“I have not endorsed Representative Gary Click, and I never will,” Watson wrote in a statement emailed to the newsroom Thursday.

The declaration hardens a position Watson first took on primary night, when he conceded the race, said he had called Click to congratulate him, and told supporters only that “the topic of endorsements will not be discussed at this time.” Thursday’s statement removes the qualifier.

In the same statement, Watson said he and his wife are relocating to Wayne County, roughly 90 miles southeast of Tiffin and well outside the district he spent the first half of the year campaigning to represent.

“After much prayer and many conversations with my family, my wife and I have made the decision to move to Wayne County,” he wrote. “We recently found a beautiful property outside House District 88 that we simply could not pass up, and we are excited to begin this next chapter of our lives together.”

Click’s campaign could not be reached for comment.

A private meeting, and what Watson says came of it

The sharpest passage in Watson’s statement concerns a conversation he says he had with Click after the May 5 primary.

“Following the primary, Gary and I had a long conversation. It was respectful and positive, and I appreciated the opportunity to speak candidly with him,” Watson wrote. “During that conversation, I expressed my concerns over many of the bills and issues he has supported and co-sponsored—particularly those involving government overreach, digital identification, and policies that I believe fail to adequately protect the interests of the people we sought to represent.”

He said the meeting did not change his assessment.

“Unfortunately, I walked away believing that while Gary was polite and told me many of the things I wanted to hear, we ultimately came to no real understanding,” Watson wrote. “I did not see the willingness to reconsider the positions that concerned me most.”

Watson said he was not disputing the outcome of the race. “As I said immediately following the election, I congratulated Representative Gary Click on his narrow victory,” he wrote. “He won the election, and I have never attempted to take that away from him.”

He framed the refusal as a matter of what the campaign had been for: “I did not spend months challenging a three-term incumbent, endure constant attacks and false accusations, face a campaign that outspent us nearly four to one, and fight for the principles we believed in simply to endorse the very establishment we were working to change.”

Watson did not provide figures to support the four-to-one spending characterization, and TiffinOhio.net has not independently confirmed it against campaign finance filings. He also said the Ohio Republican Party “poured significant resources into defending the incumbent” in the closing days of the race, a claim this outlet has likewise not independently verified.

“Representative Click has not earned my support, and he will have to earn back the trust of the thousands of voters who stood with our campaign,” Watson wrote. “Those 6,260 votes were never mine to give away. They belong to the people who cast them.”

Data centers, and the bill Click owns

Watson built much of his campaign around opposition to large-scale artificial intelligence data centers in rural Ohio, and he returned to it Thursday.

“One of the defining issues of our campaign was our fight against the unchecked expansion of massive AI data centers across rural Ohio,” he wrote. “I firmly believe that local communities—not powerful corporations or distant decision-makers—should determine the future of their own communities.”

Watson did not name a specific bill. Click is the joint primary sponsor, with Rep. Kellie Deeter of Norwalk, of House Bill 646, which would create a state Data Center Study Commission. The Ohio House passed it unanimously on March 18. It has since been introduced in the Senate and referred to the Financial Institutions, Insurance and Technology Committee, where it remains.

The bill directs the proposed 13-member commission to study environmental impacts, effects on the electrical grid and consumer utility rates, water usage, noise and light pollution, farmland, and the local economy. As TiffinOhio.net reported in February, the legislation also directs the commission to examine reports of foreign propaganda intended to generate opposition to data centers.

In a statement issued when the House passed the bill, Click said the legislation came out of his district. “This legislation originated in the heart of the 88th district, in response to my constituents. They have questions that deserve answers. They are not alone,” he said.

A residency fight, reversed

Watson’s move ends a residency argument that ran through the entire primary — from the other direction.

Click spent the closing weeks of the race branding Watson “the Arizona Kid,” a reference to the roughly four years Watson spent in Arizona before returning to Seneca County in 2022. Watson’s supporters answered by pointing to his family’s generations in the county; TiffinOhio.net reported in April that Click himself moved to Ohio from Indiana in 2006, about a year before Watson’s family marked 175 years in Seneca County.

Watson addressed the departure directly in Thursday’s statement. “While this means I will no longer call Seneca and Sandusky Counties home, it does not change the gratitude and love I have for the people who welcomed my family, believed in our campaign, and stood beside us every step of the way,” he wrote.

He said he is staying in politics elsewhere. “I am honored to have accepted a position serving on the State Council of the MAHA Institute,” Watson wrote, referring to the Washington, D.C.-based organization that operates state-level councils and endorses candidates for state office. The group does not publish a roster of its council members, and TiffinOhio.net could not independently confirm the appointment.

“My commitment to opposing government overreach, Big Tech influence, and the unchecked expansion of AI data centers will not end simply because I have changed addresses,” he wrote.

What it means for November

Click won the May 5 primary with 6,859 votes to Watson’s 6,260 — 52.28 percent to 47.72 percent. He lost Seneca County to Watson by 8.5 percentage points and held the seat only on a 15.4-point margin in Sandusky County, where he lives.

Click, a Vickery Republican and former pastor first elected in 2020, is term-limited after this cycle. He faces Democrat Aaron Jones, a Tiffin City Council member, U.S. Army veteran and production supervisor at JVIS Tiffin USA, in the November 3 general election. Jones ran unopposed in the Democratic primary and lives in Seneca County — the county Click lost.

Watson closed his primary-night statement in May by saying, “This is not the last the people of District 88 have seen of Eric Watson.” Thursday’s statement said the move “may be the end of my time representing House District 88,” while adding that it is “far from the end of my commitment to the conservative movement and to the State of Ohio.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The narrow committee divide, razor-thin after the death of the late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, could mean the vote will hinge on two Republican senators spurned by President Donald Trump, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas.

The former DOJ staffers and Epstein survivor testified on Capitol Hill, at a forum held by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats. 

They said Blanche’s relationship with Trump and his “mind-boggling” involvement in the president’s recent settlement with the IRS, as well as the botched release of the Epstein files, disqualifies him from becoming the nation’s top enforcer of the law.

“I don’t know what happened, but he is certainly not the person that I once worked with,” said Perry Carbone, a former federal prosecutor who worked alongside Blanche in the Southern District of New York, where Blanche served from 2006 to 2014.

Blanche eventually left the Justice Department to work in private law. He represented Trump as his personal defense attorney in three criminal cases in 2023 and 2024. Trump, with the approval of Senate Republicans, installed Blanche as deputy attorney general in March 2025. 

Trump announced Blanche as his pick for attorney general in early June, just over two months after former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s departure. 

The Department of Justice did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment on the hearing.

IRS deal, Minnesota probe

Carbone listed a number of reasons he believes should preclude Blanche from leading the department, including “the extraordinary IRS settlement,” the prosecution of the president’s political adversaries “on evidence that raises serious doubt about the bona fides of those cases” and efforts to “halt or interfere” with the Minnesota state investigation into the shooting deaths of U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents.

Carbone also highlighted Blanche’s “declaration of war on our judges” and the interview and relocation of Epstein co-conspirator and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell “for what appear to be political reasons.”

“We repeat a mantra daily so that no one forgets it: ‘We do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons.’ It’s not my place to say whether the nominee has forgotten that credo. That judgment belongs to the committee. I can only tell you what I’ve observed and why it troubles someone who spent a career trying to live by that credo,” Carbone said.

He added that Blanche’s firing of department officials who investigated Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, “undermines” public confidence.

“Even the appearance of retaliation for doing one’s job sends a chilling message throughout the department,” Carbone added.

Firings, resignations

Peter Carr, a longtime department spokesperson fired by Blanche in April 2025, estimated the department has lost 19,000 employees, including 30% of its attorneys and 10% of its FBI special agents.

“That includes those who were fired, but also those who’ve been pushed out or chose to leave,” said Carr, who worked as a spokesperson for special counsel Jack Smith’s office during the Biden administration. He first joined the DOJ in 2007 under President George W. Bush.

Elizabeth Stein, an Epstein abuse survivor, expressed anger that victims’ names and images were disclosed when the DOJ published the Epstein files online, as legally mandated after Congress nearly unanimously passed legislation to force the release.

“When the Epstein files were released earlier this year, my own name was left unredacted in a sentence that read in part, ‘Stein was a victim of Epstein and Maxwell in the mid-90s.’ It doesn’t get much clearer than that,” said Stein, now a human trafficking specialist and survivor advocate for World Without Exploitation.

“The name of the school I attended, where I worked, and portions of my home address were also publicly disclosed. The very institution Congress charged with protecting survivors instead exposed us.”

‘Typical’ terms

Carbone also spoke at length about Blanche’s involvement in Trump’s settlement with the IRS. 

In exchange for Trump and his family dropping a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for the 2019 leak of tax returns, the DOJ ordered the establishment of a settlement fund in the amount of nearly $1.8 billion.

Blanche defended the settlement terms as “typical” during his confirmation hearing with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 15.

“If this is not standard language, can you make that point for us? I think it’s really important to draw that out,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., asked Carbone.

The former federal prosecutor, whose career spanned 30 years, said under normal circumstances the IRS would tailor language only specifically to the matter of litigation, and possibly calculate a settlement sum.

“That’s not what this is. Some of this language is mind-boggling, and I have it here in front of me … One of the subcategories is relating to ‘lawfare and/or weaponization.’ What does that mean?” Carbone said.

Booker said the “totality of the evidence is staggering” against Blanche’s nomination.

“I want to let you all know very clearly and unequivocally that if there were just some of these issues, they would be enough to be disqualifying. … This man has had an impact already in his deputy role and now in his acting role,” Booker said at the close of the hearing.

Dramatic vote ahead

Whether Blanche’s nomination advances from the Senate Judiciary Committee depends on whether every Republican on the panel, split 11-10, supports him.

Those campaigning against Blanche’s confirmation are targeting two members — Tillis, who is retiring at the end of his term, and Cornyn.

Trump subjected Tillis to intense criticism for opposing the Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025 and said he would find candidates to oppose Tillis in his primary. Trump endorsed Cornyn’s primary opponent earlier this year.

Just over two dozen survivors affected by abuse by Epstein and Maxwell sent a letter Tuesday to Tillis and Cornyn.

“We understand that both of you remain open to opposing his nomination, and we are asking you to stand with survivors of human trafficking and sexual assault at this critical moment,” the survivors wrote.

“Under Todd Blanche’s leadership, the Justice Department released survivors’ names, identifying information and images while the names of alleged abusers and enablers remained hidden. More than a thousand women and girls were abused, yet no one beyond Epstein and Maxwell has been prosecuted.”

The women wrote that Blanche met with them following his confirmation hearing, but that it amounted to “an hour of deflection, interruption and gaslighting.”

“Senator Tillis, when you urged Todd Blanche to meet with survivors, we believed you expected a serious and meaningful conversation. What occurred instead was a box-checking exercise arranged only after his confirmation was put at risk,” they wrote.

Common Cause North Carolina, a state arm of the national progressive advocacy group, urged Tillis in early July to vote against Blanche, who the group’s director, Brooks Fuller, said “has shown the only person he is interested in protecting and defending is President Donald Trump.”

The advocacy organization joined with other groups, including North Carolina for the People and The Justice Project, to deliver messages to Tillis’ office on July 6, according to organizers.

Tillis’ office did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for a response. Cornyn’s office said it did not have a comment at this time.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The legislation passed by a vote of 232-198. All Republicans and 13 Democrats voted in favor.

The bill faces possible headwinds in the narrowly split Senate where 60 votes are required for passage. Republicans control the upper chamber with 53 members, to Democrats’ 47 members. 

The House-passed bill, sponsored by Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., would require voters to present a current state-issued driver’s license or identification card, passport, valid military or veteran ID, or tribal government-issued ID card to be able to vote. 

The base bill, the Stop Insider Trading Act, would prohibit members of Congress and their spouses and close family members from purchasing certain stocks, and require a public notice and waiting period prior to selling stocks.

Violators could face a penalty of $2,000 or 10% of the transaction value, whichever is greater, plus any net gain realized from the transaction over a specified time period. 

The bill would govern investments issued by a publicly traded company. Some investments would be exempt, including widely held investment funds and investments held in a trust. Also, a spouse’s or dependent’s transactions made on behalf of another person, or held as part of a job benefits package would also be exempt.

Voter ID

But it was the voter ID bill that attracted most attention as lawmakers debated the measure this week.

Under the bill, if a voter doesn’t have one of the listed physical forms of identification, state election officials can issue a provisional ballot. The voter would then have three days to provide the accepted ID or an affidavit that the voter doesn’t have one because of religious objections to being photographed.

Additionally, state officials would be prohibited from accepting absentee ballots unless the voter attaches a copy of a valid ID, the last four digits of their Social Security number with an affidavit that they cannot obtain a photo ID, or a notarized statement that the voter personally completed their ballot.

During Monday’s House Rules Committee debate of the bill, Democrats criticized Republicans for removing a state grant provision from the voter ID section of the bill that would have covered voters’ individual costs of acquiring IDs. 

Democrats also panned the bill for going further than state laws in Florida and Wisconsin that are considered among the nation’s strictest. 

As of April 2025, 36 states had some form of voter ID law on the books, though they vary in restrictions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., asked Steil why Wisconsin state law allows some university IDs at the voting polls, while his federal bill does not.

“Plenty of constituents of yours at a variety of different colleges and universities that you represent … right now comply with what has been described by others as the most strict voter ID law in the country by using their college ID. But their congressman is championing a bill that would tell them that they can no longer do that,” Neguse said.

“Great question,” Steil replied. “Universities across the country, including in my home state, issue IDs to noncitizens, issue IDs to illegal immigrants.”

Not as restrictive as SAVE America Act

Attaching the voter ID legislation to a bill curbing lawmakers’ stock trading appears to be Republicans’ compromise with the president’s eagerness for a more restrictive bill that faces a slim to nothing chance of clearing Congress.

Trump is pushing Republicans to pass an even broader federal election regulations bill dubbed the SAVE America Act. That bill would require additional documents, such as passports and birth certificates, to register to vote. Critics say it would upend state management of elections.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has warned there are not enough votes in the Senate to pass Trump’s preferred bill.

The president promoted the legislation in a primetime address July 16 when he declassified evidence that he said showed attempted election interference by China in 2020.

Experts say the documents released did not prove Trump’s claims, and critics panned the speech as the president’s attempt to undermine trust in the upcoming November midterm elections that will decide control of Congress.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., praised the joint stock trading and voter ID bill Tuesday, saying “probably in excess of 9 out of 10 Americans support both measures.” Johnson also said House Republicans “will continue to hammer” Trump’s messaging about elections.

Dems object

House Democratic leadership urged members to vote “no” on the bill because it would allow lawmakers and close family members to continue buying and selling stocks. 

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., said Americans “have had it” with stock trading by federal lawmakers.

“They are fed up with it. Congress needs to enact a comprehensive ban on members of Congress as well as the president, the vice president and members of their families from owning or trading individual stocks or having other financial dealings,” Scanlon said Monday.

Scanlon’s amendment to replace the GOP-sponsored stock trading bill with the text of Rhode Island Democrat Seth Magaziner’s more restrictive bill, dubbed the Restore Trust in Government Act, failed. Magaziner’s bill also includes restrictions on the president, vice president and their families.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., characterized the bill on the House floor Tuesday as a “fake stock trading ban.” 

“I want to be very clear: their bill does not block insider trading, no matter what it’s called,” Jayapal said.

They also objected to the voter ID portion.

The measure “would functionally eviscerate mail voting by forcing Americans to include photocopies of their IDs alongside their mailed ballots,” according to House Minority Whip Katherine Clark’s email to members ahead of the vote Wednesday.

Additionally, Clark, a Massachusetts Democrat, castigated the bill’s “narrow set of acceptable photo identification in order to cast a ballot in a federal election.”

The Congressional Black Caucus issued a statement Tuesday slamming the bill.

“House Republicans are not serious about enacting a meaningful congressional stock trading ban,” the Democrat-aligned group said. “The combined Stop Insider Trading Act and Voter ID Act — which incorporates provisions from the voter-suppressive, so-called SAVE America Act — would allow Members of Congress to continue owning, selling, and, in some cases, purchasing individual stocks while simultaneously imposing stricter voter ID requirements that would make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to vote, including by mail.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Provisions of the Republican-backed law that President Donald Trump signed last year that go into effect in October 2027 will require states with high SNAP error rates — the percentage of benefits that are overpaid, underpaid or go to recipients who are ineligible — to begin covering some of the program’s costs. It marks a stark change for SNAP, which is solely funded by the federal government. 

In an online briefing hosted by the left-leaning think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the American Academy of Pediatrics and Invest in Louisiana, speakers said Congress should use the government funding process to protect access to affordable food for American families. 

Sharon Parrott, the center’s president, said that Republicans are “looking right past this emergency” and using their current budget resolution to help farmers struggling with increased costs that have resulted from Trump’s tariffs and oil prices that have been driven up by the war with Iran — but not low-income grocery shoppers.

“Republican leaders in Congress are ignoring the urgent need to help low-income families and kids who are losing SNAP and can’t afford groceries,” she said. “Congress could use the budget process to help both farmers and families. At a minimum, Congress needs to slow down the hasty implementation of the massive cost-shift in SNAP costs to states.”

She said that since the GOP law, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, altered SNAP eligibility requirements, more than 4.5 million people have stopped receiving food assistance benefits. Nearly one-third, 1.5 million, are children. 

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the changes to SNAP would reduce federal spending by nearly $190 billion over the next 10 years.

Local leaders push back

Wednesday’s briefing comes amid similar calls from community organizations and state and local leaders from across the country. 

On Monday, the United States Conference of Mayors sent a letter to leaders of the Senate Agriculture Committee asking them to reconsider SNAP changes enacted over the last year and shifting funding to states. 

“At a time when many Americans continue to face economic challenges, we should be working to expand opportunity and food security, not create new barriers to assistance,” the letter, signed by more than 200 mayors, read. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement Monday that Republicans and Democrats must work together to draft a farm bill that restores SNAP and protects funding for food assistance. 

Schumer added that he will not support any farm bill that does not provide states more time to prepare to shoulder the program’s costs. 

Time is running out to get a cost-shift pause through Congress. 

The House is scheduled to adjourn Friday, and won’t be back in session until Aug. 31. Even then, it will just be back for a few weeks, before again adjourning for almost all of October. The Senate will adjourn after the first week in August and will similarly be out for the beginning of September and almost all of October. 

All about the error rates

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will require most states with error rates of above 6% to cover between 5% and 15% percent of the benefits’ total cost. States under a 6% error rate will be exempt. 

But some states with the highest SNAP error rates — of about 13.3% or higher — will be given an extension to lower their error rates before being forced to bear some of the program’s costs. Depending on the error rate, the states will be granted up to an extra two years to begin sharing costs. 

“Congress can act right now to stop the bleeding and steer us away from this oncoming childhood hunger crisis by extending that same two-year delay to every state — not just the few that benefit from the existing carveout,” said Ty Jones Cox, the budget and policy center’s vice president for food assistance. 

States with the highest error rates in fiscal 2025 included Alaska at 23%, and Delaware and New Mexico both at approximately 16%, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. 

Cox said the center estimates nearly half of U.S. states will likely have to pay $100 million or more because of the cost-sharing changes. 

“These are huge costs,” she said. “States are working hard to reduce their error rates, but they’re up against the wall. The law didn’t give them any time or resources to do so.”

Cox said that states that plan to maintain SNAP benefits will have to find the funding from other places, if they are unable to generate more revenue. She said some states may choose to eliminate summer EBT or end universal school meals to continue funding the program. 

Given the steep costs, some states, such as Alabama, have floated the possibility of cutting their SNAP programs entirely if they are unable to lower error rates, Parrott said. 

Public health impacts

The effect of losing SNAP benefits extends beyond food insecurity, said Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. 

Besides clean air and water, and a supportive family and environment, he said, food is the most important determinant of a child’s health and future success. 

Racine added that the long-term benefits of SNAP are not being taken into account when decisions regarding its future are made. 

“The benefits of SNAP accrue to that child, accrue to that family, but they accrue to people around them,” he said. “[If] you have a child who’s not suffering from hunger in the classroom, and their ability to concentrate is improved, that has impact on their fellow classmates who are not on SNAP.”

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. Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Education and Workforce, convened a panel to blast the sweeping loan changes, as well as separate, ongoing efforts from President Donald Trump’s administration to dismantle the Education Department and its impact on the federal student aid system. 

“Student loan debt now exceeds $1.7 trillion. Borrowers need clear guidance and certainty,” Scott said. “Instead, they’re forced to deal with uncertainty and chaos created by an administration that has systematically weakened the federal student aid system.”   

Scott criticized Education’s plans to transfer core student aid functions to the Treasury Department. Under an interagency agreement, or IAA, announced in March, Treasury will take over Education’s responsibility for collecting on defaulted federal student loan debt in what marks the first step in a multi-phase process toward Treasury taking on the entire federal student loan portfolio. 

The Virginia Democrat said Treasury “has no expertise serving students or institutions of higher education or monitoring servicers for accuracy.” 

Meanwhile, the Education Department finalized regulations — most of which took effect July 1 — that implement sweeping student loan system changes outlined in the GOP’s “big, beautiful” law.

Scott said that the sweeping changes to the federal student loan system originating from that law are “compounding the issues that have risen from the dismantling of the Education Department.” 

Borrowing limits

Among the major changes are new loan limits for graduate and professional students, a restructured repayment system that gives new borrowers only two plans to choose from and the elimination of a key loan program for graduate and professional students that allowed for unlimited borrowing.

Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the nonprofit policy and advocacy group EdTrust, said the mega tax and spending cut law “restricts access to federal graduate lending, pushing many borrowers, especially those from low-income and middle-income backgrounds, many of whom are students of color, into the hands of private banks.” 

Del Pilar, who was deputy secretary of postsecondary and higher education for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, said that would present a series of challenges for borrowers. 

“That means higher interest rates, fewer consumer protections, stricter credit requirements, and flat-out denials for some, forcing those students to halt their educational journey,” he said.

Access to graduate education 

Clare McCann, managing director of policy and operations at the Postsecondary Education and Economics Research Center, said her organization was “very concerned that for many borrowers who want to continue to pursue a graduate education, that they will find themselves locked out of the private market or unable to access affordable loans without a qualified cosigner.” 

McCann, whose organization is housed at American University, added that the center’s research suggested almost 40% of student borrowers subject to the new caps have either poor or no credit scores, making them unlikely to be able to borrow money in the private market without a cosigner.

McCann noted that allowing largely unlimited graduate lending is “unwise” and “puts both students and taxpayers at risk,” while calling on Congress to “allow students to borrow enough to make high-return investments in themselves, so long as their loans remain affordable and repayable based on the salaries students should expect.” 

Ellen Keast, a spokesperson for the department, defended the student loan system overhaul, in a statement shared with States Newsroom on Wednesday. 

“Blank checks to universities resulted in tuition skyrocketing for American students and families. Mass student loan forgiveness failed in nearly every courtroom it entered. The student loan portfolio is at a fiscal cliff because the last Administration perpetrated the lie that students do not need to repay their loans,” Keast said. “The Trump Administration is righting these wrongs – all while implementing historic reforms to federal student aid that will drive down the cost of college and simplify student loan repayment.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-4 to send Cameron Hamilton’s nomination to the floor, though it wasn’t immediately clear whether the full Senate would vote before it breaks for its August recess.

Hamilton led FEMA in an acting role at the beginning of 2025 but was fired that May after testifying before Congress that he personally did “not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

Trump has said repeatedly during his second administration he would like to reduce the size and scope of the federal government’s disaster management role, shifting more responsibility to state and local governments. 

Trump created a FEMA Review Council last year to propose substantial changes to the agency, which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security. That group released its recommendations in early May, though neither the administration nor Congress has taken steps to implement those proposals. 

Hamilton said during his confirmation hearing in June that if confirmed by the Senate he would ensure FEMA is “objective” and “fair.” 

He said he believes the agency’s “disaster declaration process and also the federal mentorship that goes into it needs to be improved.” 

“I believe states need to receive better customer service. I have full faith and confidence in the FEMA workforce, but we can do better,” Hamilton said. “And there’s a significant amount of areas where that process should be simplified, better understood and we owe you answers, I think, much faster.”

Hamilton wrote in the ethics paperwork that is a required part of the confirmation process after being fired from FEMA in May 2025 he worked as a senior adviser in the Education Department until August. 

After that he was hired as the senior vice president of response and recovery at LTS, Inc. in Virginia, where he worked from August until April, when he became a senior adviser/senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security. 

Hamilton reported a salary of $247,916 and a bonus of $350,000 during the roughly eight months he worked at LTS, Inc. He expects to receive another bonus from the company valued between $250,001 and $500,000 at some point in the future. 

LTS, Inc. writes on its website that it is “an award-winning enterprise consulting” firm that focuses on emergency response, automated healthcare solutions and occupational health services. 

In the ethics agreement filed with the government, Hamilton wrote that he transferred ownership of his consultant business, Onward Operations, LLC, to his spouse in March. He transferred ownership of his retail coffee business, Onward Valor, LLC, to his spouse in January.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A recent transportation workgroup put together by the state recommended, among other things, a “comprehensive system change” to transportation along with immediate actions to “ease current system challenges and build the new system foundation.”

The shared goal of the workgroup was to”to transport as many students as possible to and from their school of choice safely and consistently – regardless of where they are enrolled,” according to a recent report.

However, disagreement among the workgroup members on how to implement those goals was made clear in their final recommendations.

In the most recent state operating budget, the Ohio Pupil Transportation Workgroup was tasked with “exploring transportation issues,” including a look at the current system and a study ending in recommendations on “the feasibility of each school district providing transportation to students enrolled in a community school or nonpublic school on days that the school district is not open for operation.”

The group agreed that school transportation and the funding to do so was an issue in need of resolution, but they acknowledged that even the members of the workgroup “do no agree on what all the core challenges are.”

