From the moment he claimed victory in the Ohio Republican gubernatorial primary, Vivek Ramaswamy has built a campaign in part around a critique of his opponent’s leadership of the state’s COVID-19 response. 

The case has mostly focused on Ohio’s decisions early in the pandemic – led by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton, a physician who’s now running for governor as a Democrat – to close schools and businesses in the spring of 2020. 

Ramaswamy and the state Republican party have sought to ferry some of the lingering frustration and cynicism around COVID-19 into a race against an opponent they refer to as “Dr. Lockdown” or “Ohio’s Fauci,” a reference to longtime federal infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, who advised President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden during the pandemic and is now a frequent punching bag and apparent criminal investigation subject of Republicans. 

The state GOP has been more unsparing, accusing Acton of “recklessness dressed up in authority” and “a record marked by unconstitutional overreach, preventable suffering, and lasting damage” to Ohio families. 

“Those kids in public schools will never get those two years of their education back. That’s unforgivable,” Ramaswamy said in a victory speech in May after a blowout primary victory. 

“Businesses were shuttered, and we actually chased business and entrepreneurs to states like Florida or Texas.”

But a review of state health orders shows Ohio’s pandemic response wasn’t all that different from that of pandemic “freedom” states like Texas and Florida through the entirety of Acton’s leadership of the health department during the pandemic. 

For instance, Ohio closed its K-12 schools in the Spring of 2020 on the same day as Florida. Also, while Texas and Florida were quicker to re-open restaurants, Ohio was quicker to re-open its first bars. 

Acton led the Ohio Department of Health for the first 94 days of the pandemic before she resigned June 11, 2020. In that time, Ohio acted more or less with comparable timing with dozens of states, Democrat and Republican, largely adhering to CDC guidance under the Trump administration in responding to what was then an emerging and novel health crisis. Ultimately, millions of Ohioans were infected during the pandemic, and more than 42,000 died.

“All the states were doing this,” said Sharona Hoffman, a co-director at the law and medicine center at Case Western Reserve University’s law school. “We were not anomalous in any way. Texas and Florida were doing the same thing. … It had nothing to do with Amy Acton.”

Republicans have criticized Acton for taking comparatively common steps to respond to the pandemic, and glossing over their Republican backing. For instance, some have castigated Acton for issuing a late-breaking order delaying the March 2020 primary election. But Ohio was one of at least 16 states to delay its primaries. And the order only came after a lawsuit on behalf of immunocompromised voters seeking to do the same, organized by statewide Republicans including DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose, failed.  

Like other Republicans, Ramaswamy has distanced himself from things like his personal decision to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or his self-identification as an “adviser” to the state’s pandemic response. As recently as Saturday, he referred to Acton as a “bureaucrat who shut down our economy [and] who will do it again” if given the chance. 

The criticism comes despite insistence from DeWine, also a Republican, that the life-or-death policy choices of the day were his. 

While most health orders were signed by Acton – state law vests power in the health department director – Acton and DeWine rolled them out jointly at the daily pandemic-era press conferences that vaulted Acton to prominence. 

“The decisions that were made during COVID, they were my decisions, so no one should blame someone else if they don’t like it,” DeWine said recently. “The buck stops with me.”

Ramaswamy’s campaign declined to make the candidate available for an interview or answer questions on the subject of COVID-19. 

Acton’s campaign also declined an interview, emphasizing that DeWine has taken ownership of pandemic-era decisions and that Ohio acted in similar fashion as most states. 

“Dr. Acton is proud of the work she did alongside Governor Mike DeWine to put public health over politics, save lives, and keep Ohioans safe,” said Addie Bullock, an Acton spokeswoman. “Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy made more than $2 billion from the COVID-19 vaccine, wanted to ‘segregate’ Ohioans based on their immunity status, and spent over $70,000 lobbying the federal government and White House on COVID drug approvals.”

Ohio, Florida and (most) California schools closed on the same day

On March 12, 2020, DeWine announced that Ohio would be the first state in the nation to close all public schools, effective March 16. 

The decision proved to be a watershed moment. Within 24 hours, dozens of states followed. These included ruby red political grounds of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Utah and West Virginia. 

While Ramaswamy’s campaign regularly and correctly points out that Ohio was the first to “announce” a statewide closure, most states closed schools around the same time. 

Ohio and Florida both closed March 16, 2020, a Monday. California didn’t issue any statewide school closure at the time, but by that same day, districts enrolling 90% of California students had closed on their own accord. Texas schools were ordered to close that Friday. 

When lawmakers convened for the first time during the pandemic later that month, the Ohio General Assembly didn’t at all reverse Acton’s decision. Instead, lawmakers voted to relieve schools of certain testing and reporting requirements given the shutdowns.

The bill passed unanimously, including with a vote from Sen. Rob McColley, a northwest Ohio Republican who is now Ramaswamy’s running mate. 

States varied widely on contentious decisions around handling the 2020-2021 school year. In general terms, Republican states pushed more aggressively for open classrooms, while Democrats sought remote learning options. But these debates occurred well after Acton left and under a new state health director. 

Ohio’s bar shutdown? Shorter than sunny Texas’

Ohio closed its bars and restaurants March 15, 2020, in one of the most visceral intrusions into adults’ lives during the pandemic at the time. 

California, Florida and Texas’ bars and restaurants were all shuttered by March 20. 

In the bitter decisions over re-opening the economy, Ohio sat reliably mid-pack throughout. Restaurants re-opened outdoors on May 15, 2020, with some bars almost immediately drawing dense crowds that stirred unease in state officials. Indoor dining resumed six days later. That’s 61 and 67 days, respectively. 

Florida – its tourist towns in the midst of spring break – reopened its restaurants on May 1, 2020, and its bars June 5. That means its restaurants closed for 42 days and its bars for 81. 

Texas reopened restaurants on May 4, 2020, at between 25% and 50% capacity, and opened bars on May 22 that year. So Texas restaurants were closed for 42 days and bars for 64. 

The timeline is messier than partisan politics suggest. Florida and Texas were more aggressive opening restaurants than Ohio was, while more cautious with their bars. 

Ohio declined a mask mandate under Acton

Conservatives have repeatedly sought to connect Acton with pandemic-era, robin’s egg-blue cloth masks – a visceral symbol of one of the most unpopular elements of the pandemic among conservatives. 

But Ohio under Acton spurned a torrent of roughly two dozen progressive states that began imposing statewide mask mandates in April 2020. 

On April 27, 2020, DeWine announced that Ohio would join a wave of more than a dozen states and impose a statewide mask mandate at open businesses to slow the spread of COVID-19. 

But it never took effect, at least in the short run. The very next day, DeWine reversed himself, saying too many Ohioans found the notion of being forced to wear a mask “offensive.”

It wasn’t until July 2020, weeks after Acton resigned, that Ohio first required masks indoors, becoming roughly the 30th U.S. state to do so. 

What about closing churches?

A perennial myth of pandemic lore is that Ohio ordered the closure of churches during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Ohio Republican Party on Tuesday posted on social media an image of a man holding a sign – created by conservative organization Turning Point USA – that says “Don’t Let Dems Shut Down Our Churches.” He’s standing next to a cardboard cutout of Acton, wearing a blue cloth mask. 

Rep. Adam Mathews, a Cincinnati Republican and attorney who serves in the General Assembly, in late July penned an op-ed with the headline “Amy Acton closed churches, kept abortions going. I am Catholic. That’s what matters.” (The headline was later corrected.)

However, Ohio never shut down churches during the pandemic. And Ohio’s Republican attorney general used the health department’s shutdown of “nonessential” medical procedures to include abortion clinics, an interpretation later overturned by federal courts. In other words, Acton’s health order was used as the legal basis to shutter abortion clinics until judges intervened. Mathews didn’t return a phone call.

DeWine, a religious conservative, asked that churches either refrain from convening in person or at least adopt social distancing measures, but he said it wouldn’t be enforced so as not to interfere with people’s constitutional rights to free exercise of religion. Acton’s health order was explicit on this point. 

“This Order does not apply to and/or excludes religious gatherings, gatherings for the purpose of the expression of First Amendment protected speech,” it states.

Dan Tierney, a DeWine spokesman, said in an interview Tuesday he recalled the administration taking a lot of heat on the issue, but, he said, it’s simply incorrect to suggest any official action closed a church in Ohio. 

He said some people perhaps mistook churches’ voluntary decision to close as the result of a health order. But on the other hand, the era was a hotbed of bad actors speaking untruths. 

“During covid, there was a lot of misinformation on a lot of things from all ends of the political spectrum,” he said. “This is not the first time we had to answer that [church closure] question. We had to answer it back then too.”

California, for its part, took a more aggressive stance and closed churches. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the order, deeming it a violation of the First Amendment.  

A misleading nursing home ad

COVID-19 spread most efficiently in communal settings and hit older and infirmed populations the hardest. This combination left nursing homes uniquely vulnerable. 

Every state struggled with the same problems – not enough testing to detect the virus or personal protective equipment to slow its spread. States tried increasing pay for the care workforce, surging protective equipment into the facilities, and restricting visitors. 

Ohio, along with at least 30 other states, including Texas and Florida, banned nursing home visits in an effort to slow the spread of the virus, although research suggests the policy was ineffective. Other studies have found that no state emerged as a role model in their handling of nursing homes during the pandemic, where 39% of all COVID-19 deaths occurred.

A recent ad from the Ramaswamy campaign invokes Acton’s decisions on the subject. In the ad, a Republican activist named Linda Caudill says her mother was in a nursing home when “Amy Acton shut down the state.” She said her mother was old and couldn’t comprehend why her family couldn’t visit. 

“Amy Acton is to blame for this,” the ad states.

The ad criticizes Acton for the virus mitigation measures, while showing headlines about COVID-19-related deaths in Ohio nursing homes. 

What’s more, some of the claims of Caudill – who is arguably best known for a Columbus Dispatch photograph that captured her angrily screaming outside the Ohio Statehouse in April 2020 while DeWine and Acton gave a press conference – don’t seem to hold up either. A Columbus Dispatch fact check found that Caudill’s mother lived in Kentucky and died after Ohio lifted its stay-at-home order. 

Ohio Democrats called the ad a “scam,” and Democratic Party spokeswoman Katie Seewer accused Ramaswamy of resorting to “baseless and easily disproven lies because he’s desperate to salvage any thread of his failing campaign.”

Signal Statewide reached out to Caudill for comment. 

Andrew Tobias contributed reporting.

Signal Ohio is a nonprofit news organization covering government, education, health, economy and public safety.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The progressive think tank published its findings at the end of July in a report titled, “Care Matters: A 2026 Report Card on Care Affordability and Access.”

“Investments in care address needs across the lifespan, enabling people to live, learn, age, and work with dignity,” the report states. “Yet, the majority in Congress and the current administration have cut funding for vital care programs and pursued a sweeping deregulatory agenda that strips away hard-won policies that value care while also using unfounded attacks on program integrity to justify further disinvestment.”

Cuts in funding for Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, were contained in the budget bill Trump signed into law in 2025. They are expected to cause long-lasting damage to the country’s caregiving infrastructure. As a result of the cuts, already vulnerable populations, such as older individuals and young children, will be left without the support they need, according to the foundation’s report.

For example, Medicaid is the primary source of funding for home- and community-based services, or HCBS, which allow people with disabilities and older individuals to receive care services at home rather than in an institution or nursing facility. Following Republicans’ nearly $1 trillion cut to Medicaid, several states have begun considering cuts to their HCBS programs, while others already have begun paring back their services.

In addition to the cuts in the budget law, the administration has weakened and repealed policies that reduced the cost of childcare, protected wages for homecare workers, and improved nursing home staffing requirements, the Century Foundation wrote.

Aging and disability care 

About 8.4 million people receive Medicaid-funded home or community services annually, according to an analysis from the Bipartisan Policy Center. Through those services, people with disabilities and older adults receive help with dressing, cooking and other daily activities. 

There have long been challenges for individuals seeking to access  this kind of care — hundreds of thousands of people are on Medicaid waiting lists for them — and that limited availability is now exacerbated by Republicans’ cuts to funding for healthcare, the Century Foundation said.

Since Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law in July 2025, nearly 30 states have proposed or enacted cuts to their home and community care programs, according to an HCBS impact tracker from George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. 

Childcare and early learning

 Childcare workers were already struggling prior to the Republicans’ cuts, having long been paid low wages and often receiving no benefits through their jobs. These workers often rely on government programs like SNAP and Medicaid in order to afford food and healthcare, even when they’re employed full time, notes the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. They are likely to suffer substantial financial harm from the federal cuts to these programs, the Century Foundation report said.

Fair working conditions 

On average, care workers earn far less than the national median income. In 2025, for example, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, childcare workers made an average of $16.82 per hour, while the national median hourly wage was $24.51. Home health and personal care aides earned an average of $17.21 an hour in 2025. Those aides are often referred to as direct care workers, and they work with people with developmental and physical disabilities.

Care workers now potentially face losing their employment as well because in many instances the jobs they hold are funded by Medicaid.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman barred the Trump administration from carrying out the president’s executive order that would deny citizenship to babies born in the United States to parents deemed part of a designated terrorist organization or to parents who purposefully came to the U.S. to gain citizenship in what critics call “birth tourism.” 

The executive order also aimed to deny citizenship to children born to foreign diplomatic staff and children born in U.S. territories where Congress has not passed a law granting citizenship, which is only American Samoa.

In her order, Boardman said this summer’s Supreme Court ruling affirmed the country’s long understanding that babies born on U.S. soil were guaranteed American citizenship. 

“The 2026 Executive Order is almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class for the simple reason that the Supreme Court in Barbara already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth,” she wrote, referring to the earlier case. “This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them.”

The White House did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, ranked states according to their paid family and medical leave programs in its recently released report “Care Matters: A 2026 Report Care on Care Affordability and Access.” 

States that scored the highest were Minnesota, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Oregon and Virginia. The report explains that states received high marks for covering all workers; having an inclusive definition of family; offering broad eligible uses for leave, such as family caregiving needs; and offering more than 12 weeks of benefits, among other metrics.

“Such leave is vital to support parents’ bond with newborn children, and for individuals to take care of their own or a loved one’s serious illness,” the Century Foundation writes in its report. “This leave is vital for the health and well-being of families, and also supports families’ economic security during periods where they cannot work due to health care needs. “

Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., have paid family leave programs, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. The other states that have mandatory paid family leave programs are California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Washington, Delaware and Massachusetts. Virginia is the most recent state to pass paid family and medical leave legislation: Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a paid leave bill into law in May.

 At the federal level, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 allows eligible employees to take 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave, but there is no federal law that mandates paid leave. 

Virginia is the first state in the South to enact paid leave, the Century Foundation noted. According to a press release issued by Spanberger’s office in May, the program will cover more than three million workers in the commonwealth.

“Under this landmark law, hardworking Virginians will have the freedom to take care of loved ones, recover from illness, and spend time with their newborns — all with the confidence that they will keep their paychecks,” Spanberger said in the release. “Because no one should have to choose between spending time with their newborn and paying their bills. No one should have to drain their savings or fall behind on rent because a loved one gets sick. And no one should be forced to return to work while facing a serious illness.”

Spanberger added that the legislation will help small- and mid-sized businesses offer benefits they couldn’t previously afford. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research group, noted the benefits of paid leave for businesses in a 2021 report that advocated for a national paid leave program.

“Paid leave benefits businesses by improving retention and productivity and boosting labor force participation,” the CBPP wrote.

The Century Foundation also ranked states on policies covering paid sick days as well as safe days, paid time off that can be used to recover from an illness, care for a sick family member, or respond to a public health emergency or domestic and sexual abuse.

The states that scored highest for their sick leave programs were Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, California and Michigan. All of those states’ policies cover most workers, use inclusive definitions of family, and include safe days in their program.

“It should be common practice that when someone is sick, has a sick child, or doctors appointments they need to get to, they should be able to take time off work without worrying about losing income or their jobs,” the Century Foundation wrote.

There are a total of 18 states that have paid sick day laws. The other states that have paid sick day laws are Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. The District of Columbia also has a paid sick leave law.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In addition, data centers power AI chatbots that have been accused of engaging in sexual conversations with minors and failing to discourage them from suicide. Even among adults, excessive use of chatbots is causing “AI psychosis.”

On the other hand are undeniable benefits. The technology is already enabling tremendous strides in things like medical research and the other sciences. It’s also creating millions of construction jobs, and it’s integrating itself into everyday life in ways that make it more convenient.

But other questions are more ominous.

Who will lose their jobs to artificial intelligence? And how many more will be forced to work as living, breathing AI drones, monitored by GPS and biometric cameras as computers make humans labor right up to the limits of their ability?

As he reported and produced the podcast series “The Data Centers are Coming,” Danny Caine tried to address those questions.

Working with the antimonopoly group the Institute for Local Self Reliance, the former Kansas bookstore owner interviewed people in places like Virginia’s Data Center Alley and Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk is accused of using more than a dozen unpermitted gas-fired generators to power his massive xAI center.

Growing opposition

In those places and hundreds of others, residents fear that their lives are being profoundly altered by projects over which they didn’t get much of a say. That might explain why opposition is growing so fiercely across the political spectrum.

“Data center opposition is a remarkably bipartisan issue,” Caine told the Capital Journal.

An example: In Box Elder County, Utah, 70% of voters went for Donald Trump in 2024, while in Minneapolis, voters went for Kamala Harris by a similar margin.  

“Both passed data center moratoriums,” Caine said. “This is everybody. You’ve got farmers out west and you’ve got socialists in New York City organizing on the same issue. I think they’re doing a really good job making sure there’s room for everybody. A part of it is that this is local. It hasn’t been polarized by national political rhetoric like immigration. This is people talking about what gets built in their community and how they should grow economically.”

Caleb Max, president and CEO of industry group the National Artificial Intelligence Association, said it’s a misconception that data centers don’t have to go through the permitting processes that other projects do. He also said communities are given advance warning and a chance to have their say.

“Data centers file the same permits and go through the same county zoning and board processes as any other large development and those processes end in votes by elected local officials,” he said in an email. “Projects have been modified, relocated, and voted down outright across the country, including in Ohio.”

Max cited plans to build an OpenAI data center in Effingham County, Georgia, as an example.

“Before construction began, the company published its commitments, held a public open house where residents questioned engineers directly, and is building a community compact out of that feedback,” he said, later adding, “Was the meeting contentious? Very. That is the process working, not failing.”

However, the public appears to have been informed of the $20 billion project pretty late in the game.

OpenAI got local government officials to sign nondisclosure agreements regarding the project on Feb. 2, WTOC reported. Then, on July 21, they signed a memorandum of understanding and finalized a huge tax break for the project, the TV station reported.

With the county already committed to the project, it was publicly announced on July 22, with construction planned to start before the end of the year.

The open house Max cited was held a day after that, according to the Effingham Herald. Hundreds packed the meeting and are now forming an opposition group — to fight a project their county officials have already bound them to.

In addition, The Current reported that Gov. Brian Kemp met in May with OpenAI and Georgia Power “with no mentions of data center construction on its briefing memo.”

Opposition to such projects appears to be spreading.

An Economist/YouGov poll released last month reported that just 24% of Americans now believe data centers are good versus 47% who say they’re not. 

Democrats were most opposed, followed by independents. More Republicans were in favor than opposed, but only by five percentage points, and 29% were undecided.

In addition, Politico polls conducted in January and July found that opinion has been shifting against data centers rapidly, so opposition seems likely to grow.

Tax breaks

One reason why opinion is shifting might have to do with the belated discovery of massive tax breaks that were given in virtual secrecy to companies controlled by some of the world’s richest people.

In June, The Columbus Dispatch wrote that before he left office in 2019, Ohio Gov. John Kasich quietly gave Google, Amazon and Meta huge tax exemptions lasting 40 years.

They were part of $2.3 billion in tax breaks the former governor handed out — supposedly to persuade companies to build in Ohio. However, they’re so desperate to build more “compute,” that Industrial Equipment News reports some are even looking at ways to build data centers in the ocean.

Max, of the Artificial Intelligence Association, agreed that the AI companies don’t need the tax breaks with which Ohio and other states have been so lavish.

“They do not need them,” he said. “Communities offer them because they want to compete for the investment, and Ohio has been good at it. Governor DeWine noted in May that previously exempted projects reported $27.2 billion in capital investment in 2025 alone.”

The investment is huge, but it will create relatively few jobs once construction is completed. Policy Matters Ohio estimates that the Google, Amazon, and Meta subsidies will cost Ohio taxpayers $1 million per permanent job created.

For Caine, news of the Ohio tax breaks came just as he and his team were finishing their podcast series. It might be part of a bonus episode, he said.

“That policy was basically a secret until somebody went and dug it up years later,” he said. “That’s one thing that really upsets people about this. Data centers are bad and people hate them. But they also hate that a lot of this is happening in secret. They don’t have any input. They feel like the first time they hear about this stuff, it’s a done deal.”

Affecting neighbors

When he traveled to Data Center Alley — a region in Northern Virginia containing about 300 of the facilities — Caine saw the effects they can have on people living close to them. Generators serving some are so loud that residents are spending thousands doing things like installing plexiglass over their windows to dampen the noise.

Caine said such noise forces people indoors — and away from the neighbor-to-neighbor organizing his group advocates. 

“One thing that’s really concerning is that if you make the neighborhood environment hostile via noise or pollution or whatever, people connect with each other less,” he said. “You’re driving people inside and away from connecting with each other. Big Tech people might not mind that. Instead of being outside connecting with people, you’re inside looking at your device. So just being outside organizing with your neighbors is a kind of rebellion against what Big Tech wants to build.”

Max, the AI industry spokesman, said focusing solely on those complaints ignores advancements in the industry.

“There is a vacuum mentality here, the assumption that data centers drain the water, the power supply, and the grid, and that often isn’t the case anymore,” he said. “On water, the industry has moved to closed loop cooling that recirculates water in a sealed system rather than evaporating it. New Central Ohio developments use air cooled closed loop chillers, Meta has committed to (be) water positive by 2030, and Amazon has a water neutral pledge.”

Max also touted a pledge by PJM, the electricity grid that serves Ohio and 12 other states, that data centers will pay for any additional generation they’ll require.

However, the Ohio Manufacturers Association and others are concerned that monopoly utilities are using data centers to inflate demand forecasts to justify construction from which they’ll profit. That can force up rates, and if they overbuild, ratepayers will be stuck holding the bag, critics say.

Many data centers are easing the strain on the electricity grid by generating their own power “behind the meter.”

But that comes with downsides of its own. The great majority burn fossil fuels and generate noise and greenhouse gasses.

And PBS and Floodlight report, they’re going up so fast that they’re overwhelming state and federal regulators that have been systematically starved of resources. In a separate investigation published last week, Floodlight and The Guardian reported that a Microsoft-backed data center in New Jersey fired up dozens of gas-powered generators without getting the required permits — an apparent violation of federal law.

Impact on average people

But perhaps the most important question is what will happen to Americans — especially the most vulnerable — once all these data centers are built and AI takes a central role in the workplace.

Many worry that it will make millions of jobs obsolete. Caine is also worried about the ones that will remain.

One need only look at the lives of the 1 million Americans who work for Amazon to get an  idea, he said.

“If you look at Amazon warehouse workers or delivery drivers, they’re completely at the mercy of the machines that control their rates,” he said. “Whether it’s all the biometric cameras in the Amazon vans, or the little GPS handheld things in the warehouse, they exist to make sure the machines keep running. It’s machines first, then humans.”

In other words, Caine is saying a dangerous line is crossed when AI doesn’t just work for people, but people also work for AI.

“When the human loses agency for the sake of the machine, it’s literally dehumanizing,” he said.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

About 32,200 Ohio students are enrolled in 267 active LifeWise chapters across the state — about 43% of Ohio’s school districts, according to a LifeWise spokesperson. 

There are 240 more LifeWise chapters in process in Ohio, according to a new map on LifeWise’s website. 

“Ohio is LifeWise Academy’s home state, so we have deep roots and strong community support here,” according to a LifeWise spokesperson. “Ohio also has a long history of released time religious instruction, including the program in Van Wert that helped inspire LifeWise’s creation.”

LifeWise’s founder and CEO Joel Penton is from Van Wert in Northwest Ohio.

LifeWise is a non-denominational Christian program based in Hilliard that teaches religion to public school students during the school day at a special release time. It currently has 531 live chapters and 4,377 chapters in process nationwide, according to the map. 

Religious release time instruction must meet three criteria: the courses must take place off school property, be privately funded, and students must have parental permission. The United States Supreme Court upheld release time laws during the 1952 Zorach v. Clauson case.

Mercer County in western Ohio is the only county in Ohio where a LifeWise chapter is not live, launching or in the planning stages, according to the map. 

In January 2025, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a law passed by Republican lawmakers that mandates public school districts create a policy allowing release time for religious instruction. Ohio is one of 18 states with such a law, according to LifeWise. 

“LifeWise has been well received in Ohio communities as families see the positive impact it has on students’ behavior, academic performance and well-being,” according to a LifeWise spokesperson. 

But the program isn’t universally accepted in Ohio by any means. Some parents have said their students have been ostracized and bullied for not taking part in LifeWise, and some parents have said their child goes to a study hall in the school’s gymnasium while their classmates attend LifeWise.

“(LifeWise doesn’t) look at the effects of the Jewish students that are basically being forced into a gym, that are feeling punished because they don’t believe as such, and because they don’t believe, they don’t go,” said Kitty Schwanitz, an organizer for the Secular Education Association.  

She said LifeWise is spreading “very much almost the way that cancer spreads.” 

“(People) don’t realize what they’re getting, and that’s actually what we’re seeing a lot of,” she said.

“Parents are coming to us and going, I didn’t understand or realize what I was getting my kids into, and now they believe these things, and I’m horrified. … Parents are getting the buyer’s remorse of what LifeWise is.”

Indiana has the second most live chapters LifeWise with 63, followed by Illinois with 28, and Michigan with 19, according to the map. 

Texas has more than 400 chapters in process, Pennsylvania has more than 350 chapters in process, and Indiana has more than 200 chapters in process, according to the map. 

Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, Nevada, and Hawaii do not have any live LifeWise chapters, but all are building up chapters, according to LifeWise. 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Another young child can’t use their hearing aids because the family ran out of batteries and hasn’t come to get replacements.

Yet another child’s cochlear implant surgery was delayed by several months. 

These patients’ families, all immigrants, have been afraid of showing up to the hospital after immigration officers flooded their communities in recent months, said their doctor, pediatric otolaryngologist Asitha Jayawardena, a head and neck surgeon at Children’s Minnesota. 

Clinicians like Jayawardena say immigration arrests and detentions are taking a particularly acute toll on children’s health as families isolate at home. He’s seen some cases — such as the child with the neck infection — worsen because fearful parents aren’t coming in. 

“Without a doubt, it oscillates between being infuriating and absolutely disheartening,” Jayawardena said about the chilling effect. 

As the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement leads to sweeping arrests, healthcare workers say those actions have hit children hard — including children who are U.S. citizens and those in families without arrests.

Many healthcare providers report that since January 2025, they’ve seen a surge in missed pediatric appointments, delayed preventive care, and sick or injured kids going without treatment. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests have continued to climb — with a record 51,000 arrests in July — and experts predict continued unhealthy outcomes among children, causing collateral damage that could extend for years. 

Healthcare workers told Stateline that in addition to the physical healthcare fallout, they’ve also seen a significant increase in depression, anxiety and post-trauma symptoms among their pediatric patients. 

Delayed healthcare has critical consequences for young kids. For example, hearing loss, such as that experienced by Jayawardena’s patients, can hinder crucial development including speech, language and social skills. Along with missing health milestones and getting needed healthcare, kids are grappling with the long-term trauma of losing a parent.

“Community-wide trauma that is being inflicted is having a really important impact on families and children in particular. There are children that are losing their guardians. There are families that are losing their breadwinners,” said Amy Liebman, chief program officer of the Migrant Clinicians Network, a nationwide organization of healthcare workers serving migrant families.

“That certainly is going to ultimately impact their health and then their ability to access care,” she said.

The Trump administration also has introduced rules that allow federal agencies to take into account a family’s use of public benefits when reviewing applications for lawful immigration status. Dr. Gabriela Maradiaga Panayotti, a pediatrician in Durham, North Carolina, pointed to studies showing that such policies lead to a decrease in healthcare use, including among U.S. citizen children.

One of her patients, a U.S. citizen on Medicaid, had stopped a medication for ADHD that had helped him achieve better grades at school. His parents feared being targeted through Medicaid paperwork, so they didn’t refill his prescription. The child’s grades began to drop again.

“They didn’t want to be labeled as utilizing resources,” Maradiaga Panayotti said. “I hurt for him, especially because he’s at this tender preteen age where self-confidence and performance at school can really either build on and set a good foundation for success in high school, or can drop.”

Millions of children

Researchers at the Brookings Institution, a public policy research nonprofit, estimate that since Jan. 20 of last year, the day President Donald Trump was sworn in, and through early April of this year, over 146,000 U.S. citizen children have had a parent detained.

But many more are living with that fear. 

The Pew Research Center estimates 4.6 million U.S.-born children lived with an unauthorized immigrant parent in 2023, and roughly 2.5 million children could face the detention of both household parents, according to a Brookings analysis. 

But the trend cuts across immigration status — including those born to refugees, DACA recipients, asylees and people with temporary protected status. Across the nation, about a fourth of children are born to immigrant families, according to the Migrant Policy Institute.  

Increased ICE activity has included arrests at hospitals, and the agency has also made unprecedented efforts to obtain private health data, including Medicaid patient records, to extract addresses and immigration statuses — another major source of fear for families.

Jayawardena and his colleagues published a study in the American Academy of Pediatrics medical journal in August measuring whether pediatric outpatient care visits were disrupted during and after the large-scale immigration raids of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, when the Trump administration deployed 3,000 agents, heavily targeting Somali and South Asian communities. 

The research team found that the rate of missed appointments among Hispanic or Latino children increased by over 50% during Metro Surge compared to the same time period — the first week of December to second week of February — in the prior two years.

Missed appointments increased by 80% among Spanish-speaking families and 53% among families needing language interpretation services. 

“The barrier is not necessarily lack of access, but more the fear and the isolation, and so the enforcement is having this chilling effect on immigrant families who, even though they may need these critical services, may be avoiding the hospital, the counseling, the victim services, and other essential care,” said Jasiel Fernandez, vice president of psychosocial supports at the global pro bono nonprofit KIND, or Kids in Need of Defense. “We see that happening over and over.”

It’s just very disheartening knowing that there’s something I can do, but I am prohibited from doing it because families don’t feel safe.

– pediatric otolaryngologist Dr. Asitha Jayawardena, a head and neck surgeon at Children’s Minnesota

The Migrant Clinicians Network, along with Physicians For Human Rights, surveyed nearly 700 healthcare workers across 30 states between March and August of last year, amid spikes in immigration activity. Most of the surveyed professionals — 84% — reported significant or moderate drops in pediatric patient visits since Trump’s January 2025 executive orders on immigration.

Kids also were spending less time outdoors, which affects overall health, and saw delayed diagnoses of their conditions. About 27% of clinicians said patients feared enrolling in benefits for their children, and couldn’t afford doctor visits. Preventive care, such as vaccinations, as well as chronic disease management and mental health care were the most affected, healthcare workers reported. 

And in both the survey and through interviews with Stateline, clinicians have reported seeing kids show up to emergency departments alone.

In Missouri, one pediatric emergency medicine physician, who spoke with Stateline on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation against his hospital, recalled an 11-year-old child who had been attacked by a dog, his legs riddled in bites. He came to the hospital with only his teenage sister.  

“He told us that (his parents) were scared to come in because ICE might be at the hospital,” the physician recalled. 

Others aren’t showing up to care at all. “Kids like these are so vulnerable that they kind of could fall through the cracks,” he added. “We see the downstream effects of policy changes, and we try to address all these needs. But when kids are coming in, they’re super sick.” 

Missed care, advanced illness

Some clinicians told Stateline that by the time some children reach their clinics, their health conditions have advanced to a more difficult stage. 

