Americans: We’re Broke. 

Donald Trump: No, You’re Not.

Donald Trump and the Republicans are insisting the economy is great and unhappy Americans are deluded. Just like Democrats under Joe Biden, they’re lying to themselves and everyone else — and will eventually pay the price.

By Branko Marcetic

May 16, 2026

Source: Jacobin

Not long ago, when Joe Biden was running the show, I pointed out again and again (and again) that countless metrics showed Americans were not having a good time economically, and that Democrats fixating on glowing macroeconomic stats and telling themselves the public was deluded would not change this — in fact, that it would eventually lead the party to political ruin. This was exactly what happened, as Donald Trump and the Republicans rode the wave of public discontent with the economy to the White House and control of Congress.

Now it’s Trump and the GOP who are repeating the exact same mistake that led Democrats to lose to them two years ago.

“Look in their heart of hearts, they feel good,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently said when asked about Americans’ dismal view of the US economy. “I’m not sure what they’re telling the survey people.”

At various times, Trump himself has asserted that “everything’s doing really well” and gave the US economy under him the grade of “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” claiming that “prices are coming down substantially.”

“I don’t think the people really feel as bad as the Democrats are talking about. The economy is doing well,” one of Trump’s loyal media boosters, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, insisted.

“It’s phenomenal! That’s a big number!” another one, former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow, told Fox viewers about a recent GDP growth figure, in response to news about price rises. “And shows you how resilient the economy is. Business is strong. Profits are booming. That’s why the stock market is hitting all-time records.”

But as Bessent alluded to, what Americans are “telling the survey people” is a very different story compared to what Fox News hosts are telling Americans.

A record 55 percent now tell Gallup that their personal financial situation is getting worse, the fifth straight year that number has ticked up, and worse than any year of the Great Recession. More than 70 percent of Americans told a CBS News poll they’re struggling to afford food, housing, and other essentials. More than half told CNN the word “uncertainty” describes what they think about their financial futures. Young people are particularly pessimistic, with 81 percent of them rating the economy “bad” or “terrible.”

Nearly two-fifths of Americans still can’t afford to cover a $400 emergency, according to the Federal Reserve’s most recent “Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households” survey covering 2025 — the same exact proportion that said they couldn’t in the bad old days of 2024, and that said this all the way back in 2022, a year that saw the weakest self-reporting of Americans’ finances in years. This is roughly the same share that also told Morning Consult last year they either couldn’t cover that amount (18 percent) or would have to turn to a noncash equivalent to do so (25 percent), like a credit card, a loan, or selling something.

It’s not just price increases that are a worry. The share of Americans who told the Fed survey that “finding or keeping a job” was a concern ticked up five points from a year earlier, including a four-point uptick among those who found it a “major concern.”

Americans’ anxieties about health care costs are as high as ever, according to the most recent Kaiser Family Foundation polling, and in some respects have actually grown. The share of adults reporting that they had cut back on medication in various ways due to costs grew to 43 percent this year, a ten-point rise from 2025.

Okay, but if Americans really are as deluded as Trump and his people say, then maybe they’re just not answering these questions accurately. They might feel like they’re struggling with their finances, but that doesn’t mean they really are. It’s an insulting and elitist view cribbed directly from the previous Democratic administration, but let’s indulge it for a moment.

Unfortunately, there’s plenty of data that suggests that’s not the case.

Foreclosure filings spiked 26 percent from the same time last year in the first quarter of 2026, hitting a six-year high. In other words, the last time Americans filed more foreclosures was when the pandemic forced the economy to practically shut down. This is being driven by the spiking cost of home ownership, not just higher house prices and interest rates but soaring condo fees and insurance rates.

Foreclosures on home loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), a New Deal–era agency created to boost home ownership, leaped 28 percent over the year to this past March, after Trump ended several pandemic-era Biden policies helping homeowners who were behind on their mortgage payments. Trump essentially repeated a fatal mistake Biden himself had made.

