'Scared to death': Fear as Christian right 'handed the keys to the kingdom' in red state

Photo by Pedro Lima on Unsplash

Robert Downen

March 17, 2025

The Texas Tribune

Testifying this month against bills that would put more Christianity in Texas public schools, the Rev. Jody Harrison invoked the violent persecution of her Baptist forefathers by fellow Christians in colonial America.

Harrison hoped the history lesson would remind Texas senators of Baptists’ strong support for church-state separations, and that weakening those protections would hurt people of all faiths.

Instead, she was rebuked.

“The Baptist doctrine is Christ-centered,” Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, responded sharply. “Its purpose is not to go around trying to defend this or that. It is to be a disciple and a witness for Christ. That includes the Ten Commandments. That’s prayer in schools. It is not a fight for separation between church and state.”

Harrison was not allowed to reply, but in an interview said she was stunned that a lawmaker would question a core part of her faith. The exchange, she said, perfectly encapsulated why she has fought to preserve church-state separations — the same religious protections that Campbell said are a distraction from bills that might bring school kids to Christ.

“It was a wake up call,” she said. “I don’t think people — even many churches — realize that this is going on right now, and that is alarming.”



State Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, listens as Rafael Cruz, father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, speaks to the Senate Committee on Education K-16 on March 11, 2025. Credit: Lorianne Willett/

Efforts by the Christian Right to put more of their religion in public schools are not new. But the tone of those debates in Texas has shifted this session, with bill supporters and some lawmakers openly arguing that such legislation is crucial to combating dropping church participation rates and what they say is a directly related decline in American morality.

Last month, a Texas Senate education committee advanced two bills that would require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public classrooms and allow school districts to set aside optional prayer time during school hours. And last week, that committee also heard testimony on a bill to mandate that schools teach an anti-communist curriculum — which supporters said is crucial to reaffirming that America is a Christian nation.

Throughout those hearings, lawmakers and bill supporters frequently said that church-state separation is a myth meant to obscure America’s true, Christian roots. They argued that many of America’s ills are the natural consequence of removing Biblical morality from classrooms. And they framed their legislation as an antidote to decreasing church attendance, communism or eternal hellfire.

"To realize that only 25% of our kids in schools today have been in a church is absolutely horrific and something that we all need to work on to address,” said Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, repeating a statistic offered by one bill supporter during testimony. “That should make everybody listening absolutely scared to death," he added.

Such statements have struck even longtime scholars and observers of the Religious Right as setting a new, more strident tone after years in which terms like “religious freedom” were the norm. Many in the movement had avoided explicitly centering Christianity in bills because doing so could prompt court challenges and discrimination complaints.

The shift, experts said, reflects a Religious Right emboldened by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the second Trump administration and the broader normalization of Christian nationalism in the GOP.

“Christian nationalist leaders think they've been handed the keys to the kingdom,” said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University who focuses on movements to put the Bible in schools. “Now they're trying to unlock as 

many locks as they can.”

The growing influence

Recent polling from the Public Religion and Research Institute found that, of all Americans, about 10% adhere to Christian nationalism and 20% sympathize with aspects of it. Experts say that, despite accounting for a small segment of the broader country, Christian nationalists and their allies have been able to incrementally accumulate power through a long-term political strategy and a well of deep-pocketed donors.

In Texas, the Christian Right’s rising influence has coincided with the state GOP’s alignment with two West Texas oil billionaires, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who have given tens of millions of dollars to push their far-right religious and social views. And groups like Project Blitz, a coalition of Christian groups with deep Texas ties, have used that long-term approach to steadily normalize their views and chip away at church-state separation without drawing widespread opposition.


From left: West Texas billionaires Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn. Credit: Courtesy Ronald W. Erdrich/Abilene Reporter-News|Brett Buchanan for The Texas Tribune

“Part of their legislative strategy is to be additive,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee For Religious Freedom, which advocates for a strong church-state wall. “The idea is that you start lawmakers out with what appear to be lower-stakes legislation, and then once they take votes on that, they will move to more and more extreme versions of the legislation.”

“What we're seeing now is that strategy really coming to bear in Texas,” she added.

In 2010, the State Board of Education approved a sweeping curriculum overhaul in order to weed out what it called “liberal bias.” With advice from prominent evangelicals such as David Barton, a Project Blitz leader and self-described “amateur historian” who has popularized the idea that church-state separation is a “false doctrine,” conservative board members framed the move as a way to reaffirm “that this was a nation founded under God.”

In 2022, the Texas Legislature approved a law that required classrooms to display “In God We Trust” signs that were donated by Patriot Mobile, a self-described Christian nationalist cellphone company that also funds school board candidates. The law quickly drew controversy — at one Dallas-area school district, the board declined to also display donated “In God We Trust” signs that were in Arabic, saying it already had enough for all its buildings.

In 2023, state lawmakers allowed school districts to replace mental health counselors with untrained religious chaplains, overriding a proposed amendment that would have barred them from evangelizing to students. Ahead of the vote, The Texas Tribune reported that a main backer of the bill had run an organization that, until a few months prior, was open about using classrooms as a way to recruit children to Christianity. Barton also testified in favor of the bill.

By 2024, the theories espoused by Barton and his allies were mainstream in the Texas GOP. Prominent figures — including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Texas GOP Chair Abraham George and numerous state senators — have called church-state separation a “myth.” And at the state party’s convention that year, lawmakers framed themselves as engaged in an existential struggle with communists, socialists and others trying to indoctrinate children; delegates called for the state to require instruction on the Bible; and state education board Chair Aaaron Kinsey vowed in a speech to fight for “these three-letter words: G-O-D, G-O-P and U-S-A.”

A few weeks later, state education leaders proposed new curriculum that paired grade-school teachings with lessons on the Bible and other religious texts. The curriculum was approved late last year despite concerns by religious historians and other experts who said it whitewashed the role that many white Christians played in opposing Civil Rights, upholding slavery and persecuting religious minorities, including Baptists and other fellow believers, during the country’s founding period.

The 2025 legislative session began with some Republican lawmakers calling for “spiritual warfare” against political opponents, and leading worship inside the Capitol to ward off demonic spirits that they believe control the legislature. In addition to the Ten Commandments and school prayer bills, state senators have also approved sweeping legislation that would allow taxpayer money to be directed to religious and other private schools.

Tyler, the Baptist leader and church-state wall advocate, said the last 15 years in Texas show how successful Religious Right groups can be in steadily mainstreaming their political views and advancing their agenda.