One North Carolina pediatrician has seen kids with asthma miss inhaler prescriptions, leading to more asthma attacks. In another case, a large family of refugee children came in covered in splotchy, itchy rashes — scabies. The family had been sharing two bedrooms. Afraid, they had postponed care for four weeks. 

“All of these children, totally ridden throughout their bodies, and it’s so uncomfortable. You can’t sleep because it’s horribly itchy,” said the pediatrician, who spoke to Stateline on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation since her clinic receives federal funding. 

“We’re creating tremendous problems for our community that will probably come back to bite us, because now these kids are going around with untreated medical conditions that are only going to get worse,” she said. “It’s a time when they need even more support than before, and our administration just isn’t really allowing that.”

She and others said they’re also noticing worsening depression among their patients.

“They’re spiraling out, and they’re not getting any support because they can’t come in and get care,” said the North Carolina pediatrician. She recalled one teenager telling her that they couldn’t sleep at night. “ ‘I’m sobbing and crying, terrified that my parents will be taken away,’ ” she recalled the teen telling her.

Elsewhere, one of KIND’s clients in California, a preteen sexual assault victim, has gone weeks without mental health care.

“The child’s sponsor, who is undocumented, is very afraid to take the young person to mental health appointments or any other kind of follow-up service,” Fernandez said. “Choosing basically to forgo that for the time being.”

In Texas, which has the most immigrant detainees of any state, a 14-year-old’s primary caregiver was detained. The teen has been suffering suicidal ideation.

“That young person is unable to access services,” Fernandez said. “Even if we think that a teenager has a certain level of agency to do certain things, when the caregiver is removed abruptly … the sponsor is not able to support, is not able to meet significant needs and monitoring for that young person.”

Fernandez said KIND has been offering Uber and Lyft rides to field offices because clients are afraid to drive to appointments to receive healthcare.

In southeast Florida’s Indian River County, Heather Miranda is CEO of Treasure Coast Community Health, which runs multiple clinics serving nearby communities of agricultural workers. Clinic staff in the northern area of the county, where Miranda said most immigration enforcement activity has been concentrated, told her they’ve seen a significant decrease of kids coming in — nearly 500 pediatric no-shows since February, 16% of all appointments. 

“They’ve seen kids not coming in for sick visits,” Miranda said. “Not coming in for their well-child or their vaccines. … It’s just been, overall, a decrease in preventative care, which is really, really important.”

Back in Minneapolis, Jayawardena said that even months after Operation Metro Surge, fear among his patient families remains “a persistent problem.”

“I want to help take care of these children, and the families want to get taken care of, as does my entire hospital system — and we cannot get them just physically into the hospital for things that are necessary,” he said.

“It’s just very disheartening knowing that there’s something I can do, but I am prohibited from doing it because families don’t feel safe.”

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A promising, young Haitian immigrant in Ohio, fitted with an ICE ankle bracelet in July, threw himself in front of a semi on I-70 on Monday. Pierre Damas Bel, a Springfield immigrant and new student at Wright State University, was pronounced dead at the scene. The 20-year-old, with big dreams of going to medical school, had been mocked by fellow students about the bulky ankle monitor he was forced to wear. On a July 30 Instagram post, Bel shared his pain.

“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience,” Bel wrote. “I came here to study, build my future and to live a better life, not to be treated like a criminal.”

Like Bel, dozens of Springfield’s Haitians have been fitted with ankle monitors or detained by ICE after their Temporary Protected Status was officially ended by the Trump administration on July 27. The extreme toll on the community— that had come to Springfield legally under TPS to work and raise families until it was safe to return to Haiti— was ironically the emphasis of the “Unshackle Springfield” rally held the day before Bel took his own life.

The protest at city hall drew hundreds of faith leaders from across Ohio and the country, immigration advocates, asylum-seeking Haitians, and supporters but notably no political leadership (local, state, federal) with an elevated platform to decry the dehumanization of terrified Ohio residents.

“They’re nowhere. They’re hiding. They’re afraid of the federal government. They’re afraid of masked federal agents coming into Springfield with guns, ramming their cars against people driving down Springfield roads,” said an exasperated Lynn Tramonte, executive director of the Ohio Immigration Alliance. “I mean, who’s protecting us? I can’t believe we’re in this situation where the only people standing up are the faith community and regular, ordinary people who are on the lookout for ICE and doing these patrols.”

“The city of Springfield went from embracing the Haitian population that helped it grow to abandoning them in their hour of need.” 

Tramonte also said “agents of the U.S. government are using our tax dollars to terrorize good people who deserve to live in a safe place” and city officials are accommodating and actively assisting ICE out of fear.

She argued that the people in power who could bring peace to Springfield would rather offer “thoughts and prayers” for better days ahead than lead through conviction. The inhumanity is happening in Ohio, and Springfield is offering city property to make it more efficient.

Mayor Rob Rue once urged Congress to find a permanent legal solution for hard-working, tax-paying Haitian TPS holders in Springfield, strongly rejected the dehumanizing lies spewed by JD Vance and Donald Trump about pet-eating Haitians, and blamed consecutive bomb threats in his town on that hateful rhetoric, demonstrating that he had a functioning moral compass before.

But now, Tramonte said he is not talking publicly, and his rote political statements about enforcing the law and deporting criminals who break it “is not what we’re talking about in Springfield.”

ICE is “enforcing paperwork violations” as if they were heinous crimes, with raids, detentions, deportations, and boxy electronic shackles, she said. City officials are missing in action on purpose.

So is Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, added the immigrant advocate. After being an ardent proponent “for Haitian-Ohioans settling into their new home,” Gov. DeWine seems to have turned the page, Tramonte said. He published an op-ed in the New York Times that tries to pass the buck to President Trump, naively calling on him to “lead an effort to reform our immigration system—to make changes that prioritize our workforce needs while respecting our history of welcoming people fleeing from oppression and humanitarian crises.”

Tramonte noted wryly that “no one has ever used the words ‘Trump’ and ‘welcoming people fleeing oppression’ in the same sentence for a reason.”

The lame-duck governor, concluded Tramonte, feels like he’s done all he can. Time to move on. The ball is in Trump’s court.

“But when it’s your family, you don’t give up, and I just want him to think about it as these (Haitian immigrants), this is your family. These are Ohioans. These are your people. Don’t give up.”

DeWine can pick up the phone today, she added, and tell U.S. Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted that Ohio needs them. He can tell Ohio law enforcement to focus on criminal activity not civil immigration enforcement.

“They should not help the Trump administration send Ohioans to a country where they will be killed,” Tramonte said. “That is not who we are and now is the time to lead.”

Maybe DeWine will surprise us, and maybe Ohio’s U.S. senators will grow a spine to save an Ohio city and the immigrant population that revitalized it. I wish somebody of either party would seize the moment with the moral courage it demands. Because, as Martin Luther King Jr. taught “there comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

A Haitian son who came to Springfield with his family legally and lost that status through no fault of his own, was bullied about the large, black tracking unit ICE slapped on the leg of the honor student who played soccer and wanted to be a doctor.

When Pierre Damas Bel died by apparent suicide this week, DeWine called it “a horrible, horrible tragedy.” It is also a grievous stain on the state that conceded defeat on his future without a fight.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio motorists just endured the state’s most expensive August at the gas pump on record.

The statewide average price for regular gasoline was $3.988 per gallon in August, according to newly released data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

That was the highest August average in the EIA’s Ohio gasoline price series, which dates to 2003.

The previous record was set in August 2012, when regular gasoline averaged $3.776 per gallon statewide. This year’s average topped that mark by more than 21 cents per gallon.

The year-over-year increase was even larger.

Regular gasoline averaged $3.147 per gallon in Ohio in August 2025, according to the same federal price data. That means the August 2026 average was about 84 cents per gallon higher than one year earlier, an increase of nearly 27%.

The record comes less than two years after President Donald Trump repeatedly made cheaper energy a centerpiece of his campaign to return to the White House.

At an Oct. 9, 2024 campaign rally in Scranton, Trump promised to cut energy prices by 50% within his first year back in office. Six days later, at an Atlanta campaign rally, he repeated the promise: “I will cut your energy prices in half within 12 months.”

Trump continued predicting dramatically cheaper gasoline after taking office.

During an Aug. 6, 2025 White House appearance, Trump said gasoline would “soon” be “less than $2 a gallon.”

Instead, one year later, Ohio drivers spent August paying almost twice that amount on average.

Prices climbed well above $4 per gallon during portions of the month.

The EIA’s weekly Ohio data show regular gasoline averaging $4.085 per gallon on Aug. 3 before falling to $3.899 on Aug. 10.

One week later, the statewide average surged to $4.180 per gallon on Aug. 17, an increase of more than 28 cents in seven days.

The average then fell to $3.981 on Aug. 24 and $3.797 on Aug. 31.

The surge has coincided with the prolonged war with Iran launched by the United States and Israel on Feb. 28.

The conflict has repeatedly disrupted energy shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway that handled roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil before the war. Reuters reported that the war has pushed oil and gasoline prices higher by restricting energy flows through the strait, with U.S. gasoline climbing above $4 per gallon nationally.

Gasoline prices have remained elevated for much of the year following the outbreak of the conflict. Reuters reported Aug. 31 that prices surged after the Iran war began and climbed above $4 per gallon during the spring, while global fuel supplies were disrupted and U.S. refiners recorded sharply higher profits.

Ohio’s monthly numbers reflect that turmoil. Regular gasoline averaged an extraordinary $4.627 per gallon in May, according to EIA data, before falling during June and July and rising again during August.

By mid-August, Trump was no longer promising Americans immediately cheaper gasoline. He was telling them to accept higher prices as a cost of the war.

At an Aug. 14 political rally in New York, Trump urged Americans to tolerate paying “a tiny little bit more for your gasoline” while the conflict continued, arguing that the cost was justified by his effort to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, Reuters reported.

At the time, the national average was approximately $4.08 per gallon, 29% higher than a year earlier.

Three days later, Ohio’s weekly average reached $4.18.

Trump and his administration have since sought ways to bring prices back down. The president has accused oil refiners of profiteering, called for a Justice Department investigation and pressed companies to increase refining capacity.

Reuters reported that Trump convened major oil and refining companies as his administration faced mounting political pressure over gasoline prices ahead of November’s congressional elections.

The White House has also pursued greater access to Venezuelan crude oil, while arguing that expanded domestic refining and production will eventually reduce fuel prices.

But global markets remain exposed to the war in Iran. Oil prices jumped again this week after renewed U.S. strikes and Iranian retaliation threatened shipping and energy supplies around the Strait of Hormuz. Reuters reported Wednesday that Brent crude settled above $95 per barrel as the conflict entered its seventh month.

The August record reflects nominal pump prices and is not adjusted for inflation. But measured by the prices motorists actually saw at the pump, the EIA data show that no August since the agency began tracking Ohio prices in 2003 was more expensive than August 2026.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Start with the ad. Ramaswamy’s campaign put Cincinnati Republican activist Linda Caudill on television, looking into the camera, blaming Dr. Amy Acton for her own mother’s death. “A few weeks after that is when Amy Acton shut down the state,” Caudill says in the spot. “My mother didn’t understand it. It traumatized her. She didn’t know why her family couldn’t come visit her. Two months later, she died. Amy Acton is to blame for this.”

It is a gutting thing to say about anyone. It is also, according to public records TiffinOhio.net and the Columbus Dispatch both confirmed, false. Caudill’s mother lived and died in Kentucky — not Ohio. She died six weeks after Acton had already resigned as health director, and roughly two months after Gov. Mike DeWine lifted the stay-at-home order Ramaswamy’s ad blames on Acton in the first place. DeWine himself, the man who actually signed those orders, has said repeatedly that the pandemic decisions were his alone. Read the full breakdown here: Fact check: Ramaswamy ad blames Acton for death of woman who lived and died in Kentucky, not Ohio.

Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein didn’t mince words about it. “It’s a lie; it’s a complete fabrication,” he said. “I think it speaks volumes to the type of person that Vivek Ramaswamy is and the type of governor he will be, that he’s going to lie, cheat, and steal his way to the governor’s office.”

I don’t say this lightly: he’s right. Dorothy Farrell’s obituary is a public record. Her Kentucky address, her Kentucky funeral, her Kentucky grave — all of it was one search away from anyone building this ad. Ramaswamy’s campaign ran it anyway. More on who Caudill actually is — a decade-long GOP operative, not a random grieving Ohioan — is here: Who is Linda Caudill? The Republican insider Ramaswamy chose to blame Amy Acton for her mother’s death.

Then there is what he said about Amy Acton herself. In April, Ramaswamy posted a video to X claiming Acton has no real vision for Ohio “other than to complain about what someone else did to her.” Acton has spoken publicly, as a doctor and as a mother, about surviving sexual abuse as a child. Ramaswamy turned that into a punchline about a political opponent who won’t stop whining.

Acton campaign manager Phil Stein called it what it was: “We were shocked and disgusted to see Ramaswamy’s allies shame Amy for being sexually abused as a child.” Months later, when Ramaswamy’s own super PAC, V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, ran a second round of the same material, Stein said Ramaswamy was “once again spreading lies about Dr. Acton and shaming her for being a survivor of childhood sexual assault, all to distract from” his own record. Full story: Ramaswamy keeps accused allies, super PAC attacks abuse survivor.

A woman disclosed that she was sexually abused as a child and got help. Ramaswamy mocked her for it. That is what “other than to complain about what someone else did to her” means, coming from a man running against a survivor of childhood sexual abuse for governor of Ohio. There is no version of Ohio politics where that is an acceptable line to cross.

None of this happens in a vacuum. Before Ramaswamy was running attack ads about dead women and mocking abuse survivors, he was running Axovant Sciences, the biotech company he built around an Alzheimer’s drug GlaxoSmithKline had already given up on. He rode that company to a $1.4 billion IPO, sold roughly $40 million of his own stock while he was still publicly hyping the drug’s prospects, and walked away with what Democratic-aligned researchers estimate was $260 million by the time it was over. The drug failed. The stock cratered more than 70% in a single day and never recovered; the company was eventually wound down. Ordinary investors who bought into the hype were left holding shares worth next to nothing. Ramaswamy was not one of them — he’d structured his own stake through the parent company, Roivant, to insulate himself from exactly that outcome.

Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld reviewed the whole arc and told Fortune the fortune was built on “basically a version of pump and dump.” A 2023 Newsweek opinion column went further and called it fraud outright. To be exact: no regulator has ever charged Ramaswamy with a crime over Axovant, and he has never been convicted of one. But you don’t need a courtroom to recognize a scam artist when you’ve watched him work twice: once on Wall Street, and now on Ohio. Background here: Ramaswamy’s biotech failures and pandemic profiteering record.

Put it together and you don’t get three unrelated controversies. You get a pattern. A man who made hundreds of millions telling investors a failed drug still had promise is now telling Ohio voters a woman who left office in July 2020 is responsible for a death that happened in Kentucky two months after the order he blames her for was already lifted. A man who built a fortune on other people’s losses is now mocking a childhood abuse survivor for talking about what happened to her. I have covered a lot of shameless candidates. I have never covered one this shameless.

And it is getting worse, not better, as November gets closer. The Cook Political Report moved Ohio’s governor’s race from Lean Republican to Toss Up on July 10. The dead-woman ad and the second round of abuse-survivor material both ran after that shift, not before it. That timing reeks of desperation. This is a campaign that has decided the only path left runs through a grieving daughter’s grief and a survivor’s trauma.

More and more Ohioans appear to be seeing through it. Keep watching — and keep asking Ramaswamy’s campaign, on the record, why it runs ads that aren’t true.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A federal judge just handed Democrats a very different closing argument.

On Aug. 25, U.S. District Judge Julien Xavier Neals refused to dismiss the central whistleblower claims brought by former Strive Asset Management executive Joyce Rosely, who alleges Ramaswamy demanded that employees violate securities laws, received their repeated objections and participated in firing her afterward.

Ramaswamy and Strive deny the allegations.

But politically, the timing could hardly be worse.

The Republican nominee is heading into the final stretch of a race that has settled into a statistical dead heat, while Democratic groups are already spending heavily to portray his business career not as the qualification he says it is, but as evidence that he cannot be trusted.

Now a federal court has ensured that one of the most serious disputes from that business career will remain alive while Ohioans are deciding who should run the state.

A tied race leaves little room for a new liability

Ramaswamy is not entering the fall with a commanding Republican advantage.

The latest public polling has repeatedly shown the race within a few points. A mid-August Wedgewood Polls survey had Democrat Amy Acton ahead 47% to 46%, while a Fox News survey conducted around the same period had Ramaswamy ahead 50% to 48%. A July Siena College survey found the race tied at 47%.

RealClearPolling’s current average puts the race essentially even, with Acton holding only a fractional advantage. 270toWin’s polling table shows the same pattern: neither candidate has established a durable lead.

The Statehouse News Bureau reported Aug. 29 that the contest has entered an increasingly negative phase as both campaigns race to define the other candidate before the election.

That is precisely the environment in which an adverse court ruling can matter most.

There is no post-ruling public poll yet showing that the Strive case has changed voters’ minds. But in a race separated by roughly a point in polling averages, Ramaswamy does not need a scandal to move 10 points to create a serious political problem.

He needs it to reinforce doubts among a small number of persuadable voters.

Democrats were already building a ‘conman’ case

The Strive ruling did not create the political attack on Ramaswamy’s business career.

It landed directly on top of one that was already being built.

On Aug. 19, Ohioans for Lower Costs, a group backed by the Democratic Governors Association, launched an advertisement literally titled “Conman.”

The spot attacks Ramaswamy over his pharmaceutical business record, including the Alzheimer’s drug at the center of separate scrutiny of his former company Axovant.

The Democratic Governors Association had already been calling Ramaswamy a “pathological scammer” in an Aug. 12 attack centered on his biotech record.

The Ohio Democratic Party has adopted similar language.

Its recent releases have repeatedly described Ramaswamy as a “scammer,” including an Aug. 28 campaign roundup accusing him of a series of “lies and scams,” and a Sept. 1 release attacking the accuracy of one of his campaign ads.

That matters because the Strive lawsuit fits the same narrative without requiring Democrats to invent a new line of attack.

A former senior executive says Ramaswamy personally demanded conduct she believed violated securities laws.

She says she and another executive repeatedly objected.

Both were fired.

Ramaswamy tried to get the individual whistleblower claim against him dismissed.

The judge refused.

The political frame Democrats have spent August constructing — Ramaswamy as a businessman whose record deserves scrutiny rather than admiration — just acquired a fresh federal-court news peg.

The ruling strikes directly at Ramaswamy’s central qualification

For another candidate, an employment lawsuit involving a former company might be easier to compartmentalize.

For Ramaswamy, business is the résumé.

His own campaign biography describes him as “one of the most successful business leaders of his generation” and says he is running on a “business-grounded agenda.”

The campaign’s homepage calls him an “accomplished business leader” who spent his career “turning bold ideas into real results.”

Ramaswamy has repeatedly made the same argument himself: he is an entrepreneur rather than a conventional politician, and the skills he used building companies are the skills he would bring to state government.

That makes scrutiny of how those companies were run unusually relevant to his campaign.

The Strive case does not attack an incidental chapter of Ramaswamy’s biography.

It attacks the chapter he is presenting as evidence that he should be governor.

The allegations are no longer just a 2023 headline

Rosely’s lawsuit was first reported nationally three years ago.

At the time, Forbes reported that Rosely accused Ramaswamy and Strive co-founder Anson Frericks of pressuring employees to violate securities laws.

Another former Strive employee, John Phillips, filed a separate lawsuit containing overlapping accusations about pressure to violate securities rules and alleged misrepresentations about the company’s finances.

Those stories largely disappeared from the political conversation as Ramaswamy moved through his presidential campaign and then into the race for Ohio governor.

The Aug. 25 decision changed that.

Neals did not find that Ramaswamy actually violated securities laws. At the motion-to-dismiss stage, the court accepts well-pleaded allegations as true and determines whether they state a claim that can proceed.

But Ramaswamy specifically asked the court to conclude that Rosely had not alleged enough to keep him personally in the whistleblower case.

The judge rejected him.

When Ramaswamy’s lawyers argued there were no allegations showing he had been directly involved in Rosely’s firing, Neals wrote:

“The Court disagrees.”

The judge pointed to Rosely’s allegations that Ramaswamy supervised her, demanded that she and colleague Jeff Nye violate securities laws, heard their objections and participated in the decision to fire her.

“Taking her allegations as true, Plaintiff sufficiently states a CEPA claim against Ramaswamy,” Neals wrote.

That ruling turns what Ramaswamy could previously dismiss politically as an old employee lawsuit into an active federal case moving forward during his gubernatorial campaign.

The details are more damaging than the old headlines

The renewed scrutiny is also arriving with details that received relatively little attention when the case was first filed.

As TiffinOhio.net reported after reviewing more than 150 pages of court filings, Rosely identified five categories of conduct she says Ramaswamy and Frericks demanded.

She alleges employees were pressured to use noncompliant sales materials promising future investment returns, engage in sales activity before securities licenses had transferred to Strive, distribute materials before compliance approval, put unregistered workers on calls with prospective clients and solicit business for products before those products were registered and trading.

Rosely also alleges Ramaswamy personally engaged in what she considered unlawful securities-sales activity on Twitter.

Ramaswamy and Strive deny those allegations and argue Rosely failed to identify sufficient dates, statutes and specific conversations.

But another piece of the case could prove politically potent: Rosely says she and Nye were the two workers who repeatedly objected to the alleged conduct.

Strive fired both of them on the same day.

That fact played a central role in the federal court’s decision to allow the retaliation claim to proceed.

“Firing both objecting employees is enough to support the inference that Defendants fired Plaintiff because she objected,” Neals wrote.

Ramaswamy now has to fight two campaigns at once

The practical political problem is not merely that Ramaswamy has another negative headline.

It is that the case competes directly with the message his campaign wants voters hearing.

Ramaswamy’s campaign has spent millions trying to define the election around lower costs, property taxes, crime and education. In March, the campaign announced a $10 million statewide advertising campaign built around affordability and public safety.

Now every day spent answering questions about whether he pressured employees to violate securities laws is a day spent talking about something else.

And because Democrats had already begun airing “Conman,” they do not need to persuade voters that the new lawsuit belongs in a separate category.

They can simply add it to the pile.

Pharmaceutical profits.

“Pump-and-dump” accusations.

A former executive alleging pressure to break securities laws.

A second former employee making overlapping allegations.

A federal judge refusing to dismiss the whistleblower case against Ramaswamy personally.

Individually, Ramaswamy has defenses to each accusation.

Collectively, they threaten the brand he has spent his political career selling.

The calendar makes the problem harder to outrun

The lawsuit also reentered the campaign at a point when time is becoming scarce.

Early voting is only weeks away.

That leaves Ramaswamy far less time to allow an unfavorable story to fade before voters begin making decisions.

And the case itself is not disappearing.

Neals’ Aug. 25 order allowed Rosely to amend the three claims that were dismissed without prejudice. Her attorneys have already requested and received additional time to file that amended pleading.

The two central whistleblower claims against Strive and against Ramaswamy and Frericks personally remain alive regardless.

In other words, this is not a one-day controversy created by an old complaint being rediscovered.

The docket is active.

The plaintiff is preparing another filing.

And the surviving case is moving toward its next phase at the same time the governor’s race moves toward its final one.

No evidence yet of voter movement — but the vulnerability is obvious

There is an important distinction between a damaging political development and proof that voters have already punished a candidate for it.

No public poll released since the Aug. 25 ruling has yet measured whether the case has changed support for Ramaswamy.

His campaign also retains enormous financial resources, a Republican-leaning statewide electorate and the endorsement of President Donald Trump.

But this is no longer the kind of Ohio governor’s race in which a Republican can assume a comfortable margin.

Axios reported in August that Ohio’s marquee races had become unexpectedly difficult for Republicans, while Axios Cleveland described the governor’s race as one of several toss-up contests emerging amid broad voter dissatisfaction.

In a race like that, the political significance of the Strive decision is not that it proves Ramaswamy will lose.

It is that the ruling lands directly on an existing weakness, reinforces an attack already being broadcast to voters and keeps the conversation centered on the part of Ramaswamy’s biography his campaign most needs to protect.

The business record is now part of the closing argument

Ramaswamy has spent his campaign telling Ohioans that his success in business is evidence he can successfully run state government.

Democrats have increasingly argued that voters should look more closely at how that success was built.

The Aug. 25 ruling ensures that debate will not remain confined to old clips, opposition research or attack advertisements.

There is now an active federal whistleblower case in which a former senior executive alleges Ramaswamy personally pushed employees toward securities-law violations and helped fire her after she objected.

Ramaswamy tried to get himself out of that case.

The judge said no.

With the governor’s race effectively tied and voting approaching, a three-year-old lawsuit has suddenly become a 2026 campaign problem.

And the part of Vivek Ramaswamy’s résumé he has spent years presenting as his greatest political asset is becoming one of the central liabilities he will have to defend before Ohioans make their choice.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

After the bill passed the Ohio House, Click went a step further: He added his name as a cosponsor.

Months later, the Vickery Republican began highlighting many of the same concerns associated with energy-intensive data centers in his own district, calling potential electric-rate increases, strain on the power grid and noise pollution “legitimate” issues deserving serious consideration.

But the legislation Click backed would make it harder for cities, townships and counties to impose rules specifically tailored to cryptocurrency-mining operations.

Click voted yes, then put his name on the bill

House Bill 116, dubbed the “Ohio Blockchain Basics Act,” passed the Ohio House on June 18, 2025.

The sequence surrounding Click’s support is notable.

When the bill was brought to the House floor for its final vote, Click was not listed among its cosponsors.

The official House Journal listed only Reps. Tex Fischer, Brian Lorenz, Ty Mathews, Riordan McClain, Josh Williams and Thaddeus Claggett as cosponsors when the legislation was called for a vote.

Click nevertheless voted yes.

HB 116 passed 70-26, according to the official House roll call.

Immediately after the bill passed, sponsor Steve Demetriou moved to amend its title to add another group of lawmakers as cosponsors.

The first name on the list was Gary Click.

“Add the names: ‘Click, Daniels, Deeter, Dovilla, Gross, Hall, T., King, Lear, Mathews, A., Miller, M., Plummer, Roemer, Swearingen, Willis, Workman,’” the House Journal records.

That means Click did not attach his name to an earlier or substantially different version of the legislation and later find himself voting on unexpected provisions.

He voted for the completed House version and then agreed to have his name formally added to it after its passage.

What Click voted for

HB 116 defines a “digital asset mining business” as multiple cryptocurrency-mining devices operating at a single site and consuming more than one megawatt of electricity on an average annual basis.

One megawatt represents 1,000 kilowatts of continuous electrical capacity. And the threshold is only the point at which HB 116 begins defining an operation as a commercial digital-asset mining business, not a cap on how much electricity such a facility may consume.

Under the House-passed legislation, a cryptocurrency-mining business could operate in any area zoned for industrial use as long as it satisfies the requirements applicable to industrial uses.

More significantly, the bill says a political subdivision “shall not adopt or enforce” an ordinance, resolution, regulation or order specific to digital-asset mining businesses unless that rule also applies to “other similarly situated businesses.”

The legislation does not define what qualifies as a “similarly situated” business.

It also gives a cryptocurrency-mining company the right to appeal to a county common pleas court if it believes a local government rezoned or redistricted property in a manner that discriminates against the business.

The bill would not wipe out local zoning codes or exempt crypto mines from generally applicable industrial regulations.

But it would expressly restrict the ability of local governments to single out cryptocurrency mines for regulations aimed specifically at that industry.

That could become important when communities confront issues unique to or especially pronounced at large mining operations, including around-the-clock computer equipment, cooling systems, fans and extraordinary electricity demand.

Even the crypto lobby acknowledged the noise

The potential effects of those operations were acknowledged by the very groups lobbying Ohio lawmakers to pass HB 116.

Eric Peterson, policy director for the Satoshi Action Fund, testified in favor of the bill before the House Technology and Innovation Committee in March 2025.

In his written testimony, Peterson repeatedly described cryptocurrency mines as “Bitcoin datacenters.”

He also acknowledged a problem that would later become central to Click’s own discussion of conventional data centers.

“There are often concerns about the noise from Bitcoin miners.”

Peterson nevertheless urged lawmakers to enact protections for the industry, arguing that HB 116 would create a more predictable environment for crypto-mining companies.

He specifically praised provisions allowing Bitcoin miners to operate in industrial zones and preventing local governments from targeting mining businesses through zoning actions.

The Satoshi Action Fund describes itself as an organization working with state lawmakers on Bitcoin policy and publishes model legislation intended to protect cryptocurrency ownership, transactions and mining.

Crypto industry told lawmakers rural Ohio was prime territory

The Ohio Blockchain Council also testified in support of HB 116.

Executive Director Andrew Burchwell told lawmakers that cryptocurrency mining companies were already developing large operations in Ohio and specifically identified Standard Power, Bitdeer and MARA.

His testimony described Bitcoin mines as data centers and argued that rural communities were particularly attractive places for the industry to expand.

Bitcoin data centers, Burchwell said, “are often built in rural communities where traditional data centers are not typically looking to build.”

He argued that the projects could create jobs and tax revenue and said Bitcoin miners can reduce their electricity use when the power grid is under stress.

But his testimony also made the purpose of HB 116’s regulatory provisions clear.

Burchwell said changes to Ohio’s zoning laws were necessary to signal that the state was open for business and that cryptocurrency developers faced “no risk of undue or unjust rulemaking against the developments this industry seeks to provide within the State of Ohio.”

The official committee record shows proponents at the March 25 hearing included the Satoshi Action Fund, Ohio Blockchain Council and Americans for Prosperity-Ohio.

Then Click started talking about data-center noise and electricity costs

By February 2026, Click was using a substantially different tone when discussing the rapid growth of data centers in his own district.

Click introduced House Bill 646 with Rep. Kellie Deeter to create a state commission studying data-center development.

In sponsor testimony on Feb. 17, Click said the proposal stemmed from concerns in the 88th House District, particularly Sandusky County.

Click said he attended a meeting of concerned residents and found “many of their concerns were compelling.”

He specifically listed:

• the loss of agricultural land;

• impacts on local water supplies;

• wastewater disposal;

• strain on the energy grid, including potential increases in electricity costs for ratepayers;

• noise pollution;

• light pollution;

• tax abatements; and

• unfulfilled promises of economic development.

“Many of these concerns are legitimate and deserve serious consideration,” Click told lawmakers.

The contrast is difficult to miss.

When the Ohio House was considering protections for cryptocurrency mines, Click voted for legislation restricting local governments from enacting rules specifically aimed at those facilities.

When data-center development became controversial in his own district, Click himself identified noise, electricity demand and potential increases in residents’ electric bills as legitimate concerns.

Cryptocurrency mines and AI or cloud-computing data centers are not identical facilities. But HB 116’s own proponents repeatedly described Bitcoin mining operations as “data centers,” and both types of facilities can involve large concentrations of computing equipment and substantial electricity demand.

Arkansas already tried it

There is also evidence from another Republican-led state showing why specialized cryptocurrency-mining regulations can matter.

Arkansas enacted the Data Centers Act in 2023, limiting local governments’ ability to treat cryptocurrency mines differently from other data centers.

The law quickly generated backlash as communities complained about noise and said local governments had been left without sufficient power to address mining operations.

By 2024, Arkansas lawmakers reversed course on key parts of the policy.

The Republican-controlled legislature approved new cryptocurrency-mining restrictions requiring noise-reduction measures and state permits while repealing a portion of the earlier law that prevented local governments from imposing different noise requirements on mining businesses.

The new law allows measures including liquid or submerged cooling, fully enclosing equipment that directly produces noise, or locating operations farther from nearby homes and businesses.

Arkansas lawmakers were explicit about why they believed additional regulation was necessary.

In Act 174, the General Assembly found that cryptocurrency-mining businesses presented “significant challenges” that included “significant noise emissions” and “massive consumption of power,” as well as large water use and potential cybersecurity concerns.