At the end of last year, FHA loans hit their highest delinquency rate since 2021, though delinquencies were up across the board for every type of home loan, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Delinquency Survey. According to the Federal Reserve Board’s most recent Financial Stability Report, the early payment delinquency rate among near-subprime and subprime borrowers — meaning, the share of mortgages that went delinquent within a year of being opened by borrowers with poor credit scores — is above its historical median.

Delinquency rates in 2026 for auto loans (40 percent), mortgages (21 percent), and especially credit cards (57 percent) are way up from where they were during and before the pandemic. After a major dip, thanks to pandemic-era programs that eased the burden on student loan borrowers, delinquencies on that front are nearing their pre-pandemic numbers, with roughly 3.6 million defaulting over the previous two quarters alone. Survey data shows that these defaulted borrowers are increasingly older, over fifty years old, and were not behind on their payments before the pandemic — suggesting that it’s Americans who were doing okay financially before who are now increasingly struggling to keep their heads above water.

This lines up with data from the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, a nonprofit network of credit counselors. Earlier this year, the organization reported that the level of US financial stress is the worst since it started tracking it in 2018, and that the profile of the typical American seeking credit counseling had drastically changed. Before the pandemic, it had been a person earning roughly $40,000 a year, with a debt worth a quarter of their income. Today it’s someone making around $70,000 a year whose debt is half that number.

According to the most recent data, farm bankruptcies skyrocketed 46 percent in 2025 with 315 filings, likely indicating much broader suffering, as only certain farms qualify for Chapter 12 bankruptcy. Since Trump’s war on Iran choked off the supply of vital commodities, 70 percent of farmers say they can’t afford the fertilizer they need. Bankruptcies more generally went up 11 percent over the calendar year 2025, the third straight year they’ve increased, with the biggest growth happening among nonbusiness bankruptcies.

All of this suggests that metrics dating to 2024, which in a number of cases are the most recent data we have, are far from limited to that year. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies’ 2026 biannual rental housing report found that cost-burdened renters — meaning anyone spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities — hit another all-time high in 2024. (The 2025 and 2026 data won’t be released until 2028). That report found that higher-income households were increasingly falling into this category, with the biggest growth of cost-burdened renters taking place among those making $45,000–$74,999 a year.

Alongside this was what the National Alliance to End Homelessness called “an unprecedented rise in homelessness” of 18 percent from 2023 to 2024, also the most recent data from the organization. At the same time, the number of utility shutoffs nationally, collected for the first time in 2024 and published last month, outstripped by millions what analysts had estimated would be the total. It’s backed by a data analysis by the Washington Post of utilities in eleven states, which found there had been a rise in disconnections in at least eight of them from 2024 to 2025.

Maybe most ominous is what has been recently reported by businesses traditionally favored by lower-income consumers. Executives at Dollar Tree, Walmart, and McDonald’s have all said not only that they are seeing larger shares of high-income earners shopping at their stores but also that the low- and medium-income households that have traditionally been their bread and butter are struggling.

Dollar Tree CEO Michael Creedon said on a fourth quarter earnings call that the company “grew households across all income cohorts” and at an “accelerated rate,” but that “in the middle to higher income households, we see accelerated trade down.” In other words, more affluent shoppers who normally wouldn’t be caught dead in one of their stores are increasingly turning to low-cost retailers to spend less.

“We had a lot of growth with customers who are income bracket of $100,000 or above, and that’s pretty consistent with the last few quarters,” Walmart CEO John R. Furner said this past February. “The lower income segment $50,000 and below, we did see, of course, as we mentioned, some stress. In many cases, we see people living paycheck-to-paycheck.”

“We’re seeing, you know, solid growth, good growth with higher income and also gaining share with higher income for us,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said on an earnings call for the first quarter of 2026. “That lower income, while the declines are not as pronounced as they were, maybe, you know, six or twelve months ago when we were talking about high single digit, the low income is absolutely still declining.”

