News to Know: Trump 2.0
July 19, 2025
Notice 1: Given the passage of the Trump Administration’s major budget and taxation initiatives, I realized that it will be imperative to follow budgetary, economic, and taxation issues - especially at the state and local level (where the impact will hit hard).
With that thought in mind, I’ll be adding an additional “News to Know” focusing on those issue areas. That will make for a ready reference as you prepare questions for candidate forums and incumbent town halls, write Opinion pieces for print publications, and/or advocate for remedial measures at the state and local level. I trust that the material will be exceptionally helpful to candidates as well.
Notice 2: Berke is back with a new version of Bloom County!
Notice 3: As usual, the full text of this “News to Know” (with additional graphics) is attached as a PDF.
I. Ongoing Actions
Executive Office of the President, Executive Orders.[1]
Executive Office of the President, Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Federal Budget.[2]
Fiscal Conditions, “Monthly Treasury Statement, Receipts and Outlays of the US Government”[3] & “Tracking Federal Expenditures in Real Time.”[4]
United States Courts, Current Judicial Vacancies.[5]
United States Department of Justice, Office of the Pardons Attorney, Pardons and Commutations.[6]
Immigration Actions, https://deportationdata.org and https://tracreports.org/immigration.
Immigration News (National Immigration Forum), https://immigrationforum.org.
Litigation Tracker, https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenges-trump-administration.
Litigation Tracker, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/projects-series/trials-of-the-trump-administration/tracking-trump-administration-litigation.
Overall Developments, https://apnews.com/projects/trump-executive-order-lawsuit-tracker & https://www.justsecurity.org/112792/trump-administrations-state-power-big-picture.
Tariff Tracker, https://www.tradecomplianceresourcehub.com/2025/06/26/trump-2-0-tariff-tracker.
II. News to Know
Astrvansh, Vivek, “That $20 Dress Direct From China Now Costs $30 After Trump Closed a Tariff Loophole – and the US Will Soon End the ‘De Minimis’ Exemption For the Rest of the World, Too,” The Conversation (July 9, 2025).[7]
Fast fashion got a lot pricier for Americans this spring – and it’ll likely get even more expensive in 2027. That’s because the Trump administration has been rolling back a little-known feature of U.S. customs law that for years had allowed retailers to ship packages duty-free to U.S. shoppers – as long as each shipment was valued under $800. Known as the “de minimis” exception, this rule had helped keep prices low on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Shein and Temu, boosting their popularity with American shoppers.
But as of May 2, 2025, that advantage disappeared – at least for China and Hong Kong. That’s when the U.S. officially eliminated the exemption for low-priced imports from those places. Suddenly, cheap fashion wasn’t so cheap anymore – and demand for Shein and Temu plummeted.
But while bargain hunters might hope for workarounds by ordering from platforms based in Vietnam or elsewhere, that’s a temporary fix. The exemption is set to be eliminated for all countries in 2027, thanks to language in the tax and spending bill just signed into law.
Bird, Robert, “The Rule of Law is Key to Capitalism − Eroding It Is Bad News For American Business,” The Conversation (July 2, 2025).[8]
Something dangerous is happening to the U.S. economy, and it’s not inflation or trade wars. Chaotic deregulation and the selective enforcement of laws have upended markets and investor confidence. At one point, the threat of tariffs and resulting chaos evaporated $4 trillion in value in the U.S. stock market. This approach isn’t helping the economy, and there are troubling signs it will hurt both the U.S. and the global economy in the short and long term.
The rule of law – the idea that legal rules apply to everyone equally, regardless of wealth or political connections − is essential for a thriving economy. Yet globally the respect for the rule of law is slipping, and the U.S. is slipping with it. According to annual rankings from the World Justice Project, the rule of law has declined in more than half of all countries for seven years in a row.[9] The rule of law in the U.S., the most economically powerful nation in the world, is now weaker than the rule of law in Uruguay, Singapore, Latvia and over 20 other countries.
When regulation is unnecessarily burdensome for business, government should lighten the load. However, arbitrary and frenzied deregulation does not free corporations to earn higher profits… Chaotic deregulation doesn’t drive growth. It only fuels risk.
Legal uncertainty has become a serious drag on American competitiveness.
A study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that public policy risks — such as unexpected changes in taxes, regulation and enforcement — ranked among the top challenges businesses face, alongside more familiar business threats such as competition or economic volatility.[10] Companies that can’t predict how the law might change are forced to plan for the worst. That means holding back on long-term investment, slowing innovation and raising prices to cover new risks.
When the government enforces rules arbitrarily, it also undermines property rights. For example, if a country enters into a major trade agreement and then goes ahead and violates it, that threatens the property rights of the companies that relied on the agreement to conduct business. If the government can seize assets without due process, those assets lose their stability and value. And if that treatment depends on whether a company is in the government’s political favor, it’s not just bad economics − it’s a red flag for investors.
When government doesn’t enforce rules fairly, it also threatens people’s freedom to enter into contracts.
