The Dictatorship
I’m a sixth-generation farmer. Trump’s funding freeze is throwing my world into chaos.

The Trump administration’s decision to pause and review federal funding has sparked uncertainty for many Americans. Even if you have not personally felt the effects yet, you soon might, because these abrupt freezes are hitting family farmers and ranchers hard. And when farmers struggle, every consumer feels it at the grocery store.
Agriculture is a complex industry, often overlooked in national policy discussions. Farmers take on an immense amount of financial risk to put a crop into the ground or raise a herd of livestock, only to be wiped out by a natural disaster, rising costs or collapsing markets. The programs under review — or those completely frozen — help family farmers manage risk, access credit and stay afloat when times get tough.
Without intervention, these cuts will ripple through rural economies.
Like all businesses, farmers need some stability to succeed. As a sixth-generation farmer from West Virginia, I understand the administration’s desire to root out waste, fraud and abuse in federal programs. But the current freeze is creating chaos instead of reform. No one knows what funding will be available, or if key programs will have the staff needed to operate. Here are a few examples of the funding freeze’s real-world impacts on America’s farmers.
The freeze has most immediately impacted federal conservation and voluntary climate-smart agriculture projects. Across the country, farmers have been left in limbo after making sustainability investments, trusting that the government would uphold its commitments.
For example, some farmers who purchased cover crop seed to improve soil health or installed solar panels to reduce energy costs are now learning that federal reimbursements have been cut off. These are not theoretical losses. These are real financial burdens that could push family farms into bankruptcy. Without intervention, these cuts will ripple through rural economies. Every farm that goes out of business means fewer families in rural communities, less money spent at the local businesses, fewer kids in the local schools, and fewer tax dollars for roads, hospitals and emergency services.
Farmers and policymakers in both parties have broadly supported international food aid for decades. American farmers produce more food than we can consume, and food aid donations serve the dual purpose of providing a new market opportunity for farmers and feeding people in need around the world. The U.S. purchased roughly $2 billion in food aid last year from American farmers; dismantling our food aid program is certain to disrupt market prices and create additional stress for U.S. food producers.
Beyond agriculture, the funding freeze threatens the infrastructure that keeps rural communities running. Federal grants and loans help small towns replace aging and costly infrastructure, such as broadband and water systems, and invest in local meat and food processing. Local entities have relied on federal loans and loan guarantees — existing commitments that the government is now freezing, leaving farmers, investors, lenders and rural communities on the hook for funds already spent.
Shrinking the size of the federal workforce might seem like a reasonable way to cut costs, but in agriculture it could have disastrous consequences. Farmers rely on federal employees to administer disaster relief, risk management programs and conservation initiatives, and rural areas already struggle to recruit and retain qualified staff.
One of the more alarming impacts could be on U.S. Department of Agriculture food safety inspectors. Meatpacking plants cannot operate without them, meaning staffing shortages could slow or shut down processing facilities. This would hurt livestock growers, who already face limited options due to industry consolidation. It would also reduce meat supply, driving up prices for consumers. These funding freezes do not just hurt individual farmers. They reinforce a food system already dominated by a handful of powerful corporations. Over the past several decades, agriculture has become more concentrated, with a few companies controlling everything from seeds and fertilizers to meatpacking and grain trading. Farmers have few choices on where to sell their products, leaving them at the mercy of companies that keep farm prices low while raising costs for consumers.
Every farm that goes out of business means fewer families in rural communities, less money spent at the local businesses, fewer kids in the local schools, and fewer tax dollars for roads, hospitals, and emergency services.
Further instability in federal programs only strengthens these monopolies. When family farmers lose access to credit, conservation programs or technical assistance, they are more likely to be forced out of business or absorbed by corporate interests. That means less competition, fewer independent farmers and higher grocery prices for American families.
Finally, federal research funding drives breakthroughs in crop and animal science, safeguarding our food supply from emerging diseases and advancing technologies that help farmers produce more with fewer resources. However, the current funding freeze has stalled agricultural research, leaving farmers without the tools they need to adapt to a changing climate and evolving threats. Investing in agriculture is investing in the future — ensuring farmers can keep farming, rural communities can stay vibrant, and every American can have access to safe, affordable food.
Supporting family farmers and ranchers means supporting the backbone of our nation. These funding cuts are not just numbers on a budget spreadsheet; they represent real dollars that sustain families and power rural economies. Freezing spending and making sweeping decisions without congressional oversight just adds more uncertainty to a stressed farm economy. The right way to evaluate government programs is through thoughtful, measured approaches that protect taxpayer dollars without causing harm to family farmers, ranchers and rural communities.