In other words, lower-income Americans are cutting back their spending on even low-cost consumer goods, and higher-income households, even those making six figures, are turning to those budget options, which they have tended to shun. This does not paint a picture of an economy that’s working particularly well for anyone, and in fact, suggests that the “K-shaped economy” — where low-income households cut back spending but high-income households keep the economy propped up by spending even more — may be slowly turning into a “backslash economy,” where everything is trending down.

That both Democrats and Republicans and their respective loyalists have just wholesale swapped talking points about this speaks to more than just the polarization that shapes how many Americans look at their country. It speaks to a political and media elite that is, no matter their party or ideology, blissfully out of touch with the lives of the people they’re meant to be serving, and which, owing to its own exorbitant wealth, simply experiences an entirely different economic reality from most of the US public.

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This article was originally published by Jacobin; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

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Branko Marcetic

Branko Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

Trump Is Making America Uninsured Again

The GOP is heading into the midterms as the party that made health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans.

By Sasha Abramsky

May 17, 2026

Source: Truthout

In 2025, the Trump administration successfully pushed Congress to enact nearly $1 trillion in health care cuts over the coming decade, which the Congressional Budget Office analysis estimated would result in 10 million people losing health coverage by 2034. More recently, it has blocked any and all efforts to extend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credit subsidies for people buying insurance on the state exchanges. In demanding that the GOP leadership in Congress prevent at all costs a continuation of the expanded ACA tax credits, Donald Trump intimated that his administration was on the verge of proposing a better and more affordable health care reform to replace the ACA system.

Nothing of that nature has materialized. Instead, the administration’s health reforms have been shockingly small-bore — a handful of measures to lower the costs of prescription drugs, more incentives for consumers to create health savings accounts, a rollback of regulations on catastrophic coverage plans — thus, making it easier for younger, healthier, patients to buy junk insurance, but doing nothing for those who are older or suffer from chronic conditions.

Over the past months, even these baby steps have stalled out, with the GOP seemingly and inexplicably resigned to the fact that it will be heading into the midterm elections as the party that is putting health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans. Early in the Iran war, Trump was caught saying that the federal government could no longer afford its massive Medicare commitments now that the country was engaged in an expensive overseas conflict, and it would have to roll back responsibility for paying for this bedrock safety net program onto the states.

This represents a stunning reversal of government efforts to bring health care access to millions who had previously lacked it. In 2020, when Congress expanded tax credits during the pandemic for Americans accessing health insurance plans through the ACA, millions of Americans were finally able to access health insurance at reasonable rates through the state exchanges.

Expanding the tax credits patched a hole through which large numbers of Americans had fallen. Under the original provisions of the ACA, anyone at or under 138 percent of the federal poverty level would qualify for Medicaid; and anyone between 138 and 400 percent of the poverty level would be able to access tax credits on a sliding scale to help them cover the cost of health insurance. None of these recipients would be expected to pay more than 10 percent of their income on insurance.

Expanding tax credits did two things: It ended what advocates had taken to calling the “affordability or eligibility cliff” — a situation in which, if your income went even one dollar over the 400 percent of the poverty line limit, you suddenly lost all tax credits and your insurance costs soared virtually overnight. It also lowered the maximum payment for credit recipients from 10 percent of their income to 8 percent if they bought a so-called “silver plan” with relatively low deductibles.

Taken together, these new terms were enough to bring millions of families under the health insurance umbrella, and it allowed millions of additional families, who previously had to opt for catastrophic insurance with huge deductibles, to access the silver plans.

“It’s an advanceable, refundable tax credit,” Anthony Wright, executive director of the health advocacy organization Families USA, explained to Truthout. “And it was tied to the point of sale.” In other words, people buying health insurance wouldn’t have to fork out thousands of dollars and then wait for a tax refund. Instead, the calculated refund would be applied to the cost of insurance from the beginning.