“We have seen, over several years, a definite strategy to target public schools,” she said. “Now they have become bolder and have been emboldened, and are being more explicit about their aims.”



Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee For Religious Freedom, speaks at The Texas Tribune Festival in Austin on Sept. 22, 2023. Credit: Julius Shieh/The Texas Tribune

The new rhetoric

For decades, David Brockman has closely monitored the rise of Christian nationalism in Texas for Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, where he is a non-resident scholar. A few years ago, he said, he wanted to quantify how many adherents or sympathizers worked in the Texas Legislature by analyzing their comments and speeches for tell-tale signs of Christian nationalist rhetoric. Even then, he said, it was difficult to find many concrete examples of the ideology, or of bills that explicitly privileged Christianity.

But that’s changed.

“What they were doing instead was either carving out exceptions for ‘sincerely-held religious beliefs’ or protecting religion overall,” Brockman said. “Now, it’s a new landscape for them.”

Central to that shift has been a series of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. In that case, the court ruled with a high school football coach whose employer, a public school, asked that he stop leading prayers at midfield after games. In a 6-2 decision, the court found that the coach’s prayers were within his First Amendment rights and that his actions did not amount to government support of religion. The ruling neutered the so-called Lemon Test, which for decades had been used by courts to determine if a law or practice amounted to an unconstitutional government act establishing or preferring a religion.

Conservative Christians have taken the 2022 ruling as a greenlight to put more Christianity into public schools, arguing that things such as the Ten Commandments are the basis for American law and governance, and therefore have educational value. This session, lawmakers and their supporters have also argued that such legislation is imperative to reverse what they say is a decadeslong moral decline.

“I think our kids are just crying out for moral clarity,” said Sen. Phil King, a Weatherford Republican who authored the Ten Commandments bill. “I think they are crying out for a shared heritage.”

RELIGON IN  THE CLASSROOM 

Other lawmakers have explicitly said that they have a duty to bring kids to Christ.

“There is eternal life,” said Campbell, the senator who rebuked Rev. Harrison earlier this month. “And if we don’t expose or introduce our children and others to that, when they die they’ll have one birth and two deaths. Because they will know nothing about the afterlife, the eternity with God. But exposing them or introducing them to Ten Commandments, prayer – it asks other questions and they then have a choice in their future: Two births and one death.”

Last week, a Texas Senate panel heard testimony on a bill that would require public schools to adopt anti-communist curriculum. On its face, the bill does not seek to put more Christianity in classrooms. But supporters argued that the bill is crucial to combating godless ideologies that they say have crept into American education and undermined the nation’s true, Christian heritage.

Such fears have been a driving force of Christian Right movements since the 1950s, when Christians, believing their faith a key bulwark against Red influence, successfully lobbied to add “under God” to the pledge of allegiance and to make “In God We Trust” the national motto.

Those fears are still pronounced today. Last week, lawmakers heard testimony from Rafael Cruz, a pastor who is the father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s and an adherent of Christian dominionism, which argues Christians must dominate society to usher in the End Times. Cruz repeatedly argued that America – and thus, Christianity — are under threat from communist and socialist forces who seek to indoctrinate children through Critical Race Theory, diversity initiatives and other things that Republicans have targeted in recent years.

“In many instances our classrooms are failing us, because they’re following an agenda,” Cruz said. “It is not our agenda. It is a communist agenda that has, like tentacles, immersed itself into our education system. So we need to retrieve our educational system from that evil agenda.”

Throughout his testimony, Cruz took aim at a litany of things that he said are quietly advancing communist influence in America, be it atheism, evolution, college professors or campus protesters who “don’t like it here” and should be deported. Fighting that menace, he said, required lawmakers to legislate Christianity into public schools across the nation.

“America is a Christian country,” said Cruz, who was invited by lawmakers to testify. “And we need to build upon that foundation, because if we build that foundation in our children, everything else will fall into place.”


Rafael Cruz, father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, after testifying before the Senate Committee on Education K-16 on March 11, 2025. Credit: Lorianne Willett/The Texas Tribune

Texas has for years been an incubator for Christian Right policies that are exported to other states or codified into federal law by courts. Lawmakers and their supporters have said they are confident that the current slate of Christian-centric bills will pass and then survive expected court challenges — though some legal experts are less sure.

Rev. Harrison, meanwhile, said she has frequently ruminated on her recent exchange with Sen. Campbell, and what it portends for Americans who are not conservative Christians. To her, it’s so much more than a debate about schools or the church-state wall.

“I believe we preach the gospel of Jesus Christ most powerfully without words, and for me, that means to follow the example of the way of Jesus,” she said. “Often the most powerful example we can set for others in preaching the gospel as Christians is by our actions. We are called to love one another, and that means speaking up for those whose voices are not heard and or are silenced.”

Disclosure: Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy and Southern Methodist University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/17/texas-christian-nationalists-legislature-school/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org

'It can happen here': MAGA expert explains why Trump voters want to destroy Dept. of Education

A supporter of Donald Trump rallies outside an early polling precinct as voters cast their ballots in local, state, and national elections, in Clearwater, Florida, U.S., November 3, 2024. REUTERS/Octavio Jones
A supporter of Donald Trump rallies outside an early polling precinct as voters cast their ballots in local, state, and national elections, in Clearwater, Florida, U.S., November 3, 2024. REUTERS/Octavio Jones

The Conversation

March 21, 2025

“And one other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education.”

Donald Trump made this promise in a Sept. 13, 2023, campaign statement and repeated it frequently on the campaign trail.

Trump tried to make this long-standing pledge a reality on March 20, 2025, by signing an executive order that he said will “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all.”

Trump said that he hopes Democrats would support his executive order. “I hope they’re going to be voting for it,” said Trump, speaking from the White House in front of a group of children seated at desks. “Because ultimately it may come before them.”

Project 2025, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the Trump administration, provides detailed recommendations for closing the Education Department, which was created by an act of Congress in 1979.

The Department of Education already announced on March 9 that it laid off more than 1,300 of its 4,100 employees.

Trump’s new executive order calls for Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure (of) the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” according to a White House statement distributed to media.

I am an anthropologist and have been studying U.S. political culture for years. During Trump’s first presidency, I wrote a book about the extremist far right called “It Can Happen Here”. Since then, I have continued to study the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement, seeking to understand it, as the anthropological expression goes, “from the native’s point of view.”

Education policies in the U.S. are largely carried out at the state and local levels. The Education Department is a relatively small government agency, which as late as February 2025 had just over 4,000 employees and a US$268 billion annual budget. A large part of its work is overseeing $1.6 trillion in federal student loans as well as grants for K-12 schools.

