender-affirming care is a red-line for many Democrats, others will find it difficult to oppose a massive defense bill that includes many bipartisan provisions.

If the NDAA passes in the House, it will head to the Senate to be voted on next week.

Trump Taps Linda McMahon to lead Education Department

Posted on November 20, 2024

On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump tapped Linda McMahon, a longtime ally and co-chair of his transition team, to lead the Department of Education. McMahon served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term.

McMahon’s relationship with the President-elect spans decades, beginning when she and her husband founded World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE. After stepping down from her role as chief executive of WWE, McMahon was appointed to the Connecticut State Board of Education, a position she held for one year before launching two unsuccessful campaigns to represent Connecticut in the Senate.

Following her Senate bids, McMahon became a prominent Republican donor and vocal supporter of then-candidate Trump. After his victory in the 2016 election, McMahon was chosen to lead the Small Business Administration. The choice was praised by Senators Blumenthal and Murphy, the two Democrats who defeated her in her Senate campaigns. Blumenthal praised her as “a person of serious accomplishment and ability,” with Murphy calling McMahon a “talented and experienced businessperson.” McMahon resigned from her post without controversy in 2019 and was praised by Trump as “one of our all-time favorites” and a “superstar.”

McMahon stayed close to Trump following her departure from the administration, chairing America First Action, a super PAC that backed Trump’s 2020 presidential run. Following his loss in the 2020 election, she helped to start the America First Policy Institute, a conservative policy group advocating for Trump’s agenda and preparing for a second term. McMahon has been serving as the co-chair of Trump’s transition team with Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive who was recently tapped to lead the Commerce Department.

President-elect Trump has repeatedly called for the dissolution of the Department of Education, and McMahon will now lead the agency. In a statement, Trump said that as Secretary of Education, “Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families.”

The America First Policy Institute has advocated for the elimination of degree requirements for public sector careers, the abolishment of DEI initiatives at state universities, and the reversal of President Biden’s student debt relief plan.

While serving on the Connecticut State Board of Education, McMahon told lawmakers that she had initially planned to become a teacher and had a lifelong interest in education. Additionally, she spent many years as a trustee for Sacred Heart University in Connecticut