Congress initially passed these credits in 2021 and then, under the Inflation Reduction Act, extended the credits for another three years in 2022. Last year, despite a congressional majority in support of extending the credits, GOP leadership, at Donald Trump’s urging, stood firm against marshalling the votes needed to ensure their continuation. The affordability cliff was suddenly resurrected. As a result, from January of this year, millions of people renewing their insurance policies suddenly found themselves facing far higher bills. According to Wright, for a young person just above the Medicaid cut-off, that meant finding an extra $50 or $100 a month, itself an oftentimes insuperable obstacle for someone scrabbling just to cover their basic bills. For many older persons at the higher income side of the subsidy spectrum, it in many cases meant monthly insurance bills rising by more than $1,000, according to Wright. For some families, he says, it rose by upwards of $2,000, the equivalent of adding a second mortgage payment to families’ monthly bills.

“Congress made deliberate decisions to have premiums spike, to have more people uninsured or underinsured,” Wright argued. “People who are older, they are the ones who got socked in a big way.”

Predictably, following Congress’s failure to renew the expanded tax credits, in the first months of 2026 state exchanges calculated that up to 2 million people dropped coverage, and millions more shifted to lower cost plans with far higher deductibles, some in the $10,000 a year range. “So it really is a different product; they’re paying more and getting less,” explained Wright.

More recently, as additional insurance plans come up for renewal, and as more and more people fall months behind on their premium payments and, in consequence, get dropped by insurers, the numbers predicted to end up uninsured have soared. The New York Times published data showing that over the next couple of years, those on ACA-backed insurance plans would likely decline from 24 million to 19 million, a drop of more than 20 percent. In some states, such as Georgia, the exchanges are already reporting falloffs far in excess of 35 percent.

California has stepped in to at least partially replace the lost federal tax credits for hundreds of thousands of lower-income ACA customers who use the Covered California marketplace. But even there, according to Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, as of March 2026, there were 135,000 fewer marketplace users than a year earlier. That represents a 7 percent drop in coverage, and Altman believes the numbers will only grow over the coming months. She said there are “farmers, gig workers, small businessmen who need the marketplace because they don’t have access to employment-based coverage,” and yet these are precisely the individuals now being hit by the rollback of subsidies: people too affluent to qualify for California’s partial subsidies, but income-insecure enough to be pushed into financial hardship by increases in premiums. “This middle-income group is the only part of the health care system where we are asking the consumer to pay the full price,” Altman argued.

Add up the cuts to Medicaid, the cuts to federal ACA tax credits, and the escalating rhetoric about further paring back Medicare — despite growing popular support for Medicare for All — and “collectively we are looking at millions of people going uninsured across the country as a result of federal policy. It has ripple effects through the economy and for health care providers,” said Altman. More people, she fears, will skip vaccines, go without preventative care, including cancer screening, forgo wellness checks. Eventually, as was the case before the ACA expanded health care access, those people will present at hospital emergency rooms with untreated diseases that, had they had access to regular doctors’ visits, would have been managed far earlier.

“Our system,” said Altman, “will bear the cost of less healthy people.”

This article was originally published by Truthout; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Sasha Abramsky

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column.

How Trump Is Helping Military Contractors Fleece Taxpayers

The military-industrial complex has probably never been in a better position to bleed taxpayers dry.

By Lucy Dean Stockton

May 16, 2026

Source: More Perfect Union

Wikimedia Commons

In recent years, the Pentagon has welcomed new contracting processes that pad military contractors’ profits — a trend that is now being turbocharged under President Donald Trump, and the military-industrial complex is thrilled.

Typically, when the government buys a product or service, it uses competitive contracts to ensure that taxpayers get a fair price. But in the last few decades, the Department of Defense — with the blessing of bipartisan lawmakers — has embraced alternative processes that let contractors circumvent many of the mandated regulations governing Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) contracts, like accounting standards, cost negotiations, and intellectual property rights limitations. This means that some agencies have been empowered to negotiate terms that look closer to normal business contracts, but often offer a worse deal for U.S. taxpayers.