The Associated Press reported at the time that the changes followed backlash from residents and local officials over the 2023 law and the noise produced by mining operations.

Arkansas effectively had to restore specialized safeguards after first restricting communities’ ability to impose them.

An Ohio township is confronting the same question right now

The issue is no longer theoretical in Ohio.

In August, trustees in Shalersville Township authorized a $9,000 independent acoustical study as Bitdeer Technologies Group, a Bitcoin-mining company, pursues a proposed data-center campus there.

According to The Portager, the township commissioned the study to establish existing noise levels near the proposed development and help officials determine what local noise regulations may be appropriate.

Bitdeer has said sound from its proposed project should remain below 50 decibels at its property line.

The situation illustrates exactly why the details of HB 116 matter.

A township confronted with a cryptocurrency-mining development may conclude that it needs regulations specifically designed around the noise or operational characteristics of that industry.

The legislation Click backed would require mining-specific rules to also apply to other “similarly situated businesses,” a term the bill leaves undefined.

The bill offers more than zoning protections

HB 116 contains several other provisions favorable to the digital-asset industry.

It would establish a state income-tax deduction for capital gains arising when cryptocurrency is used to purchase goods or services in transactions of $200 or less, with that threshold subsequently adjusted for inflation.

The provision does not exempt the underlying purchase from ordinary sales tax. It instead eliminates Ohio income tax on qualifying capital gains generated when appreciated cryptocurrency is spent in those smaller transactions.

The Legislative Service Commission’s fiscal analysis says the provision would reduce state personal-income-tax revenue by an amount that could not be determined.

The bill would also prohibit counties, municipalities and certain townships from imposing taxes or charges specifically based on using digital assets as a form of payment when those charges would not apply to a transaction conducted with U.S. currency.

And it says a person would not need an Ohio money-transmitter license solely to engage in digital-asset mining, staking, exchanging one digital asset for another, developing certain exchange software or operating blockchain nodes.

Click’s record speaks for itself

Click’s later data-center legislation does not prohibit data centers, nor has he positioned himself as an opponent of the industry.

But he has made the concerns surrounding their growth part of his public message.

After the Ohio House passed his study-commission bill in March, Click said it had originated “in the heart of the 88th district” because his constituents had unanswered questions about data centers.

“They have questions that deserve answers,” Click said.

Those questions include noise, power-grid strain and whether massive computing operations could contribute to higher electricity costs.

Click had already voted on legislation involving those issues.

His vote was to give large cryptocurrency-mining operations additional protection against local rules written specifically for them.

Then he added his name to the bill.

HB 116 remains pending before the Ohio Senate Financial Institutions, Insurance and Technology Committee.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

An Ohio data analyst has identified one cause that could be a warning sign for the overall economy.

About 720,000 Americans seemingly stopped looking for work between May and June alone, CNBC reported. And Policy Matters Ohio reports that 74,000 fewer people are seeking jobs in the Buckeye State than were this time last year.

One reason for the losses: millions of foreign-born men are no longer in the country, according to an analysis that was published on Sunday. Happening amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportations, many were probably forced to leave.

Eric Pachman used government data to determine that 2.1 million foreign-born, working-age men have left the country since the start of Trump’s second term. Eighty-eight percent of them were working when they left the country, according to the analysis.

“Over the past two years foreign-born men’s labor force shrank by 1.4 million,” the report on Pachman’s website, Data 4 the People, says. “But in a normal pair of summers it would have grown by about 360,000 — so measured against trend, the swing is 1.8 million.”

The losses of foreign-born men last year and this year were by far the biggest in the datasets with which Pachman worked.

In 2025, the United States lost 1.2 million foreign-born men, followed by 919,000 so far this year. The next closest year — at the height of the pandemic in 2020 — saw only 336,000 foreign-born men left the country.

Analysts who study the government’s data regarding Trump’s mass deportations say there are reasons to question their reliability. But with the government reporting as many as 10,000 deportations in a month, it’s reasonable to assume that many of the male, foreign-born workers who have left the country did so via deportation.

Pachman’s analysis didn’t find similar steep declines in the number of foreign-born women. That raises the possibility that many more men than women are being deported, thereby breaking up families, the researcher said.

Other analyses indicate that historically, the great majority of deportations involved men.

Pachman said the fact that native-born workers haven’t rushed to fill jobs vacated by foreign-born men undermines a basic tenant of Trump’s deportation project: the claim that foreign workers took jobs that the native-born want.

“There’s a narrative that a lot of people believe despite their political party. Call it the labor-displacement effect,” Pachman said in an interview. “It says that if an immigrant takes a job, that is a job that’s being taken from another individual, say a native-born, white American. 

“If that is true, what we should be finding when we look at the public data is that as jobs go away that immigrants were holding, those jobs should be getting filled by native-born men. But we’re not finding that. We’re finding that the participation rate of native-born men is continuing to decline.”

Pachman looked at the kinds of jobs in which foreign-born men were most prevalent. 

First was farming, fishing and forestry, where they made up 42% of the workforce. That was followed by construction and extraction at 34%, 30% in building and grounds maintenance, healthcare support at 27%, 25% for food preparation and serving, and another 25% in transportation and material moving.

Those are fields that the native-born apparently find less attractive than their foreign-born counterparts.

In addition to Trump’s tariffs, healthcare cuts and his war with Iran, his mass deportations may be yet another drag on the economy.

“If this displacement theory does not hold, then we’re playing with fire with the economy,” Pachman said. “All that is going to do is lead to certain vacancies in the economy for certain types of jobs that were more likely to be done by the foreign-born. If they go unfilled, then all this does is lead to more inflation.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Since then, courts have generally followed a rule of thumb that states can specify what college instructors can teach, but not what they conclude about it. In other words, as long as professors stick to talking about things relevant to the course topic and their own area of expertise, the First Amendment strongly protects their liberty to present whatever viewpoints they feel are relevant to discuss. 

This distinction – that the state gets to choose the topic and faculty decide how to pursue it – has largely held for the past seventy-five years or so. In Ohio, the state legislature broke with this precedent when it passed its claimed omnibus higher education reform bill, Senate Bill 1. A small, unremarkable provision of that law tip-toed past the larger controversies raging over the bill and quietly stepped over that line. 

Buried deep in the 42 page law is the requirement that newly state-mandated civics courses include reading at least “five essays in their entirety from the Federalist Papers.” Fine. This would pass the test affirmed this summer in Pernell v. Florida, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, that held that the government can dictate programs but not viewpoints. But the next short sentence opened the door to blowing up this distinction.

“The essays shall be selected by the department chair.”

By itself, having a department chair determine which of the 85 Federalist Papers are most worthy of teaching is probably not a clear violation of academic freedom principles (though given the range of the Federalist essays, which ones a professor chooses to highlight can be very ideological).

But for the first time, it specifically establishes in Ohio law the power of a state bureaucrat (yes, Virginia, chairs and deans are government functionaries, ultimately beholden to their bosses rather than their own principles) to pick and choose how a particular subject is to be taught. 

S.B. 1 was passed in the spring of 2025, and in the year since, its sponsor has been unsettled by how one aspect of it has been rolled out. State Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, discovered that some professors were not going to teach a celebratory and patriotic version of American history and he introduced a follow-on bill, S.B. 461, to, as he put it, “close the loophole.” 

Senator Cirino has been remarkably candid about his determination to legislate the viewpoints that he wishes to see taught. He recently spoke on Ohio Senate Majority Communications Director John Fortney’s podcast:

Fortney: There’s even a new textbook called Unpatriotic Civics, explicitly designed to fulfill the requirements of Senate Bill 1, but “without endorsing the patriotic narrative.” That’s how far some of these leftists will go to try and get around the law. 

Cirino: Well, we’re not going to have any of that in the state of Ohio … So what we’ve done in Senate Bill 461 is we set it up that the directors of the five centers as a group need to be the ones in the future who will be approving the courses that qualify … That way we are not going to have any of this funny business which the academicians will definitely attempt to do, putting courses in there that don’t meet the intent of the legislation that we passed.

For full disclosure, I am the author of Unpatriotic Civics and its companion book, The Civics of Pluralism, that will be made available at no cost to all Ohio students through the Ohio Open Ed Collaborative, a project of the Ohio Department of Higher Education. 

Cirino didn’t fully explain his own bill, because S.B. 461 does much more than merely approve courses. The law gives his Ohio Civics Board “sole and exclusive authority over all aspects of American civic literacy courses…including course modality, syllabi, class size, faculty teachers, and course content.”

This is a level of control reminiscent of the way the Soviet Union would station political overseers at desks next to government officials to ensure they toed the line and to report on their loyalty. 

I suspect that such a Civics Board will look unfavorably upon a textbook that highlights facts including that slavery was a major issue in the American Revolution, the idea that many patriotic Americans viewed the Constitution of 1787 as an aristocratic coup, that Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail was in violation of the prohibited concepts in S.B. 1, and that Adam Smith was not a consistent believer in the free market but wanted state controls over major portions of the economy. 

Cirino has also explained that he established the structure of the Ohio Civics Board to insulate it from any popular attempts to check its power. As envisioned in S.B. 461, the board is composed of five GOP loyalists who are not elected and cannot be removed or appointed by the governor. They will enjoy a budget that would be the envy of every college dean in the state.

Not only will they directly receive the tuition dollars of students taking their classes, but were the Ohio legislature to decide to cut its share of funding to these civics centers, the university must make up all the shortfall in their budgets from its own general funds. 

All of these barriers to democratic controls were explained by Cirino this way: 

“The current chancellor is doing a really good job of ferreting out, you know, some of the courses that have been proposed to qualify, but what (S.B.) 461 is attempting to do is to solidify this a little bit more and protect it because there will be future governors, future chancellors, future legislators, who may want to, you know, water things down.”

Ohioans who care about the quality and independence of their universities and colleges might want to pay attention to S.B. 461 this fall. 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

More than 1 million American children have lost access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, following a recent federal law. Now, as schools gear up for a new term, a portion of those children could be at risk of losing free meals — viewed as crucial supports for both childhood hunger and classroom learning.  

But the changes in cafeterias could affect even families who have never participated in the federal food stamp program.

Many students who receive free school meals automatically qualify because of their household participation in SNAP or Medicaid. So a reduction in those social service programs can directly threaten their eligibility for free school meals.

And many schools offer free meals to all students. Those schools qualify for federal funding that is tied to rates of SNAP participation. The complicated federal funding formula means even a slight change in SNAP enrollment could jeopardize free meal funding for entire schools and districts. 

“Cuts to SNAP are not going to stop at the grocery store,” said Clarissa Hayes, deputy director of child nutrition programs and policy at the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit working to combat hunger. “They really are going to threaten children’s access to school meals, which is obviously going to increase hunger at home and in the classroom, and is going to have that negative ripple effect across children’s health and academic performance.”

The threat to school meals comes during a period of upheaval for federal safety net programs and growing hunger across the country amid rising grocery prices. Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act implemented new eligibility and work requirements for SNAP as well as pushed new costs onto states. Already, millions have lost food stamps, but the threats to schools are just coming into focus.

“We are really only starting to see the beginning,” Hayes said.

The free school meal program allows previously qualified students to remain enrolled over a 30-day grace period. And some students who lost SNAP coverage may still qualify for free meals at school if their families submit certain paperwork. 

Many low-income families are struggling to keep their kids fed, according to a recent survey from the nonprofit No Kid Hungry. In that survey, parents said back-to-school season creates impossible choices: More than two-thirds worried they would have to choose between paying bills or buying healthy food for their kids. Already, more than half reported cutting back on groceries given the high prices. 

More than a quarter of the nation’s public schools currently offer universal free meals. Aside from the obvious financial benefit to families, those schools have reduced the stigma of free lunch and improved efficiency in the lunch line and the office since no one is paying up front for meals or working to track down unpaid meal debt, said Carolyn Vega, senior program manager at No Kid Hungry.

But federal changes could halt the important progress made in expanding universal access.

“Then all kids at all incomes would suffer,” Vega said.

Importance of school meals

For Tennessee parent Anthony Bonner, this year’s first day of school delivered instant relief. It meant that his 14-year-old son was ensured a free breakfast and lunch every weekday, leaving worry only about dinner each night.

“School starting has definitely alleviated some of that stress, that worry and that concern,” said Bonner, a 38-year-old campaign organizer and barber in Memphis.

School meals are more important than ever since the pair lost their $250 monthly SNAP benefit in March. Bonner said he lost his eligibility because of federal changes that ended the work requirement exemption for parents of children 14 and over. He is currently working a contract job that doesn’t satisfy federal work requirements.

It’s caused him to cut back on fresh proteins and produce, opting instead for cheaper frozen veggies and packaged foods like ramen packets.

“It’s one thing to cut me off, but I should have been able to get benefits for him,” he said. “I still have yet to really have enough food that I feel comfortable with that me and my son can eat for the month.”

For now, his son’s breakfast and lunch will continue as his entire school receives free meals. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Community Eligibility Provision reimburses schools for a portion of breakfasts and lunches using a formula based on the percentage of students that qualify for SNAP and other means-tested programs. 

Kids attending schools in the highest poverty areas will likely maintain eligibility for free meals for now, said Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, which represents 50,000 school meal providers across the country.

But schools with more mixed economic levels could lose free meal eligibility as participation in SNAP declines.

This summer, Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida announced it would no longer offer free meals at all of its 500-plus schools because of changes to its federal reimbursement eligibility. Florida’s largest school system still has universal free meals in 121 schools, but children at the remaining schools must now individually apply for free meals.

This fall, Central Kentucky’s Marion County Public Schools remain in a holding pattern, said Jennifer Wheeler, school nutrition director. The school system currently offers free meals for all, but future funding may be at risk as student participation in SNAP declines.

Under its current four-year certification, the school system receives the maximum federal reimbursement for about 93% of its students. But Wheeler said current SNAP enrollment means the school system would receive the full reimbursement for about 75% of its students.

“Which then is a huge financial impact on our program,” she said.

Like many school meal programs, Marion County’s is self-funded, meaning it doesn’t receive local tax revenue to feed its 3,000 students across seven schools. Rather, federal meal reimbursements must cover the costs of food, labor and kitchen equipment.

Wheeler said rising grocery prices have already stretched many families in her community. As evidence, she pointed to the school summer feeding program, which last year handed out about 134,000 prepackaged meals. This summer, the same program with the same offerings and logistics gave out more than 201,000 meals.

“When people would come through the lines, they would talk about grocery costs,” she said. “They would talk about gas costs. So inflation, I think, is the number one driver.”

Changing federal landscape

When Congress passed last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans who supported food stamp cuts downplayed their impact. Many, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, said the changes would help cut waste and fraud from the safety net program.

Between May 2025 and May 2026, more than 5.6 million people lost SNAP coverage, according to the latest federal data. 

That 13.5% one-year decline was a much faster drop in coverage than was originally anticipated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that analyzed last year’s legislation.

The latest federal data showed about 36.6 million people received SNAP in May with an average monthly benefit of about $187 per person.

SNAP benefits are expected to shrink more as the law is fully implemented — raising fears that some states could even drop out of the program entirely as the federal government requires states to spend billions on administrative costs and benefits. 

The White House did not respond to Stateline’s questions about how the SNAP changes will impact school meals. Neither did a spokesperson for the U.S. Senate agriculture committee that oversees SNAP and school meal programs.

Currently, nine states provide free meals for all school students: California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Vermont. Experts say students in those states, which rely on a mix of state and federal funding, should be shielded from the SNAP fallout for now. 

But even states where lawmakers have specifically funded school meals could see major financial upheaval. 

In Maine, for example, the state spends $64 million per year to supplement federal meal reimbursements. But federal funds are based on how many low-income families schools serve. And those calculations will likely change as more children lose food stamps.

Already, more than 15,000 Mainers have lost SNAP coverage since last July, according to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 

The changing landscape could force the state to spend much more to supplement school meals, Maine Morning Star reported.

“Free meals for all was already a big ask when it first went into law, and that was when the federal government was giving more money,” Allison Leavitt, nutrition director of the Lisbon School Department and president of the Maine School Nutrition Association, told the Morning Star. “Now the feds are giving less money and it’s like, how do we do this?”

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. 

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

His lawyers argued there were “no allegations in the Complaint” showing the Republican nominee for Ohio governor was directly involved in firing Joyce Rosely, a former senior executive at Strive Asset Management.

U.S. District Judge Julien Xavier Neals answered in three words:

“The Court disagrees.”

In a 24-page opinion issued Aug. 25, Neals laid out the allegations that kept Ramaswamy personally in the case: Rosely says he supervised her, demanded that she and another employee violate securities laws, received their repeated objections and participated in the decision to fire her after she refused.

“Taking her allegations as true, Plaintiff sufficiently states a CEPA claim against Ramaswamy,” Neals wrote.

That sentence revived a lawsuit that spent years largely outside the political spotlight while Ramaswamy moved from Strive into presidential politics and then became the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio.

The court record goes far beyond the shorthand description of a “securities-law whistleblower case.” TiffinOhio.net reviewed the original complaint, both sides’ briefs, a federal magistrate judge’s recommendation, Ramaswamy’s objections, Neals’ Aug. 25 ruling and the filings that followed.

Taken together, they describe a senior Strive executive who says she was ordered to cross securities-law lines almost as soon as she arrived, repeatedly objected directly to Ramaswamy, received a positive performance review, and was then fired alongside the only other employee she says joined her securities-law objections.

Ramaswamy, Strive and co-founder Anson Frericks deny Rosely’s allegations. Their own court filings describe her as an underperforming employee terminated during a legitimate reorganization and attack the complaint as vague, conclusory and unsupported.

A federal magistrate judge recommended allowing the central whistleblower claims to proceed. After Ramaswamy and the other defendants objected, the district judge reached the same result.

What the judge actually decided

Neals was not deciding whether Ramaswamy violated securities laws or retaliated against Rosely. He was deciding whether Rosely’s complaint alleged enough facts for those claims to proceed.

At the motion-to-dismiss stage, a court accepts well-pleaded factual allegations as true and asks whether they state a plausible legal claim.

On the core whistleblower theory, Neals said they did.

He allowed two central claims to continue: Count I, Rosely’s whistleblower-retaliation claim against Strive under New Jersey’s Conscientious Employee Protection Act, and Count IV, which seeks to hold Ramaswamy and Frericks individually liable for that alleged retaliation.

The court’s Aug. 25 order dismissed three other claims involving age discrimination and retaliation tied to a separate internal complaint without prejudice, meaning Rosely can amend them.

The ruling therefore did not validate every accusation in the lawsuit. It rejected Ramaswamy’s argument that the whistleblower case against him was too thin to proceed.

Rosely says the pressure began “almost immediately”

Strive hired Rosely in August 2022 as executive vice president and co-head of institutional sales and distribution. She worked remotely from New Jersey for the Dublin, Ohio-based investment firm Ramaswamy co-founded with Frericks.

Rosely’s complaint says both men exercised supervisory authority over her.

Then came the demands.

“Almost immediately” after starting work, Rosely alleges, Ramaswamy and Frericks directed her to violate securities laws.

Her complaint identifies five categories of conduct, which are also detailed in Rosely’s federal court brief:

• using noncompliant sales material that improperly promised future investment returns;

• having new employees engage in sales activity before their securities licenses had been transferred to Strive;

• sending sales materials before they had been approved by Strive’s outside compliance vendor, Foreside;

• having unregistered employees discuss Strive securities products with prospective clients by telephone; and

• creating deal books and soliciting business for investment products before those products were registered and actively trading.

Rosely also alleges that Ramaswamy and Frericks personally engaged in securities-sales activity without licenses. She says Frericks called and emailed individual investors while Ramaswamy engaged in what she considered unlawful securities-sales activity on Twitter.

Rosely says she and Jeff Nye, Strive’s executive vice president and head of wealth management distribution, repeatedly objected to the conduct in conversations with both Ramaswamy and Frericks.

Those five allegations appear in the original complaint and are repeated nearly verbatim in the defendants’ own objections filed in federal court.

Ramaswamy’s lawyers attacked them as too vague. They argued Rosely failed to identify dates, exact conversations, specific securities statutes or which alleged instructions came personally from which co-founder.

The core whistleblower claim survived.

The two employees who objected were both fired

The retaliation theory does not rest only on a complaint followed months later by a firing.

Rosely says she and Nye were the two employees who repeatedly objected to the alleged securities-law conduct.

On March 21, 2023, Strive fired both of them.

That same day, Strive also fired senior vice presidents John Phillips and J.P. Towey.

The company told Rosely it was “reorganizing” and there was “no longer a position” for her.

Ramaswamy and Strive made the passage of time a centerpiece of their effort to dismiss the whistleblower claim. Rosely says the securities-law pressure began soon after she joined Strive in August 2022. She was fired roughly seven months later.

The defendants argued that seven months was too long to support an inference of retaliation.

Magistrate Judge Cathy Waldor rejected that argument in her July 2024 report and recommendation. She focused on another allegation: Strive fired the other employee who allegedly engaged in the same protected activity at the same time.

Neals reached the same conclusion.

“According to Plaintiff, Defendants asked her and Nye to break the law; Plaintiff and Nye repeatedly refused to do so and complained to management; and Defendants fired Plaintiff and Nye seven months later,” Neals wrote.

Then came the key finding:

“Firing both objecting employees is enough to support the inference that Defendants fired Plaintiff because she objected.”

A positive review, then “we had to do this”

Rosely’s complaint says her sales numbers were strong and that she received a positive written performance evaluation in February 2023, about one month before Strive fired her. Her attorneys highlighted the evaluation in their brief opposing dismissal.

Strive later described the termination differently. In federal court, Ramaswamy and the company said Rosely was fired “for underperformance” as part of a broader reorganization.

The defense argued in its February 2024 reply brief that the positive review weakened Rosely’s retaliation case: an employer preparing to fire someone for complaining, they said, would not logically give that employee a favorable evaluation first.

Rosely’s account puts the same facts in a different sequence. She says she repeatedly objected to alleged securities-law violations, received a positive review, and then was abruptly fired alongside the only other employee she says joined those objections.

The next day, according to Rosely, Ramaswamy appeared at Strive’s Dublin office to reassure the remaining employees about their jobs.

She says he referred to the four dismissals and told employees:

“we had to do this”

Ramaswamy’s lawyers argued that the statement did not show he personally participated in Rosely’s firing.

In their objections to the magistrate judge’s recommendation, they argued that the statement fell “far short” of plausibly showing Ramaswamy played a role in Rosely’s specific termination or acted with a retaliatory motive.

Judge Neals rejected that argument.

The judge pointed to the full set of allegations against Ramaswamy: that he supervised Rosely, demanded that she and Nye violate securities laws, received their repeated objections and participated in the decision to terminate her.

Ramaswamy told the court the complaint did not plausibly connect him to Rosely’s firing.

“The Court disagrees,” Neals wrote.

The other allegations — and what did not survive

Rosely’s lawsuit contains two other major storylines, but neither survived the Aug. 25 ruling in its current form.

One involves an internal complaint about alleged sexual misconduct by Strive Chief Operating Officer Ben Pham.

Rosely says that in January 2023, Nye told her a newly hired employee had reported that Pham was pursuing her romantically in an “aggressive manner.” Rosely says she had traveled with the two and found their interactions “very uncomfortable to observe.”

She brought the issue to Strive’s head of people strategy, Laura Brady, and says Brady told her to:

“keep an eye on them and report back”

Rosely says she later raised the issue with Frericks, who told her it was none of his business, and confronted Pham directly, who told her to mind her own business.

Two months later, Rosely was fired.

Those allegations are detailed in Rosely’s court filing.

They formed the basis of a separate retaliation claim under New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination. Neals dismissed that claim without prejudice, finding the complaint did not plead enough to establish the required causal link.

Rosely also alleged age discrimination. She was 52 when Strive fired her. Nye was 54 and Phillips was 53. Her complaint says the three were the only Strive employees age 50 or older at the time. Towey, the fourth employee fired that day, was 40.

Waldor initially recommended allowing the age claim to proceed, but Neals disagreed. He ruled that Rosely had not pleaded enough information about the age and circumstances of the younger employee she said was retained in her place.

That count and the related individual claim against Ramaswamy and Frericks were dismissed without prejudice.

Those claims can be amended.

The whistleblower claims do not need to be. They survived.

Ramaswamy spent years trying to move or kill the case

The Aug. 25 ruling came after a long procedural fight.

Ramaswamy and Strive first tried to move the case from New Jersey to the Southern District of Ohio.

Rosely’s employment agreement said actions brought to “enforce” the agreement had to be filed in Ohio. The defendants argued that Rosely was effectively enforcing it because she sought lost compensation tied to the contract.

Waldor rejected that argument, finding the forum clause covered lawsuits to enforce the employment agreement itself, not statutory whistleblower and discrimination claims.

Ramaswamy and Strive objected to that recommendation.

Neals rejected them again.

“The Court cannot transform the word ‘enforce’ into ‘arise out of or relate to,’” he wrote.

The effort to move the case to Ohio was denied.

Then came the delay.

Waldor issued her report and recommendation on July 24, 2024. Ramaswamy and the other defendants objected on Aug. 7, 2024.

For the next 19 months, the district court did not rule on those objections.

On March 6, 2026, Rosely’s attorney Christopher Lenzo wrote directly to Neals, noting that the defendants’ objections had been pending for 19 months and asking the judge to issue a decision “so that the litigation can proceed.”

It took another five months.

Neals finally ruled Aug. 25, 2026, more than two years after Waldor first recommended keeping the central whistleblower claims alive.

The timing transformed the political context of the case. A lawsuit filed while Ramaswamy was running for president is now moving forward while he is the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio.

Rosely was not the only former Strive employee making securities-law allegations

Rosely’s lawsuit did not emerge in isolation.

Former Strive regional sales chief John Phillips filed a separate lawsuit in 2023 accusing Strive and its founders of misrepresenting the company’s financial condition and pressuring employees to violate securities laws.

Forbes and the Columbus Dispatch reported on both lawsuits in 2023. Phillips had left JPMorgan to join Strive and alleged he relied on representations that the startup was well financed and that Ramaswamy intended to remain committed to it.

Phillips was one of the four employees Strive fired on March 21, 2023.

Later that year, Bloomberg Law reported that Strive changed its top legal and compliance leadership while the two lawsuits were pending. Strive said that personnel change was unrelated to the layoffs or litigation.

Strive said when the lawsuits first surfaced that it intended to “vigorously defend itself.”

The existence of the allegations was news in 2023. What is new now is what happened after years of litigation: Ramaswamy tried to get the central whistleblower claim against him dismissed, and a federal judge refused.

The case is moving again

The docket became active almost immediately after Neals ruled.

On Aug. 25, the judge’s order gave Rosely 30 days to amend the three claims he dismissed without prejudice.

Two days later, Rosely’s attorneys requested an additional 30 days because the lawyer primarily responsible for the case was dealing with a personal emergency.

Neals granted the extension Aug. 28.

An amended complaint is now expected while the surviving whistleblower claims against Strive, Ramaswamy and Frericks continue.

The case is no longer waiting for a judge to decide whether its central allegations can move forward.

They can.

Why this matters in the Ohio governor’s race

Ramaswamy has made his business career one of the central arguments for electing him governor.

He founded Strive as a direct challenge to the largest firms on Wall Street, accusing asset managers of allowing politics to override their duties to investors. The company’s public brand was built around fiduciary responsibility, merit and a promise to strip ideological agendas out of investment management.

The lawsuit describes a different Strive behind the scenes.

A senior executive says the firm’s founders pressured employees to use noncompliant materials, market securities before required approvals were complete, involve unregistered employees in sales conversations and solicit business before products were registered and trading.

She says she objected directly to Ramaswamy.

She says the only other employee who joined those objections was fired the same day she was.

She says Ramaswamy appeared at the office the next day and told the remaining workforce, “we had to do this.”

Ramaswamy says the allegations are false and that Rosely was an underperforming employee let go in a legitimate reorganization.

He asked the federal courts to move the case to Ohio or throw it out.

First a magistrate judge rejected the core of that effort. Ramaswamy objected. Nineteen months later, Rosely’s lawyer had to ask the court to finally rule.

Now the district judge has ruled.

Ramaswamy remains a defendant.

The whistleblower claims remain alive.

And the business record he is asking Ohio voters to trust is headed deeper into federal litigation.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The 20-year-old Springfield High School honors graduate had started classes at Wright State University on Aug. 24, studying physiology and neuroscience as he prepared for what he hoped would eventually become a career in medicine.

By Monday morning, he was dead.

Bel was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer on Interstate 70 in Clark County after exiting his vehicle and entering the westbound lanes, according to the Ohio State Highway Patrol’s initial investigation.

His family says he died by suicide after weeks of mounting distress over an electronic GPS monitor that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had strapped to his ankle following the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.

The Highway Patrol said the circumstances surrounding Bel’s death remain under investigation.

What happened in the weeks before his death, however, is increasingly well documented through Bel’s own social media posts, statements from his father, school records and the federal government itself.

An honors student with plans for medical school

Bel graduated from Springfield High School in May as a member of the Class of 2026.

Springfield City Schools said he participated in the National Honor Society, Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and varsity boys soccer program. He played forward and midfield for the Wildcats.

He was also an Award of Excellence scholarship recipient, one of several Springfield seniors recognized this spring for academic achievement, service, character and leadership.

Bel was the oldest of three children.

On Aug. 24 — the first day of Wright State’s fall semester — he began college. His social media posts described plans to study physiology and neuroscience before attending medical school.

Wright State President Sue Edwards described him Tuesday as an active honors student who was passionate about soccer and had already become engaged in his classes and campus community.

“We are heartbroken by this devastating loss,” Edwards said.

ICE put a GPS monitor on his ankle

Bel’s college experience began against a dramatically different immigration backdrop than the one under which he had finished high school.

The Trump administration terminated Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status designation, and after a June Supreme Court ruling cleared a legal obstacle to the termination, TPS protections for Haitians ended July 27.

TPS had allowed hundreds of thousands of Haitians already in the United States to remain and work legally because of dangerous conditions in Haiti.

Immigration authorities subsequently began summoning Haitians from Springfield for in-person check-ins at ICE offices in Blue Ash and Westerville. Many emerged wearing electronic ankle monitors.

TiffinOhio.net previously reported on the monitoring effort and the objections from Springfield-area pastors and immigrant advocates who said the devices stigmatized people who had been living and working legally under TPS.

Bel was among them.

In a statement released Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that ICE placed Bel into its Alternatives to Detention program with an ankle monitor on July 29 while his immigration proceedings continued.

The Washington Post reported that Bel also had a pending asylum claim.

The next day, July 30, Bel publicly described what the monitor was doing to him.

“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” Bel wrote on Instagram.

He described walking around with the device as a source of “shame and humiliation” and questioned how he would be able to continue playing college sports with it strapped to his leg.

His father says he begged to have it removed

Bel’s father, Pierre Ronal Bel, said his son made two trips to federal immigration offices in an attempt to persuade officials to remove the device.

They did not.

“After my son was outfitted with the ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal,” his father said in a statement read Tuesday by Springfield pastor Carl Ruby.

His father said the device interfered with soccer and embarrassed his son. Family members and advocates also say Bel was mocked by other students because of the monitor during his first week at Wright State.

Wright State said Tuesday that it has “no confirmed information regarding complaints or investigations into bullying related to the student.”

But according to his father, bullying was precisely what Bel raised during their final conversation.

At 8:03 a.m. Monday, Bel called his father and said he was not doing well mentally, his father said. He told his son to come home so they could talk.

Less than an hour later, the Highway Patrol was dispatched to Interstate 70.

DHS defends its handling of Bel

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Tuesday night that it had been notified of Bel’s death and that ICE had placed him on electronic monitoring July 29.

The agency declined to comment on the cause of death while the Highway Patrol investigation remains pending.

DHS characterized Bel as a “non-detained illegal alien from Haiti” and said he had entered the United States in March 2024 through a CBP One appointment before being released while his immigration proceedings continued.

The agency defended the use of monitoring and said immigrants facing removal can instead voluntarily leave the United States through the government’s CBP Home self-deportation program.