Members included representatives from private schools, religious schools, public schools, career centers, and educational service centers, as well as two Ohio state senators and two Ohio House members, one from each political party in each chamber.

Three workgroup members noted that they “do not support the recommendations report:” Shauna Murphy, of Cincinnati Public Schools; Josh Biederstedt, of Patrick Henry Local Schools; and state Sen. Catherine Ingram, D-Cincinnati.

“Family school choice” was noted in the report as a “valued principle in Ohio” that is “respected by all workgroup members.”

“However, not all stakeholders fully agree on how to best accomplish safe and reliable transportation across education systems for more students,” the report stated. “Therefore, the recommendations identify where divergence of opinion exists while seeking to inform policymakers of viable options for moving forward.”

“School choice” is a term often used by those who support the use of private school vouchers funded by taxpayers to allow students to move to nonpublic schools.

Religious education advocates supported the recommendations of the workgroup when it came to opening up transportation to more students.

The workgroup used data from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, case studies and briefs submitted by members, and “panel discussions” of “transportation experts and leaders” among school districts and communities.

Transportation to school districts as it stands now was established in state law starting in 1966, when the law stated that traditional school districts were to provide bussing for the districts and chartered nonpublic schools.

Districts are required to transport those students unless deemed “impractical to transport,” based on six different factors, in which case a payment is given to the family to compensate for transportation.

“The (payment in lieu of transportation) process is imperfect, and for many families a payment does not solve the daily school transportation problem,” the workgroup report stated.

“This is particularly true for families experiencing poverty and those with inflexible work schedules.”

In the 2025-2026 school year, the workgroup found that more than 22,000 students were deemed “impractical” for transportation, with all but 1,000 of those enrolled in community or chartered nonpublic schools.

The impracticality issue made headlines in 2024, when former Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sued Columbus City Schools for not busing private or charter school students. The school district said it believed it was following the law.

In May, the Ohio Supreme Court said Yost did not have legal standing to compel the district to do so, and that only 63 students were impacted, citing the former attorney general’s own facts.

“The attorney general has not shown that a case affecting a small number of pupils within one school district of the state concerns the well-being of ‘a substantial segment’ of the state’s population,” the court ruled.

One of the recommendations given by the workgroup was elimination of the impracticality clause over time, with the legislature working to phase out the payment system for transportation deemed impractical.

“In a new transportation system, (payment in lieu of transportation) should be exceptionally rare or phased out completely,” the workgroup stated.

Bus driver shortages

The report also noted the “persistent bus driver shortages” in the state, with Ohio Department of Education and Workforce data showing that on average, only 14.68% of vacant school bus driving positions were filled in fiscal year 2025.

In 34 districts across the state, 10% or less of the vacant bus driver jobs were filled, according to the state.

Part of the problem districts are seeing in recruiting and keeping bus drivers is the wages and benefits that come with the job, something that is exacerbated by the General Assembly’s decision to lower the funding to the Fair School Funding Plan in the last operating budget, according to Jeff Wensing, head of the Ohio Education Association.

“If you’re not fully funding the schools, if you’re not making it attractive to be a bus driver, if you’re not making it feasible to have enough buses to transport those kids, you can’t make it work,” Wensing told the Capital Journal.

A current listing for a Columbus City School bus driver listed the salary at $23.56 per hour, with at least five years of driving experience, possession of a Class B commercial driver’s license, and pre-service driver training through the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District had a listing for a bus driver at $21.65 per hour, and a “driver trainee” at $12.94 per hour.

Toledo Public Schools listed hourly compensation for bus drivers at $18.56 to $22.59, with an unspecified “annual longevity bonus” after five years.

While Wensing said the recommendations of the group were good goals, without more money, more bus drivers, and more school buses, he likened the plan to having 500 guests at a venue with a capacity of 200.

“You can only imagine the service you would get if you overload a venue like that,” Wensing said. “It’s the same with transportation, you can’t pull the rabbit out of that hat.”

Among the recommendations pushed by the workgroup were bus driver recruitment strategies “with additional state support.”

The workgroup’s call to fund the transportation portion of the education funding formula was praised by Melissa Cropper, who directs the Ohio Federation of Teachers.

But she said the group strongly disagrees with “a main premise of these recommendations – that the state is equally responsible for transportation for private school students and that transportation funding should follow the student to an unaccountable private school.”

“We should not commit to any additional funds for private school students, including additional transportation funding, until we are meeting our promise to the 90% of Ohio students who attend public schools,” Cropper said in a statement to the Capital Journal.

While the General Assembly reduced the amount going to the Fair School Funding Plan in the last operating budget, the state-funded private school voucher program saw funding in the billions of dollars.

Religious private school advocates praised the workgroup’s implementation of “school choice” in the report and recommendations.

“Ohio has made tremendous progress expanding school choice, but those opportunities mean little if students can’t get to school,” said Troy McIntosh, director of the Christian Education Network, a division of the religious lobby group Center for Christian Virtue.

“We urge the General Assembly to act on these recommendations and ensure every eligible student has reliable transportation, regardless of the school they attend.”

The Catholic Conference of Ohio also commended the workgroup’s findings. The conference’s associate director, Tom Rhatican, was a member of the transportation workgroup.

“A parent’s choice of the best educational option for their child often becomes moot without the reliable transportation promised in Ohio law,” said Brian Hickey, executive director of the conference, in a statement.

It’s unclear when, or if, the General Assembly could take up the recommendations. The legislature is currently on an extended summer break until after the November general election.

Once lawmakers return, they have a tight turnaround to take action on priority legislation before the end of the General Assembly term. Any legislation not passed before the end of the year will need to be reintroduced in the new General Assembly, starting in 2027.

Requests for comment from Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman and Ohio Senate President Rob McColley were not returned.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Faber recently released an audit of Central State University’s finances from July 1, 2022, through June 30, 2023.

He is requiring Central State’s former CFO Curtis Pettis and his insurance company United Educators to pay back more than $105,000 of penalties that added up from the university’s late payments to the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System and the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio. 

Three of the monthly STRS contributions were sent late and seven of the 12 OPERS monthly contributions were sent late, according to the over 100 page report. 

“We identified certain deficiencies in internal control that we consider to be material weaknesses and significant deficiencies,” according to the audit. 

Central State, Ohio’s only public Historically Black College, was placed under fiscal watch by the Ohio Department of Higher Education in October 2024, which continues to be ongoing. 

Central State President Morakinyo A.O. Kuti took over in July 2024 and alerted state officials of the university’s financial situation. 

“While we cannot comment specifically on charges or criminal investigations, CSU is demonstrably more financially secure than when the fiscal year 2023 audit began,” the university said in a statement to the Capital Journal in response to the audit. 

“In a short amount of time, CSU has made several improvements that have strengthened financial processes and footing, implemented strong internal controls and necessary austerity measures, ensured tax reporting compliance, and certified past due student accounts to the Office of the Ohio Attorney General.” 

What did the audit find? 

Some students were inaccurately charged tuition and fees, according to the audit. 

• 37 students were charged part-time tuition instead of full-time tuition rate, resulting in more than $54,000 being overcharged to students. 

• 11 students were incorrectly charged a fee amount, totaling $666. 

• 23 students were correctly charged for part-time tuition, but the amount of hours the students were charged did not match their transcripts — totaling $23,869 being under-charged to students. 

• Three students were charged for a semester, but their transcript did not have any classes listed — totaling $5,350 being overcharged to students.  

Five students incorrectly received unsubsidized loans that were above their eligibility amount, totaling $3,754. 

Some students were incorrectly charged rent for residence halls.  

• 33 students were included on rent rolls, but did not live in the applicable halls — resulting in an adjustment to decrease revenue by more than $100,000. 

• Six students were charged for a double room, but were living in a single room — causing a discrepancy of $1,200. 

• Three students had rent charges reversed twice on their account, resulting in rent being understated by $9,000.

• Seven students were charged twice for rent, meaning rent was overstated by $21,120. 

The audit was unable to get certain documents from the Central State University Foundation including endowments, payroll and benefit expenses, and operating expenses, among others. 

“Even after issuing a subpoena for the records, nothing further was provided by the Foundation,” according to the audit. 

“The Foundation has noted the University has all records pursuant to a memorandum of understanding; however, the University has confirmed no further records are available for audit.” 

Faber is conducting an on-going investigation. 

“Dependent on the outcome of the investigation, results may be reported on at a later date,” according to the audit. 

Central State University’s Foundation tax-exempt status was revoked by the IRS in November 2024 after not filing their annual Form 990 for three consecutive years, according to the audit. 

More than $2.7 million were transferred from five different investment endowment accounts to the operating cash account to fund operating expenses. 

A $100,000 contribution for an endowment was received, but was not deposited into the endowment investment account.

“We recommend the University does not transfer funds from the investment endowment accounts to the operating account unless the conditions meet the endowment agreement requirements,” according to the audit. 

“All endowment contributions should be directly deposited into the investment account.” 

A required endowment contribution match of $200,000 was never made during fiscal year 2021, 2022, or 2023. 

“In addition, there were transfers made from the endowment investment account in the amount of $1,107,619 that was not for purposes outlined within the endowment agreement,” according to the audit. 

The $1,107,619 was repaid to the account in April 2024. 

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.

Over the past decade, electric bills have climbed steadily across the state, but recently the pace has accelerated. In the last year alone, some Ohioans have seen their monthly bills jump as much as 44%.

Families are being forced to choose between paying their utilities, rent, or putting food on the table for their children.

This represents a new normal, as nearly one-third of American households struggle to pay their energy bills today.

Among Ohio families already receiving energy assistance, they spent an average of 22.4% of their income on energy costs, the second-highest burden rate in the nation. 

The question is no longer whether this crisis is real — it’s whether our governor, our General Assembly, and our utility regulators have the will to confront it.

To date, the answer from Ohio’s utilities and state regulators has been resounding silence, punctuated only by the procedural approval of the next rate hike.

In AEP’s recent rate case, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio had the audacity to declare that arguments concerning an ongoing affordability crisis are “misleading” — saying it is an irrelevant point to raise since everything is getting more expensive.

This is an unhelpful response and a dose of whataboutism that blatantly disregards the lived reality of Ohioans.

As continues to be the case in Ohio, where we lack state leadership on these issues, local governments are stepping up.

The City of Dayton recently approved what will be one of the largest community choice solar projects ever built inside a U.S. city limit.

The Gem City Solar Project in Northwest Dayton will power roughly 14,665 homes and cover about 30% of the city’s electric aggregation load.

It will lock in 30% of the city’s energy at a fixed price for 25 years — delivering an estimated $42 million in savings for customers already enrolled in a community choice aggregation program that has saved residents over $11 million on energy bills.

Similar local government-led projects are underway in Cincinnati, Cuyahoga County, Fairfield, and Lima that would lock in lower utility prices and municipal costs and ultimately deliver millions in savings over their respective lifespans.

As Ohioans are squeezed by rate increases they cannot stop, communities are pushing forward on projects that give residents their power back. 

The leadership shown by these communities stands in stark contrast to compounding institutional failures at the state-level.

The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio — entrusted with protecting ratepayers — has routinely rubber-stamped rate increases with very little customer benefits rather than safeguarding residents.

Utilities preserve their “reasonable” rate-of-return to benefit their shareholders and CEO pay, while residents foot the bill for unreasonable utility bills.

The failure runs deeper than PUCO alone, as Ohio’s state legislature has been equally absent.

There have been no pushes to cap rates or any political will to expand access to clean affordable energy or energy efficiency programs or deliver meaningful relief to those who need it most.

Worse, while families struggle under Ohio’s reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets, the Statehouse has spent years building barriers to Ohio energy projects that would reduce that dependence.

In 2021, the legislature passed Ohio Senate Bill 52, creating government red tape and barriers to build energy projects that would reduce our bills — a law that applies to wind and solar but not fossil fuels.

To boot, Ohio has aggressively pursued data centers — some of the most energy-intensive facilities — with no plan in place for them to significantly contribute to clean energy investment or grid costs.

Ultimately, every solar project, energy efficiency upgrade, or grid modernization project not built is a missed opportunity for local tax revenue and jobs — and represents a ratepayer paying more than they should.

Ohio’s regulators and our legislature have not just lost the plot — they have chosen whose side they are on.

Local governments are realizing that they have more power over their energy future than they may realize, and that there are better options.

Many local projects and programs aimed at addressing energy affordability don’t require permission from the Statehouse or a favorable ruling from PUCO — they simply require local leaders willing to act.

And right now, it’s the only level of government trying to solve these real problems we are all facing.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The June monthly total surpassed the 42,000 arrests in December, which included Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. If the rate for the first 11 days of July continues for a month it could be even higher, about 49,000 arrests.

Arrest numbers reached as high as 2,000 per day over a five-day period in late June, according to a New York Times report. The Department of Homeland Security has said it is “delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport pedophiles, murderers, rapists, and other criminals,” though less than a third of current detainees have a criminal conviction and 40% have never been accused of anything but non-criminal immigration violations, according to the statistics.

The Department of Homeland Security posted a list Monday of 15 immigrants previously convicted of serious crimes it said were arrested “while Americans enjoyed the weekend and the FIFA World Cup Finals.” 

The statistics also show that about 2,000 detainees a month have been freed by court-ordered bond hearings, as many federal judges, even many Trump appointees, rule against the administration’s policy of mandatory detention for many immigrants. The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to rule on the legality of the policy in its October term. 

Two immigrants were shot and killed during enforcement traffic stops in Texas and Maine this month. After a brief pause, President Donald Trump ordered traffic stops to continue. ICE officers will wear body cameras during such stops, according to border czar Tom Homan. 

A man from Mexico, apparently on a valid tourist visa for a vacation, was also killed in traffic in Florida after an encounter with ICE in July. Arrests in New York City immigration courts have also continued despite a court order banning the practice.  

Some of the unusual arrests that have come to light in the current crackdown include a nun from Nigeria walking to church in Texas (she was released the same day) and an Alaska state attorney from China. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@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 plan will also emphasize abstinence from sex and the importance of marriage. 

In doing so, it will pivot away from programs that serve populations in areas with the greatest need and that use particular evidence-based programming to reduce teen pregnancies — and some say the new language puts a greater focus on planning for pregnancy rather than preventing it.

The new grant application terms are consistent with an approach called restorative reproductive medicine that has become popular among conservative groups, including those who identify with Make America Healthy Again initiatives.

The approach discourages the use of any type of contraception and instead focuses on fertility awareness methods, usually in the context of couples trying to get pregnant without medical intervention such as in vitro fertilization or other treatments. That typically means not using any birth control and instead tracking indicators such as cervical mucus, body temperature and other physical symptoms to monitor the menstrual cycle. 

Academic studies have repeatedly shown that abstinence-only approaches result in higher rates of teen pregnancy and births, even after adjusting for other socioeconomic factors.

Congress created the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program in 2010, and has renewed funding for it on a bipartisan basis over the past 16 years, including the 2026 budget bill, despite President Donald Trump’s office targeting the program for defunding. 

During that time, teen birth rates declined by about 72%, according to federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, and much of the drop in the overall national birth rate is because teen birth rates have fallen so sharply. Experts say more comprehensive sex education, better access to contraception for girls and general behavioral trends around sex explain that shift. 

Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the reproductive rights-focused Guttmacher Institute, said the new language in the teen pregnancy program is similar to the new funding opportunity released for Title X, which is a more than 50-year-old grant program designed to help low-income populations receive reproductive healthcare.

“We do think that fertility awareness-based methods should be explained to patients and they should have the right to understand what those options are,” Friedrich-Karnik said, describing the administration’s approach. “But (patients) need to also be aware of the full options that are available and the pluses and minuses of every option that is out there.”

Body literacy modules

The intent of the program, according to the original law, was for grants to fund “medically accurate and age-appropriate programs that reduce teen pregnancy” and then to continue the programs shown to be most effective through rigorous academic evaluation. According to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs, those programs were developed for children and young adults between the ages of 10 and 24 and the people in their lives who support them.

Most of the grants that were canceled this year were programs implementing the methods proven effective in reducing teen pregnancy, while others were more research based, in which additional strategies are tested and refined. Several of those programs were canceled as well in states such as Louisiana, Texas and Washington.

A separate federal grant program called Sexual Risk Avoidance Education exists for abstinence-only programs, but the evidence-based criteria for Teen Pregnancy Prevention is much higher, said Rachel Fey, vice president of policy at national reproductive rights advocacy organization Power to Decide. She sees the new funding opportunity for teen pregnancy prevention as an extension of the sexual risk avoidance program — one of the pillars of the new description tells grantees to “incorporate sexual risk avoidance education.”

These young people are losing trusted relationships in an era of misinformation and distrust.

– Rhonda Braxton, vice president of health and wellness at Children’s Aid, which lost a grant to help prevent teen pregnancy

The funding notice requires applicants to pass an “alignment review” with agency priorities that is conducted by political appointees, a new process that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget is trying to implement for federal financial assistance across the government.

Applicants for the new teen pregnancy program are required to teach body literacy, including two distinct modules about anatomy and reproduction for girls and boys. 

Grace Stark, editor-in-chief of a Texas-based nonprofit called Natural Womanhood that promotes fertility awareness and restorative reproductive medicine, told Stateline by email that the new funding opportunity’s focus could be helpful, as it “encourages young people of both sexes to consider their reproductive goals now and in the future, and how their current health and lifestyle choices can impact those future goals.”

The female module must include instruction about the menstrual cycle and the patterns and key indicators of the phases of the cycle, and recognize ovulation as the “central event and primary indicator of hormonal health and fertility.” It must also include the advantages and disadvantages of “ovarian suppression” compared to approaches that address “root causes.” 

Restorative reproductive medicine focuses on identifying underlying conditions that contribute to infertility or other reproductive health-related problems, according to the International Institute of Restorative Reproductive Medicine. It refers to conventional approaches that use treatments that “suppress normal physiology,” such as various forms of birth control, and claims that RRM works with the body to treat problems. 

Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi introduced a bill in Congress in 2025 that would have directed federal health agencies to promote such training for medical students and professionals through existing funding opportunities in Title X and the HHS Office of Population Affairs. That bill didn’t advance.

Joely Pritzker, who has been a family nurse practitioner for more than 20 years and is the senior director of healthcare for Power to Decide, said the “ovarian suppression” language likely refers to one of the most common ways birth control works, which is to temporarily suppress ovulation. Typically, in medical practice, ovarian suppression refers to lowering the estrogen produced by the ovaries, sometimes to prevent or treat breast cancer.

Pritzker said most people in the reproductive health world would support the idea of teaching young people about their bodies, but said it comes down to how that information is interpreted and applied, and that the new program design is unclear about those intentions. Not wanting to use hormonal birth control is different from discouraging the use of it entirely, she said.

“I genuinely don’t know what (body literacy) means to the folks who wrote these proposals, other than based on everything else we know, there is an assumption that if people knew more about their bodies, they would choose not to use, for example, hormonal birth control,” Pritzker said, adding that the assumption is false.

Stark, of Natural Womanhood, said body literacy can help young people notice signs of reproductive health issues,“which (restorative reproductive medicine)-trained healthcare professionals can help diagnose and treat to improve current health and protect future fertility — and future reproductive health plans.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warns against leaning on restorative reproductive medicine in fertility discussions, saying it can be “ineffective and redundant” and unnecessarily delay a patient in seeking medical treatment when it is presented as the sole or best approach. 

The male health module, according to the federal grant funding notice, includes an emphasis on understanding how testosterone is a hormone that is responsive to sleep, physical activity and environmental factors. Instruction must include the physiology of arousal, and address how “repeated or artificially stimulated arousal may affect neural development and behavior over time,” seemingly referring to masturbation.

Testosterone has been a heavy focus of the Trump administration. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. frequently refers to lower sperm counts among men, including teen males, despite no scientific evidence backing up those claims when it comes to young men. He cites it as a reason for birth rates that have remained flat or lowered slightly every year since 2015, though experts say the lower national birth rate is actually because of the lower teen pregnancy and birth rates. 

U.S. Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also announced last week that military men over the age of 30 would receive annual testosterone level checks, which doctors say could actually be counterproductive to military readiness and could risk infertility. 

The teen pregnancy prevention programs must also include counseling on reproductive goals, and “should affirm marriage and parenthood as meaningful and value components of adult life,” the federal description says.

New recipients could include crisis pregnancy centers

Ginger Mullaney, CEO of former youth services grantee Healthy Futures of Texas, said its nearly $2 million grant funded 11 programs that served various populations, including young in foster care, and runaway and unhoused youth. The grant was cancelled, which shocked her, she said, because the group had already adapted all of its materials and programs to comply with new executive orders around diversity, equity and inclusion and other administration priorities. The new curriculum had been approved.

“We felt like we had already made all the necessary changes to comply,” Mullaney said.

Earlier this month, Healthy Futures was still deciding whether it would apply for the new round of funding. It’s not an easy task, she said, in part because the government documents no longer include a list of approved programs that qualify for the funding. Mullaney said there used to be a list of more than two dozen programs that the agency approved because they had been academically evaluated for effectiveness, but that list is gone now. However, the instructions still tell applicants they must use an evidence-based program. 

“We don’t know what (programs are) considered evidence based,” Mullaney said.

The new funding opportunity also awards more points to applicants that have never been awarded funds before.

Alison Macklin, director of public affairs at sex ed advocacy group SIECUS, said based on what she has seen at the local level, the new funding opportunity is paving the way for crisis pregnancy centers to apply for and receive federal dollars. 

Crisis pregnancy centers are anti-abortion organizations that typically offer free ultrasounds, pregnancy tests and parenting classes with a religious mission, and most often do not provide or refer for contraception. States Newsroom found earlier this year that the centers have received nearly $500 million in taxpayer dollars from state and federal sources since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.

“They’ve been given an inch, so they’re trying to take a mile, is what it seems to me,” Macklin said.

‘Losing trusted relationships’

In mid-May, staff at Children’s Aid said they expected their $936,700 Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grant to be renewed for another year after meeting with U.S. Health and Human Services and receiving nothing but positive feedback about their program. It was eligible for funding through 2028.

But at the end of June, they received another letter letting them know the grant was canceled, effective immediately.

“It was an overnight shutdown with no transition period for staff, or for young people that were relying on these resources,” said Rhonda Braxton, vice president of health and wellness at Children’s Aid, a 170-year-old organization in New York City.

It was one of 53 grantees that received letters from the federal government agency notifying them that their funding had been terminated without notice. Most were told their programs were now misaligned with federal agency priorities and that they normalized sexual activity for minors. Three affected grantees and SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change filed a lawsuit challenging the action on July 14. 

Braxton said the abrupt termination is expected to result in nine people losing their jobs, six of whom worked full time, and will affect the 1,200 young people who were served each year in areas such as the South Bronx, Harlem and Washington Heights. A group of high school-aged peer educators also found themselves suddenly without the summer job they’d planned to have with Children’s Aid.

“These young people are losing trusted relationships in an era of misinformation and distrust,” Braxton said.

She said they’ve made the decision not to apply for the new funding because it seems to be aligned with promoting abstinence-only initiatives, and, “Our experience has been that that’s not evidence-based programming.”

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 series features Walsh, a Cincinnati city councilman, speaking to the camera and setting Edwards’ past statements against his record in the legislature. The campaign describes the format as a rhetoric-versus-reality comparison.

“Ask anyone who worked at the Ohio Statehouse, and they’ll tell you that when Jay Edwards was Chair of the Finance Committee, he was famous for saying one thing and then doing the opposite,” said Lauren B. Worley, campaign director. “This series demonstrates that disconnect between Jay’s words and his deeds, proving that he cannot be a trustworthy steward of Ohio’s investments, pensions and taxpayer dollars.”

“Just as Ohio’s Treasurer has a fiduciary responsibility to steward Ohio’s $280 billion public funds, we as a campaign have a responsibility to make sure Ohioans are aware of Jay Edwards character and record,” Worley said.

The FirstEnergy money

State campaign finance records show FirstEnergy’s political action committee gave Edwards’ campaign $5,000 the day before the 2018 general election, and the Athens News reported in October 2020 that the company had also supported him in earlier years at higher levels.

After the July 2020 arrest of then-Speaker Larry Householder, some Ohio legislators redirected FirstEnergy contributions to charity. Edwards did not.

“I know that I have done nothing wrong and so I’m not going to go out and feel the need to go do something with money that I know came to me legally,” Edwards said in a 2020 interview with the paper. Asked about the principle of keeping money from a company then under federal investigation, the Athens News reported, Edwards dodged the question and said FirstEnergy was innocent until proven guilty.

In the same interview, Edwards said he had no advance knowledge of the scheme and that Householder’s arrest came as a shock. He also said he remained on good terms with him.

“I’ll openly admit I still consider Larry Householder a friend,” Edwards said. “Am I upset by him and some of his actions? Yeah, absolutely, but I think he deserves an untainted day in court and we’ll find out what happens.”

The House Bill 6 record

Edwards voted for House Bill 6, the 2019 nuclear and coal subsidy law that federal prosecutors later described as the product of a $60 million racketeering scheme. He served on Householder’s leadership team as majority whip. In 2021, when the Ohio House voted 75–21 to expel Householder, Edwards was among the Republicans who voted against expulsion. Householder was convicted in 2023 and is serving a 20-year federal sentence.

The Walsh campaign’s release also refers to Edwards as “Representative No. 8” in FBI recordings. Indicted lobbyist Neil Clark identified Edwards as “Representative 8” in the federal affidavit, according to reporting by the Athens News and cleveland.com. The affidavit itself stated that Representative 8 was not known to be a member of the alleged criminal enterprise. Edwards has never been charged with a crime in connection with the case. Clark died by suicide in March 2021 while awaiting trial.

TiffinOhio.net examined Edwards’ record in the House Bill 6 case in detail in May, and republished Signal Ohio’s reporting on his gift disclosures in April.