“The Pentagon is increasingly relying on rapid acquisition pathways that subvert competition to acquire weapons,” Julia Gledhill, a research analyst at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on global peace, told More Perfect Union. “Legislators have totally kneecapped the Pentagon’s ability to negotiate contracts with military contractors, meaning that both the military and taxpayers are being fleeced by these companies.”

These alternative contracting mechanisms, including “non-traditional contracting” and “Other Transaction Authority” (OTA) procurement, have vastly expanded over the last decade within agencies like the DOD and the Department of Homeland Security. This has corrupted a process that was originally designed to produce narrow contracts for innovative products into a major acquisition vehicle for basic procurement from well-established military contractors as well.

In 2025, these kinds of OTA contracts amounted to more than $18 billion in government spending. Across the board, it means that prototyping agreements have become much more common and expensive than basic procurement agreements.

“ The OTA is an existing vehicle that, if they expand it, it helps speed the money out the door.” Bill Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told More Perfect Union. “It’s less record keeping, less scrutiny, and it’s the perfect vehicle for lining the pockets of both the old and the new contractors.”

In April 2025, Trump signaled that he would accelerate the shift towards rapid acquisition processes through an executive order to overhaul the DOD’s procurement process. The order specifically requested that the new processes “expedite acquisitions…including a first preference for commercial solutions and a general preference for Other Transactions Authority.”

And the military-industrial complex is loving it. On an April 23 earnings call, Lockheed Martin President Jim Taiclet called the Iran War and the Trump administration’s focus on “agility” in military contracting, “a golden opportunity right now based on who’s in government, their experience, their willingness to change the demand that they have for what we do and our partners in our industry do.”

“We can move the contracting system from this FAR cost — Federal Acquisition Regulation -based, cost-based Truth [in] Negotiation Act burden that we’ve all had — and move it more towards a commercial contracting system,” Taiclet told investors. Venture-backed investors, he said, “are helping us and the government get out of our traditions and into a more agile contracting scenario.”

Lockheed Martin has won nearly $50 billion in government contracts since 2008, more than 97 percent of which were with the Department of Defense. The last quarter of 2025 represented their biggest season of contracts ever. In 2024, they were the fourth-highest awarded OTA contract recipient with the Defense Department, just behind peer weapons manufacturer Northrop Grumman.

Last year, Lockheed Martin spent more than $15 million lobbying lawmakers, including on “acquisition policy,” among other issues.

Lockheed Martin did not respond to More Perfect Union’s request for comment.

Northrop Grumman executives echoed the excitement about the expansion of OTAs. On an April 22 earnings call, Northrop Grumman President Kathy Warden told investors that the company is “seeing more use of OTAs and other nontraditional contracting mechanisms.”

These contracts have been lucrative for the defense company and its subsidiaries, which won nearly $7 billion in total Defense Department contracts in 2025.

“I don’t see a desire by the department to push industry profitability down,” Warden told shareholders. “I see a real alignment here and an opportunity for us to work with the department to create better economics for industry and the government.”

Northrop Grumman spent more than $8 million lobbying on acquisition policy, including specific lobbying on Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery Act of 2025, which expands the use of OTAs in military procurement.

Northrop Grumman did not respond to a request for comment.

Other military contractors, like L3Harris Technologies, an American defense technology company, echoed this sentiment.

“I have to give the Department of War credit for their innovative approach to acquisition here,” L3Harris Technologies Chairman Christopher Kubasik told investors on an April 30 earnings call. “What is going on now has never been done in the history of our country, and they are going fast. We and the rest of the defense industrial base are keeping up with them to the best of our ability. I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

L3Harris Technologies won $318 million in OTA contracts last year, the 6th highest of any military contractor. They were awarded $7.6 billion in total government contracts last year.