“Remaining in the country illegally, while fighting removal, is a choice,” DHS said.

Bel’s family and immigrant advocates see the government’s actions very differently.

Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said Bel had become depressed after losing TPS and that the prospect of deportation had become unbearable to him.

Ruby said the family wants the public to understand the role they believe federal immigration policy played in their son’s deterioration.

The same Springfield targeted by the ‘eating the pets’ lie

Bel’s death comes two years after Springfield’s Haitian community became one of the most recognizable targets of the national immigration debate.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, then-Sen. JD Vance amplified false allegations that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were abducting or eating residents’ pets. Donald Trump then repeated the claim before tens of millions of viewers during a presidential debate.

Springfield officials and police said there were no credible reports supporting the allegation. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine called the story “a piece of garbage that was simply not true.”

PolitiFact later named Trump and Vance’s Springfield claims its 2024 Lie of the Year.

There is no public evidence that those false claims themselves caused the federal government’s later decision to terminate Haitian TPS or its use of electronic monitoring.

But Springfield’s Haitian residents — the same community turned into a national political symbol during the 2024 campaign — are now experiencing a concentrated immigration enforcement effort involving detentions, deportation proceedings and ankle monitors.

On Tuesday, DeWine publicly questioned whether that approach is what Americans want carried out on their behalf.

“Do we want this being done, this mass deportation, in our name?” the Republican governor asked reporters. “Do we really support that?”

A life larger than an immigration case

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautions that suicide is rarely caused by a single circumstance or event. Individual, interpersonal, community and societal factors can interact in complicated ways.

Bel’s family is nevertheless unequivocal about what they witnessed in the final weeks of his life: a young man who had graduated with honors, earned a scholarship, played varsity soccer and begun pursuing medicine became increasingly distressed after the loss of his immigration protections and the placement of a GPS monitor on his ankle.

His father said his son felt humiliated.

Bel himself had written about that humiliation publicly more than a month before his death.

He was 20 years old.

He had finished only his first week of college.

If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or emotional distress, call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Free, confidential support is available 24 hours a day. You can also text HOME to 741741 to reach a volunteer crisis counselor through Crisis Text Line.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The message that prompted State Rep. Rodney Creech, R-West Alexandria, to respond was brief:

“Shame on you. We believe your daughter. You should resign.”

Creech answered the text with a laughing emoji and wrote, “If you need any topsoil let me know.”

Then he posted the exchange to Facebook.

Facebook’s edit history shows four different versions of Creech’s post appeared over the next 11 minutes. Creech initially told followers he was “requesting” that they contact the sender and said, “I would love to see you blow their phone up.”

Three minutes later, he separately edited the post to add the phone number in plain text.

Five minutes after that, Creech edited the post again while leaving both the number and his explicit request intact.

Only in the fourth version, 11 minutes after the original post, did Creech soften the most direct language.

Facebook shows four versions of Creech’s post in 11 minutes

At 10:31 a.m., Creech published the original version alongside a screenshot of the text exchange. The sender’s phone number was visible in the screenshot.

Creech wrote:

“Someone sent me this text earlier.

So to friends and family that want to have fun…I’m requesting that you just drop this person a line and say hello.

Please be nice but I would love to see you blow their phone up.

When you play stupid games you win stupid prizes!”

Three minutes later, at 10:34 a.m., Creech edited the post for the first time.

He left his request that supporters contact the person unchanged.

But Creech made the sender easier to contact: he added the phone number itself in plain text beneath the post.

At that point, Creech was still explicitly telling followers, “I’m requesting that you” contact the person and “I would love to see you blow their phone up.”

At 10:39 a.m., Creech edited the post again.

He changed “Someone sent me this text earlier” to “A random person sent me this text earlier,” changed “friends and family” to “my fb friends and family,” and added a smiling emoji.

But the substance of the request remained.

Five minutes after Creech had added the phone number in plain text, the third version still told his followers:

“I’m requesting that you just drop this person a line and say hello.”

“Please be nice but I would love to see you blow their phone up.”

The phone number remained directly beneath those words.

It was not until 10:42 a.m. — 11 minutes after the original post — that Creech softened the language.

“I’m requesting that you just drop this person a line and say hello” became:

“maybe just drop this person a line and say hello.”

And “I would love to see you blow their phone up” became:

“Please be nice but I would love to see their phone blow with friendly Creech supporters just saying hello.”

The phone number remained in the post.

The edit history shows Creech did not simply expose the number in his original screenshot and then immediately retreat from his request.

Three minutes after publishing the post, Creech affirmatively added the number in plain text while retaining the words “I’m requesting that you” and “I would love to see you blow their phone up.”

He then edited the post again at 10:39 a.m. without removing either the number or those statements.

Only in the fourth version did Creech change the most direct language — while continuing to publish the number and encourage “friendly Creech supporters” to contact it.

TiffinOhio.net is withholding the phone number and has redacted it from images accompanying this report.

Supporters said they acted on Creech’s request

The comments beneath Creech’s post show that some followers understood his invitation literally.

One commenter wrote simply: “Done!”

Another wrote, “Maybe we should all send text messages to this phone number lol.”

A third said he had already contacted the number, writing that he “asked him if he needs topsoil” and offered “better prices and free delivery.”

Others continued joking about contacting the number.

Several commenters also began trying to identify the person behind it. Screenshots of social media accounts purportedly associated with the number were posted publicly beneath Creech’s post.

One supporter suggested going further, writing: “Just go put a little top soil on their front porch for free, maybe add some manure on top.”

Commenters also posted screenshots purporting to show that the number had previously been advertised in connection with a small business. TiffinOhio.net has not independently confirmed that the person associated with those accounts sent the original message to Creech.

Another commenter raised the possibility that the number could belong to someone who had nothing to do with the message, warning that “there’s a good chance some innocent person is going to receive the messages.”

Despite that uncertainty, Creech kept the number in the post while continuing to encourage his followers to contact it.

‘We believe your daughter’

The criticism that triggered Creech’s post referred to allegations that have followed the lawmaker since an Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation probe became public in 2025.

The allegations were not simply that Creech had been in bed with his daughter.

According to BCI documents obtained by the Statehouse News Bureau, Creech’s minor daughter accused him of climbing into bed and under the covers with her while erect and wearing only his underwear.

Creech acknowledged to investigators that he had gotten into bed with the minor while wearing his underwear, but denied the sexual nature of the allegations, including allegations of inappropriate touching.

The daughter alleged that Creech’s erect penis pressed or poked her in the back while they were in bed, according to the investigative record.

Another Republican lawmaker, state Rep. Phil Plummer, a former Montgomery County sheriff, was interviewed by BCI about a private conversation he had with Creech concerning the allegations.

According to BCI interview records, Plummer told investigators that Creech said he did not remember whether he had poked the minor in the back during the encounter.

Plummer told investigators Creech’s comments were “disgusting and uncalled for” and “appalling.”

“As a father myself, I think it’s just appalling,” Plummer told investigators, according to records reported by the Dayton Daily News.

When BCI investigators questioned Creech about his conversation with Plummer, Creech initially responded, “Whatever Phil told you I probably said,” according to the investigative records.

After investigators described Plummer’s account, Creech denied making the remarks.

Creech was never charged and has repeatedly denied sexually abusing his daughter. He has called the allegations “demonstrably false” and politically motivated.

But the special prosecutor who reviewed the investigation did not describe Creech as having been exonerated.

Clark County Prosecutor Daniel Driscoll declined to pursue charges in October 2024, writing that Creech’s behavior was “concerning and suspicious” while concluding that the available evidence fell short of the threshold needed for prosecution.

“I find the statements of [the alleged victim] to be persuasive but find no independent evidence to support their claims,” Driscoll wrote.

Driscoll later told the Dayton Daily News that his description of Creech’s behavior referred both to his conduct during the investigation and his conduct during the period investigators were examining.

Five months later, Creech gave $4,100 to prosecutor’s judicial campaign

The case also raised questions about how the allegations were initially handled in Creech’s home county — and about a large campaign contribution Creech subsequently made to one of the local officials linked to that handling.

In July 2023, the minor’s stepfather, an Ohio police chief, contacted Preble County Sheriff Mike Simpson about the allegations.

According to a BCI investigative record, Simpson told a state agent that the stepfather believed he was required to report the alleged incident as a mandatory reporter and provided text messages describing Creech’s alleged conduct.

Simpson said he took the information to then-Preble County Prosecutor Martin Votel.

According to the investigator’s report, Simpson said Votel indicated “there was no criminal complaint at that time.”

“No report or other action took place from the sheriff’s office,” the investigator wrote.

Simpson later gave the Dayton Daily News a different description of the conversation, saying the stepfather had asked whether he was legally required to report the allegation and that Votel advised he was not a mandatory reporter in that circumstance.

Votel disputed both descriptions of his involvement.

“There was never a question presented to me about mandatory reporters,” Votel told the newspaper, adding that his office “did not and would not either encourage or discourage an investigation.”

What is undisputed is that no sheriff’s report was generated and no local investigation began when the allegations were first raised in July.

Both Simpson and Votel — described by the Dayton Daily News as personal friends of Creech — later recused themselves when the allegations resurfaced and an investigation eventually moved to BCI.

Then came the campaign contribution.

On Dec. 19, 2023, roughly five months after the allegations were first brought to Preble County authorities, Creech’s campaign transferred $4,100 to Votel’s campaign for Preble County Common Pleas Court judge.

Creech was Votel’s first and largest donor, according to a Dayton Daily News analysis of campaign-finance records.

The contribution accounted for roughly 75% of the financial support Votel had received for the judicial campaign at that point.

It was the only contribution Creech’s campaign had made to Votel dating back to at least mid-2019 and was the fourth-largest expenditure Creech had made to any individual candidate during that period, according to the newspaper’s analysis.

Votel went on to win the March 2024 Republican primary with about 70% of the vote and was unopposed in November. He now serves as a Preble County Common Pleas Court judge.

Votel later donated $100 to Creech’s reelection campaign in September 2024.

There is no evidence that Creech’s $4,100 contribution was a bribe or was exchanged for any official action.

But its timing and size drew scrutiny because Creech made it after Votel had been identified by Simpson as having a role in the initial handling of allegations against Creech — allegations that produced no sheriff’s report or local investigation — and while Votel was campaigning for a judgeship.

Creech denied any connection between the contribution and the allegations.

“Marty Votel is a tremendous public servant, and I am proud to know him,” Creech told the Dayton Daily News, saying their friendship went back nearly 15 years.

Creech dismissed scrutiny of the payment as controversy over “one conservative supporting another.”

Votel also denied that accepting the contribution was improper.

“I did not then, and do not now, feel that my campaign’s acceptance of these contributions was unethical or inappropriate,” Votel said.

The contribution does not establish wrongdoing. But it is part of an unusual sequence: allegations were brought to Creech’s home-county sheriff; no report or investigation followed; the sheriff said he had taken the matter to the county prosecutor; both officials, who were personally acquainted with Creech, later recused themselves; and Creech then became that prosecutor’s first and largest donor as he sought a judgeship.

Creech’s daughter later spoke publicly

The identity of Creech’s accuser was initially withheld by news organizations because she was a minor relative.

His daughter has since publicly identified herself and directly challenged Creech’s characterization of her allegations.

As TiffinOhio.net previously reported, Creech publicly described his daughter’s allegations as “textbook parental alienation” and said the controversy was “100% in the name of politics” during a February Facebook dispute.

His daughter responded directly.

“You continue to post trying to nail my mother and blame her, instead of taking blame for your own inappropriate actions,” she wrote.

She later added: “Heaven forbid a child speaks out about something like this, right?!”

The comments subsequently disappeared from Creech’s page. Creech denied removing them.

That history explains the otherwise cryptic message Creech received Tuesday: “We believe your daughter. You should resign.”

The screenshot Creech himself published contains no threat. It shows a person criticizing an elected official and urging him to resign over allegations made by his daughter.

Creech responded by directing his political supporters toward the phone number used to send it.

Ohio law addresses inciting others to harass someone

Creech’s post also raises questions under Ohio’s telecommunications-harassment statute, although there is no indication he has been charged with an offense.

Ohio Revised Code 2917.21(A)(10) provides that no person shall knowingly “incite another person through a telecommunication or other means to harass or participate in the harassment of a person.”

The statute separately prohibits knowingly posting text or an image online “for the purpose of abusing, threatening, or harassing another person.”

A first violation of either provision is generally a first-degree misdemeanor.

The existence of the law does not mean Creech’s post automatically constituted telecommunications harassment. Whether conduct violates the statute depends on whether prosecutors could establish each element of the offense, including the required intent.

But Facebook’s edit history provides a contemporaneous record of exactly what Creech told his followers.

“I’m requesting that you just drop this person a line and say hello,” he wrote in the first version.

Then: “I would love to see you blow their phone up.”

Three minutes later, Creech edited the post to add the phone number itself in plain text while leaving both statements unchanged.

At least one person warned Creech in the comments about the potential legal issue.

“Just a heads up telling people to text somebody like that can be considered telecommunications harassment,” the commenter wrote.

Creech did not remove the number from the version of the post reviewed by TiffinOhio.net.

GOP leaders once asked Creech to resign

The episode comes after Ohio Republican leaders first punished Creech over the allegations and then reversed course.

When the BCI investigation became public in May 2025, Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman stripped Creech of all four committee assignments, including his chairmanship of the House Agriculture Committee, and asked him to consider resigning.

“This, on its face, was very serious,” Huffman said at the time.

Creech refused to resign.

Nine months later, Huffman restored Creech to four committees, citing the absence of criminal charges or other action by authorities.

Huffman then backed Creech’s reelection, and the Ohio Republican Party endorsed him for another term.

Creech went on to win the May Republican primary for House District 40 with about 58% of the vote.

He remains a sitting member of the Ohio House and the Republican nominee for another term.

Tuesday’s incident began with a person sending Creech seven words of political criticism: “We believe your daughter. You should resign.”

Creech’s original public response was equally clear about what he wanted his supporters to do.

“I’m requesting that you” contact the person, he wrote.

“I would love to see you blow their phone up.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Seneca County Sheriff’s Office was notified shortly after 6 p.m. Monday that the girl was missing from a residence on South Township Road 77. The caller said the child had been riding her bicycle and had last been confirmed seen roughly 45 minutes earlier.

Multiple sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to search the area. Republic police and the Ohio State Highway Patrol also responded to assist, while another deputy was called in to deploy a drone as the search expanded.

Investigators followed several possible leads about where the child may have traveled, including information suggesting she could have been heading toward New Washington. Crawford County authorities were also notified during the search.

The Sheriff’s Office reported at approximately 6:52 p.m. that the girl had been located.

According to the final entry in the sheriff’s media summary, the child had left home on her bicycle, became lost and eventually arrived at a former teacher’s home. The former teacher then brought her home.

No injuries were reported in the media summary.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Polling suggests that cutting the program is deeply unpopular, which is why it is often referred to as “the third rail of electoral politics.” A recent AARP survey found that 82% of American adults view Social Security as “very important.” Half of those enrolled in the program say they would not survive financially if their benefits were cut.

The issue reemerged last year when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the White House’s tax-deferred investment accounts for newborns, known as “Trump accounts,” were a “backdoor for privatizing Social Security.” The accounts were part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), which passed the House and Senate with only Republican votes.

Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan celebrated OBBB’s passage and falsely claimed that the law “doesn’t touch Social Security.” The law will cut $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade to fund tax breaks that primarily benefit wealthy people. Those tax breaks will create less revenue for the Social Security trust fund, speeding up the program’s insolvency.

In 2014, when he was first running for the Senate, Sullivan suggested raising the retirement age and delaying Social Security benefits for future generations. He said “a younger generation of Alaskans or Americans can accept” such a change.

Sullivan is seeking a third term this year. His Democratic opponent is former Rep. Mary Peltola.

Florida Sen. Ashley Moody called OBBB “historic” when it passed and promised “this is just the beginning, and with President Donald Trump, we will not stop pushing forward.”

Moody was also a big fan of DOGE, the White House initiative that fired 14% of workers at the agency responsible for administering Social Security. This led to several Social Security field offices shutting down and longer wait times for those filing claims. Moody voted against multiple budget amendments to restore this funding.

More than 5 million of Moody’s constituents are enrolled in Social Security. She was appointed to the Senate last year to fill the seat vacated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. She is now running for a full term against Democratic state Rep. Angie Nixon.

Like Moody, Ohio Sen. Jon Husted also voted for OBBB and against reversing DOGE cuts. He then went a step further by proposing a constitutional amendment that would compel Congress to balance the federal budget.

Currently, Social Security is mostly funded through payroll taxes. Those funds are held by the U.S. Treasury and disbursed to beneficiaries. Any surplus funds are invested in special Treasury bonds that are drawn on when tax revenues fall short.

A balanced-budget amendment would essentially make it illegal for the federal government to spend more in a given year than it collects in revenue. If tax revenues are insufficient to fund Social Security, the government would be prohibited from drawing on the bonds to make up the shortfall. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says this would inevitably lead to a cut in services.

The AARP says such a plan would be “devastating for millions.”

Husted will face former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown in this year’s election. Brown co-sponsored the 2024 Social Security Fairness Act that increased benefits for public workers.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins did not vote for OBBB, but she did vote to allow the legislation to be debated, clearing a key procedural hurdle and setting the stage for its eventual passage. North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven said Collins was a “team player” for doing so.

Collins has cast multiple votes weakening Social Security in her 29-year career, including a 2003 vote against creating a Social Security reserve account and a 2011 vote against tabling a budget bill that proposed cutting the program.

Collins is running for reelection this year against Democratic state Sen. Troy Jackson.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) plans to make Republican hostility toward Social Security a major issue in the midterms.

“In November, voters will reject Republicans’ attempts to put this critical program on the chopping block by electing a Democratic Senate majority that will stand up for seniors and protect Social Security,” says DSCC spokesperson Maeve Coyle.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

More than 15,000 Americans have contracted cyclosporiasis in recent months, a type of food poisoning that causes low-grade fevers and painful diarrhea. The outbreak has been traced to iceberg lettuce. In August, multiple store-bought guacamoles were recalled because of potential salmonella contamination.

This has been a growing trend in President Donald Trump’s second term. Last year, 25 people were hospitalized and six died after contracting listeria from ready-to-eat pasta products. In total, the federal government failed to identify the source for 13 of the 28 foodborne illness outbreaks reported last year.

“As families spent this summer wondering what was safe to put on the dinner table, everyone is wondering what happened to the safeguards designed to protect our food supply,” the report says.

Issues of food safety and public health are generally managed by three federal agencies: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

All of these agencies were dramatically downsized by DOGE, the White House initiative that slashed workforces across the federal government. The FDA lost 3,859 employees and the USDA lost 19,984, including 874 workers at its Food Safety and Inspection Service.

The White House insisted food safety inspectors were not included in the firings, but the gutting of support staff still contributed to a growing backlog of uninspected food producers. The farm linked to the cyclosporiasis outbreak, for example, had not been inspected for seven years.

As for the CDC under Trump, it narrowed the foodborne pathogens it monitors from six to two. Cyclosporiasis and listeria are among the pathogens no longer being tracked.

“FDA inspections are the first line of defense for mitigating contamination outbreaks,” the report continues, noting that this applies to both domestic and imported products.

Food borne illnesses are also affecting the economy. USDA data suggests that food borne illnesses cost Americans $75 billion a year in medical care, lost productivity, and premature deaths before Trump started eliminating safeguards. Now, that figure seems poised to grow.

According to a CBS poll, 40% of Americans are buying and eating less produce of all brands and varieties, not just those impacted by cyclosporiasis. A separate poll found that a majority of Americans have little or no confidence in government oversight of food safety.

“Even though Trump and his allies promised to ‘Make America Healthy Again,’” the report says, “his administration has made it harder to find out what is making Americans sick.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The unnamed whistleblower predicted the result could be “foreseeable catastrophic disruption to our coming nationwide elections based on the reckless pursuit of readying a new, insufficiently tested, poorly planned mail-in ballot screening system.”

The system contains several massive flaws and, with virtually no time to spare before the November elections, USPS officials kept on developing an online verification system in violation of a Massachusetts judge’s injunction, the whistleblower said. 

The system’s verification standard is “a zero percent failure rate,” meaning that any batch of ballots that contain any single ballot with an error would result in an entire batch being rejected, the whistleblower said. 

The verification system itself is suspect due to a hurried and untested development of an online portal that states were to use to upload voter and ballot information for verification by federal officials, the whistleblower said. 

Up against a tight timeline ahead of the midterm elections, the agency also continued to develop an online tool related to the regulation, despite the federal court order to pause the work, according to the whistleblower.

No specific USPS officials were named as responsible for directing the work to continue in defiance of the courts. USPS did not immediately return a request for comment from States Newsroom.

States were expected to begin using the system as soon as Tuesday, according to the whistleblower.

Potential for millions of missing ballots

The allegations from the whistleblower, a federal official whose exact role is not specified, were detailed in a report by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group that is representing the whistleblower. 

Blumenthal, of Connecticut, attached the report to a letter to U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner.

“The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk,” the report said. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

The new policy, which President Donald Trump initiated in a March executive order, has been the subject of intense legal fighting over the past few weeks that continues with an appeal now sitting at the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. Democratic state officials and voting rights groups have said the regulation would likely disenfranchise voters.

Blumenthal said the USPS should reject the policy entirely.

“We urge you to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS,” he wrote.

‘Problems at every stage’

In a final rule published Aug. 21, the Postal Service said states would use a to-be-developed online portal to upload information about the envelopes being used for mail ballots and the voters who received them. USPS would also use the portal to verify that all ballots and voters complied with the requirements set out in the new rule.

But the project was beset with several challenges, in part spurred by the unrealistic timeline for development, the whistleblower said.

The whistleblower’s disclosure “identifies problems at every stage of USPS’s development of the Portal, demonstrating deeply flawed plans for implementation,” Blumenthal wrote.

A project of the portal’s size and importance would normally “take nine months to a year or more” to finish, according to the whistleblower’s disclosure. Smaller current Postal Service IT projects have been given eight-month timelines, according to the whistleblower. 

USPS began developing the mail ballot portal in June, just three months before it was to be introduced and less than five months before Election Day, according to the disclosure.

Individual elements of the tool have not been sufficiently tested, “rendering meaningful testing of the project impossible,” the whistleblower said.

“The Whistleblower believes that there has been insufficient internal testing of the system,” the disclosure said. “Such testing is critical to determine whether it will work on September 1, when states could be expected to start using it.”

Software developers on the project have “considerable concern” that the project skipped “standard principles of testing and debugging new software before launch,” the whistleblower said.

One faulty barcode

The IT problems heighten the danger of another major issue: a policy of rejecting entire batches of ballots based on a faulty barcode on a single ballot.

According to the whistleblower, “the administration has hidden the high likelihood” that standard raises for major disruptions in ballot delivery. 

“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state – effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the report said.

A misread barcode could result from something as simple as a voter’s changed name after marriage or a move of address, Blumenthal said.

Court order

The whistleblower said the USPS paused work for about a month after Judge Indira Talwani in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts issued an injunction against Trump’s executive order, finding, in part, that it likely violated the U.S. Constitution’s provision granting states the power to administer elections.

But USPS officials then ordered work to resume on the project, in defiance of the judicial order that remained in effect, the whistleblower said.

The whistleblower added that the agency ignored another temporary restraining order Talwani, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, issued last week and upheld Monday, and continued to work on the project.

In his letter to Steiner, Blumenthal asked if that was true and posed several other questions stemming from the whistleblower’s report, and asked for a response by Friday.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The organizations Red, Wine and Blue and the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans challenged the policy in federal court. Secretary of State Frank LaRose has promised to appeal and has asked the judge to stay the ruling, which would allow the changes to remain in effect as the case goes forward.

The arguments hinge on the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 — commonly known as the Motor Voter Act because it required vehicle registration offices to help people register to vote.

That law requires a person to attest under penalty of perjury that they’re a citizen, and it also bars states from requiring anything more than the “minimum information necessary” to get a person registered.

“Ohio is not free to impose an additional requirement for voter registration when that requirement conflicts with federal law,” the challengers’ complaint reads. “Congress made the judgment that an attestation was sufficient to demonstrate citizenship, and that nothing beyond that minimum requirement was allowed.”

How important is the change?

To the challengers, Ohio’s new law represents an important albeit subtle change. Everyone who registers to vote must be a citizen. But the groups contend requiring documentary proof, rather than just a sworn statement, will harm their members who don’t have documents readily available.

Seniors who have lost their birth certificates, those whose names have changed through marriage or divorce, or those whose passports have lapsed could all have trouble registering to vote. Similarly, younger Ohioans who are still in school may have left documents with their parents for safekeeping. The challengers add that collecting the necessary documents is both costly and time consuming — with processing times running from a few weeks to a few months.

Research from the University of Maryland indicates 21 million Americans don’t have the documents they need to register readily available.

But to Secretary of State Frank LaRose and Ohio Motor Vehicles Registrar Charles Norman, the new requirements aren’t really a change at all.

“Because Ohioans necessarily present proof of citizenship (or non-citizenship) through their applications for Ohio credentials,” they said in court filings, “registrars and deputy registrars know which applicants are eligible to register to vote.”

The Ohio officials argued the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans and Red, Wine, and Blue don’t have standing because they can’t demonstrate how the change harms their members. The state pointed to a woman named Margaret Dutcher, referenced in the challengers’ filings, who has a passport but believes she shouldn’t have to show it to register to vote.

“If she refuses to produce her passport,” the state said, “any injury will be self-inflicted.”

The decision

In his decision, District Judge Solomon Oliver focused on the question of when a driver’s license application is “submitted.” That’s the point at which the Bureau of Motor Vehicles must offer to register a person under the Motor Voter Act.

Ohio’s officials contend an application isn’t submitted until a person presents all the required identity documents. The challengers, however, argue an application is submitted when a person applies — regardless of whether they have all the required documents.

In Dutcher’s case, she and her husband visited the BMV with several documents after moving to Ohio from California. Dutcher had a U.S. Passport, her California driver’s license, two utility bills and a Social Security card with her prior name. The BMV employee told Dutcher her documents were insufficient to get a license, and therefore she could not register to vote.

Dutcher was able to register on a second visit after collecting additional documents but told the court that rigamarole “creates unnecessary obstacles to voting.”

The judge noted the irony that Dutcher actually provided the proof of citizenship Ohio law demands but still couldn’t register because “Ohio has made the voter registration offer contingent on the success of a person’s driver’s license application.”

The correct time to give BMV visitors an opportunity to register, Oliver said in his ruling, must be the point at which they apply, not when the BMV approves their application.

“To interpret this section of the NVRA otherwise would allow states to make registering to vote at the BMV more onerous, and could result in fewer voter registrations because the opportunity to apply was not proactively offered to otherwise eligible citizens,” Oliver explained.

The injunction and next steps

Oliver issued a preliminary injunction barring the state from enforcing its new documentary proof of citizenship provisions. His order notes it does not require the BMV to offer voter registration to people who actively indicate they are not a citizen.

In a press release, LaRose said he “strongly disagree(s) with that decision” and promised an immediate appeal. His office also filed a motion to stay the judge’s order, insisting the prospect of offering voter registration to incomplete applications “imposes an enormous burden on the BMV and sets the agency a Herculean task.”

LaRose pointed to the case of Maria Dearaujo, one of just six people former Attorney General Dave Yost charged after combing through hundreds of referrals from LaRose’s office. A Franklin County judge determined Dearaujo cast a ballot as a noncitizen but only on the incorrect advice of a BMV clerk.

The case “proves it’s not enough to just have a person’s attestation,” LaRose insisted.

In his most recent order, Judge Oliver asked the challengers to respond to the request for a stay by Sept. 3.

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Nick Evans on X or on Bluesky.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In Ohio, one of the states grappling with this issue, regulators have done little to crack down on the problem, sparking concern among advocates for clean energy and good government that agencies will continue to get public comments from people who didn’t authorize them or simply don’t exist.

“If we don’t address it, we’re definitely not going to fix it,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director for Common Cause Ohio, which works to strengthen public participation in U.S. democracy and hold officials accountable to citizens.

Fabricated comments corrupt public decision-making by diluting the impact of genuine people who take the time to share their views, Turcer explained. That’s especially true if officials focus on the numbers of pro and con comments versus their substance.

“It skewers the whole process, and you don’t know who to trust,” said Beth Nagusky, an adjunct law professor who has taught at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland State University and who was previously a utility regulator in Maine.

The issue of fake comments has loomed large over Crossroads Solar Grazing Center, a 94-megawatt project proposed in central Ohio’s Morrow County that would combine solar panels with sheep grazing. Earlier this year, the Ohio Power Siting Board denied the solar farm’s permit application — a controversial move since the agency had received evidence from developer Open Road Renewables that dozens of public comments opposing the project appeared to be fabricated. Even though the solar farm met all other legal requirements and the regulators acknowledged concerns about fake comments, they nonetheless concluded that ​“the project fails to serve the public interest” because of ​“consistent and substantial opposition” from local governments and nearby residents. The board did not ask the Ohio attorney general to investigate who was behind the fishy comments.

Open Road Renewables pushed back on the idea that locals overwhelmingly disliked the proposal with an analysis that shows nearly half the public comments from people in nearby towns approved of the project, once the duplicate, anonymous, and unverifiable submissions were removed. The firm has twice asked the Power Siting Board to reconsider its decision, without success.

Ohio had an earlier brush with ostensibly false feedback in 2023. Pro-fracking comments submitted to Ohio’s Oil and Gas Land Management Commission included nearly 150 names of people who denied sending them. The commission declared it would not consider the contested comments; ultimately, it greenlit drilling and fracking under state park and wildlife areas.

After an investigation, the Ohio attorney general’s office found that tactics used by a subcontractor on behalf of the Consumer Energy Alliance, a fossil fuel–aligned group that backs fracking, likely misled people into allowing the use of their names and other information. ​“The language used to solicit individuals’ alleged consent was vague, did not disclose the consumers would be signing a letter, and failed to provide the language of the letter,” wrote Melissa Wright, section chief for consumer protection for then–Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, in 2024.

But the attorney general’s office filed neither civil nor criminal charges. Instead, Wright sent a letter encouraging the Consumer Energy Alliance and its contractors to review and comply with the law in the future. ​“If CEA is going to contract with third parties to carry out its campaigns, then CEA must ensure those campaigns are being carried out in accordance with all applicable laws,” Wright wrote.

The Consumer Energy Alliance’s then–vice president for media and strategic communications, Bryson Hull, celebrated the attorney general’s move in a 2024 email to board members. ​“The victory is that the misconduct is attributed to the third-party vendor, which is critical to our reputation and ability to influence how CEA is described publicly by others,” he said.

According to the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group, the Consumer Energy Alliance was also involved in allegedly fraudulent submissions of comments on the Nexus pipeline in Ohio, petition signatures for a net-metering case in Wisconsin, and emails to enlist South Carolina lawmakers’ support for a Dominion Energy acquisition.

Among other recent cases, hundreds of seemingly false emails flooded county commissioners’ mailboxes last year in Forsyth County, North Carolina, urging them to back a petroleum pipeline. Questions arose about whether the pipeline company’s owner used contractors for an astroturf campaign.

Some in Ohio argue that the state needs to take stronger action to find out who exactly is behind fake comments and punish them for fraudulent conduct.

“Misleading public officials through known false testimony is illegal and should be prosecuted. Full stop,” said John Kulewicz, a Columbus-area lawyer who is currently a candidate for Ohio attorney general. ​“Agencies should refer false comments for prosecution.”

The Ohio Power Siting Board, for its part, has not referred any fake public comments for prosecution within the last 10 years. ​“As a rule, it has been infrequent that staff has encountered this issue, so our approach has been to clean up the docket,” spokesperson Matt Butler said.

Butler noted that the agency sends emails to let commenters know their message was received and filed in the case record. The agency does not automatically remove comments when its emails bounce back, although it ​“has removed public comments at the request of individuals who have informed the Board that comments filed in their name were not authentic,” Butler said.