And it ensures that public schools comply with federal laws that protect vulnerable students, like those with disabilities.

Why, then, does Trump want to eliminate the department?

A will to fight against so-called “wokeness” and a desire to shrink the government are among the four reasons I have found.


1. Education Department’s alleged ‘woke’ mentality

First and foremost, Trump and his supporters believe that liberals are ruining public education by instituting what they call a “radical woke agenda” that they say prioritizes identity politics and politically correct groupthink at the expense of the free speech of those, like many conservatives, who have different views.

Diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives promoting social justice – and critical race theory, or the idea that racism is entrenched in social and legal institutions – are a particular focus of MAGA ire.

So, too, is what Trump supporters call “radical gender ideology,” which they contend promotes policies like letting transgender students play on school sports teams or use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, not biological sex.

Trump supporters say that such policies – which the Education Department indirectly supported by expanding Title IX gender protections in 2024 to include discrimination based on gender identity – are at odds with parental school choice rights or, for some religious conservatives, the Bible.

Race and gender policies are highlighted in Project 2025 and in the 2024 GOP’s “Make America Great Again!” party platform.

Trump has repeatedly promised, as he did on Aug. 14, 2024, in North Carolina, to “keep critical race theory and transgender insanity the hell out of our schools.”
2. American Marxist indoctrination

For MAGA supporters, “radical left” wokeness is part of liberals’ long-standing attempt to “brainwash” others with their allegedly Marxist views that embrace communism.

One version of this “American Marxism” conspiracy theory argues that the indoctrination dates to the origins of U.S. public education. MAGA stalwarts say this alleged leftist agenda is anti-democratic and anti-Christian.

Saying he wants to combat the educational influence of such radicals, zealots and Marxists, Trump issued executive orders on Jan. 29 that pledge to fight “campus anti-Semitism” and to end “Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schools.”
3. School choice and parental rights

Trump supporters also argue that “woke” federal public education policy infringes on people’s basic freedoms and rights.

This idea extends to what Trump supporters call “restoring parental rights,” including the right to decide whether a child undergoes a gender transition or learns about nonbinary gender identity at public schools.

The first paragraph of Project 2025’s chapter on education argues, “Families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments.”

Diversity, according to this argument, should include faith-based institutions and homeschooling. Project 2025 proposes that the government could support parents who choose to homeschool or put their kids in a religious primary school by providing Educational Savings Accounts and school vouchers. Vouchers give public funding for students to attend private schools and have been expanding in use in recent years.

Critics of school vouchers, like the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers unions, argue that vouchers would diminish public education for vulnerable students by taking away scarce funding.

Trump has already issued a Jan. 29 executive order called “Expanding Educational Freedom and Educational Opportunity for Families,” which opens the door to expanded use of vouchers. This directly echoes Project 2025 by directing the Education Department to prioritize educational choice to give families a range of options.
4. Red tape

For the MAGA faithful, the Education Department exemplifies government inefficiency and red tape.

Project 2025, for example, contends that from the time it was established by the Carter administration in 1979, the Education Department has ballooned in size, come under the sway of special interest groups and now serves as an inefficient “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.”

To deal with the Education Department’s “bloat” and “suffocating bureaucratic red tape,” Project 2025 recommends shifting all of the department’s federal programs and money to other agencies and the states.

These recommendations dovetail with Trump’s broader attempt to eliminate what he and his MAGA supporters consider wasteful spending and deregulate the government.

Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 that establishes a “Department of Government Efficiency” headed by billionaire Elon Musk. Musk said on Feb. 4 that Trump “will succeed” in dismantling the Education Department.
Can Trump abolish the Education Department?

Trump’s executive order shuttering the Department of Education will almost certainly spark legal challenges in court.

Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota also introduced a bill in November 2024 to close the department.

Trump has dismantled other government agencies in his second term, chiefly the U.S. Agency for International Development, without the required congressional approval. A federal judge ruled on March 18 that the dismantling of USAID likely violated the Constitution and ordered the Trump administration to restore all USAID employees’ email and computer access.

Abolishing the Department of Education would legally require congressional approval and 60 votes to move forward in the Senate, which is unlikely since Republicans only have 53 seats.

Regardless of such legal challenges, Trump’s March 20 executive order will further weaken the Department of Education even as it remains in the crosshairs.

This story was updated on March 20, 2025, from an earlier version published originally on Feb. 7, 2025.

Alex Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Explosive report reveals right-wing tactic used to influence red state's schools

Photo by CDC on Unsplash
people sitting on chair inside room

Pro Publica and The Texas Tribune

March 20, 2025

In 2019, the Keller Independent School District in North Texas looked a lot like its counterpart just 30 miles to the east in the Dallas suburb of Richardson. Each served about 35,000 children and had experienced sharp increases in the racial diversity of students in recent decades. Each was run by a school board that was almost entirely white.

In the five years since, the districts have followed strikingly divergent paths as culture war battles over how to teach race and gender exploded across the state.

In Keller, candidates backed by groups seeking to limit the teaching of race and gender took control of the school board and immediately passed sweeping policies that gave outsized power to any individual who wanted to prevent the purchase of books they believed to be unsuitable for children.

Though more than half of Keller’s students are from racially diverse backgrounds, the district in 2023 nixed a plan to buy copies of a biography of Black poet Amanda Gorman after a teacher at a religious private school who had no children in the district complained about this passage: “Amanda realized that all the books she had read before were written by white men. Discovering a book written by people who look like her helped Amanda find her own voice.” The passage, the woman wrote, “makes it sound like it’s okay to judge a book by the authors skin color rather than the content of the book.”

Board members at the Richardson school district went in the opposite direction, even as they contended with similar pressure from groups aiming to rid the district of any materials that they claimed pushed critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that discusses systemic racism. The school board did not ban library books but instead allowed parents to limit their own children’s access to them, keeping them available for other students.



















One major difference contributed to the districts’ divergence: the makeup of their school boards.

The way communities elect school board members plays a key, if often overlooked, role in whether racially diverse districts like Keller and Richardson experience takeovers by ideologically driven conservatives seeking to exert greater influence over what children learn in public schools, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. Since the pandemic, such groups have successfully leveraged the state’s long-standing and predominantly at-large method of electing candidates to flip school boards in their direction.