How Edwards describes his own record

Edwards has campaigned on his work as House Finance Committee chair, describing himself on his campaign website as the chairman who sponsored and passed a $3.2 billion tax cut and universal school choice, according to WKYC’s coverage of the May primary. The 2023 budget he wrote converted Ohio’s EdChoice Expansion program into a universal voucher program open to students regardless of family income or school district, the Ohio School Boards Association reported at the time.

Edwards, of Nelsonville, represented Ohio’s 94th House District from 2017 until term limits ended his tenure, and chaired the House Finance Committee in 2023 and 2024. He won the Republican nomination for treasurer on May 5 with 53% of the vote to state Sen. Kristina Roegner’s 47%, backed by endorsements from Vice President JD Vance and U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno.

What the office does

The treasurer serves as the state’s banker, managing roughly $280 billion in state assets and investments and playing a role in public pension oversight. Republican Robert Sprague is term-limited and is running for secretary of state.

Walsh was appointed to Cincinnati City Council in December 2022 to fill the seat vacated by U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman, and won election in his own right in 2023 and again in 2025. Before joining council he led the College Hill Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation, where he has said he oversaw more than $85 million in development along Hamilton Avenue. He previously worked with the Sedamsville Community Development Corporation and the CDC Association of Greater Cincinnati, and sits on the Cincinnati Retirement System Board of Trustees. He holds a political science degree from Xavier University.

Edwards and Walsh meet on the November 3 general election ballot.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Springfield’s date is Friday.

That is when Temporary Protected Status runs out and somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 people in a Clark County city of fewer than 60,000 stop being lawfully present and start being cargo.

How did we get here? Kristi Noem, then running Homeland Security, put her name on a notice declaring that “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions” stopping Haitians from going home in safety.

She wrote that down. About Haiti.

The same federal government tells Americans not to set foot there for any reason. The same federal government forbids U.S. airlines from flying there because gangs shoot at the planes. DeWine, who has been to Haiti, calls it one of the most dangerous places on earth.

Noem’s paperwork says otherwise, and in June six justices decided that a secretary’s paperwork is none of a court’s business. Not the fiction in it. Not the 350,000 people underneath it.

Ohio’s Republican governor did not bother with the diplomatic version. In a statement the day of the ruling, Mike DeWine called the policy “a mistake” and laid out the mechanics: more than 10,000 Ohioans who were working and paying taxes on Thursday are illegal to employ on Friday and subject to immediate deportation. Violent gangs run the country they’re being shipped to, he wrote. The government barely functions. The economy is in shambles.

He has been saying this, loudly, for the better part of a year. Nobody in Washington has moved an inch. That is not a failure of DeWine’s persuasion. It is a fairly complete portrait of the people he was trying to persuade.

Because the argument was never close. Springfield spent decades hemorrhaging factory jobs and people. Haitians showed up, took the shifts nobody could fill, opened groceries and restaurants and churches, and stopped the bleeding. Every employer who talks to DeWine tells him the same unromantic thing: we need them, they show up, they want the overtime.

That is not a bleeding-heart case. That is a spreadsheet, handed to the governor by manufacturers in a county Trump carried by roughly 30 points.

And the damage is already booked. Policy Matters Ohio, reading preliminary federal numbers from December, found Springfield leading the entire state in job losses — labor force down 1,100, manufacturing down 900, a 13.4% amputation of the sector that holds the town up.

All of it while TPS was still in effect. That was fear alone. The actual removals are projected to pull roughly $300 million a year out of Clark County, with total losses running toward $400 million.

Congratulations to everyone who owned the libs.

Now the ugly part.

Back in January the Springfield City Commission passed a resolution politely asking federal immigration agents to uncover their faces and carry identification, like every other cop in America. The city law director had to explain that Springfield can’t make them do a thing. Mayor Rob Rue called the resolution what it was: a “voted wish.”

A wish. That is the entire leverage a legally constituted American city government holds over armed men who won’t say who they are.

One commissioner noted that masked men who were not immigration agents had already been showing up in town. Of course they had. A mask is not a safety measure, whatever the department claims. It is a guarantee that nobody — not a bystander, not a business owner, not a judge later — will ever be able to say which man did what. It converts a federal officer into a rumor with a gun.

Minneapolis has the receipts. On Jan. 24, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the VA, was filming masked federal agents when Border Patrol officers shot him dead. Homeland Security says he came at them armed and fought. Local officials dispute it, and the police chief pointed out he was a lawful permit holder. Two and a half weeks earlier an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good in the same city. The ACLU of Ohio warned in January what a surge would look like here. Six months have not made that warning smaller.

This is what’s being aimed at a town of 60,000 that spent the autumn of 2024 listening to the president and vice president of the United States tell the country its neighbors ate pets.

That slander is now in the United States Reports. Justice Elena Kagan read Trump’s own words back to him in dissent. Five colleagues and the chief justice looked at the same sentences and found nothing worth pausing over.

Asked whether people losing status should expect deportation, Stephen Miller didn’t bother with a euphemism: “Well, of course.”

Not every Ohio Republican rolled over. Rue, a Republican mayor, keeps calling the people in his city neighbors, coworkers, taxpayers and parents, because they are. U.S. Rep. Mike Turner has pushed DHS to let working people stay. DeWine keeps asking the administration to reconsider and keeps getting nothing.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno went the other direction, explaining that the status was never meant to be permanent and Ohio can’t keep carrying the cost.

Ohio is about to find out precisely what it can’t carry, and it isn’t the Haitians.

Here is the thing about a temporary program. The status was temporary. The second shift at the parts plant wasn’t. The mortgages weren’t. The kids in Springfield City Schools, most of them American citizens, aren’t.

Friday the wish expires too.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The spot began airing days after the Cook Political Report moved the governor’s race from Lean Republican to Toss Up on Friday, July 10. It is the second time this year that the Democratic nominee’s history as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse has been turned into material against her.

The ad misleadingly tells viewers that Acton’s medical knowledge was described as “insufficient” to Ohio’s medical board and that she “admitted to emotional or mental illness, drug addiction, or an alcohol problem.” It closes by telling voters they would not want Acton as their doctor and “definitely not as governor.”

Acton’s campaign responded on Wednesday, July 15, calling the claims false and the use of her abuse history a deliberate attempt to shame her. It is at least the second V-PAC spot this cycle that TiffinOhio.net has examined; an earlier ad blaming Acton for Ohio’s COVID-19 shutdowns rested on a premise Gov. Mike DeWine has repeatedly rejected, saying the closure decisions were his.

“Vivek Ramaswamy is once again spreading lies about Dr. Acton and shaming her for being a survivor of childhood sexual assault, all to distract from the fact that Ohioans can’t stand him,” campaign manager Phil Stein said in a release from the campaign.

Stein’s statement also faulted Ramaswamy for continuing to promote the endorsement of state Rep. Rodney Creech (R-West Alexandria). Creech was accused in state investigative records of climbing into bed with a minor female relative while wearing only his underwear. He denied the allegations, a special prosecutor declined to bring charges, and House Speaker Matt Huffman asked him to resign before later restoring his committee assignments. Creech remains the Republican nominee in House District 40, and Ramaswamy has not publicly addressed the allegations.

What the 1994 form actually was

Ohio’s medical licensure application at the time asked applicants whether they had been treated for emotional or mental illness. Acton answered yes and disclosed that she had sought outpatient therapy because of childhood sexual abuse, her campaign has said since the record first surfaced in April.

Ohio no longer asks the question. It was removed from the state’s medical license applications after regulators concluded it discouraged doctors from seeking treatment they needed — part of a national shift in how licensing boards handle physician mental health.

On the “insufficient” characterization, the campaign says the review in question covered a four-month internship program, and that three years later, when Acton completed her medical residency, her medical knowledge was rated “excellent.” Both ratings appear to come from evaluator reference forms submitted with the 1994 application rather than from any finding by the State Medical Board of Ohio.

Acton has been a licensed physician since 1994. She holds a medical degree from what is now Northeast Ohio Medical University and a master’s degree in public health from Ohio State, and she served as director of the Ohio Department of Health from February 2019 until June 2020.

The 2019 police report

The ad also tells viewers that Acton told the medical board she was clean, and that days later police came to her house and found she had combined alcohol with prescription drugs.

NBC News first reported the August 2019 incident in April. According to the police report, Acton pulled a mirror off a wall and shattered the glass after becoming upset with her husband, told officers she had been drinking and had taken an unknown amount of prescription medication, and was about to drive away before her husband talked her out of it. A medic recommended she go to the hospital and she refused. Police found no evidence of physical violence and classified the matter as a verbal argument over her long work hours. No one was arrested or charged.

Acton’s campaign has said she had one drink at dinner and was not intoxicated, and that the medications were migraine treatments she had been prescribed for two decades. Her husband, Eric Acton, took responsibility in a statement to NBC4.

“Seven years ago, I had too much to drink while Amy only had one drink. I started the verbal argument while she tried to de-escalate the situation, and eventually went to bed,” he said. Bexley police told NBC4 they had received two calls to the address in ten years: the 2019 dispute and a 2022 report of a suspicious person.

The April precedent

The 1994 disclosure entered the campaign in April, days after the police report became public. Donald Trump Jr. posted that Acton should be seeking help rather than running for governor, and Ramaswamy’s account reposted the message. Ramaswamy then posted a video saying his opponent had no vision “other than complain about what someone else did to her,” drawing bipartisan criticism across Ohio.

Who is paying for the ads

V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, the super PAC that describes its sole mission as electing Ramaswamy governor, is overwhelmingly funded by a handful of people who do not live in Ohio.

Federal filings reported this week by the Ohio Capital Journal show five billionaires have given the committee $37 million — more than 88% of everything it has raised, out of a committee total of roughly $42 million. Pennsylvania investor Jeff Yass gave $20 million before the primary. Elon Musk gave $5 million in May. Ratmir Timashev gave $5 million, Ross Stevens $6 million across two contributions, and Bill Ackman $1 million. V-PAC reported $25.8 million on hand at the end of June and spent more than $8.1 million that month on a single 30-second ad against Acton.

Ramaswamy, whose net worth is estimated at roughly $1.8 billion, has loaned his own campaign $25 million. Between May 15 and the end of June, his campaign and V-PAC together spent about $9 million on advertising. Acton’s side spent roughly $100,000 over the same stretch.

Super PACs may raise and spend without limit but may not coordinate with a candidate’s campaign. V-PAC and the Ramaswamy campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Ohio Capital Journal for its report on the donations.

Why the timing matters

Cook Political Report analyst Jessica Taylor wrote on July 10 that the open Ohio contest was moving to Toss Up despite Ramaswamy’s significant spending edge, citing a favorable national climate for Democrats. It is the first time since 2018 the race has carried that rating.

A New York Times/Siena poll released shortly before the change showed the two candidates tied at 47%, with Acton leading among independents. A bipartisan AARP survey conducted by Impact Research and Fabrizio Ward put Acton ahead 47% to 44%.

The pattern is one Ohio voters will see more of. Both campaigns are expected to spend heavily through the fall, and this race is on track to be among the most expensive governor’s contests in state history. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3.

In Seneca and Sandusky counties, the governor’s race shares the November 3 ballot with the Ohio House District 88 contest, where Republican state Rep. Gary Click faces Democrat Aaron Jones. Click won his May primary by fewer than 600 votes and lost Seneca County.

Acton and Ramaswamy are competing to succeed Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican barred from running again by term limits.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

State agencies overseeing Ohio’s workers compensation program, fire marshal, state prisons and more have all contracted with Flock Safety, whose network of security cameras continuously use AI to track people’s whereabouts on the public roads. 

Law enforcement agencies have for years relied on the roadside, pole-mounted Flock cameras to track down suspected criminals or missing persons, emphasizing the boon to public safety when scrutinized over its privacy implications. 

Flock owns what critics have estimated to be more than 90,000 “automated license plate readers” around the country that use machine learning, a subset of AI, to identify vehicles. The cameras power a database, searchable by license plate and other visual characteristics (think make, model, bumper stickers, dents and decals) as cars navigate the streets. 

But it’s not just law enforcement adopting the new technology, public records show. State officials in Ohio with administrative or state level law enforcement job duties are increasingly tapping into Flock’s network over the past few years to monitor residents. 

For instance, the Fire and Explosions Investigation Bureau of the state Fire Marshal’s office utilizes both the Flock network as well as five cameras to investigate fires and explosions, according to a Department of Commerce spokesperson. The state paid $21,000 to Flock last year for the data. 

The state Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, which runs Ohio’s insurance program for people who get injured on the job, paid $24,000 to Flock last year to aid in fraud investigations, according to contract records and an agency spokesperson. The bureau paid the same amount to Flock in 2025, and $6,000 over each of the two prior years. 

State officials declined to offer specifics about why they’re accessing Flock’s data, how it’s used, or where the cameras are placed.

Controversy around cameras has grown

The ACLU and others have criticized law enforcement’s use of Flock for tracking Americans, en masse, without a warrant. They’ve also highlighted findings from all over the country that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used the data to execute President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

The state is wading into its relationship with Flock while some Ohio cities, under pressure from residents, have sought to sever or unwind their police departments’ ties with the company. 

This has included Dayton placing plastic bags over its Flock cameras to stop them from capturing license plate images; Kent preemptively voting to ban any future Flock contract with its police department; and Columbus promising reforms after an audit identified thousands of database searches on behalf of federal immigration officials. Cleveland recently delayed and then approved a contract extension with Flock but with a shorter term and with new limits on sharing its data.

What is Flock?

Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company, makes a variety of sound and image capturing technology, including what it calls “advanced license plate readers.” Instead of continuous footage, they’re triggered by motion. The company says the readers can capture still images of license plates. Several of those images can effectively track movement, patterns, associations and others.

Law enforcement agencies can choose to upload their cameras’ feeds to a national database. But the company emphasizes that it’s the police offices and cities themselves that own the data that have say over who has access to the data. 

“All of the people who use our services own that data,” said Joshua Thomas, a spokesperson for Flock, speaking at the Cleveland City Club earlier this month. “Locally. They decide who they share it with.”

Several state law enforcement agencies, including the authorities over adult and youth prisons, the Ohio Department of Public Safety, plus the Ohio attorney general’s office, all contract with Flock. 

The Ohio attorney general’s office paid Flock $30,000 in 2023 and $75,000 in 2025, spending data shows. A spokesperson said the Ohio Organized Crime Investigations Commission uses the technology to investigate drug trafficking and human trafficking.

The ODRC uses the cameras as an investigatory tool to combat contraband conveyance efforts and other criminal activities at state correctional facilities, said spokesperson JoEllen Smith, who declined to answer further questions. 

ODRC paid Flock $213,500 in 2026 and $171,000 in 2025. 

And the Department of Youth Services, which runs Ohio’s juvenile prisons, uses Flock cameras to “investigate criminal activity and prevent contraband from getting into our correctional facilities.” It has paid the company about $50,000 over the past two years. 

Cities consider cutting ties with Flock

The ACLU has waged an advocacy campaign, urging cities to nix their Flock contracts. Their basic argument is twofold: one, the network makes for a warrantless, mass surveillance state where police can track movements of the innocent; and two, that data flows to federal immigration officials, who use it in their deportation efforts. 

They’ve had some success. 

This spring, Dayton Police Chief Kamran Afzal announced that an internal review revealed that federal immigration officials accessed data from Flock’s 72 cameras on more than 7,100 instances, part of what he described as a user error in setting permissions. The city has since draped black plastic bags over the cameras, as they’re contractually prohibited from taking them down. 

And last year, Kent City Council, in Portage County, preemptively voted to block its police department from entering a contract with Flock. At its meeting, council members expressed skepticism about police claims that federal immigration officials couldn’t access the data. 

Elsewhere, there has been controversy but less clear a change. 

Last week, Cleveland city council voted 9-6 to pass a six-month extension of its Flock contract spanning 100 cameras – a narrow slice of the whopping 1,700 cameras in Cuyahoga County. It came as something of a walkback after the council’s public safety committee voted to reject it last month.

“Our city is overrun with crime,” Ward 1 Council Member Joe Jones said. “We need to use every tool possible. This is a no-brainer for me. And if council members don’t want the [Flock] cameras and vote against it in their neighborhoods, Mr. Chairman, can you please put them over in my community?”

ACLU spokesman Sean McCann faulted the city for doubling down on  “warrantless government spying” and mass surveillance. 

“Residents have been clear that we cannot trust any company that sells this technology to protect our privacy rights,” he said. 

And in Columbus, audit findings released earlier this month revealed that the city police department’s Flock network was searched for immigration related reasons on nearly 16,000 occasions, despite city policy prohibiting assistance to federal immigration authorities, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been laying the groundwork for questioning the election process in state after state, as Trump has made “election integrity” the centerpiece of his recent domestic policy initiatives, including in a July 16 address to the nation. 

The center, at NYU School of Law, found in a report Tuesday that more than 185,000 challenges to voter eligibility were filed by private citizens in 2024, though “the real number is likely higher” since many election officials either were not contacted or sent incomplete responses to an inquiry. The center is regarded as left-leaning.

Mass challenges are a fairly recent development, spurred by improvements in election technology and transparency. Thousands of votes now can be challenged at once.

They’ve rarely been successful, but experts worry they create voter doubts about whether elections are being conducted fairly. Historically such challenges have also often been used to suppress the votes of people of color, a separate brief said.

“Eligible voters facing challenges sometimes don’t vote simply because the process is too confusing. Responding to a challenge requires numerous steps that can trip up voters. They may not understand their options for verifying their identity,” said the report by Brennan Center Counsel Andrew Garber.

Garber found that “mass voter challenges have become a key element in the campaign to use election integrity as a pretext for voter suppression.”

In 2024, he found, election deniers lodged challenges, “in addition to spreading lies about widespread voter fraud, refusing to certify elections, discrediting voting machines, engaging in bad faith poll watching, filing frivolous lawsuits, and threatening election officials with physical harm or criminal penalties.” 

This year, Garber warned, such challenges are likely to be an “integral strategy in the playbook to undermine the democratic process.”

Mass challenges, he said, “add basically zero value to elections while creating new costs.”

One big worry, though: “There are instances of eligible voters being removed from the rolls and learning of their removal after the deadline to register and vote in the next election,” the report said. “As is often the case with voter suppression, vulnerable individuals frequently suffer the effects.”

Mullin threats

The Trump administration is pushing state officials to examine their voter rolls and tighten their election security, thus opening the door for the help of the federal government in conducting mass challenges, the report predicted.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said last week that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania and threatened to prosecute election officials in states that don’t “participate in securing the elections” ahead of the November midterms. He has not specified the source of his data.

Trump has demanded Congress require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote and photo IDs at the polls. So far, lawmakers have so far been reluctant to approve the SAVE America Act that in various versions would restrict voting, and it remains stalled in the U.S. Senate. 

Trump and his allies have maintained for years the 2020 election was marred by voter fraud. No evidence of any widespread fraud has been found.

Election officials have largely maintained their rolls are accurate and up to date.

“In most states, list maintenance practices tend to keep pace with natural changes in voters’ lives, such as moving,” said a report this month by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Mass challenges

Recent mass challenges have rarely been successful.

The report cited efforts in Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Florida and Iowa in 2022.

“These challenges were widely rejected for lack of evidence or failure to comply with state law,” the Brennan Center found.

In 2024, Brennan’s research found that private citizens filed at least 185,232 voter challenges in the states studied. Of those, the center found officials accepted at least 5,477. That means they may have removed the voter from the rolls, declared them inactive or taken other steps to make it difficult for them to vote.

Researchers sent requests to Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas and to numerous counties in those states, the report methodology said.

“One takeaway is evident: With only around 3 percent of challenges clearly accepted, challenges contributed little to list maintenance in 2024,” Brennan found.

For instance, Georgia got in touch with about 875,000 voters in 2023 who had moved or had not voted for several years. That was more than a hundred times the number of Georgia voters who were successfully challenged the next year.

The center compiled the report by sending public records requests to 42 state and local government entities. It asked for any documents involving voter challenges in 2024 and how officials dealt with those challenges. It also looked at court filings, public reporting and election board meetings.

“Acquiring a complete record of challenges is impossible: They are often made ad hoc, officials may have no obligation to track them, and the records produced are often incomplete,” the center noted, adding that some officials refused to provide records or said they got no challenges.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told senators the bombing of Iran has cost $37.5 billion. He said that while the department has about $75 billion in unobligated funds from Republicans’ “big, beautiful” law, that money wasn’t intended to cover the costs of the war. 

Republicans and Democrats on the Appropriations Committee also heard from three of their colleagues about the need for natural disaster recovery funding and the secretary of Agriculture about her request for emergency aid for farmers. 

Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, summed up the multitude of proposals for additional money by saying the “country has many urgent funding needs.”

Collins said that while there were vastly different views among senators on the panel about the war, “the fact remains that there are must-pay bills and urgent requirements facing the department that affect the ability of our troops to be well trained and more broadly of the U.S. military to deter and defend against potential aggressors worldwide.”

Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, ranking member on the committee, said at the beginning of the three-and-a-half hour hearing the United States “is no safer or better off than before the war.”

“In fact, we are considerably less safe. Our stockpiles have been depleted and it will take years of production to fully replenish them no matter how much money is thrown at this problem,” Murray said.

By the end of the hearing, she indicated Democrats may not support any emergency funding for the Defense Department related to the Iran war. 

“Unfortunately, this hearing has done exceptionally little to justify the president’s request or to instill confidence that this administration has an exit plan or a strategy to end the war,” Murray said. “This war has cost us a lot. The last thing we should be doing is rubber stamping another $70 billion to help Trump keep it going.”

Hegseth warns of ‘critical shortfalls’  

Hegseth said that without extra money from Congress, the department would “face critical shortfalls that threaten” its ability to “pay our service members, rapidly replenish equipment and munitions, and sustain vital operations without disruption.”

Hegseth repeatedly defended the Iran war during the hearing, pressing back on criticism from several Democrats that it was similar to earlier wars in the Middle East. 

“President Trump said we’re not fighting stupid wars like that again and he hasn’t,” Hegseth said. “That’s why we haven’t been trying to remake Iranian society, but simply in the realist America First way, ensure they never have a path to a nuclear bomb, full stop.”

He declined to go into detail in a non-classified setting about the aid China and Russia has provided to Iran, but did say those two countries are “enabling some of the things Iran is doing.”

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. John D. Caine said he’d prefer not discuss the intelligence about those two countries. 

“I’d rather not opine on the specifics because that would divulge what we know. And I never want the adversary to know what I know. I just want to know it,” he said. 

Caine also declined to go into any level of detail about whether the administration has contemplated sending ground troops into Iran. 

“I think it’d be unhelpful for me to opine on hypothetical situations on whatever decisions the president may or may not take in the future,” Caine said. 

Trump request to Congress

Congress approved $838.7 billion for the Defense Department in February as part of the annual government funding process. A few weeks later, President Donald Trump began bombing Iran, starting a war that has led to the deaths of 17 U.S. service members — including three in the last few days — and injured more than 445.

The administration sent a supplemental spending request to Congress in late June, asking lawmakers to provide $87.6 billion in emergency funding. It proposed an additional:

• $67.15 billion for the Defense Department

• $11.1 billion for the Agriculture Department to provide aid to farmers

• $3.36 billion for the State Department for diplomatic, security and global health programs

• $2.03 billion for the U.S. Coast Guard

• $1 billion for the Transportation Department to “to assist in the final design and construction of a modernized Penn Station in New York City”

• $1 billion for the Labor Department to “increase the benefit levels for participants of certain pension plans that were sponsored by Delphi Corporation and terminated as a result of General Motors’ bankruptcy in 2009″

• $767.5 million for the Energy Department

• $600 million for the General Services Administration’s federal buildings fund

• $500 million for the National Park Service to upgrade a seawall and improve the World War II Memorial

• $40.26 million for the FBI for its role in the Iran war and “other classified needs”

• $36.18 million for the Treasury Department’s office of terrorism and financial intelligence

• $13.1 million for the Homeland Security Department’s operations and support account that was part of a “classified request.”

House Republicans want to use the complex budget reconciliation process to provide up to $60 billion for the Defense Department and $12 billion for farm aid. 

But that effort hasn’t yet garnered the support from Senate Republicans needed to advance. GOP lawmakers used the same process last year to bolster defense funding by about $150 billion in the “big, beautiful” law. 

That means the most likely path to provide extra money for the war and farmers will be a bipartisan supplemental spending bill, likely written by the Appropriations Committees. 

With the House set to leave Thursday for its August recess and the Senate planning to leave for its break on Aug. 6, the earliest any additional funding would become law is September.

Farm aid

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the administration’s request for emergency funding would help farmers, including those who have experienced extreme weather events. 

Collins, however, questioned the administration’s decision to limit its request for supplemental funding to agriculture losses that took place during the last year. 

“Many of our producers are struggling amid a combination of market volatility and disaster conditions last year, which included excessive rainfall in the spring, followed by a severe drought. They need relief. Yet the administration’s supplemental request does not include funding to address these recovery needs,” Collins said. “It does have $1.1 billion to help Florida agricultural producers rebound from a severe freeze this past winter. But nothing for prior disasters in other states.”

Rollins said she would be in full support of Congress providing more funding than requested for farmers affected by severe weather events. 

Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley asked Rollins to ensure the Office of Management and Budget sends lawmakers a specific request to address ongoing costs related to wildfires. 

“Senators are asking for a number from OMB in order to go forward,” he said. “And when we’re looking at the fires right now, my home state is in the epicenter of the highest risk in the country.”

Rollins said she would “absolutely” get that number to lawmakers, adding it “is a paramount importance, especially in the middle of fire season right now.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The number of women running for governor has reached an all-time high this election cycle, and the number seeking a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives could also set a record, according to July 20 data from The Center for American Women and Politics, or CAWP. 

The center, part of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, collects data on women’s representation in federal, state and local government. 

The center also conducts research and runs educational programs on the role of women in politics. Its mission is to increase female involvement in public life. 