Policymakers must listen to the voices of those most impacted and recognize the real-world consequences of any cuts. Our rural economy and food system — and therefore all of America — depends on it.
Rob Larew
Rob Larew is a leader in agriculture, public policy and rural advocacy. Larew leads the second-largest general farm organization as the 15th president of National Farmers Union, representing more than 230,000 family farmers and ranchers across the country. A sixth-generation farmer from West Virginia, Larew has dedicated his career to advancing the interests of family farmers and rural communities across the United States.
The Dictatorship
Appeals court rules against Trump tariffs, but Supreme Court appeal may soon follow


A federal appeals court ruled against President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Friday, but the ruling won’t take immediate effect because the court is giving the administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court. So as with nearly every big issue in American life, the justices may have the last word.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the administration will appeal. The president said in his own social media post that if the ruling stands it would “literally destroy the United States of America.”
The ruling came Friday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. It dealt with five executive orders imposing tariffs “of unlimited duration on nearly all goods from nearly every country in the world,” as the court put it. The U.S. Court of International Trade had previously ruled in May that the tariffs ran afoul of a federal law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The government appealed to the Federal Circuit, which upheld the trade court on Friday.
“Because we agree that IEEPA’s grant of presidential authority to ‘regulate’ imports does not authorize the tariffs imposed by the Executive Orders, we affirm,” the appeals court said, adding that it wasn’t weighing in on “whether the President’s actions should have been taken as a matter of policy.”
The court also said that further review is needed back in the trade court regarding the universal injunction it granted. The appeals court cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in the birthright citizenship case that dealt with that subject in June, after the trade court ruling came out.
The Federal Circuit’s ruling on Friday split the 11 judges who heard the case 7-4.
The judges also issued an order accompanying the ruling that keeps it from taking effect through Oct. 14. If a Supreme Court appeal is filed by then, the appellate ruling will remain on hold either until the Supreme Court declines review or issues its own ruling.
Four judges added a separate opinion that agreed with the majority, but further expressed their view that IEEPA not only doesn’t authorize Trump to issue the tariffs in these executive orders, but that it doesn’t authorize him to issue any tariffs at all.
Four other judges dissented, writing that they agreed with the majority that the trade court had jurisdiction, that the plaintiffs had standing to bring a lawsuit and that (if the tariffs are unlawful) the case needs to be sent back to the lower court for further review; but they disagreed with the substance of the lower court’s ruling that the tariffs are unlawful.
Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
The Dictatorship
A teenager died by suicide after confiding in ChatGPT. That should be a wake-up call.

In family photos, you can see 16-year-old Adam Raine grinning ear to ear. But the California teen’s prankster personality concealed a deep current of depression and despair. And earlier this year, say his parentsChatGPT — which Adam went to for comfort — helped him take his own life.
Earlier this week, Adam’s mother and father filed the first known wrongful death suit against OpenAI. The lawsuit includes ChatGPT logs from Adam’s phone, which show how completely he was lured in to rely on a Big Tech product for companionship — and how, time after time, that product ignored warning signs and structurally failed him. At first, he turned to AI for homework help. Then, as chronic illness and problems at school narrowed his world, he called on it for comfort. Instead, the lawsuit alleges, it became an accelerator for self-harm and guided him through his death by suicide. (In a statement to NBC News, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the authenticity of the logs, but said the lawsuit did not include the full context of ChatGPT’s responses.)
Chatbots are designed to keep kids hooked — even when they need off-ramps for real-world help.
As the mother of two boys, 3 and 5, I can only imagine the pain Adam’s parents are feeling. But I know that families across the country share a fundamental anger that Big Tech companies willingly risk the lives of our kids, an anger that grows every time we hear about the loss of a young person like Adam.
More and more frequently, kids are confiding in Big Tech’s AI chatbots, not just when they want help with homework, but when they’re lonely or in pain. Because AI chatbots are designed to be sycophantic and to adeptly mimic human emotion, children can’t always tell truth from fiction, or distinguish real love and concern from a machine-generated response. That makes kids dangerously vulnerable to forming unhealthy attachments.
After the Raines filed their lawsuit, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company was “deeply saddened by Mr. Raine’s passing.” The company published a blog post listing “some of the things we are working to improve” when ChatGPT’s safeguards fail. That is too little, too late — just like Big Tech’s attitude toward safety in general. Rather than do anything to help address this problem, these companies prioritize hyping up the uses of AI and increasing its “market share” of our kids’ waking hours and mental bandwidth.