Most of Texas’ 1,000 school districts use an at-large method, where voters can cast ballots for all candidates. Supporters say that allows for broader representation for students, but voting rights advocates argue that such systems dilute the power of voters of color. If board members are elected districtwide, there tends to be less diversity, according to research, which also shows that if they are elected by smaller geographic zones, candidates of color often have more success.
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“What you’re seeing happening in Texas is how at-large districts make it easy for somebody to come in, usually from the outside, and hijack the process and essentially buy a board,” said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute that champions small-donor campaign financing. “Because of this conflux of factors — at-large elections and large amounts of outside money — it just sort of defeats the idea of representative democracy.”

ProPublica and the Tribune examined 14 rapidly diversifying suburban school districts where children from diverse backgrounds now make up more than half of the student population. In the six districts that used at-large voting systems, well-funded and culture-war-driven movements successfully helped elect school board members who have moved aggressively to ban or remove educational materials that teach children about diversity, even in districts where a majority of children are not white. Nearly 70% of board members in such districts live in areas that are whiter than their district’s population.

Eight nearby school systems with similar demographics employ single-member voting systems to elect school board candidates. Under the single-member system, voters within certain boundaries elect a board member who specifically represents their area. Candidates in those districts received less campaign support from ideologically driven political action committees, and none of the districts experienced school board takeovers fueled by culture war issues.


About 150 Texas school districts have transitioned to a single-member system since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is intended to prevent voter discrimination and has brought greater racial representation to local governments. Richardson joined that list in 2019 after a former Black board member sued the district.

Such legal challenges, however, could soon become more difficult. In one of his first acts in office, President Donald Trump froze civil rights litigation against school districts accused of discriminating against minority groups, and many legal experts believe that under his administration, federal prosecutors will refuse to bring challenges against at-large systems. DOJ officials did not respond to questions from the news organizations.

Trump, a staunch critic of diversity and inclusion programs, has threatened to cut federal funding to schools that he says are pushing “inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children.”

Districts whose boards oppose sweeping efforts to restrict curriculum and books related to race and racism face even more headwinds in Texas. In January, Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public schools, a move that would expand the state’s existing ban on college campuses. And Texas lawmakers continue to target the books students can access. One bill, authored by North Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton, the wife of Attorney General Ken Paxton, would require every district in the state to follow a version of Keller’s library book purchase policy.


The president of the Keller board, Charles Randklev, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the district did not answer written questions. District officials have previously said that the board represents all students, not just those in a specific neighborhood or area.

But Laney Hawes, the parent of four students in the district and an outspoken critic of the school board, said the policy on library purchases spawned a backdoor channel to banning materials about race. That, she said, has deprived her children of reading books about Americans like Gorman that provide points of view they might not find otherwise.

“They have created a system that allows anyone in the community to complain about any book for any reason, and now that book is not on library shelves,” said Hawes, who is white. She added that the book does not contain any sexually explicit material and was strictly targeted because it dealt with race.

“They just hate the racial undertones.”

“Up Against a Machine”

School districts across Texas have drawn considerable attention for removing books from their shelves, but board members in Keller went further when they passed a policy in August 2022 that, in practice, allowed community members to block proposed purchases.

Students spoke out against the district’s removal policies during a board meeting months later, pleading for access to books about race. One biracial student, who has since graduated, told the board that books about characters from different racial backgrounds helped her feel more accepted.

“All kids deserve to see themselves in literature,” the student said. “Racial minorities being written into a story does not instantly equate the book to being propaganda. Having books that mirror the experience of race is not pushing an agenda. It's simply documenting the hardships that consistently happen to most students of color that they’re able to relate to. Concealing ideas just because they tell an uncomfortable truth is not protecting your children.”


The students’ pleas didn’t sway the board, and by July 2023, challenges to such books began pouring in.

One person opposed the purchase of “Jim Crow: Segregation and the Legacy of Slavery.” The person, who did not provide their name, pointed to a photo of a young girl participating in a Black Lives Matter protest with the caption: “Just as in the past, people continue fighting for change.” They also took issue with this quote: “You can’t ‘get over’ something that is still happening. Which is why black Americans can’t ‘get over’ slavery or Jim Crow.”

The photo and the quotes, the book challenger said, were “potentially CRT,” showed the Black Lives Matter Movement in “a positive light” and claimed “oppression is still happening.”

Another person challenged the planned purchase of “Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race,” saying that the book started “beautifully,” but that “unfortunately tenets of CRT, social justice, and anti-white activism are portrayed.” The person, who used a pseudonym, did not offer specifics.

Administrators removed those books, the Gorman biography and 26 others from the purchase list after receiving the complaints, according to district officials. Librarians can reinstate books on future lists, but 75% of those flagged for further review never made it to the shelves, an online search of district libraries shows. That includes the three books about race.

Hawes, who heads two PTA groups at her children’s schools, said book challenges and complaints have come from allies of school board members. In 2022, Patriot Mobile Action, a North Texas Christian nationalist PAC funded by a cellphone company, spent more than $115,000 supporting three ideologically driven conservatives running for control of the school board.

Leigh Wambsganss, Patriot Mobile’s spokesperson and executive director of the PAC, declined to comment but said in a 2022 podcast that the PAC chose candidates based on their Christian conservative views and sought out those who “absolutely would stand against critical race theory.” Patriot Mobile supported eight candidates in three other North Texas districts that used at-large voting during the same election cycle. All of them won their races.

“We weren’t prepared for what was coming,” Hawes said. “We were literally up against a machine.”

Another PAC, KISD Family Alliance, spent $50,000 to help elect the same Keller school board candidates. Its donors included conservative activist Monty Bennett, who previously told the Tribune that he believes schools have been taken over by ideologues “pushing their outlandish agendas.” Neither Bennett nor the PAC’s treasurer responded to requests for comment.

The slate of Keller candidates, whose combined campaign war chests dwarfed that of their opponents’ by a more than 4 to 1 margin, focused their agendas squarely on culture war issues related to library books and curriculum.

“While I have many priorities I want to focus on, if concerns over child safety, and sexualization and politicization of children make me a one-issue candidate, so be it. I will be a one-issue candidate all day long,” Joni Shaw Smith wrote on her campaign website. Smith, who is now a board member, declined to comment.

Her election contributed to what would become a sweep of the seven seats on the board. Five of those seats are held by board members who live in the city of Keller, where three-quarters of residents are white and the median household income of more than $160,000 is among the highest in the state.

Most of the Keller district’s 42 schools, however, are located in the more diverse neighborhoods of Fort Worth.
A Different Approach

Thirty miles away, the makeup of Richardson’s school board changed dramatically after the district settled a lawsuit filed in 2018 by David Tyson Jr. He argued that the continued use of at-large voting to select candidates was a “relic of the district’s segregated past.”