Women in the midterms

There are 85 women major-party candidates running for governor across 36 states this year, a number that significantly exceeds the previous record of 69, set in 2022. 

Fifty-one of those women are Democrats, another record, and 34 are Republicans. 

On the congressional level, 580 women are currently major-party contenders for the U.S. House, a figure that is just three away from the 2018 and 2020 record of 583 women candidates. 

That record could be broken once Louisiana reaches its candidate filing deadline for the House on Aug. 7, according to CAWP.  

The number of Democratic House candidates who are women has already reached an all-time high at 387. The remaining 183 women running are Republicans. 

In the Senate, 64 women from major parties are running for a seat, exactly half of them Democrats and half of them Republicans. The record for women Senate candidates was set in 2022 at 70. 

Fairly high numbers of women would need to emerge as Senate candidates in Maine and South Carolina to beat that record of 70, said CAWP Director of Data Chelsea Hill during a media briefing with other CAWP research experts on Tuesday.

A day before the briefing, Republican Sen. Darline Graham of South Carolina, who was sworn in July 14 to replace her late brother, Lindsey Graham, announced plans to run for a full six-year term following the encouragement of President Donald Trump. 

Although record numbers of congressional women candidates have not yet been reached in either the U.S. House or Senate, the overall number of women running for Congress is up compared to the last election cycle. 

In 2024, the number of women who sought seats in Congress dropped after having previously increased for three consecutive cycles, a phenomenon that CAWP later described as “evidence of stalled progress toward gender parity,” Hill said. 

Despite the increase in women seeking office over the years, female representation is still low when taken as a percentage of all candidates running for Congress and state governors. 

According to another set of CAWP data from July 20, women make up 27% of total candidacies for the U.S. House and 23.9% of the total for the Senate in 2026. About 25% of gubernationarial candidates are women. 

Milestones within reach

But at the same time, CAWP experts said at the media briefing, there are many milestones women could achieve in the 2026 election cycle, including firsts for women in certain government positions and for “women of specific racial and ethnic backgrounds and within either party.” 

They pointed to current Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a Republican, and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, who are both running to become the first women to serve as governors of their respective states. 

And Deb Haaland, the former U.S. secretary of the Interior currently running in New Mexico, could become the first-ever Native American woman governor in any state if she wins in November. 

At the congressional level, names such as Milat Keros, Aisha Wahab, Denise Powell and more have the potential to break barriers for women in public office. 

Keros is in place to become the first Black woman to represent Colorado, Wahab the first Middle Eastern or North African woman to serve from California and Powell the first Democratic woman to represent Nebraska in Congress.

At the end of the media briefing, CAWP Scholar and Director of Research Kelly Dittmar said the center’s 2026 candidacy data could be used as a tool to study and open up a broader discussion about women’s political pathways, nodding particularly to Blackburn and Klobuchar’s gubernatorial runs. 

“When we think about women moving to be chief executives of a state as a potential pathway to the presidency, (it’s) also something we need to always keep our eye on,” she said. 

CAWP’s data focuses on major party candidates and will continue to be updated regularly to account for upcoming state filing deadlines and congressional primary results. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Congress must pass a government funding bill before the new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1 in order to avoid a shutdown just weeks before the November midterm elections.

The 220-205 mostly party-line vote represents House Republicans’ opening salvo in negotiations, though without Democratic support it won’t be able to advance in the Senate. 

House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said during floor debate that GOP leaders hope passing the stopgap spending bill months before the start of the next fiscal year will avoid another shutdown. 

“For anyone questioning this legislation, the facts are simple — it extends the government funding deadline to Dec. 4, denying any party the opportunity to manufacture leverage before elections,” Cole said. “It contains no poison pills or partisan riders. It prevents harmful disruptions to our national security and the vital programs our constituents rely on.”

Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, ranking member on the committee, opposed the stopgap, saying it would “allow Homeland Secretary (Markwayne) Mullin to transfer billions of dollars to the Border Patrol.”

Republicans, she said, “refused” to change that aspect of the bill after Democrats “shared language to fix it.”

“We cannot in good conscience allow billions of dollars to flow to these agencies without major reforms to keep our constituents safe from further violence,” DeLauro said. 

Democrats don’t want a government shutdown but also don’t want “to rush” the process and omit the list of anomalies just sent up by the White House, she said. 

Those tweaks to funding levels are commonly added to stopgap spending bills but weren’t included in House Republicans’ measure because it was written before the White House sent a list of requested anomalies to lawmakers Monday. 

“There are over 50 programs listed by the agencies to take some action so that they can be protected during a continuing resolution,” DeLauro said, using the technical term for a short-term funding bill. 

The changes would support wildfire suppression activities, housing assistance for tens of thousands and programs that help people in rural communities afford their utilities.

“Rushing this bill to the floor haphazardly without carefully considering the various needs that must be met is no way to govern,” DeLauro said. “And it is irresponsible.” 

Senate anticipates changes

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, said earlier in the day that she was working with the committee’s top Democrat, Washington Sen. Patty Murray, to draft a continuing resolution of their own. 

“It appears that there is good faith on the Democratic side to try to pass the CR and avoid a government shutdown, which is always a disaster,” Collins said. 

Murray said the House’s stopgap spending bill has “problems” that will need to be fixed in order to move through the Senate.

“We just got the anomalies last night and both of us are trying to figure out the best way to get it put together,” Murray said. 

Appropriations status

Lawmakers must lean on a stopgap spending bill because they will, once again, fail to complete work on the dozen annual government funding bills before the deadline. 

The House has passed three of its spending bills. The Senate hasn’t passed any, in part, because the committee hasn’t released a single bill. The two chambers will need to begin negotiations at some point to settle on a total spending level for the 12 bills and how that roughly $1.9 trillion will be broken down among thousands of federal agencies and programs. 

That means the earliest the full-year government spending bills would become law is during the lame-duck session that is set to last for about five weeks between the election and the start of the new Congress in January. 

Lawmakers could also pass a series of stopgap funding bills instead of completing negotiations on the full-year appropriations bills. 

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 Sarah D. Morrison, a 2018 Trump appointee, ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had made many arrests in Ohio that “deeply trouble the Court.” They were illegal, she said, because they were made without a warrant and without making a determination that a person would flee before a warrant could be obtained.

One federal official “testified that almost all of his agency’s arrests are warrantless,” the judge’s order said.

Then she dismissed the case because she said the plaintiffs didn’t do an adequate job of showing the Trump administration is likely to keep making such arrests. She made the ruling even as ICE insists it doesn’t need warrants.

Groups defending the immigrants who brought the case were not pleased.

“The opinion from the court confirms what we already knew: ICE violated the law and arrested our clients illegally,” said Angela Plummer, executive director of Community and Refugee Immigration Services, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs.

“Unfortunately, we are living in a world where documented human rights violations alone are insufficient to compel court action to stop them.”

The case was brought in March by four people who argued warrantless immigration arrests were so common that the case should be a class action and include all similarly situated people.

As the Trump administration tries to arrest 3,000 immigrants a day, critics say it’s run roughshod over due process, sweeping up people who are here legally and even some citizens.

In her ruling, Judge Morrison agreed with the plaintiffs that before making arrests, ICE agents need to have both probable cause to believe a person is in violation of immigration law and is likely to flee before a warrant can be obtained.

“Upon a fulsome review of the record in this case, it is clear that (ICE agents) have, in some instances, unlawfully arrested and detained non-citizens in Ohio without a warrant and without a probable cause determination of their likelihood of escape,” Morrison’s ruling said. “Some of the accounts offered by Plaintiffs and (the class) they wish to represent about how individual agents effectuated arrests deeply trouble the Court.”

One of the plaintiffs in the case was Moises Javier Aguilar Peralta, 38, who came to Ohio from Honduras in 2023, sought asylum and got a work permit, Social Security number, and a driver’s license. 

On Dec. 18, as he walked out of a Columbus Home Depot with materials he needed for work, four masked men in civilian clothes stopped him. When he told them he had an active asylum case, the agents told him it wasn’t valid and arrested him, the suit said.

They didn’t ask him any questions to determine the legality of his presence in the country or to determine if he was a flight risk, it said.

As with the other plaintiffs, Peralta was held — and unable to support his family — for weeks and lived in a state of terror after his release, his lawyers said.

As of late March, around 670 immigrants in Ohio were in ICE detention.

“Countless of these individuals were arrested and detained without a warrant and without any pre-arrest, individualized determination of probable cause,” the plaintiffs said.

They asked Morrison to certify the case as a class action and order the government to stop making improper warrantless arrests.

Judge Morrison rejected the request, saying the four original plaintiffs didn’t adequately show they were likely to be re-arrested. But if the class were certified, re-arrests among that much-larger group would have been much more likely.

Morrison acknowledged the pressure Trump is putting on ICE to make thousands of arrests a day. She also heard from U.S. Border Patrol Acting Deputy Patrol Agent in Charge Steven Vorholt.

“Agent Vorholt, a supervisor who oversees and evaluates the field operations of USBP agents and their supervisors, testified that almost all of his agency’s arrests are warrantless,” Judge Morrison wrote.

In addition, she acknowledged that other courts have found that federal agents are making illegal, warrantless immigration arrests. 

And ICE’s own website flatly says its agents don’t need warrants to arrest people they believe are in violation of immigration law.

“ICE does not need judicial warrants to make arrests,” it says. “Like all other law enforcement officers, ICE officers and agents can initiate consensual encounters and speak with people, briefly detain aliens when they have reasonable suspicion that the aliens are illegally present in the United States, and arrest people they believe are illegal aliens.”

Even so, Judge Morrison said the plaintiffs fell short because they didn’t show federal immigration arrests are always warrantless or that the agencies have a written policy to act illegally. She cited internal documents saying agents needed to get warrants in cases where escape wasn’t imminent.

“In this case, Plaintiffs have not shown that all of Defendants’ agents always make warrantless arrests without determining the non-citizen arrestee’s likelihood of escape,” she wrote.

“Nor have Plaintiffs shown that either ICE or CBP adopted a written policy of unlawful conduct. Although the Court finds that Plaintiffs have shown for jurisdictional purposes that Defendants authorized their agents, through an unofficial custom or practice, to make unlawful warrantless arrests in Ohio, Plaintiffs have not convinced the Court that Defendants are sufficiently likely to subject them to another arrest under that practice.”

Freda Levinson, the chief legal officer of ACLU of Ohio, found a partial victory in the ruling.

“This ruling is deeply disappointing and frustrating, but it also recognizes that federal agents are wantonly conducting haphazard arrests in clear violation of the dictates and the Immigration and Nationality Act,” she said in a written statement.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Elon Musk, a former trillionaire and former co-leader of the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with now-Republican nominee for Ohio governor Vivek Ramaswamy, donated $5 million to a super PAC backing Ramaswamy in May, according to campaign finance reports released last week.

Musk joined billionaires Jeffrey Yass, Ratmir Timashev, Bill Ackman, and Ross Stevens as the primary backers of V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, a super PAC dedicated to supporting Ramaswamy’s election bid.

The billionaires have given V-PAC a combined $37 million so far, more than 88% of its total funding. About 98% of V-PAC’s second-quarter contributions, or $12 million, came from Musk, Timashev, Ackman, and Stevens.

“I do not think it’s surprising that billionaires support other billionaires running for office,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of watchdog group Common Cause Ohio.

A super PAC can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, but it cannot directly coordinate with a candidate’s campaign committee. Individuals can only contribute up to $7,000 per election cycle to a candidate’s campaign committee, which has more restrictions on what it can do.

While super PACs often throw their full weight behind their preferred candidates, Case Western Reserve University law professor Atiba Ellis emphasized that they carry their own agendas.

“This outsized amount of money can drown out what could be a dialogue about the issues in the governor’s race,” he said.

In any case, he added that voters should expect even more political advertising in what is set to be one of the most expensive governor’s elections in state history.

Democratic nominee for governor Dr. Amy Acton is narrowly outraising Ramaswamy in 2026, at least according to their most recent campaign committee filings. But without a super PAC backing her —  or $25 million of her own money to put in the race as her opponent did — Ramaswamy holds a large cash advantage. 

Acton promises to reform Ohio’s campaign finance system to make it more transparent if elected, according to her campaign platform. 

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Acton’s campaign committee said in a statement that the billionaires’ donations were only more evidence that Ramaswamy’s “scam policies would enrich himself and his fellow billionaires while raising costs for Ohio’s working families.” 

V-PAC and Ramaswamy’s campaign committee did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“Ohio isn’t for sale,” Acton wrote on social media in response to Musk’s donation. “Not now. Not ever.”

V-PAC bought a round of ad placements shortly after the billionaires’ donations, spending over $8.1 million in June on a 30-second ad against Acton. The super PAC reported $25.8 million in cash balance at the end of the second quarter.

Musk, Yass, and Ackman are no strangers to political lobbying. Musk spent over $250 million to support President Donald Trump in 2024. He was also extremely active in the 2025 Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, even appearing to hand out $1 million checks to two Wisconsin voters.

A bipartisan panel in Wisconsin later found that those checks likely violated state election law.

His donation in the Ohio race has not been flagged as problematic in any way.

“Even though this gift may be above board, voters should inquire about what his motives are in terms of influencing this election,” Ellis said.

Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, gave V-PAC $20 million before the primary. A co-founder of investment company Susquehanna International Group with an estimated net worth of $65.7 billion, Yass has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into politics to advance support for private school vouchers. 

Ackman, a hedge fund investor, donated $1 million to V-PAC in June. He was one of the most vocal opponents against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s electoral campaign and gave super PACs $1.75 million to oppose him.

Timashev is a newcomer to the political scene in comparison. He had never made a political contribution in Ohio or at the federal level until the second quarter of 2026, when he gave V-PAC $5 million in May. 

The tech entrepreneur left Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union to study at The Ohio State University, eventually amassing most of his wealth through informational technology company Veeam Solutions.

Timashev made Ohio State’s largest single donation ever in 2023, giving $110 million to create the university’s Center for Software Innovation. He has said he aims to bring 100 artificial intelligence startups to Columbus through his own venture capital firm, turning Ohio’s capital into “the next Silicon Valley.” 

But in April, three former executives sued Timashev and the venture capital firm on allegations of fraud and civil conspiracy. They later filed another lawsuit claiming that public statements by the firm about their firing — including a LinkedIn post announcing that Sen. Jon Husted’s son, Alex Husted, would take their place — were defamatory.

The executives claim he hired them away from their previous companies with promises of $50 million in funding that never came, and when they complained, he fired them. Timashev countersued in federal court, alleging that the three executives misappropriated $8 million and stole trade secrets.

Like Timashev, Stevens is best known for donating to his alma mater. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 1991, he became the founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Holdings Group, a Wall Street asset management company.

In 2019, he became the founding donor of Wharton’s Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance. But four years later, he pulled $100 million in funding from the university over how Penn’s then-president handled antisemitism on campus. She resigned days later.

Stevens gave $5 million to V-PAC in early 2025, the most he has given to a single PAC registered at the federal level, and added another $1 million in May.

Because super PACs cannot coordinate with candidates, they can use their outsized platform to steer elections in unintended directions, Ellis said. Super PACs can raise issues that their preferred candidates may want to avoid, putting pressure on candidates to address them.

Ramaswamy left DOGE in January 2025 after his relationship with Musk and President Donald Trump reportedly grew tense.

“Even though it’s unlikely that a supportive PAC is going to try to steer the agenda of a candidate, it’s certainly possible,” Ellis said.

When wealthy donors make large political contributions to a single-candidate super PAC like V-PAC, Turcer said there is “always a worry” that they will influence policymaking.

“There’s a sense that you dance with the one who brung you,” she said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

It’s heady stuff, even for zillionaires. Some promptly grab the spotlight to steal the show — or at least make news and TV appearances on the regular.

Generating sensational headlines for pure clickbait — in lieu of conducting serious policymaking for constituents — is the stand-alone goal. Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a former luxury car dealer, is good at it.

He sells sensation over thoughtful governance like a pro. The Westlake Republican has made dozens of appearances on Fox News and triggered a bunch of media coverage as a MAGA performer, bless his heart. 

Last week Moreno stewed as toxic smoke from climate-driven Canadian wildfires enveloped Cleveland and other Ohio communities.

It was bad. Would the senator address the gravity of the event soberly or warn of worse to come if man-made global warming continued to accelerate and intensify air-choking fires at home and up north?

Would Moreno point to the real time risks of highly hazardous wildfire smoke as proof of a planet heating up and suggest urgent course correction — that doesn’t include pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

Not this guy. Moreno saw smoky exposure to terrible air quality in the Great Lakes, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states as an opportunity to exploit for personal gain and went full-on tinfoil. 

He assigned villainy to the powerful winds pushing wildfire smoke from Canada into the U.S. and polluting the air for millions in a thick, acrid haze.

He charged Canada’s “failed leadership” with perpetrating an “atrocity” on the U.S. and said Canadian officials should be punished for not properly maintaining their vast, highly combustible boreal forest (that covers about 1.3 billion acres and stretches from Yukon and the Alaskan border to Newfoundland and Labrador in the east).

The sheer magnitude of the forest, its remoteness and hard-to-get-to wilderness areas (often only accessible by air), the acute limits on firefighting efforts, were all lost on Moreno. 

So, too, was the whole cause and effect part of the impossible-to-put-out wildfires actively burning across Canada.

Moreno simply ignored what has driven the frequency and severity of Canadian wildfire seasons; higher temperatures brought on by the rate of global warming nearly doubling in the last decade.

Hotter, drier conditions prime the landscape to burn. A lightening strike in a parched forest can ignite a massive burn. That’s what happened in about 71% of the burned area in Canada between 1990-2023.

Bottom line? Climate change has increased heat and drought and made wildfires more numerous and severe in dry forests north and south of the border.

At this writing there are over 900 active wildfires in Canada and just under 500 in the U.S. But the summer is yet young and smoke-filled cities are on track to become the new norm as long as fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — remain the biggest contributors to global warming.

But the spotlight-loving Moreno was clearly not interested in doing a deep dive on the problem last week to assess the best solution.

He wanted to get political mileage out of a “wildfire pollution emergency” by bashing Canada (and scoring points with the felon-in-chief he flatters).

Moreno immediately blamed our longest and closest ally for allowing plumes of smoke to blow into the U.S. — as if Canada controlled the wind. “We will not tolerate this incompetence,” huffed the MAGA cowboy. 

Moreno milked his moment in the haze by introducing a performative, if not passable, Senate bill to impose sanctions on Canada over wildfire smoke affecting U.S. air quality.

“Canada’s government failed to invest in wildfire prevention methods, including forest thinning, fuel reduction, prescribed burns and stronger enforcement against arson,” said the statement from his office — without evidence or understanding about boreal forests.

Moreno’s measure would also sanction Canadian officials found “responsible” for the fires, revoke their visas, block their assets, and formally express Congress’ opinion that the Canadian ambassador is a “persona non grata” until the wildfire smoke is gone.

Trump piled on Moreno’s rhetoric with his brand of hysteria.

“The United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air” and “we are holding Canada responsible,” he bleated and threatened to levy additional tariffs for the air invasion.

Other Republicans took the same tack as Moreno. The House Republican Conference chair accused Canada of doing nothing to keep the wildfire smoke over there. “Stop exporting your smoke into out skies. Enough is enough!”

The fire-breathing partisans, who deny the reality of climate change and aggressively promote more fossil fuel pollution over renewable, clean energy alternatives, removed all doubt about their willful indifference to the facts or shameless intent to leverage a serious public health issue for political points.

Forget the scary trajectory we’re on with wild weather extremes every other week from supercharged storms and record flooding to scorching heat and forest infernos.

It’s so much easier to lob attention-getting salvos for click bait, right?

Worked for Moreno.

He made state and national news with his insane rip on Canada blowing smoke and appeared on The Ingraham Angle on Fox News. But he didn’t come close to clearing the air. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

That doesn’t include their travel expenses for multiple out-of-town competitions, including hotel rooms, gas, meals, and sometimes even flights.

“This should be something that everyone gets to play, and it shouldn’t be only the people who can afford it,” said Hamby, who lives in Madison, Alabama. “But if you don’t have money, you’re not doing competitive cheer.”

Youth sports is now a $40 billion industry. It’s a sprawling, commercialized ecosystem where parents pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year for club teams, elite camps, out-of-state tournaments, private coaching sessions, professional-level uniforms and equipment, recruiting events, and even streaming subscription services to watch their kids play.

The amount of money involved — nearly double the annual revenue of the NFL — has made youth sports increasingly attractive to private investors, including private equity firms. State regulators are starting to take notice.

In April, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, began investigating possible anticompetitive practices in youth hockey, with a focus on the privately owned Black Bear Sports Group, the largest owner-operator of ice rinks in the United States. The company was the focus of an earlier investigation from USA Today for using its control of rinks, teams, leagues and even streaming services to create a youth hockey system that critics say have raised costs and limited choices for families.

“The Attorney General is looking into the matter concerning Black Bear Sports Group out of concern for the risk of consumer harm — including higher prices and reduced service quality — that can arise from diminished access to community and recreational services,” Danny Wimmer, Nessel’s press secretary, wrote in an email. He declined to offer further comment on the investigation.

A spokesperson for Black Bear Sports said the company is committed to growing the sport of hockey, and offers a free youth program for kids who’ve not previously participated in organized hockey.

“We’ve also saved community rinks that would otherwise have been lost: In Southern Michigan alone, five have closed since 2019, and the only one slated to reopen is a Kalamazoo rink Black Bear saved from closure,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office opened its own investigation into anticompetitive business practices in youth hockey last November. It centered on the privately owned Dallas Stars, a National Hockey League team whose board includes private equity executives. Another USA Today investigation detailed how the team used tens of millions in taxpayer dollars to corner the youth hockey market in Texas.

Oklahoma Watch, a nonprofit news outlet, last year explored so-called “stay-to-play” schemes, a common tactic in youth sports in which kids whose teams travel for a tournament must stay in one of the tournament’s partner hotels in order to play.

Consolidating smaller leagues and facilities under one company can lock families into the only game in town. Then those youth sports monopolies can cut deals with related industries, such as tournament-specific hotels or elite sports camps.

Many cheer competitions like the ones Hamby’s daughter attends are run by Varsity Brands, a sports conglomerate acquired by private equity giant KKR for $4.5 billion in 2024 from investment giant Bain Capital, which acquired it in 2018 from two other private equity firms.

Varsity Brands has been mired in antitrust lawsuits for the past several years, including a confidential settlement in May over allegations it was involved in illegal price-fixing and a separate $82.5 million class action settlement in 2024. In that suit, cheer athletes’ families in 35 states said Varsity artificially inflated the costs of cheerleading camps, competitions and apparel. The company did not admit any wrongdoing.

Private investment can provide the capital that allows sports companies and youth leagues to respond to market demand for higher-quality coaching and services. And it can stand in the gap where public investment in recreation has fallen in recent decades, said Anthony Delli Paoli, director of the Rutgers University Youth Sports Research Council.

However, Delli Paoli said, it’s a problem when families “have to take out a second mortgage or max out their credit cards in order to participate in sport.”

“There’s no good justification for locking in parents and families and driving up the costs,” he said. “That’s clearly an antitrust issue.”

Consumed

Hamby, like many parents who grew up in the 1980s and 90s, remembers playing on sports teams as a kid in rec center gymnasiums and on neighborhood ballfields, coached by volunteers who often had more enthusiasm than experience.

Those days are mostly gone.

The average U.S. sports household spent $1,016 on its child’s primary sport in 2024, a 46% increase since 2019, according to The Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative.

Several parents who spoke with Stateline across multiple youth sports reported spending far more than that, from $2,000 to nearly $20,000 annually.

Multiple parents told Stateline they knew other families who had taken on extra work to pay their kids’ team fees, or had to make a choice between paying the fees or paying a household bill.

“It’s very easy to get lost in the travel (sports) world and make it your whole life. I see so many people do it,” said Hillary Harris, another Madison mom whose 14-year-old son plays travel baseball.

“You get consumed with it because you’re thinking, ‘My kid’s going to go to (a Division 1 school) and play baseball, and this is how they’re going to get there.’”

Many parents are willing, or feel compelled, to spend thousands to help their kid be successful in a sport they love, to keep them from lagging behind their peers, or as an investment in a potential college or professional sports career.

That captive customer base is increasingly attractive to private investors.

In 2024, two of the world’s most prominent private equity investors rolled up their youth sports properties under a new parent company, Unrivaled Sports, which manages facilities and tournaments for baseball, softball, flag football and other sports, including partnerships with MLB Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr. and Olympic skateboarder Shaun White.

Former NFL quarterback Eli Manning’s private equity firm Brand Velocity Group acquired RCX Sports in June; RCX manages the licenses of the official youth sports programs of all the major professional sports leagues including the NFL, MLB and the NBA.

Earlier this year, a Chicago-based private equity firm acquired LiveBarn, a subscription-based service that lets family and friends stream amateur hockey and other sports from thousands of venues across the United States and Canada.

And 3STEP Sports, one of the nation’s largest youth sports club organizations, controlling more than 5,000 clubs across all 50 states, has been backed by a Washington, D.C. based private equity firm called Juggernaut Capital since 2019.

In June, congressional lawmakers held a hearing on private equity’s growing role in the commercialization of youth sports, an event they titled “Field of Fees.”

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, both Democrats, have cosponsored a bill that would ban private equity firms from investing in youth sports unless they can prove they don’t use predatory practices.

“Youth sports should not be a luxury good,” Deluzio told constituents in April at a community hearing he held in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.

Deluzio said kids get left behind their peers when their parents can’t keep up with the rising costs.

“The big reason for that is that youth sports are getting swallowed up by private equity vulture investors that are seeing dollar signs instead of community,” he said.

Bryan Finnerty, founder and CEO of a 220,000-square-foot sports center in Canton, Michigan, and founder of a Michigan venture capital firm, said in written testimony submitted to Congress that his sports center wouldn’t exist without private investment.