Ohio has recently made some policy updates that could help curb falsified public feedback — if enforced. A revision to the Ohio Administrative Code last year clarified that deceptive consumer practices include using fine print online and other misleading actions to gather names for submissions to public agencies. No enforcement action has been taken under the new rule yet, said Steve Irwin, communications director for Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson.

While many government agencies across the U.S. have not taken vigorous enforcement action against people and groups seeking to sway public officials with fake comments, companies can be held responsible.

In 2023, for example, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a $615,000 settlement with companies responsible for millions of fake comments urging regulators to end net neutrality.

Meanwhile, California legislators are considering Senate Bill 1159, which would forbid the knowing use of artificial intelligence to falsely represent that a real person engaged with or submitted information to an agency. The legislation was introduced after the Los Angeles Times reported that an AI-powered campaign resulted in a slew of potentially fake comments submitted to Southern California regulators, urging them to reject landmark rules that would phase out fossil-fueled heaters. CiviClick, the firm linked to the Southern California comments, insists it did not use AI for that project. So cases like it or ones with made-up names would not fall within the scope of SB 1159.

Tech tools could also help agencies in Ohio and elsewhere do a better job screening for possible fakes, said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute. Metadata could identify submissions prepared by a common source, for example. Then automated emails could require commenters to verify that the communication is genuine before it becomes part of the record.

An additional approach could be to add captcha-type verification for people to get into comment portals, suggested Turcer of Common Cause Ohio. These and other methods would assure real individuals that their input was received, while frustrating some AI bots or other dubious tactics.

The consequence of letting apparently fake comments continue to come into the public record is eroded public trust in government, said Anderson. ​“People will fairly have questions about how fair the two sides in the case are being viewed.”

That already seems to be happening in the Crossroads Solar case. Two days after the Ohio Power Siting Board handed down its rejection of the project, a resident in central Ohio’s Franklin County wrote to the agency, challenging its decision and accusing it of relying on fake comments to reject the project.

“This is deeply concerning,” said S.A. Linden, whose message Canary Media verified is genuine. ​“It makes one wonder about the integrity of the Ohio Power Siting Board. We have enough corruption in Ohio politics. We definitely do NOT need more.”

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A summer of food recalls, including the record-shattering cyclosporiasis outbreak tied to iceberg lettuce that has sickened thousands, has raised many Americans’ fears of contracting a foodborne illness.

The recalls have focused attention on the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding and staff at several public health agencies, and prompted questions about whether those changes have made consumers more vulnerable.

In fact, this year’s tally of food recalls is roughly in line with the numbers in recent years. About 48 million people each year get sick from a foodborne illness. But experts worry that the scope, severity and scale of outbreaks and their associated food recalls are growing.

While the United States sees some cyclosporiasis cases every year, this year’s outbreak has crushed records: Since May, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed more than 17,000 cases, with another nearly 12,000 reported cases still under investigation. The outbreak has resulted in at least 922 hospitalizations and two deaths.

Federal officials have blamed this year’s multistate outbreak on processed iceberg lettuce from central Mexico. The lettuce was brought to the U.S. by Taylor Farms, a distributor that supplies foods to thousands of restaurants and grocery stores, including Target, Taco Bell, Whole Foods, Kroger, Walmart, Costco and Jack in the Box.

I think there are valid questions around the timing of the response, the time it took for agencies to recognize the outbreak and to start to investigate it, get boots on the ground in Mexico.

– Jennifer McEntire, food microbiologist and founder of Food Safety Strategy

The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration are investigating at least six other clusters for which a source hasn’t yet been confirmed.

Cuts at the CDC and FDA haven’t necessarily increased consumers’ chances of food contamination or outbreaks, said Jennifer McEntire, a food microbiologist and the founder of a food safety consulting firm. However, McIntire said, “I do think the cuts may have influenced the way outbreaks unfold.”

“I think there are valid questions around the timing of the response, the time it took for agencies to recognize the outbreak and to start to investigate it, get boots on the ground in Mexico,” she said.

Darin Detwiler, a food safety expert and professor emeritus at Northeastern University, noted that the U.S. is seeing more recalls affecting multiple states, rather than a small area. He added that more recalls are being tied to a problem earlier in the food chain — such as contaminated irrigation water at a large lettuce farm rather than, say, improperly stored deli meat at a sandwich shop  — which can spread the pathogen to a far higher number of people and make it harder to track and contain.

“We’re seeing so many people impacted, so many states impacted, and the recalls are dragging on for a long time,” Detwiler. “There’s ambiguity or lack of transparency over who’s even behind a recall.”

The White House dismissed concerns about the federal government’s ability to handle outbreaks.

“The Trump Administration has never cut FDA food inspectors or other frontline personnel for domestic disease response,” White House spokesperson Allison Schuster told Stateline in an email. “President Trump’s top priority is the health and safety of the American people, and the federal government remains capable of robustly addressing any future outbreaks.”

Fewer staff, less funding

Last year, the Trump administration laid off thousands of employees at federal public health agencies including the CDC, which tracks and responds to disease outbreaks, and the FDA, which oversees and regulates food safety.

While some of the layoffs were reversed through lawsuits or by Congress, the nation’s health public agencies remain at diminished capacity. The CDC workforce has been reduced by 28% since December 2024, the month before Trump took office, according to a Stateline analysis of data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Employee numbers at the FDA are down 23% during the same period.

Last year, U.S. inspections of foreign food facilities, such as the Mexican farming operation linked to the cyclospora outbreak, plummeted to historic lows following those staffing cuts. The FDA suspended a quality control program for food testing. And the parasite surveillance staff at the CDC, which responds to outbreaks, was downsized last year by the Department of Government Efficiency from 11 people to three.

Sandra Eskin, a food safety expert who worked in the office of food safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the Biden administration, likened federal public health cuts to the game Jenga, where players construct a tower of wooden blocks and then remove the blocks one at a time while trying not to make the tower fall.

“I think that’s what we’re seeing,” said Eskin, who now leads a public health nonprofit called Stop Foodborne Illness, which advocates for stronger food safety policies. “Whether it’s cuts in staff, cuts in funding that trickle down to the states, or late responses to outbreaks — these are all pieces of wood in that game where you start pulling them out and then the whole thing collapses.”

The federal government also has delayed requiring companies to comply with new food safety rules, included in a law enacted more than a decade ago, that would help regulators track where food comes from and where it’s going during outbreaks.

Detwiler and other experts say the new rules could have helped speed the government’s sluggish response to the cyclospora outbreak investigation after Taylor Farms initially tried delaying the recall.

Last year, the Trump administration also drastically scaled back FoodNet, an early warning surveillance system that required tracking of infections caused by eight different foodborne pathogens. The federal-state collaboration is now only required to track two pathogens: salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E.coli. The other six pathogens, including cyclospora, were made optional.

The CDC says the change was made because other surveillance systems monitor those pathogens. But McEntire and other food safety experts want them reinstated on FoodNet.

State impacts

Infectious outbreaks like cyclosporiasis are typically investigated by state and local health departments, which largely rely on federal dollars distributed through the FDA and CDC. Public health has been chronically underfunded for decades under several administrations, experts say.

But the Trump administration since last year has terminated $5.78 billion in CDC grants — funds that were appropriated by Congress but had not yet been spent.

Michigan, at the center of the cyclosporiasis outbreak with the highest number of cases and clusters, is one of 23 states (plus the District of Columbia) that successfully sued the Trump administration in June 2025 over federal funding cuts.

Changes to federal funding last year affected public health infrastructure across Michigan, a representative from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services told Stateline. During the cyclosporiasis  outbreak, the state used its own resources to bolster local responses.

“While we are able to support this investigation on a local level, sustained investment in public health capacity is essential to ensuring Michigan can respond effectively to future regional and statewide public health threats,” said department spokesperson Lynn Sutfin.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

This is creating a backlash, with 70 percent of Americans saying they oppose building a data center near them.

Companies have proposed a solution that sounds good on the surface: data centers bringing their own power. If they use their own “behind the meter” energy, tech companies can get data centers running faster without increasing transmission or generation costs for other consumers.

But these dedicated power sources almost always run on natural gas — a polluting fossil fuel. Behind the meter natural gas is projected to account for 40% of all data centers’ power by 2030.

For example, Meta recently built a massive data center in New Albany, Ohio, powered by 400MW of dedicated natural gas turbines — enough energy to power over 300,000 homes.

Since there’s a shortage of gas turbines for power plants, tech companies are turning to any gas turbines they can get, many of which are far less efficient and more polluting,  and often paired with backup diesel generators, which are even worse.

A study commissioned by the Piedmont Environmental Council in Virginia highlights the hazards communities face. It found that a single facility, the VA2 data center in Loudoun County, could inflict $53 million to $99 million per year in health-related damages in the surrounding community from increased deaths and hospitalizations.

Despite these alarming findings, most approved and proposed gas turbine plants to power data centers are even larger. Just imagine what that means for pollution and health impacts nationwide — particularly in states like Ohio, which is fast-tracking these plants.

Picture the damage to our air, water, and land from increased natural gas fracking, pipelines, and methane leaks. Or the more extreme storms, wildfires, and droughts from climate change caused by burning fossil fuels.

On top of that, consumers will still pay more for energy. The increased demand for natural gas from these behind the meter facilities will likely drive up the price of natural gas for all households.

But there’s a better way to power A.I. data centers.

China, the leading U.S. competitor on A.I., is increasingly powering its data centers with renewable energy instead of fossil fuels. While there are legitimate concerns around China’s A.I. policies overall, the country is planning to power these centers with at least 80 percent clean energy, even while doubling their energy use, by 2030.

Big Tech is shelling out hundreds of billions of dollars on data center infrastructure. They should spend some of those billions to drive the use of renewable energy, pairing wind and solar with battery storage to provide 24/7 energy.

They know this can be done because they’re already doing it. Google is building a data center in Minnesota powered by 1.6 GW of solar and wind with 300 MW of battery storage. And Amazon is building a 1.2 GW solar and battery storage facility in Oregon to power a data center.

In states that allow for virtual power plants — distributed networks of home batteries, rooftop solar panels, electric vehicle chargers that are coordinated via software to act like a power plant — companies could also purchase power from residents and cover the cost of people installing their own solar and battery storage, drawing any excess generated power to meet peak demand.

For the sake of our communities, the United States must be a leader in powering A.I. with renewable energy.

This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Republican attorneys general of Florida and Texas filed a lawsuit against the FDA last December seeking to permanently revoke the agency’s initial approval of mifepristone from 2000, along with subsequent decisions over the years that eased access for patients. Florida and Texas had agreed to the FDA’s request for a stay. 

If a judge were to rule in favor of Florida and Texas, the medication would become unavailable in all states, regardless of abortion laws.

In the same ruling, U.S. Chief District Judge Reed O’Connor, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, denied a motion to dismiss the case from distributor Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, one of the drug’s main manufacturers. The company’s attorneys intervened as defendants in April. O’Connor’s ruling will delay any action in the case until after the midterm elections.  

“We expect the FDA’s review of mifepristone to not contradict the decision they made in 2023 that reaffirmed our product is safe and effective,” GenBioPro CEO Evan Masingill said in a statement Monday. “GenBioPro will continue to use all legal and regulatory tools available to ensure Americans’ access to reproductive care.”

The lawsuit by Florida and Texas is one of three suits pending in federal courts that would change nationwide access to mifepristone, and it’s the most sweeping in its goals. 

Florida and Texas’s lawsuit cites in part the federal Comstock Act, a 150-year-old anti-obscenity law that made it illegal to send any materials that could induce an abortion through the mail. That law has not been enforced for many decades. Anti-abortion groups recently called for new U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche to revisit the Comstock Act’s prohibition. 

Mifepristone, one of two drugs most commonly used to terminate a pregnancy before 10 weeks’ gestation and to treat miscarriages, has repeatedly shown in scientific studies to be safe and effective, but the FDA began another safety study in June and announced it would take about six months to complete. 

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments Sept. 9 in a case from Louisiana seeking to remove a rule allowing the medication to be dispensed without an in-person visit to a provider, and the attorneys general in Missouri, Idaho and Kansas have asked a federal judge in Missouri to roll back the rules to what they were before 2016. Prior to that year, the drug was only approved for use before seven weeks’ gestation and required three in-person office visits.

Stateline reporter Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The complaint alleges that Amazon used an “invented auction participant” to drive up prices for advertising placements and sponsored product spots on its online store. The lawsuit quotes a former company employee who said the system allowed the company to charge prices “beyond what [can] be achieved through advertiser competition.”

“Amazon has millions of advertising customers who were misled into paying significantly higher prices,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. “These higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers.”

The complaint says that Amazon has carried out the scheme for more than seven years, increasing prices for more than a million brands and sellers.

The FTC’s lawsuit was filed along with the attorneys general of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont and Washington.

“As alleged, this is a textbook example of illegal behavior by a corporation which places profits above all else,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The ubiquity of Amazon in American society pushes small- and medium-sized businesses to engage with the Company in order to stay afloat.”

Per Neronha’s statement, the coalition is pursuing “civil penalties, restitution, costs and fees, and injunctive relief.”

In a blog post responding to the lawsuit, Amazon said that “the FTC’s claim fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate.” The company asserted that the average cost-per-click for sponsored product search ads remained flat adjusted for inflation from 2019 to 2024.

“After reviewing approximately 1.5 million pages spanning six years, the FTC leans on a handful of simplified communications to allege a companywide effort to deceive,” Amazon wrote in its blog. “That is patently false.”

The company claims its “soft reserve prices” allowed it to award advertisements to the most relevant bids, rather than the highest bid amount, while still charging the true market value of an ad placement.

The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. Amazon is headquartered in Seattle.

Amazon is the third-largest digital advertising business worldwide, according to CNBC, behind only Google and Meta, with more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year.

Last year, Amazon and the FTC agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement over separate allegations that the company deceptively enrolled customers in Prime subscriptions and made it difficult for them to cancel.

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Among the 2,640 LGBTQ+ adults surveyed, those who are transgender, younger than 30 and those with lower incomes or without insurance were most likely to miss or forgo care due to cost. Over three-quarters of uninsured LGBTQ+ adults reported missing needed healthcare, according to the survey.

Overall, 6 in 10 of the adults surveyed reported missing needed healthcare in the past year due to cost, being unable to find a provider with available appointments or other reasons, compared with 38% of non-LGBTQ+ adults. Transgender adults, who made up 9% of those surveyed, were the most likely to report missing care.

Along with being more likely to postpone or skip needed care, 22% of LGBTQ+ adults reported forgoing prescription medications due to cost, compared with 12% of non-LGBTQ+ adults. Almost a third — 30% — also reported struggling to pay medical bills, compared with about a fifth of other adults.

Three in 10 LGBTQ+ adults say their health got worse because they skipped or delayed care, nearly twice the share of non-LGBTQ+ adults. This was more common among LGBTQ+ women than men — 63% of women compared with 46% of men.

Among transgender adults, nearly half — 45% — said their health worsened.

Insurance denials were also more likely. Thirty-two percent of insured LGTBQ+ adults reported denials by insurance companies, compared with just over a fifth of non-LGTBQ+ adults. Denials or delays in care, prescriptions or treatments were also more pronounced among trans adults as well as those covered by Medicaid or a self-purchased insurance plan.

The survey also looked at care among different age groups. While younger adults in general are more likely to forgo care, LGBTQ+ people had an especially high rate in the survey. LGBTQ+ adults under age 30 were 20 percentage points more likely to report forgoing care than non-LGBTQ+ adults of the same age group, according to the report. Those gaps narrow when it comes to adults over age 65, which could be because of Medicare eligibility, the researchers wrote.

The report noted that LGBTQ+ people are, in general, younger than the overall U.S. population. They are also more likely to have lower incomes, and somewhat more likely to lack insurance coverage, the authors wrote. The survey findings might reflect those  disparities, rather than LGBTQ+ identity, “though those factors are certainly intertwined,” they noted.

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

U.S. District Judge Julien Xavier Neals issued the 24-page ruling Aug. 25 in Rosely v. Strive Asset Management, rejecting Ramaswamy’s attempt to dismiss an individual whistleblower-retaliation claim brought by former Strive executive Joyce Rosely.

The allegations recited by the court are explosive.

Rosely alleges that “almost immediately” after she began working for Strive in August 2022, Ramaswamy and Strive co-founder Anson Frericks demanded that she “violate applicable securities laws.”

She says she and another employee repeatedly objected — both to the demands being made of them and to securities-law violations they believed Ramaswamy and Frericks were committing themselves.

The court says Rosely alleges Ramaswamy exercised supervisory authority over her, personally received those objections and “participated in the decision to terminate” her employment after she refused his demands.

Ramaswamy asked the court to throw the claim against him out, arguing that the complaint did not show he was directly involved in Rosely’s firing.

Neals rejected that argument.

“The Court disagrees,” the judge wrote before laying out the allegations against Ramaswamy: that he supervised Rosely, demanded that she and another employee violate securities laws, heard their repeated objections and participated in the decision to fire her when she refused.

“Taking her allegations as true, Plaintiff sufficiently states a CEPA claim against Ramaswamy,” Neals wrote.

The court then denied Ramaswamy’s motion to dismiss the claim against him.

What Ramaswamy allegedly wanted employees to do

The lawsuit was first filed in 2023, when Ramaswamy was running for president and promoting Strive Asset Management as evidence of his ability to disrupt Wall Street.

Rosely served as Strive’s executive vice president and co-head of institutional sales and distribution. Strive was based in Ohio, while Rosely worked from New Jersey.

Her allegations went well beyond a vague disagreement over compliance.

Contemporaneous Forbes reporting on the complaint said Rosely accused Ramaswamy and Frericks of pressuring her to use sales materials that promised customers future investment returns and to allow employees who were not properly registered to make securities pitches to customers.

Rosely also objected to Ramaswamy’s social-media activity, which she believed amounted to unlawful securities sales, according to Forbes.

Those were not the only allegations of that kind coming from inside Strive.

Another former Strive employee, John Phillips, filed a separate lawsuit in 2023 alleging that Ramaswamy misrepresented Strive’s financial condition to employees and investors and that he too was pressured to violate securities laws. Phillips had left a position at JPMorgan to join Strive.

The Columbus Dispatch reported at the time that both former employees accused Ramaswamy’s firm of pushing workers toward conduct they believed violated federal securities rules.

Strive responded to the 2023 litigation by saying the company “intends to vigorously defend itself,” according to Forbes.

Ramaswamy argued the claim against him should be dismissed

The case eventually moved into federal court in New Jersey, where Strive, Frericks and Ramaswamy sought both to transfer the lawsuit to Ohio and to dismiss its claims.

A federal magistrate judge recommended in July 2024 that Rosely’s whistleblower claims against Strive and Ramaswamy be allowed to continue.

Ramaswamy objected.

His lawyers argued that Rosely had not alleged facts showing that he was directly involved in the decision to fire her, much less that he had done so in retaliation for whistleblowing.

Neals rejected that defense in last week’s ruling.

The judge pointed to four allegations in Rosely’s complaint:

• Ramaswamy exercised supervisory authority over Rosely;

• Ramaswamy demanded that Rosely and another employee violate securities laws;

• Rosely and the other employee repeatedly objected to the alleged unlawful conduct directly to Ramaswamy; and

• Ramaswamy participated in the decision to terminate Rosely after she refused the demands.

Those allegations are sufficient to pursue an individual claim against Ramaswamy under New Jersey’s Conscientious Employee Protection Act, the court ruled.

The state law, commonly known as CEPA, protects employees who report or object to workplace conduct they reasonably believe violates the law.

Judge: firing both employees who objected supports retaliation claim

The ruling also allowed Rosely’s broader whistleblower claim against Strive to proceed.

Ramaswamy and the other defendants argued that the roughly seven months between Rosely’s initial objections and her March 2023 firing was too long to support an inference of retaliation.

Neals again disagreed.

The court emphasized that Rosely alleges Strive fired not only her, but also another employee who had joined her in objecting to the alleged securities-law violations.

“According to Plaintiff, Defendants asked her and Nye to break the law; Plaintiff and Nye repeatedly refused to do so and complained to management; and Defendants fired Plaintiff and Nye seven months later,” the opinion states.

The judge found that firing both employees who allegedly objected was enough, at this stage, to support an inference that their whistleblowing played a role in the decision.

Some claims were dismissed. The securities whistleblower claims survived.

Neals did not hand Rosely a victory on every claim in her lawsuit.

The judge dismissed without prejudice her separate claims for retaliation and age discrimination under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination, as well as the related individual-liability claim.

But the claims at the center of the securities-law allegations survived.

Count I, alleging whistleblower retaliation by Strive under CEPA, remains in the case.

Count IV, seeking to hold Ramaswamy and Frericks individually liable for that alleged retaliation, also remains.

Those are the claims directly tied to Rosely’s allegation that she was told to break securities laws, objected and was later fired.

Neals has not yet determined whether the underlying securities-law violations occurred. The Aug. 25 ruling settles the immediate legal question Ramaswamy put before the court: whether Rosely’s allegations against him were sufficient to survive dismissal.

The judge ruled that they were.

The allegations strike at the heart of Ramaswamy’s campaign résumé

The ruling lands in the middle of an Ohio governor’s race in which Ramaswamy has made his record as an entrepreneur and investor one of his central qualifications for office.

His own campaign biography calls him “one of the most successful business leaders of his generation” and describes his agenda for Ohio as “business-grounded.”

Strive is an important part of that record.

Ramaswamy co-founded the company in 2022 as an alternative to major asset managers such as BlackRock, arguing that Wall Street had abandoned its fiduciary responsibility to investors in favor of environmental and social politics.

He marketed Strive around a promise of putting financial performance and fiduciary responsibility first.

Now a former senior executive says that behind the scenes, the company’s own founders were demanding conduct she believed violated the securities laws governing the investment industry.

And a federal judge has refused to let Ramaswamy escape the resulting whistleblower case at the pleading stage.

This is not the first former Strive employee to make the accusation

Rosely’s accusations attracted national attention when the lawsuit was filed because another former employee was already making strikingly similar claims.

Phillips, a former Strive regional sales chief, alleged in his own lawsuit that Ramaswamy exaggerated Strive’s financial strength while recruiting workers and raising money and pressured employees to violate securities laws.

Forbes reported that Phillips alleged Ramaswamy misrepresented Strive’s finances to both employees and investors.

Phillips said he left a lucrative JPMorgan job after being told Strive was well financed and that Ramaswamy was committed to building the company. Ramaswamy left his executive role months later to run for president.

Rosely and Phillips were both terminated during the same March 2023 company restructuring.

Two former employees, in separate lawsuits, accused the company Ramaswamy built to reform Wall Street of pressuring employees to break Wall Street’s rules.

The case against Ramaswamy is moving forward

Three years after Rosely first sued, Ramaswamy tried to get himself out of the case.

He failed.

The Aug. 25 ruling leaves the core whistleblower claims against Strive and against Ramaswamy personally intact and clears the way for the litigation to continue.

The allegations now attached to Ohio’s Republican nominee for governor are stark: a former senior executive says Ramaswamy personally demanded conduct that violated securities laws, heard employees repeatedly object and participated in firing her after she refused.

Ramaswamy built his political career by arguing that his success in business proves he is qualified to run government.

A federal court has now ruled that a whistleblower accusing him of demanding securities-law violations gets to keep making her case.

Related: ‘How is Vivek Ramaswamy not in prison?’ Ohio governor candidate accused of multibillion-dollar ‘pump-and-dump’ scheme

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social.

“If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” Trump continued. “The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

Trump then suggested that opposition to the massive computing facilities was benefiting China.

“China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement,” Trump wrote. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”

The broadside comes as opposition to artificial intelligence data centers has become a growing political problem for an industry racing to build power-hungry computing campuses across the country — including throughout Ohio.

It also lands directly in northwest Ohio, where communities have already begun using local zoning authority to slow the industry’s advance.

Tiffin City Council voted 6-0 in April to impose a 12-month moratorium on data center development while the city considers what zoning rules should govern the facilities.

No data center project had been proposed in Tiffin when council acted. Instead, the city chose to study the issue before a developer arrived, with electricity demand, water consumption, agricultural land and infrastructure among the concerns surrounding the industry’s expansion.

Under Trump’s framing Monday, communities taking that cautious approach risk doing economic damage to themselves.

Trump’s China warning has an Ohio parallel

Trump’s suggestion that American opposition to data centers benefits China also closely resembles a narrative that has already made its way into Ohio legislation.

Embattled state Rep. Gary Click, a Republican ex-pastor and former community theater actor representing Seneca and Sandusky counties, and Rep. Kellie Deeter introduced House Bill 646 earlier this year to establish an Ohio Data Center Study Commission.

The proposal directed the state-created commission to examine environmental impacts, electricity demand, consumer utility rates, water use, noise, farmland and local economic effects.

But the House-passed legislation also ordered the commission to investigate something substantially different: “reports of foreign propaganda intended to create opposition to data centers.”

The language appears in the Ohio Legislative Service Commission’s official analysis of the legislation.

Click’s proposal therefore placed alleged foreign efforts to encourage opposition on the list of subjects Ohio officials would be required to investigate alongside the tangible environmental and infrastructure consequences of the facilities.

That language preceded — and foreshadowed — a broader effort by members of the Trump administration and industry advocates to connect domestic resistance with foreign influence.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claimed in May that American communities were being “bombarded” with foreign propaganda designed to stop data center development, according to The Washington Post.

The newspaper reported that Burgum and billionaire investor Kevin O’Leary, who made similar allegations, did not provide conclusive evidence that foreign actors were responsible for the widespread American backlash.

Trump has now taken that argument directly to the public, telling Americans that China “could not be happier” with the anti-data-center movement.

Husted helped make Ohio a data center destination

Trump’s declaration also follows years of aggressive data center recruitment by Ohio Republican leaders — perhaps none more visibly than U.S. Sen. Jon Husted.

As lieutenant governor from 2019 until his appointment to the U.S. Senate in 2025, Husted repeatedly promoted Ohio as a destination for some of the world’s largest technology companies and publicly championed billions of dollars in data center investment.

One month after Husted took office as lieutenant governor, Google announced its first major Ohio data center project: a $600 million facility in New Albany.

“Google investing in Ohio to open a new data center is great news for our state,” Husted said at the time. “Ohio is establishing itself as a premier destination for technology investment, and it further strengthens our case that Ohio is becoming the tech capital of the Midwest.”

The project came with a 15-year state sales-tax exemption estimated at $43.5 million, along with a 15-year local property-tax abatement.

When Google broke ground in 2019, Husted explicitly defended those incentives.

“This will fuel the economy for many years in Ohio,” Husted said, arguing that Columbus could become the “tech hub of the Midwest.”

Husted went further, saying that imposing the sales tax would have chased Google out of Ohio.

That is an important distinction in Husted’s record. He did not create Ohio’s original data center sales-tax exemption, which the General Assembly enacted in 2011 before he became lieutenant governor. But once in the DeWine administration, Husted became one of the state’s most visible defenders of using that incentive structure to attract and expand data centers.

The administration continued approving data center tax incentives during his tenure.

In 2023, for example, the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved a 75%, 15-year data center tax exemption for Aligned Data Centers’ proposed project in Perkins Township in Erie County — a project expected at the time to create 18 full-time jobs and $1.6 million in annual payroll.

Husted and Gov. Mike DeWine’s administration announced the project as part of a package of state-assisted economic development investments.

At the same time, Husted was helping promote vastly larger projects.

In June 2023, Husted joined DeWine and JobsOhio in announcing that Amazon Web Services planned to invest another $7.8 billion expanding its Ohio data center operations.

“This enormous capital investment further solidifies Ohio as the tech center of the Midwest and positions us for a bright future as cloud computing and artificial intelligence are more integrated into the economy and our everyday lives,” Husted said.

The expansion was billed as the second-largest private-sector company investment in Ohio history.

Husted was still promoting the industry’s expansion a year later.

When Google announced another $2.3 billion investment in its Ohio infrastructure in June 2024, Husted said, “Data centers are essential to our digital lives and Google’s additional multibillion dollar investment further establishes central Ohio as an important tech hub in America.”

“We value Google’s continued investment for the jobs and economic impact,” Husted said, adding that Ohio looked forward to further partnerships involving artificial intelligence and energy.

By December 2024, Husted and DeWine were announcing another planned $10 billion expansion by Amazon Web Services.

AWS said the investment could expand its Ohio infrastructure to as many as eight additional sites by 2030 and was intended in part to meet rapidly growing demand for artificial intelligence computing.

The result is an Ohio landscape in which the state’s major data center operators secured extraordinarily valuable long-term tax advantages while investing tens of billions of dollars in new facilities.

The cost of those exemptions eventually exploded far beyond state projections.

As TiffinOhio.net previously reported, Ohio Department of Taxation figures showed the data center sales-tax exemption cost the state nearly $1.57 billion in 2025 alone, compared with an earlier projection of about $136 million.

Separate reporting found that some of Ohio’s largest technology companies secured agreements allowing sales-tax exemptions to continue for decades.

Google, Meta and Amazon all entered statewide agreements offering 100% exemptions that could last as long as 40 years if investment requirements were met.

As public opposition intensified, Husted began recalibrating his position.

He now says Ohio should stop granting the broad sales and use tax exemption to new data center projects — an incentive he once fiercely defended — and has promoted proposals intended to prevent data centers from shifting electricity costs onto residential ratepayers.

But that shift comes after years in which Husted promoted the facilities as central to Ohio’s economic strategy, defended the tax breaks used to attract them and helped announce multibillion-dollar expansions by Google and Amazon.

In a July interview, Husted offered another defense of the industry’s existence.

“If you’re connected to a wire, you’re using the data center,” Husted said. “So, understand that when we look in the mirror, we are the problem.”

The issue has now become politically dangerous enough that Republican strategists themselves are sounding alarms.

A leaked National Republican Senatorial Committee memo reported by Axios in August warned that data center opposition posed a serious threat to Husted’s campaign against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, describing the issue as an “anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.”

Ramaswamy spent months calling the boom ‘good’

Trump’s aggressive defense of the industry is also much closer to Vivek Ramaswamy’s longstanding position than Ramaswamy’s more recent campaign rhetoric might suggest.

Before data center opposition became a major Ohio political issue, the Republican nominee for governor repeatedly celebrated their arrival.

Speaking at a Republican event in Jefferson County in March 2025, Ramaswamy was explicit.

“It takes two years to build an AI data center or Bitcoin mining firm or whatever — all of which I want in the state, by the way,” Ramaswamy said.

That was not an isolated remark.

As TiffinOhio.net previously documented, Ramaswamy described Ohio’s data center boom as a positive development at least 10 times in recorded appearances and posts during a five-week period in March and April 2025.

“We’ve got AI data centers moving to our state. That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. I want the sectors of the future to come here,” he said on March 27.

Days later, he was even more explicit.

“We have an AI data center boom in the state of Ohio, which is great,” Ramaswamy said. “I’m all for it, I’m strongly in favor of it.”

His argument throughout that period was not that Ohio should slow data center construction because the facilities consumed too much electricity. It was that Ohio should dramatically expand energy production to accommodate them.

“We’re seeing an AI data center boom (which is good), right at the time when we face supply constraints on baseload power generation,” Ramaswamy wrote in March 2025.

Ramaswamy has since tried to reposition himself as voter opposition intensified.

Earlier this month, his campaign announced an “Ohioans-First” data center proposal that would temporarily halt new approvals until new restrictions are enacted.

But the plan does not propose eliminating the industry. Ramaswamy explicitly rejects a “permanent categorical ban” and says preserving economic growth, investment and jobs from data centers remains an objective.

Under his proposal, data centers would continue being built if they meet his conditions.

That makes his new position a change in the terms under which he would allow the industry’s expansion — not a repudiation of an industry he spent months saying he wanted in Ohio.

Seven in 10 Americans oppose a data center where they live

Trump’s characterization of opposition as a road to poverty also runs directly against national public opinion.

A Gallup survey published in May found 71% of Americans opposed construction of an artificial intelligence data center in their local area.