Tyson became the district’s first Black board member when he was elected in 2004. After he retired in 2010, he watched with growing consternation as no candidates from diverse backgrounds followed in his footsteps, even though students of color accounted for nearly 70% of the district’s population.

Frustrated, Tyson sued Richardson, challenging its system for electing candidates under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He and Richardson officials settled the lawsuit in 2019, and the district converted primarily to a system in which candidates needed to live within specific boundaries and receive a majority of votes from residents who also lived within those boundaries to be elected.

As ideologically driven candidates swept Keller school board elections, similar efforts played out differently in Richardson. In 2022, two candidates supported by groups seeking to limit instruction and library books that deal with race and gender ran against two candidates of color with differing views. A local PAC that accused the district of teaching “CRT nonsense” in a mailer hired the same Republican campaign consulting firm that was working in support of the Keller candidates.

Despite being outspent 2-to-1, the candidates of color won their elections. Their wins gave Richardson four board members of diverse backgrounds, a remarkable evolution from an all-white board just three years earlier. And, as nearby districts began mass removals of library books dealing with race and gender, the Richardson school board embraced an “opt-out” process to give concerned parents control over their children’s reading “without impacting the choices of other families who may have different values, wishes or expectations.” Opponents say opt-out systems do not go far enough in protecting students from materials they deem objectionable.

“Single-member districts benefited us in making sure our school board maintains the diversity, and diversity of thought, we have, and not just fall into those culture wars,” said Vanessa Pacheco, one of the board members who won.

Pacheco said not being consumed by such fights allowed the board to focus on “real stuff” like dual-language classes for elementary students, expanding pre-K opportunities and scheduling school events for parents in the evenings and on weekends to account for working families.

So striking was the district’s atmosphere following the 2022 election that a Dallas Morning News commentary dubbed Richardson a “no-drama district” in a sea of school boards consumed by fights over race and gender.

Tyson, whose lawsuit set the stage for the Richardson school board’s dramatic transformation, said that the shift in voting methods has accomplished what he had hoped for.

“The goal was to get representation,” he said. “We’re a majority-minority school district, and so we need to have a majority-minority representation on the school board.”
“Now or Never”

Hawes watched as voters down the road in Richardson rejected candidates seeking to limit what the district’s diverse student body could read and learn. She watched as the board itself grew increasingly diverse. And she watched with a touch of envy as the district embraced the idea that parents and community members who opposed certain books should not make decisions for every child in the district.

With Richardson as their north star, Hawes and a growing number of concerned parents began discussing ways to force the Keller school district to adopt what they believed was a more representative voting system. It wasn’t just a question of race for Hawes. It was also about geographic diversity. Board members who live in the city of Keller hold a majority, even though less than a third of students in the district attend schools there.

So last year, Hawes and other concerned parents met with law firms and the NAACP and began planning a petition drive that would require the board to hold an election to do away with at-large voting. Members planned to meet in January to finalize a strategy.

Then, in mid-January, the Keller school board shocked many in the community by proposing to split the district in two, separating the whiter, more affluent city of Keller to the east from the neighborhoods of northern Fort Worth, which are home to the majority of the district’s students, including many who are low income. Like many districts in the state, Keller faces a massive budget shortfall.

Randklev, the board president, defended the split as financially beneficial for both districts in a Facebook post last month. He also wrote that “neighboring school districts have been forced into single-member districts, and that’s a no-win situation regardless of where you live.” He did not explain his position but said the proposed split “could provide programming opportunities that best reflect local community goals and values and foster greater parent and community involvement.”

But many parents, including Dixie Davis, who previously ran unsuccessfully for the board, said the proposed change would leave the vast majority of the district’s low-income student population, and most of its students of color, with uncertain access to facilities like an advanced learning center and the district’s swimming complex.

On Friday, board members abandoned plans to divide the school district in two, citing the cost of restructuring the district’s debt. But their push to split the district has further energized efforts by some parents to do away with at-large voting. Brewer Storefront, the same law firm that fought to change the voting system in Richardson, has filed a similar legal challenge in federal court against Keller and concerned parents have launched a petition drive to force the district to vote on its at-large system. The district has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit and did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“With the momentum and uproar around this proposed district split, it's now or never to get this done,” Davis said. “It'll be a huge uphill battle, but this is our best shot.”


Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Jessica Priest, The Texas Tribune, contributed research.

Texas poised to make measles a nationwide epidemic: public health experts

Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

The Texas Tribune

March 21, 2025

With its measles outbreak spreading to two additional states, Texas is on track to becoming the cause of a national epidemic if it doesn’t start vaccinating more people, according to public health experts.

Measles, a highly contagious disease that was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, has made a resurgence in West Texas communities, jumping hundreds of miles to the northern border of the Panhandle and East Texas, and invading bordering states of New Mexico and Oklahoma.

Based on the rapid spread of cases statewide — more than 200 over 50 days — public health officials predict that it could take Texas a year to contain the spread. With cases continuously rising and the rest of the country’s unvaccinated population at the outbreak’s mercy, Texas must create stricter quarantine requirements, increase the vaccine rate, and improve contact tracing to address this measles epidemic before it becomes a nationwide problem, warn infectious disease experts and officials in other states.

“This demonstrates that this (vaccine exemption) policy puts the community, the county, and surrounding states at risk because of how contagious this disease is,” said Glenn Fennelly, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Texas Tech University. “We are running the risk of threatening global stability.”

[After COVID, Texas is less prepared for the next pandemic]




The measles outbreak — the largest in the state in 30 years — has spread from two cases in late January to more than 270 cases and now includes 11 counties, most of them in the rural South Plains region.

So far this year, there have been more than 300 cases of measles confirmed across 15 states, as of March 13. The Texas outbreak, which makes up the bulk of those cases, is only linked to cases in New Mexico and Oklahoma, where state officials said this month that someone associated with the Texas outbreak was exposed.

Last month, Texas officials reported that an unvaccinated, otherwise healthy school-aged child died from measles, the first death from the virus in a decade.

This month, New Mexico officials said an unvaccinated adult in Lea County, about 50 miles away from the outbreak’s epicenter of Gaines County, who died had tested positive for measles. Officials are still confirming whether the cause of death was measles, according to the New Mexico Department of Health.

“This is a very multi-jurisdictional outbreak with three states involved and about seven or eight different local health departments, in addition to some areas where the state serves as the local health department. There are a lot of moving parts,” said Katherine Wells, director of public health for the City of Lubbock, during a Tuesday meeting of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a national organization for large metropolitan health departments.