In fact, Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants his Meta AI companion to fill users’ “demand for meaningfully more” real-world friends. In 2023, The Wall Street Journal reportsthe chatbot’s product managers “told staff that Zuckerberg was upset that the team was playing it too safe,” which led to a loosening of the standards that kept conversations from becoming too sexualized.
Meta’s internal documents allowed their AI chatbots to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual” until the company was asked about it by Reuters. New research from the family advocacy group Common Sense Media finds that Meta’s chatbot for Instagram and Facebook willingly coaches teens on how to carry out self-harm, disordered eating and violent fantasies.
As AI chatbots become confidantes and even parasitic bosom buddies, many children share secrets they won’t or can’t tell their families. Chatbots, though, are designed to produce engagement and keep kids hooked — even when they need off-ramps for real-world help. Products like ChatGPT — tragically, unspeakably — become abettors and co-conspirators in suicidal plans, with the chatbot, according to the lawsuit, even providing Adam advice on how to tie a noose.
If this were any other industry, lawmakers would have listened to the thousands of parents and young advocates who have been banging down their doors pleading for change.
The scale of the harm wrought by these companies grows by the day.
But Big Tech has big money, which means big lobbying — and so far, that has blocked real safeguards. Instead of working with lawmakers, these companies even pushed for a ludicrous federal moratorium on AI regulation, which would have negated hundreds, if not thousands, of state laws already on the books and blocked any state laws dealing with AI for 10 years. This prompted a nationwide revolt of parents, attorneys general, governors and state legislators on both sides of the aisle.
My two boys haven’t yet begun to ask me for phones, and they don’t know what social media or chatbots are. And still I’m scared to death we won’t get through to lawmakers in time to save them. My eldest is a whip-smart, sensitive kid, who I’m terrified will be destroyed by social media, either preyed upon by an online child predator, or persuaded to do himself harm because his young mind won’t comprehend that the “friend” he is confiding in is actually a machine humming away in a massive data center somewhere, helping him — like it did for Adam — plan a “beautiful suicide.”
Meanwhile, tech giants are buying off academics and whitewashing research about the dangers their products pose to our kids. They’re infiltrating trusted institutions like the PTA, backing “safety” initiatives while fighting to defeat safety reforms, suing organizations they view as threats. They try to silence whistleblowers — even when those whistleblowers are called before Congress. And now they’re even creating political super PACs to intimidate lawmakers into voting their way and ignoring tragedies like Adam’s.
Let me be absolutely clear: Politicians should think twice before accepting donations from these Big Tech super PACs. The scale of the harm wrought by these companies grows by the day. They are not working in good faith with legislators and regulators to ensure that our privacy and our children’s lives are protected.
Thankfully, state legislators don’t have to wait for Washington to act. In California, for instance, state Sen. Steve Padilla introduced SB 243which would establish safety guardrails for “companion” chatbots and make companies track interactions with users in crisis. And AB 1064the LEAD for Kids Act, championed by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, would ban emotionally manipulative AI companions for kids, require parental consent and more.
These are all sensible measures — and they are under attack by the very companies whose products are harming our children. Just last week, Meta announced a California-specific super PAC to go after such bills.
Meta, Apple, Google, OpenAI and their ilk will never regulate themselves, so we urgently need to do it before more children die and more families are destroyed. In Adam Raine’s memory, we have an opportunity to prevent future tragedies — if lawmakers will listen.
The Dictatorship
After the Annunciation school shooting, the gun lobby is counting on our doing nothing

They showed up to Annunciation Catholic School on the far south side of Minneapolis on Wednesday wearing backpacks and new shoes their parents may have just purchased during back-to-school shopping. They filed into the adjacent yellow brick Catholic church for the annual start-of-the-school-year Mass with adults shushing their giggles and excitement. After all, Annunciation had just got a new principal and a new priestand the older children had been assigned their “buddies” from younger grades who would watch them and learn the scripture and rituals of the Catholic Mass.
A barrage of bullets exploded through the stained glass windows and shattered yet another American community.
And then, during a religious service that was supposed to usher in a school year defined by the phrase “a future filled with HOPE,” a barrage of bullets exploded through the stained glass windows and shattered yet another American community.
Two families that dropped their children off at school will never see them again. There is now an empty chair at each table. Two bedrooms frozen in time. Two futures snatched away by a shooter’s cowardly rage. Eighteen more people are physically injured. Some remain in critical condition. But “in critical condition” could just as well describe the whole Annunciation community, the city of Minneapolis and, really, America in its exhausted entirety.
Those babies — one 8 and the other 10 — gunned down in the pews at their Catholic school have forced us all to face a sickening lesson about the current state of our country. The people responsible for writing the laws that govern us have developed a tolerance for children being slaughtered in their schools.
