Jun. 7, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

ByChristina Wyman

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education recently announced it would freeze enrollment in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Librarya literacy initiative that offers one free book per month for children from birth until five years old. More than 20 states provide full or partial funding for the program, which claims to have donated over 300 million books to kids in the U.S. and elsewhere. The beneficiaries includes 170,000 Missouri childrenbut the state’s Republican-dominated legislature decided to cut the program’s funding from $6 million to $2 million.

As a teacher and author for children, I know the consequences of these cuts are all too clear. I have witnessed firsthand what it looks like when children do not have access to books. Such a drastic cut to such an important service is more of the same as far as this country’s continued acts of political and economic violence against its own citizens.

From literacy advocates to the American Association of Pediatrics to even the current U.S. governmenteveryone agrees that early childhood literacy is critical. According to Take Action For Libraries, a nonprofit political action committee, early access to books paves the way for a lifetime of learningwith more books in the home potentially leading to higher educational attainment.

The impact of access to books is also a symbolic one. I grew up in a working-class household and could feel, at a young age, that my family’s socioeconomic status did not measure up to that of many of my peers. We lived in a small walk-up apartment in Brooklyn; we spent most weeks surviving paycheck to paycheck. While many of my classmates and friends were in similar (or worse) positions, others enjoyed vacation homes, their parents’ new cars, and all manner of resources not available to the rest of us. Those kids could afford educational and enrichment opportunities. We had to hope and pray for many of the same chances — or settle for free alternative, if there were any.

But while my family did not have much, we did have books. Though my parents read little, they made sure the bedroom I shared with my sister was stocked with stories. We often devoured several books a week, having to resort to rereading them if we finished them before our next trip to bookstores or libraries (another institution currently under attack). Had Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library been available in the 1980s, there is no doubt my parents would have taken advantage of this program. And while families of any income can participate in Parton’s initiative, as with any universal social program those with the least will suffer from cuts the most.

It is a certain kind of person who sees early and easy access to books as a bad thing. Part of my role in schools involves visiting classrooms for teaching observations. I will never forget one school I was assigned to observe in rural Wisconsin. I sat at the teacher’s desk as he picked up the autobiography of Pakastani activist Malala Yousafzai. I expected each student to grab their own class copy so that that they could read along with him—so that they could huddle over the book at their desks, feeling its pages and connecting with the words in ways that every reader understands.

Some children had their own copies, likely furnished by their parents. But most did not. Instead, the teacher read his one copy aloud, while those without a book stared at each other, kicked each other under their desks, doodled in their notebooks, picked at their fingers, and participated in any other distraction they could think of – all because they simply could not see the words on the page.

To be clear, that teacher was one of the most effective and engaging teachers I have ever known; he did the best he could with what he had available. I later learned that his school district did not offer its schools a budget for class sets of books. But to this day, I wonder what sort of opportunities those kids were given to develop a love of reading (if any).

Teachers (and our wallets) can only do so much – we are not magicians. To read books, children need access to them – the same type of access that Missouri is poised to take away from its own communities, and the effects can be observed in all corners of schooling.

The state’s decision comes at a perilous time for children’s literacy. According to the National Assessment for Educational Progress, also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” reading scores for high school seniors fell to their lowest since 1992. Surveys have found that high school students are assigned fewer and fewer books to read. Children are reading, and especially for funless than ever. And schools’ overreliance on technology is likely to be exacerbated by the looming disaster that is AI.

Through no fault of their own, our children, our books, are in crisis. Free book programs should be considered a necessary component to all communities – like clean water and sanitation. Instead, Missouri’s decision to cut a beloved free book program, and any other state that follows suit, is only contributing to the challenges we currently face.

As a writer for children, I often visit schools to talk with kids about the importance of reading: “No one can take away your ability to read books,” I often say. What I don’t tell them is that there are so many groups, from politicians to legislators to self-proclaimed “parents’ rights” groups who are trying to do exactly that. If students become readers, they will know exactly what these people are trying to take away from them: Their ability to navigate the world as socially literate, informed, and empathetic citizens. Books, and access to them, is one of the few aspects of childhood that holds the potential to feel fair and equal. Is it any wonder that those currently in power wish to do away with it?