Most of Texas’ measles cases are in unvaccinated school-aged children and are concentrated in the Mennonite community in Gaines County, which traditionally has low vaccination rates.


Wells said efforts to increase the vaccination rates in Gaines County, which is about 70 miles from Lubbock, and the surrounding region have been slow as trust in the government has seemingly reached an all-time low.

“We are seeing, just like the rest of Americans, this community has seen a lot of stories about vaccines causing autism, and that is leading to a lot of this vaccine hesitancy, not religion,” she said.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the politicization of vaccines and overall weariness to health mandates like quarantines and masks. Public health officials are now battling misinformation and public resistance to measles.

Wells said because the state can’t stop people from traveling, she fully expects this outbreak to last a year, and the surrounding states and the nation should prepare themselves for a potential spread.


“Measles is going to find those pockets of unvaccinated individuals, and with the number of cases and ability for people to travel, there is that risk of it entering other unvaccinated pockets anywhere in the United States right now,” Wells said.
Vaccine hesitancy

Fennelly was living in New York in the 1990s when pamphlets started getting passed around the Hebrew community warning against the unfound dangers of the measles vaccine. Soon, the vaccine refusal rate began to climb, and an outbreak started filling hospitals with sick infants.

Now, decades later, Fennelly is watching the same series of events play out in Texas.


“This could have been predicted. There have been steady rates of increased personal belief exemptions over the last several years leading to pockets of under-vaccination across the state,” he said.

In the West Texas region, misinformation about vaccines, distrust of local public health officials, and fear of government authority overruling family autonomy have reigned supreme, creating the pockets that measles infiltrated this year.

However, this is not just a South Plains problem but a statewide issue as vaccine exemptions continue to grow.

“We have several pockets of population that have high unvaccinated groups. We sent out a letter to public and private school districts with low vaccination rates explaining the situation and asking them to update their children’s shots,” said Phil Huang, director and health authority for Dallas County Health and Human Services, during the Big Cities Health Coalition meeting.


Texas requires children and students to obtain vaccines to attend schools, child care centers, and college. However, individuals can claim they are exempt if they are in the military, have a religious or personal belief that goes against getting immunized, or if a health provider determines it is not safe to do so.

Since 2018, the number of requests to the Texas Department of State Health Services for an exemption form has doubled from 45,900 to more than 93,000 in 2024.

Data suggests that vaccine exemptions and those living in areas with higher vaccine exemption rates for measles and pertussis are at increased risk of contracting these diseases. The authors of this data collection concluded that “geographic pockets of vaccine exemptions pose a risk to the whole community.”

Fennelly said the hurdles to obtaining exemptions are easy to clear, leading to an increasing number of people refusing the vaccine.

State lawmakers this session have filed more than a dozen bills that would strengthen or expand vaccine exemptions.

“We don’t have the capacity in Texas to deal with so many sick children if this continues to spread. We are already at our limit with seasonal influenza and respiratory syncytial virus. Our doctors are at their limit,” Fennelly said.

Simbo Ige, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, had to deal with a measles outbreak in her city a year ago, with 64 individuals testing positive, 57 of whom were associated with a shelter. She said the quickest way they controlled the outbreak was quickly administering more than 30,000 doses of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.

A Chicago Department of Health report projected a high probability of an outbreak of more than 100 cases without the city’s rapid intervention.

“It required a lot of education and messaging because people wanted the answer to why I need to get vaccinated. We started listing out the reasons — parents won’t be able to go to work, kids can’t go to school, and even worse, kids can get sick and die,” Ige said. “It’s 2025. We shouldn’t be having children dying from measles in this day and age. We have the tools. We just have to amplify the message.”

New Mexico’s public health officials started spreading awareness of vaccinations immediately after they learned Texas had its first measles case and before New Mexico got its first case.

“We started setting up clinics and getting the ball rolling,” Jimmy Masters, the southeast region director for the New Mexico Department of Health, said. “Let's see what we can do to get people in the doors and vaccinated beforehand.”

Nearly 9,000 New Mexicans have received measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine shots between Feb. 1 and March 10. During that same time period last year, officials vaccinated 5,342 people.

Texas has held multiple vaccination clinics in the outbreak area, but according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, only 350 doses have been administered.

New Mexico has also emphasized its Vaxview website that keeps track of residents' immunizations, allowing concerned people to check within seconds if they need a shot. Texas has a vaccine tracking program known as ImmTrac2, but it’s an opt-in program that doesn’t have most adult records. If someone doesn’t opt in by age 26, their records will not be retained.

“We told people to contact us to ensure their vaccine status is up to date,” Masters said. “If they aren’t sure, just call the health office so we can find out for them. And if they don’t have their records updated for the vaccine, then we can ask them to come in and take advantage of the clinics or come in as walk-ins.”

Because of this, most of Lea County is considered immunized, Masters said, so public health officials in New Mexico don’t view the outbreak as rapidly evolving.

Back in Texas, the opposite is playing out. Advice from public health officials is seemingly ignored, and vaccine efforts are struggling.

“We need to have a consistent message from all levels. We need to reinforce the message that vaccines are safe and vaccines are how you prevent this, and we have concerns when other messages dilute this message,” Huang said.

Texas Department of State Health Services officials are also encouraging people to vaccinate, but whether people will listen is out of the agency’s control.

“The only way to stop the virus from spreading is to get more people immunized. We are …providing education about the severe complications associated with measles infection, and directing them to locations where they can get vaccinated,” said Lara Anton, spokesperson for the state health agency.

Fennelly said the main difference between Lea County and Gaines County is the public acceptance of the vaccine and public health in general. He said if Texas wants to improve, there should be studies on why people are so hesitant to accept vaccines.

“We need to be asking why Gaines County? What are the concerns, and how do we, the health profession and public health officials, most effectively confront and allay those fears,” he said. “People shouldn’t be more afraid of the vaccine than the disease.”
Obstacles to quarantining and contact tracing

A person with measles visits a friend, another visits kids at a college, and the other has friends over. Public health departments in West Texas are trying to trace the spread of measles, since other than strongly suggesting people quarantine, there’s nothing more local officials can do to prevent infected individuals from traveling.

“We shouldn’t be surprised in this kind of environment that we will have more cases,” said David Lakey, the vice chancellor for health affairs and the chief medical officer at the University of Texas System. “I think we need to work with individuals to ensure they stay home during an event like this.”