Cameron, Dell, “DHS Tells Police That Common Protest Activities Are ‘Violent Tactics’”, Wired (July 10, 2025).[11]
DHS is urging law enforcement to treat even skateboarding and livestreaming as signs of violent intent during a protest, turning everyday behavior into a pretext for police action.
Cooper, Ryan and Dayen, David, “Ten Bizarre Things Hidden in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill,” The American Prospect (July 7, 2025).[12]
Hale Spencer, Saranac, “Border Czar Makes Misleading Claim About Immigrants With Criminal Records,” FactCheck.org (July 17, 2025).[13]
Kelly, Makena and Elliott, Vittoria, “This is DOGE 2.0,” Wired (July 10, 2025).[14]
____________, “DOGE Put Free Tax Filing Tool on Chopping Block After One Meeting With Lobbyists,” Wired (July 17, 2025).[15]
Nathan, Debbie, “ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court,” The Intercept (July 15, 2025).[16]
Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers.
“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime.
…. Immigration which are run by the Executive Office for Immigration Review — part of the executive branch, not the judiciary — are far less transparent than most courts. Their prosecutors work for ICE and DHS; they have no obligation to provide defense lawyers; and their judges are appointed — and fired — by the president.
…. Judge Shirley Lazare-Raphael, who is also a New York City immigration judge, told The Intercept that the new phenomenon of occluding ICE attorneys’ names has not been formalized via a directive or rule. “It’s up to the judges whether or not they want to do it,” she said. … Lazare-Raphael said she had heard that some ICE attorneys have said they found it “dangerous to state their names publicly.”
That reasoning echoes DHS’s questionable claim that ICE agents need to mask up because of what the department described as an almost 700 percent increase in assaults against agents nationally during the first six months of this year. But as DHS revealed last week, the raw number of assaults this year is 79, compared to 10 in the same period last year. Given that ICE arrests have more than quadrupled since Trump took office — and the agency’s determination of what qualifies as an assault is often dubious — this uptick likely sounds more dramatic than it is.
…. Adam Boyd, a former ICE attorney who resigned last month, according to a report in The Atlantic, said that many ICE lawyers feel frustrated about having to ask judges to dismiss cases so that ICE enforcement and removal officers can grab immigrants outside courtrooms and swell the Trump administration’s deportation numbers. Boyd said he left after making what he called “a moral decision.”[17]
The asylum system has suffered a stunning collapse under President Donald Trump’s second term. In the past six months, judges’ denials of asylum have skyrocketed from rates of 62 to 80 percent — and immigration enforcement statistics expert Austin Kocher predicts that the figure could soon top out at 95 percent.
Pradhan, Rachana and Allen, Arthur, “World’s Premier Cancer Institute Faces Crippling Cuts and Chaos,” KFF News (July 8, 2025).[18]
The White House wants Congress to slash the cancer institute’s budget by nearly 40%, to $4.53 billion, as part of a larger proposal to sharply reduce NIH’s fiscal 2026 coffers.
Saunders, Liz “Five Men, a Phone, and the Risks to Agricultural Credit,” Ag Data News (July 9, 2025).[19]
…. Access to fair credit is important for a farm’s success, since without it small farms in particular may struggle to afford better equipment, irrigation systems, and additional land. Agricultural loans obtained from commercial banks to finance production doubled between 1985 and 2024, from about $40 billion to $80 billion... Without this credit access, it’s likely that many farmers would be unable to invest in the necessary land, equipment, and labor to raise their profits, increase food supply, and reduce agriculture’s negative impacts on the environment.
…. Recognizing the importance of agricultural community access to credit, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced in 2022 a new effort focusing on these issues.[20] The agency documents the existence of rural banking deserts — census tracts that have no physical banks located within 10 miles — as well as reported instances of discriminatory and exploitative agricultural lending.[21] It highlights these as major issues limiting the credit accessibility and long-term financial health of farmers.
Since launching this initiative, the agency has taken concrete steps to address rural banking challenges, including meeting with farmers to better understand the issues and publishing a report on rural banking access. However, most notably, in March 2023 it finalized regulations implementing Section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which required lenders to report detailed information on small business loans, including those to small farms.
Farm Credit System lenders who meet the broader rule’s loan volume threshold are explicitly included in these reporting requirements. The Bureau dedicated significant discussion in the final rule to its deliberate inclusion of agricultural lending, emphasizing that the resulting data would enable fair lending oversight and enforcement in agricultural credit markets. Previously, the CFPB lacked access to the data necessary to supervise or litigate predatory lending in agriculture. Due to litigation-related delays, the rule was scheduled to become effective in summer 2025.
A dysfunctional CFPB would render this deadline moot and prevent the CFPB — and other agencies and researchers — from obtaining the data needed to even begin to protect the nation’s small farms from predatory lenders and address damaging banking deserts. To illustrate the scope of the latter problem, the figure above maps all banking deserts (urban, suburban, and rural) in California.
It’s reasonable to wonder why the lack of a physical branch would be a barrier to credit given the proliferation of online banks. However, as the CFPB noted in its 2022 report, 70% of all commercial agricultural lending comes from smaller community banks, who farmers say are able to understand and adapt to the unique rhythms of an agricultural community in a way that larger and online-only banks aren’t equipped to handle. Without the local knowledge and longstanding relationships that community banks have, outside banks often cannot accurately assess farmers’ creditworthiness and may not find it profitable to invest in developing that local expertise.