Jun. 7, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Going into November’s midterm electionsDemocrats have put together a strong message that the prices of food, gas, healthcare, housing and utilities are too high and that Americans need to elect members of the party who take their financial struggles seriously. And that message has been working. Since President Donald Trump was elected in 2024 and embarked upon a term that has unsettled even those of us who were expecting the worst, Democrats have consistently overperformed in special and off-year elections.

Just ask Mikie Sherill and Abigail Spanbergerthe recently elected Democratic governors of New Jersey and Virginia, respectively. An April Fox News poll showed Democrats edging Republicans 52% to 48% on which party would better handle the economy. That was the first time Democrats have had an advantage on that question in 16 years.

Given the party’s edge on this important metric, unless Democrats suffer a significant reversal in public opinion over the next five months, they should be considered likely to take control of the House after nearly four years in the minority. But preserving the party’s momentum rests on persuading voters that Democrats will take seriously the issue of affordability for everyday Americans. Our future success, including our hopes to reclaim the White House in 2028, will depend on us showing that we won’t just promise, but we will deliver.

But on one important issue, I fear Democrats may be walking blindly into a buzzsaw and risking giving away the advantage they have established over Republicans on who cares more about working Americans. The issue is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guarantees Americans that their bank accounts are insured up to $250,000. Some Democrats have bought into the idea that there needs to be a dramatic expansion of those federal banking insurance subsidies, and they are joining Republican supporters of the industry’s push. The legislation was introduced by Sens. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., and Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md.and currently it is being debated in the Senate Banking Committee. The bill, which would expand federally-backed deposit insurance guarantees for business transaction accounts from the $250,000 cap to as much as $5 million, is being sold as protection for “Main Street.”

But that’s far from the truth. More than 99% of Americans’ bank accounts are already fully covered by the FDIC’s $250,000 cap. It’s been quite some time since a good survey was done, but in 2016, JPMorgan Chase reported that the median small business held an average daily cash balance of just $12,100. There is little in the legislation, then, for most small business owners.

Indeed, the biggest beneficiaries of this legislation would be large corporations with treasury departments that are staffed to manage cash positions of this size. Those corporations already have plenty of options today to insure their accounts and to pay for those options themselves. Under this bill, they would instead get coverage backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.

That is to say, those corporations would get coverage backed by you, by me and by every other American taxpayer. The legislation was also written to benefit all but a handful of the largest banks in the country, including more than a dozen with more than $100 billion in assets each.

By guaranteeing deposits at such a scale, the federal government would be stripping banks and large depositors of any incentive to manage risk, thus recreating the “moral hazard” that helped drive the savings and loan crisis that cost taxpayers more than $120 billion. That crisis followed the 1980 deposit insurance coverage hike. This bill would subsidize wealthy depositors and banks by socializing the risk of the next bailout onto every American taxpayer.

The above is the economic argument against this bill. Now let me give you the political argument. Democrats win when we deliver our economic and affordability message. We lose when the party is seen as too cozy with Wall Street and other wealthy supporters. That perception of doing the bidding of the banks and not Americans struggling to make ends meet should make Democrats think twice about this legislation.

After all, voters never forget a bank bailout. The political damage of 2008 still reverberates today. The view that Democrats, who controlled Congress, were willing to rescue Wall Street while Main Street drowned was a generational wound.  The Democrats’ perception as being most concerned  about corporations helped fuel the tea party, the shellacking that was the 2010 midterms and a decade of lost ground on economic credibility.

We see from the elections Democrats have won since 2024 that middle-class Americans are trusting us to make their lives more affordable. Voting to put those same Americans on the hook for the next bank bailout would be a horrible way to repay that trust.

Democrats must not risk hurting their winning message on the economy by passing a giveaway for banking lobbyists and their wealthy clients.