Nearly half of Americans — 48% — said they were strongly opposed. Just 7% strongly favored having one built nearby.

Opposition was even higher in the Midwest, where 76% opposed local construction.

And resistance crossed party lines. Gallup found majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents opposed having a data center built where they live.

The reasons opponents gave were overwhelmingly domestic and practical.

Half cited excessive resource consumption. Gallup found 18% specifically mentioned water use and another 18% cited electricity consumption. Others pointed to pollution, noise, traffic, quality-of-life changes, higher utility bills, increased costs of living and taxpayer subsidies.

Gallup concluded that the intensity of opposition could fuel significant grassroots activism and make data center development a major issue in state and local elections.

That backlash is already visible in Ohio.

Tiffin has paused new development. Residents elsewhere are organizing around farmland, electricity, water and zoning. Data centers have become a liability in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race. And Republicans are increasingly scrambling to promise that residential customers will not be stuck paying the industry’s power costs.

Yet Ohio did not become one of America’s leading data center destinations accidentally.

For years, state leaders recruited the industry, celebrated its multibillion-dollar investments and used tax incentives to make Ohio more attractive to developers.

Husted argued that taxing Google could have cost Ohio the project. Ramaswamy declared himself “strongly in favor” of the data center boom. Click sponsored legislation instructing state officials to investigate “foreign propaganda intended to create opposition” to the facilities.

Trump has now distilled those arguments into their starkest form.

Communities that embrace data centers, he says, can become “successful and rich.” Communities that resist them risk becoming “backwards and poor.” And the Americans organizing against the projects, according to the president, are making China happy.

For communities asking whether they actually want the data center boom in their backyard, Trump’s message leaves little room for dissent: “let Data Reign” — or risk being left behind.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

After Republican Common Pleas Judge Jon Ickes was suspended from practicing law for two years and removed from the bench by the Ohio Supreme Court, the Blade declared the current state of the Sandusky County Republican Party an embarrassment to Fremont’s Republican history.

“Sandusky County is sliding into political cesspool status,” the editorial board wrote, pointing not only to Ickes but to a Republican sheriff who went to prison and a Republican prosecutor who left office after a criminal conviction.

But Sandusky County did not suddenly begin sliding with Jon Ickes.

The scandals stretch across nearly the entire chairmanship of Justin Smith, who has led the Sandusky County Republican Party since January 2008.

During Smith’s more than 18 years at the helm, a Republican sheriff went to prison for stealing drugs and abusing his office. A Republican prosecutor resigned after a criminal conviction and an effort by the Ohio attorney general to remove him. One Republican judge was hit with a $33,300 state finding over invoices the Ohio auditor called falsified. Another was removed from office by the Ohio Supreme Court after disciplinary authorities found 10 ethical violations.

Smith did not personally cause those acts, and there is no evidence he directed the underlying misconduct. But after nearly two decades running the political organization responsible for recruiting candidates, supporting campaigns and filling vacancies, the record of the party Smith leads is also his political record.

Overmyer: From Republican sheriff to prison

Smith became Republican chairman in January 2008. That September, Kyle Overmyer was sworn in as Sandusky County sheriff following the death of Sheriff David Gangwer.

Overmyer would eventually become one of the most spectacular public-corruption cases in the county’s modern history.

By 2015, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation was examining his handling of prescription drugs collected through law-enforcement disposal boxes. Overmyer nevertheless won the March 2016 Republican primary with 61% of the vote.

Five months later, a grand jury indicted him on 43 counts, including 38 felonies involving theft in office, deception to obtain dangerous drugs, tampering with records and other theft offenses.

Smith did not call for his resignation.

“We are not going to make any judgment until we see what’s going on,” Smith said after the indictment. “I do believe that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.”

Overmyer was also an elected member of the Republican Central Committee. Even while suspended and under indictment, he participated in a Republican committee meeting to help select an interim replacement for his own office.

He ultimately pleaded guilty to 13 felony counts, including theft of dangerous drugs and theft in office, and was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $25,000 in restitution.

Then the prosecutor fell

Three years later, another major Republican officeholder collapsed.

County Prosecutor Tim Braun pleaded guilty in December 2019 to negligent assault stemming from improper physical contact with a female subordinate.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost then sought Braun’s removal, citing his criminal conviction and what the state described as a broader pattern of misconduct involving female employees.

Unlike some other cases, the county Republican Party did act against Braun. Republican leaders unanimously called for him to resign and leave the Central Committee, and Smith said the county needed to “get back on track.”

Braun resigned in January 2020.

The Republican Central Committee then appointed Beth Tischler to replace him — a decision that would become important as another courthouse controversy unfolded.

The $33,300 Brad Smith finding

Republican Juvenile and Probate Judge Brad Smith has held his Sandusky County judgeship since 2009.

Years later, the Ohio Auditor of State documented another extraordinary episode inside county government.

A state audit found that Brad Smith admitted manually creating seven invoices connected to two nonprofit organizations.

The auditor called them “falsified invoices” made to appear as though the organizations had billed for specific services that had not been provided as represented.

Six corresponding checks totaling $33,300 were cashed.

The auditor issued a $33,300 Finding for Recovery against Smith and his bonding company for public property the state said had been “converted or misappropriated.”

Brad Smith strongly disputed that characterization, arguing that the nonprofit organizations performed legitimate services and that the payments reflected longstanding arrangements. The auditor considered his objections and left the finding intact.

Then the finding disappeared.

In 2023, Tischler — the Republican prosecutor appointed after Braun’s resignation — sought to abate the entire $33,300 finding. The Ohio Attorney General’s Office approved the request, and Smith repaid nothing.

The abatement was backed by several county officeholders. Tischler later supported Brad Smith’s reelection, while Smith supported Tischler’s campaign for judge.

Earlier this year, Smith faced another campaign-finance controversy when TiffinOhio.net reported that his campaign directed contributors to a personal Venmo account.

The Ohio Office of Disciplinary Counsel later confirmed that four donors had sent a combined $650 through the account and that the money was returned after TiffinOhio.net reported the arrangement. The disciplinary office declined to impose discipline.

Despite those controversies, Brad Smith was again the only Republican candidate for his judgeship in the May 2026 primary.

Then came Ickes

If the Brad Smith case raised questions about financial accountability, the Jon Ickes case exposed a more basic failure of political vetting.

Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Ickes to the Sandusky County Common Pleas Court in 2020. He later won election as a Republican.

By October 2024, a disciplinary complaint against him was public. The case included allegations of an unprofessional courthouse environment and serious conflicts of interest arising from Ickes presiding over criminal cases in which his stepson participated as a law-enforcement witness.

A disciplinary hearing occurred in May 2025, and the Board of Professional Conduct issued its findings months before the 2026 Republican primary.

Yet when Republican voters received their May ballot, the party offered them one candidate for the Common Pleas Court seat:

Jon M. Ickes.

No Republican challenged him.

During the disciplinary case, Brad Smith testified favorably about Ickes, calling him “a solid human being and a good judge.” Tischler also defended his performance, rating him nine out of 10 as a trial judge.

The Ohio Supreme Court reached a much harsher judgment.

On Aug. 19, it suspended Ickes for two years and immediately removed him from office without pay. The court pointed to what it called a “glaring conflict of interest” and said the damage to confidence in the judiciary was “incalculable.”

Ickes’ uncontested Republican nomination has now created another problem: whether a suspended judge who cannot serve may remain on the November ballot.

Independent candidate Kimberly Ontko has asked the Ohio Supreme Court to remove Ickes from the ballot or prevent votes for him from counting. As of Aug. 31, the case remained pending, with the court ordering another filing due Sept. 1.

The Blade put the responsibility plainly.

In a functioning political party, its editorial board wrote, Ickes would have been pressured to resign or would have faced a serious Republican primary challenger.

Instead, the party handed him its nomination without opposition.

Gary Click and Smith’s political pipeline

State Rep. Gary Click belongs in this history for a different reason.

Click has not been convicted of a crime like Overmyer or Braun, subjected to a state Finding for Recovery like Brad Smith or removed from office like Ickes.

His connection is political.

In 2017, before Click became a state representative, the Sandusky County Republican Party recommended him for the Ohio Republican Party State Central Committee.

“The committee was impressed with Gary Click’s reputation and to his commitment to the Republican Party,” Smith said at the time, explaining that Click had been selected from several candidates.

Click eventually moved from the local Republican apparatus into the Ohio House.

Since then, TiffinOhio.net has repeatedly reported on Click’s political judgment, including his campaign’s paid defense of House Bill 6 before the nuclear bailout became synonymous with Ohio’s $60 million bribery scandal, donor-funded travel and his continued legislative relationship with Republican Rep. Rodney Creech after allegations that Creech sexually abused his minor daughter. Creech denies the allegations and has never been criminally charged.

The Smith-Click relationship remains current.

When Smith became county commissioner this spring, Click praised him through his official legislative newsletter, describing Smith as bringing “strong leadership” and “a clear commitment to public service” and predicting he would serve with “integrity and dedication.”

Then the chairman got a county office of his own

For most of his 18 years as chairman, Justin Smith operated largely behind the political machinery.

That changed this year.

Smith himself has a history in county government. Personnel records previously obtained by TiffinOhio.net showed he was reprimanded while working as a deputy clerk of courts in 2019 over concerns that included political activity during county work time and inaccurate work. Smith denied wrongdoing and said he had been forced to resign.

In April 2026, after Commissioner Charlie Schwochow left office, the Republican Central Committee Smith chairs selected Smith to fill the vacancy.

Because Smith was a candidate, Vice Chairman Ben Decker presided over the meeting. Nine Republicans sought the appointment. After three ballots, Smith won.

The committee simultaneously made its longtime chairman a county commissioner and the Republican candidate for the remaining two years of the term.

Brad Smith swore him into office two days later.

Justin Smith remains chairman of the Sandusky County Republican Central Committee.

Eighteen years is long enough to own the record

Political leaders cannot control every act committed by every candidate their party elects.

But leadership cannot mean claiming credit for victories while treating scandal after scandal as somebody else’s responsibility.

For more than 18 years, Justin Smith has led the Republican organization that dominates Sandusky County politics. During that period, Republican officeholders have gone to prison, pleaded guilty to criminal misconduct, faced major state audit findings and been thrown off the bench by Ohio’s highest court.

Some were condemned by the party. Others survived without primary opposition. Some were defended or rehabilitated by other Republican courthouse officials. And through all of it, the organization responsible for filling vacancies and supplying Republican candidates remained under the same chairman.

The Blade concluded that Sandusky County will remain vulnerable to “political hacks” until voters put public integrity ahead of party loyalty.

That warning followed the collapse of Jon Ickes.

But the fuller record runs from Overmyer to Braun, from Brad Smith to Ickes, through the rise of Gary Click and finally back to Justin Smith himself.

Different offices. Different scandals. Different levels of wrongdoing.

One chairman.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The outrage centered on Axovant Sciences, the biotechnology company Ramaswamy built around an experimental Alzheimer’s drug that GlaxoSmithKline had already tested unsuccessfully four times. Ramaswamy acquired the rights for $5 million upfront, put the drug at the center of what became the biggest biotechnology IPO in U.S. history at the time, and watched Axovant briefly reach a valuation of about $2.8 billion.

Meanwhile, Ramaswamy sold nearly $40 million in shares of Axovant’s parent company, Roivant Sciences, during the same year the Axovant story was electrifying investors. Two years later, the Alzheimer’s drug failed its decisive Phase 3 trial. Axovant shares plunged more than 70% in a single day.

Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld later accused Ramaswamy of cashing out while publicly hyping Axovant and wrote that the sequence “almost resemble[d] a classic pump-and-dump scheme.”

That controversy alone raises obvious questions about the businessman now asking Ohioans to make him governor. But in 2026, the Axovant story is no longer the whole story.

New reporting has exposed how Ramaswamy’s mother, while working for Axovant for a $250,000 salary and holding hundreds of thousands of deeply discounted stock options, helped reanalyze the failed clinical data into results the company presented more favorably to investors. A federal judge this month allowed a whistleblower claim against Ramaswamy to continue after a former executive at his next company alleged that he instructed employees to violate securities laws. His gubernatorial campaign spent more than half a million dollars through a credit card without initially disclosing the individual purchases, then amended its reports after state auditors flagged the filings. The campaign has also spent nearly $560,000 leasing an aircraft through a company tied directly to Ramaswamy.

And while campaigning as an enemy of elite privilege and political self-dealing, Ramaswamy is proposing tax and cryptocurrency policies that stand to benefit people with financial portfolios very much like his own.

The $5 million drug that became a $2.8 billion company

Ramaswamy was a hedge-fund investor before he became the biotech entrepreneur whose fortune would later bankroll his political career. In late 2014, his company acquired worldwide rights to an experimental Alzheimer’s drug then known as RVT-101 and later renamed intepirdine.

The price was startlingly small: a $5 million upfront payment to GlaxoSmithKline. Axovant later paid another $5 million and would have owed additional milestone payments and royalties if the drug succeeded, according to the company’s SEC filings.

The reason Glaxo was willing to let it go was no secret. The drug had already missed its primary endpoint in four clinical trials, according to Forbes. Three trials tested the drug by itself. A fourth tested it alongside donepezil, an existing Alzheimer’s treatment, and also failed one of its principal statistical tests.

Ramaswamy saw something Glaxo did not — or at least convinced investors that he did.

Axovant was formed in October 2014. Eight months later, it went public.

On June 11, 2015, Axovant shares debuted at $15. The company raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and the stock jumped roughly 90% on its first trading day. A company that had not existed the previous summer was suddenly worth about $2.8 billion, according to Forbes.

The company’s later SEC filing records $362.3 million in gross IPO proceeds from the sale of 24.15 million shares.

Axovant had no approved drugs. It had generated no product revenue. Its enormous valuation rested overwhelmingly on the prospect that Ramaswamy was right about the Alzheimer’s drug Glaxo had abandoned.

Asked by Forbes at the time how a drug acquired for $5 million could suddenly support a multibillion-dollar valuation, Ramaswamy called it a “great drug candidate” and said approval could make a “huge difference” for patients.

Ramaswamy cashed out nearly $40 million as the hype peaked

The most explosive part of the Axovant story is not simply that Ramaswamy made a risky scientific bet and lost. It is what happened to his own finances while investors were buying the story.

Axovant was controlled by Ramaswamy’s holding company, Roivant Sciences. Ramaswamy did not personally dump publicly traded Axovant shares. He sold part of his ownership in Roivant.

His own tax records show that he sold nearly $40 million worth of Roivant stock in 2015, the same year Axovant exploded onto public markets.

Sonnenfeld, a Yale professor who has spent years examining Ramaswamy’s business record, laid out the transaction in a 2023 Fortune commentary.

Ramaswamy’s spokesperson initially told Sonnenfeld that the suggestion Ramaswamy made money from Axovant’s failure was false. The campaign then acknowledged the Roivant sale, arguing that Ramaswamy and other shareholders sold a small portion of their stakes to make room for an outside investor.

Sonnenfeld was unsparing.

He wrote that Ramaswamy was “busy cashing out while shamelessly hyping Axovant’s prospects in media interviews,” describing the sequence as “almost resembling a classic pump-and-dump scheme.”

Two years after the IPO, the scientific verdict arrived.

Axovant’s 1,315-patient Phase 3 MINDSET trial found that intepirdine failed both of its co-primary efficacy endpoints. The drug did not meaningfully improve either cognition or patients’ ability to perform daily activities compared with placebo. Axovant announced the failure on Sept. 26, 2017, and its stock collapsed by roughly 70%.

Ramaswamy called it the “single greatest failure” of his career.

He had already made his money.

His mother helped turn failed data into a better sales pitch

Axovant’s investor pitch did not rely only on Ramaswamy’s confidence. The company went back into Glaxo’s old clinical-trial data and found more favorable ways to analyze it.

One of the people doing that work was Ramaswamy’s mother.

Axovant hired Geetha Ramaswamy as vice president of medical and scientific strategy. According to company filings reviewed in an August 2026 Oligarch Watch investigation, she received an annual salary of $250,000 and an option to purchase 262,500 Axovant shares at 90 cents apiece.

She co-authored analyses that went back through the same 684-patient Glaxo trial that had failed its primary objective.

One was a “responder analysis,” which divided subjects into responders and non-responders. Another was a “completer analysis,” which examined patients with complete data at each study visit rather than the full randomized population.

Those methods produced a much more attractive picture of the drug.

The completer analysis reported statistically significant improvements on certain cognition and daily-function measures. Axovant then included the favorable data in securities filings and publicity supporting its decision to move the drug into Phase 3.

Days before Axovant’s IPO, the company told investors in an SEC filing that the old Glaxo data supported its belief that intepirdine had the potential to become a “best-in-class” Alzheimer’s treatment. In July 2015, Axovant cited the reanalysis to announce “statistically significant benefits.”

The methodology drew skepticism even then. Chardan analyst Gbola Amusa rated Axovant a sell and criticized the completer analysis as less scientifically rigorous and less relevant to regulators. Medical statisticians have long warned that excluding patients who drop out of clinical trials can introduce bias into the results.

The Phase 3 trial eventually tested the proposition on a fresh group of more than 1,300 patients.

It failed.

TiffinOhio.net reported earlier this month that the California State Teachers’ Retirement System was among the investors burned by the collapse. Its reported Axovant position fell from roughly $1.23 million to about $68,000.

Ramaswamy, meanwhile, had reported tens of millions of dollars in capital gains during the year of the IPO.

A federal judge just kept another securities-law controversy alive

Axovant was not the last Ramaswamy company to produce accusations involving securities laws.

After leaving biotech management, Ramaswamy co-founded Strive Asset Management, selling it as an “anti-woke” alternative to firms such as BlackRock. Former Strive executive Joyce Rosely later sued Strive, co-founder Anson Frericks and Ramaswamy.

Her complaint says Ramaswamy and Frericks began demanding “almost immediately” after she joined Strive that she violate securities laws. Rosely says she and another employee repeatedly objected to those demands and to securities-law violations they believed Ramaswamy and Frericks were committing themselves.

On Aug. 25, U.S. District Judge Julien Xavier Neals refused to dismiss Rosely’s whistleblower claim against Ramaswamy under New Jersey’s Conscientious Employee Protection Act.

The court summarized the allegations against Ramaswamy directly: Rosely says he instructed her to violate securities laws, personally engaged in conduct she believed violated securities laws, exercised supervisory authority over her and received her objections in meetings before she was fired.

The judge ruled that those allegations state a legally sufficient whistleblower claim against Ramaswamy and allowed that portion of the case to proceed. Other discrimination-related counts were dismissed.

Three years after Ramaswamy launched Strive as another example of his supposed business acumen, one of its former senior executives is now pursuing a federal whistleblower case accusing him personally of pressuring workers to break securities rules.

His Ohio campaign put $509,473 behind the words ‘credit card payment’

The financial questions followed Ramaswamy into his campaign for governor.

From April 2025 through June 2026, his campaign reported $509,473 in credit-card spending without initially itemizing the underlying purchases. Instead of telling voters who was paid and what the campaign bought, reports listed large monthly payments to American Express.

Ohio law requires campaigns to disclose individual expenditures and their purposes. The Ohio Capital Journal reported in June that Ramaswamy’s campaign had effectively placed a wall around more than half a million dollars in spending.

This was not a campaign unfamiliar with itemized credit-card reporting. During Ramaswamy’s presidential run, his federal campaign separately reported individual purchases made by credit card.

Ohio auditors eventually flagged the gubernatorial campaign’s filings. The campaign amended them in July, and the Secretary of State’s Office said the reports had been corrected.

The new disclosures showed where the money had gone: printing, mailing, events, transportation, hotels, software, tolls and other campaign expenses. Some individual charges ran into tens of thousands of dollars.

The details became public only after the original filings obscured them and state auditors demanded corrections.

Nearly $560,000 in campaign money went to a jet company tied to Ramaswamy

The corrected credit-card reports were followed by another striking campaign-finance revelation.

Ramaswamy’s campaign has spent nearly $690,000 leasing aircraft since he began running for governor, according to campaign-finance records reviewed by the Ohio Capital Journal.

Nearly $560,000 went to V Leasing LLC.

The address listed for V Leasing in campaign records is a house owned by Ramaswamy. His state financial disclosure lists V Leasing among his business interests, and reporting by Signal Ohio identified the company as the owner of the private aircraft he uses.

Campaign records show another roughly $130,000 went to a separate aircraft-leasing company.

Ramaswamy has used private aircraft not merely for cross-country campaign travel but for short hops between Ohio cities. Flight records have documented trips between Columbus and Cleveland or Akron that can be driven in roughly two hours.

Ramaswamy has personally loaned more than $25 million to his gubernatorial campaign. The arrangement produces a remarkable financial loop: Ramaswamy’s fortune finances his campaign, and his campaign reports hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to a company tied to Ramaswamy for aircraft use.

The anti-affirmative-action candidate took an immigrant-only fellowship while already a millionaire

Ramaswamy’s political brand depends heavily on his attacks against affirmative action, DEI and institutions that distribute opportunities based in part on identity.

His own résumé contains exactly the kind of identity-based advantage he now condemns.

In 2011, Ramaswamy received a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans while attending Yale Law School. The program exists for immigrants and the children of immigrants. Ramaswamy, who was born in Cincinnati to parents who immigrated from India, qualified through his family’s immigrant status.

He was also already making extraordinary money.

Ramaswamy’s released tax returns show he reported $2.25 million in income in 2011, the year he accepted the fellowship, after reporting another combined $1.17 million during the previous three years.

Ramaswamy later said he accepted the fellowship when he “didn’t have the money” for law school.

Then, shortly before launching his presidential campaign, Ramaswamy paid someone to remove the fellowship from his Wikipedia page.

A paid editor disclosed that Ramaswamy had hired him to make changes to the biography. On Feb. 9, 2023, the editor removed the Soros fellowship and Ramaswamy’s participation in Ohio’s COVID-19 Response Team. Ramaswamy announced his presidential candidacy less than two weeks later, according to Mediaite.

The fellowship was eventually restored by other Wikipedia editors.

Ramaswamy had already collected the money.

His tax agenda would benefit fortunes like his — including his own

Ramaswamy’s financial interests have not stopped intersecting with his political agenda now that he is running for governor.

One of his signature proposals is eliminating Ohio taxation of capital gains as a step toward abolishing the state income tax entirely.

Ramaswamy knows capital gains well. His own released tax returns show approximately $211 million in capital gains across just two years — about $37 million in 2015 and roughly $174.5 million in 2020.

A nonpartisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission analysis of a legislative proposal to exempt capital gains found 81.6% of the benefit would flow to Ohioans earning more than $200,000. The proposal would reduce state revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

As TiffinOhio.net previously reported, the candidate demanding that Ohio stop taxing capital gains is himself precisely the kind of taxpayer who can generate nine-figure capital gains.

Ramaswamy has spent years selling himself as someone wealthy enough to be immune from political corruption. His tax agenda demonstrates the other side of enormous personal wealth: government decisions worth very little to an ordinary wage earner can be worth millions to someone with Ramaswamy’s portfolio.

He backs opening Ohio public money to crypto while holding millions in a bitcoin company

The same problem appears in Ramaswamy’s cryptocurrency agenda.

Ramaswamy has praised Ohio House Bill 18, dubbed the Ohio Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve Act. The legislation would permit the state treasurer to put certain state funds into digital assets and rewrite investment laws governing Ohio’s five public retirement systems to allow cryptocurrency-linked exchange-traded products.

Ramaswamy is not merely an ideological supporter of cryptocurrency. He has substantial personal money riding on the industry.

A securities filing analyzed by TiffinOhio.net showed Ramaswamy beneficially owned roughly 5.7 million shares of Strive, worth approximately $69 million at the market price used in the analysis.

Strive has transformed itself from Ramaswamy’s “anti-woke” asset-management startup into a publicly traded bitcoin treasury company. Its corporate strategy now depends heavily on bitcoin, and Ramaswamy’s state ethics disclosure separately lists his personal holdings in bitcoin and ether.

The candidate pushing Ohio government toward greater cryptocurrency investment is already heavily invested in the same financial ecosystem.

From Alzheimer’s patients to Ohio voters, Ramaswamy is still selling the businessman

Ramaswamy’s campaign does not ask voters to overlook any of this because his business history is irrelevant. It does the opposite. His wealth, investing background and supposed talent for spotting opportunities are central to his argument that Ohio should hand him control of state government.

That makes the record behind the fortune essential.

Ramaswamy took a drug Glaxo had tested unsuccessfully four times and bought the rights for $5 million upfront. Eight months after creating Axovant, he took the company public. Its valuation exploded to nearly $3 billion. He publicly promoted the drug’s potential while selling nearly $40 million of stock in parent company Roivant. His mother, employed by Axovant and holding cheap stock options, helped produce favorable reanalyses of the old failed data. The drug failed again when subjected to the decisive Phase 3 test, and shareholders watched Axovant collapse.

That is the episode Sonnenfeld said almost resembled a classic pump-and-dump.

Ramaswamy then built Strive, where a former executive says he personally demanded securities-law violations and retaliated against her when she objected. A federal judge has now allowed her whistleblower claim against him to proceed.

His Ohio campaign initially buried more than $500,000 in individual purchases behind generic American Express payments until state auditors forced corrected disclosures. The campaign has reported nearly $560,000 in aircraft payments to a company tied to Ramaswamy. He accepted an immigrant-status fellowship while earning millions, then paid to remove it from Wikipedia before entering national politics. He wants Ohio to eliminate a tax on the kind of enormous capital gains that made him rich and backs expanding public exposure to cryptocurrency while holding a multimillion-dollar stake in a bitcoin company.

The question that went viral two years ago was deliberately provocative: “How is Vivek Ramaswamy not in prison?”

Ohio voters do not have to decide whether Ramaswamy belongs in prison. They do have to decide whether this is the business record they want in the governor’s office.

Ramaswamy has spent a decade selling investors, customers and voters on one big idea after another. The Alzheimer’s drug changed. The company changed. The investment pitch changed. The political pitch changed.

The man collecting the upside has remained remarkably consistent.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“We need to bring down property taxes in this state immediately — eventually down to zero,” Ramaswamy told supporters at his February 2025 campaign launch. “If you own land, it should not feel like it’s a lease from the government.”

Ohio’s own budget officials have now put a price on that promise.

A February memo prepared for Republican Gov. Mike DeWine by the Ohio Office of Budget and Management found that abolishing local property taxes would wipe out more than $20 billion in annual revenue that pays for schools, police, fire departments, emergency services and other local government operations.

Replacing that money through Ohio’s sales tax could require a statewide rate approaching 15% to 18%, according to the OBM memo. To keep the rate from climbing that high, the office said lawmakers could expand the sales-tax base to food, health care and other goods and services that are currently exempt.

Without replacement revenue, OBM warned that police, fire and EMS agencies would face station closures, dramatically reduced staffing and slower emergency response times. Schools would face layoffs, larger class sizes, closures and program cuts. The memo concluded that abolishing property taxes without replacing the money would “quite literally ‘defund’ the police.”

The OBM memo analyzed a citizen-led constitutional amendment to abolish property taxes statewide. Ramaswamy’s campaign proposal was separate, but he repeatedly promised voters the same result: property taxes at zero.

Ramaswamy promised zero. Ohio found a $20 billion-plus hole.

Property taxes generate about $24 billion a year for Ohio local governments, including revenue from real property and public-utility personal property, according to OBM. The memo said that total is roughly equal to all revenue Ohio collects from its state income and sales taxes combined.

That money is not sitting unused in Columbus. Ohio does not collect a statewide property tax. The revenue is collected locally and supports school districts, counties, cities, townships and other local entities.

OBM said the state already spends more than $2 billion a year reimbursing local governments and schools for existing property-tax relief programs. Replacing another $20 billion or more after abolishing local property taxes would be “fiscally impractical and economically harmful,” the agency concluded.

Ramaswamy’s zero-tax promise never accounted for where that money would come from.

Eliminating the property tax does not eliminate the cost of teachers, sheriff’s deputies, firefighters, ambulances, libraries or local government. If those services remain, the bill has to be paid another way.

A 15% to 18% state sales tax

Ohio’s state sales-tax rate is 5.75%. After consulting with the Ohio Department of Taxation, OBM estimated that replacing local property-tax revenue through the sales tax could require a statewide rate approaching 15% to 18%.

The agency warned that rates that high would encourage tax avoidance, push consumer spending across state lines and hurt Ohio businesses, especially in border counties.

DeWine called the potential result “absolutely devastating,” according to the Statehouse News Bureau.

For Ohio families, the shift would be immediate. A homeowner could lose a property-tax bill and then pay a much higher tax every time the family buys taxable goods. Renters would pay the higher sales tax too, even though they do not receive a property-tax bill directly.

Ramaswamy has also pledged to make Ohio a zero-income-tax state, cutting off another potential replacement source. OBM estimated that replacing property-tax revenue through the income tax could require statewide rates of roughly 11% to 15%.

Ramaswamy’s original tax agenda therefore promised to eliminate both property taxes and the state income tax while leaving unanswered how Ohio would fund the services those taxes support.

Groceries and health care could be next

OBM identified another way to keep the sales-tax rate from climbing toward 15% to 18%: start taxing purchases Ohio currently leaves untaxed.

“To moderate the potential rate increase, the sales tax base could be broadened to tax food, healthcare, or other goods or services that are currently exempt,” the state analysis says.

Under Ohio law, most groceries purchased for consumption away from the store are exempt from the state sales tax. Prescription drugs, insulin and a range of prescribed medical equipment and supplies are also exempt.

To keep the sales-tax rate from reaching the high teens, OBM identified food and health care as additional sources of revenue Ohio could tax.

That turns Ramaswamy’s promise on its head. He told Ohioans eliminating property taxes would let them keep more of their own money. DeWine’s budget office found that the cost could instead be shifted onto what those same Ohioans buy, including basic necessities.

The property-tax bill disappears from the mailbox. The tax bill shows up somewhere else.

The alternative: police, fire and school cuts

If Ohio abolished property taxes without replacing the revenue, OBM said local services would take the hit.

Property taxes account for approximately 65% of local tax revenue in Ohio, according to the memo. About three-fifths of property-tax revenue supports local school districts.

OBM warned that schools would face layoffs, larger class sizes, school closures and program cuts.

Police, fire and EMS agencies would face station closures, especially in smaller communities and townships, along with “dramatically reduced staffing” and slower emergency response times.

The DeWine administration summarized the result in unusually stark terms:

“As this analysis demonstrates, a constitutional amendment to abolish local property taxes, with no plan to replace the lost revenues, would quite literally ‘defund’ the police — and fire departments, schools, libraries, senior centers, and other local government services — in our communities statewide.”

That finding collides directly with Ramaswamy’s law-and-order campaign message. His campaign platform promises to “crush crime,” support law enforcement and slash taxes at the same time.

Police departments cannot operate without revenue. Fire departments cannot staff stations without revenue. School districts cannot pay teachers without revenue. Abolishing the tax that supplies a large share of that money means replacing it or cutting what it funds.

Ramaswamy walked away from zero

Ramaswamy no longer campaigns on eliminating property taxes.

By February 2026, he was promising what he called “the biggest property tax rollback in the history of our state” instead of abolition, according to the Statehouse News Bureau.

By July, the reversal was explicit.

Asked how local services would be funded under his tax plan, Ramaswamy said he wanted to roll property taxes back to pre-pandemic levels — “not eliminate them, OK?” — according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

His campaign now proposes rolling property taxes back to levels before the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and limiting their future growth. Ramaswamy argues that economic and population growth would generate additional revenue to help cover local needs.

The published plan does not provide a statewide figure for how much local revenue the rollback would remove or a dollar-for-dollar formula showing how affected school districts, police departments, fire departments and other local governments would be made whole.

Ramaswamy has abandoned the zero-property-tax promise, but the same arithmetic follows his current plan: every dollar cut from local property-tax collections must be replaced, removed from a public service or shifted to another taxpayer.

The tax bill moves. It does not vanish.

Ramaswamy launched his campaign promising to take property taxes “eventually down to zero” while also calling for the elimination of Ohio’s state income tax.