Instead of saying, “No more of this,” our society has introduced more attempts to protect kids in places that should be inviolate. Metal detectors. Security guards. Active shooter drills. Thankfully Annunciation had adopted a protocol of locking the church doors before Mass began. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said locking the doors likely saved many lives.
We should never ever normalize a scene as horrific as this, but somewhere along the way, mass casualty events have become a grim fact of American Life. It’s hard to admit this, but the unbearable has become unacceptably routine. I hate writing that sentence. These facts should cause us sorrow and even shame. The death and despair. The wounds that last a lifetime. The assault on our sense of security. The targeting of CHILDREN. And the ready access to guns that are essentially weapons of war. All of this should be unacceptable. School shootings are still devastatingly shocking, but history shows that these atrocities do not guarantee change.
People committed to truly creating a safer America must figure out how to stand up to a gun lobby that is counting on a woefully predictable pattern. Shock. Grief. Outrage. Anguish.
Calls for thoughts and prayers. Vigils. Funerals. Editorials.
Pledges for action and change.
All of it falling short of achieving a goal we should have reached years ago — restricting easy access to assault weapons.
Another part of this predictable pattern is a debate over what led the shooter to this kind of unthinkable violence. The motives, lifestyle and so-called manifesto will be studied. Was the shooter a lonely outcast or angry and addled? But no matter the answers to those questions, there is a constant through line in these mass shootings at schools and movie theaters and concerts and clinics: access to war-fighting, high-velocity firearms that have no place among civilians.
I grew up on the south side of Minneapolis, and I attended a Catholic school just a few miles from Annunciation.
Since Republicans will be predictably silent, Democrats and those who can find their way to support reasonable gun safety measures need to figure out how to react to the constant ticktock of violence with a constant amplification of their demand for gun reform.
I grew on the south side of Minneapolis, and I attended a Catholic school just a few miles from Annunciation. I know that parish well. It’s part of a cluster of Catholic church/school campuses that dot the Twin Cities. Annunciation has always been a particularly active congregation, in part because of the stability in its surrounding upper middle-class community.
It’s a thriving hub that hosts fish fries, bingo nights, scout troops and basketball leagues. The buildings buzz all week, even in the summer months when kids learn how to ride bikes on the recess lot and seniors do laps to get their steps in. It’s where south siders buy Christmas trees and the church engages in a Mission Monday program where the first day of the week is dedicated to participating in programs like Meals on Wheels, making goodie bags for seniors living in elder care centers or turning old T-shirts into re-usable diapers for the sister parish Annunciation adopted in Haiti.
Catholic churches throughout the city have sometimes struggled in recent years to maintain active congregations and thriving schools. As the Twin Cities went through a series of changes with demographic shifts, rising poverty rates and conversely pockets where working families were priced out of neighborhoods, Catholic parishes were mandated by the diocese to be not just in the community but of the community. Annunciation, built in 1922 on the far stretch of the city near where the suburbs start, has thrived as a model of that creed.
But now it is the most recent marker in America’s daisy chain of school shootings. The Tudor building that was such a place of pride with its careful plantings and holiday decorations will forever be a monument to grief. No different than Sandy Hook, Columbine, Jonesboro, Uvalde, Parkland and so many more. Too many more.
I hope that Annunciation’s community-strong model will provide both steel and balm.
Eventually the students will return to school. Drivers along 54th Street will once again hear the squeals from the playground and the sound of children’s voices united in sing-song hymns floating through an open classroom window.
“Annunciation” refers to the moment the angel Gabriel told Mary she would conceive a son.
Shoppers visiting the Kowalski’s grocery store across the street or the Holiday gas station just down the road will forever feel a jolt of anguish. How could they not?
The Twin Cities is a place that was already reeling from another large casualty shooting earlier that weekthe shooting of lawmakers and their families in June, and May marked the fifth anniversary of police murdering George Floyd. And with this latest monstrous assault, it has joined the litany of communities forever marked by the pain of schoolchildren being deliberately murdered.
Those communities all figure out how to move forward, but they never really move on. And we should not either.
In religious teaching, “annunciation” refers to the moment the angel Gabriel told Mary she would conceive a son. What if we honored those children who lost their lives and all those families affected by this shooting with a full throttled denunciation of high-velocity assault weapons, followed by swift legislative action, punitive laws and stiff penalties.
The gun lobby is counting on all of us to go back to that predictable pattern after a school shooting in which outrage fails to usher in true change.
Maybe this time we can finally prove them wrong.
Michele Norris is a senior contributing editor for BLN and the author of “Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race & Identity.”
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