Agricultural lending is distinct from other rural small business lending because it relies on specialized, farm-level knowledge of management practices and local environmental factors that are difficult to capture remotely. Community banks are uniquely positioned to assess such risks, especially when they have a personal relationship with the farmer.
Stutz, Howard, “As International Trips to Vegas Drop, Industry Leaders Say Trump Changes Hurt, Not Help,” The Nevada Independent (July 16, 2025).[22]
Tourism experts warned last week that fees added to the nonimmigrant travel visa required to enter the country, coupled with an 80 percent cut in federal funding for a program that promotes international visitation to the U.S., could have lasting negative effects. Both were part of the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
…. [US Travel CEO Geoff] Freeman said increasing fees “discourage visitation at a time when foreign travelers are already concerned about the welcome experience and high prices.”
He also worried that the new policies could have a lasting effect on international visitation as the U.S. prepares to host soccer’s 2026 FIFA World Cup in 11 cities while planning is underway for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. “Raising fees on lawful international visitors amounts to a self-imposed tariff,” Freeman said.
…. The National Travel and Tourism Office said international airline passengers declined 1 percent in June, which includes U.S. citizens returning from abroad. However, the number of non-U.S. citizens visiting the U.S. declined by more than 6.6 percent compared to June 2024.
Tribble, Sarah Jane, “Trump Team’s Reworking Delays Billions in Broadband Build-Out,” KFF Health News (June 20, 2025).[23]
The Commerce Department, which runs the massive Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program (BEAD),[24] announced new rules in early June requiring states — some of which were ready to begin construction later this year — to solicit new bids from internet service providers.[25] The delay leaves millions of rural Americans stranded in places where health care is hard to access and telehealth is out of reach. “This does monumental harm to rural America,” said Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at Penn State.
The Biden-era program, known as BEAD, was hailed when created in 2021 as a national plan to bring fast internet to all, including millions in remote rural areas.
A yearlong KFF Health News investigation, with partner Gray Media’s InvestigateTV, found nearly 3 million people live in mostly rural counties that lack broadband as well as primary care and behavioral health care providers. In those same places, the analysis found, people live sicker and die earlier on average.
The program adopts a technology-neutral approach to “guarantee that American taxpayers obtain the greatest return on their broadband investment,” according to the June policy notice. The program previously prioritized the use of fiber-optic cable lines, but broadband experts like Ali said the new focus will make it easier for satellite-internet providers such as Elon Musk’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper to win federal funds.
…. The requirement for states to do a new round of bidding with internet service providers makes it unclear whether states will be able to connect high-speed internet to all homes, said Drew Garner, director of policy engagement at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.[26] Garner said the changes have caused “pure chaos” in state broadband offices. More than half the states have been knocked off their original timeline to deliver broadband to homes, he said.
The change also makes the program more competitive for satellite companies and wireless providers such as Verizon and T-Mobile, Garner said. Garner analyzed in March what the possible increase in low-Earth-orbit satellites would mean for rural America. He found that fiber networks are generally more expensive to build but that satellites are more costly to maintain and “much more expensive” to consumers.
…. Fiber-optic cables, installed underground or on poles, consistently provide broadband speeds that meet the Federal Communications Commission’s requirements for broadband download speed of 100 megabits per second and 20 Mbps upload speed. By contrast, a national speed analysis, performed by Ookla, a private research and analytics company, found that only 17.4% of Starlink satellite internet users nationwide consistently get those minimum speeds. The report also noted Starlink’s speeds were rising nationwide in the first three months of 2025.
Valsania, Maurizio, “Along With the Ideals It Expresses, the Declaration of Independence Mourns for Something People Lost in 1776 − and Now, Too,” The Conversation (June 17, 2025).[27]
III. Additional Resources
If you aren’t already doing so, I encourage you to read Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s “Lucid”[28] and Timothy Snyder’s “Thinking About.”[29] Can’t miss reading also includes:
Democracy Docket,[30]
Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters From An American,”[31]
Just Security’s Coverage of National Security & Other Topics,[32]
Project Democracy’s “If You Can Keep It,”[33]
Michael McFaul’s “McFaul’s World,”[34] and
Robert Reich’s Substack posts.[35]
Worth noting: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities just launched Executive Action Watch, which tracks Trump Administration actions and “explains their impact on low-and moderate-income people and the programs people use to help meet their essential needs.”[36] Another valuable factual resource is the United States Department of the Treasury, Fiscal Data.[37]
Finally, several knowledgeable individuals have launched Grant Watch, a project to track the termination of grants of scientific research agencies under the Trump administration in 2025.A project of Noam Ross, Scott Delaney, Anthony Barente, and Emma Mairson, with input and support from additional volunteers, project managers are tracking terminations of grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).Data on terminated NIH and NSF grants are collected from submissions from affected researchers as well as government websites and databases.[38]
You are a fountain of information, Sharon, Thank You and will reStack ASAP 💯👍