Defense contractors’ profit margins already far outpace most other industries by as much as four times. While typical commercial industry profits sit around 6 percent, many military contractors see profits of at least 15 percent, paid almost entirely by U.S. taxpayers. Military contractors have received more than half of all Pentagon spending since 2020. And as the industry has grown more consolidated, the remaining companies are exercising even more power over the Pentagon.

The defense industry spends tens of millions of dollars lobbying the government each year. In 2025, the industry collectively spent a record-breaking $198 million to influence lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Last year, the Pentagon failed its financial audit for the eighth consecutive year, after auditors found significant accounting errors, missing information, and billions of dollars unaccounted for. It remains the only major U.S. federal agency that has never passed an audit.

“We’re experiencing one of the biggest military spending buildups in American history,” Gledhill said. “So you can imagine that a combination of a $1.5 trillion military budget and a less competitive, less accountable weapons acquisition process is really the perfect recipe for fleecing the American people in the name of weapons production and procurement.”

The use of OTAs may also become particularly useful for the DOD as it launches Trump’s Golden Dome Project, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated this week could cost up to $1.2 trillion over 20 years. The project, which is heavily reliant on satellites, would likely benefit from Trump’s Dec. 18, 2025 outer space-focused executive order in which he urged agencies to act with “a first preference for commercial solutions and a general preference for Other Transactions Authority or Space Act Agreements” to promote streamlined acquisitions.

This article was originally published by More Perfect Union; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

‘The power Of Organizing’: How Indigenous Organizers Defeated A Mining Company At Pe’ Sla

Prayer camps, direct action, and a pair of lawsuits pushed Pete Lien & Sons to withdraw from the sacred Black Hills site. Organizers say the victory offers a roadmap for future land defense fights

By Alexandra Martinez   

May 17, 2026    

Source: Prism

A federal judge on May 4 temporarily halted drilling near Pe’ Sla amid sustained opposition from Native nations and local water protectors. Credit: Angel White Eyes

Indigenous organizers and environmental groups are celebrating a rare and hard-fought victory after a South Dakota mining company withdrew its plan to drill for graphite near Pe’ Sla, a sacred site in the Black Hills. The withdrawal followed a monthslong coordinated campaign that combined prayer, direct action, and legal pressure—tactics that could offer lessons for future land defense fights, organizers say.

Pete Lien & Sons informed the U.S. Forest Service on May 7 that it was withdrawing its plan of operations for the Rochford Mineral Exploratory Drilling Project and did not intend to submit another drilling plan for the site, according to a letter shared by project opponents. The decision came days after a federal judge on May 4 temporarily halted drilling amid sustained opposition to the project from Native nations and local water protectors.

“I think it shows the power of organizing, the power of community coming together to say no through direct action,” said Wizipan Garriott, president of NDN Collective, which was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit to halt the drilling. “It also shows the power of being able to bring things to the court. And then it also shows the power of tribes being able to organize and to take action.” 

South Dakota-based nonprofit Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, another plaintiff in the case, wrote in a statement published to Instagram that organizers will stay on alert if the mining company decides to reapply with another plan.

“This is a testament to the people, organizations, and tribal governments who showed unified action, determination, and courage in the face of what seemed to be overwhelming odds. It is unusual for a mining company to be slapped down decisively. Pe’ Sla is safe!” the group wrote.

Pe’ Sla, also known as Reynolds Prairie, is a high mountain meadow in the central Black Hills that holds deep spiritual significance for Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people. Tribal nations use the land for prayer and cultural activities; buffalo also graze there. The exploratory drilling plan would have allowed Pete Lien & Sons to search for graphite 0.6 miles north of Pe’ Sla, including at sites within a two-mile protective buffer zone established in 2016 through an agreement between the Forest Service and tribes.

The Forest Service approved the project on Feb. 27 using a categorical exclusion, a streamlined review process that allowed the agency to avoid a full environmental assessment. Opponents argued that the project’s proximity to Pe’ Sla required more rigorous review and tribal consultation.