Done right, Finnerty said, such investment can strengthen communities, expand access and create more sports opportunities for children.

But “when short-term financial goals become more important than the children and families those organizations exist to serve, it is appropriate to ask difficult questions,” he said.

‘Well worth it’

Tiffany Whitlow’s son David found the kind of success many sports parents dream of for their kids.

He started playing sports at age 3, eventually specializing in soccer and playing on travel teams. Whitlow estimates the family spent a few thousand dollars a year on sports when he was younger, a number that surpassed $10,000 per year as he grew older and approached $20,000 shortly before he graduated.

During David’s senior year of high school, the school’s football coach came to a soccer practice looking for a kicker. David volunteered. His family invested in extra coaching, gym memberships and training to get him ready to play.

Now he’s a kicker on the football team for Alabama A&M University, a Division I school.

Whitlow said her family’s investment was “well worth it.” She plans to do the same for her younger son, who is 3 and just started tee ball.

“Me and my husband both believe you learn the core competencies for life through sports,” she said. “You learn how to be on time, you learn how to work on a team. Those kinds of things really prepare you to be the best kind of human and adult you can be.”

Hamby said her daughter loves cheer — and she’s good at it. Participating has given her confidence and helped her make close friends, gifts that are hard to measure in dollars.

“It’s finding something that they can be proud of and I love that for her,” Hamby said. “I want her to feel like she’s exceptionally good at something.

“For me, those are good things that you don’t see, but I’m paying for that, too. It comes with the sport.”

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.

An attendee asked Ramaswamy whether it was true he wanted to shut some schools, according to reporting by WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau. He denied it repeatedly, saying his target was duplicated academic programs rather than the institutions themselves.

“I think that we have too many duplicative programs in our universities,” Ramaswamy said. “When I look at a region, I want to look at Ohio in terms of regions like regional governance; I want every region to have the best higher education institutions available for people in that region. But not every university needs to offer every program.”

He said he wants Ohio to have the country’s best nursing, computer science, civil engineering and humanities programs. “They just don’t have to be under the same exact roof in the same college,” he said.

What he said in March and April

The reversal is measurable against Ramaswamy’s own record over the spring.

In a video posted to his Threads account on March 13, Ramaswamy was answering a question about whether Ohio’s income tax could be eliminated when he turned to higher education.

“Look at the number of universities in our state. I love universities in Ohio. I want us to have the best universities. But we have too many of them. They need to be consolidated,” he said in the video, according to the Statehouse News Bureau. “And when you consolidate them, they can actually be centers of excellence who [are] actually the best in their respective domains instead of trying to create replicas and clones of one another throughout the state.”

Two weeks later, on March 27, he published an opinion column on his campaign site and in the Columbus Dispatch and other Gannett papers. The column proposed that state-funded universities with lower enrollment become specialized “centers of excellence,” and said his first budget would give the chancellor of higher education authority to review publicly funded institutions.

“It will identify where missions overlap, where enrollment collapse has made independence untenable, and where administrative functions can be unified without harming students,” Ramaswamy wrote, according to the Statehouse News Bureau’s account of the column. “The chancellor will then return to the General Assembly with a concrete plan on a fixed timeline.”

The column named Cleveland State University, the University of Akron, Kent State University and Central State University as institutions facing problems.

In April, at a Turning Point USA event at Ohio State University, a student asked Ramaswamy about the idea. “I don’t think you should be funding subpar universities,” he answered.

Asked in Strongsville about the column, Ramaswamy said the universities he named were “examples of where tuition was going up.”

“It’s a big leap from that to say if you should shut down a university,” he said. “But are there individual programs that we might say, ‘OK, this one belongs to this university and this one belongs to this university within a given region — that I do favor.”

Republicans pushed back first

The first significant objections came from inside Ramaswamy’s own party.

Gov. Mike DeWine, whom Ramaswamy is running to succeed, told reporters on March 30 that he supported some of the ideas in the column but not consolidation.

“I’m not in favor of consolidating our colleges or doing away with any of our 14 public universities,” DeWine said. “It’s important to have them all over the state so frankly, people who can’t afford to live at the college and pay room and board, they can commute. We still have commuters.”

State Sen. Jerry Cirino, a Kirtland Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and has led the legislature’s higher education overhaul, was blunter when WEWS asked him about it in late June.

“I don’t know how much he knows about how higher ed works in the state of Ohio,” Cirino said.

Cirino said he would welcome a conversation with Ramaswamy and that consolidation could be discussed — but for branch campuses rather than main campuses. He said he has favored eliminating majors with low enrollment, and that a genuine consolidation plan, as opposed to defunding institutions labeled subpar, would be received differently.

Two university presidents also objected. Cleveland State President Laura Bloomberg said in April that consolidation should not be the only option on the table.

“We need to honor the identity of our public universities, which were formed for specific purposes to meet the needs of their region,” Bloomberg said. “All options need to be discussed — there are many ways to think about programs and strategic partnerships that are far short of consolidation and achieve the goals of being more nimble, efficient institutions of higher education.”

Kent State President Todd Diacon responded with a written defense of the state’s public campuses. “In the decade of the 1960s, we built 60 new buildings. Those buildings were filled with the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation, ready to build Ohio’s future,” Diacon wrote in part. “This was not a waste. This was Ohio investing in itself.”

The tax connection

Ramaswamy first raised university consolidation while discussing his plan to eliminate Ohio’s personal income tax, and his opponents have tied the two together ever since.

David Pepper, the running mate of Democratic nominee Amy Acton, said the proposal shows how far Ramaswamy is from the everyday cost calculations Ohio families make.

“A tax break that helps everyone at the top, and students, particularly in poor communities, are told by Vivek Ramaswamy, ‘Get in the car, go pay room and board hundreds of miles away, because I’m gonna deprive you of the local opportunity you have to get a degree,’” Pepper said.

The income tax raises roughly $10 billion a year, about a quarter of Ohio’s operating budget, and helps fund K–12 schools, Medicaid, public universities, prisons and services for seniors, veterans and people with disabilities. TiffinOhio.net has previously reported on analyses projecting that eliminating the tax would open a $9.8 billion annual budget gap and that replacing that revenue through property taxes would require an increase of roughly 20% statewide. Ramaswamy has argued the gap can be closed through economic growth and spending discipline rather than service cuts.

What it means locally

Seneca County’s two universities, Heidelberg University and Tiffin University, are private institutions and sit outside the state system Ramaswamy has been describing. The closest public campus is Terra State Community College in Fremont.

Terra State has been under state fiscal watch since March 23, when the Ohio Department of Higher Education applied the designation following a March 17 recommendation from the state auditor. The college has up to three years to resolve the problems and must submit a financial recovery plan to the state. It has had two interim presidents since April; Chad Breeden took over on Monday.

Ramaswamy has not named Terra State in any of his public comments on higher education, and community colleges were not part of his column. But the debate he opened — over what the state owes public institutions that are struggling financially — now runs directly through Sandusky County.

DeWine’s objection turned on the same point. Students who cannot afford room and board depend on a campus close enough to drive to. In this part of northwest Ohio, that is a short list.

Ramaswamy faces Acton in the general election on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Officers with the Fostoria Police Department responded at approximately 10:26 p.m. July 20 to a report of a person struck by a train in the 400 block of South Town Street, in the Seneca County portion of the city, according to a written release from Police Chief Gabe Wedge.

Officers found the juvenile conscious and alert, Wedge said. He was taken to Fostoria Community Hospital for further treatment.

Witnesses told police the boy and another person, also a juvenile, ran around the lowered crossing gates on foot in an attempt to beat the train, according to the release. The second juvenile was not injured.

Wedge said no further information was available. Neither juvenile was identified.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Usually there was a balance to it, but lately, especially with one side of the aisle deciding it no longer was going to listen to science or experts in their fields, we’ve been seeing a lot more mindless cutting of programs.

Elon Musk famously brought a chain saw on stage to a CPAC event in early 2025 to showcase how haphazardly he was planning to make cuts to government spending while he was in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, a program that made so many unnecessary cuts to programs and government jobs that a significant amount of people needed to be rehired when they were done.

When people make cuts to programs without asking why those programs exist, there are consequences. We’re experiencing one of those consequences right now with the cyclospora outbreak.

Cyclospora is a microscopic, single-celled parasite that infects the small intestine, causing an intestinal illness called cyclosporiasis. It is primarily transmitted by consuming food or drinking water contaminated with infected feces. It frequently causes watery, explosive diarrhea, bloating and fatigue.

The parasite often contaminates fresh fruits and vegetables — such as salad greens, cilantro and berries — through tainted irrigation water or inadequate hygiene during handling.

On Friday, investigators announced that epidemiological and traceback data linked a substantial outbreak cluster to shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico, and it then suspiciously retracted the claim. The alleged contaminated product was served at Taco Bell locations across five states, with Ohio being one of them along with Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia.

At the time I’m writing this, federal health officials have identified 1,644 cases of cyclosporiasis and nearly 100 people have been hospitalized. It’s also likely much worse than that because CDC reporting is delayed badly (Michigan alone has announced over 5,000 cases).

So how did things get so bad?

Usually, when there is an issue with a food-borne illness, the government is on top of it. Top scientists and other experts in their fields are able to investigate the issue quickly, find what the infected people had in common, then trace everything back to a likely source. That didn’t happen for weeks with this cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Why?

It all boils down to unnecessary cuts.

The Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria at the CDC, which does most of the tracing of cyclospora outbreaks, was funded largely by USAID. USAID was established by President John F. Kennedy and provided humanitarian relief and civilian foreign aid globally, but it was one of the first things Musk chopped when he was in charge of DOGE. One team of scientists at the CDC that was funded by USAID originally had 11 members and its program head quit after staffing was cut to just three.

Additionally, the CDC scaled back funding for a federal-state surveillance program for foodborne pathogens called FoodNet a year ago on July 1, 2025. It made the reporting of illnesses like listeria and cyclospora optional. At the time, a representative from Trump’s administration said the Department of Health and Human Services was focusing on more dangerous diseases like salmonella.

This is what happens when unnecessary cuts are made. To make the government “more efficient,” it stopped taking less-deadly diseases as seriously and now there is a massive outbreak of foodborne illness that is hitting us at home.

You’d think they would have learned their lesson because this isn’t the first time slashing funding for science has backfired on this administration.

DOGE also cut about $15 million of federal funding for the government’s screwworm monitoring program in central America as part of its slashing of USAID. The government had a program in Panama that released sterile screwworm larvae into the wild to attempt to halt the northern spread of screwworm, which causes devastation to cattle herds.

Earlier this summer, screwworm was discovered in the United States for the first time since it had been declared eradicated in the 1960s. If you thought beef was expensive before, just wait. The Trump administration now is preparing to spend $1.3 billion to combat the screw worm outbreak.

Save $15 million to spend $1.3 billion. How efficient.

This isn’t even the first disease outbreak directly traced to a poor Trump administration policy.

This past April, Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth, playing to a growing anti-vaccine base of voters, issued a memo making the annual influenza vaccine voluntary for military personnel.

Less than two months later, a major flu outbreak occurred at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, racing through the basic military training wing where new recruits sleep in bunk beds and share meals at large communal tables.

Nearly 300 troops got sick and at least one died.

At the time of the outbreak, only 40% of the recruits had opted to take the vaccine due to the change in policy. The Air Force has since rescinded the policy, requiring all recruits get their flu shots.

Yet again, political decisions were made that ignored science and they backfired.

How much more can we take? At some point, people need to remember that some policies and programs exist for a reason.

The unintended consequences of these decisions have been explosive in 2026 — and not just in the bathroom.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Homan, who President Donald Trump has tasked with leading his mass deportation campaign, said in a Sunday interview on Fox News that ICE’s acting director has instructed officers to wear a body camera “whenever possible” during vehicle stops. 

This month, two immigrants — 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero and 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — were shot and killed by ICE agents who stopped their vehicles. Neither man was an initial enforcement target, the Department of Homeland Security said.

During Sunday’s Fox and Friends Weekend program, Homan said he supported body cameras because “they exonerate more law enforcement than they convict.” 

“I want officers to wear body cameras because I want the American people to see what the officers saw when they took that action,” Homan said. 

Federal immigration officers have shot 22 people and killed six, including three U.S. citizens, during the second Trump administration. Most shootings have stemmed from traffic stops, which Homan said officers were continuing. 

After the back-to-back shootings of Salgado Araujo in Texas and Guerrero in Maine, DHS instructed agents to pause vehicle stops, but Trump quickly reversed those plans. 

Congressional standstill

Homan blamed Democrats for the reason immigration agents don’t have body cameras, pointing to the weeks-long shutdown of DHS. He also accused traffic stops of becoming more dangerous because of Democrats criticizing ICE.

“They’re more dangerous now than ever because Democratic members of Congress, Democratic mayors and governors have preached for the past year ‘ICE isn’t a real law enforcement agency. ICE has no authority. Resist,’” he said. 

Democrats refused to approve funding for DHS unless restraints were placed on ICE and Border Patrol officers, such as the requirement for body cameras, after two U.S. citizens were killed by federal immigration officers in Minnesota in January. 

Congressional Republicans last year used a special legislative maneuver to allocate roughly $175 billion to DHS for immigration enforcement, detainment and deportations, without needing Democratic support. 

GOP lawmakers used the same move following the shutdown this year to fund $75 billion for ICE and Border Patrol until September of 2029.

In a separate interview, on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, Homan again gave his support for body cameras on ICE officers and blamed Democrats for a lack of body cameras. 

“I think body cameras are the way to go,” he said. 

After the two killings in Minnesota in January, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said DHS would be issuing body cameras to immigration officers. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Over the past few weeks, several groups of lawmakers have written public comment letters to Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought expressing strong opposition to the new draft rule, which would give political appointees the power to decide what institutions receive grant funding, among other revisions. 

A summary of the rule cites the Biden administration as to why it is needed. “Federal awards were often used during those years to promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public,” it says, pointing to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, policies.

Democrats said the proposal exceeds the office’s authority, will make it harder for grant recipients to carry out funding priorities established by Congress and would turn federal grants into a tool for President Donald Trump to “unilaterally advance his partisan agenda and punish political rivals.” 

The draft rule would allow Trump to “terminate or suspend any grant at any time for any reason and without any notice,” they said.

“Ultimately, these changes will make it harder for grant recipients to apply for and manage federal funds – undermining public safety, public health, economic competitiveness, and the government’s ability to address rising costs,” wrote Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and the entire Senate Democratic Caucus in their July 1 letter to Vought. 

Maryland Democrats in Congress and members of the Congressional Community Safety Caucus, led by Reps. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, LaMonica McIver of New Jersey and Gabe Amo of Rhode Island, also wrote letters urging OMB to rescind its proposed new rule. 

Hundreds of billions in funds affected

The more than 100-page draft rule, published in collaboration with 41 other federal grant-making agencies on May 29 and titled “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance,” would change the framework used to evaluate grant applications as well as guidelines for cost sharing.

It would potentially affect hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding at universities, nonprofit organizations and other U.S. institutions, according to SciLine, an independent nonprofit service for journalists and scientists run out of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Under the proposed rule, federal grants could not be used to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” DEI initiatives. 

Awards would also in many cases have to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities,” and agencies would be allowed to cancel funding that is “not effective at achieving program goals or Federal agency priorities” or “no longer in the Federal Government’s interest.” 

“The overarching goal of OMB’s proposed revisions is to improve transparency, accountability, and oversight for how Federal taxpayer dollars are used in the context of Federal grantmaking,” according to the executive summary of the rule.

OMB officials say they could implement the new draft rule as early as Oct. 1. 

Community violence intervention programs 

During the public comment period for the draft rule, which ran from May 29 to July 13, congressional Democrats slammed its vague language and the implications it holds for many institutions that rely on federal funds. 

Maryland’s senators and Democratic representatives in their July 10 letter to Vought denounced the rule for changing a process traditionally based on merit. “The federal grantmaking process includes essential, non-political guardrails that this rule seeks to eviscerate,” they wrote.

They also said the proposed rule contains a slew of new undefined standards for grants, including that they must adhere to “gold standard science” and cannot reflect “anti-American values,” that recipients may not be able to understand or comply with. 

Maryland institutions, often known as hubs for scientific research and innovation, have been hit hard by National Institutes of Health funding cuts and mass federal layoffs since Trump began his second term in 2025. Local governments and schools that receive federal funds have also taken blows, as has the state’s overall economy. 

In their July 13 letter, members of the Congressional Community Safety Caucus voiced concerns over how the draft rule could specifically affect community violence intervention programs. 

Community violence intervention programs, local efforts that have been linked to drops in violent crime rates in cities across the country, rely on federal grants for “state and local government investments, hospital partnerships, philanthropy, and research support,” according to the lawmakers’ letter.

The new draft rule, they wrote, would jeopardize the operation of these programs by allowing Trump administration officials to “withhold, suspend, or terminate grants, or change terms and conditions mid-implementation, forcing grantees to operate in a tumultuous environment.” 

The administration has already made cuts to parts of the Office of Justice Programs, further limiting the funds available to community violence intervention programs.

Other responses 

Though opposition to the proposed rule is mainly coming from Democratic lawmakers, some bipartisan criticism regarding the rule’s broad scope and fast timeline exists. 

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, on July 6 asked Vought to extend the proposal’s public comment period at least 90 days and “withdraw portions of the rule that would potentially harm small and rural communities and scientific and biomedical research.”

“While I agree these principles should guide the administration and oversight of Federal funds, the rule would impose new, burdensome requirements on award recipients … and conflict with Congress’ control over the federal funding process,” she wrote.  

OMB did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment on lawmaker pushback to the proposed rule. But Vought took to social media last month to express his view of the opposition. 

“The freakout by those on the Left subsidized by taxpayer funds over OMB’s update of the regulation governing federal grant making tells you how important it is to keep the bureaucracies from leaking out spending that is woke, wasteful, and contra to the policies of the Trump Administration thru the NGOs,” he wrote. 

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. Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state convened the former officials, along with advocates and educators, at a virtual press conference to blast those sweeping moves, which are part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to dismantle the 46-year-old Education Department. 

Murray rebuked the transfers as “outrageous” and “completely unacceptable,” noting that while she is fighting “tooth and nail” against any effort to dismantle the agency, she is “especially concerned about what this could mean for all students, especially students with disabilities.” 

The agency in June said the Department of Health and Human Services will administer programs under Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, while civil rights enforcement under its Office for Civil Rights will be transferred to the Department of Justice. 

The Education Department had announced 10 earlier interagency agreements, or IAAs, with HHS, Labor, Interior, State and Treasury, which transfer several of Education’s responsibilities to those agencies.

The department has said it “will continue to perform all statutorily required duties and responsibilities” involving special education programs and civil rights enforcement.

OSERS is responsible for administering the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which guarantees a free public education for students with disabilities. The umbrella unit OSERS includes the Office of the Assistant Secretary, Office of Special Education Programs and the Rehabilitation Services Administration. 

The civil rights office is tasked with investigating complaints from students and families. 

‘Learners, not patients’

Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc of the United States, an advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said that the transfers “would split apart the offices responsible for making disability rights real in schools, leaving families chasing answers across the federal government instead of getting accountability from one education agency.” 

Neas was the deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary at OSERS during the Biden administration. 

“The stakes have never been higher,” she said. “If we allow the Department of Education to be dismantled, we not only undo decades of progress, we also risk abandoning the promise that every child deserves a chance to try and to succeed.” 

Catherine Lhamon, executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law said the “new interagency agreement between the Department of Education and the Department of Justice is what someone would create if the person were designing a system to fail.” 

Lhamon served as assistant secretary for civil rights during the Obama and Biden administrations. 

“The principal harm of this new agreement is that it guarantees lengthier continued silence from the federal government on the classic kinds of discrimination cases families experience,” Lhamon said. Examples include restraining or secluding students, she said.

It raises “the core question (of) whether students with disabilities have the free appropriate public education to which the law entitles them,” Lhamon added.

Stephanie Smith Lee, co-director of policy and advocacy at National Down Syndrome Congress, pointed out that “IDEA is an education and civil rights law, not a healthcare program.” 

“Students with disabilities are learners, not patients,” added Lee, who served as director of the Office of Special Education Programs under the George W. Bush administration. 

“Moving special education and vocational rehabilitation to the Department of Health and Human Services would separate them from the rest of federal education policy and weaken the expertise and coordinated oversight that students, families and states depend on,” she said. 

Savannah Newhouse, a spokesperson for the Education Department, dismissed the criticism, saying in a statement to States Newsroom that Murray and the former officials were part of a failing status quo. 

“As Senator Murray is well aware, the Department of Education’s interagency partnerships do not alter the Trump Administration’s dedication to students with disabilities and federal civil rights laws,” she wrote. “These agreements simply ensure that well-positioned agencies can support the workload, pool their expertise, and ultimately strengthen protections for students.” 

US House bills ‘dead’ in Senate  

Meanwhile, earlier in July the House Committee on Education and Workforce advanced a package of 10 bills permanently transferring several of Education’s functions to other departments and largely reflecting many of the earlier IAAs. 

Notably, that package does not include any efforts to transfer Education’s responsibilities regarding special education programs and civil rights enforcement to other agencies. 

“As long as this former preschool teacher is a United States senator, every one of those bills is dead on arrival,” Murray said. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Associate Judge Todd E. Edelman warned during a status hearing in the case against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn that the government may be “operating at its own peril” if it does not preserve the pool for the defense attorneys and their expert to examine and test. 

Edelman questioned why the Trump administration couldn’t “maintain the status quo” for the rest of the week to ensure access to the evidence doesn’t become an “issue in this trial.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Reddington said the Interior Department was in the middle of remedial work on the Reflecting Pool after draining it. 

Reddington said prosecutors “certainly asked them to hold the site as a whole,” but added he doesn’t have control over whether they do. 

Edelman then encouraged the “government to not do anything further” on the Reflecting Pool before denying without prejudice Hearn’s defense team’s motion to dismiss the case. He said the effort was “entirely premature” but didn’t prevent the lawyers’ from filing a different motion to dismiss in the future. 

Mary Dohrmann, a principal at Washington Litigation Group and one of Hearn’s lawyers, wrote in the motion to dismiss the “Constitution simply does not permit the government to charge a man with destroying an object, retain exclusive custody of that object, and then drain, disturb, and alter the object before the defense may examine it, despite a written demand for its preservation.”

“And yet that is what has happened here,” Dohrmann added. “The government’s failure to preserve this evidence, in the face of an express demand no less, has destroyed Mr. Hearn’s ability to collect evidence material to his defense on multiple elements of the charged offense. Dismissal is the only appropriate remedy in view of the government’s actions.”

Edelman scheduled a readiness hearing for Sept. 11 and set the trial to begin on Sept. 28. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trump’s three separate proclamations to impose steep tariffs on items like hockey sticks, wine and cement, came just days after he threatened to slap more tariffs on Canada as smoke from raging wildfires in Ontario blanketed much of the northeastern U.S. through the weekend. But a senior administration official denied the new tariffs were in response to the smoke.

“These are not the so-called wildfire tariffs. The president has asked for options on that, and options are being shared with him. These tariffs are in response to discriminatory treatment by Canada against U.S. products,” the senior administration official said on a call with reporters Monday afternoon.

The tariffs will go into effect Aug. 19.

Trump appeared alongside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney Sunday at the FIFA World Cup trophy ceremony in East Rutherford, New Jersey, but the two leaders did not discuss White House plans for the new tariffs, according to the senior administration official.

Trump triggered the new tariffs under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a Depression-era provision that authorizes the president to impose duties up to 50% of a product’s value in response to discrimination against U.S. commerce. The provision has been long forgotten since the 1940s and has never been enforced, experts say. 

“To our knowledge, Section 338 has not been used for this purpose before,” the senior administration official told reporters. “It’s been on the books for a long time. In our view, the terms are clear: It gives the president this authority in situations where a country discriminates against the United States relative to the treatment given (to) a third country.”

Trump’s unprecedented sweeping tariffs on global goods, including from Canada, imposed in April 2025 under the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA, were found illegal and overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in February.

The administration was ordered by the U.S. Court of International Trade to refund roughly $166 billion in duties paid by importers under the IEEPA tariffs.

Since the Supreme Court’s major blow to Trump’s trade agenda, the White House has sought other routes to impose tariffs. Almost immediately after the court’s decision, Trump announced a temporary base 10% tariff on all imports under section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. Those tariffs are now being litigated in trade court.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

That’s the conclusion of a study of Cincinnati that was made public last week.

The study by the University of Notre Dame’s Student Policy Network in conjunction with the Center for Land Economics used data from the Hamilton County Auditor’s office to simulate the effects of a specific kind of “land-value tax.” 

It would tax land at four times the rate of the buildings and other improvements on it. Currently, valuations of land and improvements are added together and taxed.

The goal of a land-value tax is to create a financial incentive to develop unused or underused land in otherwise developed neighborhoods. The tax mix would be different, but it would provide the city with the same revenue it’s getting currently.

Most Ohio economists appear to think it’s a good idea.

Ohio state Sen. Louis Blessing III, R-Colerain Township, is proposing a constitutional amendment that would allow Ohio communities to opt into a version of a land-value tax.

The researchers found that Cincinnati has more than $1.87 billion in vacant or underdeveloped land, and they found some striking incongruities.

For example, a low-income apartment building in the hip Over the Rhine neighborhood is taxed at 22 times the rate of the parking lot next door.

“When we went parcel by parcel through Cincinnati’s assessor data, the pattern was impossible to miss,” Curtis Brashaw, co-leader of the student team, said in a written statement accompanying the report. “A downtown lot worth millions can pay less tax per square foot than the apartment building next to it.”

The principle behind a land-value tax is straightforward. Taxing land at a greater rate than improvements makes development more financially attractive. And particularly in urban areas, that discourages a gap-toothed landscape in which prime land is underused. 