State lawmakers have stripped control from cities and counties from implementing mandates, such as closing businesses and schools. While some of these laws apply only to COVID-19, public health experts say it has created an environment where state health officials can only offer suggestions to Texans with little enforcement, allowing measles to continue to spread.

“The state of Texas is taking it seriously and trying to balance how they approach this while respecting the laws of the state and also people’s freedoms,” Lakey said. “They are doing it while also making sure that we are doing everything it can to identify people, provide vaccines, isolate individuals, and take all the other steps to address an event like this.”

With young children particularly vulnerable to the disease, Lakey said hospitals must screen people entering hospitals.

Wells said there have been a couple of women who gave birth at a Lubbock hospital who were infected with measles or were recently exposed to it, and babies six months old or younger have needed treatment with immunoglobulin because of exposure.

“That’s really why measles is so scary. It’s so communicable, and it’s so easy to enter some of the very vulnerable areas where babies don’t have those vaccinations yet,” she said. “That’s going to be day cares, schools, hospitals, pediatricians offices, and we’re seeing those cases more and more as this outbreak continues.”

This potential spread makes contact tracing necessary, but Wells said it is one of their region's most significant challenges besides testing. While a laboratory set up in Lubbock has cut down wait times for tests results from 72 hours to one day, Wells said rural Texas doesn’t have the staff to track the travel of more than 270 people.

“This is going to be a large outbreak, and we are still on the side where we are increasing the number of cases, both because we’re still seeing spread and also because we have increased testing capacity, so more people are getting tested,” she said.

New Mexico has a lead investigator for contact tracing who interviews the patients, gathers medical records, establishes a point of contact, and organizes vaccinations for those who were potentially exposed to prevent spread.

While West Texas officials try to follow the same policies, the health care system is decentralized, meaning the contact tracing is done by the local health authority first, and then, if necessary, the state gets involved and possibly, assistance from the CDC.

Chris Van Deusen, spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said while the state is not necessarily struggling to contact trace, he acknowledges the extra manpower it requires.

“That also depends on the individuals talking with us and sharing that information. So that can be difficult, particularly when dealing with a more insular community. It can be difficult to make inroads, and that is why the local process is important,” Van Deusen said.

Experts say that as travel season ramps up and if Texas can’t seem to stop the spread, states nationwide should prepare themselves for what may come.

“The message to health departments is be ready, and schools need to think about this and government officials because this really does have the potential to grow beyond these three states,” Wells said.

Disclosure: Texas Tech University and University of Texas System have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/21/texas-measles-vaccine-new-mexico-oklahoma-us/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org

Farmers panic as Trump threatens $1 billion in grants — that they've already spent

Photo by Chris Ensminger on Unsplash

Grist.org

March 22, 2025

The Trump administration’s freeze on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law from the Biden era, has left farmers and rural businesses across the country on the hook for costly energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installations.

The grants are part of the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, originally created in the 2008 farm bill and supercharged by funding from the IRA. It provides farmers and other businesses in rural areas with relatively small grants and loans to help lower their energy bills by investing, say, in more energy-efficient farming equipment or installing small solar arrays.

By November 2024, the IRA had awarded more than $1 billion for nearly 7,000 REAP projects, which help rural businesses in low-income communities reduce the up-front costs of clean energy and save thousands on utility costs each year.

But now, that funding is in limbo. Under the current freeze, some farmers have already spent tens of thousands of dollars on projects and are waiting for the promised reimbursement. Others have had to delay work they were counting on to support their businesses, unsure when their funding will come through — or if it will.

REAP is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Secretary Brooke Rollins said the agency is “coming to the tail end of the review process” of evaluating grants awarded under the Biden administration.

“If our farmers and ranchers especially have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole,” Rollins told reporters in Atlanta last week.

But it’s not clear when the funds might be released, or whether all the farmers and business owners awaiting their money will receive it.

For Joshua Snedden, a REAP grant was the key to making his 10-acre farm in Monee, Illinois, more affordable and environmentally sustainable. But months after installing a pricey solar array, he’s still waiting on a reimbursement from the federal government — and the delay is threatening his bottom line.

“I’m holding out hope,” said Snedden, a first-generation farmer in northeast Illinois. “I’m trying to do everything within my power to make sure the funding is released.”

In December, his five-year old operation, Fox at the Fork, began sourcing its power from a new 18.48 kilowatt solar array which cost Snedden $86,364. The system currently offsets all the farm’s electricity use and then some.

REAP offers grants for up to half of a project like this, and loan guarantees for up to 75 percent of the cost. For Snedden, a $19,784 REAP reimbursement grant made this solar array possible. But the reimbursement, critical to Snedden’s cash flow, was frozen by Trump as part of a broader review of the USDA’s Biden-era commitments.

Snedden grows the produce he takes to market — everything from tomatoes to garlic to potatoes — on about an acre of his farm. He also plans to transform the rest of his land into a perennial crop system, which would include fruit trees like pears, plums, and apples planted alongside native flowers and grasses to support wildlife.

A solar array was always part of his plans, “but seemed like a pie in the sky” kind of project, he said, adding he thought it might take him a decade to afford such an investment.

The REAP program has been a lifeline for Illinois communities struggling with aging infrastructure and growing energy costs, according to Amanda Pankau with the Prairie Rivers Network, an organization advocating for environmental protection and climate change mitigation across Illinois.

“By lowering their electricity costs, rural small businesses and agricultural producers can put that money back into their business,” said Pankau.

That’s exactly what Snedden envisioned from his investment in the solar power system. The new solar array wouldn’t just make his farm more resilient to climate change, but also more financially viable, “because we could shift expenses from paying for energy to paying for more impactful inputs for the farm,” he said.

He anticipates that by switching to solar, Fox at the Fork will save close to $3,200 dollars a year on electric bills.

Now, Snedden is waiting for the USDA to hold up their end of the deal.

“The financial strain hurts,” said Snedden. “But I’m still planning to move forward growing crops and fighting for these funds.”

At the start of the year, Jon and Brittany Klimstra were nearly ready to install a solar array on their Polk County, North Carolina farm after being awarded a REAP grant in 2024.

As two former scientists who had moved back to western North Carolina 10 years ago to grow apples and be close to their families, it felt like a chance to both save money and live their values.

“We’ve certainly been interested in wanting to do something like this, whether it be for our personal home or for our farm buildings for a while,” said Jon. “It just was cost prohibitive up to this point without some type of funding.”

That funding came when they were awarded $12,590 from REAP for the installation. But, after the Trump administration’s funding freeze, the money never came.