DeWine’s budget office has now shown the price of the first promise.

Replacing property-tax revenue through the sales tax could push Ohio’s statewide rate toward 15% to 18%. Keeping the rate lower could mean extending the sales tax to food, health care and other currently exempt purchases. Leaving the revenue unreplaced would mean deep cuts to police, fire departments, schools and other local services.

Ramaswamy sold voters the tax cut.

DeWine’s budget office calculated the bill.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Faith leaders recently spoke out against the ICE activity that has been taking place in the Clark County city after a June decision by the U.S. Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to end temporary protected status for the 330,000 Haitians who’ve fled the violence in their home country. Legal protected status for Haitians officially ended on July 27.

Haitian Support Center Executive Director Viles Dorsainvil is a TPS holder with an asylum case pending. 

“I am calling out this administration to tell them that we deserve to be treated with dignity,” he said. “We deserve to be treated as human beings. We are not animals.”

Dorsainvil is one of about 15,000 Haitians who live in Springfield, with a mixture of temporary protected status, citizenship, and other legal status.

“They are not a threat to the community,” Dorsainvil said. 

First Baptist Church Pastor Adam Banks said Haitian people are not “political bargaining chips.”

“They are not threats to be monitored and removed,” he said. “They are care providers, co-workers, faith leaders, and family. … We demand an end to deportations that tear families and our community apart.”

ICE agents are detaining people in Springfield in shopping plazas, gas stations, and apartment complexes. 

“Springfield is under siege right now,” said Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church.

Fellow Springfield pastor Gilbert Joubert Adrien was detained by ICE agents on Aug. 20 and advocates are calling for his release.

“We hope that will happen very, very soon,” Ruby said. “He needs to be out immediately. He is a good man with a congregation to serve, and they are without a pastor right now.”

A pastor from the First Haitian Evangelical Church of Springfield was detained last week when he was in Northwest Ohio and he might be out of the country already, according to Ruby.

Many Haitians detained in Springfield by ICE are being sent to Butler County Jail in Hamilton, which had 1,103 total inmates as of Friday afternoon.

The general housing capacity for Butler County Jail is 844, even though the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction recommends 756 as the housing capacity, according to a 2025 ODRC inspection report.  

Haitians living in Springfield are being required to report to ICE offices in Blue Ash or Westerville and wear ankle monitors. 

“Being outfitted with that monitor, it just symbolizes slavery,” Dorsainvil said. 

He shared the story of a mother who came to the Haitian Support Center, having given birth a few weeks prior, but lost the baby.

“She could not even walk, but they put the shackle on her,” Dorsainvil said. “You cannot understand how hard it is to hear those people on a daily basis crying.”

They are afraid to go out. They do not have freedom to go out. They don’t have the freedom even to look for help.

– Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of Springfield’s Haitian Support Center

Advocates are calling for an end to the ankle monitors. 

“It is inhumane,” Ruby said. “It is an insult. It is designed to humiliate, and we want it to stop right now.”

The pastor recently helped a Haitian family relocate to Canada. 

“Their children had survived kidnapping attempts when they were in Haiti,” he said. “Most families can’t go to Canada. It was only an option for this family because they had an immediate family member who was there.”

The U.S. Department of State currently has a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory for Haiti “due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited healthcare,” according to the agency.

A top security official and chief of staff to the nation’s defense minister was kidnapped in June. 

The federal government promised Haitians who self-deport a free airplane ticket and a $2,600 check to return to Haiti. 

“They are not getting the money that our government has promised,” Ruby said.

He talked to a reporter in Haiti who shared that Haitians who are being deported are getting off the plane and running for their lives. 

 “It puts a target on them that says to the gangs, ‘come get this person.’ ” 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trumbull County Court of Common Pleas Judge David Engler was elected to the county court’s domestic relations and juvenile division in 2024. He argued to the state supreme court in an April filing that the constitutional amendment “is being applied to eliminate parental-consent requirements for minors and to render judicial-bypass proceedings unnecessary or unavailable.”

Going further in his court filing, he argued that voters were “not informed” that the constitutional amendment would “eliminate” judicial bypass proceedings.

Judicial bypass is a longstanding legal method minors can use to ask a judge to allow an abortion without the need for parental permission. In judicial bypass cases, judges assess the “maturity and voluntariness” of a request via hearings and testimony, according to documents related to Engler’s court filing.

“The omission (of the judicial bypass proceedings) concealed a consequence essential to both advocates and opponents, and prevented average voters from understanding that the measure would alter the judiciary’s structure,” Engler wrote to the court.

The judge asked the court to dictate the administration and enforcement of the amendment “in a manner that preserves and does not eliminate or interfere with juvenile-court jurisdiction over judicial-bypass proceedings.”

Judicial bypass has been a method since the late 1990s. Engler’s county of Trumbull only saw two judicial bypass requests per year in the five years before he took the bench. In the year since he took over as judge, that number dropped to zero, leading Engler to say his office “has been stripped of a statutory and historically exercised judicial function.”

The reproductive rights amendment was passed by 57% of Ohio voters in 2023, enshrining abortion rights, miscarriage treatment, and other reproductive health measures into the state’s founding document.

The judge’s claims were countered by groups like the ACLU of Ohio and the Reproductive Rights Law Initiative at Case Western Reserve School of Law, along with the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.

Requesting that the court dismiss Engler’s claims, the state attorney general’s office called Engler’s arguments “untimely.” The office and the organizations who filed court documents in opposition to Engler’s request said he did not provide evidence that the constitutional amendment had specifically caused the drop in judicial bypass cases.

“(Engler) has alleged only that fewer judicial bypass cases have happened to arise in Trumbull County recently,” the ACLU of Ohio wrote in court documents. “That allegation is manifestly insufficient to support an inference that parental consent laws for abortion are no longer being enforced in Ohio.”

The Ohio Supreme Court dismissed the case without filing an opinion explaining the dismissal. The court’s announcement noted that the decision was agreed to by Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy and all six of the other justices on the court.

Abortion rights advocacy group Abortion Forward praised the decision in a recent email newsletter.

“While this case was transparently political, it does provide a valuable example of the potential for judicial interference in abortion politics in Ohio, even with the constitutional guarantee in place,” the newsletter stated.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Now, faced with a smaller, sicker clientele, the 11 insurers remaining in Ohio’s marketplace are proposing to increase premiums on average by 14.7% for 2027, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress. 

Natasha Murphy, the group’s director for health policy, said the new expense will only add to the burden besetting hundreds of thousands of Ohioans who are already struggling to get by.

“It’s just exacerbating the affordability crisis that millions of Americans are finding themselves in — especially as it relates to their monthly premiums,” Murphy told the Capital Journal.

Last summer, congressional Republicans renewed President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. That was a provision in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that provided $1 trillion in cuts for the richest 1% of Americans over 10 years while cutting more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and federal food assistance over the same period.

And while they renewed the tax cuts, congressional Republicans last year declined to renew pandemic-era subsidies for insurance purchased on the ACA exchanges. That caused premiums to more than double for nearly 497,000 Ohioans who bought their health insurance there.

It would have cost about $350 billion to extend the subsidies to 24 million Americans for 10 years. Meanwhile, Trump’s war of choice with Iran has created $38 billion in direct costs in six months — with no end in sight.

After the subsidies expired, 161,000 Ohioans dropped marketplace coverage.

That leaves insurers with customers who are likely to be sicker and more expensive to cover, Murphy said.

“They’re anticipating that the folks who remain in the market are going to be sicker and more expensive,” she said. “A lot of the folks who were healthier — and unfortunately some folks who weren’t that healthy — thought they weren’t able to afford their coverage and dropped out of the marketplace.”

The coverage losses on ACA exchanges come as policymakers are bracing for the brunt of Medicaid cuts to kick in Jan. 1. The Big Beautiful Bill hopes to create the biggest savings by placing bigger paperwork burdens on recipients and restricting states’ ability to raise revenue.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the provisions in the Trump bill and the expiration of ACA subsidies will lead to 16 million more Americans being without health insurance by 2034.

Murphy sees the moves as part of a long-term Republican project to undermine the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation — and even Medicaid itself. She called it “death by a thousand cuts.”

“And then when you look at the Medicaid work requirements and what it’s going to take for states to finance their Medicaid programs, it’s a full-throated attack on the ACA,” Murphy said. “But it’s also a pretty significant undermining of Medicaid as a core health-safety net for millions of Americans.” 

If so many Americans lose their insurance, it will have downstream consequences. 

Emergency departments — especially those in rural communities and poor neighborhoods — will be forced to care for more, sicker people who can’t pay. That will force those hospitals to cut services or even close, ER docs warn.

“The unfortunate reality is that hundreds of thousands of Americans have dropped marketplace coverage, many of whom are and will remain uninsured,” Murphy said. “That’s going to have broad implications for individual and family-level health, but more broadly, you’re going to see providers and hospitals see their uncompensated care costs rise and that’s all going to be exacerbated by the upcoming Medicaid changes.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nationwide, the median drive time between hospitals providing inpatient maternity care to Medicaid enrollees and the closest in-state alternative is 43 minutes for rural hospitals compared with 13 minutes for urban hospitals, the analysis found.

The study by KFF, a healthcare research organization, suggests that the closure of rural obstetrics units will accelerate as a result of the healthcare changes included in the broad tax and spending measure President Donald Trump signed last summer. That law will reduce some payments to hospitals and cut Medicaid enrollment by introducing work requirements.

Already, rural obstetric services are diminishing at a rapid rate: From 2010 to 2022, 238 rural hospitals closed their obstetrics units while only 26 hospitals opened new units. In 2023, almost half of rural counties did not have a hospital offering obstetrics services.

A 2022 report by the Government Accountability Office cited low Medicaid reimbursement rates and the challenge of recruiting and retaining providers as major factors.

Brittni Frederiksen, the lead KFF researcher for the report, said in an interview that rural hospitals already operate on thin margins, and that the additional cuts could push some of them over the edge.

“There are likely going to be rural hospitals that close their obstetric units or have to close the entire hospital, and so people will have greater distances to travel to safely deliver a baby,” said Frederiksen, an associate director at KFF who specializes in women’s health policy.

The states with the longest potential driving times, according to the KFF analysis, are Alaska, Nevada and North Dakota. The other states where the median trip would be an hour or more are Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming.

The states with the shortest drive times are New Jersey, Louisiana, and Ohio.

A lack of access to maternity care can lead to increased maternal mortality, low birthweight and premature births.

The United States has one of the worst maternal mortality rates among higher-income countries, at 17.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The U.S. rate is double, or even triple, the rate in most other high-income countries, according to The Commonwealth Fund, a philanthropic and research group.

Outcomes are even worse for women on Medicaid, the government insurance program for people with lower incomes. A recent survey of Medicaid patients who gave birth in 2023 and 2024 found that those patients experienced more complications, such as high blood pressure and gestational diabetes, than women with private insurance.

“We already have a maternal health crisis in this country, and already have very poor outcomes when it comes to delivering babies safely in this country. And then in rural areas, in particular, people already have to travel long distances to deliver,” Frederiksen said.

“Anytime you increase the distance to delivery, you know the likelihood that it could result in poor outcomes increases.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Despite her deeply held liberal politics, she admires the work of conservative groups that for decades have built influence in state governments across the country. 

“We on the left have left a huge amount of power on the table,” said Goldstein, the founder and president of State Futures, a nonprofit launched last year that coordinates hundreds of Democratic lawmakers across the states.

Few on the right have been as influential as the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC touts over 2,000 lawmakers as members — nearly a quarter of the country’s total state lawmakers. Despite fierce criticism, the organization has made an indelible mark on state policy by pushing hundreds of pieces of model legislation that have reshaped public education, state labor laws and taxation. 

“One of the things the right has known for decades is that by moving state policy, you move national policy,” Goldstein said. 

State Futures is among a growing number of progressive groups looking to combat the influence of groups such as ALEC. Experts say the left has years of work ahead if it wants to match the prowess of the organized right, which coalesced more readily around a few core issues. But the second Trump administration has rallied Democrats across the states seeking to oppose federal policies. This year, State Futures has worked with lawmakers who proposed nearly 250 bills in state capitols seeking to place limits on federal immigration efforts. 

Attention on state policymaking has only heightened as Democrats see the potential to flip hundreds of state legislative seats this November and chip away at the GOP’s hold on American politics. 

But Goldstein and other organizers say the left needs to make significant investments in state politics and policy that outlast any individual election cycle. In working to build Democratic power across the states, she’s studied the ALEC playbook. Aside from its relentless focus on state capitols over the years, she compliments the organization’s work of nurturing relationships that connect conservative lawmakers coast to coast.

“These are real people who are real friends,” she said. “I admire ALEC very much. I admire a lot about the right.”

For its part, ALEC says it welcomes more attention on state policy — even from those on the other side of the aisle.

Jonathan Williams, the organization’s president and chief economist, says more people are concurring with ALEC’s belief that changing policy starts with the states.

“There’s lots of groups out there that have tried to replicate ALEC from the left,” he said. “And there is some irony … that a lot of the left wanted to take ALEC out there for many years, and now they want to join in and try to replicate it.”

Williams said new progressive groups have often sprouted up with massive war chests focused on specific areas of policy.

In contrast, ALEC has built a strong base of support from conservative and free-market lawmakers and consistent funders including businesses, nonprofits and trade associations.

“You just don’t see years and years of concentrated and growing support from a wide base of supporters,” he said of progressive groups. “Some of these groups come out of nowhere, it seems.”

California Democratic Assemblymember Sade Elhawary said state lawmakers increasingly recognize the power of working across state lines. Sometimes, that’s done through pushing similar pieces of legislation. But other times it means just showing support — such as January’s gathering of Democratic lawmakers from more than a dozen states in Minnesota following a large deployment of federal immigration officers there. 

“We are so much stronger together,” she said. “We shouldn’t be doing it on our own, because then we can get attacked on our own.”

Elhawary is among the 112 lawmakers from 35 states working on federal response issues with State Futures. She said the national Democratic Party is losing the messaging war as it struggles to mount an opposition to President Donald Trump. But she said state lawmakers have the ability to articulate a clearer vision for voters by working on  issues that most matter to their constituents.

“When we can organize beyond our state, I think we can organize folks on the ground,” she said. “This is not about just the legislators. This is about community.” 

Connecting state lawmakers

Liberal groups have sought to offset the growing influence of conservative movements for years.

A group with the acronym ALICE, the American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange, in 2012 aimed to counter ALEC’s national influence.

Liberal activists started the group in Wisconsin in direct response to the hotly debated policies of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a former ALEC member. In 2011, Walker signed highly publicized legislation eliminating collective bargaining rights for most public employees, a policy championed by ALEC. 

ALICE in 2014 merged with the Progressive States Network and the Center for State Innovation, creating what is now known as the State Innovation Exchange, or SiX. The group, which says it includes about 1,800 state lawmakers across 50 states, helps legislators to strategize on legislation that can reshape policy across state lines. 

While the group does work to counter the organized right, Executive Director EJ Juárez said it employs different tactics than conservative groups like ALEC. He said lawmakers work with their communities to craft legislation that is responsive to current needs — not just a wish list from outside interests.

“It’s not just, ‘Pass this bill because we wrote it and we think it’s good,’” he said.

ALEC maintains that its model legislation is crafted and debated by member lawmakers. 

Last month, SiX unveiled a national push for legislation to hold federal immigration officers accountable by allowing residents to sue agents for constitutional violations.

Democratic lawmakers in Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Utah and Washington said they would work to rewrite state laws to make it easier to sue federal agents. They cited recent laws passed by Connecticut, Maryland and Rhode Island in announcing their broader effort.

To date, the American Civil Liberties Union says no federal immigration agent has ever been convinced of criminal wrongdoing while on duty. 

“This is about using all the tools that are granted to the states to create the accountability and democracy that we deserve,” Juárez said. 

He said enthusiasm is rising among state Democrats looking to respond to Trump administration policies. But Juárez said the left still doesn’t have the sustained political infrastructure touted by the right at the state level.

“When you look at the organization of infrastructure on the left, it is completely different,” he said. “It is much more responsive, and it is much more reactive. And what that does is it robs many great efforts of the ability to scale to true nationwide-changing power.”

All eyes on elections

While national Democratic groups have spent months organizing in opposition to federal immigration policies, many are now turning their sights to November’s midterm elections. 

In July, Democratic lawmakers from 15 states met ahead of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ summit in Chicago to discuss not just politics, but how states should prepare for the potential of federal election interference.

Those lawmakers said they were more determined than ever to exert their inherent state authority as they look to oppose Trump. 

“None of us are in this alone,” said Pennsylvania Democratic state Rep. Leanne Krueger. “There are so many things coming at us that hearing best practices from other places is really helpful.”

That meeting was hosted by the States Project, which was founded in 2017 to elect Democrats and build power at the state level. Most state lawmakers are employed part-time, making it difficult to research policy matters and connect with lawmakers across the country, said Mandara Meyers, the executive director of the organization. 

But those needs have only accelerated during the second Trump term. 

“We’re just in an unprecedented moment, right?” she said. “I think states are dealing with a different kind of challenge and a different kind of federal interference than they ever have before.”

The States Project is one of the largest outside spenders on Democratic state legislative races. But that work is viewed as more crucial this cycle as Democrats have a path to flip several Republican-held legislative chambers and break GOP supermajorities in states across the country this November.

But Meyers acknowledged that groups on the left are still building out the organizations needed to win and sustain power in states. And despite a renewed appreciation for the power held by states, many still view state legislative races as the “kids’ table” of American politics. 

While Democrats are poised well in state races this fall, they still have a long way to go in building out the kind of institutional power the right has enjoyed in states, said Peverill Squire, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Missouri who has researched state legislatures for years. 

Even in this favorable midterm cycle, it’s unlikely that Democrats can capture the majority of legislative seats in states. GOP lawmakers currently hold nearly 55% of the nation’s 7,386 state legislative seats and Republicans have control of all chambers in 28 legislatures. 

With groups like ALEC, Squire said, Republicans and corporate interests have benefited from pushing a fairly straightforward agenda centered on deregulation and tax cuts. But he said the left has a wider range of policy interests that could make it difficult to push model legislation in states.

“My guess is that it would take considerable time and effort for them to coalesce on a common platform in the same way Republicans managed to do over the last two decades,” he said. 

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. 

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Tiffin police were called to a residence on Douglas Street shortly before 8 p.m. Saturday after the homeowner reported that a man he did not know had entered the house and fallen asleep inside, according to a police media summary.

The man had moved outside by the time officers responded. Police identified him as Andrew Lovas, 41, of Tiffin, and requested emergency medical personnel to evaluate him.

Officers recorded a preliminary breath-test reading of .230, according to the police log. Lovas was subsequently taken into custody and transported to the Seneca County Jail.

Seneca County jail records show Lovas was booked at 8:33 p.m. Saturday on a charge of disorderly conduct under Ohio Revised Code 2917.11(B)(1), which applies to certain disorderly behavior while voluntarily intoxicated.

The jail record describes the charge as disorderly conduct involving intoxication that causes annoyance or alarm. No bail amount was listed in the booking record.

The police media summary does not indicate that anyone was injured or that Lovas was accused of damaging or stealing property inside the residence.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

He has attacked affirmative action as institutional racism, spent years crusading against diversity, equity and inclusion programs and wrote a book subtitled Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.

But when Ramaswamy was a wealthy young hedge-fund investor preparing to attend Yale Law School, he accepted $50,000 from a fellowship for which his own identity was indispensable.

Ramaswamy was awarded a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011. The fellowship was created specifically for immigrants and children of immigrants. Ramaswamy, born in Cincinnati to parents from India, qualified because of his family’s immigrant background.

Without that background, his Harvard degree, academic record, professional accomplishments and Yale admission would not have been enough to make him eligible.

That makes Ramaswamy’s own history difficult to reconcile with the sweeping case he now makes against affirmative action, DEI and institutions taking identity into account when distributing opportunity.

The competition was merit-based. Eligibility was not identity-blind.

Ramaswamy has defended the fellowship by emphasizing that it was merit-based. That is true, but incomplete.

The Soros fellowship selected accomplished candidates competitively. But before merit could determine who won, immigrant background determined who was allowed to compete.

Michigan Technological University described the eligibility rules for the competition in September 2010, shortly before the application deadline that produced the 2011 class of fellows. Applicants had to be green-card holders, naturalized U.S. citizens or qualifying children of naturalized citizens. George Washington University likewise described “New American” status as an eligibility requirement and said applicants had to provide documentary evidence that they met it.

Ramaswamy met that requirement. His official fellowship biography identifies him as “the child of immigrants from India” and says the fellowship was awarded to him in 2011 to pursue his law degree at Yale.

The distinction matters. The program did not simply consider every graduate student in America and choose Ramaswamy because he had the strongest résumé. It first created an applicant pool based on immigrant-family status, then used merit to choose winners from within that pool.

A candidate identical to Ramaswamy in every relevant academic and professional respect, but born to two U.S.-born parents, could not have received the same consideration.

That is an identity-based preference. It was not race-based affirmative action, and the fellowship’s current rules explicitly state that race and ethnicity are not considered when choosing among eligible candidates. But in the broader sense of affirmative action — deliberately expanding opportunity for members of a defined group because of their background — the program did exactly what Ramaswamy now condemns institutions for doing: identity affected access to opportunity.

Ramaswamy was already making serious money

This was also not the story of a penniless student whose only realistic route to Yale depended on financial assistance.

After graduating from Harvard, Ramaswamy worked at QVT Financial, a hedge fund where he specialized in biotechnology investments. His income during that period became an issue during his 2024 presidential campaign after reporters examined tax returns he voluntarily released.

Fox News reported from those returns that Ramaswamy earned a combined $1,173,690 during the three years preceding 2011.

In 2011, the year the fellowship was awarded, Ramaswamy reported another $2,252,209 in total income.

TiffinOhio.net previously reported on those earnings and Ramaswamy’s public explanations for taking the money.

There is an important timing distinction. Ramaswamy has said a large hedge-fund bonus that contributed to his income was paid after he submitted his fellowship application, so it would be misleading to claim that he had already received his entire $2.25 million in 2011 income when he applied.

But his finances before the award were hardly modest. During a contentious 2023 interview with Mehdi Hasan, Hasan confronted Ramaswamy with tax-return figures showing roughly $650,000 in 2009 and roughly $450,000 the following year.

Ramaswamy did not ultimately claim he was broke. Defending his decision to accept $50,000, he acknowledged having “a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank” and argued that someone in that position would still take the money.

That defense is perfectly understandable as a statement of personal financial self-interest. Fifty thousand dollars is $50,000, and the fellowship did not require applicants to be poor.

But it leaves the political contradiction intact. Ramaswamy had substantial financial resources and nevertheless accepted a valuable educational benefit that was available to him specifically because he belonged to a favored category: a New American from an immigrant family.

Then came the crusade against affirmative action

Ramaswamy’s subsequent rhetoric has not been limited to opposing racial quotas or arguing over the mechanics of college admissions. He has presented himself as an opponent of a much broader system of identity-conscious decision-making.

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina in 2023, Ramaswamy called affirmative action “the single greatest form of institutional racism in America today” and promised that, as president, he would end it “in every sphere of American life.”

He went further, declaring that meritocracy and equity were “fundamentally incompatible” and calling for a restoration of “colorblind meritocracy.”

His 2022 book made the argument part of his personal brand. Its full title is Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.

The publisher’s biography on that same page contains a striking detail: it touts Ramaswamy’s Harvard education, hedge-fund career and Yale law degree, then notes that he attended Yale as a recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

In other words, a book marketed around the “death of merit” carries an author biography noting that Ramaswamy benefited from a graduate fellowship he could not have received without qualifying through his immigrant-family identity.

His rhetoric has continued as he moved into Ohio politics. In a lengthy 2025 interview on the Shawn Ryan Show, Ramaswamy described himself as having been a “crusader” against DEI before opposition to it became fashionable and celebrated what he called a “post-DEI” moment. He contrasted equal opportunity with what he derided as attempts to produce equal results.

That philosophy invites an obvious question when applied to Ramaswamy’s own biography: If institutions should distribute opportunity without regard to identity, why should the child of Indian immigrants have access to a graduate fellowship that the child of native-born Americans could not even apply for?

His immigrant background was not incidental

One possible response is that Ramaswamy earned the fellowship. There is every reason to believe he did.

The 2011 fellowship class was highly competitive. Contemporaneous reporting from Stanford said 30 fellows were chosen from more than 1,000 applicants and that the awards provided as much as $50,000 in grants plus $40,000 in tuition support over two years.

Nothing about acknowledging Ramaswamy’s accomplishments changes the eligibility structure.

This is the same distinction at the heart of affirmative-action debates generally. Beneficiaries do not have to be unqualified for a preference to exist. The relevant question is whether membership in a particular group changes someone’s access to an opportunity.

For Ramaswamy, it did.

His immigrant background was not a biographical footnote added after he won. It was the threshold fact that permitted his application to be considered.

If his parents had been born in Cincinnati instead of India, Ramaswamy could have possessed the same Harvard diploma, worked at the same hedge fund, earned the same hundreds of thousands of dollars and secured the same admission to Yale Law School. He still would not have qualified for the fellowship.

A politically inconvenient piece of his biography

The fellowship later became sensitive enough that Ramaswamy paid a Wikipedia editor who removed the reference from his biography shortly before he announced his 2024 presidential campaign.

TiffinOhio.net previously reported that the paid editor removed references to both the fellowship and Ramaswamy’s service on Ohio’s COVID-19 Response Team. His campaign acknowledged paying for edits but denied they were politically motivated, saying the changes were intended to correct factual distortions. The fellowship reference was later restored.

That episode is often reduced to the politically explosive Soros surname, but George Soros is largely beside the point here. The fellowship was established by his older brother, Paul Soros, and Paul’s wife, Daisy, both Hungarian immigrants. There is no basis for portraying Ramaswamy’s fellowship as a grant from George Soros or his political network.

The more consequential connection is the one in the program’s name: New Americans.

Ramaswamy received an educational opportunity because he belonged to a class of Americans the program was explicitly created to assist.

The standard Ramaswamy now sets for everyone else

Ramaswamy did nothing improper by applying for the fellowship. He satisfied its rules. The program was not need-based, so his substantial income did not make him ineligible. And a young professional accepting $50,000 that an institution willingly offers him is not, by itself, scandalous.

The issue is the standard Ramaswamy later chose to impose on everyone else.

He does not merely argue that poorly designed DEI programs should be reformed. He has turned “meritocracy” into a defining political principle and attacks affirmative action and identity-conscious institutions as fundamentally incompatible with it.

But one of the institutions that helped Ramaswamy along the way explicitly considered identity before merit ever entered the equation. It first asked whether he was an immigrant or the child of immigrants. Only after he passed that test did his accomplishments matter.

Ramaswamy benefited from that system while already earning sums that most Americans will never see in a year. When challenged years later, he defended taking the $50,000 because it was available to him.

There is nothing irrational about that decision.

What is difficult to square is Ramaswamy’s insistence that identity-based opportunity is corrosive when other people receive it, while treating the identity-based opportunity he received as simply a smart decision to take free money.

For Vivek Ramaswamy, the road to becoming one of America’s loudest opponents of affirmative action included an affirmative-action fellowship available to him because his parents came to America from India.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

It is far less specific about the private school where he spent all four years of high school.

Ramaswamy attended public schools in the Cincinnati area through eighth grade before leaving the public system for St. Xavier High School, the private, all-male Jesuit school where he spent grades nine through 12 and graduated as valedictorian in 2003.

His campaign biography tells the story differently.

The official Vivek for Ohio biography specifically credits a teacher at his “Greater Cincinnati public school” with challenging him to “aim higher and believe in what he could achieve.”

The very next sentence jumps to his graduation: “That spark stayed with him, graduating as valedictorian from his Cincinnati high school.”

“His Cincinnati high school” was St. Xavier.

The campaign labels the first school public. It strips the second school of its name and its private-school status.

It is a carefully packaged version of Ramaswamy’s education: the public school is part of the origin story; private St. Xavier is reduced to a generic “Cincinnati high school.”

He has used the same shortened story in public

The campaign biography is not an isolated example.

During a June 23 interview with Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel, Ramaswamy described the opportunities Ohio had given him and his family.

“I went to public schools through eighth grade,” Ramaswamy said during the interview.

He then moved into his parents’ story, his business career and his account of living the American Dream in Ohio. He never told listeners that after eighth grade he spent four years at St. Xavier.

Ramaswamy used the same formulation during a 2023 ABC News interview about affirmative action and educational opportunity.

“I went to public schools through eighth grade,” he said while discussing the students and racial diversity of the schools he attended.

Again, no St. Xavier.

The wording is technically accurate but incomplete in exactly the same place each time: Ramaswamy tells audiences when his public education began and ended, then leaves out where the remaining four years of his K-12 education took place.

The full version sounds very different

Ramaswamy has given the complete account when he chooses to include St. Xavier.

In a 2021 C-SPAN interview, he described the transition in one sentence: “I went to public school till 8th grade, went to a Catholic high school and graduated in 2003.”

During an April 2025 appearance on The State of Ohio, he was more specific.

“I’m a product of public education in Princeton schools through eighth grade,” Ramaswamy said. “I went to Saint X for high school.”

He also named St. Xavier while recounting his education during his 2026 Republican primary victory speech.

Those accounts require only a few extra words. They also make clear what disappears from the shortened version.

Ramaswamy did not simply attend a private school for a semester or briefly transfer out of public education. He left the public-school system after eighth grade and spent his entire high-school career at St. Xavier.

The private school he leaves unnamed can receive Ohio voucher money

The omission has added significance because Ramaswamy is campaigning on an aggressive expansion of private-school choice.

Ramaswamy has called for every Ohio family to qualify for a full school voucher, including families sending children to private schools. Ohio already offers EdChoice scholarships on a sliding scale, but Ramaswamy has proposed eliminating the income-based reduction and making the full benefit universal.

St. Xavier is one of the private schools that can receive those taxpayer-funded vouchers.

The school currently charges $19,500 in annual tuition. St. Xavier tells prospective families that eligible students can use Ohio EdChoice scholarships there, including high-school awards of up to $8,408.

That creates a sharp contrast in Ramaswamy’s campaign presentation.

He wants Ohio to send more public money to private education. The private school he attended can receive that money. Yet his official biography goes out of its way to identify the public school that shaped him while refusing even to name the private school where he spent the next four years.

Ramaswamy has compressed his origin story before

The selective treatment of St. Xavier also fits a broader pattern in how Ramaswamy has presented his upbringing politically.

During the first Republican presidential debate in 2023, Ramaswamy told a national television audience: “My parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago.”

Later in the debate, he said, “I did not grow up in money.”

But Ramaswamy’s own book, Nation of Victims, describes his childhood household differently.

“We were a comfortably middle-class family with two incomes,” he wrote of his family when he was in sixth grade.

His father worked for General Electric as an engineer and later a patent attorney. His mother was a physician who worked as a geriatric psychiatrist.

The Washington Post and Fox News both scrutinized Ramaswamy’s “no money” framing during his presidential campaign, contrasting the rhetoric with his own description of a comfortable two-income childhood and his private-school education.

The issue was not whether his immigrant parents arrived in America wealthy. It was the much broader impression created when their circumstances at immigration were used as shorthand for the household in which Ramaswamy himself grew up years later.

The public-school story follows a similar formula.

The underlying fact is real: Ramaswamy went to public school.

The political version stops before the fact that complicates the image: he left after eighth grade for four years at private St. Xavier.

A public-school credential, minus the private-school years

Ramaswamy has made his own education part of his case for overhauling Ohio’s schools. During a May interview with Cincinnati radio host Bill Cunningham, he cited his experience in public schools while discussing why their performance matters to him.

In that interview, he gave the entire history, naming Evendale Elementary, Robert E. Lucas Intermediate School and Princeton Junior High before acknowledging St. Xavier.

His gubernatorial campaign could have done the same thing in a single sentence.

Instead, its official biography preserves the politically valuable label — “public school” — and hides St. Xavier behind three deliberately vague words: “Cincinnati high school.”