“When a property owner chooses to improve their land, whether by constructing a new apartment building or renovating a deteriorating structure, the tax bill rises as a direct result,” the report said. “In this way, the tax code treats investment as a liability rather than an asset, discouraging development. Over time, this creates a financial disincentive for development that contributes directly to vacant lots, surface parking, and urban blight. We tax the wrong thing.”

Changing the tax mix would create winners and losers.

Under the student group’s simulation, median taxes on vacant land would increase 126%. And median retail and commercial property taxes would increase 39% — largely because land with that zoning and in those locations is valuable.

On the other side of the coin, homeowners and apartment dwellers would benefit. The median single-family home would see a 10% drop in property taxes, while taxes on multi-family units would decrease more than 16%.

The study also found that the biggest benefits flow to those who need them most.

“The burden shifts progressively,” it said. “The lowest-income neighborhoods see median cuts near 17% and middle-income neighborhoods 10% to 11%, while only the highest-income quintile sees a median increase of about 11%.”

In places where a land-value tax has been implemented, there’s some evidence that it helped the overall economy. For example, Allentown, Pa., implemented such a scheme in 1996. 

Tax cuts flowed to nearly 75% of properties and building permits increased by 32%, the Strong Towns Archive quoted former U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., as saying. The Notre Dame students’ report said that new development in Allentown far outstripped that in nearby communities such as Bethlehem. 

Blessing, the Ohio state senator promoting a land-value tax option, said the new report helps prove his case that it’s a smart idea.

“This is exactly the kind of evidence Ohioans deserve as we look for real answers on property taxes,” the report quoted Blessing as saying. “This amendment doesn’t impose anything on anyone. It simply gives communities the option to stop penalizing the families and businesses who improve their property. This report shows Cincinnati what that choice could look like, and I believe Ohio’s voters should be the ones to make it.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The children range in age from 18 months to 18 years and were allegedly found in a roughly 12-foot by 12-foot room inside a Hamden house when law enforcement conducted a search warrant for a parallel investigation on June 30. 

The $1 million is going into a special fund that is being set up for Vinton County for the 16 children, said Joel Potts, the chief government and external affairs officer at the Ohio Department of Children and Youth. 

“These resources are specifically for this emergent need,” he said during a recent Controlling Board meeting. 

“We know that many of them will be needing therapeutic foster care for quite some time to come. That is $150 a day to $250 a day on average per child. So those costs alone would bankrupt the county when you see them doubling the number of cases.” 

Potts said he has never seen anything like this before in his 40 year career. 

“A child off the radar is terrible enough,” he said. 

“Sixteen kids in one family in one household to be off the radar is something that I’ve just not seen.” 

Livestock was kept in better conditions than the children, Vinton County Sheriff Ryan Cain said during a press conference earlier this month. 

“Extremely high presence, I’m sure, of bacterial and human feces,” he said. “It was just a disgusting scene.” 

Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson said it’s something we’re not used to seeing in America. 

“It really looked third-world,” he said. “I think if they would have waited another 24 hours, there was a very high probability that we’d be dealing with a death or multiple deaths of these children.” 

The children were not enrolled in school, authorities said, adding that some of the children can’t speak and that the 18-year-old can’t spell their name. 

“It was terrible,” Wilson said. “They really looked almost like feral animals … so when we’re talking reading and writing and education, we’re talking a whole ‘nother level of expectations here.”

Ohio state Sen. Kyle Koehler, R-Springfield, asked if $1 million is enough money to help the 16 children. 

“What happens when the youngest of the children are in their teens and things start coming forth that we didn’t expect?” 

Potts stressed the $1 million is for the children’s immediate needs.  

“Over the next several months we are going to have a much better sense of what these particular children are dealing with, and what their long-term needs are going to be,” he said. 

Ongoing costs will be necessary, Potts said. 

“This is unprecedented,” he said. “We’ve seen a county agency literally double the number of kids in temporary custody overnight.”

Vinton County is Ohio’s least populated county with about 12,600 people.

All of the children are currently in foster care and the hope is the children will get adopted, Potts said. 

“As horrendous as these types of cases are, it does give us that opportunity to ask those hard questions, and it’s time for us to ask those hard questions,” he said. 

“You can’t look at something like this and not think that we need to do more.”

During the state budget process last year, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine originally proposed an additional $83 million to Ohio counties for child protective services, but lawmakers did not fully fund the request in the last year’s budget, said Ohio state Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, D-Westlake.

“I do know that this was a very large discussion in our state budget that we heard from county officials across the state about the dire needs of protective services and not having enough money,” Sweeney said.  

Ohio state Sen. George Lang, R-Butler County, said he spent his early years in foster care. 

“I do believe this is one of those rare exceptions where we need to err on the side of helping rather than err on the side of fiscal prudence,” he said. 

Ohio state Rep. Mark Johnson, R-Chillicothe, was in Hamden over the weekend and saw the house is on a dead-end road with only one other house at the end of the road. 

“No neighbor, the hardware store guy, the fire department had never visibly seen a child here,” he said. “It’s rather bizarre, to say the least.”

Making sure the children are taken care of is the top priority, Wilson said. 

“We’ve got to ensure the kids are safe,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure they’re placed in good, solid therapeutic placements. And we have to hold accountable the people who are looking to do this to their own family.”

Gary Siders Sr., 73, Catherine Siders, 67, Gary Siders Jr., 36, and Elizabeth Siders, 33, are each facing 16 counts of felony endangering children in Vinton County Common Pleas Court. They have all pleaded not guilty.

A Vinton County judge signed a gag order on July 14 after Gary Siders Jr.’s attorney filed a motion for the order. 

855-BCI-OHIO (855-224-6446) is the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation tip line. 

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.

Ohio Senate Bill 386 and its House companion, the bipartisan Medicaid Savings Act, would move Ohio away from the managed care system that currently serves roughly three million Medicaid enrollees and toward an administrative services model, similar to one Connecticut adopted years ago.

The sponsors argue it could save the state hundreds of millions of dollars a year by cutting out what they call the “middleman.”

They’re not wrong that Ohio’s managed care program has room for improvement and there may well be room for direct state/provider partnerships, but scrapping it altogether, in this particular moment, would be a mistake. 

This debate isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening just as Ohio finalized a new two-year state budget ahead of the July 1 constitutional deadline, and just as federal Medicaid cuts signed into law last year begin working their way through state budgets, with Ohio expected to lose tens of billions of dollars in federal Medicaid funding over the next decade and hundreds of thousands of Ohioans expected to lose coverage.

At its core, managed care works like a fixed payment plan for a state’s health care spending.

Instead of absorbing the seasonal swings and unpredictable spikes of a fee-for-service system, Ohio pays managed care plans a set amount per member, per month, and the plans largely absorb the risk of what happens after that.

In a time when the state’s fiscal footing feels shakier than usual, that kind of predictability isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a hedge against the very volatility Ohio is trying to manage.

And even more importantly, Ohio’s managed care contracts create real incentives to measurably improve the population’s health while decreasing costly inefficient care — a real boon to the people covered by Medicaid and to Ohio’s taxpayers.

Ohio requires its Medicaid health plans to share financial rewards with providers that deliver high quality care while lowering costs, and health plans tout specific innovative provider partnerships as selling points when bidding on state contracts. 

Those commitments should be treated as exactly that — commitments, not marketing copy.

Ensuring that plans follow through on the value-based partnerships and other population health solutions in their winning bids isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s central to whether managed care delivers on its promise.

When done right, managed care is one of the few tools Ohio has that actually aligns incentives, improves outcomes, and creates budget stability for the people who need it most.

The transparency critique is fair — but there is a fix

One of the strongest arguments for the Medicaid Savings Act is that the state has too little visibility into how managed care dollars are actually spent.

That’s a legitimate frustration, and I saw it firsthand when managed care plans’ pharmacy benefit managers failed to serve the public interest and hid highly questionable business practices behind “proprietary” labels. 

But Ohio’s General Assembly and the Department of Medicaid have spent the last seven years building tools to fix exactly that problem, including ensuring state legislature’s access to plan-level eligibility, billing, and spending data.

ODM also holds the health plans accountable to the highly detailed terms of their contracts and the promises they made when bidding to secure the work.

Better transparency is achievable through better oversight. It doesn’t require walking away from a model that, when done right, does something a Connecticut-style administrative services organization wouldn’t: put plans’ own money on the line for outcomes.

What Ohio would actually lose

Ohio’s Next Generation Medicaid and MyCare managed care programs tie substantial financial incentives to outcomes: increasing preventive screenings that save lives, delivering blood pressure and diabetes management that help people feel better while lowering costs, and providing care coordination for people with serious mental illness and complex chronic conditions.

Ohio’s MyCare program, for example, fully integrates Medicare and Medicaid benefit access and financing for dually eligible members, closing a gap where a bifurcated system creates fragmentation across Medicare and Medicaid and removing incentives to shift costs between programs rather than actually reduce them.

MyCare’s coordination greatly improves member experience and streamlines access to needed care while reducing administrative burden for the state, for members, and for the care teams advocating on their behalf.

As federal rules tighten Medicaid eligibility and coverage, that kind of integration becomes more valuable, not less.

In Connecticut, while the administrative costs have been reduced relative to managed care, the state is still facing high costs with individuals using home and community-based services — a similar population to the Ohioans served through MyCare.

Ohio has already addressed this gap with this mature integrated program to serve these exact members — why cut off our nose to spite our face? 

Reform the model. Don’t demolish it.

None of this means the status quo is good enough.

Legitimate questions remain about whether managed care plans are saving money on the right things and the state should keep pushing for more transparency and for plans to create more downside risk among the value-based providers, so everyone in the chain has real skin in the game. 

With over half of the state’s budget dedicated to Medicaid, member advocates and policy experts alike should continually push for systems that deliver better results at a lower cost, and alternative delivery systems, including the ASO model, may emerge as a viable solution for certain populations in certain circumstances.

But lawmakers should be honest that the Medicaid Savings Act is a big bet — one being made at the exact moment Ohio can least afford budget uncertainty.

Before trading a system built around aligned incentives and shared risk for one built around administrative efficiency alone, the state should make sure it isn’t solving a transparency problem by giving up the very structure that gets results for the Ohioans who need them most.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The restaurant, bar and event space at the same location will stay open.

“After much thought and consideration, we have made the difficult decision that the 2026 season will be the final season for the golf course at The Front 9,” the family said in a written statement. “The golf course is currently open, and we plan to finish the 2026 season as scheduled. Current leagues, members and scheduled golf activities will continue throughout the remainder of the season.”

The statement was direct about the scope of the decision: “We want it to be very clear: The Front 9 restaurant, bar and event space are staying open. This decision affects the golf course only.”

The owners attributed the closure to the economics of running a nine-hole course.

“While the golf course has a special history, continuing to operate and maintain it is no longer financially sustainable,” the statement said. “We have worked hard to keep the course going, but operating as a 9-hole-only course has made it difficult to generate the level of revenue needed to keep up with the rising costs, staffing, equipment, maintenance and course conditions our golfers deserve.”

The family said it has hired a real estate agent to begin marketing the golf acreage, and that no sale is pending.

“At this time, there is no pending sale, no selected buyer and no finalized plan for how the land will be used,” the statement said.

The property sits at 6730 N. Township Road 69 in Liberty Township, in the Old Fort Local School District, with a Kansas mailing address. Seneca County Auditor records list the parcel at 76.864 acres, owned by The Front Nine LLC and appraised at $367,010 for 2025. The parcel is classified commercial and coded as a golf course. It is not enrolled in the state’s Current Agricultural Use Value program, which reduces taxes on qualifying farmland and can trigger repayment when land converts to another use.

Most of the acreage is already carried on the county’s books as open ground. Auditor records break the parcel into about 55 acres of undeveloped or residual land, roughly 17 acres of woodland and 2 acres of primary site, along with smaller wetland and right-of-way areas.

The course has changed hands twice in the past decade. Auditor transfer records show First Federal Bank took the property from Nature Trails Inc. by sheriff’s deed in July 2018, in a transaction covering four properties. The Front Nine LLC bought this parcel from the bank that December for $225,500. The company was registered with the Ohio Secretary of State in November 2018, weeks before the purchase closed.

On its website, the business says the owners bought the clubhouse and front nine at auction in 2018, after the former Nature Trails course had sat vacant for nearly two years, and opened in July 2019. The site is signed by Brian and Tracie Eakin. A 2019 report in The Advertiser-Tribune identified Tracie Eakin and Christine Spencer, sisters, as co-owners.

The owners had previously described losing greens to severe weather. “As a nine-hole course, the loss of multiple greens has an outsized impact,” the business wrote on its website. “Unlike an eighteen-hole facility, where play can sometimes be redirected, every green here matters.”

The family asked in its announcement that questions be directed away from employees.

“At this time, our staff and family do not have additional details beyond what is shared here, and we ask that they not be put in the position of answering questions they may not have answers to,” the statement said. “Confirmed updates will be shared when they become available.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Three months later, that investor wrote his first checks to Husted’s federal campaign — $507,000 of them, all on the same day.

Federal Election Commission records show Larry Connor, founder of the Miamisburg-based Connor Group, gave $250,000 to Team Husted, the senator’s joint fundraising committee, and $250,000 to Ohio Flyer PAC, an independent-expenditure super PAC that has spent more than $1.6 million against Democrat Sherrod Brown, on Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025. He gave another $7,000 directly to Husted for Senate the same day.

Those were the largest political contributions of Connor’s life, and the first federal money he had ever given Husted — a politician whose calendars show him meeting with Connor about school plans six years earlier.

Congress did not fund the school. The Cincinnati project appears nowhere in the earmark table attached to the fiscal 2026 spending package that became law on Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026. Eight other projects Husted requested did make it in, worth $27.4 million to Ohio — an airport in Youngstown, a road in Wooster, a community college in Columbus, parks in Chillicothe and Vinton County.

This spring, Husted asked for the $5 million again.

What the record does and does not show

Nothing in the public record establishes an agreement, an understanding, or any connection between Husted’s funding request and Connor’s contributions. Earmark requests are public by design, and Husted submitted dozens of them. The stated recipient is Kids and Community Partners, the Connor Group’s charitable arm, not the for-profit real estate firm — a distinction Husted’s own paperwork turns on.

In the certification letter accompanying the request, Husted wrote that “none of the entities for which I have requested congressionally directed spending are for-profit entities,” and certified that “neither I nor my immediate family has a pecuniary interest” in any of the projects. Both statements are required under Senate Rule XLIV.

Connor also spread money widely that August day, giving $228,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and $10,000 to the Ohio Republican Party. In November 2025 he gave $206,768 to V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, the super PAC backing Vivek Ramaswamy’s run for governor, joining a roster of billionaire donors that includes Elon Musk and Jeff Yass.

What the record does show is a sequence, and a relationship that runs back two decades.

“School Planning,” 2019

Husted’s official calendars from his time as lieutenant governor record at least five contacts with Connor in 2019 and 2020.

A call was scheduled for Thursday, July 25, 2019. On Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2019, Husted met Connor at the Connor Group’s Miamisburg headquarters. On Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2019, he met Connor at Connor’s own office for 30 minutes under the subject line “School Planning.” On Monday, Nov. 4, 2019, a call was scheduled under the subject “Dayton School,” with a note that Connor would reach Husted on his personal cell. Another call was set for Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2020.

The Greater Dayton School, the Connor Group’s first school, opened four and a half years after that “School Planning” meeting.

The request

On Thursday, May 15, 2025, Husted submitted his fiscal 2026 spending requests to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development. Among them, listed on his own Senate website, was $5 million for the “Connor Group Kids and Community Partners Fund” for “Construction of Greater Cincinnati School and School Based Health Center on Site.”

The project would replicate the Greater Dayton School, which the Connor Group calls Ohio’s first private secular school built to serve under-resourced students. The Connor Group’s published materials say the Cincinnati school is expected to open “in 2028 or 2029” with a one-time capital investment of $5 million — roughly the amount Husted asked the federal government to supply.

Seven weeks after the spending package became law without it, Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins named Husted to the Appropriations Committee, filling the vacancy left when Sen. Markwayne Mullin was confirmed as Homeland Security secretary. Husted is the first Ohioan on the panel since George Voinovich left the Senate in 2011. He was assigned to six subcommittees; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development — the panel that would decide the Cincinnati request — is not among them.

In his fiscal 2027 requests, published this spring, the Connor project appears again at $5 million. On that same list, Husted requested $1.326 million to expand a Sandusky County Park District facility in Fremont and $2 million for infrastructure at a Sandusky County community park in Jackson Township. Combined, the two northwest Ohio park requests total less than the single Cincinnati school request.

A program Husted created, and a school that depends on it

At the Greater Dayton School’s March 2024 grand opening, then-Lt. Gov. Husted spoke alongside Connor. “I remember thinking that starting a school is hard, and that starting a school like this seems impossible,” Husted said, in remarks the Connor Group published on its website. “… I knew Larry well enough that he had a plan and he would work to overcome every barrier that got in the way and make it a reality and never give up.”

The school’s model leans on EdChoice, Ohio’s private school voucher program — and Husted takes credit for creating it. Writing to the Upper Arlington school board in 2024 to discourage it from joining a lawsuit against the program, he said: “I know because I created it in 2005 when I served as Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives.” The Greater Dayton School’s founding principal, identified by the Dayton Daily News as Stich, credited the program at the opening: “It takes Larry Connor, it takes the state of Ohio being dedicated to scholarships for student choice to fund an operation like this.”

EdChoice began as a program for low-income students in low-performing districts. That changed under the administration in which Husted served as lieutenant governor: the state budget signed Tuesday, July 4, 2023, extended eligibility to families at up to 450% of the poverty line. Ohio spent more than $1 billion on private school vouchers in fiscal 2025. Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page has since found the program unconstitutional while allowing it to continue during appeals; the Tenth District Court of Appeals heard argument Tuesday, May 12, 2026, in the suit brought by the Vouchers Hurt Ohio coalition, and a ruling is expected within months.

Connor’s support for Husted in Ohio tracks that history. He has given $51,885.41 to Husted’s state campaign committee since 2003, and his wife, Christine, another $17,552.35 — $69,437.76 between them, according to Ohio Secretary of State records reviewed by TiffinOhio.net. His largest state contribution came 22 days after the voucher expansion was signed: $15,499.69 on Wednesday, July 26, 2023, the maximum an individual could give under Ohio law at the time. Thirty-nine contributions at exactly that figure went to Husted’s committee that year.

The stakes are not abstract in Seneca County, where Tiffin City Schools is absorbing a $1.2 million annual funding loss from property tax legislation that took effect in March.

A recurring question in Husted’s race

Campaign finance questions have followed Husted through the campaign. TiffinOhio.net previously reported that he accepted $116,892 from billionaire Les Wexner between 2001 and 2025, including a contribution two months before he voted in September 2025 to block a Senate amendment directing release of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents; his campaign later said it would give the money to charity. He also testified as a defense witness this spring in the trial of two former FirstEnergy executives accused of bribing state regulators to pass House Bill 6, the utility bailout he championed as lieutenant governor. Husted has not been charged in either matter and has denied wrongdoing.

He faces Brown in the November general election for the remaining two years of the Senate term he was appointed to in January 2025.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I welcome Mr. Ramaswamy to the race for however long he sticks around,” then-Attorney General Dave Yost said in a statement issued during the event. “We’ll see if he actually stays in — Mr. Ramaswamy quit on President Trump and DOGE on day one, he quit on Ohio and moved his company to Texas, and he quit his presidential campaign after a devastating fourth-place finish in Iowa.”

Yost lost the primary and is gone from the race. Ramaswamy won on May 5 and faces Democrat Amy Acton on Nov. 3. But the line has outlasted the man who delivered it, and the record behind it has since grown more complicated in two directions. One of the three departures Yost cited is disputed — Ramaswamy says he was not pushed out of DOGE, and Politico reported that he was. And in December, for the first time, the pattern ran the other way.

Sixty-nine days

Trump announced on Nov. 12, 2024, that Ramaswamy and Elon Musk would jointly lead the Department of Government Efficiency. Sixty-nine days later, on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025 — Inauguration Day — Ramaswamy was out, before the effort had done substantive work.

He has consistently said the decision was his. Asked on Fox News the following Monday whether Musk had fired him, Ramaswamy rejected it twice. “I think that’s incorrect,” he told host Jesse Watters, adding that the two men “had different and complementary approaches” — his own centered on constitutional law and legislation, Musk’s on technology. Pressed a second time, he answered: “No, we had a mutual discussion.”

The administration’s account matched his. Trump transition spokesperson Anna Kelly said on the record that Ramaswamy “played a critical role in helping us create DOGE,” and that his plan to run for governor “requires him to remain outside of DOGE based on the structure that we announced today.” On the morning of the inauguration, Ramaswamy posted a photograph of himself shaking hands with Musk. “A new dawn,” he wrote.

Politico published a different version hours later. Citing three people familiar with Musk’s preferences who were granted anonymity, the outlet reported that Musk had spent the preceding days making clear he wanted Ramaswamy gone, and that Ramaswamy had already been cut out of the effort’s decisions.

The proximate cause, according to that reporting, was a post Ramaswamy made on X in late December 2024, during the Republican fight over H-1B visas, arguing that American tech companies hire foreign-born workers in part because the country’s culture had “venerated mediocrity over excellence.” The comment drew heavy criticism from parts of Trump’s base. “They wanted him out before the tweet — but kicked him to the curb when that came out,” one of the three people told Politico.

A Republican strategist Politico described as close to Trump advisers was blunter. Ramaswamy “just burned through the bridges and he finally burned Elon,” the strategist said. “Everyone wants him out of Mar-a-Lago, out of D.C.”

Not all of Politico’s sourcing cut against him. The outlet reported that a person close to DOGE said Musk did not think it feasible to campaign for office while working on the effort, and that a person familiar with Ramaswamy’s thinking said the two were on good terms and that “the reality is that it wasn’t possible” to do both at once. CBS News reported the previous day that the leadership change followed friction with incoming staff.

Every element of Politico’s account rests on people who were not named. Ramaswamy’s denial is on the record and under his own name, and no one has produced documentation resolving the two. What is not in dispute is the clock. He was appointed in November, gone in January, and campaigning for governor 35 days after that.

One week in February 2023

The exits Yost referred to had a common motive, and two of them happened within days of each other.

Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences in 2014 around a specific model: acquire drug candidates that larger pharmaceutical companies had shelved, then develop them through subsidiaries. He stepped out of the chief executive role in January 2021, telling shareholders the move reflected in part his “increasing public engagement” — the year he published “Woke, Inc.” and began building the political profile that would carry him into the presidential race. He stayed on as chairman for two more years. On Feb. 21, 2023, Roivant announced he had left its board the previous day to run for president, crediting him as founder and noting that six medicines developed at its subsidiaries had won FDA approval over the prior decade.

That same week he resigned as executive chairman of Strive Asset Management, the anti-ESG investment firm he had co-founded in Columbus a year earlier and which by that point managed more than $500 million. Co-founder Anson Frericks confirmed the resignation at the time, and Ramaswamy told CNBC that May that he had stepped away and was off the firm’s board for the duration of the campaign.

The campaign those resignations were made for lasted eleven months. Ramaswamy announced on Feb. 21, 2023, and ended it on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024, after finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses. He endorsed Trump that night.

TiffinOhio.net has examined Ramaswamy’s biotech record in detail, including the 2015 Axovant IPO and the 2017 failure of the Alzheimer’s drug intepirdine. No regulator has charged him with wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted of any crime.

The company that left Ohio

The second item on Yost’s list is the one Ramaswamy most directly contests, because it describes something a company did rather than something he did.

In November 2024, Strive announced it was relocating its headquarters from Columbus to Dallas, taking most of its Columbus staff. Ramaswamy has said the decision was made without him. Asked about it by News 5 Cleveland, he noted he was neither chief executive nor a board member by then, and cast the move as the thing that pushed him toward the governor’s race.

“The new CEO was pursuing a merger and acquisition with a company in Texas, and they had a decision to make about where was the more business-friendly environment to set up that business, and they made the decision to put that in Texas,” he said. “To me, that was actually a moment that motivated me, that said I have a mission, a cause to make sure that we make Ohio more competitive than Texas or any other state in the country.”

The explanation has not retired the issue. Union leaders in northwest Ohio and Democratic lieutenant governor nominee David Pepper have continued to raise the relocation on the campaign trail, and it has surfaced repeatedly in coverage of the race.

December: not an exit

On Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, Ambros Therapeutics launched with a $125 million Series A round co-led by RA Capital Management and Enavate Sciences. The company, based in Irvine, California, named Ramaswamy a co-founder alongside board chairman Keith Katkin, with Jay Hagan as chief executive. Trade coverage identified Ramaswamy as a co-founder, an investor and a sitting board member.

Ambros licensed its lead candidate, neridronate, from the Italian firm Abiogen Pharma. The drug has been approved in Italy for more than a decade to treat Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Type 1, a rare and severe chronic pain condition with no FDA-approved treatment in the United States; a German drugmaker discontinued two Phase 3 studies of it in 2019. Ambros said its own pivotal trial was on track to begin enrolling in the first quarter of 2026, and Hagan told the Orange County Business Journal he expected top-line results in early 2028.

The strategy — take an older drug another company set down, and run new trials on it — is the one Ramaswamy built Roivant around a decade ago.

What distinguishes the December launch is its timing and its direction. Every previous departure moved him out of business and toward a campaign. This one did neither. He was already ten months into the race for governor, and he did not leave a company. He started one. He has also kept up out-of-state appearances during the campaign, including a keynote at a Utah energy and data center summit.