“We were several site visits in, several engineering conversations. We’ve had electricians, the solar company,” said Brittany . “It’s been a very involved process.”

Since the grant is reimbursement-based, the Klimstras have already paid out-of-pocket for some costs related to the project. Plus, the farm had been banking on saving $1,300 in utilities expenses per year. In a given month, their electricity bill is $300-$400.

Across Appalachia, historically high energy costs have made the difference between survival and failure for many local businesses, said Heather Ransom, who works with Solar Holler, a solar company that serves parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.

“We have seen incredible rate increases across the region in electricity over the past 10, even 20 years,” she said.

Through Solar Holler, REAP grants also passed into the hands of rural library systems and schools; the company installed 10,000 solar panels throughout the Wayne County, West Virginia school system. About $6 million worth of projects supported by Solar Holler are currently on hold.

In other parts of the region, community development financial institutions like the Mountain Association in eastern Kentucky combatted food deserts through helping local grocery stores apply for REAP.

Solar Holler also works in coal-producing parts of the region, where climate change discussions have been fraught with the realities of declining jobs and revenue from the coal industry. The program helped make the case for communities to veer away from coal and gas-fired energy.

“What REAP has helped us do is show people that it’s not just a decision that’s driven by environmental motives or whatever, it actually makes good business sense to go solar,” Ransom said. In her experience, saving money appeals to people of all political persuasions. “At the end of the day, we’ve installed just as much solar on red roofs as we do blue roofs, as we do rainbow roofs or whatever.”

The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan draws over 1.5 million visitors every year. Jim Lively hopes some of those people will camp RVs at a nearby site he’s planning to open next to his family’s local food market. He wants to use solar panels to help power the campsite and offset electric bills for the market, where local farmers bring produce directly to the store.

Lively helped promote REAP during his time at an environmental nonprofit, where he’d worked for over two decades. So the program was on his mind when it came time to replace the market’s big, south-facing roof.

“We put on a metal roof, and worked with a contractor who was also familiar with the REAP program, and we said, ‘Let’s make sure we’re setting this up for solar,’” he said. “So it was kind of a no-brainer for us.”

They were told they had been approved for a REAP grant of $39,696 last summer — half of the project’s total cost — but didn’t feel the need to rush the solar installation. Then, at the end of January, Lively was notified that the funding had been paused.

The property runs on electricity, rather than natural gas, and Lively wants to keep it that way. But those electric bills have been expensive — about $2,000 a month last summer, he said. When they get the RV site up and running, he expects those bills to approach $3,000.

Selling local food means operating within tight margins. Lively said saving on energy would help, but they won’t be able to move ahead with the rooftop solar unless the REAP funding is guaranteed.

Continuing to power the property with electricity rather than fossil fuels is a kind of personal commitment for Lively. “Boy, solar is also the right thing to do,” he said. “And it’s going to be difficult to do that without that funding.”

The grants aren’t only for solar arrays and other renewable energy systems. Many are for energy efficiency improvements to help farmers save on utility bills, and in some cases cut emissions. In Georgia, for instance, one farm was awarded just under $233,000 for a more efficient grain dryer, an upgrade projected to save the farm more than $16,000 per year. Several farms were awarded funding to convert diesel-powered irrigation pumps to electric.

The USDA did not directly answer Grist’s emailed questions about the specific timeline for REAP funds, the amount of money under review, or the future of the program. Instead, an emailed statement criticized the Biden administration’s “misuse of hundreds of billions” of IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law (BIL) funds “all at the expense of the American taxpayer.”

“USDA has a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy. As part of this effort, Secretary Rollins is carefully reviewing this funding and will provide updates as soon as they are made available,” the email said.

Two federal judges have already ordered the Trump administration to release the impounded IRA and BIL funds. Earthjustice, a national environmental law organization, filed a lawsuit last week challenging the freeze of USDA funds on behalf of farmers and nonprofits.

“The administration is causing harm that can’t be fixed, and fairness requires that the funds continue to flow,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.

Rollins released the first tranche of funding February 20 and announced the release of additional program funds earlier this month. That did not include the REAP funding.

The USDA announced Wednesday it would expedite funding for farmers under a different program in honor of National Agriculture Day, but as of March 20 had not made an announcement about REAP.

Rahul Bali of WABE contributed reporting to this story.

I don't 'feel safe': How Trump is hurting tourism in America

Photo by Daniel Abadia on Unsplash

Alex Henderson

March 22, 2025

ALTERNET

Since Donald Trump's return to the White House, reports of tourists and visitors from Canada, Europe and other parts of the world being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are growing.

Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney says she was held for 12 days in an ICE facility. Jessica Brösche, a German tattoo artist detained at the U.S./Mexico border, was held for over six weeks.

Rebecca Burke, a Welsh comic artist, was detained in an ICE facility in Washington State for 19days.

According to Salon's Tatyana Tandanpolie, some travel agents in Canada are now encouraging tourists not to visit the United States because of civil liberties concerns.

In an article published on March 22, Tandanpolie reports, "Since Trump took office in January, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detained at least four tourists: three from Europe and one from Canada, each for upwards of 10 days after they attempted to enter the country. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has also been denying entry to foreign nationals — in one French scientist's case, doing so over text messages criticizing President Donald Trump. The combination has made potential visitors scared to travel to the U.S. out of fear they, too, will be detained, turned away or targeted."

Tandanpolie adds that some travel agents are now "loathe to encourage U.S.-bound trips altogether," including Ontario, Canada-based Micheline Dion.

Dion told Salon, "No one wants to enter a possible volatile situation and even worse be denied entry…. As long as there is no stability in the U.S., we will not feel safe or confident to go back…. If…. I'm not going to travel for my own safety, I'm going to educate other Canadians to do the same because the last thing you want is another something coming up saying, 'Oh, we're having trouble coming back home. They won't let us go. They've arrested us. They put us in a detention place.'"

Karen Wiese, another Ontario-based travel agent, is also advising against travel to the U.S.

Wiese told Salon, "I support a lot of different racialized and LGBTQ+ clients who are just very nervous about being attacked and going anywhere in the United States."

Facing detention in the U.S. "is terrifying for anybody who wants to be able to travel to a destination," Wiese noted, adding, "I'm all for my clients going to a different destination to just avoid anything like that that may happen…. It's been constant, people saying, 'We don't want to do this. What else can we do?' It's just a pivot moment where we look for something else. Mexico might be an easier place for them to visit."

Tatyana Tandanpolie's full article for Salon is available at this link.