Two legal challenges followed. On April 2, NDN Collective, Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, and Earthworks sued the Forest Service, alleging violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and religious freedom protections. On April 30, nine Native nations filed a separate lawsuit accusing the Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture of violating federal historic preservation and environmental laws by approving drilling near Pe’ Sla without adequate consultation or review. 

But according to Garriott, legal action alone did not stop the project. He said they learned drilling had begun without meaningful public notice. Garriott said access roads had been plowed and equipment was staged before opponents were fully aware that operations were underway. Once that information traveled among organizers, attorneys and tribal leaders sought an emergency restraining order to halt the work.

“That communication is necessary for … being able to coordinate our political and legal strategy and PR strategy around this,” Garriott said.

As litigation intensified, Pete Lien & Sons accelerated drilling, Garriott said. He said the company went from one drill operating a 12-hour shift each day to three drills operating two 12-hour shifts per day, effectively running around the clock in what he alleged was an effort to complete as much drilling as possible before a court hearing.

Pete Lien & Sons did not respond to Prism’s request for comment.

In response, Indigenous land defenders occupied two active drill pads on April 30 and held a ceremony at the site. NDN Collective said at least 10 drill pads were located within the two-mile buffer zone around Pe’ Sla. The group described the actions as part of a campaign to stop what it called illegal drilling near sacred land.

“It was only through direct action that we were able to stop some of those holes from being drilled,” Garriott said, “and it was the holes that were closest and adjacent to the tribal lands themselves.”

The company’s withdrawal is a significant victory for Pe’ Sla protectors, but Garriott cautioned that the work is not finished. He said tribes should be granted access to any core samples collected during drilling to understand what the company was seeking, and cultural monitors should be allowed to assess damage already done to the land. 

“There needs to be monitoring of the reclamation process to ensure that that is done right and correctly and adequately,” Garriott said. “They tore things up really bad up there.”

The victory at Pe’ Sla also arrives amid growing concern over other proposed extractive projects in the Black Hills, including uranium exploratory drilling near Craven Canyon, an area known for Indigenous petroglyphs. 

“What happens here is happening or is going to happen in other parts of the country,” Garriott said.

The Pe’ Sla fight also exposes a deeper conflict over how the green energy transition is pursued. Graphite is a key mineral used in electric vehicle batteries and other technologies, and mining companies increasingly frame extraction as necessary to meet the demand for clean energy.

“From the very beginning, it’s always been about extraction of resources at the expense of Indigenous peoples, at the expense of Indigenous cultures, and at the expense of Indigenous-owned resources,” Garriott said. “There are ways to advance clean energy while not exploiting and damaging our environment.”

For Garriott, the campaign against drilling at Pe’ Sla was also inseparable from treaty rights and the long history of the Black Hills. Under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the Black Hills were guaranteed to the Great Sioux Nation, though the U.S. later seized the land after gold was discovered there. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the taking of land without just compensation was illegal. The Sioux rejected the decision and its accompanying monetary compensation, but the land itself was never returned.

“We would never go into somebody’s church and begin drilling,” Garriott said. “Yet that is what they’re doing here.”

He said the issue is also ecological, arguing that drilling near Pe’ Sla could contaminate water sources in the Rapid Creek watershed and threaten drinking water in surrounding communities.

“We all need clean water,” Garriott said. “We all have a duty to protect clean water, and we all have a human right to clean drinking water.”

For now, Pe’ Sla protectors are celebrating a win they say is proof of what becomes possible when Native nations, grassroots groups, attorneys, students, and community members act in concert.

During the court hearing, more than 100 high school students walked out of class and gathered at the courthouse in Rapid City, South Dakota, in opposition to the drilling, Garriott said. 

“It shows what can happen,” he said, “and the power of people coming together.”

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This article was originally published by Prism; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Alexandra Martinez

Alexandra Martinez is the senior news reporter at Prism. She is a Cuban-American writer based in Miami, Florida, with an interest in immigration, the economy, gender justice and the environment.