Stepping back from a company to seek office is routine, often legally necessary, and Ohio has elected candidates who did exactly that. Yost’s charge was never really about the mechanics of resignation. It was about whether Ramaswamy finishes what he starts — a question Ohio voters answer on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

TiffinOhio.net has covered Ramaswamy’s business record, pandemic-era positions and campaign travel throughout the 2026 cycle.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Miami Beach police arrested Kalmbach, 31, at 10:33 p.m. Tuesday, July 14, at the W South Beach hotel on Collins Avenue. He faces two first-degree misdemeanors: battery involving domestic violence and violation of a domestic violence injunction.

The arrest came five days after a judge, on a motion granted by agreement of both sides, postponed his kidnapping trial. That trial had been scheduled to begin Monday, July 20. It is now set for Monday, Sept. 14.

Kalmbach was booked into the Miami-Dade County jail at 3:35 a.m. Wednesday, July 15, and released after posting bond the following day, according to Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation records. Bond was set at $7,500 on each of the two counts, for a total of $15,000, and he was placed on GPS Level 1 electronic monitoring under a pretrial release order. A judge issued a stay-away order barring contact with the alleged victim. Attorney Howard Srebnick, who also represents Kalmbach in the felony case, filed a notice of appearance and a written plea of not guilty on Friday, July 17. Arraignment is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 16, before County Judge Alicia Garcia Priovolos.

The following section describes allegations of domestic violence.

What the arrest affidavit alleges

Kalmbach denied that anything happened. According to the sworn complaint/arrest affidavit, he told the responding officer that he and his girlfriend had been sleeping and that no argument or physical contact had occurred. The officer wrote that he observed no visible injuries on Kalmbach.

The alleged victim, contacted separately inside the hotel room, also told officers that no threats or harm had been made, according to the affidavit. She declined treatment from fire rescue and declined to have crime scene photographs taken.

The officer nonetheless identified Kalmbach as the primary aggressor. The affidavit states that officers were dispatched to the hotel after the alleged victim’s sister called the front desk to report that her sister was involved in a domestic dispute. Inside the room, the officer wrote, he observed redness on the left side of the alleged victim’s face and on her left forearm that appeared recent, a broken cup on top of a dresser, and items scattered across the floor and into the bathroom. Two hotel employees reported hearing the alleged victim screaming and crying, according to the affidavit.

A records check revealed that Kalmbach was subject to a non-expiring protective order obtained by the alleged victim, the affidavit states, and the officer noted the injunction case number. A Florida Department of Law Enforcement lethality assessment was completed. Seven officers were equipped with body-worn cameras at the scene.

Kalmbach was transported to the Miami Beach Police Department holding facility. The affidavit describes the two as having been in a ten-month live-in relationship.

The affidavit was sworn by Officer M. Gutierrez on Wednesday, July 15. TiffinOhio.net is not naming the alleged victim.

The felony case remains pending

Kalmbach was first arrested in Miami on Feb. 23 on two third-degree felonies. In April, Miami-Dade prosecutors replaced those counts with far more serious charges: kidnapping with a weapon, a life felony, and aggravated battery with great bodily harm and a deadly weapon, a first-degree felony. The Information alleges he confined the alleged victim between Feb. 21 and Feb. 23 using “a pair of scissors and/or a knife,” and cut her hair and cut her with a knife, causing “great bodily harm and/or permanent disfigurement, to wit: a scar(s).”

He has pleaded not guilty and demanded a jury trial. He has remained free on bond in that case since Feb. 26.

The state filed an amended discovery exhibit on Wednesday, July 8, listing six essential witnesses and disclosing that police reports, body-worn camera footage, crime scene photographs, a domestic violence assessment and 911 dispatch records had been turned over to the defense. A new trial prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney Janeen Zamora, was assigned that same day. A report hearing is set for Thursday, Sept. 3.

As of the online docket, the felony case reflects no entry addressing Kalmbach’s bond following the July 14 arrest. He is now free on bond in both cases at once, with the felony trial set for Sept. 14 and the misdemeanor arraignment two days later.

Ohio political connections

Kalmbach lost the 2024 Republican primary in Ohio House District 69 to incumbent state Rep. Kevin Miller. His campaign was endorsed by U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan and U.S. Rep. Bob Latta and backed by Americans for Prosperity and the Center for Christian Virtue.

State Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery) donated $1,000 to Kalmbach’s campaign on Feb. 20, 2024, according to pre-primary campaign finance reports filed with the Ohio Secretary of State. Campaign finance records show the financial relationship ran in both directions: Kalmbach Feeds donated $250 to Click’s committee in 2021, Paul Kalmbach Sr. donated $250 in September 2024, and Daniel Kalmbach donated $350 to Click in May 2025.

Kalmbach is the son of Paul Kalmbach Sr., chief executive of Kalmbach Feeds in Upper Sandusky and a longtime Republican donor. Independent journalist DJ Byrnes at The Rooster reported during the 2024 campaign on questions about Kalmbach’s residency and professional background.

Kalmbach has not been convicted of any offense in either case. He is presumed innocent.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The federal government took a major step forward Friday toward opening more than 2,800 acres of Ohio’s only national forest to oil and gas development. 

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a lease sale scheduled for Sept. 15 of 41 parcels of land in the Wayne National Forest totaling 2,840 acres.

Although some bureaucratic hurdles remain, a lease sale brings fracking the forest for the first time – the subject of political effort since at least 2016 – far closer to fruition, giving specific companies legal rights to the land and minerals beneath it. 

Wayne is unique in that it’s not one contiguous plot of land but more like three separate swaths around southeast Ohio. The leases for sale sit near Marietta, Ohio, and Parkersburg, West Virginia.

The announcement Friday comes as GOP President Donald Trump’s administration has aggressively pursued opening public land to the energy industry. This includes shrinking national monuments in Utah, which would allow for oil and gas development, and reportedly pursuing the same in Alaska, all while rolling back rules around bond requirements, public comments and procedural timelines around those lease sales. 

Meanwhile, the state of Ohio has opened about 22,000 acres of its state parks and wildlife areas to oil and gas companies as well since 2024, via recently passed GOP-backed legislation. 

The September 2026 federal lease sale isn’t final – the winning bidder would still need a BLM permit to drill. However, this would likely be a rubber stamp, said Wendy Park, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, which has fought the leasing effort in court. 

She said parallel litigation involving other previously leased lands in Wayne could invalidate the environmental analysis used to support the September 2026 lease sale, but there’s no telling what a judge might do. 

She said fracking – an industrial process used to free natural gas from shale underground, technically known as hydraulic fracturing – threatens wildlife, including the Indiana bat, a designated endangered species. It means light and noise pollution and truck traffic into a recreational treasure. 

“Is there no place left in Ohio that’s safe from fracking?” she said. “Almost every corner of Ohio, except the Wayne, has been fracked.”

Mike Chadsey, a spokesman for the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, said “unconventional” wells, which run far deeper and extend laterally to enable modern fracking techniques, would be new in the Wayne. However, the forest has hosted conventional oil wells (the traditional, shallower, vertical well style that predates modern fracking) since 1990.

He said the leasing process is “deliberate, transparent, and built on years of environmental review” and public input.

“Ohio has a long track record of producing oil and natural gas safely and responsibly, demonstrating that responsible energy development and environmental stewardship can go hand in hand,” he said. “Additionally, due to the Wayne’s patchwork of parcels, leasing federal minerals helps those landowner/mineral owners who are adjacent to the Wayne realize the full economic potential of their property.”

The government’s announcement triggers a 30-day public protest period to receive additional public input opened today and will close August 17, 2026. Members of the public can comment here.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

FDA had announced Sunday the false positive on a Taylor Farms lettuce sample, amid an outbreak of cyclosporiasis that has sickened more than 1,600 people.

But in a call with reporters Monday afternoon, acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas said the false positive report doesn’t change the basis for the probe or the epidemiological data supporting Taylor Farms’ voluntary recall of some of its iceberg lettuce products.

“I want to stress that our investigation continues, including into other potential sources and commodities for other clusters of illnesses,” he said on the call. 

The announcement comes after the FDA previously reported on Saturday that a sample of iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms in central Mexico had tested positive for the parasite. As of Sunday, the FDA said there are no confirmed samples of Taylor Farms lettuce testing positive for cyclospora.

The FDA did not cite any other positive tests for the source of the outbreak, which has been linked to severe gastrointestinal illness.

As of Monday morning, a banner on an FDA webpage tracking the outbreak still reads: “Do not eat recalled iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. FDA’s investigation is ongoing.”

The FDA also said: “Due to the complexity in detection of Cyclospora, FDA laboratory experts re-reviewed the sample results and have concluded that the finding does not represent true amplification and should be considered a false positive.”

5 states affected

After an FDA investigation into the source of the outbreak affecting at least five states identified shredded lettuce provided by Taylor Farms and sold in many Taco Bell restaurants in the United States as a potential reason, the California-based produce firm announced a voluntary recall of many of its lettuce products. 

The sample that generated the false positive was not part of the current recall, according to FDA acting Deputy Commissioner for Food Donald Prater. 

Prater said that it was important to communicate the finding given the ongoing outbreak and public health risk. The FDA detected the false positive during a subsequent quality check in the lab and immediately issued the correction, he said. 

“The reevaluation of the sample does not alter the data supporting the outbreak advisory that prompted the current voluntary recall,” Prater said on the call with reporters Monday. “FDA’s traceback investigation and the outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms’ location in central Mexico.” 

The FDA and Taylor Farms continue to work together to ensure that “product implicated in this outbreak” has been removed from store shelves and not sold on the market, the Sunday statement continued. 

Taylor Farms statement

In its own statement Sunday, Taylor Farms said the FDA had “apologized” to the company after informing it of the mistaken result. 

“Based on initial information provided by health officials, in an abundance of caution, we completed a voluntary recall of iceberg lettuce from central Mexico,” the company’s statement read. “Recalled product was limited to iceberg lettuce grown and processed in central Mexico. All other Taylor Farms products, including all Taylor Farms brand products available for purchase, are not involved in the recall.” 

In the call with reporters on Monday, however, an FDA official said that the agency informed the company of the false positive report and explained how it happened, but did not offer an official apology. 

“We did not offer an official apology, but did explain factually the issues,” the official said. 

The multistate outbreak of the parasite has mostly been concentrated in the Great Lakes and Appalachian regions, with cases identified in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, according to the FDA. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there have been more than 1,644 confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis, the food-borne illness caused by ingestion of the parasite, with 94 of those cases leading to hospitalization. There have been no reported deaths. 

The CDC’s webpage on the cyclosporiasis outbreak was last updated on Saturday, before the false positive was announced. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Election officials who do not comply with administration directives to enhance security of voting machines and to share voter data with the federal government through the powerful Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements computer program would be subject to fines and even prison time, he said.

“If the states that choose not to participate with the SAVE program and they choose not to participate in securing the elections, we will make sure that we make those states a priority to look at who voted in their states, and hold the election officials accountable,” Mullin said during a press conference. 

The Trump administration will make it mandatory for states to undergo security enhancements of their voter machines and withhold grants or reimbursements to any states that do not, he said.

The mandate was necessary, he said, because foreign adversaries produce parts that are vital pieces in U.S. voting machines, and can “change voter registration and your vote.”

“The machines have to be secured and your voter registration list needs to be scrubbed,” he said, summarizing the department’s message to state officials. “Our machines are vulnerable. There are steps that can be made right now that can secure those.”

Earlier Friday, Mullin sent a letter to the secretaries of state of four states the department reviewed — Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — to warn them of the “tens of thousands of non-citizens who are illegally on the states’ voter rolls.”

Leaders from those states immediately pushed back against Mullin and President Donald Trump’s claims. 

It is unclear what authority Mullin would use to investigate state election administration. The U.S. Constitution empowers states to run elections.

But it is clear the Trump administration considers election security a top priority in the leadup to the midterms.

Mullin’s remarks followed President Donald Trump’s address to the nation Thursday evening in which he declared that the U.S. election systems are vulnerable to foreign cyberattacks and nations such as China and Iran have sought to influence the outcome of past elections, including in 2018 and 2020. 

Noncitizen voting

Trump has long focused on voting by noncitizens, which is rare. 

Mullin on Friday said the Homeland Security Department reviewed voter rolls in a handful of states and discovered more than 250,000 noncitizens who were registered to vote. 

The federal government will make it a priority to “look at who voted in their states” and hold their election officials accountable, Mullin said. 

The federal government will go through the records “one by one,” he said at the press conference, and pursue maximum charges for anyone found to have voted illegally, which includes up to five years in prison and $250,000 in fines. 

SAVE in court

The SAVE program allows local jurisdictions to determine someone’s immigration status for purposes such as applying for government jobs, benefits and driver’s licenses. 

The administration wants states to use the powerful computer system to check the citizenship of people on voter rolls and is battling in court to restore that use of the program after a federal court ruled in June the expansion was unlawful.

Mullin blamed the program’s pause on “activist judges” who don’t want secure elections. 

The SAVE program is distinct from, but shares its acronym with, the SAVE America Act, a bill that proposes to restrict voter access by adding requirements to register and cast ballots, including photo IDs. The bill is stalled in the U.S. Senate and does not include funding for election security infrastructure. 

Democratic officials cry foul

In Mullin’s letter to Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, which was shared with States Newsroom, Mullin shared “concerning results” of a preliminary review of Nevada’s voter registration data showing there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens registered to vote. 

“I hope that you share in the commitment to ensure that only U.S. citizens participate in our federal elections,” Mullin wrote. “Allowing just one non-citizen to vote cancels the vote of one U.S. citizen.” 

Mullin said his team would help support the state to “take steps to protect Nevada voters and ensure that ineligible voters will not impact upcoming federal elections.”

Aguilar, a Democrat, told States Newsroom in a statement Friday that the department’s estimate is “wildly speculative at best.” The department “hasn’t shared anything that backs it up,” he added.

Aguilar said there are multiple safeguards in place to prevent noncitizens or any other ineligible voters from casting a ballot, and that Nevada runs “some of the safest, most secure and accessible elections in the country.”

“The Administration lacks a fundamental understanding of how elections work,” Aguilar wrote. “They just want to cause chaos and doubt ahead of the midterms.” 

In a statement Friday afternoon, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, said all evidence shows that noncitizen voting is “extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.” 

Every resident must take multiple steps to verify their identity before they cast a ballot or register to vote, he said. 

“While the Department has made clear that we cannot share Pennsylvanians’ private, personal information, we will review any information provided by DHS so that we can evaluate the validity of these claims,” Schmidt said. 

California under fire

California has repeatedly come under fire from Trump regarding its elections. In his speech Thursday evening, he cast doubt on the integrity of the state’s recent Los Angeles mayoral and gubernatorial races. 

Secretary of State Shirley Weber described the claims as fallacious and unsubstantiated. 

“Non-citizen voting remains exceedingly rare,” she said. “In California, election officials work every day to maintain accurate voter rolls and ensure that only eligible voters are registered.”

She said her team will carefully review Mullin’s letter to assess the methodology for its claims, and “welcome legitimate best practices that comply with state and federal law while protecting Californians’ personal information.” 

“However, the information provided during the President’s remarks and on the White House website, do not inspire any level of confidence in the methodology used or the conclusions reached,” she added. “If the President is truly committed to election integrity, he must stop undermining confidence in our democracy, making it harder for eligible Americans to vote, and attempting to seize authority that the Constitution clearly reserves for the states.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nearly all of those 22 incidents – 19 – involved Department of Homeland Security officers shooting upon people in their vehicles during traffic stops, a crucial nexus, according to a States Newsroom review of news reports and documents. The encounters spanned the nation, from Colorado to Texas to Oregon to New Jersey.

Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, where he promised to carry out an aggressive immigration crackdown, federal immigration officers have killed six people, three of them U.S. citizens. Four deaths came during traffic stops.

Following Guerrero’s death, the second immigrant to be killed by ICE officers during a traffic stop in a week, DHS put a pause on traffic stop enforcement. But Trump quickly ordered the department to abandon those plans.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that officers will conduct vehicle-related enforcement stops “in order to continue their deportation campaign.”

The agency has plenty of funding at hand. Congressional Republicans last year used a legislative maneuver to allocate roughly $175 billion to DHS for immigration enforcement, detainment and deportations, without needing Democratic support. GOP lawmakers did the same move this year to fund $75 billion for ICE and Border Patrol until September of 2029.

After the ICE shooting in Biddeford, the entire Maine congressional delegation called for an independent investigation, with Republican Sen. Susan Collins urging an end to vehicle enforcement.

A Thursday report from the American Civil Liberties Union found patterns of misconduct by immigration agents during Trump’s second term, identifying 432 incidents where agents either used or threatened to use force against immigrants and bystanders.

The report reviewed more than 1,200 incidents across eight states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland and New Mexico. 

Of the traffic-related enforcement, the ACLU found in 76 instances, people and passengers were pulled from their cars; windows were smashed 47 times; officers 14 times rammed vehicles into people’s cars; and they hit people with cars six times. 

What happened afterward

In the moments after those 22 shootings, DHS has quickly accused those who were fired upon of using their vehicles as weapons against immigration officers. 

But independent video has often contradicted that narrative. 

In at least five cases DHS brought, charges were dismissed after the department accused U.S. citizens and immigrants shot by federal agents as being the aggressors. 

In August 2025, Francisco Longoria, a Mexican national, was driving his vehicle in San Bernardino, California, when federal immigration agents in unmarked cars tried to pull him over. He fled and the agents fired upon him.

The Department of Justice charged him with attempting to harm agents, but prosecutors couldn’t defend the DHS actions and charges were dismissed. Longoria was not injured.

Marimar Martinez was labeled a domestic terrorist by DHS and indicted after she was shot in her car five times by Border Patrol agents in October 2025, during the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration deportation campaign in Chicago. DOJ dropped its charges against Martinez, a U.S. citizen, after the Trump administration accused her of using her car as a weapon.

When the president initially directed immigration agents to the nation’s capitol, Phillip M. Brown, a U.S. citizen, was pulled over by law enforcement, including an immigration officer who shot into his vehicle. During the October 2025 shooting, Brown was not injured, but charged with fleeing from law enforcement. The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute the case.

During the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation drive in Minneapolis in January, that left two U.S. citizens dead, a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis was shot by a federal agent while in his home. DHS accused Cesar Sosa-Celis of striking an immigration officer with a broom handle, but Cesar Sosa-Celis denied it and surveillance video contracted the federal government’s claim.

The immigration agent who shot Cesar Sosa-Celis was prosecuted by local Minnesota officials and arrested in May for falsely reporting a crime and for assault.

In Houston, on July 7, ICE officers killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, saying he tried to run over agents as has been the case in other incidents.

Salgado Araujo was driving several other people to work that morning when immigration officers approached his van. He was not considered a person of interest, DHS has stated.

The FBI has sought a search warrant to seize plastic bags with “crystal-like substances,” to test for methamphetamine, according to the Texas Tribune. One of the lawyers representing Salgado Araujo’s brother, who was in the van during the shooting, said it was granulated salt.

A grim beginning to the year

The most people shot by federal immigration agents was in January.  Three of the five people shot by ICE and Border Patrol officers were in Minnesota, with two of them fatalities. 

The two deaths were in Minneapolis, where the Trump administration conducted an aggressive deportation campaign that targeted the city, which has a high Somali refugee population. 

That month, federal immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens, and shot and wounded Cesar Sosa-Celis. 

Good was killed while in her vehicle, which then DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled her as a domestic terrorist. DHS accused Good of using her SUV as a weapon, but independent video did not uphold that allegation.

A week later, federal immigration officers shot and killed intensive care unit nurse Pretti, who was recording agents on his phone and helping a woman who was pushed down by them. Noem again labeled him a domestic terrorist and said he was attacking agents, but multiple videos taken from different angles do not show that.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But with prices of fuel and other petroleum products remaining high, costs are continuing to rise and consumers find themselves with less money to spend, it reported. 

The Cleveland Fed on Wednesday published one of its eight annual installments of the Beige Book. It seeks to assess economic conditions through online surveys and interviews with businesses, community leaders, economists and others.

The bank’s region includes all of Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky. There was a consensus throughout that costs were rising.

“Nonlabor input cost growth remained robust in recent weeks,” the report said. “Contacts across industries continued to cite higher fuel costs as the primary driver of input cost pressures. Firms reported direct impacts as costs rose for transportation and petroleum-based products and indirect impacts as higher fuel costs filtered through to items sensitive to shipping costs, including metals and construction materials.”

It added that the expense of things such as  electricity, insurance, software, and food is also continuing to rise, but at a slower pace than it had.

Some of the Cleveland Fed’s contacts said that with fuel prices falling in recent weeks, they’d see other prices fall. But several developments put that in doubt.

The United States and Iran are again attacking each other, and energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz are again being throttled. Meanwhile, global oil reserves are at their lowest point in decades.

Some of those surveyed by the Cleveland Fed said they were passing only part of their increased cost to customers, while others said they were passing all of it along. And the increased cost is having an accelerating effect on consumer demand — especially among those who are already strapped.

“Consumer spending declined modestly after a slight decrease in the prior reporting period,” the report said. “Retailers across industry segments attributed the declines to the ongoing impact of high fuel prices.” 

It added, “One non-auto retailer said spending by low-income households fell while that of high-income households was unchanged, and another noted that price increases pushed revenue higher even as unit sales fell. Auto dealers generally reported flat or softer sales due to high vehicle prices and interest rates, and one dealer added that demand for service and parts rose as consumers held onto vehicles longer.”

Economists watch consumer spending closely because it makes up nearly 70% of gross domestic product.

Meanwhile, demand in the real-estate and construction sectors grew robustly since early June, with demand for luxury homes staying strong and that for affordable housing growing, the report said.

It added that demand for manufactured goods grew moderately, powered in part by data center construction and in part by the Trump administration’s tariffs.

“Data center development continued to drive demand for metal products and electrical components,” it said. “In addition, several metal producers reported stronger orders as customers depleted their imported inventories and shifted to domestic sources to avoid tariffs.”

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 Jeffrey Helmick granted a preliminary injunction on July 13, allowing these ten businesses to continue selling their intoxicating hemp products. 

Helmick wrote in his opinion the ten businesses “have adequately alleged they will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary injunctive relief.” 

Titan Logistics Group LLC, Hopportunity Holding Company LLC, Saucy Seltzer LLC, App Girls LLC, Modern Distribution LLC, Grayscale Brewing LLC, IHC Investments Inc, Know Naturals LLC, Precision Fill and Pack LLC, and JSZN LLC filed a lawsuit against nearly 100 county and municipal prosecutors offices across Ohio to stop any legal action against them under a new Ohio law that bans low-level THC hemp products and THC and CBD beverages. 

The case is in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. 

Helmick initially put a temporary restraining order in place, but it expired July 13 — the same day he issued the preliminary injunction.  

The ten businesses are in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Nelsonville as well as North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon, and Florida.  

Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson filed a motion to stay on Tuesday, but the court has not responded. 

“This Court’s decision has also invited confusion and chaos into Ohio’s marijuana markets,” Wilson wrote. 

He went on to write the preliminary injunction creates “a patchwork intoxicating-hemp market … that will harm consumers, businesses, and law enforcement.” 

“Untested, untracked, and unlabeled intoxicating cannabis products are available once more for purchase by children,” Wilson wrote. 

He questions how Ohioans, law enforcement, and stores are supposed to know which THC beverages are covered by the preliminary injunction. 

Ohio Senate Bill 56 took effect March 20. The law also changes the state’s marijuana law. 

The 2018 Farm Bill said hemp can be grown legally if it contains less than 0.3% THC, but new federal restrictions on hemp products are set to take effect Nov. 12 that will ban products that contain 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. 

“What Senate Bill 56 has done is to exclude federally legal intoxicating hemp products from Ohio’s statutory definition of hemp, redefine them as illegal marijuana, and then to prohibit any company from cultivating or selling those products unless the company has a physical presence in the State of Ohio,” Helmick wrote in his opinion. 

The Ohio Healthy Alternatives Association was happy with the preliminary injunction. 

“While this preliminary injunction is an important step forward, the OHHAA recognizes that the fight is far from over, and will continue to staunchly support its members throughout this litigation while advocating for their right to provide Ohioans with access to federally legal hemp products of their choice,” they said in a statement.

In a separate case related to Ohio S.B. 56, Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Magistrate Jhay Spottswood-Harrison denied granting a preliminary injunction to Happy Harvest and Get Wright Lounge on June 24. 

A Franklin County Court of Common Pleas judge initially issued a TRO on April 22 to allow Happy Harvest locations and Get Wright Lounge to sell their existing products, but the 10th District Court of Appeals stayed the TRO. 

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.

Brazenness is a key tool of tyrants, both personal and political: Just as you’re shocked into inaction when someone cuts the line at airport security, so too Trump relies on baffling our expectations, which is what should concern us about the upcoming election and his efforts to interfere with people’s right to vote and to have their votes counted.

Trump used a nationally televised address Thursday to spew more outlandish misinformation about our election system as a pretext for aggressive federal intervention. He endorsed Mike Lindell – the pillow mogul who has done more than anyone, save Trump, to cast bad-faith doubt on Minnesota election integrity – for governor Wednesday.

In response, Minnesota faith, labor and civil society leaders have declared: Not this time. 

They’re also trying to alert and assist some 80 civil society groups in 19 states, many of them already facing Department of Justice harassment and other forms of heavy-handed federal intervention into election administration, in what looks like an effort to keep Republicans in power no matter the will of the voters.

Because our election system is so decentralized — tens of thousands of polling places across the country, thousands of counties counting and certifying votes — the resistance needs local and state leadership and organization. 

The blueprint for pushing back is a memo, first reported here, that’s circulating among pro-democracy leaders, titled, “Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework.”

The idea of the title is that if we are to be a free people in the face of despotism, we must exercise our constitutional rights to preserve them. 

The instrument for organizing resistance is civil society, which “Act Free” describes as “the broad, distributed, multi-sector mobilization of everyday people behaving, with agency, as if the Constitution applies to them. And in doing so, making it apply.”