Cedric Richmond is a former U.S. representative from Louisiana and a former senior advisor to President Joe Biden.

Jun. 7, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

A group of three families, on behalf of their transgender childrenand two transgender young adults, filed a lawsuit Tuesday in New York seeking to block a subpoena from the Justice Department for NYU Langone to release their medical records and other personal information to the government. The filing is only the most recent in a slate of lawsuits led by trans kids and their families across the country, from Maryland to California.

The timing of these lawsuits is notable as they come in and around Pride Month, a period intended for the celebration of queerness and to honor hard-won battles for social and legal acceptance. Instead, trans children, and their families, are living in fear and using time, energy and resources to protect themselves from the state for the perceived transgression of merely existing.

The government’s objective in its subpoena, which bids hospital representatives to appear in court before a grand jury in June and present documents “sufficient to identify each patient” who as a minor received gender-confirming care of any kind dating back to 2020,  appears to be twofold: to deny healthcare to trans kids, by, among other things, citing billing to insurance companies as “fraudulent”; and to intimidate healthcare providers from providing gender-confirming care to transgender patients at all.

This tactic appears to be working as trans healthcare centers and clinics around the country shutter, making care increasingly hard to access. “In addition to concerns about how the government might use private health information, parents said they fear that their children’s records will be held up as part of an investigation that ultimately aims to deny them medical treatment,” The New York Times reported Tuesday.

While the DOJ told the Times that it does not respond to requests for comment on grand jury subpoenas or activities, the Times also reported that “[t]he government has said it is acting on the behalf of patients and families as it investigates whether health providers and drug companies have illegally promoted off-label use of medications or used fraudulent billing practices to secure insurance coverage for gender-related treatments to minors.”

The DOJ has based its investigations into gender-confirming care for trans youth in the Northern District of Texaswhich is home court for a notoriously reactionary and partisan chief district judge, Reed O’Connor, and therefore “a venue favored by conservatives,” Reuters explains. In the past, O’Connor has taken initiatives to quash legal recourse for the subjects of his rulings, such as Rhode Island Hospital, which has been treating trans minors. “He…issued an injunction claiming to prohibit the hospital from seeking relief in the federal courts that oversee Rhode Island under threat of contempt. And he barred the hospital from ‘aiding and abetting’ any other party that might ask for help from these courts, including the children whose rights will be trampled by disclosure of their records,” Slate reported in May.

In basing its investigation in the Northern District of Texas, the department can file requests for subpoenas — for medical records and private patient information in other states — in O’Connor’s court. This, as Slate reporting describes, is part of the DOJ’s wider attempt at “forum shopping key cases to MAGA judges across the country who are much more likely to reward underhanded tactics.” It’s a breach of the sanctity of state laws, variations of which have been an important part of this country’s legal framework.

The Justice Department has made the case that part of its investigation involves looking at trans healthcare providers’ use of off-label drugs, arguing this could be either fraudulent or illegal. Yet as the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality explainsoff-label use is both “legal and common.” (For instance, Trazodone, while originally intended to treat depression, is often prescribed for other conditions, such as insomnia, bulimia, alcohol dependence or diabetic neuropathy.)

This is all to say that this administration is not just failing to take care of our most vulnerable populations, but it is actively targeting them. The fact that vulnerable children and their families are compelled to sue the federal government in an effort to have their constitutional rights honored says everything we need to know about this current political landscape.

“Every week there’s something new,” one teenager targeted in the Rhode Island Hospital case, who was only identified by their first initial because their family has faced harassment and threats in the past, told WBUR. “One week, they try to ban care. Another week, you find out that they want to know your personal information.”

It is the job of any well-functioning democracy to protect children and other vulnerable groups. As a trans man, navigating the progressively hostile and reactionary medical, political and legal landscapes demands an enormous amount of energy, not to mention it produces a great deal of fear and anxiety — and I am in my 40s. I cannot imagine how much this state targeting of trans youth is derailing the lives of children who want and deserve nothing more than to simply be kids.

Noor Noman is a writer focused on culture, race and LGBTQ issues.