For a candidate asking Ohio voters to trust him with the future of public education while promising to expand taxpayer support for private schools, the part of his own education that his campaign chooses not to identify is not a trivial detail.

Ramaswamy spent four years at private St. Xavier.

His campaign needed only three words to make that disappear.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trump signed the proclamation Wednesday, increasing the amount of imported lean beef trimmings eligible for the lower, in-quota tariff rate by 300,000 metric tons. The additional imports will be divided into three tranches of 100,000 metric tons, with the first opening Sept. 1, the second Oct. 1 and the final tranche Oct. 31. The expanded quota expires Nov. 30.

The policy applies specifically to lean beef trimmings, which are commonly blended with fattier U.S. beef to make ground beef. The White House did not identify particular countries that will supply the additional product, instead allocating the temporary increase to eligible nations classified in the tariff schedule as “other countries or areas.”

The move has drawn sharp opposition from cattle organizations, including the Ohio Cattlemen’s Association, which argues that increasing foreign competition now could weaken the market signals producers rely on when deciding whether to make the expensive, years-long commitment to expand their herds.

Ohio cattle producers push back

Ohio Cattlemen’s Association President Lindsey Hall said cattle producers are already contending with historically high costs for feed, land, equipment and labor.

“Artificially interfering with the cattle market through increased imports is not the answer to higher grocery prices,” Hall said after Trump first announced the plan Aug. 21.

Hall said stronger cattle markets have given producers an opportunity to begin rebuilding their herds after years of contraction, while policies that weaken those market signals could discourage producers from retaining animals and making the investments necessary to increase domestic cattle numbers.

The issue reaches directly into Ohio. USDA data show Ohio had about 1.23 million cattle and calves as of Jan. 1, including approximately 275,000 beef cows. The state had about 1.24 million cattle and calves a year earlier.

Northwest Ohio has thousands of cattle of its own. USDA’s latest county estimates counted approximately 5,500 cattle and calves in Seneca County and 4,500 in Sandusky County.

The beef dispute also comes as Ohio farmers navigate broader disruptions tied to Trump’s trade policies. TiffinOhio.net reported in December that Ohio agricultural sales to China had fallen sharply amid renewed tariff and trade disputes.

Earlier this week, TiffinOhio.net reported that Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy backed Trump’s reciprocal-tariff approach as Ohio manufacturers and farmers absorbed mounting costs and export losses.

Farm groups warn of pressure on American cattle prices

The American Farm Bureau Federation has urged Trump to reconsider the import expansion. The organization calculated that an additional 300,000 metric tons would translate to nearly a 60% increase in beef imports during the 90-day period compared with current levels and warned that the added foreign supply could put further downward pressure on prices paid to American producers.

Farm Bureau said U.S. beef imports are already at record levels while ranchers are attempting to rebuild herds reduced by years of drought. The organization has argued that weakening cattle prices now could discourage producers from retaining breeding animals, slowing a recovery that already takes years because cattle inventories cannot be rapidly expanded.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association also criticized Trump’s announcement, saying increased imports would undermine efforts by domestic producers to rebuild the U.S. herd.

“U.S. farmers and ranchers need stability,” the group said, arguing that cattle-production decisions are made years in advance.

Financial markets reacted immediately when Trump first announced the plan. Cattle futures fell to eight-month lows on Aug. 21 following the announcement, Reuters reported. Economists and traders interviewed by Reuters also questioned whether the import increase was large enough to produce a noticeable change in retail beef prices.

The order does not guarantee lower grocery-store prices

The White House has presented the import expansion as an attempt to address high beef prices, but the proclamation does not guarantee that shoppers will see a particular reduction in the retail price of ground beef.

Under Trump’s order, the Department of Agriculture and U.S. trade officials must monitor whether lean beef trimmings entering under the expanded quota are being sold at prices 25% below the market price for those trimmings. If they are not, the administration must notify Trump, who could eliminate the remaining expanded quota.

That 25% provision applies to the imported beef trimmings themselves. It does not mandate a 25% reduction — or any specific reduction — in the price consumers ultimately pay for ground beef at a supermarket.

The administration argues that additional imports are necessary because domestic cattle supplies remain constrained by drought, wildfires and restrictions on live cattle imports from Mexico stemming from concerns over New World screwworm. The White House also says USDA expects U.S. beef production to decline about 4% this year compared with 2025.

Federal cattle data confirm that the domestic breeding herd remains tight. USDA reported 27.6 million beef cows as of Jan. 1, down 1% from the previous year. By July, USDA counted 28.5 million beef cows, also 1% below the previous July, although the midyear report showed the overall cattle and calf inventory edging higher.

Trump’s latest action is also not the administration’s first expansion of foreign beef access this year. The Aug. 26 proclamation specifically leaves intact a separate increase Trump authorized in February for 80,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings from Argentina.

Trump shifts attention to meat processors amid backlash

As criticism from cattle producers continued, Trump on Friday turned his attention toward the highly concentrated meat-processing industry. He said his administration was preparing legal measures aimed at giving farmers and ranchers more ability to process and sell their own meat, according to Reuters.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said additional announcements involving beef processing are expected beginning Monday. She said the administration is considering expanding opportunities for ranchers to sell across state lines, increasing support for smaller processors and rescinding existing federal guidance.

Four companies — Cargill, Tyson Foods, JBS USA and National Beef Packing Co. — control about 85% of U.S. meat processing, Reuters reported. Farm and cattle organizations have long raised concerns about consolidation and the limited number of buyers available to producers, though the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association warned Friday that any regulatory changes should preserve federal meat-inspection standards.

For Ohio cattle producers, the more immediate change arrives Monday. Beginning Sept. 1, the first 100,000-metric-ton tranche of Trump’s expanded foreign beef quota will open, followed by another 200,000 metric tons scheduled to become available before the end of November.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The crash occurred around 2:50 p.m. Aug. 28 at the intersection of state Route 18 and County Road 26 in Hopewell Township, Seneca County.

According to a preliminary investigation by the patrol’s Norwalk Post, a 2015 Ford Taurus driven by Hadiya Batts, 29, of Tiffin, was traveling west on County Road 26 when Batts failed to yield at a posted stop sign at state Route 18.

The Taurus was then struck by a northwestbound 2015 Harley-Davidson Freewheeler operated by Ronald Kuyken, 74, of Fremont, investigators said.

Kuyken suffered fatal injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene. His passenger, Susan Kuyken, 65, also of Fremont, was taken by ambulance to Mercy Health — Tiffin Hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.

Batts suffered minor injuries and declined treatment at the scene, according to the patrol.

Investigators said Ronald and Susan Kuyken were not wearing helmets. Batts was wearing a seat belt.

The intersection and surrounding roadways were closed for approximately two hours while investigators and emergency crews worked at the scene.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol was assisted by the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office, Bascom Fire Department, Tiffin EMS, Mercy Health Life Flight, John’s Towing, the Seneca County Coroner, Seneca County Department of Transportation and the Ohio Department of Transportation.

The crash remains under investigation.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But the words Acton actually used at a Tuesday press conference were considerably broader. Although reporters were asking her about ICE and federal immigration enforcement, Acton never said “ICE,” never used the word “immigration” and did not announce a new immigration enforcement policy. Instead, she said Ohio should continue working with federal law enforcement while holding officers operating in the state to professional standards.

The distinction has been blurred in subsequent coverage. National Review published a headline declaring that Acton “Vows to Cooperate with ICE” and characterized her remarks as a promise to cooperate with the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. News 5 Cleveland went with “Party flip? Democrat Acton supports ICE collaboration,” describing her as “breaking from her party.” The story was subsequently republished Friday by the Ohio Capital Journal under the headline “Democrat Acton supports ICE collaboration.”

What Acton actually said

Video of the press conference shows Acton discussing expectations for law enforcement officers who operate in Ohio and the state’s relationship with federal law enforcement.

“We need to hold anyone who comes to our state to the same standards of professionalism that we expect of our public safety officers, and I will always fight for that,” Acton said.

Addressing previous remarks she had made about federal enforcement operations in Minnesota, Acton continued:

“I was talking about Minneapolis in a moment where, you know, I was saying that we need to hold anyone who comes to our state to the same standards of professionalism that we expect of our public safety officers, and I will always fight for that. People of Ohio deserve to feel safe, and they deserve the professionalism and the training.”

When the questioning turned to cooperation with federal authorities, Acton said:

“We always work with the federal law enforcement, and we will do so — whatever it takes to keep Ohioans safe.”

That sentence became the basis for headlines saying Acton had pledged cooperation with ICE. National Review went further, reporting that she “said she would cooperate with the Trump administration’s deportation efforts.” News 5 reported that Acton would not prevent local law enforcement from assisting immigration raids.

Acton’s quoted answer itself, however, did not say any of that explicitly. She said Ohio would continue working with “federal law enforcement.” She did not specifically endorse ICE raids, discuss ICE detainers, promise state resources for deportation operations or describe what particular forms of cooperation between Ohio agencies and ICE she would support as governor.

There is an important qualification: Acton made those remarks while responding to questions about ICE, so it would be unreasonable to pretend immigration enforcement had nothing to do with the exchange. Her reference to federal law enforcement can reasonably be understood to include ICE in that context. But saying that is different from reporting that Acton announced support for ICE operations generally or pledged to assist the Trump administration’s deportation program.

Acton had already said immigration laws should be enforced

The characterization of Tuesday’s remarks as a new “party flip” also conflicts with Acton’s previous public statements.

More than seven months ago, Ideastream Public Media directly asked Acton what role state and local agencies should play in immigration enforcement.

Unlike Tuesday’s answer, Acton’s response in that January interview explicitly addressed immigration law.

“If people are here as criminals, if people are here illegally, we need to enforce the laws of this country and the laws of the state of Ohio. But we need to do that lawfully.

“Ohioans everywhere I’m going, regardless of party, are heartbroken, they’re afraid, they are horrified [by the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis]. They want to see public safety. But they want our communities, our frontline responders, to be well-trained and be good at what they do.

“Quite frankly, the Statehouse is not fully funding the local funds [for law enforcement training]. As governor, I’m going to be investing in that. But we need [ICE activity] to be lawful and we need a full and transparent investigation [of Good’s death].”

Acton’s position in January therefore already combined two ideas: that immigration laws should be enforced and that the government must carry out that enforcement lawfully.

That makes it difficult to characterize her comments this week as a sudden reversal. Months before the August press conference, Acton had already publicly said that people who are in the country illegally are subject to federal and state laws and that those laws should be enforced.

She has also criticized how ICE has operated

Acton has simultaneously been critical of federal immigration enforcement tactics under the Trump administration.

On Jan. 24, following federal enforcement operations and deadly shootings in Minnesota, Acton posted on X:

“What we are witnessing in Minnesota is not normal or okay.

“Law enforcement should be keeping people safe by going after dangerous criminals, not by terrorizing communities.

“The people of Minnesota deserve a full and transparent investigation, safe streets, and basic human dignity.”

Those comments are consistent with what Acton said in her January Ideastream interview and with her remarks Tuesday: enforce the law, pursue dangerous criminals, cooperate with law enforcement agencies and demand lawful and professional conduct from officers.

None of that establishes that Acton opposes all cooperation with ICE. She has not said that. But it also does not support portraying Tuesday’s comments as a newly announced endorsement of ICE’s broader enforcement tactics or Trump’s deportation agenda.

What changed was the headline

The Statehouse News Bureau used more restrained language in its coverage, reporting that Acton “would not direct local police to refrain from assisting federal immigration agents.” Its evidence was the same statement: “We always work with the federal law enforcement, and we will do so, whatever it takes to keep Ohioans safe.”

News 5 and National Review pushed the interpretation further, converting that general statement into headlines about “ICE collaboration” and a vow to “cooperate with ICE.” National Review went further still by characterizing Acton as agreeing to cooperate with the Trump administration’s deportation efforts.

What Acton actually committed to Tuesday was continued cooperation with federal law enforcement to protect public safety. She also demanded that people operating in Ohio meet the same standards of professionalism expected of Ohio law enforcement officers.

And contrary to the suggestion that Acton abruptly changed positions, her public record shows she was saying substantially the same thing in January: immigration laws should be enforced, dangerous criminals should be targeted, enforcement should be lawful and law enforcement officers should be properly trained and professional.

What changed this week was not Acton’s stated position. It was the headline.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

According to a report released on Aug. 24 by the minority staff at Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, Americans have spent about $71.5 billion more on gasoline since the start of the Iran war. The average family paid an additional $604 for fuel over that time.

Much of that money has gone to higher profits for Big Oil companies, according to the report; since the start of 2026, they have reported profits of more than $125 billion.

As a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, Trump told voters: “Please remember this: I will never put personal profit before national security. Nobody should. … I will never, ever put the special interests before the national interests.”

While other presidents have traditionally avoided trading stocks, Trump has continued to buy and sell them as president. Richard Painter, who served as ethics adviser to the George W. Bush White House, told the Associated Press in May, “Technically he can do this, but it is a fundamental breach of trust.”

A White House spokesperson said in a statement sent to the AP, “Neither President Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.” 

According to the Joint Economic Committee minority staff report, Trump owned somewhere between $12.5 million and $45.6 million in oil and gas company stocks in 2025. Because those stocks have gained about 39% in value in 2026, those holdings would now be worth between $17.2 million and $61.1 million, giving the president a windfall of somewhere between $4.6 million and $15.5 million.

“President Trump continues to get richer from an illegal war that he started and refuses to resolve, while Americans pay the price for his actions,” said New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, in a statement.  “On the campaign trail, Trump promised giveaways for Big Oil and relief for working families, but he can’t deliver both. Since launching his war with Iran, Trump has made clear that he puts his own financial interests – and those of his biggest bankrollers – ahead of Americans who are burdened with higher costs for gas and everyday essentials under this administration.”

Trump is required to publicly disclose his personal financial holdings annually, though the forms only require officials to list the names of stocks and provide a range of values for each rather than an exact dollar amount. 

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

At least since Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Husted to the Senate at the beginning of 2025, Husted has had communications with Intel about potential deals with other businesses to revive the project.

Husted, a Republican, also said he pushed the Trump administration to make its controversial $9 billion taxpayer investment in the beleaguered chipmaker last year.

News of the investment and the potential deals substantially increased the value of Intel stock when it became public. 

Husted has also received thousands in campaign contributions from Intel lobbyist Josh Rubin, whom DeWine appointed to be chairman of the JobsOhio board in September 2023. Husted was DeWine’s lieutenant governor at the time. 

A quasi-governmental entity that has spent billions in what at least used to be public dollars, JobsOhio has given Intel more than $27 million for the Ohio project. The state, of which Husted was the second-ranking executive at the time, gave Intel more than $600 million. 

Husted’s communications team didn’t respond to questions for this story — including whether he thought trading of individual stocks by members of Congress should be banned.

Catherine Turcer, executive director of the good government group Common Cause Ohio, said Husted’s relationships with Intel and Rubin raise questions about whom Husted is serving.

“The problem has to do with how very cozy everything is,” she said. “It would be so very easy to make decisions based on what benefits your boss, what benefits yourself, and not what benefits Ohioans. And that’s where the challenge is. Whenever you have stock, an investment in a company, it’s very hard to look just at economic policy.” 

Blockbuster project

To great fanfare, the DeWine-Husted administration in 2022 announced the massive Intel project about 20 miles northeast of Columbus. 

It promised to be at least a $20 billion investment — and it promised to serve the strategic goal of bringing microchip production back to the United States.

It came with a price. The DeWine-Husted administration said it would put up $2 billion in state incentives and JobsOhio pledged another $150 million.

The project began to hit snags. At the start of 2024, Intel announced that it was delaying its construction timeline, citing sluggish chip sales. 

Hemorrhaging money in July 2025, the company announced that it was laying off 24,000 people worldwide, abandoning two construction projects in Europe and further delaying the Ohio project. Originally slated to begin production by the start of this year, the facility now won’t start making chips until 2030 at the earliest.

As the problems grew, so did the DeWine-Husted administration’s entanglements with the chipmaker.

Rubin, a former campaign manager and longtime advisor to DeWine, signed on as a lobbyist for Intel in 2022, the year the Ohio project was announced. 

The same year, he and his wife made nearly $15,000 in contributions to Husted’s political committee, Jon Husted for Ohio, records at the Ohio Secretary of State’s office show. A year earlier, they made at least $20,000 in such contributions.

Rubin also contributed generously to DeWine’s committee. Campaign-finance watchdog Transparency USA reports that Rubin has given $60,000 to Mike DeWine for Ohio over the years.

In September 2023, DeWine appointed Rubin, a lobbyist with dozens of clients, as chairman of JobsOhio, an entity that has passed out more than $2 billion to businesses in the form of incentives. JobsOhio gets its money from the state liquor franchise, which the state allows it to lease for far less than it’s worth.

Lobbying disclosures show that Rubin continued to actively lobby DeWine and Husted on behalf of Intel at least until earlier this year. 

They also show that Rubin was registered to lobby JobsOhio — whose board he headed — for Intel until the end of last year. Despite his and his partners’ registrations, they didn’t file any reports showing that they actively lobbied the agency after Rubin joined its board.

Intel was asked how much it had paid Rubin and his firm, how much it paid after Rubin joined the JobsOhio board, and whether any of that money was specifically to lobby JobsOhio after Rubin was part of the organization. The company declined to comment.

Rubin didn’t respond to calls and emails about these matters. DeWine’s press secretary insisted that Rubin didn’t have a conflict of interest.

JobsOhio is exempt from most state ethics and transparency laws. 

A spokesman for the agency said it has its own strong anti-conflict rules. He didn’t respond to repeated questions asking whether Rubin had ever declared a conflict or recused himself from funding decisions, even though he and his partners had been registered to lobby DeWine, Husted, and JobsOhio on behalf of Intel and multiple other clients. 

Inside track, personal investment

Lobbying disclosures also show that Rubin actively lobbied Husted for Intel from 2022 until DeWine appointed his lieutenant governor to fill the Senate seat vacated by JD Vance when he became vice president in January 2025. 

Husted’s office didn’t respond when asked what was discussed regarding the Intel project when he talked with Rubin, or whether Rubin had a conflict in his dual roles as Intel lobbyist and head of a quasi-public entity that had given Intel millions.

It also didn’t respond when asked whether Husted himself had a conflict stemming from a family investment in a company to which his administration had given $600 million in the form of a “reshoring” grant.

Husted’s Senate lobbying disclosures show that as of Jan. 21, 2025, his wife owned as much as $15,000 worth of common stock in Intel. His most recent financial disclosure — for calendar year 2025 — shows that investment as well.

State lobbying disclosures require different information than those at the federal level. DeWine’s disclosures show he had big enough investments in Intel to generate $14,000 in dividends from 2021 through 2023.

Since Husted disclosed his wife’s Intel investment, multiple news reports indicate that Husted was privy to developments that resulted in rises in the value of Intel stock:

• Last August, the Trump administration announced that it would take a 10% stake in Intel. Critics said the government was picking winners and losers, but Intel’s stock surged 6% on the news. Husted told The Columbus Dispatch, “It’s foundational. It’s a big deal. It’s the perfect relationship. And they had no relationship before. It’s something I’ve been working on and hoping for for some time.”

• In May, Husted told The Dispatch that he had discussed with Intel a preliminary chipmaking deal with Apple. Intel declined to confirm it to the newspaper. After Trump later wrote about the deal in a social media post, Intel stock rose 10%, CNBC reported.

• In July, Husted told The Columbus Dispatch that Intel informed him of a potential partnership with a South Korean Firm, SK Hynix. The Street reported that Intel shares jumped nearly 9% when the news broke — even though SK Hynix denied the deal.

Reform efforts

There have been efforts to stop the perception that members of Congress might be profiting from information to which they have special access.

Last year, separate, bipartisan bills were filed in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House that would ban members of Congress and their families from trading individual stocks because they might be privy to such insider information.

One measure passed the House last month, but Democrats opposed it after Republicans inserted an unrelated voter ID measure.

Channel 4 WCMH in February reported that Husted didn’t take a position on a trading ban. Ohio Democratic U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty opposed it, saying it would allow the “government to control my personal financial decisions.”

Meanwhile, Husted’s Democratic opponent in the February midterms, former Ohio Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, supports a ban on congressional ownership of individual stocks — and on lawmakers becoming lobbyists after they leave office.

A review of Brown’s federal financial disclosures since 2012 didn’t appear to show he had any such investments. In an email, Brown slammed his opponent for what he called Husted’s “corruption.”

“Jon Husted has spent his entire career helping corporations and billionaires at the expense of Ohioans,” Brown said. “While Husted is busy lining his own pockets and rigging the system even further for hardworking families, Ohioans are being crushed by record high prices on their groceries, gas, health care, and utilities. Ohio doesn’t have to continue accepting Husted’s corruption. It’s why we are going to hold him accountable this November.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Lynnea Soposki, Luke Soposki, and their one-year-old son Logan Soposki died in a multi-vehicle crash on Interstate 71 in Delaware County in April. Modou Ngom, an immigrant who came to the United States in the 1990s, was the driver that caused the crash. 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee started airing an ad earlier this month showing footage of the crash that killed the Soposkis while claiming former Democratic Ohio U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s votes on immigration caused Ngom to enter the country. 

“Sherrod Brown opened our borders to dangerous illegals. The consequences were deadly. … Because of him, Ohioans paid the price,” the 30-second NRSC ad claims.   

Brown is challenging Husted in the November election. 

“Lynnea and Luke were not political symbols. Lynnea was a beloved veterinarian. Luke loved to brew beer. … They loved each other and their son,” according to a statement from the family of Lynnea, Luke, and Logan Soposki. 

“Our grief is not raw material for a campaign, and their images are not public property to repurpose for anyone’s advantage.” 

The family said they were not asked, nor would they have consented, to the Soposkis being in the ad. The statement said the photograph was taken by Anton Marandi, who has the copyright of the photo, and did not give his permission. 

“We are asking that the advertisement be taken down, and that our family’s images and this tragedy not be used in political messaging by any campaign, going forward. We would ask the same of any candidate, of any party, who did this.”

The ad featuring the Soposki family has run its full cycle, according to a source familiar with the ad traffic, but the ad still remains on the NRSC’s YouTube page. 

“For 32 years, radical leftist Sherrod Brown backed open border policies that cost Ohioans their lives, without ever apologizing,” NRSC Regional Press Secretary Nick Puglia said in an email. “Our ad campaigns will continue to hold Sherrod Brown accountable.”

The Soposki family said they sent both an email and certified mail to Husted’s campaign asking for the ad to be taken down, but never received a reply.  

The Husted campaign did not respond to questions sent by the Ohio Capital Journal. 

Brown served in the U.S. House from 1993-2007, and then was in the U.S. Senate from 2007-2025, before losing to Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno in the 2024 Election.

FactCheck.org said the ad has “weak ties” between Brown and the car crash that killed the Soposkis. 

Brown voted against a 1996 immigration bill that would have increased the number of Board Patrol agents, constructed border fencing and fast-tracked deportations. The bill was then rolled into an omnibus appropriations bill that Brown voted for and then President Bill Clinton signed it into law. 

“Brown’s initial vote against the immigration bill made no difference in terms of what became law,” according to FactCheck.org. 

“It’s also difficult to say how passing or not passing the legislation would’ve had an impact on Ngom, given we have scant details about him and his immigration to the U.S.”

The Cook Political Report rates Ohio’s U.S. Senate race as a “Toss Up.” 

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Everybody across all lines seems to not really want these things in their local community.

– Sandusky native Holly Wenzinger, on rapidly expanding megawatt and gigawatt-scale data centers in Ohio

Along a stretch of road in a rural, northeast Ohio township just southwest of Sandusky, multiple yard signs appeared unexpectedly. One after the other.

At first, I thought they were premature campaign signs planted in early August. But every successive lawn display in screamed the same message: “Protect our community: No data center.”

What I had stumbled on in Erie County’s Oxford Township, population 1,185, was a microcosm of the ballooning revolt spreading across the state against the race to build more sprawling data centers in Ohio than anywhere else.

It took a beat for Ohioans to get wise to the financial and environmental burden of these massive facilities sold as an economic boon. Pure AI snake oil. Google the AI bubble.

Risky AI infrastructure buildout, (that relies on massive debt and unproven future revenues) also faces severe physical bottlenecks with power and water shortages — and now angry communities are blocking new data center construction. 

Tech companies thought they could get away with ignoring the silent stakeholders in the data center boom — citizens who live and work where AI factories locate.

They are the ones who bear the direct consequences of these resource-depleting data centers. They cover the costs to bring data centers online but often have no say—or even prior knowledge — about giant AI warehouses breaking ground in their neighborhoods.

Folks in Oxford Township saw what happened in nearby Perkins Township where residents were left in the dark about a massive hyperscale data center campus. It’s being constructed on an old manufacturing site a stone’s throw from Sandusky High School.

The first building alone, (about the size of three football fields) will use up to 96 megawatts (MW) of electricity — enough to power 75,000-100,000 homes or more than the entire city of Sandusky. 

When word trickled out about another hyperscale, 250-megawatt data center proposed in Oxford Township on a 146-acre campus near the EHOVE Career Center, residents were ready.

Hundreds attended a meeting hosted by data center developers that quickly became heated as many in the audience shouted objections and heckled the tech company presenters.

People were not in the mood for slick sales talk. They came prepared with questions about surging electricity bills, power grid stress, water usage, constant noise, and air pollution.

Wenzinger, a Bowling Green State University graduate with a degree in environmental policy and analysis, has seen emotions run high as communities come together “at this scale” with deep foreboding about data center development with no rules or public safeguards.

The response to this common, remarkably unifying issue has evolved into something “existential” that is “bigger than all of us and is really immediate and present,” she said.

The 27-year-old was herself drawn to the untold story of AI digital infrastructure when the Perkins Township data center moved, without notice, into her hometown.

She became a volunteer petitioner with Conserve Ohio, a grassroots organization gathering signatures for a constitutional amendment that would ban all large-scale data centers in Ohio.

Wenzinger has also been meeting with Ohioans around the state to raise awareness about the short-and long-term impacts of hyperscale data centers and how communities can protect their interests apart from corporate ones.

She is regularly astounded by how many people show up to learn what Big Tech doesn’t tell them about the 200-plus data centers in Ohio.

Wenzinger flipped through slides of her presentation in a packed local church in Oxford Township.

She told the standing-room-only crowd how new generation data centers consume huge amounts of local electricity and water, how they drive up utility bills for residents, how they create loud, non-stop noise and air emissions from backup diesel generators, how they offer very few permanent jobs after construction, and how they still get enormous public hand-outs at an enormous loss to state revenue.

Under former Republican Gov. John Kasich, Ohio committed at least $2.3 billion in sales tax exemptions to tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Google.

The quiet deals promised 100% sales tax breaks for up to 40 years if companies met certain goals.

That blank check to Big Tech cost Ohio more than $1.5 billion in 2025, almost 12 times the state’s $136 million forecast.

After losing that much revenue in data center subsidies, Gov. Mike DeWine — who supported the costly giveaways for some of the richest corporations in the world —  paused consideration of new data center tax breaks in May to figure out what went so wrong.

What went wrong with Ohio’s build-now-ask-questions-later data center boom?

Ask the farmer and the family and the retired couple and young people whose quality of life is in jeopardy today because the state’s Republican leadership gave short shrift to how communities would fare while greasing the wheels for Silicon Valley.

Politicians welcomed unregulated, massive computing facilities that run 24 hours a day and deplete energy equivalent to that of a whole city to power servers and cooling systems.

They kept the highly speculative transactions with Big Tech secret, without public input or rigorous debate, because they didn’t want people to know. 

But Ohioans know now and are fighting back. The proposed data center in Oxford Township has been tabled.

“We have carefully considered the concerns expressed by residents,” said a statement from township trustees, and determined “it is not in the best interest” of our community. The data center developer plans to revisit after the midterms. 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The move comes after the Trump administration imposed a new round of 50% tariffs on a wide array of Canadian-made goods. The administration justified its action by insisting Canada was discriminating against American-made cars, dairy, and alcohol.

While the complaints are narrow and specific, the scope of Trump’s new tariffs is anything but. The motley assortment of goods includes plywood products, textiles, cosmetics, seeds, tools, machinery, electronics, furniture, and sporting goods.

All told, the Trump administration’s list touches about $20 billion in imports.

“For each product,” Champagne promised, “our tariff would match the American tariff on the same type of Canadian good.”

The Canadian list includes many similar product categories and accounts for a comparable dollar amount of imports from the U.S.

And Canadian officials are taking longer term steps to bolster their economy for the coming trade war. The government is planning a $7.5 billion package to prop up Canadian businesses and help support workers who lose their jobs.

President Trump warned on social media that he’s “giving serious consideration” to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.

Paying coming and going

Canada is Ohio’s biggest export market. In 2025, Ohio sent $17.5 billion in goods across the border — roughly a third of the state’s total exports.

“And that’s more than the next four highest trading partners combined,” Scioto Analysis Principal Rob Moore said. “Mexico, China, France, and the United Kingdom don’t even add up to that.”

More than half of Ohio’s total exports to Canada come from the equipment and machinery or transportation industries.

Meanwhile, Ohio imported about $16 billion in goods from Canada last year. Crude oil accounted for the biggest share at $3.2 billion. But Ohio brought in at least half a billion dollars’ worth of car parts, plastics, aluminum, and iron and steel alloy products.

“I mean you’re seeing what this is,” Moore said, “It’s the automobile industry. This decision is going to make it very difficult for folks in the automobile supply chain to be able to succeed in Ohio.”

And because goods will soon face tariffs whether traveling north or south of the U.S.-Canada border, Ohio companies could feel the pinch twice.

Ian Sheldon, an Ohio State University economist focusing on agriculture and international trade, points to the automotive industry.

Since the early 1990s, the industry has become deeply integrated across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, spurred on by the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Now, raw materials and components often cross North American borders several times as a vehicle is assembled.

“There is a potential for the automobile parts sector in Ohio, which is part of this highly integrated value chain, to be hurt by U.S. tariffs on what comes from Canada, and these retaliatory tariffs that Canada’s putting place against the United States,” Sheldon said.

GM and Stellantis both have a presence in Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s Toledo-area district.

In a statement she said, “We should be working to open and expand new export markets for Ohio farmers and ranchers, and our domestic companies headquartered in Northwest Ohio, not cutting off existing markets.”

“It is my hope that this Administration comes to its senses and pursues common-sense trade policies that benefit Ohioans,” Kaptur continued, “and not waste time with petty beefs and self-defeating squabbles.”

What’s next

Sheldon thinks the Trump administration may have launched this trade war to gain leverage in talks to renew the USMCA trade agreement.

This year, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada had an opportunity to extend the deal for another 16 years, but negotiations broke down after the U.S. refused to sign on.

Trump himself insisted on the negotiating the USMCA during his first administration. Less than a month before winning the 2024 election, he was insisting the deal’s predecessor, NAFTA, was “the worst trade deal ever made” while the USMCA was the best.

The USMCA remains in effect for now, and the countries will review it annually, but Sheldon sees a “huge risk” to the agreement going forward.

The U.S. undermined the agreement, he said, by sidestepping existing dispute resolution systems to launch a trade war instead. And Sheldon explained there’s additional weapons available if the countries want to continue their tit-for-tat escalation.

“I think there’s quite a lot of pressure being put on the Canadian government to impose export taxes on those important inputs like oil, gas, electricity and possibly fertilizers,” he said.

“I think if that were to happen, that would cause a considerable amount of damage not just to Ohio but to states that trade extensively with Canada.”

Moore offered a similarly gloomy outlook. If the trade war drags on, higher production costs in the immediate term and uncertainty in the long term will start affecting people’s jobs.

“Trade wars are destructive,” Moore said. “They’re going to make goods more expensive, which is going to make people in Ohio, especially low-income people in Ohio, poorer. They’re going to cost jobs, which is going to end up impacting families today, and also the children in those families and their future prospects.”

“We’re going to feel this now,” he added, “and we’re going to feel it for decades into the future.”

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This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.