Although “Act Free” has been a group project, a key author is Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the Minnesota ecumenical progressive group ISAIAH and one of the most influential people you’ve probably never heard of.

It begins with a bracing warning: “Anyone paying attention knows that Donald Trump is not preparing to lose the 2026 midterms. He is preparing to disrupt and sabotage them, and his administration has been laying the groundwork for months.”

The evidence is all around us, but you have to connect dots and see the full picture: 

In Georgia, the former director of National Intelligence was present at an FBI raid of Fulton County, where agents seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots and other documents. Recall: Georgia is where Trump demanded the Republican secretary of state “find” the 11,780 votes needed to give him victory in 2020. 

In June, FBI agents raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which Ohio Capital Journal describes as advocates for voting and labor rights and against outsized corporate power.

The Justice Department has sued 29 states — Minnesota among them — and the District of Columbia over their refusal to provide unredacted voter rolls that include the driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers of voters. 

Several current and former election officials in Wisconsin confirmed they have been interviewed or approached by the FBI, which is apparently investigating the 2020 election. 

The Justice Department is sending election monitors here and other (suspiciously blue and purplish blue) states and cities. 

A dangerous MAGA tool beat a principled Republican in 2024 for Maricopa County recorder and is now in charge of vote counting in Arizona’s most populous county. 

Trump has issued an executive order that seeks to dictate election administration — in an unconstitutional power grab — via the U.S. Postal Service.

The Trump administration is threatening to withhold terrorism-prevention funding unless states comply with election demands, according to reporting from a progressive outlet that covers voting rights and litigation.

The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter recently to election officials in all 50 states threatening them with prosecution if noncitizens vote in the upcoming August and November elections. (Voting by noncitizens is prohibited in federal elections, and extremely rare.)

Trump recently fired the two Democrats and forced a Republican to resign from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, thus paralyzing it.

You can read these as discrete events, but Trump’s history tells us that this is all deliberate. As the “Act Free” memo argues, “The point is to generate enough chaos, legal uncertainty, and manufactured doubt to suspend certification (of votes), and in that void, consolidate power around the people already holding it.”

Schrantz told me that Operation Metro Surge “baptized me in the breadth of possibilities of what we might have to deal with.” 

Unfortunately, however, the denial continues, especially among the swells on the Acela Corridor. 

“When I’m around D.C. and New York elites, they wanna tell themselves a story that there’s some normal way we can get through to the other side of this. I just don’t think so. It’s as bad as it looks, and we need wider bandwidth to imagine what’s possible,” she said in an interview. 

Once we get people to understand what’s happening, then what? 

The “Act Free” memo sketches out a civil defense of democracy that draws on recent history: 

“When ICE and CBP occupied our communities for two and a half months … tens of thousands of trained constitutional legal observers documented every encounter. Mutual aid networks sustained people through the crisis. Small businesses invoked their Fourth Amendment rights and refused warrantless entry. Local law enforcement mostly stood aside rather than collaborate. And when called, 50 to 70% percent of the general population showed up, not because they were activists, but because they understood what was being taken from them and chose to act.”   

The political cost of Operation Metro Surge became too great for the Trump administration, and they were forced to retreat.  

So, how do democracy defenders replicate what was achieved resisting Operation Metro Surge when it comes to ensuring a free and fair election? 

“Act Free” advises that state leaders need “a rigorous, ground-level understanding of the macro threat landscape, the specific vulnerabilities of their state’s election administration system, and a genuine power analysis of the people and institutions inside it.”

Schrantz offers a refreshingly hard-headed primer on power analysis, and it’s worth quoting in full: 

“Knowing who sits in which seat is not enough. A genuine power analysis asks: who has leverage over that person? What does it take to move or block a specific decision? Who are the allies already inside the system? What is the procedural timeline for each key decision? Who could be positioned for sabotage? What conservative or election denier lawyers are positioned to act, and when? What have you already seen play out, and what does it reveal about the network of power being utilized? This is the organizing discipline most pro-democracy coalitions skip. It is the most important thing to do first.”

Then you’ve got to recruit community leaders: “Someone with a real network of relationships, in their neighborhood, school, congregation, childcare center, apartment building. These leaders are essential to organizing scaled and aligned public action with agency, and to maintaining a distributed strategy that cannot be decapitated.”

Because Trump’s strategy is racial division — the suspect votes are always in counties with significant populations of Black and Latino voters — the coalition must be multi-racial, as both a core value but also a “strategic necessity,” the memo reads.  

Next: Assign roles: legal, political, press and public, tactical/operational, grassroots deployment.

“Act Free” advises employing “deterrence” well before Election Day: Making sure elected officials and other people of influence know they are being scrutinized and will pay a cost if they cede to Trump’s demands — but will be strongly supported if they do their jobs honorably. Clergy and other local leaders can meet with secretaries of state, county boards and county election officials about the importance of free and fair elections and get them on the record about their commitment. 

Finally, it’s rehearsal time. Every potential scenario must be gamed out so everyone knows what to do: “Each role has a specific set of actions. Each scenario has a specific protocol. This is what you see. This is what you do. This is who you call.”

Americans assuming the courts will work it all out don’t realize how slowly the judiciary operates. (Which is precisely why Trump never faced justice for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.) MAGA will seek to fill the vacuum as the courts dither, “manufacturing a pretext through smears and propaganda, using legal maneuvers to suspend seating an unwanted elected official, grabbing and holding power in the vacuum created by the suspension of certainty.”

But if the organizers do their jobs, hundreds of thousands of trained volunteers will be ready to exact severe political costs, and quickly, if the authoritarian tries to intervene in local election administration. If there’s another “Brooks Brother riot” or another instance of MAGA foot soldiers attempting to stop ballot counting, a counterprotest will demand the count continue, and information will be quickly disseminated about the usurpers. If they seek to block polling stations or intimidate voters, precinct captains will film and disseminate. 

Those hundreds of thousands of volunteers will need courage undergirded by solidarity and the comfort that comes from knowing they have secured the blessings of liberty for their descendants.

As “Act Free” says, “The woman in the pink coat who stepped forward with her iPhone when Border Patrol (killed) Alex Pretti made a courageous choice that worked to expose the lies of the Department of Homeland Security. That kind of leadership does not emerge from nowhere. It emerges from … people who have already processed the stakes and know what they are willing to risk when the moment comes.”

You can feel despair about what’s happening, but that’s a dead-end choice. 

Reading “Act Free” reveals what we should feel: concern, yes, but also vigilance — and hope. 

This story was originally produced by Minnesota Reformer, 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 administration has filed a total of 27 lawsuits against more than 20 cities, counties and states with such policies since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, according to the Justice Department. In just the past three months, the administration has sued at least a half dozen jurisdictions, including Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, a county in Michigan, and the city of Philadelphia, for seeking to place limits on the activities of  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

These policies tend to focus on restricting immigration enforcement in public spaces, limiting how local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration authorities, and barring both local and federal immigration agents from wearing masks or otherwise concealing their identity while on duty.

“These sanctuary policies are most times created to help make communities safer. They promote a greater level of trust and cooperation between communities and public institutions of all kinds,” said Cassandra Charles, senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy group.

Some cities have had sanctuary policies since the 1980s, but Charles said many states and cities are creating new protections as the Trump administration has ramped up its deportation campaign. She described the current swell of litigation as “unprecedented.”

Charles said the administration is misinterpreting the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which states that federal law trumps state law. That clause, she argued, does not allow the federal government to dictate what laws states can pass, nor does it “create a duty for the states to help the federal government enforce federal law.”

But the Justice Department argues that sanctuary laws violate longstanding constitutional precedent and prevent the federal government from conducting lawful enforcement activities.

“As explained in DOJ’s briefs in these cases, states and localities do not have a right to obstruct federal law enforcement, to regulate the federal government, or to discriminate against the federal government,” Kiersten Pels, an agency spokesperson wrote in an email. “These and other cases simply seek to vindicate that fundamental aspect of our constitutional structure.”

Our state taxpayer dollars should not go towards having local law enforcement enforce federal immigration law.

– Maryland Democratic state Sen. Clarence Lam

The lawsuits have yielded mixed results.

In May 2025, the Justice Department sued four New Jersey cities (Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark and Paterson) to challenge their policies curtailing local cooperation with federal immigration agents. The next month, a U.S. district judge in New Jersey, appointed by President Joe Biden, tossed out the suit, arguing the cities’ policies didn’t impede ICE activities because of the state’s existing sanctuary laws.

But earlier this month, a U.S. district judge in Pennsylvania sided with the administration in a lawsuit challenging a new Philadelphia policy.

Last month, the administration sued to stop the city of Philadelphia from implementing a new policy barring immigration agents from wearing masks, concealing their badges, or using unmarked vehicles while on the job. Last week, the judge—a Trump appointee—cited the Supremacy Clause in siding with the administration, issuing a preliminary injunction blocking the city from moving forward.

When the Philadelphia City Council approved the policy, the judge ruled, “it attempted to sidestep the Constitution’s clear mandate and disregarded this fundamental principle of law that has informed American jurisprudence for over 200 years.”

The new policy barring officers from concealing their identities was part of a package of seven ICE-related bills the council approved in April. Rue Landau, the city council member who sponsored the package, noted that the other measures have taken effect.

“If the federal government won’t protect their residents, local leaders have the obligation to step up to the plate, and that’s exactly what we did here in Philadelphia,” Landau said. “Great news for Philadelphia: We’ve got six laws on the books, and right now we are working on ensuring that the city of Philadelphia clearly spells out how we’re implementing these laws.”

In late April, the administration filed a similar lawsuit against the state of New Jersey to challenge a law, enacted in March, that prohibits immigration agents from shielding their identity while on duty.

Maryland is the latest state to face a DOJ lawsuit.

Its new law, in effect since May 31, prohibits state and local correctional officers and law enforcement agents from inquiring about or investigating a person’s immigration status. It also bars them from detaining or transferring a person to federal authorities for a suspected immigration violation without a warrant or court order.

Last week, the Justice Department sued Maryland to stop the law, arguing that its “purpose and effect is to obstruct federal law enforcement.”

“Such blatant disregard for federal laws that have been on the books for decades is not merely a political disagreement or passive abstention; it is deliberate, disruptive action that jeopardizes the public safety for all Americans,” the lawsuit states.

In May, local sheriffs from 17 counties in Maryland also sued the state to halt the new law. Their complaint argues that the law puts them in “an impossible and unconstitutional position.”

“If Plaintiffs follow the Act, they are effectively forced to shield removable aliens from federal custody,” the lawsuit states, while “if they continue cooperating with ICE as they have for years, they risk state penalties and lawsuits.”

In some sections, the sheriffs’ lawsuit and the DOJ lawsuit against Maryland employ identical language.

Chris Hajec, head of litigation at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors stricter immigration enforcement and filed the lawsuit on behalf of the sheriffs, said the Maryland law “puts (the sheriffs) in a dilemma.”

“Either they’re violating the state law and they’re going to get sued by their attorney general, or they’re violating the federal criminal law and they could be prosecuted,” Hajec said.

But Maryland Democratic state Sen. Clarence Lam, the Senate sponsor of the new law, dismissed that argument. Lam said the law only limits what state officers can do, without obstructing ICE from carrying out its duties.

“We think that these efforts to block the implementation are bogus,” Lam told Stateline. “We as a state are wholly within our right and jurisdiction to be able to place limitations on what state and local law enforcement agencies can do. There’s nothing that prevents us from doing so, and that’s all this does.”

“Our state taxpayer dollars should not go towards having local law enforcement enforce federal immigration law.”

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.

It just wants a ride and a meal.

As ticks spread into new parts of the country and emergency room visits for tick bites climb higher than usual, states are scrambling to monitor where the pests are showing up, what diseases they may be carrying and how to warn residents before a bite turns into something far more serious.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in April that emergency department visits for tick bites were higher than expected across much of the United States and at their highest levels for that point in the year since 2017. 

In June, there were 112 tick-related ER visits per 100,000 people, compared with 110 per 100,000 during the same period last year, according to the CDC’s online tick bite tracker. That suggests this year’s summer trend may be in line with 2025.

Nationwide, the latest available data show an estimated 65 tick bite-related emergency department visits per 100,000 people, up from 47 per 100,000 last year. This year’s current figures are preliminary and subject to change, but if they hold, this year’s rate may be the highest since 2017.

Health officials say the trend reflects a combination of expanding tick populations, changing environmental conditions and increased human exposure during warmer months.

The concern extends well beyond Lyme disease.

The lone star tick, once found primarily in the Southeast, has steadily expanded its range and is known for its aggressive host-seeking behavior, often actively crawling toward people and animals. An adult female is distinguished by a white dot or “lone star” on her back.

The species has been linked to alpha-gal syndrome, an allergy that can cause people to develop severe reactions after eating beef, pork and other mammalian products. Researchers also continue to monitor ticks that carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever, anaplasmosis and other illnesses.

Tick surveillance by state health officials varies widely across the country. Some states maintain active surveillance programs that collect and test ticks to identify where disease-carrying species are becoming established. Other states rely more heavily on human disease reports or passive tick submissions, making it harder to detect changes before infections begin to rise.

Those differences can leave public health officials with an incomplete picture of how quickly tick populations are changing — and where people may face the greatest risk.

Several states, including Massachusetts, Missouri and Oklahoma, have expanded surveillance efforts in recent years or launched public education campaigns as tick habitats shift. All three joined the list of states that now or will soon mandate reporting of alpha-gal syndrome. Other states are studying the spread of lone star ticks and the increasing recognition of the syndrome, which experts believe remains underdiagnosed. 

Some experts say warmer winters in many parts of the country have allowed ticks to remain active for longer periods each year while expanding into regions where they were once uncommon. At the same time, growing white-tailed deer populations and changing land use have created more opportunities for people and ticks to cross paths.

Public health officials say the best defense remains preventing bites altogether. They recommend using insect repellents registered by the Environmental Protection Agency, wearing permethrin-treated clothing, including long sleeves and pants in wooded or grassy areas, checking people and pets for ticks after spending time outdoors and removing attached ticks as soon as they’re found.

For states, the challenge is becoming less about responding to tick season and more about adapting to a future in which, in many places, the season is lasting longer — and the tiny hitchhikers are turning up in places they never did before.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@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 exchange, first reported by Fox News, turns on a single word — “mortality” — and on which patients it counts.

What Acton said

On a podcast appearance in September 2025, Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Health, cited the numbers as evidence that Ohio’s early response saved lives.

“In those early days, the mortality rate was 50%. I started with that in March. By June, when we reopened, it was because we took swift, decisive action. The mortality rate had gone down to 5%. We learned how to save lives,” Acton said.

Asked about the figure, Acton’s office told Fox News she had been referring to death rates in hospitals — not the share of everyone who caught the virus.

Why the charge depends on the denominator

A spokesperson for Ramaswamy, who was living in New York City during the pandemic, said the claim rewrote the pandemic’s history.

“Liberal Amy Acton is desperately trying to rewrite history, spewing lies in a futile attempt to justify her disastrous decision-making during COVID,” Connie Luck said. “But her outrageous claims only confirm what we already know: she’s an incompetent, failed government bureaucrat who ran our state into the ground and is wholly unqualified to lead Ohio.”

That criticism measures Acton’s numbers against overall COVID-19 mortality — the share of all infected people who died. By that yardstick, the rate was never close to 50%; the virus killed roughly 275,000 Americans in 2020, according to CDC figures cited by Fox, and the overall death rate ran in the single digits. That much is not in dispute. But it is not the population Acton, a physician and the state’s former health director, said she was describing. She was talking about people sick enough to be in a hospital or an intensive-care unit — and for those patients, the record tells a different story.

The 50%: intensive-care patients

When Acton was signing Ohio’s first emergency orders in March 2020, the only U.S. outcome data available came from small hospital case series, and those early reports found ICU death rates at or above 50%.

A case series of 21 critically ill patients at a Washington State hospital, published in JAMA on March 19, 2020, found that 11 of them — 52.4% — had died. Eleven days later, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study of 24 ICU patients across nine Seattle-area hospitals; as of March 23, half had died.

Those figures held up in later, larger analyses. A CDC study published in June 2024, drawing on more than 4.7 million U.S. cases from before vaccines were available, found that 44.2% of patients admitted to an intensive-care unit died. The CDC authors described that result as similar to earlier studies conducted in Seattle, which found 50%, and Washington, which found 52% — the same two March 2020 reports.

The 5%: hospitalized patients by June

Acton’s second number tracks a different but equally documented trend: the sharp drop in deaths among hospitalized COVID-19 patients as clinicians learned to treat the disease.

An analysis prepared for STAT by the nonprofit FAIR Health, based on hospital records for roughly 100 million insured Americans, found that the mortality rate of hospitalized COVID-19 patients fell from 11.4% in March 2020 to below 5% in June — and stayed there, reaching 3.7% by September. Other studies that adjusted for age and underlying health found the same collapse: mortality in one New York hospital system fell from 25.6% in March to 7.6% in August, and survival among ICU patients in an English cohort rose from 58% in late March to 80.4% by the end of June. Researchers have credited wider use of steroids such as dexamethasone, less reliance on early ventilation, and hospitals that were no longer overwhelmed.

One point of precision: Acton’s two numbers do not describe exactly the same group. The 50% reflects intensive-care patients at the pandemic’s outset; the roughly 5% reflects all hospitalized patients by June. Read as a single, unbroken statistic, the “50% down to 5%” compresses two different populations. But each figure is grounded in real data, and the trajectory she described — catastrophic early mortality among the most seriously ill, followed by a steep drop by summer — is exactly what the record shows. Nothing in it is invented.

Acton’s counter

Acton’s campaign used the exchange to point back at Ramaswamy’s own pandemic record. Ramaswamy is the founder of Roivant Sciences, a biotech company whose subsidiary was involved in COVID-19 treatments.

“While Dr. Acton was working hand in hand with Governor DeWine to keep Ohioans safe, Vivek Ramaswamy was calling for mandatory COVID-19 testing, making more than $2 billion off of the COVID vaccine, and recommending segregating Ohioans based on biomarker status,” said Addie Bullock, a spokesperson for Acton’s campaign.

Those points track the public record. Ramaswamy advised Ohio’s 2020 pandemic response under then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted and backed measures that people close to the DeWine administration considered overreach, including mandatory testing and isolation for select groups, as TiffinOhio.net has reported. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who appointed Acton and later endorsed Ramaswamy, has repeatedly said the pandemic closure decisions were his own, not Acton’s — a point he made again when he called an earlier Ramaswamy attack ad inaccurate.

The dispute is the latest turn in a race in which Ramaswamy has made Acton’s pandemic record a centerpiece, a strategy detailed in TiffinOhio.net’s review of Ramaswamy’s record. Acton and Ramaswamy meet in the general election on Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The contribution appears in federal campaign finance filings for V-PAC: Victors Not Victims, the independent super PAC formed by Ramaswamy’s allies to support his campaign. Records show Scotts made the $250,000 payment on Jan. 30 and designated it as a corporate contribution. Because V-PAC is an independent-expenditure committee rather than a candidate’s campaign, federal law lets it accept unlimited sums directly from corporate treasuries — something candidates themselves cannot do.

In a statement, Scotts Chief Communications Officer Tom Matthews did not dispute the contribution and said the company gives across the political spectrum. “When it comes to political contributions, we have a history of donating to Democratic and Republican organizations and committees,” he said, adding that the company’s corporate spending is guided by “a commitment to supporting a stable, predictable and science-based regulatory environment.” Matthews cited the company’s Marysville headquarters and Ohio workforce, saying its “commitment to Ohio runs deep.”

Scotts is not an ordinary corporate donor. In 2012, the company was sentenced in federal court in Columbus to a $4 million fine for eleven criminal violations of federal pesticide law — then the largest criminal penalty ever imposed under that law. A separate civil settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brought the total to $12.5 million.

The company had pleaded guilty to treating its wild bird food with two insecticides that regulators had prohibited for that use, including one whose label warned it was “extremely toxic to fish and toxic to birds and other wildlife.” According to the Justice Department, Scotts kept selling the treated bird food for two years after the product line launched — and for six months after its own employees warned management of the danger. More than 70 million units had been sold by the time the company recalled the products in 2008. Scotts also admitted falsifying documents to convince the EPA and state regulators that unregistered pesticides had been approved.

The case is more than a decade old, and Scotts resolved it in full. The company attributed the falsified paperwork to a product manager, who pleaded guilty separately, and part of the sentence steered $500,000 to Ohio bird-conservation efforts, including the state Audubon society’s important bird area program and a Columbus Metro Parks habitat project. Matthews said the decades-old case had no bearing on the donation. “In no way did a compliance issue that occurred nearly 15 years ago and has long been resolved influence our decision making here,” he said.

Matthews’s statement described the company’s practice of making corporate contributions to “state-level political organizations and committees that represent the broader business community and the consumer lawn and garden sector.” V-PAC is a federal committee organized to elect a single candidate, and the statement did not separately explain the company’s decision to support it.

The donation gives a company with a federal environmental conviction a financial stake in Ohio’s next governor. Whoever wins in November will appoint the director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency — a cabinet post that oversees the state’s air, water and waste enforcement — and will set the administration’s environmental priorities. Scotts is one of Ohio’s larger manufacturers, with its headquarters and research operations in Union County.

V-PAC has become the financial engine behind Ramaswamy’s bid, raising tens of millions of dollars, most of it from a small group of wealthy contributors led by Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, who has given $20 million. The committee reported roughly $23 million in cash on hand this spring. Ramaswamy, a Republican, faces Democrat Amy Acton, the former state health director, in the Nov. 3 general election to succeed term-limited Gov. Mike DeWine.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Moreno, a Westlake Republican, said Thursday he plans to introduce legislation targeting the Canadian government and the officials he blames for smoke that has repeatedly fouled the air across Ohio and the Great Lakes. “I’ll be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity,” he wrote on X, quote-posting a Cleveland journalist’s image of a haze-shrouded downtown.

His office released the bill text Friday. Formally titled the “Countering Atmospheric Nuisances Arising from Drifting Airborne Foreign Incendiary Residual Emissions Act” — the CANADA FIRE Act — the measure is set for introduction July 20. It would require the president to determine whether Canadian wildfires harmed U.S. air quality and, if so, sanction Canadian officials deemed responsible, block their assets and revoke their visas. It also declares Canada’s ambassador “persona non grata” until the smoke clears and directs a study of a victims compensation fund financed by new tariffs.

“Thanks to Canada’s failed leadership, Ohio’s skies are seeing the worst pollution on record and Ohioans across the state are being subjected to hazardous conditions – we will not tolerate this incompetence,” Moreno said in a statement. His office faulted Canada for failing to invest in “forest thinning, fuel reduction, prescribed burns, and stronger enforcement against arson.”

The air was, by any measure, dangerous. The Ohio EPA issued a statewide air-quality advisory Wednesday, effective early Thursday, warning that pollution could reach the “very unhealthy” to “hazardous” range. In Cleveland, federal monitors rated the air “hazardous,” with the Air Quality Index climbing past 500 Thursday afternoon — a scale that tops out at 500. David Margolius, director of the Cleveland Department of Public Health, said conditions were worse than the 2023 smoke events that first turned Ohio’s skies orange.

What Moreno’s bill does not address is what scientists say is driving these increasingly frequent smoke events: a warming climate.

Peer-reviewed attribution research has found that human-caused climate change significantly increased the likelihood of the record wildfire seasons now sending smoke south. One study of Canada’s catastrophic 2023 season concluded warming more than doubled the odds of that scale of burning in eastern and southwestern Canada and made the extended fire season more than five times as likely. The Canadian Climate Institute notes that while the number of fires isn’t rising, the large, fast-moving blazes are — and it cautions that the “arson” framing Moreno’s office invoked distorts the science. In wildfire terminology, “human-caused” describes any ignition not sparked by lightning; it is not a synonym for arson, and it is not what is making the fires bigger.

Fire scientists have been blunt. Jen Beverly, a wildland fire professor at the University of Alberta, told the BBC that Canada’s boreal forests produce fires that are especially hard to control and that “we’re seeing more of those because of climate change.” Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University has warned that until governments address the root cause, the smoke will keep coming.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney answered the wave of Republican criticism by turning it back on Washington. “Climate change is everyone’s responsibility — truly everyone’s — including the United States,” he said, contrasting Canada’s investments in clean energy with U.S. moves to obstruct it, including the Trump administration’s campaign against offshore wind.

That contrast lands close to Moreno’s own record. During his 2024 campaign, Moreno made expanded oil and gas production a centerpiece and, as Inside Climate News reported, argued that America needs more fossil fuels. The League of Conservation Voters named him to its “Dirty Dozen” list of candidates it considers the worst on the environment. The emissions from burning those fuels are the same greenhouse gases that scientists say are heating the atmosphere, drying out forests and lengthening the fire seasons whose smoke now settles over Ohio — a warming climate that researchers have also tied to more frequent extreme weather and rising costs for basic services.

Ohio, meanwhile, has moved in the opposite direction from Carney’s clean-energy pitch, expanding fracking onto public lands while renewable projects face steep permitting hurdles that fossil fuel operations largely avoid.

Moreno is not alone in aiming at Ottawa. Four Michigan House Republicans sent a letter this week urging Canada to do more on wildfire management, and Moreno’s office echoed its language. Their case is that Canada’s forest management has fallen short and that the consequences are real: the smoke has closed schools, canceled outdoor events and battered Michigan’s summer tourism economy during its peak. As of Friday, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre counted roughly 895 active wildfires nationwide.

Whether a sanctions bill aimed at a close U.S. ally advances is another question. It would need to clear a Senate where such a measure faces long odds, and it does nothing to change the atmospheric conditions carrying the smoke across the border. For Ohioans watching the haze return summer after summer, the more consequential debate may be the one Moreno’s bill sidesteps: what, if anything, Washington intends to do about the warming that keeps the fires burning.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.